1 Through a Glass, Deadly

by Sarah Atwell

  “Water would be fine.” I was getting impatient. “Where are the thugs?” When Matt looked blankly at me, I added, “Sean and Kevin. Have you charged them?”

  Matt nodded. “I have—a whole menu of charges. Sean made his one phone call and then clammed up. Kevin will tell us anything we want to know, starting with when he lost his first tooth. Or maybe when he was toilet trained.”

  “Are they being held together?”

  “Of course not. Every time Sean looks at Kevin, Kevin flinches. Now, shall we get started?”

  “Are you going to record this?” I asked.

  “Not yet. This isn’t a formal statement—we’ll get to those later. I just want to get the facts straight. Do you have a problem with that?”

  I shook my head. “Not unless it’s going to get us into trouble. Or you. I know you’ve bent quite a few rules.”

  “Let me worry about that. There are a few advantages to being the chief.” He tossed a brief smile at me, then surveyed us all, around the table. “I know we’ve been over this before, but I want to go back to the beginning and be certain I have all the facts. And Frank—I’d appreciate hearing your side as well. Allison, since you seem to be the connecting thread here, why don’t we start with you? And maybe now you can fill in some of the details we skipped the first time around.” He pulled his pad closer and picked up a pencil. “Your name is Allison McBride?”

  “No.”

  All heads swivelled toward Allison. She smiled weakly. “That’s what I’m known by. But my real name—the name I entered the country by—is Aisling.” It came out as “Ashlin.”

  “I see.” Matt made a note. “Why did you change it?”

  “Jack thought Allison sounded more American, and I went along with it. Like I did so many times. It’s the name I’ve gone by for years now, but enough of that.”

  “Tell us about how you met Jack. John Francis Flannery, right? That is his real name?”

  “As far as I know. Though I wouldn’t put anything past him.”

  Allison—I couldn’t bring myself to think of her as anything else yet—sat back in her chair and took a swallow from her bottle of water.

  “I came over near twenty years ago. Some of my friends, they knew where they could get summer jobs in the States—waitressing at Cape Cod. I was just done with school and I had no better plans, so I said, sure, I’d come along. We had temporary visas, or whatever you’d call them. I planned to spend the summer, make some money, then go home again and figure out what I wanted to do. Only it didn’t work out that way. I met Jack one night. He was from Boston, came down with some friends of his, and he stopped in for a drink and a bite, where I was working. Irish, but he was born here, and we just started talking. And things just sort of happened from there.”

  “You married him?” Matt asked.

  “I did, God help me. I’d known him all of a month, but he was so sure—and he could be charming, when he put his mind to it. Swept me off my feet—isn’t that the saying? Only it’s true, and he did. So we got married the end of August, and he took me back to Boston.”

  “Do you know what he did for a living?”

  Allison shook her head. “He wouldn’t talk about it. He always had plenty of pocket money, and we didn’t spend much. He always had a nice car, but we lived in a small apartment, and we didn’t go out often. Well, not together— he was out a lot, at night. I took a few odd jobs, nothing important—he wouldn’t have liked that.”

  “Did he ever bring anyone home with him?” Matt asked. I looked at him, wondering where he was going with this.

  “Now and then, but he usually told me to go watch television or something. I didn’t know them.”

  “Can you describe them, as a group?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What was your general impression? Were they, say, professionals, or laborers? Old? Young?”

  “I haven’t thought about those days for a long time.” Allison looked away, remembering. “Ordinary people, laborers, as you say. Never their wives or girlfriends. Young and old, but not together, I guess.”

  I was getting bored with this ping-pong game. “Matt, what’s this got to do with anything?”

  “I’m trying to get a handle on Jack’s life, his colleagues. We know about his criminal record back in Boston, and his connection to organized crime. Does that match what you knew about him?”

  Allison shook her head. “I feel like such a fool. For a long time, I was blind in love and I didn’t ask much. And he made it clear he didn’t want me to know. After a while, I realized I didn’t want to know. I didn’t like the people he brought home. You’ll think I was stupid. But I knew no one else in the country, and I had no money of my own and nowhere to go, so I looked the other way.”

