The Liar

by Steve Cavanagh

  “See the photograph at the back of the report. That’s my shirt. Leonard’s blood is all over it. He didn’t want to live if his daughter was dead. There was no point. She was his life. He opened his wrists and his throat with a sharp object. You couldn’t do that. But Howell could because he loved his daughter.”

  “Howell and his wife burned my child to death!”

  His voice reverberated around the room, and it was not until the last echo faded that I spoke again; softly and quietly.

  “You’re wrong. Rebecca Howell did something worse.”

  I took up the letter Rebecca had written to Julie and read aloud.

  “I made a mistake. I thought I could trust you. You promised me and you lied. Julie made Rebecca a promise: In exchange for twenty-thousand dollars, Julie would give her baby to Rebecca. The first ten thousand was paid just after Julie got pregnant, the next after she gave birth.”

  With quick, violent motion he shook his head.

  “The document in front of you is a DNA analysis of Leonard Howell’s blood, taken from my shirt. It compares it to a control sample and there are no genetic marker similarities.”

  I saw him stiffening in his chair, his eyes becoming wider, more alert.

  “The control sample is from Caroline Howell.”

  I was aware of other people in the room for the first time in several minutes. I heard the gasps.

  “I’ve been through all of Rebecca Howell’s medical records. She changed physicians in September 2002, so she could have a fresh start with a new physician, maybe one who wouldn’t know the real reason for the omission in her medical records. See, there’s a gap. A maternity gap. There is no record of Rebecca Howell ever becoming pregnant, never mind having a baby. No blood tests. No scans. No ante-natal appointments. No pregnancy. There’s a note in the file made by her new doctor who states that Rebecca told him her old records were lost. Maybe that was enough for her new doctor. It’s not enough for me. The maternity notes aren’t there because there never was a pregnancy.”

  I let the silence build in the room. He was lost in terrible thoughts, his eyes moving rapidly, hoping and praying that the truth was somehow false. I watched his face crumble, his lips move silently.

  “Rebecca Howell faked her pregnancy. Leonard was in Afghanistan. His last tour. She probably wore padding for months – making it appear to friends and neighbors that she was with child. There was no pregnancy. And yet, Leonard Howell came home to a baby girl. Your baby girl.”

  Shaking his head, he listened and buried his fingernails in his scalp as he began to rock back and forth. The weight of his mistake taking full grip in his mind.

  “My guess is Julie changed her mind after the baby was born and broke her promise to her sister. Rebecca had paid money, she was months into the lie. That fake pregnancy was now real and a huge part of her life. Rebecca’s last day as a county medical examiner was twenty-four hours before the fire.”

  I took one more piece of paper from a stack in front of me, gave it to Barker.

  “That’s a cremation order for an infant called Jane Doe. She was found in a dumpster, and was not more than a couple months old. No one claimed the body. The order is signed by Rebecca Howell. It’s the last thing she did as a medical examiner. She never returned to that job. Know why? She filed the order away in the case notes, and she took that child’s corpse away. She went to Julie’s house to steal the baby, and burn the house down to make it look like the child perished in the flames. But no child died. Rebecca put Jane Doe’s body in the cot and set it alight. And she left with Emily.”

  I’ll never forget the sound Barker made. I’d heard it before. Howell had made the same sound when he’d stood on the driveway of his ruined house and learned that his daughter was most likely dead. It sounded like a soul being ripped in two.

  “Tell me where your daughter is. We can still get her out alive. Tell me!”

  “The tomb of the unknown artist, in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Marlon will shoot her at seven a.m. if you don’t stop him.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  I’d never been in a helicopter before, and once we’d landed in a field to the rear of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery I promised myself I wouldn’t ever set foot in a helicopter again. I had no idea how long we were in the air. It felt like an hour, but it could’ve been ten minutes. My eyes were shut the whole time and the only thing I could concentrate on was gripping the support straps that hung from the ceiling. The landing was a little rough, and I’d been holding on so tightly that I’d managed to pull one of the fabric straps from the ceiling. It hung loosely around my head.

