Road Kill; Puppet Master; Cross Wired

by Jan Coffey

  His eyes narrowed. “The Connecticut Attorney General,” he said, an edge emerging through the suaveness, “has already been in consultation with the Justice Department on the topic of trying your son as an adult. We’re well aware of his age.”

  Staring into the young man’s brown eyes, she wondered how she’d succeeded in reaching a working relationship with the other two Secret Service agents, while this one had her blood pressure about to go through the roof.

  Lexi’s hand found the lawyer’s card in her pocket. “I’m focusing on Juan’s care right now. That should be your only concern, too,” she reminded him. The future was just an unpleasant haze.

  She watched as the man’s composure quickly returned. That casual, friendly attitude was only a veneer, she thought. Just beneath the surface, this guy was as edgy as a fox.

  “Of course, ma’am. I’m here because we are concerned. And the sooner we settle this pointless argument, the sooner we’ll have Juan on his way.”

  There was nothing pointless about her request. And she didn’t believe anything he said. Hank Gardner was still downstairs. She wondered where Agent Atwood was. She would take his gruffness and attitude anytime over this one’s.

  Lexi took out the attorney’s card and looked down at the name and phone number. Judy McGrath’s home number was carefully printed in neat handwriting on the back of the card.

  “Before anyone moves my son, I’d like to contact my attorney and have her join us here to go over all the details.”

  The young agent shrugged and looked away. “You do what you have to, Dr. Bradley…as we will. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

  As he brushed past her, Lexi felt a sense of dread cut into her like a chill wind. She didn’t believe they would actually wait for her lawyer to arrive.

  A man and a woman, both in street clothes, stepped out of the elevator. Luna approached and greeted them. They all headed for Juan’s door. From the other end of the hall, an orderly was pushing a gurney toward her son’s room, too.

  Lexi didn’t know the name of the hospital or the exact location. Maryland was all Luna had said. Once they moved Juan, she might not get authorization onto the grounds of a military hospital. She was in deep trouble. She pulled out her cell phone to call the attorney.

