“Didn’t he smell a rat?”
“Actually, that’s been done before, usually with a first-time criminal the police want to put pressure on, frighten a bit. Their goal is to get names and places so they can go higher up the food chain, roll up the whole operation, that sort of thing. So this didn’t particularly arouse any suspicion.”
“Do we know which detective asked for the favor?”
“The policeman wouldn’t say. But in any case, I think you have to be wary of both men.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. “Are you there?” Elena asked.
“Yes. I was just processing this information.”
“As I see it, you’re definitely in danger from Walt Crosley,” Elena said. “You probably can’t trust either Steve Alston or Jesse Callaway. Do you agree?”
“I guess you’re right. I suppose the only two people I can trust in this whole thing are you and Mark.”
“How about Megan?”
Shannon’s silence spoke volumes. Finally, she said, “Megan says she’s turned her life around. But at this point, I think it will be safer if I don’t share too much with her.”
AT A BIT PAST SIX ON THIS SUMMER EVENING, THERE WAS STILL more than an hour of daylight left. Ideally, he’d be safer keeping this watch later tonight, under cover of darkness, but he wanted to catch Frasier as she got home.
The maroon sedan wasn’t new, but it was a late enough model to blend in with other cars parked on the street in that upper-middle-class neighborhood. He found a spot with a good view of Frasier’s driveway. It would be nice if he could park farther away, but he needed to be close in order to see and react to her arrival.
He slouched behind the wheel, hoping the darkened car windows would give him a certain amount of anonymity. The good thing about the timing was that he could smoke without fear of the glow of his cigarette giving him away.
He lit up, scooted down in the driver’s seat, and turned the rearview mirror so he could see any car coming up the street behind him. Patience. He’d learned that the hard way. Put in the time. Don’t get ahead of yourself. That was the key.
He needed the information Frasier had. And he’d do whatever was necessary to force her to give it up. But first he had to get her in his control.
When he glanced at the rearview mirror, he saw her car coming down the street toward him. But there was another car right behind hers. He’d wait until they went by, then make his move. Frasier’s car slowed for the turn. The following car had its left turn blinker on as well. He cursed under his breath. Someone was coming home with her.
He quickly calculated the pros and cons of dealing with two people. He could do it—no question. He’d done it before. But it would be easier and cleaner with only one. He shrugged, stubbed out his cigarette in an already-full ashtray, and reached for the ignition key. There was always tomorrow.
AS SOON AS SHANNON GOT HOME, SHE LEFT MARK TO FEND FOR himself while she changed into jeans, a blue T-shirt, and sandals. Now he was in the kitchen putting together supper for the two of them, while she sat in the overstuffed chair in her living room, one leg dangling over the arm, the phone pressed to her ear.
“Megan, I’m glad you’re settling into your new apartment,” Shannon said. “And I know you want to have Mark and me over for dinner sometime, but we’ve both had a tough day. He’s cooking scrambled eggs and toast for us. Then we’re going to relax and watch some mindless TV. How about another night?”
“Okay,” Megan said. “I guess I should have asked you ahead of time. But when Parker and I got home, she suggested we cook for you tonight.”
The two women chatted for a moment more before Mark called, “It’s on the table.”
“Got to go if I don’t want cold eggs,” Shannon said.
The sisters exchanged good-byes, and Shannon arose from her chair and walked into the kitchen.
“Who was that?” Mark asked.
“Megan. She and Parker wanted to have us over for dinner.”
Mark stopped with a plate in his hand. “I know she’s your sister, and I’m happy she’s liking her new living arrangements, but I need some time to relax tonight. How about you?”
“Yes. Unfortunately, I have some things to tell you that will probably make it tough for you to relax.”
Mark dished up the food and they both sat down. “I cooked it. I guess you can bless it,” he said with a smile.
At first Shannon started to say she was in no mood to pray. But then it occurred to her that was exactly what she needed to do. “Sure.” They bowed their heads, and Mark eased his hand over hers.
