Lou Mason Mystery - 01 - Motion to Kill

by Joel Goldman

  Camaya leaned against the back, taillights lighting his face with a red glow. Blues’s Trans-Am and Kelly’s pickup were parallel parked at the edge of the grass, clockwise from the Escalade. Mason guessed Blues was somewhere between nine o’clock and midnight.

  From inside the cabin came the sounds of reckless searching. Cursing followed the crash of furniture upended and glass broken. Mason knew they were looking for both him and the disks. He was glad that he was outside and that the disks were safe with Riley and Sandra.

  “The angrier they get, the better off we are. It’ll make them careless,” Kelly whispered.

  When they were through kicking the front door off its hinges and stepped outside, Mason and Kelly eased to within a few feet of the clearing and crouched behind a mound of limestone boulders.

  “Are you going to invite them to surrender?” Mason asked.

  “I doubt if they’ll RSVP. If they start shooting, I’ll return fire first. That way, I can reload when it’s your turn.”

  Mason’s throat was dry and tight, but his grip on the shotgun was slippery and wet. He marveled at the odds that he would be waiting to kill someone who was waiting to kill him for the second time in two nights. He was no more skilled with a shotgun than he was with a toilet-tank lid. Only this time, he was ready; willing to level the gun, squeeze the trigger, and watch a man die. That was the true marvel, he realized. The night before, he hadn’t thought about killing, only surviving. Now all he thought about was killing.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  Three men stood on the porch. Camaya raised his arms, directing one of them to return to the Escalade and the other two toward the woods on either side of the cabin. Kelly steadied the barrel of her shotgun on the rocks. He matched her movements from his spot two feet away.

  “Shit!” Mason hissed as one of the killers started toward them.

  “Shut up and watch the other side of the woods. I’ve got this.”

  Despite Kelly’s order, Mason couldn’t take his eyes off the killer moving toward them. As he got closer, Mason could see his gun. It had a triangle-shaped frame stock, a pistol handle, and a short barrel. It reminded Mason of the guns favored by bad guys in every action movie he’d ever seen.

  He was close enough now that Mason could see his wide forehead, mushy nose, and hard-set mouth. There was no trace of fear, nerves, or regret.

  Kelly jabbed Mason in the side, pointing to the south side, the gesture reminding him of her order. Mason watched Blues’s target take his first steps into the trees before stopping and crumbling to the ground. Blues was good, but not good enough to smother the sound of the man’s startled cry.

  Mason glanced to his left to see if Camaya had heard his man go down. Camaya took a cautious step forward, now flanked by the third gunman. Kelly spoke in a voice loud enough for her man to hear but not loud enough for Camaya.

  “Freeze, or I’ll blow you in half!”

  “Fuck you, bitch!”

  The killer fired first, but Kelly made good on her promise, two blasts tearing into him, twisting his body and shredding his chest. His finger clung to the trigger of his gun as he fell, exhausting his clip.

  One of the rounds found the propane tank mounted near the side of the cabin. The tank erupted in a blinding ball of fire, the shock wave knocking Mason and Kelly to the ground, the limestone boulders shielding them from the molten shrapnel.

  Dazed, Mason raised his head. Kelly was sprawled facedown in the dirt. Mason crawled to her. She was conscious, her hands digging into the soil. He rolled her over, pulling her into his arms. Tears ran down her soiled cheeks as the flames swept through her cabin.

  Above the roaring blaze, Mason heard more automatic fire. He looked in the direction of the shots and saw Camaya riddle the tires on the Trans-Am and the pickup from the open passenger window of the Escalade. As they sped away, Blues ran after them, emptying his magazine, his shotgun useless at that distance.

  Kelly stiffened, clotting off her tears. She and Mason were stunned by the power of the blast but otherwise in one piece. The searing heat from the fire drove them from their rock pile. Once clear, she called out the rest of the Pope County Sheriff’s Department, the fire department, and Doc Eddy.