  Considering her luck, she should have known. The phone was totally out of charge.

  ~~~~

  Chapter 16

  Wednesday, January 16, 10:09 p.m.

  Sparks, Nevada

  Express Copy was the only twenty-four-hour copying place Mitch could find near the highway. Located between Reno and Sparks, the store was visible from the exit off Interstate 80. Mitch pulled into an empty lot across the street and studied the brightly lit store for a couple of minutes. The yellow pages he’d ripped out of the phonebook outside a convenience store by the last exit lay on the passenger seat.

  He looked back at the exit from the highway. No black sedan. There hadn’t been any sign of it since he left the motel. He’d lost them…for now.

  Mitch thought about calling Elsa. He glanced at the clock display on the dashboard. She’s probably sleeping. Taking care of the grandchildren was a tough job. When Elsa was down there, she went to bed whenever they did.

  “She’ll be worried, though,” he murmured to himself. She had to know by now that he wasn’t home. She was a good woman. They’d been married…how long? Thirty-seven years in June. He should call and leave a message anyway, maybe at home. That way, when she called looking for him, she’d get the message.

  What would he say? Christ. What could he say to her? That he’d been part of something that had gone crazy? That his dreams of doing something great had turned to shit. No…worse than shit. He was responsible for killing people. There was no other way to put it. He’d killed children.

  It wasn’t what they’d set out to do. How had it gone so wrong?

  Mitch felt himself growing nauseous. He tried to block out the images of all those dead children…and others. He rolled down the window and took deep breaths of air. The smell of greasy fries wafting across the road didn’t help. He looked back at Express Copy.

  He didn’t like the floor-to-ceiling glass front panel of the store. The insurance agency that shared the building was dark. He looked up and down the strip. The Comfort Inn had just a few cars in the lot and the two fast food places on this side of the highway overpass were closed. The street was dead quiet, no passing cars. Even the traffic on the highway was surprisingly light.

  Still, Mitch was wary of the openness of the large windows of Express Copy. Only one person seemed to be working the late shift. From where Mitch was sitting, he could see a balding, middle-aged man loading paper into one of the big copying machines.

  Mitch looked behind him down the street. No one was coming. He grabbed the top file off the back seat. He had to make the effort. It was clear they were after him. When they caught up to him, he was a dead man. He couldn’t fold his hand and give up, not after coming this far. There was still a chance that he could make a difference. If he could save even one life. Even one…

  As he opened the car door, an eighteen-wheeler hauling a pair of trailers roared across the overpass. The sound made him jump back against the car in a rush of panic, and he dropped the folder, the pages fanning out at his feet. For a moment, he thought he was having a heart attack. When his pulse slowed a bit, he bent and scooped up the pages.

  “You’re doing the right thing, you ass,” he muttered. “Show some guts.”

  For the first time in years, he felt like a weight was being lifted from his shoulders as he hurried across the deserted street.

  A loud chime sounded as he walked through the door. The balding man looked up at him from where he was crouched beside a copying machine.

  “Can I help you?”

  He had a gruff voice, like sand over glass.

  “I need to fax something,” Mitch told him, stepping to the side of the counter and pretending to look at a business card display.

  “Is it international?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “Domestic. I’m faxing these to Connecticut.”

  “How many pages?”

  Mitch looked down at the file in his hand. “Thirty pages, maybe a few more.”

  “I’ve got four big jobs that need to be ready to go for the morning. I have to start them first. Afraid I won’t get to it for maybe an hour.”

  “Mind if I do it myself?”

  The clerk pushed slowly up to his feet. “Do you know how to use one of those?” he pointed to a fax machine on a counter against the wall.

  “Sure.”

  “I can’t charge you any less for doing it yourself.”

  “No problem,” Mitch said, quickly moving in that direction. A car passed on the street, but it drove by too fast for him to get a look at it. He didn’t think it had come off the exit ramp.

  He took a slip of paper out of his shirt pocket. There was a number listed on it. He started dialing.

  “You can put the whole stack in.”

  “I know,” Mitch said, glancing in the direction of the street again. The lights from the store reflected off the windows of his car across the road. There was nobody else around.

  He opened the file on the counter. Old paper clips and rusty staples held some of the pages together. The pages had become mixed when he dropped them, but he wasn’t worrying about keeping everything in the right sequence. He piled whatever he could into the fax machine while going to work on removing the staples and clips.

  It seemed to take forever before the sheets started to feed into the machine. An error flashed across the thin screen. The fax was incomplete.

  Why was there an error?

  He glanced at the slip of paper in his hand again and punched in the numbers.

  The large copying machine that the store clerk had been working on started suddenly.

  “Do you need any help with those?”

  “No,” Mitch called back. “I’m all set.”
>
  He stacked in few more pages into the machine. Some of the ones from before appeared to be going through.

  Mitch’s cell phone started ringing in his pocket. He ignored it. He’d been ignoring it since he’d left California last night. Or was it the night before? He was losing track of time.

  “Is that you ringing?” the clerk asked.

  He wasn’t going to answer the phone and he wasn’t going to answer the store clerk, either. He tore a large staple out of a stack of pictures. He didn’t know how these would go through the fax.

  The chime on the door sounded. Mitch paused for a moment as a cold sweat broke out along his spine. He found himself blocking the machine with his body. He didn’t want to turn around to see who had come in, but he didn’t want the newcomer to see what he was doing, either. He hurriedly moved the pictures to the fax machine. The pages he’d put there before were running through.

  “Well, this is a busy night for a Wednesday,” the clerk said in his gruff voice. “Can I help you fellas?”

  “No, thanks,” a soft low voice replied. “This is what I’ve been looking for.”

  It was a man’s voice. He’d found what he was looking for. Mitch didn’t have to spend too much time contemplating what that meant. He knew.

  The shot in Mitch’s back felt like a sharp punch. Like a hot poker, the bullet burned through him, the force of it smashing him up against the counter. He was startlingly aware of his head banging on the fax machine as he slid to the floor.

  He never saw the killers, but an image of Elsa’s pretty face flickered before his eyes and then merged into a flashing, brilliant eternity of fiery autumn color.

  ~~~~

  Chapter 17

  Thursday January 17

  Yale-New Haven Hospital

  Bryan Atwood glanced over at the cluster of family pictures on the desk.

  Hank, holding the phone to his ear, followed Bryan’s gaze. “When was the last time you saw the girls?”

  “We went out for dinner on Christmas Eve.”

  “Did Jenny go out with you, too?”

  Bryan shook his head. Despite the divorce, there’d been one tradition that Bryan and his ex-wife had kept…until this year. They would put their differences aside and take the girls out to dinner on Christmas Eve. “She was spending it with her boyfriend’s family.”

  She hadn’t told the girls yet, but Jenny had told Bryan that her boyfriend had popped the big question. They were planning on getting married this coming summer.

  Truly, Bryan had been happy for her. He was also happy for his daughters. They were the kind of kids who loved family and the family rituals. The only person he didn’t feel happy for was himself.

  Hank looked back down at the papers on the desk in front of him. Bryan forced his focus back to the job, clearing his mind of everything but what they had to do.

  The hospital staff had been very accommodating about letting them use one of the administrative offices for the night. Rather than flying back and forth across the country, Bryan and Hank decided to try getting a lot of their legwork done from here.

  Bryan had been on the phone with Geary for some time earlier, discussing the missing medical records, the phony nurse, the threat on the boy’s life. He was reasonable enough to see the wisdom behind some of the decisions that had to be made tonight. The most important, of course, was that Juan was on his way to Baltimore right now. Geary told him that the mother would be able to join her son there in the morning. There was no point for Hank and Bryan to stay with the teenager until he was conscious. Geary’s biggest concession—and Bryan had heard him biting his tongue as he said it—was that he and Hank were to proceed with their portion of the investigation as they saw fit. Neither New York nor Washington would second-guess them, but they needed to keep Geary apprised of their actions on a daily basis.

