Beneath the Cracks (29 page)

Mike Lucero was a son of a bitch if ever one
existed.  His greatest aspiration in his career was to be as
obnoxious as possible to the men he guarded in the wing of what he
termed,
coddled felons
.

"Oh yeah, Mike?  What were you right
about this time?"

"Remember when I told you it was just a
matter of time before other jurisdictions started sniffing around
your past?  It looks like your day in court is coming
again.  You've got a visitor, this one all the way from the
left coast."

A thin smile crept across Wendell's
face.  "I was only suspected of other crimes, Mike.  My
conviction was for two deaths, and of course the armored car gig
with Marie."

"Fuckin' liberals," Mike spat through the
bars.  "You should've been put out of our misery a long time
ago."

"Please tell my visitor that even though I
am an incarcerated felon, I still have the right to remain silent
and have legal counsel present should I choose to speak to
anyone."

The door hummed loudly, signaling the
electronic release of the lock.  Mike grinned.  "Oh, he
swears up and down that he ain't here about a crime. 
Personally, I think he's lying through his giant white teeth."

"What did he say?"  Wendell's graying
temples started to throb.

"Says it's about that bitch daughter of
yours.  You remember.  The one you're always complaining
about.  Hey Wendell.  Maybe it's true.  Maybe the
apple don't fall far from the tree after all."

He rose and shuffled to the door to the cell
and assumed the position for transfer in shackles.

"I'll be damned.  Don't tell me you
really care about her after all that talk, Wendell."

"It's been a boring decade.  Maybe I
could use a little good news."

Wendell's heart slammed against his ribs;
worry prickled along nerve endings.  Had something else
happened to Helen?  He'd been so woefully out of control since
all of this began, it had eaten away at his soul like a
cancer.  Now all of his imaginings of Helen's life settling
back into some semblance of normalcy evaporated like wisps of
smoke.  He had to know…had something else happened since she
left that bastard she'd married? 

Throughout the long walk to the room where
he would meet this mysterious visitor, Wendell fretted and silently
cursed his decision to be noble and cloak the sins of his family in
order to spare Helen.  He should've fought it, done anything
in his power to stay on the outside where he could protect her.

"For a man thinking he's about to get good
news, you look more dour than a guy walking down death row,
Wendell."  Mike smacked the back of his head.  "He's in
there."

A doorknob twisted, steel yielded to the
shove, and Wendell got his first glimpse of the visitor.

His first thought was a relative of Larry
Bird – on steroids.  The massive blond man was NBA tall with
WWF muscle cloaking his body with formidable strength. 
Wendell recognized an aura he once possessed.  Power. 
Righteousness.  Superiority.

This was a cop.  His heart sank. 
Oh Helen.  I'm so sorry.

The door slammed behind him, and the yet to
be identified visitor pulled out a chair.  He gestured with
one hand but didn't speak.  Wendell felt the eyes boring into
him.  The gaze was more than curiosity.  The stranger
dissected him, like he was searching for something familiar, but
wasn't quite sure he found it.  Maybe this wasn't about Helen
after all, though how anyone could mistake Wendell Eriksson for
someone else was absurd.

"Mike tells me you're here about Helen."

"Imagine my surprise, finding you alive,"
the man said.

Wendell shuffled to the chair and sat with
his hands folded on the table top.  Desire for any word about
Helen overrode his innate reflex to protect her by pretending
hate.  It had been so long.  The cooing infant was never
far from his thoughts, or the little girl crying after her first
day of kindergarten over the nickname
scarecrow
, and a
million other treasured memories of her life before Wendell was
irrevocably ripped out of it. 

He swallowed against the burning sensation
in his throat and stared at the chains binding his wrists. 
"Is Helen all right?"

Air huffed loudly out of the stranger's
lungs.  "Well I guess that answers my first question. 
You love her as much as she loves you.  What I can't
understand is why she pretends you're dead and why neither one of
you has made contact in all these years."

Wendell's eyes rose slowly.  "Who are
you?"

