Death to the Chief (Atlanta Murder Squad Book 2)

by Lance McMillian

  She leaves the rest hanging, but one doesn’t need to be Einstein to complete the thought.

  I whisper, “I think I was pretty frank with you about all my baggage the other night.”

  “You were. Now I’ve seen it for myself—very eye-opening.”

  I stagger. The memory of sharing myself with her by the fire in my backyard plays a lot differently after what she just said. Cate didn’t believe my protests that night that I wasn’t a good man. Now she does. Good for her. She deserves someone who will make her happy.

  “Minton wanted me to tell you that it was time for lunch. What should I tell him? I’ll leave so you can eat in peace.”

  “You’re good at leaving.”

  The delivery is calm and cold-blooded. I’d rather her yell and throw things. Without any fight left in me, I turn around to slump away.

  She interjects, “Wait. I’ll go down with you.”

  Minton and Susan Benson are all smiles at the bottom of the steps when we reach them. He asks, “Did Cate tell you the good news?”

  With a forced smile, she gives him a quick shake of her head. Minton then announces, “Cate is going to be our next justice on the Georgia Supreme Court!”

  “She’ll make an excellent colleague,” Benson chimes in. “But she’s going to have to take Warren Jackson’s old chambers. No one else on the Court wants it for obvious reasons.”

  I turn to Cate, offer a ruined grin, and mutter, “Congratulations.”

  The flatness of my tone catches Minton off guard. He starts to say something, but I cut him off at the pass. Using the investigation as a pretext, I excuse myself with great haste—fleeing again, a repeat of the night before. Benson analyzes me with grave concern. I leave the three of them to it.

  Back in the car, I do a quick calculation in my head. The machinations to get Cate and me together were in place before I accepted Minton’s appointment. Even if I had turned him down to stay working on Corvettes in my garage, I still would’ve met Cate at my brother’s house. In that alternative reality, we might’ve had a future together untainted by the car bomb that almost killed us. The irony is rich. Repaying my debt to Ella cost me Cate as part of the bargain.

  Before I exit the Mansion grounds, Scott calls me. He says, “Are you at lunch with the Governor and Cate?”

  “Just leaving, on my way to the squad room. I want to hear what the Daltons have to say.”

  “See you in a bit then. But I wanted to ask if you have ever Googled Cate?”

  “Why?”

  “Click on her entry for Wikipedia. It’s one of the first search results.”

  “Can’t you just tell me?”

  “I want you to read it for yourself.”

  He hangs up, and I grumble about having to jump through his hoops. But I still follow his instructions and click on Cate’s Wikipedia page. The purpose of Scott’s call is obvious from the first word. Her full name.

  Alexis Cate Slattery.

  50

  The tension in the squad room is thick with pent-up anxiety. A heater groans in spates of inefficiency but does the job almost too well. The hotness adds to the underbelly of agitation in the air—as if everything about the situation is slightly off-center and no one knows what to do about it.

  All hands are on deck except for Marlon, who is at the scene. A live audio feed is piped through a lonely speaker on a table. The chirping of what I take to be FBI voices squawks out. The real action should start in about ten minutes. Scott approaches me.

  “Did you do what I asked?”

  “Yeah.”

  He waits for me to expound my thoughts on Cate as a new candidate for the elusive “AC,” but I’m too sullen to play along. Finally, he insists, “And?”

  “Alexis Cate is a pretty name.”

  Concern crunches his face in an uncertain frown. But he pushes forward.

  “I need to talk to her.”

  “Now is not a good time.”

  “I’ll go behind your back if I have to.”

  “The Governor just told me he was going to appoint her to the Georgia Supreme Court. You can take it up with him.”

  The news sets him back on his heels. He scans the room up and down in search of obvious options but doesn’t find what he is looking for.

  He observes, “That could be a grave mistake.”

