Dead Wrong

by Mariah Stewart

  “Stop . . .” Channing’s voice was all but inaudible.

  “How are you going to look her in the eye, Channing? Personally, that would be the toughest thing for me, if she had raised me, thinking she’d done a good job and all, and I’d turned out to be . . . well, what you are. But I guess that’s not going to bother you, to look that sweet lady in the eye, knowing that she still loves you so much. She’ll blame herself, though, don’t you think? Mothers always seem to blame themselves for everything, don’t they?”

  “It’s not her fault. . . .” Channing’s voice was quivering.

  Aidan kept his eyes on the gun that was still dangerously close to Mara’s head, Channing’s finger still on the trigger. Who knew what it would take to set it off? But Aidan had no choice. He had to keep talking. It was the only chance Mara had.

  “I’d trust you with my life. . . .”

  Aidan took a deep breath and forced his voice to remain calm, not for one second forgetting what was at stake.

  “Now, you know what’s going to happen here, don’t you? You shoot your one bullet off, I can take you out in the blink of a eye. But right now, I’m thinking that the thing to do is to blast your kneecaps off, keep you alive—painful though that will be—so that we can bring you to trial. Shame for Mrs. Channing to have to go through all that, though, isn’t it? And you know she’ll stand by you. Probably come out here for the trial to be with you. That’s the kind of woman she is, don’t you agree? She really loved you the way a mother is supposed to love her son.” Aidan shook his head sadly. “And you know, this is going to kill her. She’s probably going to be called to testify, too, you know. At your trial. How do you think she’ll hold up under all that? Hell of a way to repay that good woman for all she tried to do for you.”

  Channing was staring at him from across the distance of a scant fifteen feet.

  “How are you going to explain to her why you put that gun to an innocent woman’s head and pulled the trigger?” Aidan’s voice dropped. “How will you look her in the eye and explain any of what you’ve done?”

  “Don’t . . .”

  “Do the right thing, Channing. Be a man. This one time, do the right thing.”

  “The right thing . . .” Channing mumbled.

  “It’s your one chance, Channing, your last chance to get out of this with some dignity. Let her know there was still some decency in you, that in the end, when it counted, you had a choice, and you did the right thing.”

  The two men continued to stare at each other.

  Then, in the blink of an eye, Channing’s hand twisted and his finger pulled the trigger before anyone had time to react.

  Mara screamed as she hit the ground, and Aidan slid down the slope on his good hip. He lifted Mara and turned her away from the body that still jerked, the head of which was partially blown off.

  “Ohmygod . . . ohmygod . . .” Mara cried. “He . . . he . . . he . . .”

  “Shh, it’s over, it’s done.” Aidan held her and rocked her as one might rock a small child. “It’s over.”

  “No, no, it’s not.” She sobbed. “Annie . . . he took Annie. . . .”

  “What?”

  “Annie . . . She must have come to the cabin, he must have found her.” She pointed behind him, her words coming in a desperate rush. “Down there, in the ravine . . . her car . . .”

  Aidan set her feet on the ground and hurried to the car. Mara scooped up Spike and followed Aidan into the ravine. He opened the front and back doors and made a perfunctory inspection.

  “There’s no blood. Can you open the trunk without a key?”

  She leaned past him into the front seat, opened the console, and hit a red button. The trunk popped open and he looked inside. It was empty except for a bag of books and a shopping bag holding a newly purchased sweatshirt.

  “He must have taken her someplace.” Mara’s face was filled with fear.

  “Then there’s a good chance she’s somewhere close by,” he told her. “We’ll find her. First, we need to call for help. I guess you don’t have your cell phone on you.”

  “I do.” She pulled it out of her back pocket with hands that trembled so badly, the phone dropped to the ground. “What if we can’t find her? What if—”

  “We’ll find her. Right now, we need to get the local police out here. With their help, we’ll find Annie.” While he dialed for assistance, Aidan kept one arm around her, shielding her from the bloody mess that once had been Curtis Alan Channing.