  Frank made an inarticulate sound of disgust. “Ah, you should have gotten in touch with me. How much did your mother know?”

  “Uncle Frank, I’d only met you a time or two, and I had no clue where to find you. And my mother . . .” Allison shut her eyes and swallowed. “I didn’t do right by her. I didn’t ask her to my wedding—not that she missed much, for it was a shabby thing. And I never went back to see her—Jack wouldn’t have it. Maybe he thought I’d go and never come back. Maybe he was right. I had no money for plane tickets, nor did Ma. I talked to her, regular, but I never saw her again.” Her voice thickened, and there were tears in her eyes. Cam reached out and laid a hand on her arm, and she flashed a grateful look at him.

  Matt nudged the story back on track. “What brought about the move to Chicago?”

  “I’m not sure. One day Jack comes in and says, ‘Pack up—we’re leaving town.’ And that’s what we did.”

  “This was”—Matt looked down at a sheet in front of him—“about ten years ago?”

  “Sounds right. He never explained why. And the life we led there, it wasn’t much different than our life in Boston. He’d go out, I stayed in.”

  I tried to imagine Allison’s life, all those years. Nothing to keep her busy or give her a sense of purpose. No children. A man who controlled the purse strings, controlled where and how they lived—and then told her nothing. A throwback, was Jack Flannery. But Allison had gone along with it. I could understand the “why”—she had few skills, she knew no one, and she was “in love,” or so she thought—but for the life of me, I couldn’t understand the “how.” How she had gotten through the long empty days that had stretched into years. How she had ever mustered up the will to leave.

  Matt must have been following the same train of thought. “And then you left him?”

  Allison nodded, then looked at me before turning back to Matt. “You’re thinking I should have been gone years before. I wasn’t stupid, and I read all about women’s rights, what women could do with their lives. But I couldn’t see how—and I’d married the man. My mother would say, ‘You made your bed, now lie in it.’ She was a good Catholic, and it would have broken her heart if I divorced Jack. And as long as I didn’t, he thought he owned me. He did, more or less.”

  “What changed?”

  “My mother died. And when I no longer had to worry about what she would think—I thought about what I wanted, at long last. So I left. But I couldn’t face him, couldn’t tell him. So I saved up what money I could, and one day I just walked out with what little I could carry, and I just kept going. Two years ago, now.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I kept moving. I took whatever jobs I could find, usually waitress or serving drinks—anything that didn’t require much in the way of identification, and that paid in cash. And in all that time, there wasn’t a day that I didn’t expect to see Jack walk into whatever dead-end bar I was working in. I had no car, no possessions, nothing I couldn’t carry away with me at a moment’s notice. And every time I caught a glimpse of someone who reminded me of Jack— and I have no idea whether it really was him or not—I’d move on.”

  Cam sought her hand and twined her fingers through his.

&nb
sp; “And then he found you, here in Tucson,” Matt said.

  She turned to me then. “Em, I’m sorry to have dragged you into all this. And you were so kind to me. I just wanted to try something new, and I thought maybe, just maybe, I was safe at last. And then I saw Jack at that restaurant, and I didn’t know whether I was seeing things or it was really Jack.”

  I couldn’t let Allison continue to beat herself up over this. “Allison, none of this is your fault. People leave their husbands all the time. And people are entitled to live their own lives. I’m glad you walked into my shop, glad I got to know you. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Cam spoke for the first time since we had sat down. “I’ve got a question. Allison, you say you tried to stay below the radar—no credit cards, no car registration, nothing that would leave a paper trail, right?” Allison nodded at him, her eyes troubled. Cam turned to Matt. “Then how did Jack Flannery track her down?”

  “That’s something I’ve asked myself, Cam,” Matt said. “And I’m curious about the timing. Allison, you said you left Chicago maybe two years ago. Why was he looking for you now, or why did it happen that he found you now?”