  Cate consumed most of my mental energy over the past half-hour. She remains innocent to me, despite coincidental circumstances that keep conspiring against her. For one thing, if she were playing a long con, it’s still too early in the game to kick me to the curb. She’d want to keep me close. For another thing, Cate is not that person—a tenet of reckless faith to which I cling with blind obstinacy. But who the hell knows anything?

  “Leave Cate alone for the time being,” I answer. “Let’s see what the Daltons have to say.”

  I pat Scott on the arm and move to stand closer to the others in front of the speaker. The steps are slow. Everything inside of me is wobbly.

  ***

  Taylor places a cell phone with Marlon on the other end next to the speaker. Marlon gives us the word that Tommy Dalton is on the move. Tommy exits his building and heads toward the open air of Liberty Plaza, a block away. When he enters the park, he scans around for his brother, but Jerry is yet to be seen. Like Tommy, we wait.

  Sophie asks, “Think Jerry will show?”

  No one answers. Marlon soon relays that Jerry is approaching the plaza from the opposite direction of the Capitol. The separate FBI audio feed confirms the same information. That Jerry would approach from that direction is curious. I wonder where he parked. No buildings are out that way. And no FBI agents, either.

  I soft tap my foot on the floor in nervous apprehension. All of us are staring at the speaker and cell phone on the table as if seeing them will make the sound travel faster to our ears. I close my eyes just to be different.

  Marlon explains, “Jerry is scouring around like a street rat, moving real slow, checking everything out.”

  The coast better be clear. Every second of silence feels like failure. One of the FBI agents—agent Bill if I’m not mistaken—crackles through the speaker that the brothers should be conversing within seconds. I open my eyes. After another interminable interlude of nothingness, Tommy speaks first.

  “What happened?”

  Silence. The fear that we lost the audio connection jolts me, but Marlon calmly explains, “Jerry is standing there, still looking around.”

  I ask him, “He can’t see you guys, can he?”

  “No chance. We’re tucked away. Our only visuals are through long-range cameras.”

  A beat later, Jerry’s taut voice bristles through the speaker with strained regret: “I don’t know what happened. The word is that he figured it out somehow. Doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Did you at least use gloves?”

  “You don’t put together a bomb with gloves.”

  That’s worth a couple of indictments right there, and I breathe a sigh of relief. None of us in the squad room dares make a noise for fear of missing the next bit of dialogue. But everyone wears a half-cocked smile, almost giddy at the evidence now in our possession.

  Tommy asks, “What now? Try again?”

  More silence. My heart thunders in my chest. Should they again try to murder me? Two grown men are actually having that conversation, and I’m listening to it live. The whole experience is otherworldly.

  Jerry answers, “Probably too late. We could kill him easy enough, but the genie’s out of the bottle now. We need to lay low and hope my fingerprints don’t come back on that bomb. I wiped what I could but never expected it would be in any shape to ever dust for prints.”

  “What about Gene?”

  “I don’t like that, either.”

  “You didn’t—”

  “Hell no.”

  “Then who?”

  “Don’t know. Could be—”

  “What?”

  “Something’s not right.”


  The conversation halts. From the sound of it, a stiff wind rattles the microphones in Liberty Plaza. After an interval of time that feels like forever, Marlon provides an update, “Something has Jerry spooked. He just whispered in Tommy’s ear. No way the mics picked that up. They’re walking away toward the direction Jerry came from. No audio coverage down there, either. We’re out of business. I’m going to hang up and consult with the feds. I’ll touch base later.”

  The suppressed tension of everyone in the room releases in a simultaneous cacophony. I find a chair and collapse into it. When the excitement dies down, the team looks to me for guidance. I summon whatever energy I have left and draw up a game plan.

  “Barbara, get with Trevor Newman and start writing indictments. Let’s just charge them with everything—state and federal—at this point. Get them in cuffs as soon as possible, especially since Jerry may be wise to us. Sophie and J.D., are the two of you up for arresting the Attorney General? I think you’ve earned it.”

  J.D. pounces, “Absolutely!”

  Sophie agrees.

