Out Of Time (34 page)

“Why did you have George Carter killed?” I demanded “He’d done nothing wrong. He had a wife and a baby due any day, for god sakes. Why did he have to die?”

I couldn’t tell what hurt Hill more. His knee or having to answer my questions. His face was ashen. “Nothing I say can be used in court,” he said. “So don’t get your hopes up.”

“I don’t give a crap about court,” I assured him. “Or hope. Now talk.”

“He finally figured out what had gone down with Roy,” Hill said sullenly. “Around Christmastime, Tillman visited him and asked so many questions that George finally figured out what had happened to Roy back in 1989. Stupid do-gooder. Took him eight years to make the connection. He never dreamed anyone but Gail could have done it. When I he had visited Gail in jail, I was afraid he’d go to someone in the department next with what he suspected. So I paid Pete to kill him. He was willing. Pete didn’t care about George or Roy. He only cared about money. Pete had helped me in the past, but the money had dried up when he got transferred to white collar. He wanted more money. He didn’t even care why I wanted George dead. He just did it.”

“Why kill Pete then?” I asked. “He was on your side.” I wanted Bill Butler to hear all the details. I wanted him to know that I had been right from the start.

“George shot his mouth off to Pete before he was killed. When Pete put two and two together about Roy, he also threatened to go to the department. But only if I failed to pay him off.”

“Pete had helped you in the past by sabotaging drug cases?” I asked.

Hill didn’t answer for a moment, then he locked his eyes on mine with an angry glare and nodded. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he didn’t like me much.

“Say it,” I ordered. “Say it out loud so Bill can hear you.”

“Yes. Pete and I threw drug cases for money,” he spit out. “Lots of money. Roy and George were too goody-goody to help.” He looked up at me, pleading. “I’m bleeding to death here,” he said.

I ignored him. Not that I thought Bill was stupid, but I wanted to make sure he got the point. “In other words,” I said. “Pete decided to blackmail you after he figured out that you had killed Roy Taylor. So you killed Pete. You did it right after I talked to you at the Lone Wolf, didn’t you? You didn’t want to take the chance that I would spook him. You couldn’t let him live long enough to talk to me.”

His expression told me I was right. “Go on,” I said. “I want to hear you say it. You killed Pete Bunn.”

“I killed Pete,” he said through tightly drawn lips. “So what? You’ll never be able to prove it. I had to kill him. I couldn’t afford to have rumors start about me. I needed the job in Professional Standards to cover my tracks.”

“And I guess we know that you killed Judge Tillman, too.” I said. “You were the old friend he was meeting that night. He was ready to confront you about the compromised drug cases and Roy’s murder.”

Hill was silent and I didn’t press the issue. He had guessed, correctly, that if the D.A. was going to hang him, the Peyton Tillman murder was his best shot. But I wasn’t

worried. They’d get him for it. Detective Morrow would find enough physical evidence to link Hill to the judge’s murder once she focused on him as a specific suspect. No one can kill that cleanly.

“Why did you search their houses?” I asked.

“I was afraid they’d marked their meetings chei he with me down in a calendar or something,” he said quickly. “I had to erase any trace of our getting together.” I knew he was lying. Smart man. Nothing he was telling me was worth beans without evidence to back it up. But I was smarter. There was evidence somewhere or else he wouldn’t have searched for it. I didn’t know exactly what the evidence was—but I did have a good idea of where it might be.

“You’re doing good,” I assured Hill, who had resumed his groaning. “Keep it up and I’ll toss you a few dozen Percodans.” I gritted my teeth, determined not to let my own pain show. But the throbbing had turned into a strobing of fire that was spreading up my left side. I leaned against the trunk of a tree and slid to the ground, unable to stand any longer. God, but my side hurt. Still, the job wasn’t done yet. Bill had to hear the rest. He was staring at Hill, mesmerized.

