by Meg O'Brien
He closes the knife, puts it back in his pocket, and starts toward me with a large section of the cord in his hands.
“You don’t have to do that,” I argue, backing off. “You could just take me with you.”
“I don’t think so. That cuff on your ankle would go off the second we walked out the door. Clever of you to think of that, though.”
He reaches for me.
“You can’t do this,” I say, easing back toward the door. “Luke knows about you. He’ll figure out what you’ve done and he’ll come after you.”
He shakes his head. “Who cares? Nobody will listen. Not when they find the gun that killed Gabe in Luke’s hotel room.”
My eyes widen. “Are you saying you’ve done that? You’ve planted the gun in Luke’s room?”
“It seemed fitting,” Ian says.
“Fitting. You mean, because it’s the same way you planted drugs in my apartment?”
His eyes meet mine. “The same way certain friends of mine, shall we say, planted those drugs in your apartment.”
“So it was you who gave the orders to set me up. Funny, I didn’t even see it at first. I guess I had to get out of the forest to see the trees.”
“You were getting out of hand, Sarah. You never should have gone after good cops like the Five. They were only doing their jobs.”
“Doing their jobs! You call rape ‘doing their jobs’? And what about Gabe? Was he only doing his job? Then, why kill him?”
He smiles. “Ah, yes, Gabe. Well, about that you were right, Sarah. I did get onto Esme in the middle of the night. Once I heard they were getting a rescue team together for you, I flew into Orcas and paid a local fisherman to take me over to Esme in his boat and drop me off. I had planned to meet privately with Gabe, but as I walked up onto the shore I heard a man’s voice, yelling. I followed it to where you lovely ladies had staked him out like a butterfly on a wall. He sure was a sorry sight—bugs in his ears and up his nose. Actually—” Ian smiles “—it was almost funny.”
I smile, too, just to let him know I’m with him.
“Anyway, he admitted he had told you everything, Sarah—everything except my involvement, that is. He said you were coming back in the morning to let him go. I couldn’t trust him to keep his mouth shut about me then.”
I take a slow step to the side, closer to the door. “So you’re telling me you have no problem killing someone just to keep from being found out, and yet you expect me to just stand here while you tie me up?”
“Sarah,” he says, his voice tired and strained, “I don’t care whether you stand, sit or lay down, but you are going to be tied. Go along with this, and I’ll try to be gentle. Put up a fuss, and I’ll hurt you. Either way, it’s the same.”
This time he lunges for me, and I spin on my heel and run for the door. It’s been my plan to go through it, and I’ve left the door slightly open, so that when I reach it I can just pull it open and be outside. But halfway across the room my ankle cuff catches on an end table and slows me down. Ian gets to the door before me, slamming it shut, locking it and blocking my path. I know I can’t make it around him, so I turn and run back into the living room, my eyes seeking wildly for another escape route. The French doors to the garden, however, are being repaired, and plywood has been nailed over the opening.
Ian is big—big enough to break me in two with one hand, and I realize I am trapped, with no kind of weapon and little ability to fight him off. Only one thing left to do—and I do it. Running full force into the big bay window, I crash through paper and glass, my arms covering my face. Landing on the ground, I feel pain in my elbows, face and knees. I can hear Ian coming through the window behind me, and I scramble up and run across the front lawn.
Before I can get to the street, Ian grabs me from behind with an arm around my waist. With his other hand he wraps the draw-cord around my neck. He begins to pull it taut, cutting off my breathing. My chest heaves as it tries vainly to replenish the oxygen I used up while running.
“Damn you, Sarah,” Ian says savagely into my ear. “Now you’ve done it. The signal from that cuff of yours will have this place crawling with cops in minutes.” He yanks harder on the cord. “I guess I won’t be tying you up after all, sweetheart. I sure hope that evidence is where you said it was.”
As if to emphasize his words, I feel the sharp, thin line pulled even tighter.
Then I see Grace out of the corner of my eye. She’s about five feet away, to our left, her legs spread in a stance a little wider than her shoulders, both arms extended toward us with her hands together. In the next instant I see a flash of fire, and hear a loud snap. I feel Ian’s body jerk violently against me, as the bullet takes him down.
Luke is suddenly at my side, putting his arms around me. “Thank God you’re all right,” he says. He runs his fingers through my hair and draws me to him. Grace comes over and puts a hand on Ian’s throat, feeling for a pulse.
“Still alive,” she says.
Police cars begin to arrive. Cops get out, their guns drawn.
When the cops see Ian lying on the ground, I fear they might shoot all of us, right on the spot. But then Joe Pinkowski, Ian’s captain, arrives, yelling for them to back off. Joe, I learned yesterday, has been biding his time for months, helping Internal Affairs to gather enough evidence against Ian.
“Did you get it?” I ask Pinkowski.
“We got it all, thanks to you,” he says, nodding to a nondescript van down the street. “It’s all on tape, and we even had a link to the prosecutor’s office. Ivy O’Day and the prosecutor heard him confess. They heard everything.”
