Obstruction of Justice

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  It was Molly who was in trouble.

  Molly had managed to hold on to the last rung of the ladder with her hands. The whole thing had pulled away from its supports except at the very top, and the ladder swung gently several feet from the wall. Her feet, unsupported, danced in air.

  A few steps above her, where the ladder was still in one piece, Collier clutched the sides of the ladder. He pulled his gun from his belt and aimed at Jason, who was totally unprotected as he stood on the ledge below.

  "Jason," the girl shouted to her brother. "You can get away. Go!" Was it rain or tears that trickled down her face? Nina couldn’t tell.

  On the ledge below, the boy stood up, swaying.

  He seemed to jump toward the wall. With incredible strength and agility, finding invisible toeholds and fingerholes in the rough wall, he began to climb up the face of the building. "Molly, hold tight. I’m coming," he called.

  "Jason, no! He’ll kill you!"

  "Hold on tight!"

  He was up, just a few feet below her waving feet. He almost had her.

  One of her hands slipped. Flailing wildly, she scrabbled for a hold, just as she had that night in her bedroom as she hung, fighting to live....

  "Molly!" Jason screamed.

  The mass of people now surrounding Nina and Paul screamed in horror too, the din of their voices merging into one long moaning, crying sound that Nina would never forget. Rain broke the flashing neon lights into a hundred pieces.

  Molly’s other hand slipped off the rung.

  In an impossible, superhuman gesture, Jason reached out one arm, the other hand clamped to one of the ladder supports still attached uselessly to the wall, bending his body out from the building, stretching....

  He had her. She was clamped tightly to his side, held with one hand.

  They could not hang on. They couldn’t climb. They could only wait for the inevitable ending. The boy’s eyes bulged a little and the cords in his neck stood out, but he held his sister motionlessly. He had done all he could.

  All Nina could see of Collier was the top of his head, slanting raindrops splashing against him and the bulk of his body. Paul must have realized he could not shoot now without endangering the two young people below him. He had stuffed his gun into his pocket.

  The only sounds came from the rain splattering on the roof and the noise of sirens. Many heads now looked down over the side of the building, watching in an anguished hush. Nina felt the presence of death hovering in the air above the ladder.

  All her muscles tensed as she held fast against the presence. "Collier." She called down to him in a rasping, guttural voice that wasn’t hers.

  "He killed my wife," Collier said, looking up, meeting her eyes. His were wide, innocent, filled with a terrifying light. "It’s only right. Look at them. You see? They’re supposed to fall."

  "No," Nina said. "Anna would want you to save them. To be merciful, Collier. Please. For Anna."

  A long, long second passed.

  Collier looked down at the boy and girl, only a few feet below. "It’ll never hold, Nina," he said absently.

  Then he climbed down a few rungs. Bending at the waist, clinging with one hand, he reached toward Jason.

  And a miracle occurred. The ladder held.

  Collier clamped his hand on to Jason’s wrist. He gripped it tightly until the rope could come down, and the helping hands.

  Clapping, more shouting, a commotion as the three of them were hauled back over the side.

  Nina put her arms around Paul’s neck and buried her face in his jacket. She didn’t want to see if that presence had receded. She was cold, colder than she had ever been before.

  Kenny, dripping and leaning against the wall, said breathlessly, "Ray took the car. He lied to Jason. All he told Jason was that he’d totaled it and he asked Jason to take the blame with Sarah. He said he got drunk and lost a bunch of money gambling and drove the car into a tree. He ... he ..."

  "He cried," Jason said. "He said he couldn’t face my mom or my grandfather. He said he’d gambled away the money." He turned to Collier and said, "I’m sorry about your wife."

  Collier’s shoulders sagged. He bowed his head.

  Molly fainted, and people crowded around her. Someone covered her up.

  The rain still fell, silent and dark.

  Epilogue

  THE MAN AND THE WOMAN CAME TO THE SUMMIT of the great mountain just before two o’clock in the afternoon.

  October had brought the cold with it, a still, windless cold. Snow would not be far behind. On the treeless summit, the slab of granite with its cairn of stones in the center, they stopped, threw off their packs, and lay down, gasping a little in the thin air.