  “Good, we’ll try to make it happen. We’ll give the arrest of Jerry to the feds and let them deal with the Navy SEAL.”

  Scott answers his phone and walks to the other side of the room. I ask Barbara, “Enough there for a conviction?”

  “Probably. They didn’t mention your name. But how many bombs failed to go off in Atlanta in the past day?”

  Across the way, Scott whoops a celebratory yell that commands the attention of the rest of us. He ends the call and turns around to the onslaught of our attentive looks.

  “Just got the word from our fingerprint techs. They got one usable, partial print from the bomb, and we got a match. Jerry Dalton.”

  Barbara notes, “The chances for a conviction just went up.”

  I respond, “He should’ve used gloves.”

  ***

  A few minutes later, Scott pulls me aside and asks, “Tough thing to listen to, huh? You all right?”

  “I’m too spent to be much of anything.”

  He nods in sympathy and says, “My gut says we should still make that shooting range appointment this afternoon.”

  I don’t need much convincing.

  Jerry intimated to his brother that it was “probably” too late to kill me. But the regretful tone behind his words told a different story. He still wants me dead. The only thing holding him back is a sense that the moment is not quite right. I don’t like those odds. The gun range it is.

  While he has me cornered, Scott takes another stab at the Cate issue.

  “I need to talk to her, Chance. Questions persist that she needs to answer. Our work isn’t finished.”

  “Can’t help you there. She’s not speaking to me at the moment. Like I said, call up the Governor if you feel that strongly about it.”

  He’s crazy enough to do it. I leave the squad room to go for a walk.

  51

  The Atlanta Beltline is a corridor of former railroad tracks turned into walking trails. The path runs close to the squad room, and I make my way there, hoping the fresh air can help me separate the wheat from the chaff.

  Who killed Warren Jackson?

  Today’s developments with the Daltons feel like a victory, but I’m still empty-handed when it comes to the solution of the crime I was actually charged with investigating. Gene Davis knew something about Jackson’s murder, and that something presumably got him killed. But who pulled the trigger?

  I think of Cate. Truth be told, the purpose of this walk centers on clearing her. Scott makes solid points, and the Alexis Cate revelation is a stomach punch. I don’t care. I refuse to believe it of her—can’t believe it, in fact. Not based on the evidence, but on what that would mean about myself. To defend Cate and verify my sanity, I need to find the real killer.

  The investigation stalled at nine suspects. I conjure them up now.

  Senator Clement Parsons. Beverly Jackson. Gene Davis. Tommy Dalton. Jerry Dalton. Aurora Winnett. Gary Winnett. Larry Miller. Adam Lumpkin.

  Gene’s murder removes his name from the list. May he rest in peace.

  After talking with her this morning, I’ve already eliminated Aurora Winnett as a suspect in my mind and stick with that decision now. Not a single person saw her during the critical time, and she’s about the only person I’ve encountered who actually seems upset that Warren Jackson is dead.

  The Daltons have already revealed a willingness to kill me to quash the bribery case against them, and Jackson’s death stands to save the family an astronomical amount of money. On paper, they are the strongest candidates. Except Gene’s demise changes the equation. My operating assumption is that the murders of Jackson and Gene must be linked somehow. If the Daltons didn’t kill Gene—and the just-recorded discussion between the two makes plain they didn’t—then they are off the hook for Jackson, too. With great reluctance, I scratch them off as likely suspects. But I do leave the door cracked just in case.

  Beverly Jackson plays the part of an eccentric old lady, but a calculating mind rests behind her displays of outrageousness. I’m confident she could’ve killed her husband without batting an eye. I’m less confident that a gun would’ve been her weapon of choice. And I have zero belief that she would’ve met with Gene Davis at night in his car on some dingy downtown Atlanta side street, much less shoot him at close range in a way that blood would splatter all over her. Even Beverly has her limits.