  The FBI tactical team shook their heads at me. Lynch whispered to them, and then shot me a condescending look. Harper told them to knock it off.

  I checked my watch. Six forty-five. In fifteen minutes Marlon would put a bullet in Caroline.

  We got out of the chopper, and my feet sunk into deep, wet grass. Keeping my head low until we were well clear of the blades, I ran, hunkered over, to the crop of trees that separated the cemetery from the field.

  I hung at the back of the pack, with Harper. Lynch led the tactical unit, who carried automatic rifles and wore black helmets and Kevlar. Lynch wanted me there. We couldn’t spare the time, and Lynch envisaged that Marlon would hear the chopper coming so it was likely there might be a hostage situation. In that case, I was to get on the phone to Barker and use him to talk Marlon down. Barker still wouldn’t talk to the feds so they needed me here, as liaison. What I knew might come in handy. Might not. But they wanted me there all the same. Harry stayed behind.

  I’d asked Barker if he had any way of contacting Marlon – via a cell phone or secure email. He said no. Marlon had been paid the ransom for his work – and he would fulfill his obligations to the letter. I’d asked him how certain he was of this.

  “I swore an oath to Julie. To clear her name. To make the ones who hurt her suffer. I paid Marlon well to do the same.”

  It seemed that Barker had first encountered Marlon in LA. He’d tried off-loading two antique shotguns with no bill of sale, or provenance for the weapons. It took Barker all of three minutes to find out they’d been stolen two weeks previously from a house in Beverly Hills. Some money had been taken from the house, a car, and the guns. But not before the weapons had been tried and tested. Marlon had emptied both barrels into the elderly male owner of the house before he’d left.

  Trained to exploit an opportunity, Barker had turned Marlon into an asset. Someone who could do wet work for him. And he’d done plenty. He’d put two in the back of McAuley’s head at the ransom drop six months ago. Barker also confirmed Marlon had been responsible for the set-up at his apartment. He’d shot Washington, and killed Beck, and the super

  Lynch ripped open the sleeve of his shirt on a thorn bush as he pushed his way through the line of trees to get to the cemetery. By the time I had to climb through, the branches had been pushed down by the team ahead of me.

  The only light came from the small beams attached underneath the tactical unit’s rifles. Sunrise was still a good forty-five minutes away and the hill ahead of us was still cloaked in heavy darkness. Lynch covered his small flashlight with his palm as he stood in the north corner of the cemetery and consulted the map.

  He looked around, but didn’t scan the torch light in his direction of view.

  “Six hundred yards up the hill. It’s one of those walk-in tombs. Looks like a little house. This part of the cemetery is closed to the public, so if you see a male – they’re hostiles. We go, two-by-two cover. We’ll come up on the left until I say break, then B team will flank from the right. Wait for my signal before we go in. Flynn, you stay at the bottom of the hill,” said Lynch.

  The grass was knee deep. Ahead of us the rows of tombstones, statues, and railed-off graves began. Many of the stones and ornate figures were covered in lichen, they were crumbling and here and there the stones themselves had tumbled over and broken in two. I watched the four-man team, with Lynch
at their head, as they filed up the hill. A low mist looked like a blanket of cobwebs that covered the ground.

  Harper and I waited for them to get ahead, then she started up after them, through the dead, toward the tomb at the top of the hill.

  It was still full dark. The sun had yet to threaten the skyline, and I checked my watch. Coming up on six fifty. Ten minutes to go. It was possible that Marlon may not even be here. Maybe he would stay away, and only arrive at seven, when it was time to put the girl down. It’s not easy killing someone. Some can do it without blinking. Some are compelled to murder, be it through circumstance or psychosis. For others, it’s part of the job. I got that impression from Marlon. And even though it was a simple task, it couldn’t have been easy. It would be especially difficult to sit in the room with the girl, and count down the hours, the minutes, and the seconds until it was time to pull the trigger.

