by LS Sygnet
“That’s enough,” Johnny intervened before the blame game could begin in earnest. “There’s plenty of system failures to go around, plenty of mistakes made in the past. None of it is relevant now. At the present time, we’re going forward honestly with each other. Dev, if you’d be more comfortable with Helen coming clean with the FBI about her impersonation –”
“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Devlin hissed. “They’d arrest her, and Wendell would be on some FBI most wanted list by sunset!”
Crevan grinned. “So you’re not really opposed to bending the rules here and there – you just don’t like being kept in the dark about it.”
I curled into the corner of the sectional sofa and wished I could simply turn back time. None of this would’ve happened if I had a stronger sense of morality. If I hadn’t turned out just like my father – Wendell that is. I’d never regret being nothing like Crevan’s sire.
“I’m not breaking any laws, bending them, loosely interpreting the intent or any other such nonsense,” Dev grumbled. “Hell, I don’t like being a party to this after the fact.”
“Then you know where the door is,” Johnny said quietly. “But Helen’s still in danger. My sons are still in danger. Do I wish she’d simply come to me before doing something so… foolhardy? Of course I do, but as Helen so astutely reminded me when she confessed, I wouldn’t have lifted a finger to help her liberate her father. On the contrary, I’d have locked her up if necessary to keep her from doing what she did. At the same time, it’s not something we can change now. Wendell’s out. As far as anyone is concerned, he’s as dead as Terrell Sanderfield. If the goal is to put him back in prison, that can’t be done without putting my wife there right along with him. I won’t allow that.”
“Shit,” Devlin said. ”I’m not suggesting anything of the kind, Johnny. And I hope you know that my… disappointment… well it hasn’t dented my resolve to see these people brought to justice.” He pinned me with a pointed stare. “Legal justice, Helen, not just some perverted sense of it.”
“Then find out who visited my father. Go to Mike Lucero. Learn everything you can about who was there and why that visit happened. In the meantime, I’ll try to track down Dad again and get some more information from him.”
“All he said was that he the FBI was the other branch of law enforcement to visit him?” Crevan asked.
I nodded. “I was so hell bent on getting answers about Marie and Lyle that I didn’t focus on what I should have,” I said.
“And what was that exactly?” Devlin asked.
“I needed to make sure Dad wasn’t really part of this other thing, Dev. I know I should’ve thought about all of that more carefully before I helped him escape from Attica, but all I could see was that I was righting a wrong that I should’ve never allowed to happen in the first place. He convinced me that he had no idea that I wasn’t his biological daughter.”
“He convinced me too,” Johnny said. “This man, this very flawed cop, might’ve done a lot of things worthy of incarceration, guys, but he loves Helen. He was sickened by what’s been happening in Darkwater Bay. I won’t say I’m not worried about what he might do to protect his daughter, but I believe completely that he isn’t abducting and selling human beings.”
“Could he be the one that killed Sanderfield?” Devlin asked the question that had frankly been nagging in the back of my head since I found out the man was dead.
“I doubt it. You were there when we talked about the method of execution, Devlin,” Johnny said. “Hell, you agreed with Chris. That hit was so precise.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Military sniper precise. Or spook. Don’t suppose the CIA could be involved in this.”
I laughed. “Why not? We’ve got every other branch of law enforcement in the mix.”
“Helen, I was serious,” Devlin said. “Frankly, it scares me to think we’ve got someone with that kind of deadly accuracy running around Darkwater Bay. He could take anybody out from a thousand yards away, and we’d never catch him. None of us is safe.”
It was time for a little history lesson, and not the kind that Tony Briscoe could supply about Darkwater Bay.
“Have you ever dealt with an assassin before, Dev?” I asked. My eyes roved to Crevan, to Johnny. “Any of you?”
“Helen, I think it’s pretty clear that the closest any of us have come to someone of that particular pathology is Mitch Southerby,” Johnny said.
“Southerby,” I scoffed. “He killed people up close. At the bureau, we stopped calling true assassins like the one who killed Sanderfield snipers. They’re long distance serial killers. Highly skilled, detached, shadows. These people haven’t heard of the grid, and forget radar. We’ll never find him because he’s long gone. He was a ghost before the police showed up at the crime scene. Sanderfield’s security team didn’t see anything or anybody because he made the shot and disappeared. He could’ve walked right up to them after it happened and they wouldn’t have known it. But he wouldn’t do that. He made the hit and moved on. That’s what they do. That’s how they operate. They answer to no one. They live nowhere. They’re tethered to nothing.”
“Then how the hell does somebody go about finding such a guy to hire him?”
I shrugged. “Soldier of Fortune magazine. Underground methods of communications. You know somebody who’s a friend of a friend who heard of a guy. The price of a hit like that would be astronomical. We’re not talking about services for hire to a disillusioned housewife.”
“Okay,” Crevan said. “That’s helpful. We’re looking for somebody with money, somebody well connected.”
“I’d agree. The person who hired the LDSK had to be in that elusive one percent of wealth.”
Devlin frowned and took the conversation in another direction. “We think we have a leak but can’t prove it.”