  Nina looked up into the sky just as she had on the day, two months before, when she and Collier had climbed the mountain in the midst of the threatening storm. All was clear and bright this time, and the crescent moon hovered like a ghost low in the sky, overshadowed by her big brother.

  Paul, beside her, made a cushion for his head on his pack, and closed his eyes.

  A month had gone by. Paul had spent the time in Carmel, and Nina had been picking up the pieces. When he called and asked her to go up Tallac again, she had refused at first, but he had said the most amazing thing, that they might learn something new about Ray de Beers’s death at the summit. All the long way up they had avoided talking about the de Beers family.

  And now, achieving the summit once again, she felt peace all around her. The mountain was at rest.

  "Paul ..."

  "I’m here," Paul said drowsily.

  "What are we looking for?"

  "In a minute." He was quiet again, relaxing in full sun. Out there where Lake Tahoe glinted silver in the sun, a pair of eagles dipped and turned in the sky.

  "I’ll miss California," he said. "I’ve never worked in Washington, D.C. And three months is a long time to be away. But I’ll be set for the year after this job."

  "I wish you weren’t going."

  "We all need a rest. Try to stay out of trouble, will you?"

  Nina pushed at him lightly with her boot. "I intend to," she said. "Now. Don’t you want to know what happened to them? Jason, and the others?"

  "All right. I’m ready now."

  "First, Collier."

  "How did our statements go over?"

  "Perfectly. Jason and Molly and Kenny came through once I had a chance to talk to them. Collier’s gone," Nina went on. "He took a leave of absence, dropped out of the DA race. I called him just before he left, and he didn’t even know where he was going. He just said, someplace warm. He’s a casualty, Paul. I wonder if I’ll ever see him again."

  "He’ll be back when he feels better," Paul said.

  "It’s not just Anna. Looking for Anna’s killer was only a symptom of his illness. He was burned out, Paul. Thank God he didn’t kill Jason."

  "He would have killed the wrong person," Paul said. "I really thought the kid did it after our talk with Sarah."

  "Kenny told me the rest of it a few days later. Ray wrote the check, took the cash to Ruben, and hired him to kill Leo," Nina said. "Ray was paranoid. He thought Leo was taking everything away from him— his power on the job and his wife. He hated Leo enough to try to kill him. And when Ruben told him he’d talked to his probation officer and had a change of heart, Ray had to cover up, so he strangled him. Then he ran Anna down and dumped the car on El-Barouki. And he begged Jason to tell his mother he’d taken the money and the car, not telling him what he’d done. Incredible that Jason agreed, even so. He loved his father in spite of everything, Paul."

  "When did the kids figure it out?" Paul asked.

  "After we talked to Joe and Lucy, remember? Joe was at the house working and he told Molly how his missing car killed Anna. Then Molly told Jason on a visit to the jail. Jason didn’t know what to do. It was just another blow among so many others."

  "Did any hard evidence turn up?"

  Nina said, "A long shot. Ginger matched pri
nts in the car to Ray. There were no prints of Jason. Ray did it, Paul. There’s no doubt."

  "Tell me about the de Beerses."

  "Sandy says Sarah’s marrying Leo on Christmas Day. Kenny’s going to be the best man. Then Kenny’s starting Cal Tech in the spring semester. That’s good, isn’t it? Jason and Molly are both going to Columbia."

  "What about the arson charge and the grave-digging charge?"

  "I pled Jason guilty. He did dig up the body—I’m still not sure why—and he did set the fire, Paul. But Amagosian took into account a lot of mitigating circumstances. Jason was convicted of two misdemeanors and has to complete a counseling program while he’s at Columbia as part of his probation. He says he knows he can’t run away from his troubles anymore.’’

  "Good lawyering," Paul said drowsily, and Nina let herself bask for a minute in the warmth and his compliment.

  "Oh, yes," she said. "Collier told me he sat down with Lucy Lauria and explained what we think really happened. It’ll never be proven, though. Anyway, Sandy told me yesterday that Lucy Lauria had Ruben’s body removed from the grave where it had been buried and reburied it at a Catholic cemetery in Reno. She still plans to marry Joe."

