ABSOLUTION (A Frank Renzi novel) (48 page)

Marie was
his
girl. How dare Renzi comfort her? Marie loved
him,
no one but him. He wanted to tell her it was going to be all right. He really did love her. He tried to raise his hand to get her attention, but his arm wasn’t working anymore. He saw Renzi turn and walk toward him, saw Marie take the gun out of her waistband.

How wonderful. Marie had stood by him after all.

He mustered his last remaining strength to tell her he loved her but everything was tinged with black and the words
I love you Marie
stuck in his throat. The only thing coming out of his mouth was warm and salty, his lifeblood seeping out of him.

_____

Frank released Marie and walked toward Timothy Krauthammer, the man who’d become a priest without mercy, a man who tortured and killed women, lying motionless on the floor now, blood pooling under his head, his right hand flung out to one side, inches away from the Glock-9 pistol.

“
You miserable fuck! You ruined everything!”

He wheeled and froze. Heard the shot. Felt a sledgehammer hit him in the chest. Saw Marie’s face, contorted with rage. Saw the snub-nosed revolver in her hands. He tried to make sense of it.

Marie had a gun? Where did she get a gun?

And then he was flat on his back, knocked off his feet by the impact of the bullet, his breath torn out of him. His chest felt like a cement mixer had run over it. Gasping for air, he rolled onto his stomach, everything happening in slow motion as he scrambled for cover before she shot him again, watching her come at him, tracking his movements with the gun.

She fired again and missed. Each second was an eternity. Adrenaline kept him going as she advanced on him, screaming wordlessly, holding the snub-nosed revolver with both hands. More shots as she began to fire.

Bam-bam-bam.

Bottles of juice stacked on a shelf at the end of an aisle exploded, showering him with shards of glass. He felt agonizing pain as a bullet ripped into his thigh. His heart hammered his chest as he dragged himself on his elbows and squirmed behind a shelf, bruised and bleeding but still alive thanks to the Kevlar vest. But for how long?

He had been too shocked to do an ammo count, couldn’t remember how many shots Marie had fired. If she had more ammo, he was in trouble. He heard the SWAT team battering the side door, silently exhorted them to hurry and ripped the Sig-Sauer free of his ankle rig. The cops out front were following Lieutenant Murphy’s plan: Wait for the SWAT team to get inside and gain control. But that could take a while, and Marie was trying to kill him.

Still, he didn’t want to shoot her.

He grabbed a can of green beans and lobbed it in her general direction.

She let loose a barrage of shots.

Silence for a moment, then the click-click-click of the hammer striking an empty chamber.

“
Renzi!” A faint shout from the SWAT team. “Are you okay?”

“
Yes,” he said, but his voice was so weak he knew they wouldn’t hear him, knew if they saw Marie with a gun in her hands they would shoot first and ask questions later. He crawled to a display stacked with liquid laundry detergent, grabbed hold of the shelf and dragged himself erect. His left pant leg was soaked with blood.

He eased around the corner.

Ten feet away, Marie stood doubled over, her face in her hands, sobbing, her chest heaving as she gasped for air. A snub-nosed .38 Special revolver lay on the floor. Ignoring the searing pain in his thigh, he hobbled over to her, dragging his wounded leg.

She raised her head and looked at him, tears streaming down her cheeks. He put his arms around her and felt her shudder with wracking sobs.

“
He-he-he was the only one th-th-that loved me,” she hiccoughed. “We were g-g-going away together. Tim was my knight in shining armor.”

She still didn’t get it. Whatever Tim had said in the hours they’d spent together had convinced her to trust him. In Marie’s mind Tim was just a good guy having a bad day. Except for the fact that he’d told her Tim had murdered those women. Maybe she didn’t believe it. He wondered if what she felt for Tim was love or some twisted sense of indebtedness. Running from a father she thought didn’t give a damn about her, escaping into the arms of a serial killer who maybe did. Or said he did anyway. Frank doubted that Timothy Krauthammer was capable of loving anyone.