“Meaning?” Johnny asked.
“Isn’t that what the two of you realized when Levine told you that Marcos had no idea that Datello was the one turning on him? He thinks it’s Franchetta. Now he thinks Franchetta’s the one who embezzled all that money.”
“And he’s probably right,” I said. “But, I think I see where you’re going with this, Devlin. If somebody knew why Datello killed David Ireland, and knew that the feds weren’t using that information against Sully Marcos, then we certainly have a leak somewhere.”
“Not on our end,” Johnny said.
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
They stared at me again, dumbfounded.
“There is conceivably one other person who knew about Danny’s involvement in something incriminating Sully Marcos who isn’t a cop.” It was a tenuous thread, but there nonetheless.
“Southerby,” Johnny growled.
“Yes. So in addition to finding out who visited Dad at Attica, wouldn’t it behoove us to find out who Southerby has been talking to other than his attorney?”
“His attorney could be the leak,” Johnny suggested.
I disagreed. “If Southerby’s lawyer knows anything, you can bet your ass that Marcos would know it too. Marcos is still pinning the whole thing on Franchetta.” I glanced at Johnny. “I’m pretty sure Marcos believes that Franchetta’s been lying to him all along. Especially since the murder weapon used to kill my ex-husband was found in a waste management plant Sully owned.”
Johnny’s fists clenched. “That’s a point I hadn’t considered, Doc.”
“I’m missing something,” Crevan frowned.
“We’re pretty sure that Franchetta was following Hamilton at Sully’s request,” Johnny said. “He likely observed a suicide and took the gun, thinking they might use it as a tool to frame someone else after Hamilton’s body was discovered.”
“But that missing weapon would make it look like a murder, not suicide,” Devlin said.
Crevan was staring at me. “And that’s exactly what Special Agent Mark Seleeby thought,” he said. “So Franchetta kept the gun Rick used to kill himself, thinking that he could somehow lever
age something from Helen if the FBI investigated her for the murder.”
“Which they did,” I said.
“Ah hell,” Devlin shook his head. “They were bound and determined to use you one way or another, weren’t they?”
“I’m not so sure that Marcos isn’t still angling for some way to use her,” Johnny growled. “Over my dead –”
“Don’t say that,” I interrupted. The last thing I wanted was Johnny tempting fate, particularly when the niggling fear of my karmic debt was so strong. “I’d rather it be over my dead body than yours.”
Nobody spoke for a long while. There was no eye contact, no acknowledgement that what I said was right or wrong. Maybe on some level, we all understood that while people may think they are getting away with murder, in the end, that simply isn’t the truth.
Chapter 4
We needed to find Mike Lucero. My one and only conversation with Dad while he was still a guest of Attica didn’t cover what sort of relationship Dad had with any of the guards other than Timmons, who was supposedly a good guy. I thought about what Dad had to arrange before my brilliant little jail break plan was set into motion.
It was inconceivable to me that any prison personnel would knowingly conspire to help him escape. So what sort of relationships had Dad cultivated during his near 20 year tenure in prison? Was it more of a look-the-other-way type of arrangement? Special treatment? Access to a telephone to make private calls?
For the obvious reasons, the latter seemed the most likely favor anyone could offer Dad. He’d need that privacy to contact anyone on the outside, and the missing corpse scenario, my father’s remains allegedly being cremated instead of some other dead man’s, had to come from outside help. But who?
And why would Dad all of a sudden take someone into his confidence to enact such a brilliant ruse? Hadn’t he lectured me, after hearing my plan to free him, that I was involving too many people? So who would he trust with something like that?
Johnny strolled through the kitchen and planted outside the open refrigerator door. I watched him peck through the offerings before settling on string cheese. The door thudded shut. Our eyes met.
“You want something?”
The truth, perhaps. I know me. And yes, I’ve come to terms with the reality that I’m not nearly as enigmatic as I once believed, specifically where Johnny Orion is concerned. I suppose a bit of disgust had leached into my facial expression when he frowned.
“Now what?”
“You tell me,” I said.
“Sorry, sweetheart, but if I’ve done something wrong, I’m completely and blissfully unaware of it at the moment.”
“You lied to me, Johnny.”
He paused. It was like watching his eyeballs flicker through an invisible file of lies, trying to figure out which one he told that had suddenly come to my attention. It was not a nice realization for me.
“There have been so many that you’re not sure which one I’ve exposed?”
He grinned. “There are lies, and then there are lies, Doc. You know that. What did I do? Claim to have put the toilet seat down with I didn’t really do it?”
I shook my head. “Lies and then lies. Those are your words. But I remember many other things you’ve said to me since we met, Johnny. And it occurs to me that Dad’s phone call to you, telling you exactly when and where you could find me… something about that story just doesn’t quite gel in my mind.”
“In what way?”
“Don’t ask me like an indulgent husband, and don’t assume for one second that I haven’t put certain pieces of this puzzle into place. You had to know it was only a matter of time – and it wouldn’t be the first little foray you took into being an accomplice into something less than legal.”