  “You knew he was going to do that, didn’t you?” She leaned back against him, still shaking as if desperately cold. “You knew he was going to kill himself.”

  “I knew it was going to be him or you. It had to be him.”

  “All that talk about Mrs. Channing . . .”

  “She’s the only living person he cared about. I wanted him to think about the reality of facing her. Of having her attend the trial, of having to look at her, and see how much pain he caused her. I didn’t think he could face that.”

  “After you planted the idea in his head.”

  “Like I said, one of you was going to die. I couldn’t let it be you. . . .” He held her as tightly against him as he could. “There was no way I was going to let it be you.”

  “We have to find Annie.” Her voice broke. “What if he has her locked up someplace without air? What if he’s hurt her and she’s bleeding? What if he . . . if he . . .” She couldn’t say the words.

  “We’ll find her, sweetheart.” He took her hand and they walked up the hill. Sirens screamed far in the distance. “We’ll find her.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-TWO

  THEY STOOD IN THE ROAD AND WATCHED THE STATE police vehicles fly up the hill in clouds of dust. Aidan left a still-shaking Mara in the company of one of the detectives, who took down all the information she had about Annie’s disappearance, while he led the others to the body at the foot of the ravine.

  The crime scene crew arrived to begin their process, and the others spread out across the hill to search the caves and crevices and small valleys that dotted the area for Annie.

  Mara watched anxiously as the men and women disappeared, one by one, over the ridge or into the woods.

  Where was Annie? Was she still alive?

  “This your house?” Detective Lenosky asked after he’d gotten all of the information he’d needed from Mara. They were standing in front of the small cabin that stood among the trees on the opposite side of the dirt road.

  “No, that belongs to a man who lives out of state. Florida, I think,” Mara replied. “Our house is farther down the road.”

  “We’ll be sending a team of crime scene investigators in to dust for prints and other evidence.”

  Mara nodded. She’d expected as much.

  “Excuse me,” Lenosky said to Mara, signaling to the second team of investigators as they arrived. “I’ll be right back.”

  Mara watched him point at her cabin. The car began moving slowly in that direction.

  Lenosky walked back to where he’d left Mara. As he approached, his attention was drawn back to the small cabin. “Is anyone living there now?”

  She shook her head. “My sister said she heard in town last year that the owner was going to put the place up for sale. I don’t know if he’s done so yet.”

  They both stared at the cabin.

  “Hey, it’s worth a look,” Lenosky told her.

  He started across the road, with Mara close behind, Spike trotting along at the end of the leash.

  “No, no. I want you to stay here. Just in case . . .” He softened, choosing his words carefully “We don’t know what we’re going to find when we go inside.”

  “If she’s in there, I want to be with you when you find her,” Mara insisted.

  “I can’t let you do that. But I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll go in first, alone. You can wait right outside the door.”

  Mara made a face.

  “Take it or leave it,” he said a
s they neared the cabin.

  “I’ll take it.”

  The detective tried the front door, but it was deadbolted from the inside. They went around to the back, and as soon as they turned the corner, they saw the car.

  “I don’t think the man who lived here owned a car with Georgia plates on it,” Mara said.

  Lenosky shined a flashlight inside the car. Fast-food wrappers were tossed on a map of Pennsylvania that lay open on the front passenger seat. Other than that, the car was as neat as a pin. All the doors were locked.

  “First things first. Wait here,” Lenosky told her as he walked to the back of the cabin and tried the back door.

  It swung open easily.

  Mara took a step forward, and the detective blocked her way.

  “You’re not listening to me, so let me put this in terms you might understand,” he said a little more forcefully. “If your sister is in here, and if she’s been harmed, it may not be a pretty sight. Furthermore, it’s a crime scene. I can’t have you mucking it up. You just have to wait.”

  “All right.” Mara backed down.

  Lenosky entered the cabin with his gun drawn. Anxiously, Mara watched him through the back window until he disappeared into the front room. He came out minutes later, shaking his head.

