Act of Betrayal (13 page)

Once again rescued by an over-the-road driver, Schultz was delivered to a well-equipped truck stop fifteen miles farther on, where he paid for the driver’s lunch, not stopping to get anything to eat himself, then bought a gas can and filled it. A few words with the man behind the counter resulted in an announcement over the PA system that a good buddy—that was him, Schultz had to remind himself—needed an east-bound hitch, and in minutes he was on his way. The driver bent Schultz’s ear about gun control, but that was a small price to pay to get moving again.

Schultz chafed at all the contacts he was making—people who could later place him in certain locations at certain times, if anyone was following him asking questions—but it was unavoidable. If he wanted to switch rental cars, he’d have to turn back to Bismark, and he didn’t want to double back on his own path. Car rental agencies were widely spaced in North Dakota, along with everything else.

He had gotten a whole seventy-five miles farther when the right front tire blew with a sudden pop and pull on the steering wheel that caught him in deep thought. He corrected without incident and pulled over on the shoulder.

To his amazement, the trunk yielded an inflated spare, a workable jack, and a beat-up tire iron with a stain on one end that jangled his cop sense, but he refused to allow himself to examine it closely. Changing the tire took only a few minutes, but it was hard work for a man in his mid-fifties who already carried a spare tire of his own twenty-four hours a day. It didn’t help that he discovered that the lug nuts were so loose. He felt obligated to pop the hubcaps on the other three wheels and check those out, too. Having a wheel fly off at seventy mph and causing an accident wasn’t his idea of maintaining a low profile.

He stowed the blown tire and the tools in the trunk and headed out again, wondering what else the car had in store for him. At 6:00 P.M. hunger drew him off the interstate, and he made an impromptu decision that Billings, Montana, was his destination for the day. All of his decisions were spontaneous. The more he planned his future actions, the more likely it was that anyone chasing him would pick up a pattern in his movements and get ahead of him.

Whoever it is seems to be ahead of me already, at every turn.

It was just fifty hours since Rick’s body had been discovered, and in that time Schultz had gone, in the eyes of the police, from grieving parent to a man wanted for vehicular manslaughter. It was as though he had been picked up by the heels, held upside down, and shaken—cut loose from everything that anchored his life. He had barely slept, and emotionally and physically he was on shifting sands, liable to make a misstep any minute. That stuff he’d blurted out to PJ about being framed was an example. He knew he needed rest, and he needed to get his thoughts together.

Schultz checked into a Motel 6 and foraged in the convenience store across the street for dinner. The store had a selection of sandwiches and a microwave, so he carried back a sack of heated roast beef sandwiches, a bag of corn chips, a six-pack of root beer from the cooler section, and a couple of stale doughnuts bypassed by the morning crowd and left sitting forlornly in the display case. Nutritional it was not, but by the time he got the items back into his motel room he was ravenous from the smell of the roast beef. He flicked on the TV and put it on CNN. Then he spread out a towel on the bed to serve as a tablecloth and tore into the food. He ate in the manner he always did when he was alone, which was to get the food in fast and worry about cleanup, not to mention social graces, later.

After wolfing down the first sandwich, the edge taken off his hunger, he started to consider the situation. He was worried about Julia. She was an obvious target for anyone out to get him. Julia and he had made plans for her to get out of state, but that was before Caroline Bussman was run down with Schultz’s car.

He didn’t know what Julia would do when she got that news. Most likely she would go to the police and establish an alibi for him. Then what? After she told her story, there was no reason for the Chicago police to keep her in protective custody. So she’d be on her own, as she had been through the latter part of their marriage, he thought. He pushed down the guilt. All he could do was hope that she had sense enough to get out of town, to use the plan they had discussed for her to go to Florida to stay with her friend Cassie Wilkins.

Julia and Cassie had been friends for decades. Two years ago Cassie and her husband had retired to a senior community in Florida, but shortly afterward her husband had died. Julia had a standing invitation to visit anytime, but had never taken Cassie up on it, due to one thing or another. Schultz thought she’d be safe there, because if someone was after him it was undoubtedly due to a connection with his work with the department, and Cassie had no link to him or his work.

