Now You See It (23 page)

Brady made a decision. “I installed a private security system
in Mike Cavanagh’s office a year or so ago. The security setup sucked there, to
start with. It’s an old building, and the owners tried to save money skating by
with the minimum. I had some new components I wanted to try out, anyway.”

“A match made in heaven.”

“A lucky one, it turns out. I haven’t had a chance to access
the feeds of last night. It’s a direct feed to my secure storage downtown, so
the fire wouldn’t have interfered with the picture until the cameras
melted.”

“We’ll need that record,” Lyons said.

“I figured. I can make you a copy.” When they started to
protest, Brady said, “It’s in a secure server. A copy’s the only way you can get
the data off. You can send someone with me.” He’d known they wouldn’t like that.
“Look. I’ve got data in that system from a half-dozen law firms, a couple of
major corporations. I can guarantee you won’t get a court order to blunder in
there yourselves.” Which was one reason he’d targeted legal firms as his first
clients. “And I’ll be glad to take one of your techs along. He can keep an eye
on me, and I’ll have someone I can talk to.”

“And a detective or two.”

“Done.”

“Well, not quite yet,” Olsen said. He drew the “Eyes Only”
folder out of his briefcase and skidded it across the table toward Brady. “You
want to tell us about this?”

Chapter Seventeen

Gemma slipped the small white rock into her pocket with a discouraged sigh. She was making exactly no progress with her
filing,
even practicing twice a day. No matter how hard she concentrated, or didn’t, the wretched rock just sat there, like a rock.
Rats!

She had just gotten up for a glass of water when she heard Brady’s steps coming up from the office into the living area. “You’re back,” she said, and reached out to touch his face. He looked haggard, his skin dull and his eyes turned down more than ever. She swallowed the urge to storm out and confront the police and give them hell for abusing him, knowing how silly it was.

The coat he’d been carrying on one finger brushed against her back as his arms came around her. He pulled her close and held her without speaking for a few seconds. He pressed her tight enough against him that she could clearly feel how much he’d missed her. He casually flung the coat onto a chair, and his hands slipped low on her hips. Then he leaned backward from the waist, leaving their centers pressed tightly together, and kissed her nose. It was one of the most erotic things she’d ever experienced. “How bad was it?”

“Bad enough. Worse than I’d expected, but then it usually is.”

“Usually? You do this a lot?”

He kissed her again, this time on the lips. Then he pulled away. “I’ve got the video from the security cameras in Mike’s office from last night. I already gave the cops their copy. Want to look? Maybe you’ll notice something. I have to warn you, though, it’s pretty rough to watch.”

“Does it show everything?”

“Pretty much. Like I said, it’s hard.”

She closed her eyes briefly and took a deep, breath. “Let’s do it,” she said, forcing herself through the wall of her own reluctance.

He slipped the disc into the DVD player.

She was surprised at the quality of the picture. “It’s in color.”

“Live feed to the server.”

“Oh, Cinda.” Her eyes filled as she watched Cinda studying, taking notes, completely unaware she had only minutes to live.

Brady fast-forwarded a second, and they watched Mike come in, have a brief exchange with Cinda, and go into his inner office. “Mike wouldn’t let me bug his inner sanctum,” Brady said with chagrin. “Something about confidentiality.”

“Yeah, the Constitution’s a bitch.”

He sent her a startled glance and laughed shortly. “You sound just like him.”

“I’ve heard him say that a million times. Wait a minute—”

“Yeah. There he is.”

The camera picked up the intruder as he neared Mike’s office, and projected the image in a split-screen.

“How does it do that?” she asked.

“The camera in the hall is motion-activated. Watch, now.” The murderer was wearing a camo over shirt, a watch cap with a face mask and latex gloves, and kept flattening himself against the corridor wall, moving quickly a few steps, and back against the wall again.

“Look at the way he moves,” she said, “like a secret agent in a movie. Why is he doing that?”

“He’s playing spy. Pretending he’s some kind of commando.”

“So, that’s not something he’s supposed to do to stay hard to see?”

Brady shook his head. “No. For all intents and purposes, the building’s empty. He’s role-playing. That’s as scary as anything he’s done so far.”

The feed shifted as the intruder came through the office door, pistol drawn.

Brady hit a button on the remote and the image froze. “How tall would you say he is?” he asked.

“Those are standard doors, so, six foot, or so.”

“Yeah.”

“You know,” Gemma said, “he looks like—that could almost be Doug.” Her breath had stopped in her throat. “Something about the way he moves—no, really,” she said as Brady swiveled his head to stare at her from under lowered eyebrows.

He paused the picture again. “Yeah?”