"Johnny Orion.  I'm sure you've
surmised by now that I'm a cop."

He nodded.  "Is Helen all right? 
Has she been hurt?  Is she in trouble?"

Johnny shook his head.  "You really
don't know, do you?"

"Know what?  Why won't you tell me
–"

"Physically, your daughter is fine…" Orion's
gaze drifted away.  "She's perfect."

"Oh."  Oh indeed.  He recognized
that besotted expression.  "She told you I'm dead?"

"Sort of," Orion said.  "She later
admitted that most of our conversation the night we met was less
than truthful, though that was one point she never clarified for
me."

"You love my daughter."

"I'm gonna cut to the chase here,
Wendell.  We probably haven't got much time before word
trickles out of this place that you had a visitor, and I'd rather
not be around to answer questions about why I came all this way to
see you."

"Where are you from?"

"Ever heard of Darkwater Bay?"

Wendell's eyes narrowed.  "Of course I
have.  It's not a very good place to live.  Please tell
me Helen isn't living in that cesspool." 
Dammit,
Helen!
  Would she really be so reckless to go after
Datello alone?

"Oh, she's there all right.  Straight
out of the FBI and into the ninth circle of hell."

Wendell brought forth shock in a practiced
move of ignorance.  "Helen was in the
FBI
?  Even
after…after what I did? And what exactly did she do for the
FBI?"

"It seems that someone had the good sense
not to hold her accountable for your crimes."

Wendell breathed heavily through his
nose.  Who was this guy, and why was he really here?  He
couldn't know much; at least if he did, he hadn't heard it from
Helen.  The gears started grinding as Wendell began to profile
Orion.  How could he use this information to his advantage, to
Helen's
advantage?

"Did you ever hear anything about her life
after your term started?"

Wendell shook his head and let the lies roll
off his tongue effortlessly.  "I wondered.  I've always
wondered.  All these years I've hoped that she forgot about
me, about her mother and all that ugliness."

"Helen was even married," Orion said.

"Was?"

"I'm pretty sure that's where things started
going wrong for her."

"What do you mean she
was
married?  Is she divorced?  My daughter wouldn't have
tolerated any…"

"Abuse?  Yeah, she's a black belt in
jujitsu, which I'm sure you're responsible for.  I already
know that her piano skills are a direct result of pleasing
daddy."

He summoned tears on command, or at least
the damp threat of them.  "She still plays the piano." 
Eagerness replaced Wendell's worried mask.  "Tell me about her
life.  Is she happy?  What does she do?  Did she go
to medical school like she wanted to?"

"No," Johnny said.

"Why not?"

"I wouldn't know.  Your daughter is
very guarded, Wendell.  She's got these ideas about honesty
that quite frankly, I can only assume she learned from you."

"If you're not here to tell me about her
life, why did you come?"  Wendell's thumbs curled around the
thin chains that bound the shackles at his wrists. 

Orion leaned forward.  "I came here so
you could tell me about
her
life.  What did you do to
her, Wendell?"

"I didn't do anything to her!"

"In case you're curious, her marriage ended
in divorce after her husband was arrested."

"Oh my God."

"For laundering money for Sully
Marcos." 

Wendell stared hard at Orion. 
He
knows more than I'd expect, possibly, no hopefully more than the
FBI knows.
"Helen would've had nothing to do with that. 
Do you hear me?  She wouldn't –"

"Because you raised her so well?"

"She wouldn't have knowingly gotten involved
with someone like that!  I know my daughter."

"You knew her, probably better than anybody
else on the planet.  Tell me something, Wendell.  If you
weren't locked up in prison for the rest of your life, and you
found out Helen married some guy that duped her, went behind her
back and made her look like a fool at best with the FBI, what would
you have done to a guy like that?"

"I don't under–"

"Would you have lured him out into a
national park and shot him in the head with a .22 caliber
pistol?"