“Who killed Roy Taylor?” I asked Hill. “It wasn’t Gail, was it? You bought her a drink that night and sent it over to her table, didn’t you? Only it had something in it that didn’t show on the standard drug screen. She blacked out, and you killed Roy, making it look like Gail had done it. That’s what the wild shots above the doorway were all about. You had to get powder burns on her hands and her fingerprints on the gun. She wasn’t even conscious when you did it.”

A silence descended on the clearing, broken only by the far-off screech of an owl.

“Who killed Roy Taylor?” I asked again, more forcefully.

Hill stared back, his face pale. He was losing blood fast.

“Let’s go,” I said to Bill. “We’re leaving him here. There’s a rabies epidemic in Durham County. With any luck, he’ll run across a rabid raccoon or two.”

“I did,” Hill shouted angrily. “I did. Okay? He was acting like Dudley Do-Right for chrissakes. I’d offered him a piece of the action but instead he was going to turn me in on the drug thing. I had to kill him.”

“How in the hell did you think you could get away with it?” I asked. “Didn’t you think it would look funny when all of these people connected with Roy Taylor turned up dead?”

“You,” he said.

“What?”

“You,” Hill repeated. “When you took the case, I figured it was the perfect way to cover my tracks. All I had to do was make it look like you had killed them for the money, as a way to get Gail out of jail.”

Bill made an indefinable sound and shook his head.

“It would have worked,” Hill insisted. “With that Morrow woman in charge of the Tillman team, it would have worked.”

“I’ll be sure to tell her you said so,” I promised.

There was one more matter to clear up. For me, it was, perhaps, the most important question of all.

“Did you know that Roy and Gail had a daughter?” I asked.

“What?” Hill looked confused.

“At the time you killed Roy Taylor, did you know that he had a step-daughter?” I repeated more loudly. “Did you know when you killed him that there was a three-year-old girl in the next room, cowering under the covers afraid that you would come and kill her next? A little girl who saw the lights of your truck and heard the roar of the engine and thought a monster or maybe a spaceship had visited her house?”

He was silent.

“You didn’t know until you read about it in the papers, did you?” I answered for him. I was shaking I was so pissed. I’d been that little girl myself, one who’d heard gunshots and raced to find her parents dead on the ground. I knew what it was going to do to Brittany. “Because if you had known she was there, she would be dead now, wouldn’t she? You would have killed her and let Gail go to her grave thinking she had done it. It wouldn’t have bothered you a bit.” Just thinking about it made me so angry that I struggled to my feet again and took aim at his good knee, planting my legs wide for better balance.

“Don’t do it, Casey,” Bill yelled, speaking out for the first time. “Don’t let him goad you into it. I won’t be able to help you if you do.”

Hill took Bill’s interference as a sign he was on his side. He held up his hands. They were covered in blood from his injured knee. “For god’s sake, you’ve got to get me out of here,” he said to Bill. “I’m dying.”

“Good,” I snapped back, grabbing a low-hanging branch and struggling to stay upright. “Payback’s a bitch, isn’t it?”

Casey Jones, karmic avenger. But my body was not reacting as it should have. I was growing weaker and it scared me. My head felt funny, like bees were buzzing inside it.

“Are you hit?” Bill asked, finally realizing that I was hurt. He forgot I held the gun and rushed to me. He propped me up against the tree and checked my hip. “You are hit. Oh god, what if it was my gun?”

Even through m cven

“Put your arm around my neck,” he ordered me. It was no time to argue. I complied. He lifted me easily—I was impressed—and started for the fence.

“The guns,” I reminded him. He placed me on the ground gently and returned to the pine trees to retrieve the two extra guns. “Good god, Casey, there’s enough here for an artillery.”

“Bring them,” I ordered him. I didn’t want Hill taking the easy way out. I wanted him to spend a long, long time in the state’s worst prisons, personally getting to know some of the perpetrators he had put behind bars. Preferably, very personally.

Bill removed the clip on his Glock as a sign of faith, then emptied the bullets from the Lorcin and stuffed both guns in a back pocket. This time he groaned when he lifted me. “Christ, how much do you weigh?”

“Muscle weighs more than fat,” I reminded him.

