Case of Lies

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  They heard an amplified bullhorn. Nina could see a uniformed man holding it. “Mr. Flint, please pick up the phone. That’s all we ask. We are not interfering with you. Please pick up the phone so we can talk. We need to find out what you need right now.” He lowered it and waited. Nothing happened.

  “He doesn’t need a gun to kill Hanna,” Wish said, voicing the thought that was also in Nina’s mind.

  “Maybe he’d like to talk to me,” she said. “He sent me a message last night. Maybe he wants to know how I reacted.”

  “Let the cops handle it,” Sandy advised.

  “I’m going to ask Cheney.” The sergeant was huddled with a group of Placerville deputies on a neighboring property. Nina steeled herself and went to him. “He might talk to me,” she said. “He has said that he wants to talk to me.”

  One of the deputies said, “He’s not talking to anybody.” But Cheney puffed out his cheeks and considered her.

  “Better to let trained people try,” he said eventually.

  “They’ve been trying.”

  “You’d be out of range. You’d be safe.”

  “I’m willing.”

  “I don’t know. You’re not known for your soothing qualities. What makes you think you can sweet-talk him?”

  “I’ll just ask if there’s anything he wants to tell me,” Nina said. “If he doesn’t respond, I’ll get out of the way. I’m very worried about my client, Sergeant. His brother-in-law has collapsed and his wife and his niece have been killed by this asshole. I’m all he has out here. Just knowing that I’m here might help Dave.”

  “I’ll go talk to the guy in charge.”

  She went back to the car. Roger was sitting up in back, drinking from a bottle of water. Sandy and Wish sat in fold-out beach chairs behind the car.

  “Better?” she said.

  “I think I had an anxiety attack,” he said. “I felt dizzy, but I’m better now.”

  “Good.” She went around the car.

  “How’s it going?” Sandy asked. She was just sitting there, under an oak tree that hung over the street, looking comfortable with her legs up on the fender, a thermos on the ground and a cup in her hand. Wish read the Placerville want ads.

  “No change. You look all right.”

  “As long as it takes,” Sandy said.

  “You should go home. I can get a lift with Sergeant Cheney later.”

  “Listen to her,” Sandy said to Wish, shaking her head. “Thinks we’re going home.”

  “He’s our client,” Wish said to Nina. “We can’t go home until he’s okay.”

  “There’s nothing you can do.”

  “We’re sitting with him,” Sandy said. “He’s in there, we’re out here, but we’re with him. He needs us.”

  “You need us,” Wish said. He got up and made her sit in his chair. “Coffee,” he said. “Long night ahead, maybe.”

  At the bottom of the hill where the police had stopped traffic, Nina could see many more lights and people. “Reporters,” she said. “I wonder what they know.” She drank the coffee gratefully.

  Nothing happened for over an hour, except that the sun did a lot of things that must go on every evening, which she didn’t often notice: It sent sharp rays through the trees, it sparkled in the west on a neighbor’s chimney, it withdrew its warmth, it disappeared, leaving its radiant trail. The police grouped and regrouped, talked on their radios, moved their cars around. Now and then the officer with the bullhorn repeated his request that Flint pick up the phone. The Hanna house with its unkempt yard and old fruit tree became the focus of her world.

  At seven Wish braved the reporters to bring back pizza. Roger huddled in a blanket in the car, and Nina and Sandy continued their vigil from the plastic chairs. It reminded Nina of a Fourth of July at Tahoe when she and Bob had sat on the beach at North Shore with a crowd of people waiting endlessly for the first burst of fireworks in the sky, but the mood was very different now.

  They were waiting, helplessly, for a tragedy.

  Cheney found them a few minutes later. He ambled up and leaned against the van. “It’s full dark now,” he said. “The talk is of trying tear gas. I mentioned your offer to the Crisis Negotiation Team. The officer in charge wasn’t interested an hour ago, but he just told me if you want to talk through the horn, just to ask if Flint wants to talk to you, he’ll allow that. He’ll be beside you to coach you if Flint responds. If nothing happens, things are going to get rough.”