Wendell willed the color from his
face.  His heart thumped heavily in his chest.  Orion was
a fucking gift, no other way to look at it.  Glee tickled over
his nerve endings, hidden deep beneath flesh and blood and the
visceral façade of horror.

"What would you have done with the gun,
Wendell?"

"That…that would depend on the location of
the national park."

"Say it's near a large river, like the
Potomac."

"I suppose I would've disposed of it in
pieces, in various locations in the river."

"That would definitely make it impossible to
recover."

"If you love her, you can't possibly believe
she would've –"

"What I feel or believe or anything else is
none of your business.  We're talking about you,
hypothetically speaking of course."

"All right," Wendell nodded and committed to
a risky dance near truthfulness.  "Hypothetically speaking
then, let's say I wasn't really as ignorant of Helen's situation as
I pretended.  Say I was aware of what this bastard put my
little girl through and used my influence here to put an end to her
problem."

"Did you?"

"I would do anything for her."

"Now that, I believe," Orion leaned back in
his chair and crossed his arms over his chest.  "It's sort of
the conundrum I'm facing at the moment."

"Oh?"  Orion was taking the bait, and
Wendell knew his chance was on the tip of the smitten man's
tongue.

"Do I take what I know, what I suspect, and
do something about it, or…"

"I will say this one time, Mr. Orion. 
If you hurt my daughter, I will find a way to get to you. 
It'll be the last thing you ever do."

"Or do I make sure that no one ever asks the
questions that have been knocking around in my head for the past
few days?  I started thinking about it, you see, after I
started digging into Helen's past because I
do
love her, and
I couldn't fathom what could've possibly happened to her that made
her so emotionally closed off when I know she doesn't really want
to live her life this way.  And lo and behold, what do I
find?"

"Me.  Alive."

"Yes," Johnny drawled.  "You. 
Probably the one person alive who
can
help Helen."

"What can I do?  As you so astutely
observed, I'm locked up for the rest of my life."

"You could confess that you arranged for
Rick's little mishap in the woods."

Wendell stared hard at his hands.

"Which we both know could be disproven in
about sixteen seconds, since the only contact you have is with
guards who wouldn't walk across the hall to piss on you if you were
on fire.  So claiming responsibility for his death would
simply look like a father trying to protect his guilty daughter.
 Am I correct in my assumptions, Wendell?"

"Possibly."

"So I'm thinking the next best thing you
could do would be to put your
real
skills to work to protect
Helen."

"What do you mean?"

Johnny rested his elbows on the table and
propped his chin on his fists.  "I've been reading all about
you, Wendell, and your alleged crimes – both those that resulted in
your conviction and the ones they suspect you committed but could
never find any solid evidence."

"And?"

"You weren't some indiscriminate killer or
thief, were you?"

Wendell gnawed on the inside of his lower
lip, much as his mother had done when she was debating
options.  He wondered if Helen still did it too.  It was
the lack of such little details about her life that made him ache
with loneliness.

"I'm thinking that the best way to help lay
this bullshit to rest with a very guilty, very dead ex-husband is
if there is irrefutable evidence that someone else committed the
crime.  What do you think, Wendell?  Does that sound like
something you'd do?"

He traced random patterns on the table with
his fingertips.  "You don't
know
that Helen did
anything," Wendell said.  "If you were to…insinuate…that
someone else was involved in the murder, it could circumvent true
justice and let the real killer walk away scot free."

"The real killer
will
walk away scot
free.  The only suspect on the FBI's radar at the moment is
your daughter.  And they're gonna keep coming after her until
she cracks and does something stupid that either gets her arrested
or worse."

"Worse?"

"Killed."

"Jesus," Wendell muttered.  He sucked
in a deep breath.  "A twenty-two?"

"Yes."

"That's good," Wendell said.  "They
won't have more than fragments of fragments, so ballistics will be
virtually impossible.  Shell casings are another story. 
Were they recovered from the crime scene?"

"I don't know, but I could probably find
out," Johnny said, gaining a first, chilling glimpse into the mind
of the man who raised Helen.