  Blues and Mason walked the quarter mile to the county road to wait for them. Kelly stayed behind, a lone silhouette framed by the inferno devouring her hiding place. Incandescent shadows swarmed through the trees like extras in a low-budget horror movie before evaporating into the black sky.

  The rescuers and the rescued worked through the night stamping out the few burning embers that had drifted into the trees. By daylight, the fire had consumed itself.

  Brilliant tracers of pink and orange crept into the morning sky as the last tendrils of black smoke drifted away.

  Soot stained and weary, Blues, Mason, and Kelly poured themselves into a deputy’s car and joined the procession back to town. Tow trucks dragging the Trans-Am and the pickup bounced along, bringing up the rear.

  Riley and Sandra, their faces pinched with fatigue, were waiting in front of the courthouse when they pulled in. Sandra was stretched out on the wide stone handrail using her arms for a pillow. Riley lay across the stairs like the hypotenuse of a triangle. Mason had the feeling that the morning wasn’t going to get any better.

  “Hi, honey, I’m home!” he called out with more good cheer than was fair.

  He figured the one who answered was probably still alive. Sandra rolled off her perch and reeled Riley to his feet.

  “You folks okay? The deputy told us what happened when you called in,” Riley said.

  Kelly walked into Riley’s waiting arms and he held her, rubbing her back. She pulled away a moment later.

  “A little shell-shocked, Riley, that’s all,” she said. “Any luck?”

  “Well, I’ve got an answer, but it’s not the one you expected,” Riley said. “There’s nothing else on the porno disks.”

  “What do you mean?” Mason asked.

  “The only thing on those DVDs is people doing the horizontal mambo and switching partners faster than you can say ‘Swing your partner, do-si-do.’”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. There has to be something else. You’ll just have to keep looking until you figure it out. It’s been a long night. We’ll all get some rest and start fresh this afternoon.”

  “I’m sorry, son. There’s no point in it. I spent half the night looking, and there just isn’t anything else there.”

  Mason took a deep breath and shoved his hands in his pockets to keep him from shaking Riley until he made some sense.

  “What in the hell are you talking about? People are getting killed for those damn disks, and you’re trying to tell me it’s all a big mistake? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  “Son, no one’s getting killed for the skin flicks. Now, Johnny Mathis—that’s a different story entirely,” he said.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  “Johnny Mathis?” Kelly asked.

  “Yup. It’s not a commercial CD, like an album you’d buy. Somebody copied the songs onto a blank CD.”

  “They put it in a CD case from a Johnny Mathis album to make it look like the real deal,” Sandra added.

  “I was playing it on a boom box while I was fiddling with these other disks,” Riley continued. “Right smack in the middle of my wife’s favorite tune, he hit that high note—kinda like a warble—then it cut out. Nothing. So I got to wondering about Mr. Mathis and I decided to run some tests on his CD.”

  “Riley found two documents that had been imaged onto the CD. We printed them out,” Sandra said, handing copies to Blues, Kelly, and Mason.

  Each document consisted of a single page. The first listed the shell companies O’Malley had set up to borrow money from his bank and identified the owners. Sullivan owned half of each of the companies. O’Malley owned the other half. The document would have made St. John’s case against him.

  “These must be the documents Sullivan wanted you to d
estroy,” Kelly said to Mason.

  “I don’t think he wanted me to destroy anything. I think he was just testing me to find out which side of the line I walked on. There was no way he could know if every copy of this had been destroyed. Especially if it had been imaged onto a CD. Besides, he wasn’t the only one who knew about this. O’Malley knew. They were partners. What’s on the other page?”

  “Another list,” Sandra said. “I recognize the names of some of the companies involved in the fixtures deals. But there’s also a list labeled ‘accounts.’ Each account is a combination of letters and numbers. I don’t know what they mean.”

  Kelly scanned the second document. “It’s a combination of bank account numbers and passwords. Offshore banks in the Cayman Islands use the codes to identify account holders and give them access to their accounts without using names. When I was with the FBI, we spent a lot of time breaking these codes down so we could trace laundered money.”

  “So break these down,” Mason said. “It’s the key to the fixtures deals. We’ll follow the money and find out who started all of this.”