  Bryan finished jotting down the information he’d been able to get from Clark County Coroner's Office for the December 20 shooting in Las Vegas. He was also promised by the third-shift supervisor that the autopsy reports would be emailed to him tonight.

  “I have to go to the car for my laptop. Do you need anything?” Bryan asked, pulling on his overcoat.

  Hank was on hold with someone working at the District Nine Medical Examiner’s office in Orlando. He’d been able to get past the after-business hours answering machine and find a live person who wasn’t the third shift janitor. Mike Forbes, the shooter at the high school in Orlando, was scheduled to be autopsied first thing in the morning. Before they started the procedure, Bryan’s partner had said he wanted to make sure the medical examiner knew what to look for.

  Hank touched the growth of beard on his chin. “Yeah, you can get my overnight bag. It’s on the back seat.”

  The room was windowless, but the last time Bryan had a chance to peek outside, snow was falling hard and fast.

  “Has Luna contacted you since they left?” Hank asked.

  Nick Luna was part of the escort service taking Juan Bradley to Maryland.

  “No. He said he’d call as soon as they settled Juan at the hospital.”

  “How about Dr. Bradley? Have you talked to her?”

  “You saw her last. Luna was supposed to give her all the details. I assume she’s already on her way to the VA hospital in Baltimore.”

  Whoever was on the line with Hank came back on, and Bryan grabbed the car keys and went out. It was better this way, he told himself. It was better for everyone having Lexi deal with other agents who were investigating the case.

  The elevator brought him to a lobby that appeared deserted, with the exception of a security guard who nodded to him as he passed. Glancing through the double doors, Bryan could see the snow was coming down hard and piling up in the street. No one seemed to be on the road. No plow had come through, either.

  Bryan turned to the guard. “Is there a way that I can get to the Howard Street Garage going through the building?”

  The burly young man behind the counter shook his head and started to explain how he could get closer by using a second floor walkway, but Bryan’s attention was immediately drawn to a movement on a bench at the far end of the lobby. He’d missed her the first time.

  Bryan thanked the guard and walked toward the bench. She obviously hadn’t seen or heard him, either. With her coat draped over her shoulders, she was leaning forward, her elbows planted on her knees. Her face was propped in her hands, her eyes closed.

  “Dr. Bradley,” he said softly.

  Her hand slid from under her chin. There was a moment of obvious confusion in her face. She blinked a couple of times, seemingly trying to see if she were awake or asleep.

  “I must have dozed off,” she whispered.

  “The exhaustion is finally getting to you.”

  She shook her head, stretched, looked up at him again.

  “You’re too tall,” she said under her breath.

  Bryan decided she was still half asleep. “You aren’t going to pass out on me again, are you?” he said, sitting down next to her.

  She rubbed her eyes and stifled a yawn. Strands of her blond hair had come out of the band and fallen on her shoulder. She looked sleepy. An image popped into his head of her blond head lying on a pillow, of her opening her eyes for the first moment of the day. He could see her stretch and sit up in bed…

  Slow down, he told himself, stifling the image. Keep it professional. He forced his glance out at the snow.

  “What time is it?” she asked. Before he could check the time, she glanced down at her own watch. “Ten after two. I called them more than an hour ago.”

  “Called who?”

  “A cab,” she said, getting up to her feet and looking up and down the snowy street.

  “Where’s your car?”

  “At my house. My brother drove it from my office to the house when he was visiting last night,” she answered. “I came here in a police cruiser on Monday. I haven’t left since.”

  Bryan didn’t know what the exa
ct weather forecast was, but what he could see from here wasn’t too promising.

  “It doesn’t seem they’ve done much work clearing the streets yet. Where were you going to try to get a cab to take you?”

  “An hour or so north of here,” she whispered. “Well, I was hoping.”

  “You might be stuck here for the night.”

  “I can’t,” she said turning to him. “They took Juan two hours ago. That arrogant agent…what was his name? Nick…Looney…”

  “Nick Luna.” He smiled.

  “That’s him,” she said, running a hand through her hair. The band holding it back fell to the ground. She bent down and picked it up. “He wouldn’t even tell me the name of the hospital that they were taking Juan to.”

  “That’s not confidential information. Not as far as you’re concerned.”

  “Thank you,” she said, throwing her hands up in frustration. “I called my lawyer. She called someone in Hartford. I don’t know who. I don’t know if that was the reason for it or not, but Agent Luna stopped to see me again before they left with Juan. He said that as soon as Juan was checked in, they’d call me with the exact details of where he is and how I can get clearance to visit him.”

  “He didn’t give you the name or location of the hospital?”

  She shook her head. “He said he’d call me with that information. I gave him my cell number, which, by the way, is no good since my phone is totally dead. I also gave him my home number, but that doesn’t do me any good when I’m stuck here at the hospital.”

  Bryan thought she was working herself up for good reason. There was no cause for Luna to be such a hard ass with her.

  “My understanding is that Juan was flown to the Baltimore VA Rehabilitation and Extended Care Center. I’ll get you the street address and arrange for security clearances.”