The Liar

by Steve Cavanagh

  I knew how he felt. I’d been there. Being a lawyer is one of those professions where you can do a hell of a lot of harm simply by doing your job.

  He tried to say something, but the emotion rising at the back of his throat wouldn’t let him. He wiped at his eyes. Guilt, anger, regret – call it what you want – it was beginning to tear at Harry with its black claws.

  I took over the conversation with Harper.

  “Howell had a reputation for dispensing his own brand of justice, but I don’t believe Howell would’ve intended to harm the child. He’s got a strange sense of morality – he might kill Julie but the thought of harming a child would be repulsive. That’s just my reading of him.”

  “I could believe that,” said Harper, “But why attack Julie Rosen?”

  “We don’t know. I still don’t believe he was involved. There’s something deeper here,” I said.

  Flipping over the pages in the police report into the suicide of Rebecca Howell, I found the page with the suicide note and handed it to Harper. She read it slowly, her fingertips brushing her lips as her eyes scanned the script.

  “So Julie and Rebecca did something. Something bad. Howell found out about it maybe? I suppose it’s possible. What do you think Julie and Rebecca did?” she asked.

  “I’ve got no idea. In terms of a connection, we think it’s possible Barker was Emily Rosen’s father and maybe he’s trying to frame Howell,” I said.

  “Rebecca Howell is the key here. Any theories?”

  “I’m not sure. Not yet. I need to see Rebecca’s medical records. I’ve dealt with a few suicides and it’s rare for one to occur without some pre-existing psychiatric problems. Rebecca Howell’s note confirms something happened between these sisters and I think it goes back a long way. Maybe there are counseling records – or something like that which could shine a light on this. If Howell was the man in black, we might just be able to find the real reason. It has to be about Rebecca; something to do with her.”

  “Getting her medical records won’t be easy,” Harper said.

  I pulled a document out of my file and gave it to her.

  “Her next of kin is Lenny Howell. This is the power of attorney Howell signed allowing me to act for him. This will be enough.”

  Harper called over a young male agent and told him to go get Rebecca Howell’s medical records even if it meant waking the damn doctor out of his bed. A call was coming in on her cell. She answered it, hung up.

  “That was Lynch – he’s coordinating the search area. Meanwhile he just got us our warrant for Barker’s apartment.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  The Dodge Charger couldn’t accommodate all of us, so we took a dull gray/blue Crown Victoria and tore through the streets to Barker’s apartment – sirens and blues the whole way. I sat in back beside Harry. Washington was up front with Harper in the driver’s seat. Harry didn’t want to come along. I knew it, but he didn’t say it. Washington had insisted we ride along because of the clock – if there was anything in the apartment that could be relevant to the Rosen or Howell cases, Washington needed to know right away. Harry was the only person who had known Julie Rosen, and I had a working knowledge of both cases, but the FBI didn’t want me. They wanted Harry.

  Only reason I was in the car was because Harry insisted on it. Another Crown Vic, of a similar indeterminate color, came behind us. In that car were two feds who would act as the entry team – both were white males in their thirties with light hair. They both wore sunglasses, blue tees and blue jeans. One was called Beck, and the other Allen. The FBI were made up of thinkers, drinkers and door-kickers. I guessed that Beck and Allen fell into the latter category. In the back of the second car was a forensic tech called Kit, a small guy in glasses and a Pearl Jam tee-shirt. I looked over my shoulder and saw Beck, or it could have been Allen, struggling behind the wheel as they tried to keep up with Harper.

  “You do know that having me come along for this could cause serious problems for the DA if they decide to retry Howell?” I said.

  Angling in his seat, Washington spoke to me over his shoulder.

  “I’m not worried about the Howell trial right now. Our tech’s looked at the video Barker played in court. They’re saying either it’s the best fake they’ve ever seen or it’s real. Right now, we’re working on the assumption that Caroline might still be alive. Better that way. If it’s a scam, we’ve lost nothing but some overtime.”

  We pulled up outside a small apartment building ten minutes from the precinct. The Crown Vic that had followed us, pulled up on the right. The occupants quickly got out and made it to the building before us. I got out of the car and looked around. It wasn’t a bad area but it wasn’t great either; a convenience store, a taco joint and a bar were in the same block as the apartment. I saw a school across the street and a park nearby. The building itself didn’t look that old. Probably went up in the early nineties. Harry and I followed Washington and Harper into the lobby.

  Black and yellow tiles in a zig-zag pattern on the floor, and monochrome white on the walls. An unmanned security desk sat across from a bank of elevators. A set of double doors ahead of us must’ve led to the stairs. Beck, Allen and Kit waited in the lobby.

  “Where the hell is the building super?” said Washington. He made a call on his cell. It didn’t look like he got an answer.

  “Apartment seventy-three is on the eighth floor. I say let’s go and to hell with the super,” said Harper.

  A nod from Washington sent Beck and Allen racing up the stairs, their side-arms drawn and held low in front of them. Kit stayed in the lobby with the rest of us.

  “I’m not climbing eight flights of stairs,” said Harry.

  I nodded.

