Last Shot (2006) (25 page)

"But the Vector poster boy?" Tim asked.

Dean pursed his lips thoughtfully. "The selection of trial participants is scientific, Deputy." He paused. "I wish public relations were as well, but it's not."

Tim pressed forward. "Do you know Ted Sands?"

Dean's eyebrows quivered contemplatively, and he looked at Percy.

"He was a former Beacon-Kagan security worker," Percy said. "I hired him myself. He left about a year ago to pursue freelance options."

Dean asked, "Is he the mess in my front yard?" At Bear's nod he said to Percy, "Get to the bottom of this. And quickly. These officers will need all the specifics of his employment with Beacon-Kagan and anything else on him you can assemble."

Already on the job, Percy moved to the door, earnestly but awkwardly poking a handheld.

"A fugitive and a former security guard?" Chase said. "Why's this ending up here?"

Bear said, "We were hoping to defer to your greater knowledge."

"I haven't the damnedest," Dean said. "I run an international conglomerate. That's a lot of employees, and each one of them steps on some toes for the bottom line now and again. I've had threats originating from every state in the union, and quite a few not of this union. Percy can acquaint you with our file of disgruntleds, if you'd like."

"We'd like," Tim said. "And we'd also like the guest list for the party."

"We need to proceed with discretion. To protect the company--and my guests. We're about to launch a product that's a major breakthrough for tens of thousands of kids. It's lifesaving. I don't want us to do anything to threaten it."

"So that's a...?"

Dean smiled. "A gentle no. I don't know about this killer, but our guests are not connected to him. There were some important people here this evening."

Tim and Bear looked at each other. Tim nodded. Bear cleared his throat and said, "In addition to being a deputy marshal, I've been admitted to the bar. So let me explain, since your own legal staff are not in attendance, the legalities of where we're at: Your house, while a private and sumptuous residence, is also a crime scene that figures in a federal investigation. You, your family, and your companies are going to cooperate with that investigation. Your choice--the Marshal can make a phone call, and a federal judge can explain why, in writing. Your attorneys can call their contacts at the office of the attorney general, and we're off to the cock fights. Or we can just get to work. Together. It's timing, really--a matter of wising up before someone else gets turned into folk art on your porch."

"You make a convincing case, Counselor. Change that to a reluctant yes." Dean's unflappable grin remained. "It's a red herring, but you'll get the list. Now, it's been a long night, and this is clearly a topic requiring our alert attention. Why don't you come by the office tomorrow. Noon. I'll have the boys there. The list. And whatever you'll need from Percy's files." He gestured to the door, a man used to directing human traffic. "Anything else?"

"Just that guest list." Tim handed a Service card to Dolan, since he was closest, and said, "Call if anything else goes bump in the night."

An actual butler, who'd been waiting fussily in the wings helplessly regarding the legion of trespassers, saw them out. He closed the door behind them without a farewell, seemingly glad to be sealed back within his domain. Tim and Bear paused at the edge of the porch, surveying the scene. Most of the deputies had cleared out, and the media crowd at the cordon had thinned considerably, leaving the diehards and the paparazzi.

It took four criminalists to lift Ted Sands into the CSI van. Though they'd made some headway with the chisels, Ted still remained in the block, a frozen tobogganer.

The blotch on the flagstones looked like an oil stain.

"Helluva statement," Bear said.

"This isn't a statement," Tim said. "It's an introduction."

They threaded through the remaining cops at the cordon and climbed into Tim's Explorer.

"Of course the old man's gonna be cooperative," Tim said once both doors had shut. "And every button on every phone in that house is lit up right now."

Bear hummed two notes of agreement. "Dispatching flunkies to purge the files at Vector."

"By noon tomorrow they'll have already cleaned house. We can't wait."

"Right. So call Tannino. Get him to wake up some judge."

"I'm driving, you call him."

Bear, looking righteous but increasingly uneasy, got Tannino on the phone and asked for clearance for the subpoena request.

From the driver's seat, Tim could hear the Marshal's voice. "Listen, is the High Plains Drifter with you, or is this your own two A.M. brainstorm?"

"Yeah, Rackley's here."

