One False Move (14 page)

When she didn’t answer he looked over at the other man. The one standing had moved closer to the screen as if there was something down below that had caught his interest.

“Yeah, you might say we had a bit of a car accident.”

There was something in the way he said it that made Andrew adjust his grip on the rod. He wondered how hard it would be to move closer to the door that separated the porch. Could he close and lock it before they reacted, before they realized what he was doing? Then he’d still have the woman to deal with. He glanced at her again. She was small, wet and scared. Yeah, she was scared. But was she scared of Andrew or of the two men on the porch?

“It’s a hell of a night to be out, that’s for sure.” Andrew tried to sound sympathetic. He moved into the room, pretending to look out the window. “Looks like the worst of it may be over.”

A couple more feet and he could rush to slam the door.
Damn!
He’d need to drop the rod in order to do it. He was thinking like a two-handed man instead of a one-handed one.

“I can drive you to Louisville.” He kept talking. He still had the element of surprise on his side. He was about to make his move, when the man stood up. In one slow, easy motion he raised his hand to Andrew as if to offer to shake it. It was such a casual gesture that Andrew loosened his grip on the rod. He didn’t even see the gun until it was too late.

Until the blast filled the room.

2:47 a.m.

Melanie couldn’t believe it. Jared had meant to kill the man. Just like that. The bullet had grazed his forehead and knocked him off his feet. A half inch to the left and it would have gone through his fucking brain.

Now Jared stood over him, his finger still on the trigger. The man looked as if he was out of it, rubbing his fingertips over the wound and looking at the blood as if he couldn’t believe it was his own. Melanie stood back and watched. So did Charlie. She expected Jared to lift the gun and fire another shot. She expected to see the man’s head explode this time. She wanted to close her eyes and, yet, she couldn’t look away.

Instead of lifting the gun and firing it, Jared turned. He just walked away. Melanie stared at him as he sat down in one of the easy chairs. From the side of the table he grabbed what looked like a leather briefcase and suddenly became interested in its contents. He rifled through the case’s pockets, undoing zippers, taking out notepaper, examining it all and shoving it back into the case. He pulled out a couple of books, checked the covers and started to shove them into the briefcase, as well, when he stopped. Jared examined one of the back covers of the books, glanced at the man on the floor then at the cover.

“You’re
this
guy,” he said, flipping the book over to look at the front again. “You wrote this book, huh? Andrew Kane.”

Melanie watched the man—Kane. He looked up at Jared when he said his name, so maybe he was okay. Maybe the bullet hadn’t done any damage.

“So you write books,” Jared continued.

She couldn’t decide if Jared was impressed or if he was making fun. She didn’t seem to be very good at reading her brother lately.

“How many books have you written, Andrew Kane?” Jared was flipping through the book, stopping several times, and it looked to Melanie as though he was actually reading parts.

She finally sat down across from Jared on the worn sofa. She couldn’t believe how wonderful it felt to sit, and only now did she realize her legs were numb. Her arms felt raw, and even in the dim yellow light she could see all the scratches and cuts. She pulled her legs up under her and wrapped her battered arms around herself in an effort to stop shivering. Her wet, aching, cold muscles seemed secondary to trying to figure out what the hell Jared was up to.

Melanie tried to remember when the last time was that she had seen Jared with a book. Even as a kid he rarely read or did homework, usually getting someone else to do it for him. But here he was, sitting back, apparently fascinated, not just with this book but that he had an author right in front of him. Wounded and bleeding, but right in front of him. Right where Jared liked to have people he wanted to control.

All Melanie could think was,
Poor Andrew Kane.
If only he had simply left his fucking keys inside his car. That was all Jared had wanted. Melanie had offered to slip in, find the keys and slip back out. No one else needed to get hurt, Melanie had said, remembering the blood splatters all over Charlie’s coveralls. But no. Jared decided he needed something to eat. Evading the law evidently gave him an appetite.

“Seriously, how many books have you written?” Jared asked again.