  Senator Clement Parsons pushes a lot of the right buttons. His stubborn unwillingness to talk to me about the Daltons on the phone suggests an underlayer of motive not apparent when I first met in him in Washington. And no one has admitted to seeing Warren Jackson alive after the Senator left him. He also told me in D.C. that he left Jackson’s chambers, walked down the hall, and returned to tell his old friend one more thing. That little detail nags at me, but I can’t put my finger on why. The problem again, though, is Gene. Parsons spent all day yesterday in Washington, even voting on a bill around the same time Gene was murdered. I checked. Could the Senator have contracted out the job? Sure. But I’m not yet to the point where I’m willing to entertain hired killer flights of fancy.

  In terms of opportunity, Adam Lumpkin is a strong suspect. He and Jackson were next door neighbors. He could’ve easily traveled one door down to murder his judicial enemy. On the night of the murder, no one saw Lumpkin until 7:10 p.m. when he came out onto the landing to join the crowd around the bar. Senator Parsons left the Chief Justice at 6:50 p.m., giving Lumpkin a good twenty minutes to pull off the shooting. And even though Lumpkin doesn’t strike me as the type eager to meet with Gene Davis at night in a dubious part of town, maybe Gene didn’t give him a choice. But how on earth would Gene have known that Lumpkin murdered Jackson? I give that question a lot of thought. Lumpkin remains on the list.

  Larry Miller is a good and proper man, but even a righteous man can be pushed too far. And Jackson seemed intent on pushing Miller to the breaking point. The opportunity was there. By his own admission, Miller kept hovering around the back hall on the lookout for the Chief Justice. The distance from the back door of the courtroom to the murder scene is short enough to travel in almost no time. There’s something else. Gene and Miller were together in the courtroom around the time that Jackson met his demise. Did Gene witness something that implicated Miller in the crime? Did he then arrange a meeting to get Miller to confess to the murder while secretly taping him? Except Miller got wise to the plan and committed another killing to cover the first—a good man sucked into a spiraling pit of evil. I can’t discount the possibility.

  I have no illusions about Gary Winnett’s character. Arrogant. Controlling. Violent. The type of man who nurses grudges with a single-minded intensity. Aurora’s affair with Warren Jackson must’ve torched his ego to a burnt crisp—the angry phone call to Beverly Jackson a window into his desperation. Does it matter if Aurora isn’t AC? That’s what drew our attention Gary’s way in the first place—the belief that AC’
s text meant that Aurora wanted to rekindle a romance with Jackson. We theorized Gary found out and went apoplectic. But Aurora never made that overture to Jackson, disproving our theory. Does that absolve Gary? Not in my book. Gary never forgot the betrayal, and marital tensions between him and his wife remained sky high—the recent divorce filing the latest evidence of discord. Maybe Gary finally decided to spend his rage on the man who, in his small mind, stole Aurora away from him.

  My phone rings. Lost deep in analyzing the case, I barely notice the noise at first. I fumble in my pocket for the device and hurry to answer when I read the caller ID—Cate.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, it’s me. Is now a bad time?”

  “The opposite—something has come up that you deserve to know. The FBI got the Dalton brothers on tape talking about trying to blow us up. They should be arrested soon.”

  “That’s insane. Why?”

  “Hard to say. They always wanted control of the investigation to protect themselves and saw me as an impediment to that goal. With me gone, they figured the GBI would get the case back.”

  “So they killed the Chief Justice?”

  My walking stops. Cate’s question is the natural follow-up to what I just told her, but Scott’s seeds of doubt in her prod me to an uneasy caution. After some internal deliberation, I decide to tell her the truth, broadly speaking.

  “We’re not sure yet.”

  She doesn’t respond. In the silence, I begin moving again, to keep warm if nothing else. My heavy breathing in the cold air echoes in the phone, and I wonder how curious she will be about Warren Jackson’s murder. I steel myself to make sure that she is the next one to speak.

  Cate says, “Well, be careful until they’re arrested. But that’s not why I called. The Governor and Susan Benson gave me a verbal frisking over lunch. They think I might’ve been a little too hard on you.”