  “That’d be my doing, I’m afraid,” Frank volunteered. We all turned to look at him.

  “What do you mean?” Matt asked.

  “Jack and me, we’d been doing business for a while, see? Long distance, you might say. Worked well enough. But a couple months ago, Jack wanted to up the ante. That was fine by me—I’d had no problems with our business dealings. But then I thought, since we were partners and all, in a manner of speaking, I’d like to meet up, face-to-face. And I hadn’t seen Allison since her mother died, so I thought I could kill two birds with one stone. Shake hands with my business partner Jack, see my niece. So I come to Chicago with the latest shipment of goods, Jack and I get together to do the deal, and everything’s fine until I mention I want to see Allison. So then he hems and haws and says he’ll have to check with the little missus, and the next thing I know, he’s gone.”

  I’d heard this before, but Matt hadn’t. He shook his head. “Hang on here. All right—Jack leaves Chicago to look for Allison, because you’ve asked to see her, and she’s not in Chicago any longer, and he wants to keep his partner happy. But how does Jack know where to look? And, for that matter, how did you know where Jack had gone?”

  “Dunno about the first part. As for the second, easy: I found out where he was headed. Bought me a ticket for the next plane out.”

  “What?” we said in chorus.

  “Look, I had a big investment here, and while we might be relations, if only by marriage, I wasn’t sure I trusted the bloke. So I tracked him. Not too hard—he wasn’t hiding his trail or anything.”

  Matt looked vaguely pained. “Frank, you’ve given us the ‘why’—why Jack had a sudden need to track down his missing wife. But that still doesn’t answer my basic question: How did Jack know where to find Allison? And, for that matter, how did our friends Sean and Kevin know where to find Jack? They don’t strike me as rocket scientists. I’ve pulled their records—they’re penny-ante crooks. They don’t make plans, they carry them out for someone else. So what brought them to Tucson?”

  We all pondered that. Or maybe some of us did. I know my mind was a blank. I’d been too busy dealing with what was in front of me, starting with a dead body, to think about the “why’s,” but Matt raised a good point. There was this procession of people making a beeline from Chicago to Tucson, and there was no obvious explanation about how that had happened.

  Frank stood up. “Matt, can you point me toward the loo?”

  “Down the hall, on the right. You aren’t going to disappear on us, are you?”

  “Wouldn’t think of it.” Frank grinned and sauntered down the hall.

  Matt sighed and sat back in his chair. “Clear as mud. Allison, you sure you had no contact with your husband until last week?”

  “Positive. And in truth I was a bit surprised. But so far as I know, he never found me until now.”

  Just in time to get very dead.

  My train of thought was rudely interrupted by a commotion in the hall. Male and female voices, both heated. As they approached I thought I recognized at least one of them, and my suspicion was confirmed when Agent Price stormed into the room, trailed closely by Mariana the desk sergeant.

  “I’m sorry, Chief—he just wouldn’t stop. He says he’s FBI.”

  Matt had risen when Price arrived. “Don’t worry, Mariana, it’s all right. I can handle it from here.”

  Mariana grumbled something and retreated. Price closed the door behind him. I could have sworn the air in the room crackled with electricity as the two men faced each other across the expanse of the table.

  “Agent Price. What brings you here?” Matt’s tone was neutral, but I could hear the tension in it.

  Price surveyed the rest of us at the table, lingering on Allison. “You have two prisoners here, and her.” He nodded toward Allison. “I’m taking them back to Chicago.”

  “I don’t think so,” Matt said evenly, but there was ice in his voice. “This woman has done nothing illegal, and as for the others, I’m going to charge them with murder and kidnapping. In my jurisdiction.” He paused, and then asked, almost conversationally, “How did you know they were here? Their paperwork hasn’t even cleared.”

  Agent Price looked momentarily nonplussed. Maybe he wasn’t used to having people question his right to trample all over them. Finally he said, “Sean Callahan called . . . his employers in Chicago, and it got back to me.”

  And why would that be? I wondered. I sat up straighter in my seat, eager to hear more.

