“My God, Grandmother!” Lawrence took a step toward her, eyes hard with comprehension. “You hired someone to kill Catherine?”
Elizabeth Stern gave a raw-throated laugh. “I did what was necessary for this family, and Gilly took care of the details. He understands more of what it means to be a Stern than you do. You’re a disgrace.” She turned slightly, leveling the gun again.
Catherine felt numb and immobile, an image carved into a rock. Her legs were drilled into the floor. Her voice strangled in her throat.
“I have no intention of shooting you in the Stern mansion, unless I am forced to do so,” Elizabeth said. “You will walk out of here and drive away. He will be close behind. You won’t make it far. You won’t know anything. It will be a merciful death, better than you deserve.”
“Please, Grandmother . . .”
“Shut up! Stay out of this.”
There was the sharp crack of a door bursting open, then Bustamante’s voice behind them: “Drop the gun, Mrs. Stern.” Out of the corner of her eye, Catherine saw Bustamante coming up. Crouched over, the gun gripped in both hands. Across the study, two other men had come through the other door, guns extended, approaching the old woman. “Don’t make me shoot you,” Bustamante said.
Afterward, when Catherine tried to piece together the sequence of events, she couldn’t be sure of what had happened first. Her eyes had been locked onto the muzzle of the gun rising in the old woman’s hands. Odd, how she had remembered the way her hands had looked, liver spotted and gnarled and shaking a little. And for the briefest moment, the time it took to snap a photograph, she had known that she was about to die.
Then Lawrence’s arm thrust in front of her, crashing against his grandmother, and the gun flying into the air and hanging there, it seemed, for a long time before it crashed and skidded along the carpet. Bustamante had rushed forward and taken hold of one of the old woman’s arms, then the other. He’d pulled them behind her back and Catherine had heard the click of handcuffs. The other policemen were moving about, a blur of blue uniforms, ordering Lawrence to lie on the ground.
But Lawrence was holding her, sobbing into her neck. “I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t know.” He was still sobbing when he was ripped away from her and sent sprawling facedown on the carpet.
32
“What the hell is this?” Erik tapped on the brake and slowed past the pulsing stream of red, blue, and yellow lights from the police cars parked in front of the Stern mansion. Shadowy figures moved across the yard and around the other police cars in the driveway. The whole mansion was lit up like a Christmas tree, lights blazing in the windows, spotlights washing down the front walls. A group of men stood inside the opened front door, backlit by the lights in the entry. Catherine was probably there somewhere, but she’d be looking for a brown sedan, not the Pontiac he was driving.
He drove to the end of the block, turned the corner, and sped toward Speer Boulevard. People were out on the sidewalks, coming and going toward the commotion, he guessed. Not the kind of commotion expected in a neighborhood of gnarled old trees and sprawling slate-roofed mansions that practically oozed old money. He laughed at that, the surprise and consternation caused by all those police cars screaming by.
He turned into the traffic heading west on Speer and settled into the outrage burning through him. He was flashing back now—and he hated the flashbacks, the images more real than the boulevard and the red taillights glowing ahead. He was in Baghdad when the call came. Escort a group of congressmen out of the green zone and show off the progress in a suburb with stuttering electricity and water dripping out of faucets an hour a day. Rolling along in the convoy one minute, looking past the shouting and jeering people on the streets, and the next minute the SUV ahead blasted into the air, doors and bumpers and arms and legs and a human head—he could still see the surprise in the bulging eyes—frozen in the air before fluttering over the street like confetti. He’d decided then that there were people who deserved to die, that he would use his skills for justice. He’d also vowed he would never be set up again.
Gilly had set him up this evening.