After the amen, they sat quietly for a moment, lost in their own thoughts. Then Shannon chewed a bite, took a sip of iced tea, and said, “I talked with Elena Waites today.”
“Is there more trouble about Megan’s arrest?”
“You might say that. It was all faked—no arrest warrant was issued for Megan.”
Mark’s face mirrored his surprise. Slowly he lowered his fork, the food on his plate momentarily ignored. “So if that’s the case . . .”
“Either Alston or Callaway, more likely both, had something in mind. My guess is that they wanted to soften her up and ask her some questions, but I foiled their plan by telling Megan not to say a word without Elena present.”
“What sort of questions?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they know something I don’t know. Elena says that at the end of the interview, Alston bore down on her about being involved in the bank robbery along with Radick and Crosley. He mentioned something about her share of the loot.” Shannon placed her knife and fork across her plate and wiped her mouth on a napkin. “I’m beginning to believe that there are some things about Megan I still don’t know.”
“Well, we certainly can’t trust the detectives, can we?”
“I don’t—” The ring of her phone interrupted her. She rose and hurried into the living room, with Mark trailing behind. She picked up the phone, and they both took seats on the sofa.
“Dr. Frasier.”
“Doctor, it’s Steve Alston.”
Shannon beckoned Mark closer and punched the button to put the call on speaker. “Yes?”
“We just got some information I thought you might like to hear. Want me to drop by and give it to you in person?”
Shannon frowned and shot Mark a questioning look. He shrugged, as if to say, “Your call.”
“That would be okay. Dr. Gilbert is here as well. You can tell us both. That will save me having to tell him later.”
Alston’s voice changed slightly, and Shannon could almost see his mind working. “Why don’t you put this call on speaker and I can tell you both right now?”
“Sure.” Shannon waited a second. “Now you’re on speaker. What’s the news?”
“Yesterday one of our patrols arrested a gangbanger who’d stolen a car. When they shook him down, he was carrying a semiautomatic pistol—unregistered, of course. The lab fired some test rounds from it and got a match to bullets from a recent crime. Want to guess which one?”
Shannon was in no mood to guess. “Which?”
“We got a perfect match with the bullets the medical examiner dug out of Barry Radick. From what the kid told us, this was a drive-by shooting, part of a gang initiation. It appears that Radick just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Shannon wasn’t sure how to take this. Not long ago she would have welcomed the news that the shooting outside her house was nothing more than a random act. Now she wasn’t sure whether she could believe anything Alston said. She wasn’t sure she could believe anybody.
“Anything else?” she asked.
“No. I just thought you’d want to know.”
She ended the call and turned to Mark with a puzzled expression on her face. “I don’t know if that makes things clearer or muddies them. I’d always thought that Radick’s murder had something to do with the bank robbery. And even if his shooting was random, what was he doi
ng at my house? He wasn’t just wandering by—his car was parked down the street, and he was coming up the walk. Why?”
Mark shook his head. “We don’t have the answer, do we? I mean, in medicine, sometimes the answer is clear as a bell, sometimes—”
Shannon stopped him with an upraised hand. “Wait! Clear as a bell. Let me think.” Shannon closed her eyes and tried to recapture the thought that had struck her. Something was tickling at the edges of her memory, something that seemed out of the ordinary at the time. She’d shoved it into a corner of her mind, but now it was peeking out once more.
“What?”
“It was something in the cemetery. Something that was out of place.”
“We scoured every inch of the area covered by those GPS coordinates,” Mark said. “And if we missed something, Crosley didn’t. Remember, the police said there were mausoleums opened, gravestones tipped over, even a few holes dug. I don’t know what those numbers from Radick mean, but I don’t think they point to the cemetery.”