Luke is picking splinters of glass out of my hair. “Dammit, Sarah, I knew we should have hidden somewhere inside, rather than around the corner. What if we hadn’t gotten here in time?”
“It would never have worked,” I say, shaking my head. “He’d have known you were there.”
“She’s right,” Pinkowski says. “The van was risky enough.”
“Even so…” Luke says, gently wiping blood from my cheek, then my arms, with a handkerchief.
Laughing shakily, I feel my face for cuts. “I guess I never dreamed,” I say, “that I’d have to exit through a window.”
“There’s somebody over there who wants to talk to you,” Joe Pinkowski says. He unlocks my ankle cuff and removes it.
I look over at a black sedan that has pulled to the curb. Judge Ford, Luke’s father, stands next to it, his thumbs-up reassuring.
Luke puts an arm around my shoulders. “I’ll go with you,” he says.
We begin to walk toward the car, and a window slides down. My mother sits there, a tremulous smile on her face. “Thank God it’s all over,” she says, pulling me down for a hug.
Addendum
SARAH LANSING
Seattle, WA
December 30
As an addendum to my foregoing notes, I feel sad to have to admit that in the case of the Seattle Five, the real victim—Lonnie Mae Brown—became lost. The media wrote her up as “only” a poor black woman, who made what little money she had as a whore. Women like Lonnie Mae are a dime a dozen on the city streets, the papers implied. They all perform the same services, and are in many ways interchangeable.
That might be true…until you dig down deeper.
I did that. I went looking for Lonnie Mae’s children, and I found them, still in foster homes. They had been there for five years. The social services department that had taken them away from her had never been able to find permanent homes for them.
So did they fare better where they were than they would have with their mother? There was no way to know, but they were under a psychiatrist’s care. I had a meeting with him, and he told me they hadn’t improved much from the first day he’d seen them. They missed their mom, he said.
I told them I’d known their mom, and that she loved them. I don’t know how much it helped. But maybe one day they’ll remember that, when they need it most.
I’ve beco
me a CASA in my spare time—a Court Appointed Special Advocate for abused and neglected children. It’s a volunteer job, but I managed to get myself assigned to Lonnie Mae’s kids, and that makes it worthwhile to put in all those hours without pay. It’s my job just to be friends to them, and to stand up for them in court. Tell how much they deserve placement, or to be reunited with a relative. Lonnie Mae’s mother showed up one day. She said she’d take them, and she seems to have been a good grandmother, even visiting them in the foster homes, never losing touch. There are some problems, but if I can work them out, I think those kids will be okay.
My “real” job now is working for a commission Judge Ford put together, a group that oversees police conduct. Part of the job is to defend innocent cops. The other part is to see that the guilty ones get put in jail.
Jane’s children didn’t fare as well as Lonnie Mae’s. I looked for them and their father, and learned that the house in Bellevue collapsed and slid down a hill during the quake. Jane’s husband’s and children’s bodies were found in the debris. Jane’s body was brought home, and after things settled down I went to the cemetery where all four were buried, and placed Jane’s locket on her tombstone. Though my remorse over her death was deep and overwhelming, I could only hope that wherever they were, she and her children were together at last.
I got a postcard from Dana the other day, from somewhere in Canada. The postmark was smudged so I don’t know precisely where she is. She wrote only, “All is well,” and added a smile face, which I take to mean that she’s with the man she loves and that her husband hasn’t been able to find them. Kim Stratton is working on a new film, and in love, according to Entertainment Tonight. Now and then we talk, and she told me that the “in love” part is only Hollywood gossip. I doubt she’ll ever forget Gabe, or what happened at Thornberry, though she says she’s doing her best to move on—as we all are, even though each and every one of us will always live with a certain amount of guilt over our part in Gabe’s death.
Timmy and Amelia are building a new writer’s colony together on Camano Island, which, though it was closer to Seattle, fared better than the San Juans. The funding, I suspect—though he hasn’t talked about it—is coming from Judge Ford. Grace, my old nemesis, has returned to the force in NYC and seems content. Her e-mails to me are snappy and short, but her tone has softened somewhat. She seems to be recovering from the death of her brother, and is working on a special force to weed out bad cops on the NYPD.
As for Ian, he recovered from a bullet in his lung and was honored with a trial of his own. His crimes as head of the renegade cops in Seattle, and especially the murder of Gabe Rossi, were much worse than theirs. He ended up with life—no chance of parole.
Before “the Big One,” Seattle had just finished retrofitting all its bridges to withstand as much as a 9.0 quake. The one we had was only a tenth more than that, but a tenth at that level is a lot of power. It had taken most of the bridges down, and the one thing we had to be grateful for was that the tsunami generated by the quake had gone to the south, losing most of its power by the time it reached the California coast. Seattle is still recovering, but things are going great. No one can deny the spirit of the people of Seattle, the city leaders, the rescue teams that did such a brave job during those first days after the quake, and yes, the Seattle cops.