Melanie watched as Andrew Kane untangled his legs from underneath himself and leaned against the wall. It seemed to be an effort for him to move. She wondered how he had ever intended to defend himself with only a pole, his right arm practically attached to the side of his body.

“That’s my fifth one,” he told Jared in a voice that sounded stronger then he looked. Then he sat there watching Jared, waiting for the next question, as if it was the most normal thing in the world for them to be sitting down having a conversation about writing books right after Jared had tried to blow his head off.

“I write a little poetry,” Jared said, and Melanie stared at her brother, trying to keep her jaw from dropping. She glanced at Charlie to see if he was buying any of this bullshit. Charlie, however, had found a bag of cookies and was working his way to the bottom.

“Do you know ‘Richard Cory’?” Jared asked the writer.

Now Melanie wanted to laugh. How ridiculous that Jared would think he and Andrew Kane would know any of the same people. Yet to her surprise Kane answered, “‘And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, went home and put a bullet through his head.’”

“Yeah, I love that poem.” Jared smiled. “Here’s this guy, this Richard Cory, and everybody fucking admires him because he’s rich and handsome and has it all. Or so it appears, right? And yet, this guy goes home and blows his fucking head off. Goes to show not everything is what it appears to be, right?”

It was a poem, a fucking poem.
Melanie couldn’t believe she was sitting here wet, cold and filthy while Jared exchanged rhymes with a man he had tried to kill. This had to be the perfect ending to a nightmare she hoped was, indeed, ending soon.

8:05 a.m.
Hall of Justice

When Grace arrived at work, she found Max Kramer in her office, sitting in her visitor’s chair, using her phone while he waited. He glanced at her, holding up one finger to indicate that he was almost finished with his call. No apology for using her phone. Finally he said into the receiver, “No, it’s white. That’s all I can tell you. I gotta go.” And he hung up, sitting back in the chair, taking his Starbucks coffee cup from the corner of her desk and sipping it, as if this was his office.

The coffee’s aroma filled the small space, reminding Grace that their office brew couldn’t possibly be related to this wonderful scent. She tried to focus on that rather than be pissed off by Kramer’s presumptuous attitude.

“Forgot my cell phone,” he said almost as an afterthought and still no apology.

“You must have heard how bad our coffee is,” she said instead of addressing his rudeness. She slipped past him to get behind her desk, putting down the mug of coffee she’d brought in with her.

“I’m addicted to this stuff. In fact, I’ve started chewing gum in the afternoon to curb my withdrawals.”

She pulled out a couple of files from the two stacks on her desk and glanced across at him. That wasn’t his only addiction. She could tell that he bit his nails, too. Expensive suit, salon-cut hair, silk tie and yet he paid no attention to his hands. Odd for an attorney, she thought, since her own hands were an integral part of her court presentations. She probably couldn’t make a closing argument without using her hands. Of course, Vince would most likely say she couldn’t talk without using her hands.

“Your client has several priors,” she said, getting down to business. A brief chit-chat about coffee was all the niceties she was willing to grant the man who’d fought for Jared Barnett’s release. “What makes you think she has any room to bargain?”

“She may be able to identify who’s responsible for the string of convenience-store robberies.” He said it like it was an official announcement, then sat back and sipped his coffee, looking pleased with himself, as if he had handed her the thief’s name, address and DNA sample.

“What makes…” Grace stopped to check the name, “Carrie Ann Comstock think she might be able to do that?”

“She was in the vicinity of the store on Fiftieth and Ames when it was robbed. She saw the man leave.”

“The store was robbed at one-fifteen in the morning. What exactly was she doing in the vicinity at the time of the robbery?”

She watched his hands. His fingers tapped the oversize cup that he held between both hands. His right hand index fingernail had been bitten down to the quick. She decided she didn’t trust an attorney who bit his nails and spent more money on his hair than she did.

“It really isn’t important what she was doing.”

That was exactly what she’d expected him to say. She sat back in her chair with her hands wrapped around her mug, as if ready for a showdown.

“So she thinks she got a good enough look that she might be able to identify him?”