  “We’ll take the elevator. We just need to wait until the entry team is at the front door,” said Washington.

  I hit the button to call the elevator, checked my watch.

  On Washington’s belt was a small, black radio receiver. I saw him take a set of earbuds from his overcoat, plug one end into the receiver and place the other in his ear.

  “Check, Washington. Command serial …” and he rhymed off some sort of standard radio code to connect with Beck and Allen. I glanced to my left and saw Harper doing the same.

  The elevator arrived, Harper got in and held the doors open.

  The echoes of federal boots on the stairs dwindled away the higher they got.

  I looked around the hallway. Two security cameras were mounted high on the walls. One in the northeast corner, above the security desk, and another in the southwest corner. I made my way around the security desk to the door behind it. I tried the handle and found it open. Inside was a luggage rack, a mop and bucket that hadn’t seen much action lately, and a small table that held a bunch of half-empty cleaning products. Nothing else in the room.

  I came out, closed the door behind me and made my way to the acrylic plan of the building tacked to the wall beside the elevator. Fire exits and rally points were highlighted on the plan in red.

  On the eighth floor there were a dozen apartments. It was also the top floor. Apartment seventy-five was hatched in green. I checked the key and saw it meant this was the building supervisor’s apartment. From the plan, the supervisor lived directly across from apartment seventy-three.

  “The super’s apartment is right across the hall from Barker’s,” I said.

  Joining me beside the elevator, Washington checked the plan. He nodded and tried the super from his cell, again. Nothing.

  A buzzing of soft static, then Washington placed a finger over the receiver in his ear. I guessed the entry team were outside Barker’s front door.

  Washington pressed a button on his mic, and said, “We don’t have the super. It’s a hard entry. Go for it. We’re coming up.”

  A pan-pipes version of “Love In An Elevator” played in the elevator car while it slowly ascended. Nobody spoke. Kit tapped at his aluminum suitcase, out of time to the music. Standing beside me, Harry rubbed
at his chin. It was almost as if a weight was descending on him, slowly crushing him. Harper and Washington exchanged a glance. They needed a break in the case – something that might lead them to a half-starved seventeen-year-old girl in a concrete grave. They were desperate. I could smell it on them. And I knew why, too. Because if we didn’t find something in the apartment then the feds were pretty much out of ideas. There were no more leads. With the time remaining, even if Harper had ten thousand men they wouldn’t be able to locate Caroline in time.

  I turned away from the others and watched the lightbulbs on the brass floor-display flicker on and off as the elevator made its way to the top floor.

  The doors opened and we came out to a brightly lit corridor. To our left was another set of double doors with a pull handle on each door that led to the stairwell. On the right was a long corridor leading to apartments on either side of the hall. I saw Beck, or it could’ve been Allen, standing at the open door of apartment seventy-three. The fed was waiting on Washington. As we reached the open door to Barker’s apartment I saw the name tag on the fed’s vest read Beck. He holstered his weapon and slipped his thumbs through the belt eyelets on his jeans.

  Beck spoke softly in a Southern accent that helped slow down his speech. There are few fast talkers in the deep South. He said, “It’s clear. Looks like we were expected.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  It was a small, clean, well-kept apartment in an otherwise average apartment building in White Plains, lit with a single bright ceiling bulb. All four walls were covered in a cream wallpaper with faintly patterned horizontal stripes. A thin beige carpet on the floor. A tidy kitchen area to the left. Ahead, a couch in the middle of the floor and opposite the kitchen was a single bed. A door to the left of the bed must’ve led to a bathroom, probably with just enough space for a toilet and a shower. A small bookcase to the right of the bed looked to be the only source of entertainment in the room.

  That was all.

  No TV. No pictures on the wall.

  Sparsely furnished, but in reality there wasn’t much room for any more furniture.

  Beck and Allen were slowly turning the place upside down. Opening cupboards and emptying out the contents, overturning the couch, rifling through the bookcase. Allen found a piece of paper slotted between the pages of a hardback like a bookmark. Carefully he unfolded it and began reading.

  We were all inside the little apartment now, and there wasn’t much room with the bodies standing around. I moved beside Allen and read over his shoulder. The letter was addressed to Julie Rosen and written in the same hand as Rebecca Howell’s suicide note.

  Julie,

  I made a mistake. I thought I could trust you. You promised me and you lied. But you were right, I’m not a good mother. I’m sorry for what I did. I hope you are too.

  Goodbye,

  Becca.

  I was lost in that letter. The words were floating around my head like ghosts in an old house.

  Washington tapped Beck on the shoulder, “You said you think we were expected?”

  “Yeah, check it out,” said Beck. He stopped ripping open the couch, walked past us, slammed the front door shut and went back to the couch. At first, I didn’t notice it. I stood beside Washington next to the kitchen. Harper and Harry stood on the opposite side of the apartment in front of the bed.

  I only saw it when Washington started forward, headed for the door.

  There was something on the back of it. Letters had been carved into the plain, varnished wood with a sharp knife. Each stroke had been repeated many times with the blade, giving it a frenzied appearance. Like each letter had been clawed into the wood.

  It was a message. For us.

  You will never find her. Daddy must confess his sins.