  “I’m sorry. I thought . . . I really thought maybe . . .” He said. “Aw, I guess it would have been too easy, you know?”

  Mara began to cry. She sat on the back step, her head in her hands, and sobbed.

  “Hey, I’m sorry. I know you’ve been through a lot.” Lenosky tried to comfort her, but it was obvious that weeping females were beyond his own comfort zone. “Look, you want me to get your boyfriend?”

  Mara just continued to sob.

  “Oh, jeez, lady . . .” Lenosky ran his hand through his dark hair. “Look, you wait right here. I’ll get your boyfriend, okay? You just sit here with your dog . . . where the hell is the dog?”

  Lenosky looked around. Spike was at the rear of the car, standing on his hind legs, sniffing at the trunk, gleefully wagging his tail.

  “Miss Douglas.” The detective touched her shoulder. When Mara looked up, he pointed to Spike. “The dog . . .”

  “Spike?” she called. The dog’s tail wagged faster.

  Lenosky started toward the car.

  “Oh, my God . . .” Mara bolted off the step, rushing past him. “Open it. Get it open! Annie? Annie!”

  From inside the trunk of the car came the softest moan.

  “Open it.” Mara turned to the detective. “We’ve got to get her out!”

  “I can’t very well shoot the lock off the trunk. You stay here, talk to her. Let her know that she’ll be out of there in just a few more minutes.” The detective ran for the road.

  “Did you hear that, Annie? Just hang on. Just a bit more.” Mara was sobbing with anguish and laughing with joy at the same time. “We’re going to get you out. . . .”

  In minutes, the detective returned with Aidan and two other state troopers, one of whom was holding a key ring.

  “Is that the key?” Mara asked anxiously.

  “We’ll soon find out,” the trooper replied as he slid it into the trunk lock. “It was in his pocket, the dead guy’s. If this was his car, chances are . . .”

  The lid popped, and the detective raised it. Inside, Annie lay facedown, her arms tied behind her back, her ankles tied together. Aidan and Lenosky turned her over gently and removed the gag from her mouth.

  “Oh, thank God,” she gasped. “Thank God you found me. I don’t know how much longer I could have lasted.”

  They lifted her from the trunk and cut her bindings. Mara was there to hug her, and the two sisters wept in each other’s arms.

  “Where is he?” Annie wiped the tears from her face. “Channing. Did you get him? Is he in custody? Please tell me he didn’t get away.”

  “He’s dead, Annie,” Mara told her.

  Annie looked up at Aidan. “You . . . ?”

  He shook his head. “He shot himself,” Aidan told her.

  A strangled laugh escaped Annie’s throat and her eyes widened. “You have to be kidding.”

  Aidan shrugged. “I guess he figured since it was all over, he’d save himself the humiliation of an arrest and trial.”

  “It’s not . . . it’s not what I’d have expected him to have done.” She shook her head slowly, clearly puzzled. “It doesn’t fit his profile.”

  “Well, now, I guess you’d know as well as anyone that profiles aren’t always exactly on the money, Annie. Sometimes all the pieces don’t really fit the way you think they’re going to.”

  “I guess.” Annie flexed her hands. “Boy, does that feel good. Help me stand up here, Aidan. Let me lean on you for a minute or two.”

  “Take as much time as you need, Annie,” he told her. “God knows I’ve leaned on you plenty over the past year. You just take your time. . . .”

  “. . . so I checked the prison records, accounted for every goddamn minute that Curtis Channing spent under that roof.” Evan Crosby stopped at the red light and switched his phone from his right ear to his left. “Guess what I found?”

  “Well, I’m sure it was something really good,” Miranda Cahill replied, “or you wouldn’t have called me to tell me about it.”

  “Right. I found that on Monday, the sixteenth of February, a van left the prison with four inmates, a driver, and two deputy sheriffs on board. Want to see if you can guess the names of two of those passengers?”

  “Oh, let’s see . . . could one have been Curtis Channing?”

  “Very good, Agent Cahill. And the other?”