Gemma rolled her eyes. Brady actually sounded jealous. “Oh, please!”
Men!

“I’m going to speed it up. You really don’t need to see this next part up close and personal.” He pressed a button, and the video skipped to Cinda lying on the floor, blood spreading from beneath her body.

“Holy Mary!” Gemma said and swallowed convulsively.

Brady slipped his arm around her and hugged her close. “You okay?”

She blinked back tears, not quite quickly enough. One escaped down her cheek and Brady gently brushed it away with his thumb. “No, but it doesn’t matter,” she said. “Let’s go on.”

“You sure?”

She nodded.

“Okay. Here’s where Mike comes out—sees something’s wrong.”

She watched, fascinated, horrified, as her brother staggered back through the door into his darkened inner office. The killer followed him, paused at the door, as if the darkness inside confused him, then flinched violently. He staggered, grabbed a corner of Cinda’s desk, and pulled himself almost erect.

“Okay,” Brady said. “He drops the backpack, takes out the Molotov. Lights it. Tosses it.”

“Mike said he shot the guy,” she said. “You can see there, as he’s leaving, he’s carrying his left arm funny.”

“Yeah, I saw that. It looks like an upper arm shot. Maybe collarbone, but I don’t think so.”

“Mike’s a better shot than that.”

“Not with a concussion and a hole in his chest. It’s a wonder he could hit the guy at all.” He turned off the TV. “Think it’s Doug?”

“I said it could be. I don’t want it to be, though. I hope it’s not. I hate to think I know someone who could do all this.”

“Well, I’m sure as hell not going to vote for him.”

“You couldn’t, anyway.”

“Sure I can. I always register as soon as I get to a new city.”

“I thought you were Canadian”

“Mom was Canadian. Dad was from Chicago—that’s where I was born.”

“I’d like to hear more about them sometime.”

He smiled back at her. “When do you go back to the hospital?”

Gemma glanced at the clock. “A couple of hours. What’s wrong?” Brady’s expression worried her. There was a new, haunted look in his eyes, and she wished he could confide in her, even though she knew better.
Damn spooks and their damn secrets,
she thought. It was like some sort of ethnic weakness.

“I just feel there’s something I should remember,” he said, staring at the whiteboard. “It’s right there, but I don’t see it.”

She sighed and stood up. “We’re going to need coffee. I’ll get it.”

He followed her into the kitchen and stole a cookie from a bag beside the fridge. “I’ll get something low-tech to write on.”

* * *

Brady went upstairs, grateful Gemma was too exhausted to notice his preoccupation. Having his past thrown at him twice in one day was a little more than he’d been ready for.

Being forced to remember always knocked him back, and it took time for the images to fade. The little girl, big eyes and teeth, big smile, walking toward them. He was on point as the Team climbed a narrow path between a sheer rock wall on one side and a sheer drop on the other, edgy as they all were because the terrain forced them to cluster together. He should have known better, but when he got the child in his sights, he froze. She couldn’t have been more than nine, but had a child’s pitiless dedication and no hesitation setting off the explosives she wore hidden under her long, loose shirt. Brady yelled and dove for cover when he saw her eyes change. A rock protected him from the shrapnel that killed half his Team. But he was deaf and blind for days, concussed and scorched and puking blood—pissing blood, shitting blood—but alive. Four of his men were dead, along with nine civilians and the little girl. All of his surviving Team were wounded.

And he was through. There was no excuse for what he’d done, no justification. Any one of his men would have given his life without a second’s thought to protect a child, but none of them deserved to be destroyed because of his inability to kill one. Worse, he knew he’d make the same choice again, if it faced him. The Navy might have forgiven his lapse, but he would never forgive himself.

He shook his head and took a couple of yellow legal pads from a milk crate beside his desk, plucked a clutch of pencils out of a marmalade jar and checked their points, reached over to sharpen two of them. As he bent to the automatic pencil sharpener, he saw the backup drive he’d used to copy the data from Gemma’s computer. Something nagged at him, and he put the thumb drive on the pile of supplies.

When Gemma came back into the living room, an oversized coffee cup in each hand, Brady was standing at the table, staring at a list of files scrolling down the screen of his laptop.

“This is the last of the coffee. Did you find something?” she asked him.

He looked up only long enough to grab a cup. “Thanks. I’m not sure. I keep feeling there’s something here I missed.” The word seemed to echo in his head, but he couldn’t get his mind around it. “Everything looks perfectly normal.
Shit.”
He snapped the cover closed.

“Okay,” he said, as she settled on the floor beside him. “Here we go again.” He took a gulp of coffee, set the cup down carefully. Stress and caffeine were making him jumpy.