  "Good," Paul said. "Joe’s all right. Have they found Quentin’s Mercedes?"

  "No," Nina said. "It’s probably at the bottom of some cliff somewhere around here. Jason won’t say."

  "A memorial," Paul said. "Did you ever find out who took the sunglasses?"

  "Molly. Jason told her I had them. She was trying to protect him, and she didn’t trust me. She waltzed into the house one afternoon while Andrea was picking up the children at school."

  "It had to be her. Teenage girl, harmless, the neighbors would think."

  "Oh," Nina said. "You’ll never guess what I heard about Kim Voss."

  "What’s that?"

  "I saw an article about her in the San Francisco Chronicle arts section. She’s been discovered. Her series ’Synchronous Variations’ is being shown at a big gallery on Sutter Street. She’s suddenly famous. According to the paper, she was discovered by a gallery owner in Carmel who got curious because people were asking where to find her work."

  Paul let out a hearty laugh.

  "The flash of green wasn’t Jason’s sunglasses in the painting, Paul."

  "I’ve thought about that," Paul said. "So Kim was wrong there?"

  "No, she had that right too. Ray was wearing an olive-green golf hat that day on the mountain. That painting told the whole story.

  "And that’s about it," Nina went on. "That’s my report."

  "You missed one thing. Remember I asked you to try to find out who paid El-Barouki to leave the country? That’s the one thing that’s been really bothering me," Paul said.

  Nina said, "That was easy. One call did it. To the Mirror. I gave the reporter the name, and she called back with the info five minutes later. Munir El-Barouki won one million, six hundred thousand dollars in the California Lottery Quick Pick game on the day before he left for Egypt."

  Paul sat up. "You’re pulling my—"

  "True! I swear!"

  Paul said, "Manifold are the wonders of the universe. He’ll probably buy a gun store in Cairo. You know, this kind of case only happens once or twice in an investigator’s career."

  "What kind of case?"

  "The kind where we’re led around by the nose. A real honest-to-God mystery. The kind where it comes together, but in a way we can’t build from logic."

  "Well, I’ll be doggoned," Nina said. "You’re willing to admit there’s something to the idea of—"

  "Auspicious coincidence," Paul said. "Synchronicity. I admit it. But this kind of case is a rare thing, a very rare thing. I can’t say that in all my years in homicide work I’ve ever seen the workings of fate so clearly exposed. It makes me feel—"

  "Small," Nina said. "Collier said that once. About a storm."

  "It’s another kind of natural phenomenon," Paul said. "Beyond me."

  "Yes. I feel that too," Nina said. "I feel as though we changed the way it was supposed to work out."

  "We took on the gods, and kicked ass," Paul said. He laughed and scratched at his arm.

  "I see you carried your gun up the mountain. What are you going to do with it, shoot the moon?"

  "It stays with me," Paul said. "I may not have much control over anything at all, but at least I have my gun. I’d rather be judged by twelve than buried by six." Lifting up his water bottle, he took several long swallows.

  "What I can’t figure out is, why did Jason say all that stuff about the bad things he did at Kenny’s right before Collier burst in? And why in the world did he dig up his father’s grave?" Nina said.

  "Well, let’s do what we came up here to do," Paul said. "Maybe it’ll answer your questions." He stood up and shook out his legs. "Up, woman. The search is on." He began circling around the granite, bending low, turning over rocks. "The bolt struck up here," Paul said. "There’ll be some kind of mark." Nina followed, intrigued. She still had no idea what he was up to.

  Near the edge of the summit rock, where the stony slope ran down to the unseen ledge where she and Collier had taken shelter that dreadful afternoon, Paul said, "Come here."

  "What’s this?" They both looked at the place where the rock made a shallow black depression filled with debris. Paul opened his pack and took out a pointed trowellike object. He put on leather gloves and began digging energetically at the debris. "Look," he said. He reached down and drew out a curious crystalline tube, about four inches long. Laying it carefully beside him, he reached in again.