The SWAT team burst through the door, screaming and yelling.

“
Police! Freeze! Drop your guns!”

And then it was bedlam, footsteps thundering, more voices yelling as a dozen sharpshooters and cops swarmed through the front doors where the floor was crunchy with shattered glass and slick with blood. His own, Frank realized, his sweatpants soaked with it, his thigh throbbing with a steady pain, keeping time with his heart.

Better do something about the bleeding.

“
Marie’s okay,” he said to no one in particular. “Tim shot himself.”

A superfluous statement since the cops were already crowded around Tim’s body. Someone took Marie by the arm and led her away. Woozy and light headed, Frank sank slowly to his knees and then to the floor.

He blacked out for a time, and when he came to, Lieutenant Murphy was kneeling beside him, barking orders. “Get the goddam medics in here. He’s bleeding like a son of a bitch!”

He drifted in and out, bobbing on a sea of calm. Marie was okay. Marie was alive at least. Then he remembered Marie was the one who shot him. He drifted off again and then Dana was kneeling beside him, offering him water from a cool plastic bottle.

“
I couldn’t save him,” he said.

Dana’s eyes glinted with tears. She seemed giddy with relief, smiling and crying as she stroked his cheek. “You did what you could, Frank. How could I expect you to talk him into some sort of sanity in twenty minutes when I couldn’t do it in four years of therapy?”

“
At least Marie’s safe.” His eyelids felt heavy and his eyes closed.

“
Yes,” Dana said, “and so are you. That’s the important thing.”

He rubbed his chest where the slug had hit. His chest hurt almost as much as his leg. He was going to have a nasty bruise.

“
Marie shot me.”

“
Marie
shot you?” Dana gasped. “Why?”

“
She thought Tim killed himself because of me. She said I ruined everything. She said Tim was her knight in shining armor.” His body ached all over and he was feeling lightheaded again.

Two EMTs come through the door rolling a stretcher

“
Over here!” Dana yelled. “Hurry! He’s lost a lot of blood.”

An EMT with a stethoscope dangling from his neck examined his thigh and muttered, “Uh-oh, this looks like trouble.”

“
You have to stop the bleeding,” Dana said urgently. “He’s going into shock.”

He gripped her hand and tried to tell her he’d be okay, felt himself slipping away, and everything faded to black.

CHAPTER 30

Two weeks later

Favoring his injured leg, Frank approached the hospital bed where Sean Daily lay against the pillows, propped up at a sixty-degree angle. Stacks of get-well cards lay on his bedside table and the sweet aroma of two large floral bouquets on a side table wafted through the room.

Sean beamed him a smile, but his face was as white as the bandages that swathed his head. At least the tubes in his nose and the IV line in his arm were gone, unlike the last time Frank had seen him.

“
You’re limping, Frank. Sit here.” Aurora rose from a chair on the opposite side of the bed near the window. She looked exhausted, dark circles beneath her eyes, though her silvery hair was perfectly coifed.

“
The Limping Detective. Great title for a movie,” he joked, waving her back into the chair. “I can’t stay, just stopped by to see how Sean’s doing.”

“
He’s looking a lot better, isn’t he?” she said, smiling now. “The doctor said he’s going to be fine.”

“
Can’t keep an old Irish Mick down,” Sean said with a cocky grin.

He perched on the edge of the bed to take the weight off his sore leg. “How did it go with Ralph? Aurora told me he came to see you.”

Sean’s grin broadened. “Wonderful, Frank, just wonderful. The three of us had a great talk, didn’t we, Aurora?”

“
Indeed we did. Ralph is a fine young man,” she said, adding with a mischievous smile, “Handsome, too, like his father.”

Sean’s eyes grew somber. “Mary sent her regards. Ralph said she would have come with him if she’d been well enough to travel. But now that Ralph knows where I am, she’s at peace.”

