Never Fear (31 page)

“Take the left door, I'll take the right,” I whispered, and Harrison began to move, the broken glass on the carpet snapping under his feet with each step.

Harrison stopped at the first door and swung into the room with his weapon raised, then stepped back into the doorway and shook his head.

“Cover the far door,” I whispered, and Harrison raised his gun.

I pressed myself against the wall on the right and inched along. The door was another six feet. Half a dozen steps with glass snapping under each step and I stopped. Harrison nodded that he had me covered, and I reached out and tested the handle—it was unlocked. I turned the handle as gently as I could until I felt the latch release, then I pushed the door open and brought the Glock up to a shooting position.

Half a step into the room I caught the smell of beer, and then the door swung violently back toward me. I tried to react, but it was too swift. The door knocked me back against the frame and then started to close on me. I tried to bring up the Glock but the door closed on my arm, pinning it just above the elbow. Pain shot up into my shoulder and my legs buckled. If the Glock was still in my hand I couldn't see it through the narrow opening or feel it in my fingers.

“Tell your partner to stop, or I shoot you right now,” Hazzard said from the other side of the door. I could smell the beer on his breath through the opening where my arm was caught in the door. I could see the barrel of his revolver as he pressed his hand to the edge of the door. What little I could see of the room appeared to be mostly empty and used for storage.

“I don't think a man who just saved a woman's life is going to shoot me,” I said.

Hazzard leaned into the door with his bulk, closing it on my arm even tighter.

“Tell him to stop,” he shouted.

I tried to speak but the pain in my arm took my breath away. I looked back at Harrison moving toward me with his gun raised and shook my head.

“Don't come any closer,” I managed to say.

Harrison stopped, his weapon trained on the door that had me trapped and helpless.

“I'm not going to jail,” Hazzard said. “Do you understand?”

I could only manage a nod as the music in the far room fell silent.

“Why the hell didn't you just walk away?” Hazzard said as he yanked the Glock out of my pinned hand and threw it across the room.

“Where's Cross?” I said.

Hazzard made a sound that could have been a laugh. “What is it you think you've done, Lieutenant? ” he said.

I glanced over to Harrison as he took a careful step forward, trying to place his foot between pieces of glass so it wouldn't give away his movement.

“Dazzle me with your detective skills,” Hazzard said.

I began to put images together in a new way, as if I were looking at a photo album that had fallen off a table and spread across the floor. Two young black men falling to the ground while another stands defiantly. An out-of-control cop picks him up in a chokehold until the last breath of life is squeezed from his lungs. Victoria Fisher hiding a piece of paper in a file. My brother running down a street in his socks. A glowing yellow sign—PUBLIC FAX—and now a clean sheet of plastic spread across the floor in Cross's house.

Through the narrow opening in the doorway I could just see the edge of Hazzard's face as he leaned against the door pinning my arm.

“It wasn't you,” I said.

I saw a flash of recognition in Hazzard's eyes.

“You haven't killed anyone—not twenty years ago, not today. That's why you brought Fleming here, why you saved her at Cross's house.”

“Go on, Lieutenant,” Hazzard said.

I looked back at Harrison as he took another step toward me, a piece of glass snapping under his foot.

“It was Cross who picked up that kid and choked him to death,” I said. “It wasn't you.”

Hazzard's eyes appeared to drift for just a moment.

“He was just standing there, wouldn't get down on the ground with the others,” Hazzard said. “Cross killed him before I knew what he was doing.”

“You were the senior officer about to make the leap to Homicide. You took responsibility because you knew there would be no questions asked of one of the force's rising young stars. You might even get a citation for bravely subduing a dangerous criminal with your bare hands. The investigation would go nowhere.”

“And didn't,” Hazzard said.

“Until Victoria Fisher.”

“I didn't know about that,” Hazzard said.

“Cross killed her when he discovered she knew the truth about the kid's death.”

Harrison took a step toward me, pushing glass out of the way with the toe of his shoe.

“Did you help Cross make her death appear to be part of the River Killer's work, or did he do that by himself ?” I said.

“It was done by the time I knew,” Hazzard said.

“But you did nothing because it could have ruined you,” I said.

“She was dead. I couldn't bring her back.”

“She was murdered.”

“I couldn't change that,” Hazzard said.

Another piece of glass cracked under Harrison's foot as he inched closer.

“You could have stopped it from going any further,” I said.

“It was stopped. I spent eighteen years making sure Cross was never in a position to do any more harm.”

“Tell that to my brother.”

“I told Gavin to let it go,” Hazzard said.

Harrison took another step and was now nearly within reach of me.

“Cross killed three more people because of you,” I said.

“I didn't know. I tried to stop it,” Hazzard said.

“Dana Courson didn't even know why she died.”

Hazzard leaned into the opening in the doorway and I saw tears in his eyes.

“It shouldn't have happened,” he whispered.

“Detective Williams had his throat cut. And you let Hector Lopez get hunted down like an animal because you knew he could identify Cross as the cop at the Western Union office who took the security tape.”

“I tried to stop that. I was there to stop it,” Hazzard said.

“You didn't.”

Harrison was now three feet from me, his gun raised toward the opening in the doorway.

“Cross killed my brother,” I said.

Hazzard began to shake his head back and forth like a traumatized zoo animal in a cage.

“It's not my fault,” Hazzard said.

“Then why are you burning your things?”

A piece of glass cracked under Harrison's foot and Hazzard pressed his weight against the door and raised the barrel of his gun into the opening a few inches from my face.

“Tell your partner to stop,” Hazzard yelled.

Harrison froze.