“But they do,” Shannon said. “I remember walking by a series of brass bells hanging from a curved metal rod. I thought it would be nice to have something like that at a gravesite, tinkling as the wind blew. But that ornament was something new, something out of the ordinary in an old cemetery like Greenwood.”
“So maybe someone decided to add it to the grave of an ancestor,” Mark said.
“No. There’s more. I ran my hand along the bells, wanting to hear them. And one bell had a different tone, not like the others.”
“So you think—”
“If we look at those bells, I’ll bet we find something inside one of them—a clue that will lead to the stolen money everyone seems to be hunting.”
TWENTY-FIVE
MARK OPENED HIS MOUTH BUT CLOSED IT BEFORE THE WORDS “That’s crazy” could escape. Maybe what Shannon said wasn’t crazy—at least not any crazier than the other events of the past two weeks.
“Suppose there is something in there. How are we going to find where it leads us?” he asked.
Shannon was already on her feet. “One step at a time. First we go to the cemetery and find what’s in that bell. Maybe there’s a clue there as well.”
“Why don’t we just . . .” Mark let the sentence trail off. He was about to suggest they pass this information on to Alston and Callaway. But the rigged arrest of Megan had left him unwilling to trust the two detectives, and he knew Shannon shared that distrust.
She walked to the window, looked out, then turned to face Mark. “We probably have an hour or less of daylight. I don’t want to go sneaking around a graveyard at night—besides which, they may lock the gates for security. I’m going. Are you with me?”
Mark sighed and bid a mental good-bye to the rest of his scrambled eggs. “Of course. I’ll drive.”
AS MARK’S CAR ENTERED GREENWOOD CEMETERY, SHANNON looked around and wondered if she could find the exact place where the GPS coordinates had led them before. The last time they were here, Megan directed them to the spot. But Shannon didn’t have that app on her own phone, and she didn’t want to include her sister in this foray. She held firm to her resolve to trust only her attorney and Mark.
“Do you have any idea where we’re going?” she asked.
“Pretty much,” Mark said. “Far southwest corner of the cemetery. We enter on Peace, left on Glory, right on Friendship.”
“I like the names of these little streets,” Shannon said.
“Well, I doubt that the names mean much to the people buried here, but the sentiment’s nice.”
The sun was low in the western sky, and some of the shaded areas were already darkening. Mark turned on his headlights, but they illuminated only the road, not the areas around the tombstones and monuments.
“There! There’s the monument with the statue of a Confederate soldier,” Shannon said. “The hanging bells are near there. I saw them when I was walking back to the car.”
Mark pulled to the side of the narrow road and parked. “Check the glove compartment. There should be a flashlight in there.”
Shannon opened the little door and reached in. The first thing her hand encountered wasn’t the familiar cylinder of a flashlight. Rather, it was an irregularly shaped piece of cold, slightly greasy metal. She pulled back her hand as though she’d touched a snake. “Mark! The gun is still in here.”
Mark leaned across, reached into the glove compartment, and pulled out first a handgun, then a flashlight. He tucked the gun into his belt on his left side, the butt forward, out of the way but ready for a cross-draw. He checked the flashlight, found that it worked, and slid it into his side pants pocket.
“Can’t you leave the gun in the car?” Shannon asked.
“We’re not the only ones hunting whatever Radick was talking about. What if Walt Crosley is over there somewhere hiding behind one of those monuments?” Mark reached over and laid his hand lightly on Shannon’s shoulder. “I promise I won’t draw the gun unless our lives are in danger.”
“Can you at least put on the safety?”
“Revolvers don’t have a safety. This one requires either a strong pull on the trigger or manually cocking the hammer back. It’s not about to fire accidentally.” He touched the handle of the gun. “Don’t worry. I know how to use it, and I’ll be careful.”
She nodded, then opened the car door on her side and exited. “I think the bells are over that way.” She headed for a spot to the left of the Confederate soldier monument.