  “It’s not that simple. You just can’t hold the numbers up to a mirror and read them backward. But this is another reason for me to go to Chicago. I’ve got friends there who can decipher them.”

  Kelly led the way to the Home Style Cafe on the west side of the square for breakfast. The restaurant was filled with regular customers who made it part of their daily ritual. The men in denim shirts and blue jeans were stretching their last cup of coffee before starting their day. The storefront was dusky brick, unchanged for the last forty years. Kelly and Mason slid side by side into a booth while Sandra, Blues, and Riley chose the counter.

  “Why do you think Sullivan imaged those documents onto a CD with Johnny Mathis?” Kelly asked.

  “He was hiding them in plain sight. Anyone who found the CD case would see the Johnny Mathis label and think it was nothing important. If they opened the case and saw a disk without a Johnny Mathis label, they might get suspicious and listen to it. There was enough music on the CD to make most people assume there wasn’t anything else on it, but it took a true fan like Riley to listen long enough to find the documents.”

  “I respect the man and his music,” Riley said from his seat at the counter.

  Mason continued. “Sullivan knew that St. John had him cold when St. John served the subpoena on him. The fixtures documents were his trump cards. Sullivan was going to offer a trade to St. John. Somebody else found out. They must have been looking for the documents when they broke into Sullivan’s house last month.”

  “And Harlan was going to try his own version of let’s make a deal. Now they’re both dead,” Kelly said.

  The sun flattened out against the water-spotted window. Kelly rested her elbow on the ledge, chin cupped in her hand, her eyes set on some distant place. The sad weariness Mason had first sensed in her had spread in the hours since her cabin burned. She hadn’t talked about it and didn’t have to. It was the last link to her father. He’d died long ago, but now he was truly gone. Mason tried to comfort them both by holding her close. She pulled away, her melancholy smile telling him that he was not what she needed right now.

  Breakfast passed quietly. She explained that her chief deputy would handle the investigation while she was away. Another deputy would drive her home to clean up and pack and then take her St. Louis, where she’d catch a Southwest flight to Chicago, getting there in time for lunch. She left the tip and said good-bye.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  There was a Holiday Inn two blocks away with a vacancy, and Mason’s plastic was still good. He showered and slept past noon, too tired for nightmares. It was Friday and he counted on the latest set of clothes he’d just purchased to last through the weekend or his insurance settlement wouldn’t see him past Labor Day.

  By two o’clock, he was all dressed up with no place to go. He drifted back to the courthouse and Kelly’s office, figuring that Blues and Sandra would turn up eventually. Nobody told him not to, so he camped out in Kelly’s chair.

  He was about to go looking for Blues when a file clerk walked in with a fax from the community blood bank. Like all faxes, it had a bold Confidential stamp across the cover sheet. Like all people who were tired of getting shot at, Mason ignored it.

  The second sheet was a copy of the blood bank’s laboratory test from September 1987 for Richard Sullivan. The lab data were medical hieroglyphics to him, but the narrative report couldn’t have been clearer. It was 95 percent certain that Richard Sullivan was the natural father of an unnamed child, then aged ten. The mother was Meredith Phillips. The report was addressed to Dr. Kenton Newberry of Rogersville, Kansas.

  Mason finished writing the information on a yellow pad just as Blues and Sandra came through the door. Judging from the creases in their jeans, they’d all been on the same schedule.

  “Trans-Am’s got new wheels and is running fine,” Blues reported.

  “Well, Chief, got any bright ideas for the rest of our summer vacation?” Sandra asked.

  “Yep. We’re going home.”

  “Pardon me. But unless I’m missing something, we came down here to hide from Camaya—and now we’re going back to Kansas City!” Sandra said. “Should we just paint a target on our backs or would a Shoot Here, Stupid sign be better?”

  “We haven’t done a bang-up job of hiding. Besides, he won’t look for us there if he thinks we’re still down here. We’re the only ones who’ll know where we’re going and we won’t tell anybody, now, will we?”

  The mildly accusing tone came out without premeditation.