  I’d met Marlon, briefly. I didn’t think he could easily sit beside a teenager for the night, then shoot her in the morning. That takes a special kind of killer. My guess was Marlon wouldn’t do it that way.

  I was wrong.

  The silencer helped. But no silencer on the planet can render a gunshot mute. The explosion of primer and gas has to make a sound. It’s still pretty loud. And the action on the ejection port of any automatic weapon is also bound to create noise. The slam of the steel port opening, and then closing as it ejects the spent cartridge. It’s like a soft hammer fall. Audible, but not loud. Imagine that happening twice per second, for three seconds.

  The other sound came from the rounds peppering Lynch’s Kevlar vest. And then I heard something else. The sound of someone choking on their own blood. I saw Lynch a hundred yards ahead of me. He’d turned away from the shots and held his hand toward the blood gouting from his throat.

  I looked around. Standing at the bottom of the hill, in the grass, with no cover, I decided I was in the worst place possible. I bent low and moved up the grassy bank, toward the tombstones.

  A hand on the back of my head slammed me to the wet thick grass. I hadn’t heard Harper come up behind me, but I knew it was her. The hand on top of my head was small, but the force used to put me face-down was considerable. She grabbed the back of my shirt and together, we crawled behind a raised clump of grass. My legs were bleeding again and the pain caused me to clamp my teeth together to stifle a groan.

  The return fire from the tactical unit was deafening. It seemed to come from all around.

  “Did you see where the shot came from?” said Harper.

  “No,” I said.

  She leaned out, stared up the hill.

  “He has to be at the top. Laying down with a rifle. He’s got the perfect firing position. High ground, and the right weapon and enough elevation to see the whole graveyard,” she said.

  “What’re you going to do?” I said.

  “Quiet. Don’t make a sound. Stay here,” she said, then rolled over three hundred and sixty degrees, back onto her stomach, then crawled forward.

  I moved forward too. Every inch of that crawl sent waves of pain through my torn legs. I got close enough then turned and put my back to the tombstone. It was just as well. Huge clods of earth and grass from the same flattened area where I’d been lying suddenly leapt into the air as rounds struck home.

  The tactical unit ceased firing. They were taking cover.

  I felt the cold seeping through my shirt. I was soaking wet, again. And the cold only served to heighten my panic, my heart beating against my chest and my breath was like the exhaust from a car engine – great, fast, steady plumes of frozen breath drifting up above my head.

  I heard cracks and felt small stones landing on my belly and legs.

  Marlon must’ve seen my breath and he was peppering the tombstone with rounds. I heard the cracks from bullets bouncing off old stone. I controlled my breathing, put my head low so any fog from my breath would mingle with the low-lying mist on the long grass.

  This old part of the cemetery really was a hollow, until you got to the top of the hill. The echoes were strong and deep. I heard the same sound of metal impacting stone at high velocity all over the place. It was like being in a movie theater with surround sound. Lethal volleys of suppressing gunfire were resounding in my ears from every angle.

  I worked up the courage, and got my feet beneath me and quickly whipped my head around the tombstone and back again.

  I saw the tomb on the hill, but I didn’t see any of the feds or the shooter.

  But I could hear the feds all right. They returned fire with their assault rifles. And I heard a single command.

  “Covering.”

  More shots, both silenced and loud. Then just the phut phut of the silencer on the rifle.

  “Man down, man down.”

  Silence. No wind. Not even a puff of air through the trees. If Marlon had put someone else down, that left three tactical agents, plus Harper. A terrible thought came to me. Saying “man down”, didn’t necessarily mean it was a man. What if Harper had been the last one to get hit?

  More silenced shots and the sound of shells eating old tombstones.

  It took me a few seconds to realize my cell phone was buzzing in my jacket. My heart was thumping so hard I didn’t notice it at first. My back hard against the tombstone, and covering the light from the screen with my jacket, I checked the phone.