"You got hands-free?" Bear snapped his Nextel into the speaker cradle as Tannino continued without a pause. "If not, just repeat this as I go. The judiciary do not construe their role as making our job easier. Sorry--less difficult. The bench sees its duty, vis-a-vis us, thanks to the attorney general and his buddy Chertoff, as defending the rights of citizens. The rights of certain citizens have always been particularly fiercely defended. The people you guys just left are not merely rich. They don't just put people in office. They decide who stays in office. And how far forward on the gravy train the officeholders ride. I've already had three calls at this hour--one from Sacramento, two from our nation's capital: Houston, Texas--regarding the little speechifying you did in Kagan's study, improvised from your law degree taken at Camarillo Veterinary College. The people calling me are shocked--shocked--that we appear to be taking the victims of such a heinous crime into a back room of their own modestly decorated middle-class home and beating them with a rubber hose. The callers assume they can make our lives unpleasant. So the fuck what? Our lives are unpleasant. But they can make it nigh on impossible for us to do our jobs."

Bear said, "So that's a no, then?"

"We wouldn't even get to hear a judge say no. The AUSA would run circles around us with probable cause. And because the old man's playing it all smiley, Your Honor'll say, 'If he quits cooperating...'" Tannino muttered something to his stirring wife, then said, "Don't pick fights you can't win. Until you can win them."

Dial tone.

Bear disconnected the call, looked at Tim. "Thanks. Set up by my partner. Explains why animals always react to you with instinctive hostility."

They passed a few blocks in silence, and then Bear said, "I knew I should've driven."

Chapter
36

Ortiz got off a solid blow, and Kenny Shamrock's nose exploded in red mist. Chase whooped and raised the volume on the plasma as the Ultimate Fighting Championship surged into the fifth round. He sat in the embrace of a soft leather couch in the sunken TV pit, picking absentmindedly at his Gibson--natural finish, spruce top, mahogany sides, rosewood fingerboard, nickel frets, and abalone inlays. A bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue pinned down a magazine on the coffee table on which he propped his feet. His eyes and nostrils had gone pink around the rims, pronounced flares of color against his fair skin.

Dolan paced frenetically behind him in the game room proper, circling the pool table and knocking balls off one another. The spacious area, a converted drawing room on the second floor of the south wing, had been redone in the style of an architectural loft. Composed of a bar, a panel kitchen, a game area, and the conversation pit-cum-lounge, the sleek room joined the brothers' childhood bedroom suites.

Dean had waited until late in life to have children, and Dolan had been the recipient of four years of undivided domestic attention before Dean's long-suffering wife, Mary, had died giving birth to a second son. In a rare touch of sentimentality, Dean gave the baby her maiden name, Chaisson.

With relief Dean had recognized his second son's intensity and charisma and sought to cultivate them further. Chase was strong-willed, daring, at ease in his own body. Slamming doors. Skin lifted at the knuckles. Girls climbing through his window. Over the years Dean managed to keep Chase on course without reining him in. Riding the momentum of a strategically timed Kagan-endowed Business Department chair, Chase had entered USC. In the fall semester of his sophomore year, he'd switched his major from sociology to finance. Dean had overseen the transition, supplying a team of tutors, including a former adviser to the state treasury. Within months, Chase had hit his stride, as Dean always claimed he would. There'd been no slowing him since.

Though tonight was a hell of a shock for them all. After the grenade on the front walk had designated Ted Sands as proxy target, Dean had insisted--with little resistance--that Chase and Dolan move back behind the gates. Concentrating resources had been a mantra of the old man's since back when Beacon was still in the picture.

A plexi-coated bulletproof window (all the better to ease Dean's paranoia) looked out over the back pool. Dolan had undone its various locks and cracked it a few inches, hoping the breeze would evaporate his panic sweat. Honeysuckle had worked its way up the lattice outside, framing the window, the bobbing white flowers scenting the cool inrush of air.

"Did you know Ted Sands?" Dolan asked.

Chase strummed the first four notes of the Fifth with bored irony. "I remember him, sure. Nice guy. Good head on his shoulders." Chase finally turned around. "Oh, come on, that was funny." He whipped a coaster at Dolan, narrowly missing. "Have a drink or something. Christ. It's not good to stress this late at night, D. Especially after dinner. All you're doing is stewing in unused fatty acids."

"Not my predominant concern at the moment."