“Helen, I seriously have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You said Dad called you and told you what I was planning to do when I went to New York.”
Johnny hissed a curse under his breath.
“If you helped him, why the fuck were you so pissed off at me when –”
“Because you ran away from me,” he growled. The half eaten strand of cheese was tossed into the sink. Johnny’s large hands manacled my wrists and yanked me close. “You gave yourself to me, Helen, and then you lied to me, walked away, were ready to get on that jet with Wendell and disappear.”
“I told you it was killing me,” I said. “Just the thought of never seeing you again.”
“But you still went up those stairs.”
“Johnny…”
“If I’d known what you were doing, I would’ve stopped you Helen. But it was too late without watching you get arrested and prosecuted for a shitload of felonies. It was damage control. I didn’t want to… there was no choice. Surely you can understand that.”
I sucked in a deep breath. “This is important, Johnny. Exactly how far did you go to help Dad arrange his death?”
Confusion etched his brow. “What? Helen, I had no idea what he planned to do. All I did was make a phone call.”
“To?”
“His old desk sergeant, some guy down in Clearwater, Florida.”
“And you never thought for a second that he was up to something?”
“Not with the message he asked me to…” Johnny’s voice faded suddenly. “Shit. He played me again.”
I couldn’t have suppressed the grin if I tried. “He’s good at it, Johnny. Don’t feel bad. Dad was very good at what he did back in the day. I think I told you once that my father is a forensics natural, a profiler without being trained. He knew he could tap into your gratitude over his phone call to do whatever he asked. Now what was his message?”
“I thought he was telling the his remaining advocate not to be surprised if he didn’t survive incarceration much longer, that in some strange way, he was telling me too that he’d sacrifice himself to protect you if need be.”
“Don’t doubt that he would, Johnny. But on the other hand, I have a very well-founded fear that Dad protecting me from the outside is more his style than dying to keep me safe.”
“So that old desk sergeant must’ve freaked out and called.”
My eyes widened. “Or perhaps he was really the other law enforcement visitor.”
“No, Helen. Your father had two before you showed up, remember?”
“So this desk sergeant helped make Dad look like he died? Why would he do that if he thought Dad was innocent?”
“Because he not only thought Wendell was innocent, he was convinced that the man had been wrongfully imprisoned.”
I groaned. “We need to talk to Mike Lucero. Seriously, Johnny. I’m not sure Dad was completely honest with me about who visited him.”
“Let’s ask David. Surely he won’t hide how the bureau learned about my visit. If someone really went to see Wendell, if the FBI sent a man in, David has no reason to hide that from us now.”
I shook my head. “Are you nuts? If we start asking David about who visited my father and why, it’ll shine a spotlight on something we really don’t want them looking at too closely.”
“Then be sneaky about it, a little less the David influence and a lot more the Wendell,” Johnny suggested. “He said the guy’s name was Noah. Let’s ask David if someone by that name is working the Marcos case.”
“He’ll want to know why. And if that’s how he found out you visited Attica last fall, it’ll make him wonder why we’re suddenly concerned with my father’s visitors. Let’s not forget that I’m the earliest known possible victim of these human traffickers in Darkwater Bay, nor does this case really have a link back to Marcos.”
“Then let me ask. He’d be more likely to think we uncovered something in the investigation that I don’t want to share with you, something that might possibly point a finger at Wendell as part of this –”
“No!”
“You don’t have to shout,” Johnny grinned. “But I wish you’d be objective and think about this rationally, Helen. Do you think that we didn’t disc
uss the possibility that Wendell was part of your abduction?”
“I know we discussed it,” I scowled at him.
“Not us, us. David. Crevan and Dev. We did talk about it. It was part of the process. I’ll tell David that I was going through the old file and saw some obscure reference to an unknown visitor that Wendell had, some guy named Noah from the FBI.”
“Can I be part of this conversation?”
“Not if he’s gonna believe that I’m keeping you specifically in the dark regarding that aspect of the investigation.”
“Johnny, you can’t do this to me. I –”
He pressed one finger over my lips. “Shh. I didn’t say you can’t hear the conversation. He just can’t know that you’re listening. Can you stay calm enough to do that?”
I nodded. “I won’t say a word, I swear.”
“A real promise, not the kind where you simply make an X over your heart while your eyes scream suckers at anybody naïve enough to believe that equates giving your word.”
I rolled my eyes. All this time, and he’d seen through me even when I thought I was so cleverly enigmatic. “Yes, a real promise. You want to put some duct tape on my mouth for good measure first, or are you gonna make the call?”
Johnny slid his arms around my waist and hugged me. “I didn’t really lie to you, Helen.”
Yeah, and I’d never really lied to him either.
He chuckled softly. “I told you the truth when I said I wasn’t part of his skillful cover of his prison escape – at least, not knowingly. Don’t start doubting me now.”
“I don’t. It’s just…”
“Helen, you don’t tell me every little thing either. Don’t pretend that you do. Something’s been bothering you ever since we went to the Sanderfield crime scene. You have very consciously avoided telling me what that was.”