“She got a good enough look that she was able to
recognize
him,” Max Kramer said with a smile.

“Why didn’t she come forward sooner?”

He shrugged, a practiced gesture that raised his shoulders almost to his earlobes. “Who knows? So do we have a deal?”

“Hey, Grace.” Pakula suddenly filled her open doorway. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t know you had—” He stopped when he recognized Max Kramer. “I didn’t realize you had a pile of trash in here.”

Grace had to restrain her smile. Instead, she watched Kramer shake his head and shift his weight in the chair to give Pakula his back. Detective Tommy Pakula had been one of the detectives involved in Barnett’s case and his appeal process. Grace knew the detective well enough to know it’d be easier to cut out Pakula’s tongue than to get him to refrain from speaking his mind. He leaned against the doorjamb, arms crossed, waiting for Grace to indicate whether or not she wanted to be interrupted, whether or not she needed rescuing.

“Actually, we were just finishing up,” she announced, enjoying Kramer’s raised eyebrows and his befuddled look, probably another practiced gesture. He obviously didn’t think they were close to being finished. “Why don’t you send me the details later today, and I’ll get back to you,” she said, standing now—a practiced gesture of her own—and pushing back her chair as if she had an appointment with Pakula.

Max Kramer reluctantly stood. “Okay, so I’ll do that and give you a call this afternoon.”

Kramer hesitated at the door, waiting for Pakula to step aside. Grace wished she could get Pakula’s attention, just long enough to give him Grandma Wenny’s evil eye and warn him to keep his cool, to play nice.

“No hard feelings,” Kramer offered when Pakula stepped away just enough to let him pass. Grace cringed. Why didn’t Kramer cut and run?

“Oh, sure,” Pakula said. “Why would there be any hard feelings? You go on national TV and tell Bill O’Reilly and the whole fucking world the Omaha PD framed Jared Barnett. Why would I have any bad feelings about something like that?”

Kramer shook his head as if he didn’t have time to deal with such nonsense. “It’s nothing personal.”

“No, of course not,” Pakula agreed, but Grace knew…she knew that wasn’t the end of it.

“If you ever need to dial 911 and nobody shows up—that’s nothing personal, either.”

Kramer shook his head again. That’s when his phone started ringing, and he reached inside his jacket’s breast pocket, bringing out a slim cell phone. He was answering it and walking down the hall without even considering that he might owe Grace an explanation. After all, didn’t he say he forgot his cell phone?

Pakula stood in the doorway watching Kramer. Grace waited. Finally he looked at her and said, “You had breakfast yet?”

She shook her head.

“How ’bout we pick up a couple of Egg McMuffins on our way to the autopsy?”

8:15 a.m.
Platte River State Park

Andrew no longer noticed the residual pain from his mending collarbone. Who’d have guessed that an instant remedy would be a bullet wound to his head?

Christ! It hurt. It felt as though the entire side of his forehead had been scraped away and left raw and bleeding. He felt as if he was going to vomit as waves of nausea rolled over him. His vision had finally begun to return to normal after seeing triple for a few hours. He wished he could turn off the ringing in his ears, though, and the banging in his skull meant his head would surely explode any minute and simply take him out of his misery.

They were taking turns using his shower and eating his food. Maybe when they finished they’d simply take his car keys and wallet and leave. He still wasn’t sure if the guy named Jared had intended to shoot him or just scare him. After getting a good look in his eyes, Andrew thought he recognized the guy, but he couldn’t place him. He didn’t think this Jared was the type who missed a shot. Maybe that’s what Andrew wanted to believe. Maybe that’s what he needed to believe.

The younger one, Charlie, had helped Andrew up onto the sofa. Like an idiot, Andrew had thanked him, an automatic response but so inappropriate that even the kid had looked at him as if he had misunderstood. Then he’d grinned and nodded. All cleaned up and with his hair red instead of black, he looked like a kid. He had overheard him call the woman Mom, and Andrew couldn’t help thinking that was just great. He was being assaulted and robbed by Ma and Pa Kettle out in the middle of the woods.