"Right. Your health pales as a priority next to the boogeyman." Chase feinted a few jabs, leaning with the defending champ though he'd watched the recorded fight at least ten times and knew that Ortiz would finish him with an armlock in the next round. "Listen. The Dean's having Perce beef up security. Jameson does it again, he'll get his nuts shot off." Abruptly, Chase turned off the TV and rose.

"Where you going?"

Chase brushed past him, sliding the window open farther and swinging a leg over the sill. "Girl." He waited for the patrolling guard to disappear around the corner below.

"Percy said--"

"Yeah, but Percy doesn't put out." Chase got a toehold in the sturdy lattice, then looked up and grinned. "Old times, huh?" His flexed arm pulled out of view, leaving Dolan to watch the honeysuckle buds shaking with his brother's continued momentum.

Chapter
37

You're not safe here." Kaitlin followed Walker down the hall, over a dozen or so floor-adhered labels reading CARPIT. She grabbed his arm, spinning him around outside Tess's door, speaking an urgent whisper. "There was a deputy poking around."

She produced a card, and Walker paused to take a look. TIM RACKLEY. DEPUTY U.S. MARSHAL. Vaguely familiar name.

"I'll be fine," he said.

"Yeah, well, bravo, but we won't. You're all over the news. I get an aiding-and-abetting, what happens to Sammy?" She returned his silent stare, her eyes surprisingly pretty in their anger. They'd always been; it was as though the rust flecks around the pupils glowed with the intensity. "He won't be safe until you're..."

"Until I'm what?"

Her gaze dropped; she released his arm. The fire had dissipated as quickly as it had flared. "Gone," she said.

Walker set his mouth, nodded. He turned the corner into Tess's room and began loading up an army knapsack with all the Vector materials he could find. Kaitlin watched him from the doorway, arms crossed. He stopped, hand tapping a bookshelf. "There was another tape. Kid's writing. Where'd it go?"

"I think Sam said the deputy took it. Wait a minute, Walker, don't wake him--"

Walker brushed past her and into Sam's room. Sam scrambled up from the floor, smacked the TV to turn it off, and dove into bed.

Kaitlin's anger shifted, heat-seeking the new target. "You're supposed to have been asleep two hours ago."

"I couldn't. Too itchy."

"There's a tape missing from Tess's room," Walker said. "Did the cop take it?"

"He's a deputy U.S. marshal," Sam said. "That makes him a fed, not a cop."

"Did he take it?"

"Don't spaz. I have another." Sam bugged his eyes at Kaitlin. "Am I allowed to get out of bed now?"

She waved a defeated hand. He dug in the closet, rubber T. rexes, comic books, and orphaned board-game figurines taking flight over his shoulder. He handed Walker a duplicate, except MY NEWS SEGMINT was now rendered in label-print.

Eyes on the tape, Walker headed out swiftly. He heard Sam call after him, "You're welcome."

Walker lowered himself to the living room carpet and plugged the tape into the VCR. That annoying local reporter, Melissa Yueh, led the way to the house in which Walker now sat. A shot of Sam sacrificing army men to an ant hill in the front yard, then a clip from his Vector commercial. All the while, Yueh's honey-sweet voice singsonged on, detailing the magic of gene therapy and Sam's "tragic" condition. Some inserts from the Vector lab featured Dolan answering Yueh's questions awkwardly, until Chase, clearly the more charismatic of the brothers, took over.

Next the segment cut to Tess, the archetypal Troubled Mother, sitting at the tiny Formica-topped table wedged in the corner of the kitchen. She leaned over her coffee, her wrist and hand curled around the mug the way they always did. Despite her evident exhaustion and the widened span of her crow's feet, which had begun incursions on her upper cheeks, she still had that inner life pouring out of her. God only knew the source--it certainly wasn't inherited, and it was more than the sum of her looks. Men homed in on it at a glance, crossing movie theaters, pursuing her at shopping malls; when she used to take him for walks around the park, she'd actually stop cars. Girls were wary--they either steered clear or went submissive like bellied-up dogs. Women hated her, blindly and irrationally. "Spirit," some people called it, though to Walker the word had been worn useless by repetition, like "miracle" or "values." Or "tragic," for that matter. Whatever Tess had, she drew hotshots who wanted to possess it, older men who fed on it, and tough guys who were afraid of it, but she always skipped on, unscathed, until an unplanned pregnancy ensnared her with a wedding band. The sight of her now--her captured aliveness--was disorienting, like a deja vu that retrieves a segment of dream.