“I’m so sorry,” he said unexpectedly. “I’m so sorry I didn’t believe you. God, I was a complete jerk. You needed my help. You finally came to me for help. And I ignored you completely. I’m an asshole.” This confession was accompanied by heavy breathing as he toted me along the fence, searching for an opening.

“I like the new you,” I told him. “Confess your unworthiness some more.”

“Hey—what about me?” Hill yelled from the darkness behind us. “You can’t just leave me here.”

“So long,” I called back over Bill’s shoulder. “Have a nice day.”

Bill did not even look back. Like I said, Hill was history.

“There’s a spot,” Bill said. “Hold on.” He plopped me on the ground and I screamed. I know it was rude, but it felt like someone had just stabbed a dozen steak knives into my hip. “Sorry,” Bill mumbled. He crawled to the base of the fence where the heavy metal had been pried away from the ground. He used the long barrel of my gun to dig away dirt from the base of the fence on either side of the opening. When he had gouged a trench wide enough to wiggle through, he pulled the wire up, straining against its tension. I was impressed again. He bent the wire enough for us to crawl underneath, saving us who knew how much hiking— or toting—time.

“Are you sure the guardhouse is over there?” I asked.

“Positive,” he said. “City boys can track, too, you know.” He went first, sliding through the opening on his back before straddling the drainage ditch on the other side. “Stick your legs through,” he ordered me.

I was having trouble moving both my legs. I slid the right one through the hole in the fence, then used my hands to maneuver the left one into position.

“Jesus, Casey—that bad?”

I nodded and he began to gently pull me through the opening, lifting the wire with his free hand so that my chest would clear the fence. “No jokes,” I warned.

“No jokes,” he agreed.

“I have to rest,” I admitted. “God almighty, this hurts like a son of a bitch.” I probed my hip with my fingertips. The pants were soaked in blood and my hands came away stained with what looked like deep purple in the moonlight.

“Shit, Casey. How badly hit are you?” He cradled me in his arms and carried me over the ditch, then made his way through a few more yards of pine woods. We broke free onto the edge of a well-manicured lawn. The cloudiness of the last few days had disappeared, and, without the canopy of woods above us, the moonlight illuminated the night with a cheery brightness. To my intense relief, I saw the lights of the guardhouse glimmering a football field away.

“Hold still while I check this,” Bill ordered. He laid me on the grass and probed my soggy sweat pants.

“Behind,” I told him. “I was hit from behind.”

“Okay, roll over.” He sat cross-legged and laid me over his lap like I was about to get a spanking.

“Don’t get carried away,” I warned him. “Just because your fondest wish is coming true.”

“If you can joke about it, you’re going to live,” he told me. He peeled down my sweats, then stopped. “Good god,” he said.

“What?” I asked, alarmed.

“Who wears black lace underwear on stakeout?”

“What am I supposed to wear, bloomers?”

Either he had a delicate touch or my senses were on overload; I could feel the night wind on my wounded hip like the softest of kisses before I even realized he had bared my butt for inspection. “I don’t believe it,” he said, whistling.

“What? Did it hit an artery?” I began to squirm.

“Lie still,” he ordered. “No, you’re fine. But your glutes are amazing. You must work out all the time. This is the flattest butt I’ve ever seen.”

“Pull my pants back up immediately,” I ordered him between gritted teeth. “Or you will die.”

“I was just paying you a compliment,” he said. “Really, they’re amazing.”

That was when I began to laugh. It was too much for me. I was losing blood, felt light-headed and was relieved to be alive—plus I was finally living my fantasy of being stripped by Bill Butler under the moonlight. Only none of it was happening quite as planned and it struck me as hysterical.

Bill began to laugh, too.

We sat there on the grass, laughing with relief, until the commotion attracted the guards and we could spot two flash lights bobbing our way. “Cover my ass,” I ordered Bill, trying to regain my composure.

“No way,” he said. “It’s the main attraction. You’ve been shot right in the left buttock. It’s a perfect bullet hole. You could put a pencil through it.”