Yet we’ll never be the same. None of us who went through it will ever go to bed again without wondering if the ground might shake us across the room in the night, nor will some of us ever again take the elevator to the top of the rebuilt Space Needle without wondering if we’re taking our lives into our hands. Seeing Phantom of the Opera is definitely out. No one wants a chandelier falling on them, real or not.
Ivy O’Day prosecuted the case against the Five, and she did a great job in court. She outlined the DNA, using simplified graphs the jury could understand, and pulled in Barry Scheck to testify about them. He was brilliant. As cofounder of the Innocence Project, he and other lawyers have given much of their personal time to proving, through DNA, that people who’ve been charged with a crime are innocent. In this case, he was working to help prosecute the guilty. All I had to do was sit there and watch as the net tightened around the Five. Which was a good thing. It hadn’t been all that long since I’d taken on a DNA case, but every time a lawyer turns around there’s new information. I hadn’t exactly had time this past year to keep up.
It helped that the evidence was rock solid. No other five men could have left that sperm on Lonnie Mae’s stockings, and her own DNA proved the stockings were hers. When it was clear a conviction was imminent, one of the Five copped a plea and confessed to the Five’s hiring an arsonist to torch Lonnie Mae’s apartment. He was hoping for a lesser charge, and Ivy promised him one to get him to talk. But the judge who sentenced him wasn’t all that lenient. Each of the Seattle Five got life, just like Ian.
It was a tougher sentence than any of them had expected. Not many people are angry enough to go after cops for the rape and murder of a poor black prostitute, who, some might say, “deserved what she got.”
I thought of the original words to “Up a Lazy River,” the song Gabe had told me about. Seventy years ago when the old jazz clarinetist was writing the words to that tune, defending a murdered black woman—whether she was a prostitute or not—was low on the list of priorities in this country. And while I’ll go along with the scholars who say Arodin wasn’t a racist, and that it was “normal” to call blacks by the N word in those days, I’m glad Hoagy Carmichael came along and rewrote those lyrics. One more epithet bites the dust. I also think it’s especially appropriate that Hoagy Carmichael practiced law before he became a full-time songwriter. One day, I’ll have to look up some of the cases he handled.
Little by little, drop by drop, things are changing here in America. Maybe there’s a whole new slew of bigots out there, who, like the neo-Nazis, want to bring all the ugliness back again. But I’m betting that people who care about freedom in its truest sense won’t let them. There are new laws in place every day, and as more and more abuses come to light, the laws will continue to kick in and put the abusers where they belong.
The thing that lifted my spirits most during the trial was that the courtroom was filled to overflowing with Seattle cops. When the jury announced its guilty verdict against the Five, the cops stood up en masse and cheered. No one likes a rotten apple in the barrel, and the Seattle PD had been through a lot in recent years—the World Trade Organization riots, the scandal about the Five, and then the earthquake. Everyone was in a fighting spirit. Everyone wanted to clean things up.
My book came out a few weeks ago, and true to the publisher’s predictions, it hit the New York Times bestseller list. Now everybody thinks I have answers. I’ve been invited to go on all the talk shows, tell people how to turn things around.
Hell, I don’t have any answers. I just hope my book raises awareness, perhaps inspires conversation among those who are in a position to make changes. I’ve talked a lot about that with Bill Farley at Seattle Mystery Bookshop. It turned out he was completely innocent of any involvement with the Five, and was simply passing along the invitation Timothea issued to get me to Thornberry.
On a personal note, Luke and I were married a week ago, on Christmas Day. By that time we’d been dating for months, and I couldn’t believe I’d ever even questioned his loyalty. Marrying Luke was the only thing, finally, that made good, clear, logical sense. He and I had always looked after each other, first when we were kids, then at Thornberry. I think that to have a man in her life who puts her first, who looks after her at all times—and vice versa—may be the most any woman can ask.
The fact that I love him like crazy—like a seventeen-year-old, in fact—had something to do with my saying yes, as well.
My mother and Judge Ford came as a couple to our wedding. Neither one seems to want to tie the knot a second time, but they’ve been together a lot since the night Ian was arrested and Mom came home. Luke and I smile at
that sometimes, remembering how we had talked about older people losing their husbands or wives and then finding their first loves again, by some quirk of fate. I guess I don’t mind too much having been the tool of Fate in this case.
Luke and I have also talked about ourselves. We both know life could get complicated for us. Luke travels a lot for his job, and I’m busy with CASA and my work with the commission. But in this age of tornadoes, hurricanes, quakes, school killings, and who-knows-what’s-going-to-happen-next, we have each other, and we intend to keep it that way. Love, after all, is the only lasting thing.
Love, as the poets say, is all there is.
ISBN: 978-1-4603-6375-1
GATHERING LIES
Copyright © 2001 by Meg O’Brien.
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