He turned onto Broadway and drove south toward the motel, steering with one thumb, pushing in Gilly’s number on the cell with the other. Something new stirred in his consciousness now, another possibility. The phone was ringing. He could picture the phone in the gatehouse at the ranch where Gilly had handed him the envelope with fifty thousand dollars—because he always demanded payment in advance; he was a professional—and another envelope with photos of Catherine McLeod. A wedding photo, for Christ’s sake, white gown and pearl necklace, as if he needed that image! And snapshots of the town house and car and even a picture of the side door she used at the newspaper building. Everything he had needed to take care of the job.
There was no answer, no machine voice telling him to leave his name and number. Erik hit the end key, dropped the cell on the seat beside him, and tried to grasp the sense of what had happened this evening. Gilly must have known the target had stumbled onto the truth. Why else would she have gone to the mansion, except to confront Lawrence? But that didn’t mean Gilly knew the target would bring the police. He could have been on the level when he’d called this afternoon—he’d give him that, he decided. And if he ever did find the proof that Gilly had set him up, he would kill the man.
He thought of the police at the Stern Mansion. They had probably arrested Lawrence—it was logical, the head of the Stern companies, the man with the most to lose. He wondered if Catherine McLeod had figured out the old lady’s part.
He intended to fulfill his contract with the old lady. He always fulfilled his contract. He picked up the cell again, scrolled to Catherine’s name, and pressed the redial key. After three long rings, he connected to her voice mail.
“Say good-bye,” he said. He slowly pushed in the end key.
Catherine slumped against the planter on the stone porch, petunias and geraniums licking at her arms. An airplane hummed overhead, a white slash of light that cut through the black sky. Police cars had pulled into the driveway and stopped at the curb, lights flashing, radios crackling. She had watched Bustamante and the blue uniforms hustle Elizabeth Stern and Lawrence across the porch, down the brick walkway and into squad cars that had peeled away. The neighbors huddled in the shadows had disappeared.
Her cell had rung in the muffled depths of her bag. She’d waited a moment before dragging it out and checking the voice mail. The sound of his voice had made her go cold, as if a blizzard had blown into the evening. Now the cell lay opened on the lip of the column. The light in the readout had shut off ten minutes ago. Her legs felt like rubber beneath her. If she pushed away from the column, she would dissolve into the stone floor.
Bustamante came through the front door and across the porch. “You did good,” he said. He was backlit by the house lights, his face in shadow, smiling at her. “Jefferson County sheriff arrested Gilly Mason a few minutes ago. He and Mrs. Stern will be charged with conspiracy to commit homicide.”
She picked up the cell and handed it to Bustamante. “He called me,” she said.
Bustamante swung around, said something to one of the officers, and pressed the cell into his hand. The officer disappeared into the house. “We’ll see if we can pinpoint where the call came from,” he said.
“What about Lawrence?” Catherine heard herself say. He had saved her life. She could still see the black tunnel aimed at her. She had gone perfectly still—she remembered that now—simply waiting to die because there was nothing else to do, no words to utter, no actions to take.
“We’ll separate Lawrence and Mrs. Stern, interrogate them, and make sure their stories check.”
“I believe him,” Catherine said. “He wasn’t involved with the killer.”
Bustamante was quiet a moment. He turned away and glanced out across the yard. She could see the resolve in the set of his jaw. “I hope you’re right,” he said. “Sometimes in cases like this, the conspir
ators start spilling the beans on one another to cut a better deal for themselves. We’ll see what Gilly Mason wants to tell us.” He looked back at her. “You should go back to the B&B and get some sleep.”
Sleep? That was funny. The idea of the empty room at the B&B with odds and ends of clothes she had dragged from her old life, the laptop on the desk waiting for her to write tomorrow’s story—the story of her career—the bed that the owner would have tightened like an Army cot—all of it made her want to laugh out loud. It seemed likely that she would never sleep again.
“I was hoping we could go somewhere and have a drink first,” she said.
This seemed to take him by surprise. He turned his head a little, as if he hadn’t heard correctly and might still catch the words hanging between them. Then something else came into his expression, a kind of amusement, as if he were entertaining the idea.