  “Right now?” Nina said.

  “Right now.” He extended a hand and Nina took it.

  “Hold the fort,” she told Sandy, an old joke between them.

  “Good luck,” Wish said. Nina and Cheney moved carefully from car to car, until they came to two uniformed police directly across the street from the house, standing in the dirt of a neighbor’s flower bed. One of them held the bullhorn. “Officer Christian. Nina Reilly,” Cheney said.

  “You’re the hostage’s lawyer?” Officer Christian said. He was a tired, square-jawed young man who barely looked at her.

  “That’s right.”

  “You say Flint has attempted to communicate with you?”

  Nina explained.

  “There has been zero action inside ever since our arrival. We’re about to quit this attempt. My concern is that you might say something that will set off an incident.”

  “I know. I understand.”

  “Here’s what you’ll say.” They rehearsed for a couple of minutes. Christian warned her about her tone, which he said would be more crucial than her words. The gravity of what she was about to do made her throat feel tight. All around her were silent police officers standing amid flashing red lights.

  “Go.” He showed her how to hold the horn. A cord ran from it to the nearby police car. It was heavy and awkward and rusty. She held it up with both hands.

  “Mr. Flint? Mr. Flint, are you there?” She waited a moment to allow the fact of her female voice to sink in inside the house, and to recover from the shock of hearing her voice amplified from, it seemed, Sacramento to Reno. “Mr. Flint, I’m Nina Reilly. I’d like to help. If you’d like to talk to me, all you have to do is pick up the phone. I’m calling you right now.” A uniformed woman nodded and dialed the Hanna number.

  “Do you need anything? I’m right outside, and I can help.”

  “It’s ringing,” the officer said.

  “It won’t hurt just to talk for a minute,” Nina said through the horn.

  The officer passed her the phone. Just like that. Nina dropped the horn and it made a loud protest. “Hello? Hello?”

  “He says, nobody try anything.”

  “Dave?” The voice was ragged, gasping, but recognizable. “It’s Hanna!” she mouthed, hand over the phone. They could all hear Dave’s voice on the monitor in the police car. Officer Christian was breathing fast, trying to tell her what to say, but it was hard, they were both so shocked that it was Hanna on the line, not Flint.

  “Dave, are you all right?”

  “Did you hear? Nobody try anything.”

  “Nobody will try anything. Nobody.”

  “He says he wants a helicopter and pilot. Two hundred fifty thousand in cash in the passenger seat. One hour.”

  We can talk about that, Officer Christian mouthed. Nina said, “We can talk about that. Are you injured, Dave?”

  “He says, shut up. He says listen. One hour.”

  “Okay, there is discussion out here, Dave. Arrangements are being made.” Christian had nodded and told her to run with the demand.

  “He says he’ll let me go. Please don’t let them try anything for a while, Nina.” This sounded like Dave’s own words, like he was very frightened that the police were about to enter the house forcibly.

  “While they talk, Dave, do you or Mr. Flint need anything? Some food or water?”

  A pause. “He says, shut up and listen. He says he wants you to know he killed Sarah. Shot her because she was watching.” This bald statement sent
shock waves all through the assembled group. Nina thought of Roger.

  “Okay,” she said. “I understand. He killed Sarah.”

  “He says he killed Chelsi and the others to stop the lawsuit.”

  “Okay.”

  “He says you started it and made him finish it. He says it’s all your fault.”

  Tears started up in Nina’s eyes. Hearing this was like being gouged by sharp beaks. I’m quitting law, she thought. I’m getting out.

  “He says, time’s up. Do we have a deal?” Dave said.

  She was swallowing, trying to control herself, but she couldn’t. She shook her head. Christian took the phone. Helpful hands supported her.

  Sandy and Wish put her in the front passenger seat of the van. She was crying uncontrollably. Roger had disappeared. “It’s all right, all right,” Sandy said, patting her shoulders. Wish made her drink some water. “I think we should take her home now,” he told Sandy.

  “He said I caused it.”