  “No, we won’t!” Sandra said, bristling at the implication in Mason’s voice. She turned and walked out.

  “Hey, where are you going?” he called to her.

  “To the bathroom. Do I need an escort?” she replied over her shoulder.

  “What’s that all about, man?” Blues asked when she was out of range.

  “I don’t really know. I didn’t intend for it to sound that way. But she sure took it personally. It just seems kind of odd that Camaya found us so easily.”

  “I told you he’d come looking for us, and he’d figure you were with Kelly.”

  “Yeah, but how did he know where Kelly was?”

  “She’s the sheriff, for crissakes! You look for her at the sheriff’s office.”

  “Well, unless he keeps tabs on ex-FBI agents, how did he know she was the sheriff down here? St. John didn’t even know that.”

  The more Mason talked, the more he warmed up to this latest thread. “Even if he knew Kelly was in the Ozarks, the location of her cabin was practically a state secret. Somebody sure as hell had to tell him how to get to it. And back at the warehouse, Sandra didn’t bat an eye when that black Escalade pulled up.”

  Blues got his clenched-jaw cop look as he chewed on the possibilities. “And she didn’t complain about being stuck down in that basement all night with Riley.”

  “Maybe I’m just grabbing at shadows. But we don’t know where Camaya is or how much help he’s got. If he stayed in the area, chances are he’ll watch the roads back to KC. I’ve got a different route in mind.”

  Mason told Blues about the blood-bank results before showing him a road map he’d dug out of Kelly’s desk. They were about 180 miles south and east of Kansas City. They would take Highway 54 west across the state line into Kansas to Highway 169, then head north on 169 to Rogersville, a small town about sixty miles south of Kansas City.

  It was roughly the same distance to Rogersville from the lake as from the lake to Kansas City. It would take three to four hours to get there. Mason didn’t know what they would find there on a Friday night, but he doubted anyone would be watching for them along those roads. They agreed to say nothing to Sandra about their route. They would stop in Rogersville for dinner. Mason hadn’t gotten any further in his thinking when Sandra reappeared.

  “Okay, guys. I’m ready,” she said, all trace of hostility gone.
“I hope your moms told you to go to the john before going on the highway.”

  “You betcha!” Mason said. “Come on, Blues; I’m not stopping every ten minutes for you.”

  As they were walking out of the bathroom, Mason noticed a pay phone tucked in an alcove between the sinks and the urinals. He told Blues to take Sandra to the car and he would meet them in a minute. He pretended to have forgotten something in Kelly’s office, and on the way back out stopped to talk to the sheriff’s dispatcher, a greasy-haired kid, probably not yet twenty-one and barely winning the war on acne.

  “Were you on duty last night when Sheriff Holt called in from the cabin?”

  “Sure was! That must have been one hell of a fire!”

  “Lucky thing the troops knew how to get there. I never could’ve found the way on my own.”

  “Shit, man!” he said laughing. “Nobody knew how to get to that cabin. The sheriff had to damn near talk the lead deputy all the way in. We all knew she had the cabin, but she was mighty private about where it was.”

  “No kidding?” Mason’s stomach tightened with a cold shiver, and he changed the subject. “How do you keep in touch with Sheriff Holt when she’s on the road?”

  “Age of the cell phone, man.”

  “Mind giving me the number? I may need to get in touch with her.”

  “No problem,” he said as he scratched it on a piece of paper and handed it to Mason.

  Mason started to leave and stopped. “Just one last thing. I was wondering, do you have any pay phones around here?”

  “Yeah. There’s one in each john.”

  “Thanks,” Mason said and headed for the car.

  Sandra was in the front seat, riding shotgun.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  Mason couldn’t explain his sudden suspicion of Sandra, yet he couldn’t shake it, and her passive aggressive response didn’t help. He would have preferred ducking her usual barrage of sarcasm and threats than the uncomfortable silence that filled the car. When he turned to look at her, she made a point of staring out the window, not bothering to ask why Blues was ignoring all the highway signs pointing to Kansas City.