He licked his lips, cleaning off the glaze from the doughnuts. Surely Julia knew enough not to hop in her car and drive directly to Cassie’s.

Surely.

He thought back over the events of the last two days, trying to pin down exactly why he felt such a great sense of danger. At first, there had been only the numbing shock of his son’s death, and the manner of it.

The way Rick looked… No, don’t bring that up. Doesn’t do any good.

It had been during the evening he spent with PJ at Brandy’s Bar that the feeling that he was being pursued first came upon him. Between one drink and the next, he had suddenly acquired a feeling of terrible naked vulnerability.

It was something PJ had said, something about Rick’s past coming back to haunt him, and that his past was probably responsible for his violent death.

Not Rick’s past, but mine. Mine.

The extra sense that Schultz had when it came to crime-solving, that link he was able to develop with the killer, had set up a clanging in his mind that was impossible to ignore. The answering machine message had simply been the icing on the cake.

Rick’s killing was an execution, pure and simple. Although Rick was doing time for selling drugs, he was only a small building block, one of many at the bottom of the pyramid; Schultz was sure of that. His son had been caught selling marijuana to schoolchildren. That looked bad for a cop’s kid, but it was the level of drug crime that a sixteen year old would be involved in, not someone ten years deeper into the business. Rick was lazy. He had been trying to find a way to pick up some cash to avoid holding down a legitimate job. No big-time drug deals gone bad, no Colombian drug lords snapping at his heels.

Who would possibly hate Rick enough to go to that much trouble to kill him? A stranger killing, a psycho picking an opportunistic victim? Not likely. It had been set up in advance. Ginger was proof of that. Ginger wrote the come-on letters. He died in an apartment rented by Ginger.

Ginger Miller. Ever since PJ had mentioned the name to him, he had thought there was something significant about it, something he should recognize.

His eyes were heavy with the need to sleep, and he knew he had to be on the road early tomorrow. He switched off the TV, barely aware that there had been something on the national news about St. Louis, something about a politician, maybe. Fleetingly he remembered seeing Chief Wharton’s ugly puss on the screen. Must be a high-profile case. Schultz couldn’t work up any interest in checking into it. He seemed completely disconnected from the concerns of ordinary homicides.

In the bathroom he unwrapped the soap, put down the bath mat, and took a hot shower. As he breathed in the steam and scrubbed, he suddenly straightened up. The shower spray hit him in the face like hot needles, but he didn’t notice.

He had an idea what the whole thing was about. It was something that happened thirteen years ago. He started piecing things together in his head as he stood under the shower, washcloth dangling from his hand.

It all fit. He felt a thrill of elation at having figured it out and put a name to it. And then fear, somewhere in his gut.

A man with Ginger Miller’s initials was after him, and the worst thing about it was that the man was a cop, a retired cop now. After thirty-three years with the department, Schultz was finally up against one of his own.

W
HEN SCHULTZ REACHED HIS
twenty-year anniversary with the St. Louis Police Department he was given a gold pin and a new partner.

That was thirteen years ago, but Schultz remembered that particular new partner as if it had all happened yesterday. At that time Schultz had a reputation for being good with the new detectives, showing them the ropes and keeping them in one piece until they could fend for themselves. He wasn’t gentle with them, and at one time or another all of them hated him. He had gone through five partners in the last eight years, all of them better off for their stint at driving Schultz around town.

Vince Mandoleras was Schultz’s new apprentice, twenty-eight years young and in awe of his senior partner. They were working burglaries. Three weeks into the partnership, Vince made a good collar and recovered a couple hundred thousand dollars’ worth of stolen electronic equipment. It was actually Schultz who led him to the scene, maneuvered him into making the arrest, and made sure Vince’s fly was zipped when it was time to talk to the lady reporter.