She’d taken only a dozen or so steps when Mark called, “Right here.” He was one row over from where Shannon stood. He pointed to a metal rod that extended out of the ground to almost waist height. Suspended from a curve at the top of the rod was a string of progressively larger bowl-shaped bronze bells. He reached down and started the assembly swinging. Chimes sounded, but one of the bells seemed to give off a slightly discordant note.
Shannon hurried to where Mark stood. She held out her hand. “Let me hold the flashlight while you reach in and see what’s inside that bell.”
He bent down to peer inside the largest one. “Can’t see anything. Let me feel.” In a moment he said, “Sure enough, there seems to be something wired to the clapper.” He pulled his knife from his pocket. “Let me see if I can get it free.”
Shannon looked around her and marveled at how quickly darkness was falling. Maybe it got darker earlier in a cemetery. Or maybe it just seemed that way. Even the usually busy street right outside the cemetery fence was devoid of traffic at this moment. “Can you hurry?”
“Almost through,” Mark said. In a moment, he pulled out a small key. “Hold the light here. I think there’s a label stuck on it.”
The light jerked as Shannon reacted to a noise nearby. “Did you hear that?” she said.
Mark paused. “No. What do you think you heard?”
“Just a . . . just a sound.” She shivered. “Let’s get in the car. I’m uncomfortable standing here in the open.”
Mark looked around. “I think you’re jumping at shadows, but okay.”
“On second thought, let’s leave. I’ll feel better when I’m out of this graveyard.”
A few moments later, Mark had the car in gear and moving along the cemetery road toward the exit. “There’s the source of your noise,” he said. He pointed to a man standing by a monument nearby, his face turned away from them, his head bowed as though in prayer. “It’s probably someone who’s come to the grave of a relative. Maybe this is their birthday or anniversary. Nothing to be scared of.”
“I guess what I heard was his car door closing.” Shannon pointed to a dusty maroon sedan parked on the verge of the road. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have been frightened.”
MARK GUIDED HIS CAR THROUGH THE DARKENING STREETS. Despite his having told Shannon they were in no danger at the cemetery, he glanced frequently at his rearview mirror as he drove. He even took a couple of extra turns to make sure no one was following them.
Beside him, Shann
on held the flashlight like a club, apparently ready to wield it as a weapon if anyone came near them. Her other hand lay in her lap, her fingers ceaselessly turning the key from side to side, end to end. It wasn’t lost on Mark that although she’d been concerned when he pulled the gun from his glove compartment, she hadn’t asked him to put it back. Perhaps she was finally getting the idea—she truly was in danger.
“Can you tell what’s stuck to the key?” he asked, his eyes still on the road.
Shannon shined the light onto her lap. “It’s a tiny label—some sort of plastic material, like something done with a label-maker.”
“What’s on it?”
“I can’t tell. It’s too dark. Just a second.” She adjusted the beam of her flashlight slightly. “It’s another series of numbers.” She squinted and moved the key closer. “They’re so tiny I can barely read them.”
Mark shook his head. “Not more GPS coordinates, I hope.”
“No, it’s one series: 75035299.”
“What about the key? Any idea what it might open?”
The light from the flashlight began to flicker and fade. Shannon brought the key closer to her face. “It’s sort of like a house key.”
“Think it could be to a safe-deposit box?” Mark asked.
“I only know about the one I have, and it’s different from this key. There may be some numbers engraved on it, but if so, they’re under the label. Besides, I’ll need a better light to see them.”
“Maybe they represent an address or something,” Mark said.
The flashlight was almost useless by now. Shannon clicked it off and opened the glove compartment door just enough to shove the flashlight in. “You need new batteries for this,” she said.
“I’ll take care of it.” He took his right hand off the wheel long enough to touch the checkered grip of the .38-caliber revolver stuck in his belt. The mate to this revolver was in the back of the glove compartment. Mark wished more than ever that Shannon would take it. Maybe he’d give that one more try.
Critical Condition Page 23