  Sandy said grimly, “He caused all of it. If I get my hands on him-”

  They heard a shot.

  For a moment, the whole forest was quiet. Then the police sprang into action, taking up positions, guns drawn, yelling. From several hundred feet away Nina could see Officer Christian holding up his arm, raising it up and down as though to quiet them.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “He shot Dave.”

  A new, uneasy quiet descended. The police were close to storming the house, but Christian was making the signal No, no to them. He grabbed the bullhorn and said, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” The door to the house was opening.

  A man came rushing out, looking wildly around and yelling something. He was tackled instantly, made to lie supine on the ground while two officers cuffed him. He struggled for only a minute, then lay on the ground quietly. Other officers rushed into the house.

  Nina, Wish, and Sandy moved toward the house. No one stopped them.

  A policeman came back to the front door and made a sign. The man inside was dead and it was safe to come in. “Oh, no,” Nina said. “No!” It was impossible, Dave Hanna gunned down in his own home while she watched the whole thing-there was Roger, running up the steps onto the porch. He rushed inside.

  Then he came back out, waving his arms. He looked around and saw the cuffed man on the ground.

  “Dave?” he said. The police officers pulled the man to his feet.

  It was Dave Hanna, disheveled and bloody but alive. “I got him, Rog!” he cried.

  32

  “I GOT HIM”

  PLACERVILLE, Cal. (AP)-

  A man held hostage at gunpoint in his own home by a serial killer managed to turn the tables on his attacker yesterday, wresting the gun away and shooting the attacker fatally.

  Dave Hanna, a former firefighter from Placerville, California, was resting at home today after the violent face-off with Leland Moss Flint of Palo Alto, California, the man who killed Hanna’s wife and niece. Flint allegedly shot Hanna’s wife, a bystander, during an armed robbery at Lake Tahoe two years ago. When Hanna filed a wrongful-death lawsuit that developed leads to Flint, Flint allegedly killed Hanna’s niece and two witnesses to the robbery.

  Yesterday, Flint crawled through a basement window in Hanna’s house. When Hanna came home, he was beaten and tied up. Police arrived after a 911 call by Hanna’s brother-in-law, Roger Freeman, and they surrounded the house.

  Five hours into the grueling standoff, Flint demanded a pilot, helicopter, and large sum of money in return for Hanna’s life-but while the killer was talking to the police, Hanna loosened his bonds and jumped Flint. In the ensuing struggle Flint was fatally shot.

  “It’s miraculous that he got the gun away from Flint,” said Sergeant Fred Cheney of the South Lake Tahoe Police Department, one of the multidistrict police forces called in.

  “He’s a hero,” said Rosetta Williams, a next-door neighbor of Hanna’s who was evacuated during the hostage situation. “We all knew and loved his wife. It’s fitting that Dave caught the killer.”

  “No quote from you,” Sandy observed, handing Nina the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle when she came in the next morning. “How’d you sleep?”

  “Sleep? What sleep?”

  “The schools are closed. The prediction is two feet.”

  It was snowing, large, dry flakes, the temperature in the thirties. The cabin on Kulow had been warm and silent, and all Nina had wanted that morning was to stay in her bed under the Hudson Bay blanket, watching it fall and covering all the horror of the Hanna case.

  In the end, she hadn’t wanted to be alone. And Sandy would need her. So she threw on corduroy pants and a ski sweater and let her hair hang loose. It was the first day of the rest of her life, the one in which she quit, because it was her fault.

  “You have a lot of mop-up on the Hanna lawsuit today. Mr. Hanna already called. He’s actually not at home, he’s staying with Roger. I thought you’d be in at nine.”

  “Sorry. You and Wish were great yesterday, Sandy. Thanks again.”

  “I hope we never have anything like that again. The waiting was bad. I never thought he’d get out alive.” Sandy looked tired, too. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “I’m happy you’re here, Sandy. Where’s Wish?”

  “Sergeant Cheney called and Wish said he’d go see him. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I’ll be in my office.”

  “Don’t you want some coffee?”