  “Why would you find out?” Matt said, in the same level, deadly calm voice.

  Agent Price wavered, infinitesimally. “For the record, Sean Callahan and his associate Kevin McCarthy are among the targets of an extended investigation by the FBI into certain criminal activities in Chicago. Ms. McBride here is a material witness, based on her involvement with Jack Flannery.”

  “I see. You neglected to mention that, when we last spoke.”

  I knew Matt well enough to know that he wasn’t buying Price’s line of hogwash.

  “Because it was none of your business.” Price apparently had decided to go on the offensive. “The FBI has prior jurisdiction in this matter.”

  So intent were the two men upon their staring match that they failed to notice the door opening. Frank walked in and surveyed the confrontation. His eyes lighted on Agent Price.

  “Price, isn’t it?” he said.

  Agent Price whirled on his heel to confront Frank. “Do I know you?” he hissed.

  Frank smiled amiably. “No, but I know you. I saw you with our boy Jack, back in Chicago. Just before we closed our last deal.”

  The temperature in the room dropped precipitously.

  Chapter 24

  strike: term which describes the behavior of certain colors which when heated to a certain temperature change colors (Edward T. Schmid, Advanced Glassworking Techniques: An Enlightened Manuscript)

  Matt smiled, ever so slightly. If Agent Price had known him better, he might have been concerned.

  Agent Price almost sputtered. “I was there to review his testimony, if it’s any of your business. And who the hell are you?”

  “Frank Kavanagh, diamond dealer—and Allison’s uncle. And I don’t buy that you were there to check Jack’s story, mate,” Frank countered.

  Price refused to believe he was losing control of the situation. He turned away from Frank, as if to dismiss him, and addressed Matt.

  “Lundgren, I’m taking these three with me.”

  “Agent Price, sit down. You’re not going anywhere at the moment.” Matt’s voice held an edge now, and I shrank involuntarily in my seat.

  Agent Price wavered, as if weighing his options, and then took a seat at the end of the table opposite Matt. Matt waited until he was seated before resuming his own seat.

  In the same l
evel voice, Matt went on, “Agent Price, the rest of us have been having a most enlightening discussion about this case. About why Jack Flannery chose this particular time to reclaim his wife, and about the two men who followed him here and killed him—and most likely also killed the deliveryman a few days later. And then kidnapped Allison McBride—by the way, we have witnesses to that last event. Mr. Kavanagh here”—Matt nodded in the direction of Frank—“he’s added a few significant facts to our discussion. For example, the fact that he is Allison’s uncle. The fact that he was engaged in a business arrangement with Jack Flannery. And most recently, the fact that he saw you in the company of Jack Flannery in Chicago not long ago.”

  “I am aware of Mr. Kavanagh’s activities. Are you sure you want to probe too deeply into them, since you seem to be so chummy?” Amazing that he could talk with his teeth clenched.

  “Agent Price, I am not aware of any laws that Frank Kavanagh has broken in my jurisdiction. Actually, he has provided material assistance in rescuing his niece and taking the suspects into custody. He deserves a commendation, at the very least. And now he says that he knows you. Would you care to explain that?”

  Price was out of his chair and on his feet quickly. “I don’t have to explain a damn thing to you, Lundgren. You have no idea what you’re meddling in here. I intend to secure my prisoners and get out of here.”

  “Price, sit down.”

  Again the two men locked eyes, and my mind darted back to the image of a gunfight once more. Was it being in Arizona that made me think in those terms? Tombstone, the Earps? Maybe this wasn’t a dusty street, with the innocent local residents scurrying for cover as Good and Evil met in the heart of town. But it was uncomfortably close to it. And why did I think again that Matt should be wearing the white hat?

  I really didn’t want to be here, in this room, as these two men went head to head. I would happily be anywhere else. As it was, I had the perfect seat to watch the confrontation—and to watch the faces of my companions opposite. Allison looked terrified, Cam looked stubborn, and Frank looked . . . amused? I went back to watching the main attraction.