“Some other time, Catherine. I’d like that. Right now I’ve got to deal with this.” He tossed his head in the direction of the front door. “I’ll have an officer follow you to the B&B, make sure everything’s okay.”
“Will this ever end?”
“We’re close, Catherine. Gilly may be eager enough to make a deal that he’ll tell us where to find the killer.” He jammed his hands into the pockets of his khakis and gave a little shrug, as if it were all he had to offer and he was aware that it wasn’t enough. “You still have to be careful for a while.”
Catherine drove through Sloan’s Lake Park until she found a lot with several parked cars near the tennis courts. It was still early in the morning—not yet eight o’clock, she guessed, although the dashboard clock looked bleached out in the sunlight. Even with the dark sunglasses, she had to squint into the brightness reflected in the windshield. She wedged the Taurus between two other nondescript sedans; it would have been conspicuous in one of the vacant lots. Here it would look as if it belonged to a tennis player.
She slid her bag off the passenger seat and picked up the yellow long-stemmed rose with the plastic water container at the end of the stem and started walking across the grass and down the hill to the lake. Halfway there, she stopped and took off her sandals. The feel of the grass in her toes, cushioning the soles of her feet, gave her a sense of calmness, she thought, as if this were natural, touching the earth this way.
She hadn’t slept last night, although she’d curled up on top of the bed after she’d finished the articles and sent the text to Marjorie. An hour late, she knew, but Marjorie had held the first page. The headline in this morning’s paper was an inch-high: “Prominent Family Arrested.” And beneath the headline, in bold, black type: “Murder-for-Hire Scheme Discovered.” Running beside the article was the story she had written on the briefing held in Washington, with the explanation of the way in which the Stern family and Senator Russell had hoped to be silent partners in the casino. Inside on page two was another article on the Sand Creek run scheduled for tomorrow—the real homecoming, Norman had called it.
“You sure you want to write about all of this?” Marjorie asked when Catherine had called to tell her what happened. “Maybe I’d better put Jason on the story.”
“It’s my story,” Catherine had said. My story and my life, she was thinking. “I was there. No one else knows this story.” Still, she suspected that Marjorie had brought in Jason to tidy up her prose, cut down on the emotional aspects—the black tunnel of the gun rising toward her and that sort of thing that she hadn’t been able to resist adding. The deletions didn’t matter. Erik would have read the paper, and he knew by now that he had failed. He had not prevented her from writing the truth. The realization gave her more satisfaction than she had anticipated. It was possible he would leave town, give up his mission to kill her, now that Elizabeth Stern was in custody. It would be the sensible thing to do, and yet a part of her knew he would not give up.
She reached the lake shore, clamored over the rocks, and stepped into the water. Runoff from the snow on the high peaks of the mountains. The cold sent spears of shock up her legs. Maury’s memorial service would be held sometime this morning. Philip hadn’t mentioned the time or the place, making certain that she didn’t show up. No matter. She would have her own service. You were supposed to pray at these things, she supposed, but she hadn’t prayed since she was a child. She remembered praying that her mother—the woman with long, black hair, leaning over her, smiling—wouldn’t be sick anymore. Such a faint memory, pulled out of the shadows of her mind. But her mother had gone off in an ambulance and had never come back, and Catherine had stopped praying. She had gone to live with people she didn’t know—a lot of people she didn’t know—until Dad and Marie had taken her home.
She rolled up her capris and took a couple more steps into the water that lapped around her calves. She flexed her toes in the cold, soft mud and tossed the rosebud like a Frisbee. It rode on the surface, moving away, a streak of yellow on the blue water. “Go with the spirits, my friend,” she said, and that seemed right somehow. Something her mother used to say: go in harmony, go in beauty, go with the spirits. She watched the rose until it slid under a small wave and disappeared.