“You're not a killer,” I said. “You just watch people die so you can go on with your quiet life of collecting baseballs and hockey sticks.”

I couldn't see Hazzard's face anymore, but I could hear his breathing on the other side of the door, each breath more labored than the last.

“Walk away, Lieutenant,” he said softly.

“I can't.”

Harrison started to move again toward the door.

“You used an innocent man to hide Fisher's murder. You used my father,” I said. “You were Danny's dark angel, pointing him in the wrong direction.”

“You don't want to know what I know,” Hazzard said. “Turn around and walk away.”

“What don't I want to know?” I said.

“Leave, Lieutenant,” Hazzard said.

“I'm not moving,” I said. “It all stops right here, right now.”

“It's not going to stop,” Hazzard said.

“What the hell do you know, Detective?” I yelled.

“Please,” he whispered.

“What do you know?”

Hazzard exhaled heavily and cried out.

“Everything! . . . I know who he was in San Francisco, in Seattle, Portland. His name was Johnson in Minneapolis; Fisk in Philadelphia. He sold men's clothes in Cleveland. He acted in little theaters in Dallas, Chicago, and New York, and a dozen other cities where no one knew him except for me, because I never let it go. I spent years tracking credit cards and money orders, and driver's license applications. And before he ever touched another woman in any of those cities, I would make a phone call, and the next day a policeman would pay him a visit, and he would move on to find another shadow to hide in until I found him there, too.”

A voice in my head began to say,
Don't, don't, don't
, as I felt myself being dragged back into a dark closet full of nightmares.

“My father,” I said.

“Do you even remember the first two victims' names?” Hazzard said.

“Alice and Jenny.”

He took a heavy breath.

“You should have walked away,” Hazzard said.

I shook my head.

“You're not going to do this to me,” I said.

“I didn't do this, he did.”

“You can prove my father killed those women?”

“I don't have to prove it. I stopped him from killing again, that's all that matters,” Hazzard said.

“Where's Cross?”

“Forget Cross. It's all here. I give you back your father. He's yours now. Never let him slip away, never let him go. Do you understand? Never.”

“No, I don't understand. What do you mean?” I said.

In the distance I heard the sound of sirens approaching.

“I was a cop,” Hazzard said.

“What the hell have you done?” I yelled.

I felt Hazzard's weight shift against the door as he looked around the edge of the door into my eyes.

“I was a great cop,” Hazzard said.

"No,” I started to yell as Hazzard lifted his gun toward his head.

43

Harrison was moving toward the door when I felt the heat of the concussion and Hazzard's blood hit the door frame. He dropped straight down, his bulk hitting the floor with such force it seemed to shake the entire house.

I staggered back from the doorway and Harrison caught me as I fell to the floor. For a moment the world seemed suspended in that moment of silence at a dinner when no one knows what to say next. My right ear was ringing from the sound of the gunshot as Harrison looked down at me, frantically saying something that I couldn't understand.

“Are you hit? Are you hit?”

I reached up and touched the moisture on the side of my face and saw my fingers covered in blood.

“No, it's not mine.”

“You're sure?” Harrison asked, moving his hands over my shoulder and down my arm that had been trapped in the door.

I nodded. “Do we need to call paramedics?”

Harrison rose and forced open the door and looked inside, then rushed across the hall to the bathroom and came back with a towel, knelt down, and began to wipe the blood off my face.

“He's gone,” Harrison said.

The ringing in my right ear began to subside, replaced by a dull silence. I tried to run back through what Hazzard had said.

“He said, ‘It's all here.' What did he mean by that?”

“I think he was talking about inside that room.”

I got to my feet and stepped into the room. Hazzard lay facedown in a pool of blood that was slowly soaking into the carpet. A nickel-plated .38 revolver, the kind of old-school gun carried by older detectives, still rested in his hand.

I turned and looked around the room, then retrieved my gun from where Hazzard had thrown it. A large table with documents spread out across it was against the far wall. Next to that were several file cabinets. On the wall above the table was a large map of the United States, red pushpins spread across the entire country in no apparent pattern.

“Portland, Seattle, Dallas, Minneapolis, Cleveland.”

I looked at Harrison.

“It's all here,” I said.

“It's like the room used by a task force,” Harrison said, then he picked up a folder marked GAVIN.

He opened it and pulled out a sheet of paper and handed it to me. It was a surveillance report for the day my brother was killed. It was from a Hotmail account and listed the sender as Andi James, Sloan Investigations.

“He hired James to follow Gavin when he learned they had discovered something. He alerted Cross to the situation and Cross took matters into his own hands.”

I ran through the details of my brother's movements on his last day, and just as James had told us, she lost contact with the subject at County USC.

“He was already way ahead of us when we met him that first time in this house,” Harrison said.

“He was ahead of us long before that,” I said, stepping over to the table.

Laid out in neat, straight rows were more than a dozen thin files, all labeled with a different name and a different city. I picked one up.

“Fisk, Philadelphia.”

I opened the file. The top sheet was a copy of a driver's license.

“Edward Fisk, 1628 Fourteenth Street South. This is four years old.”

The only other thing inside the file was a program from a theater company.

"The Iceman Cometh
, by Eugene O'Neill.”

I handed it to Harrison and he opened it, looked it over. “Edward Fisk as Harry Hope.”

I looked at the names and cities and realized that my father was all of them. More than a dozen different names, in a dozen cities. I started looking in the files one after the other, city after city. A year and two months in Portland. The same in Dallas. A year and four months in Minneapolis. And in each city the face on the driver's license grew a little more weary, the lines a little deeper.