  A text from Harper.

  The assault team can’t move. They’re pinned below the shooter. Can you get to Lynch’s gun? I need a distraction.

  Slowly, keeping as low as possible, I peered around the tombstone. Lynch was thirty feet away. Unmoving. His gun in the grass beside him. With the pain in my legs, and the view that Marlon had of the cemetery, Lynch’s gun may as well have been in Kansas.

  I texted her back.

  I can’t make it to the gun.

  I checked the time again – five minutes to seven. I let thirty seconds pass. In that time I thought about Christine and Amy. They would be all right. In time, Christine would have a new man. Amy would have a new dad. They didn’t rely on me financially. Christine was in a good job – her father would take care of them. It was a sobering thought, they didn’t really need me.

  Right then, the girl in that tomb needed me more than anyone else on this earth.

  I took a breath and called out.

  “Marlon, it’s Eddie Flynn. I’m unarmed,” I said.

  I stood up, hands in the air above my head. Marlon was lying flat on the bank at the top of the hill. He was moving slowly to his right, toward the entrance to the tomb. His gun was aimed at me, and I knew that before he got up and went into that tomb he would shoot me dead.

  “I’ve got a message from Scott Barker,” I said.

  Marlon stopped moving. His head bent low so that he could look through the telescopic sight on the rifle, taking aim right at me.

  I closed my eyes and said, “Scott wanted you to know he told us the truth.”

  Three rapid single shots.

  My heart thudded in my ears. I didn’t dare to breathe. I knew if I took a breath the pain would take over, the shock would hit me and I would fall. I felt numb from cold. Maybe I wouldn’t feel the rounds tearing through my body. My head swam and I felt dizzy. I wanted to grab on to something, breathe and take the hit all at once but fear froze every limb. I couldn’t move. A burning started in my chest. My hands shook and I couldn’t hold on any longer.

  I took a breath. Opened my eyes.

  At the top of the hill, lit by the flashlights on the feds guns, I saw Harper with her pistol aimed at the ground. I looked down at my chest. No blood. I filled my lungs with the freezing air. It felt good. My legs burned as I ran up the remaining three hundred yards of the hill, and saw Harper standing over Marlon. She’d snuck up from the right, and came upon him from behind.

  Marlon was dead.

  Two of the tactical unit members were working on Lynch, tying gauze to his throat before lifting him and running back down the hill toward the choppe
r. But I knew it was too late for him.

  When I turned around, Harper was nowhere to be seen. And the heavy iron door that led to the tomb of the unknown artist lay open.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

  Standing outside the tomb, with the door ajar, I could see light spilling out and cutting through the early morning gloom. I followed the indentations of Harper’s boots where she’d trodden down the grass while making her way inside.

  I peered around the door. The first thing that hit me was the smell. It was mold, and shit, and something else. Something old and foul and dead. I gripped the iron door to prise it apart further so I could go inside. Harper had only opened it so far; just enough to squeeze her small frame through the gap.

  The door moved surprisingly easily. I’d braced my feet ready to have to push like the devil to open the thing. But Marlon must have oiled the hinges, and when I got inside I saw he’d put rollers on the bottom of the door to take the weight off the hinges. I stepped onto old concrete.

  An oil lamp burned in the corner of the stone room. Harper knelt beside it. She was working at something on the ground.

  It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the light.

  “Get help, we need to lift this,” said Harper. I looked down and saw she was using a crowbar, working at what I thought at first was the floor. Turns out it was an inch-thick steel plate that covered the floor in the center of the room.

  I hollered outside, and seconds later two feds came in. One of them had another crowbar, and he managed to work it underneath the plate.

  Marlon had been a truly huge man. Only someone of his size could’ve slid this plate across the floor on his own. Just below the edges of the plate, was a layer of soil and dirt to make it easier to move.

  “To the left, on three,” said Harper.

  She counted three, pulled the crowbar down, and we pushed with our hands and feet and slid the steel plate to the side.