“We can definitely rule out some wild-assed Asian revenge plot. Tran can’t find any trace of anyone coming after you. The women in the photos were prostitutes. Ned was a sex addict.”

Gemma shook her head, eyebrows drawn together. “No, he wasn’t.”

“That’s not what the cops are saying.”

“They’re wrong about that. Ned—I don’t know the right words for it. He didn’t really like sex, that much.” She thought for a minute. “He liked to be bad. He liked to take pictures. He’d print them over and over and over on that stupid whizbang color laser digital whatzis of his. That’s how I finally found out what was going on—I found a bunch of them one day when I was looking for something else.

“It was like this huge punch in the gut. But then everything fell into place, all the little things, odd pieces of conversation, looks, stuff that had puzzled me over the years. But it wasn’t about the sex for him. It wasn’t even the pictures. His, I don’t know, his fetish, I guess, was for feeling sophisticated and wicked. For doing something just over the line. He liked to think he was some kind of twenty-first century Henry Miller, pioneering new sexual frontiers.”

Brady paused, trying to integrate the new information. “Okay. That doesn’t change the theory. In fact, it fits pretty well.”

“What theory?”

“The one we’re building here.”

“If it’s not revenge, what is it?”

“Let’s go back over everything. Start with the day the cops came.”

Instead she said, “Brady, we never looked into whether this guy tore up Ned’s apartment. Maybe he did, but no one said anything about it.”

“Not likely. I’m pretty sure the cops would have mentioned it. They were pretty thorough laying it out today. They never tell us everything, you know that. But I can’t see why this piece of information would have mattered.”

“He knew who Ned’s attorney was. He had to have known Ned.”

“So that’s an anomaly. We never did get around to checking it out, either. Let’s put that on the list for tomorrow.”

Brady looked at his watch. “Time for the Big Campaign Speech.” He flicked on the TV. “And there’s our man.”

They watched as the cameras pulled closer, showing Doug’s smiling face in close-up. Gemma wished she could make up her mind about Doug, get some clear guidance on it all. One minute he seemed like the perfect suspect, and the next, he was the kind, slightly stuffy friend who loved her.

“Who’s that little guy beside him?” Brady asked.

“His new campaign manager. Jonathan, something.”

“Lots of energy.”

“I think Doug’s his heart’s True Love.”

“That’s a shame. Bad news ahead, dude.”

On the screen, Wheeler was finishing up with thanks and promises. As the crowd broke into cheers, Doug raised both arms with two fingers spread in the sign of victory.

“Hey! Did you see that?” Gemma said.

“Yeah, I did. But do you see his eyes?” He ran the DVR back a few seconds to a close-up of Doug as he took center stage. “That fuzzy look?”

Gemma was sure Brady felt as grim as he sounded. He paused the picture, backed up and took it through the cheering sequence again on mega-slow speed.

“He’s just excited,” Gemma said. “All that adulation. He lives for it.”

Bullshit,
Brady thought,
he’s doped to the gills. Gotcha, you son of a bitch. Now I just have to prove it.

“How could he have waved like that if he’d been shot in the shoulder?” she asked.

“Watch carefully, Gemma. Watch his face. Watch his arm. Maybe we’ll see something.”

“You think it’s Doug,” she said.

“Yeah, I do.”

They watched the sequence three times. There was nothing. Not even the barest flinching to indicate he might be injured. Shit! Every instinct was screaming at him that Doug was the one they were looking for.

Gemma took her lower lip between her teeth for a second. “Okay. I need to ask this, and I don’t know how, without sounding totally egotistical, but—”

“Am I sure I’m not just jealous?” He laughed at her. “Yeah. I’m sure. The guy’s wrong. I just have to prove it.”

“We have to prove it.”

“Yeah.”

“How do we do that?”

“I’m working on it.” He looked off into space. “Maybe that’s the problem,” he said. “We’ve been working on this, worrying it to death until we’ve lost our focus.”

“A nap sounds nice.” Gemma cut her eyes around at him and he watched the color rise in her face.

He grinned at her. “Well, I was thinking something more relaxing, like a couple of rounds of
HALO
. You don’t play, though.”

“
HALO
? No.”

“You said you don’t play computer games.” He stared off into space. “That’s got to be it.” He went quickly to the table and popped open his laptop. Rapidly he scanned the directory. He exhaled sharply and began typing.

A spreadsheet opened. “Son of a bitch! There it is. It’s been here all the time.”

“What has?”

Brady sat back. “What Ned was hiding. What the Bad Guys were trying to find—probably what they killed him for. Look at this. Names, dates, amounts.”