  Washington drew out his cell, hit a button on the screen and held the phone to his ear while he slowly walked over and stood before the door. He ran his finger along the letters, and jerked his hand away when he got a splinter.

  “The Goddamn building super must have heard this being done. Where the hell is he?” he said and he took the phone away from his ear to look at it in anger while the super failed to pick up his call for the third time.

  “Shush, quiet,” said Harper.

  Everyone stopped. Washington sucked at his finger and moved close to the door, his nose almost touching it. I thought he was maybe trying to figure out what kind of knife or implement had been used to draw the message.

  “Do you hear that?” said Harper.

  “I do,” said Kit, laying down his suitcase.

  We listened. I didn’t know what for. Then I heard a cell phone ringing. It was faint. Without making a sound I moved toward the source. It seemed to be coming from close to the door.

  Washington ended his call.

  The ringing stopped.

  In that same second a lot happened all at once. Harper, Washington and I came to the immediate conclusion that the ringing sound belonged to the super’s phone. I knew Harper and Washington realized this too because both of them reached for their side-arms and Harper took a step toward the door. The phone was probably in his apartment, across the brightly lit corridor.

  Immediately after I realized the super’s phone was probably in his apartment, I came to three conclusions.

  The first was that in all likelihood, the super was dead.

  The second was that Washington was standing in front of the door and examining the message precisely because that’s what Scott Barker wanted him to do.

  Before I could wrap my head around the third thought, Washington flew past me, backwards, in a cloud of splinters, noise, dust, blood and light that shone onto his ruined chest from the five-inch hole in the center of the door.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  It’s in those long, excruciating moments of unexpected violence that you really get to know somebody. You get to know who they are on a basic, primal level. Washington’s body hit the upturned couch, knocking it over. Before the couch landed, Harry was kneeling in front of Washington, pressing a cushion into the hole in his chest. The turquoise couch cushion quickly turned red.

  In that same moment, Beck and Allen dove for cover behind the small kitchen island. Kit was on his hands and knees, crawling toward Harry and Washington.

  Harper was a whole other story. Her gun was in one hand and the other was outstretched, about to grab the handle and throw the ruined door open.

  And me? I was thinking. I guessed that whoever was on the other side of the door had hidden in the super’s apartment and watched Beck and Allen make their entry – then saw me, Harper, Washington, Harry and Kit follow the entry team into Barker’s apartment. The large hole in the door could only have been made with a shotgun. I didn’t hear another round being racked into the chamber so I assumed this was a Mossberg Riot gun – which could fire repeatedly.

  One shot, straight through the center of the door had caught Washington full in the chest. Nine inches above the hole in the door I saw a peephole. I imagined the shooter watching us walk into the apartment through the peephole in the super’s door.

  And when he came out of the apartment opposite with the shotgun in his hands, he could watch the peephole in Barker’s door from the corridor. The light from the hot ceiling bulb in Barker’s apartment would be a speck of light. When that single point of light was extinguished it meant that someone was standing directly in front of the door – blocking out the light.

  The perfect time to shoot.

  Harper’s gun was raised, ready to snap into a shooting position once she opened the door. But opening that door only had one outcome. The shooter would still be there, waiting for another target.

  I couldn’t call out – it would just send a useful signal to the shooter.

  We stood across the apartment from one another. The door was on my right. And Harper’s left. If I wanted to save her I would have to dive across the open space. Which meant diving across the path of the next shotgun blast to go through the door.
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  I crouched, bunching the muscles in my calves, ready to spring low and hard and grab Harper’s knees, bringing her down before the shooter could take her head off.

  But I didn’t jump.

  Didn’t need to.

  Harper had seen everything I had. I knew it. Because she pinned her body to the wall, angled the weapon and emptied a clip through the door at head height.

  More bullet holes appeared in the center of the door, and I saw Beck, Allen and Kit following Harper’s lead. The noise was deafening. Three firearms discharging fiercely in an enclosed space, tearing the wood to shreds. I dropped to the floor and covered my ears.

  Clips slid out from their handguns, to be replaced smoothly by fresh, full magazines. I glanced at Harry and saw the strain on his face – his full weight now on Washington’s chest, trying to stop the blood.

  Washington made no sound.

  When I lowered my hands the ringing in my ears felt like a monk banging a church bell inside my head. It hurt and I staggered a little as I got to my feet.

  The apartment door was open.

  And Harper was gone.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  Before I followed her, I saw Beck and Allen assisting Harry. One of them spoke to Washington, while the other lent his weight to the compression on the wound and Kit got on his phone – called for backup and a paramedic.

  “Agent down. Shotgun wound to the chest. Urgent medical assistance required,” said Kit.

  The door opened on Harper’s side, so I stepped smartly past the door and flung my back at the wall so I could get a look at the corridor.

  I couldn’t see Harper, nor anyone else.

  I waited a beat.

  No shots.

  Then I heard Harper swearing, loudly. I kept low and moved quickly into the hallway, looking in all directions. Nothing on my left, just open corridor. Straight ahead I saw the super’s apartment. His door was open and I could see him sitting in an armchair facing the hallway.