  “Hmm, let’s see, who could I be thinking of? Starts with a G . . .” She pretended to give it some thought. “Oh, I don’t know, could it be . . . Vince Giordano?”

  “When she’s hot, she’s hot.” Crosby nodded to the guard at the prison gate, flashed his badge, and was waved through.

  “So I guess you’re going to ask Vince if he’ll fill you in on what they might have chatted about while they were in that van.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What?” Miranda frowned, picking up on his hesitation. “What are you thinking?”

  “According to the deputies who were with them in the van, they didn’t chat at all.” Crosby pulled into a parking spot and cut the engine. “Apparently, they didn’t even sit near each other. Vince liked to sit in the front, behind the driver. Channing sat in the rear, next to one of the deputies.”

  “They had to have been alone at some point,” Miranda murmured. “I know there’s a connection between these two.”

  “Yeah, my gut’s telling me the same thing.” Crosby got out of the car and walked up to the prison doors. “I’ll call you back and let you know what Giordano tells me.”

  He stopped at the front desk to chat with the receptionist, then asked her to see if the assistant warden had a few minutes for him.

  She placed the call, then buzzed Crosby through. He followed the familiar hall to the administrative offices. He waved to the pretty office assistant as he passed through on his way to Fred McCabe’s office. The door was open and McCabe was waiting for the detective to arrive.

  “Evan, how’ve you been?” The beefy ex-wrestler extended an equally beefy paw for Crosby to shake.

  “Good. Good, thanks, Fred.”

  “Have a seat.” McCabe closed the door. He nodded at the file that Crosby slid across the desktop. “That help you out any?”

  “Helped me connect the dots. Now all I have to do is figure out what picture those dots are making, and we’ll be home free. I just need a few minutes with Mr. Giordano—”

  “Vince Giordano?” McCabe’s brows knit together.

  “Yeah, how many Giordanos you got out here?”

  “None.”

  “What?”

  “As of two o’clock this afternoon, no prisoners named Giordano.”

  “But . . .” Crosby felt flustered, deflated. “How . . . ?”

  �
��Court order. Didn’t you hear about it?”

  “I heard one was in the works, but—”

  “Judge Mulvaney signed it this morning, and by two, the bastard was walking out the front door, smug as could be.” McCabe shook his head. “Had his lawyer send someone from the office to pick him up. Laughed all the way from his cell to the car.”

  “Son of a bitch.” Crosby’s face flushed and he slammed his fist onto the top of the desk. “Son of a bitch . . .”

  “Hey, Crosby, I know how you feel. Believe me, if there’d been any way to hold him, we’d have done it.”

  “Any idea where he was going?”

  “He didn’t confide in me. Try his attorney. He might know. Want me to look up his lawyer for you?”

  “No, I know who it is. Thanks.” Crosby stood, the room suddenly too small to contain him. His anger was growing by leaps and bounds. He had to leave.

  “Thanks,” he said again, and headed out the door, silently cursing the system that could turn an animal like Vincent Giordano back into society.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-THREE

  AIDAN SAT ON THE SAND, HIS HEELS DUG IN, AND watched the woman who lay beside him, her face turned to the sun. He reached out a hand to straighten the old quilt where it had curled back on one end, resisting the urge to lie down and just hold her close to him. They were at the end of a long, perfect weekend at the beach. Mara would be leaving soon to go back to Lyndon, back to her job, her home. Her life before him.

  He didn’t want her to leave, but he didn’t know how to ask her to stay.

  Spike trotted across the sand with something in his mouth. The dog ran to within ten feet of the blanket, then shook whatever it was he had to tease Aidan.

  “Bring that over here, let me see what you have, you little monkey,” Aidan whispered loudly. The dog pawed the sand merrily.

  “I’m not asleep,” Mara told him without opening her eyes, “so you don’t have to whisper. What does he have, anyway?”

  “Looks like a crab shell.” Aidan rose to take it from Spike, who immediately took off down the beach with it, Aidan in pursuit.