A month later, an informant told Schultz about a guy who was selling computers out of the back of his pickup truck. It seemed that when Lemont Clark got four or five beers in him, he’d yap to anyone who’d listen that he had enough hot shit to stock him a warehouse, and maybe he’d just rent one of those storefronts on Gravois, open up a deep-discount computer store, and put in a waiting room for the customers. Cash only, and don’t expect no receipt.

Schultz and Vince sat across the street in an unmarked car and watched Clark’s apartment. They saw him lug boxes out in a steady flow, pile them in his truck, and return a couple of hours later with the truck empty. A couple of times they followed him and witnessed the transactions. Vince leaned out the window and brazenly took pictures. But they weren’t interested in the marks who bought the stuff. They wanted Lemont’s supplier, the one who was pilfering from manufacturers’ shipments. They couldn’t decide if Lemont was the one doing the pilfering or if he was just the salesman. In two weeks of surveillance, they didn’t turn up any deliveries to the apartment.

“Must have shit stacked from floor to ceiling in there,” Vince said. “We could get him on fire code violations alone.”

“Could be running a mail-order business or something,” Schultz said.

“Yeah,” Vince said, spreading that little-boy grin on his face like jam on toast, “or something. When we gonna bust this asshole?”

“Patience isn’t your strong suit, is it?”

“I got plenty of patience. I even got slow hands. You just ask my girl.”

Vince had a relationship with a single mother of twin baby girls that loosely qualified as an engagement to be married. Talk was the babies were his, but he hadn’t owned up to it yet. He said he was waiting for a salary increase before making the leap, but Schultz had a feeling that after he got a raise there would be some other excuse on the horizon. The Mandoleras men had always been slow to commit. Glen Mandoleras, Vince’s father, was a detective in narcotics. Schultz had known him for a few years. Glen hadn’t married Vince’s mother until Vince was long out of diapers.

After a few days of being bugged about holding back, Schultz got a warrant to search Lemont’s place, based on the photos Vince had taken. Schultz had a feeling that they were rushing things, but there was nothing he could put his finger on during their surveillance, so in they went.

Schultz figured Lemont would bolt toward the rear when the cops showed up at his door, so Schultz took the fire escape around back himself. He sent Vince to the front to deliver the bad news.

Schultz kept telling himself to ignore that little buzz at the back of his skull that warned him when things weren’t right. It was a simple arrest. They had a warrant to go in, backed up with Vince’s photos of goods being sold on the street. And if anything went wrong, it was Schultz who would take the brunt of it when the guy ran straight into his arms.

He climbed the fire escape and approached the window they’d scoped out earlier—the one he expected Lemont to come bursting through as if his pants were on fire, with all that hot electronic equipment burning his ass.

On the way to the escape window, Schultz came to a frosted window that he supposed was the bathroom. He ducked down to pass under it, but then noticed that it was large enough for him to crawl through, and it was open about four inches. He could raise the window, duck inside, and grab the guy before he had a chance to hide anything—like the record books he must be keeping somewhere if he was accountable to somebody higher up. It was Lemont’s records, not Lemont himself, that Schultz considered the catch of the day.

Schultz put his fingertips on the bathroom window sill to steady himself, and then slowly lifted his head up until his eyes cleared the sill and he could see into the room.

He found himself staring at Lemont’s naked butt. The man was standing at the sink, shaving. The room was steamy. He’d just taken a shower. Most of the mirror was fogged up, but Schultz could see Lemont’s face reflected there as he lifted his chin and ran the razor down his throat.

Heart thudding in his chest, Schultz froze in place. Lemont hadn’t reacted at all, hadn’t seen him. The man calmly rinsed the razor under the faucet. Feeling like a Peeping Tom, Schultz quickly scanned the interior of the bathroom. It looked as though the window was easily accessible from where Lemont stood, and it would be his logical bolt-hole as soon as Vince pounded on the front door and announced himself.

Schultz slowly lowered his head until he was clear of the window, then positioned himself next to it on the fire escape, pressing against the wall of the building. He drew his gun and waited for all hell to break loose.

A shotgun blast jolted him, and he almost pulled the trigger on a wild shot himself. A heartbeat later, the first sound still in his ears, the shotgun was fired again.