  Another bit of short tubelike rock came out, and another. They seemed to be made of fused rock, thin and hollow, wormlike in appearance. Nina had never seen anything like them before. They were alien. She found them frightening, as if they had unearthed something from outer space. "Paul," she said. "What are they?"

  "The marks of the lightning," Paul said in a tone of satisfaction. "This is where the lightning struck Ray de Beers. The lightning literally melted the rock where it struck, down almost a foot, making this hollow broken tube to show where it passed into the earth. All the other marks have been obliterated by weather."

  "How do you know this?"

  "The Internet," Paul said. "Under ’lightning.’ Try using one of the search vehicles, like Magellan. I’ve also been chatting with a forensics expert in electrical engineering, and he turned me on to a program on public television that I bet Kenny saw one night in his lonely apartment. And to think some people say public TV is boring!" He put each piece of the wormlike rock tube into its own plastic bag and carefully packed it into his pack. "Okay," he said. "Let’s finish the job." He was on his feet again, head low like a dog sniffing out something.

  "What are we looking for, Paul?"

  "Burned wire," Paul said. "Any length." They moved in circles around the spot where Ray had died, looking among the jetsam left on the summit by wind and meteors for something like a burned wire....

  Nina found a small piece, about fifteen feet away, just at the drop-off. "Here!" she shouted. "I’ve got one!" Paul came over and they both looked at the six-inch length of black wire.

  "That does it," Paul said. "Give it to me. Let’s just see if we come across any more."

  Fifteen more minutes of labor brought them three more bits of the same thin black wire. As they found each bit, Paul casually tucked it into his pocket.

  They were both very tired of clambering around after such a long climb. "That’s enough," Paul said finally. They sat down heavily. Already at three o’clock the shadows were lengthening across the faraway Nevada mountains.

  "We have to go down, Paul," Nina said.

  "Yes. As soon as I catch my breath again."

  "Did we find what we were looking for?"

  Paul nodded.

  "Are you going to tell me about it?"

  "It was the book you saw at Kenny’s," Paul said. "About sugar rockets. Later, I asked Kenny what a sugar rocket was and
his reaction made me curious. So when I started looking into lightning strikes on the Web, I looked up rockets too. Kenny gave me some help there."

  "Well, what is a sugar rocket?"

  "You’ll find it under ’pyrotechnics’ on the Web, if you ever want to look up the exact recipe," Paul said. "A fellow named Cloaked Guerrilla saw fit to post it for the world’s benefit. It’s a small rocket made with ingredients you can buy over the counter.

  "The propellant is made with potassium nitrate, sugar, and sulfur. You put the ingredients in a plastic container and shake them. It looks like a yellowish powder.

  "Then you make a casing out of brown package tape wrapped around a dowel, and a nozzle out of a plug of putty. You fill the hollow casing with the propellant, and take black powder purchased at a gun shop, make a paste with it, and smear it over the nozzle. You launch it from a guide stick made of wooden shish kebab skewers."

  "Sounds like something some crazy kid might try to make."

  "I think that’s exactly what happened," Paul said. "The three of them were probably sitting around in Kenny’s apartment, talking about Ray. And Kenny had his inspiration. Weather scientists have recently managed to send rockets up, trailing wires, into storm clouds. It is somewhat unpredictable, but every once in a while the damn things work. Lightning building up in the cloud is released, and travels down the wire to the ground. I’m sure Kenny knew all about it."

  "You’re kidding!" Nina said. "They called down the lightning?"

  "It doesn’t always happen," Paul said. "You have to have the right combination of circumstances. A mountaintop is the best place. The storm has to be right overhead, and the rocket has to hit the cloud just right."

  "You’re saying—I can’t believe it! They planned to kill Ray with a lightning bolt?" Nina said.

  "I don’t think they ever thought it would work," Paul said. "Too many contingencies. I’m sure it was just a prank they thought they’d try out that day.

  "But heaven cooperated. Remember how the party separated when the storm came up? I guess Jason and his father made it to the top. Somehow, Ray fell and was knocked unconscious. I can picture Jason looking at him, looking at the sky"—Paul was looking at the sky himself—"and thinking, what the hell. I think he tied the wire to Ray’s pack, still on his back, and set off the rocket."