  “Give me a minute.” Nina went into her office and shut the door. She went behind her desk, kicked her shoes off, put up her feet, and closed her eyes. She had spent the night alternately pacing the floor and sitting on the couch in front of the fire, trying to understand what she had done.

  Flint’s words, that it was her fault, damned her. The guilt was overwhelming. Even with Dave’s miraculous survival, she had it from the killer’s mouth that she had set him off on a murder spree.

  And for what? What good had come of her legal machinations, her travels, her theories? Three murders and several attempted murders. She was tapped out on the expenses, Dave would get little besides scars and traumatic memories, and Chelsi was dead.

  Tapped out. Yes, that was it. In a way, she had tried to play God with a devil. And this was the result.

  She didn’t think she could go on. She would quit practicing law, teach or something. She didn’t have the hide for it anymore. Representing a client meant being personally responsible, and she was responsible.

  Flint himself had said she had set him off.

  She picked up the receiver and called Roger’s house.

  “How are you both this morning?” she asked when Roger picked up.

  “Dave is holding court. He looks pretty banged up with the bandages on his face, but he’s in a great mood. The docs say he’ll be fine in a couple of weeks. He slept last night and this morning the reporters found us, so he’s been doing interviews. I threw out all the booze in the house.”

  “Can I talk to him?”

  “Sure. Hang on.”

  Hanna’s voice sounded weak. “Hi.”

  “Hi. I called to see how you were.”

  “Fine. My rib hurts but I have some pills. There are people here. I can’t talk long.”

  “I’m glad you made it,” Nina said. “I wanted to apologize. For getting you into it. I guess I really did get Flint going.”

  “Yeah, he blamed you for everything. Not that he wasn’t about to kill me, when the cops came.”

  “I’m sorry. For what you went through.”

  “That’s what I get, for letting Roger and Chelsi talk me into hiring you. It was them, too, pushing, pushing. Flint went crazy.”

  “Did he say anything to you-anything strange?”

  “Like what?”

  “That he didn’t kill Sarah?”

  “The opposite. He was real clear about it. He did it.” She heard someone talking in the background. “There’s a guy here who wants to buy th
e rights to my story. Do you know a lawyer who handles stuff like that?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Listen, I’m gonna go. Nina, start dismantling whatever you’ve been up to, okay? Roger and I have talked about it and we feel we’ve suffered enough. Just throw the case out or whatever you do.”

  “How about if we talk tomorrow about it?” Nina said.

  “If you want. Bye.”

  Nina hung up. She felt sick. It was the whole Hanna case making her sick. At least Dave made it through, she thought.

  Wish burst through the door, Sandy right behind him. “Have to talk to you right now,” he said breathlessly.

  Nina held her hand to her chest. “Not another murder!”

  He dropped into a chair. Sandy had locked up outside. She took the other client chair. “Stop scaring us, Willis,” she said. “What is it?”

  “I talked to Cheney. He says the coroner gave him a preliminary report this morning. The coroner told him that Lee Flint had bruising on his arms and legs and cheeks.”

  “So? Dave struggled with him.”

  “It’s not like that, Nina,” Wish said slowly.

  “Well, out with it,” Sandy told him.

  “These are specific marks of being tied up. You know, in the chair at the Hanna house.”

  “The chair Dave was tied in?”

  “Sergeant Cheney had just talked to the hospital. Mr. Hanna didn’t have any marks like that.”

  “Flint was tied up? Not Dave?” Nina said. “You’re confusing me, Wish.”

  “No, you have it exactly right. Flint was tied up, not Mr. Hanna. We’re sitting in the sergeant’s office and he’s telling me this. He wants to have you brought in for a discussion. Then he gets a phone call from the police forensics lab in Sacramento. I was right there, Nina. He almost fell off his chair.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s about our client, Nina. Are you ready?”

  “Go ahead,” Nina said.

  “The fingerprint report came in on the gun Meredith gave you. The one used in the robbery.”

  “And?”

  “There was a surprise.”

  “Which was?”