“
I’m glad you worked things out.” Frank smiled at Aurora and said, “Sean’s a lucky man to have a woman like you for a partner.”

“
You don’t have to tell me that, Frank.” Sean reached out and took Aurora’s hand. “I’m the luckiest man in the world.”

“
Luckier than you know. After I got out of the hospital I made some calls to check into that New Hampshire case—”

“
Frank, I swear I didn’t—”

“
Sean, I believe you. I’m not going to turn you in.”

Sean puffed his cheeks and blew out air, visibly relieved. “That’s twice you saved my life, Frank. If you hadn’t come to the rectory that morning, I’d be dead now.”

“
He’s right,” Aurora said, nodding. “Dr. Ornstein told me so. He said Sean wouldn’t have made it if he’d gotten to the hospital ten minutes later.”

“
I’m grateful you won’t turn me in, but—” Sean struggled to sit up, then sank back against the pillows. Aurora handed him a Styrofoam cup with a straw. He took a sip and swallowed. “I wish I knew who killed Judy.”

“
We may never know. That’s what I wanted to tell you. I tracked down the private investigator Judy’s parents hired and talked to him. Thirty years ago when Judy was murdered, DNA evidence wasn’t even a blip on anyone’s radar screen, but the PI collected a sample from the semen they found on her underwear and had it tested.”

“
DNA,” Sean said, and nodded slowly. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“
You’ve got the luck of the Irish, Sean. After you split, the cops took several items out of your room, including a hairbrush. The PI found it in the evidence file, got a DNA sample from your hair, had it tested and compared it to the DNA from the semen.”

Sean’s face lit up in a confident smile. “And it didn’t match, right?”

“
Not even close. Someone else killed her, Sean. Case closed.”

“
Halleluiah!” Aurora exclaimed, leaning forward to embrace Sean.

Watching them was ample reward for the many hours he’d spent on the phone, tracking down the PI and talking to the New Hampshire State Police. He eased off the bed. His leg was better, but still sore.

“
Sorry I can’t stay,” he said, edging toward the door. “I have to pick someone up at the airport.”

“
Your therapist friend?” Aurora said with a faint smile.

He grinned. “How’d you guess?”

“
From the happy look on your face and the wicked gleam in your eye.”

_____

“
You ditched the crutch,” Dana said, giving him a stern look as he stopped for a traffic light at the Louis Armstrong Airport exit. A jumbo jet rumbled overhead, taking off into a cloudless blue sky.

“
I got sick of it. The doc won’t let me go running for a month. He didn’t want me driving either, but—”

“
But he doesn’t know your relentless determination.”

“
Stubborn, you mean, too stubborn sometimes. If I’d let you come into the store with me, you might have talked Tim into surrendering.”

“
I doubt it. I’ve done a lot of thinking these last two weeks, Frank. Nobody could have convinced Tim to surrender. He knew he was facing all those murder charges. What did he have to live for?”

The light turned green, and Frank turned left onto Airline Drive. “Tim was a control-freak to the very end. Choosing when to die, and how.”

They fell silent as they passed several motels and then the Garden of Memories, its lush green lawn dotted with pink-and-white geraniums, the final resting place of many New Orleans area residents.

But not Timothy Krauthammer.

“
Tim’s father wouldn’t come and pick up the body,” Frank said. “He called the DA’s office and said he’d pay them to ship the body to Wahoo.”

“
Sad, but not surprising. What happened with the murder cases?”

“
The DA closed them. Tim’s DNA matched the DNA evidence they collected from Patti Cole’s fingernails, and the taskforce collected a ton of evidence in his room linking him to the other murders.” He looked over at Dana. “Tim kept their tongues in glass jars with labels on them.”

She combed her fingers through the sable-brown hair that fell to her shoulders, no ponytail today. “Tim was mentally ill. He needed help and he didn’t get it. That’s a shame, but I feel worse for all those women he killed and their families. Those women never had a chance. What will happen to Lisa Marie Sampson?”