She saw Rex bounding over the grass as she climbed back over the rocks, Marie behind him, dragging the leash and balancing a large carton in both arms. Everything about the dog was familiar, the way he ran with his ears back and his head stretched forward, the funny way his back legs splayed sideways. She ran up the hill to meet him, and then he was jumping on her, barking and howling. She dropped down onto her knees and pulled him against her, but the weight of him pushed her over sideways. She heard herself laughing out loud, rolling with the dog, tugging at his fur until finally, he settled down and crawled onto her lap and licked at her hands.
Marie was still a little ways up the hill. She had stopped, Catherine realized, giving her a moment with Rex, but now she came toward them. She set the carton down, then let herself down on the grass next to Catherine. “He missed you,” she said.
“I’ve missed him.” Catherine glanced back at the lake. She tried not to start crying. She’d called Marie last night after she’d gotten back to the B&B and asked her to bring Rex to Sloan’s Lake. It was a risk, she knew. The old Victorian house was only a few blocks away. She wanted to say good-bye to Maury, and she wanted to see Rex. “Thank you for bringing him,” she said. Then, “I’ve missed you, too.”
“Oh, Catherine.” She felt herself pressed against Marie’s chest, her arms warm and soft against her blouse. “I read the newspaper this morning. Is it over now?”
“Detective Bustamante hopes to learn the killer’s whereabouts from Gilly Mason.”
“Until then . . .” Marie let her go.
“I’ll be careful.” Catherine tried for the most reassuring smile she could muster. “I promise.”
“I’ve brought your birth mother’s box of things,” Marie said, pulling the box over between them. “I thought you’d like to see them now.”
Catherine lifted off the lid and stared at the necklace and earrings strung with what looked like old glass beads, chipped a little, but still shiny and bright, a rainbow of colors. They sat on top of the loose pile of papers. So little for a lifetime, she thought. She picked up the necklace and let the beads run like water through her fingers. She’d seen beads like this in old photographs. She wondered if Margaret Fitzpatrick had worn a necklace like this at the treaty councils.
She curled the necklace into the little cushion in her lap and lifted out a stack of papers, yellowed with age, brittle in her hands, the edges frayed and torn. The first page was smaller than the others, with a thin border around the edges and large black type across the top that said, “Marriage Certificate.” Catherine glanced down the page: Mary Fitzpatrick and Thomas Perry. United in marriage on June 3, 1968, St. Elizabeth Church, Denver, Colorado. Father Michael Byrne, witness.
Then, stuck to the back of the certificate, as if they belonged together—the beginning and the ending—was a three-inch newspaper clipping, the typ
e smeared, the lines in the folds faded. The small headline read: “Worker Killed.” In the margin above the headline, someone had penciled, October 20, 1970.
Catherine read through the article slowly, absorbing the news as if it had occurred yesterday. She knew so little about her parents. The vaguest memories of her mother, the silky black hair, the quietness about her, the easy smiles. Her father—a remote figure in history who no longer existed, except that he seemed to exist now, in his marriage and in his death. Somewhere along the line, someone—she supposed it had been Marie or Dad—had told her that her father had been killed shortly before her mother had died. “You’re our little girl now,” they had always told her.
Catherine turned away a moment. The lake, and the mountains in the distance, looked blurred and shimmering. Rex had fallen asleep, nuzzled against her leg, snoring into the morning quiet. This was who she was, she was thinking, before she tried to become everyone else.
“I’m sorry,” Marie said, reaching out and touching her shoulder. “I thought you were ready.”
“I am ready.” Catherine patted at the moisture on her cheeks and went back to thumbing through the other papers. A collection of childish drawings and colorings, all stick figures and circles and wobbly stars with the name “Catherine” scrawled in the corners. Her mother had kept these, she realized. They had meant something to her.
Beneath the drawings was a bundle of thin pages held together by an old rubber band that broke in half when she tried to pull it off. She spread the pages in a fan on the grass. Lines of beautiful and precise handwriting—the kind of penmanship taught in another age when important records had to be written by hand. There was no name on the first page, but on the last line of the last page was a signature: Margaret Fitzpatrick. 1867.
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