Playing Dead (36 page)

“I know you do. I’m sure I’ll be in contact once we have what we need.”

“Oh, good! Isn’t this exciting? Maybe not for you, you do it all the time, but for me. I’ve never had something so exciting happen.”

She turned into her bedroom and went to the closet. She pulled out the shoebox with her most current notes and handed it to him.

“Is this all?”

“No, just the last two months.”

She opened her closet and pointed to all her pretty shoeboxes. “I labeled them in code, so no one would figure it out. Did I do good?”

Jeffrey Riordan, aka Agent Jones, stared at the shelves of shoeboxes in the retard’s closet. Fuck. They couldn’t haul all this crap out of here! But they couldn’t leave it, either.

“Jones!” Harper called from downstairs. “It’s getting late.”

“We need it all, Ms. Lane.”

“Oh. I see.” She bit her lip and looked at the boxes. “I guess twenty-six boxes is a lot, isn’t it?”

“You’ve been very diligent.” Too fucking diligent. “Would you please pull them down for me? I’ll ask my partner to help transport them to the car.”

“Oh, yes, certainly.” She began pulling them off the shelves. Slowly.

“We have another appointment, we need to rush a bit.”

“I’m sorry. Of course.” She was flustered, but she pulled them down faster.

Jeffrey went downstairs. “There’s twenty-six boxes of crap,” he whispered to Harper.

“We need to get out of here.”

“You get the boxes to the car, I’ll take care of her.”

Ten minutes later, the boxes detailing every night Lora Lane had spent at the Rabbit Hole were stored in Riordan’s trunk. Including, Jeffrey was certain, her “orders” to poison Oliver Maddox, who’d been far too close to figuring out what had happened to Rose Van Alden’s estate. And that would have led to even more secrets that Jeffrey couldn’t have come out—ever—especially in an election year.

“Thank you, Ms. Lane,” he said.

“Will you be by again?”

“Very likely. I like you a lot.” He leaned forward as if to kiss her.

She blushed, but her eyes were bright and excited and focused on his eyes. Better his eyes than his hand that now held a knife.

He placed one hand on her shoulder, dipped his head, then shoved his fist forward, the knife cutting through her. He’d never stabbed anyone before, and it felt strange and exhilarating. Her eyes were innocent and surprised. She hadn’t registered what happened. She gasped.

He pulled the knife up until it hit bone, then pulled it out and she dropped to the floor, mouth open, eyes wide and fading.

He stared at her. The incision was deep and long. There was a lot of blood. Shit, all over his hands and his favorite jacket.

“Let’s go before anyone comes,” Harper said. “We’ll burn your clothes with the shoeboxes.”

He turned and followed Harper out.

“Our guy had better take care of Lowe before he opens his mouth,” Riordan told Harper. “Why the fuck didn’t we know Lowe changed his identity?”

“Hamilton was the only one who ever saw Lowe in person, and he never came down here.”

“We should have followed up.”

“We had the girl watching Barney as soon as he returned from L.A.”

“You mean Lowe,” Jeffrey snapped.

“After all these years, he didn’t say anything—and I don’t think he ever would have. He didn’t say anything to Maddox, and Lora said he didn’t say anything to Claire O’Brien. It was the Feds who learned—”

“Exactly! The Feds learned, and now we’re screwed.”

“Lowe’s too scared to talk. He’ll be dead first.”

“He’d better be. I’m sick and tired of this crap. I have an election to win, I can’t go clean up after everyone. Where the fuck is Collier? I don’t like that he’s running around. I never trusted him.”

“We’re looking for him, but he’s gone to ground. He has everything to lose. He won’t talk.”

“That’s bullshit. He’ll sing like a canary if they cut him a deal. We need to find him before the Feds. If he hadn’t panicked and left town, the Feds wouldn’t be so damn suspicious.”

Everything would work out, Jeffrey told himself. Problems like Lora Lane and Frank Lowe and Claire O’Brien were bumps in the road. They happened every once in a while. He would control this situation, win the primary, and everything would be just fine.

THIRTY-THREE

Mitch rushed through the emergency room doors carrying Claire. Steve was driving Lowe to FBI headquarters in order to print and interview him. Lowe wanted a written guarantee of protection before he talked, and Meg was already working on it.

Mitch went to the nurse’s station and said, “I have an emergency. This woman was drugged and crashed into the river.”

“Are you her significant other?”

He couldn’t reach his badge. “Special Agent Mitch Bianchi, Federal Bureau of Investigation. My badge is in my wallet.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” The triage nurse walked around to Mitch, bringing a gurney with her. “Put her down here. I have some paperwork for you to fill out.”

“Can’t you just see what’s wrong with her?”

“We will, but I still need to know her name, any medications she’s allergic to, health insurance.”

“She lost her identification in the river,” he said. “Her name is Claire O’Brien. She works for Rogan-Caruso Protective Services, I’m sure she has insurance through them. She’s twenty-nine. I don’t know if she’s allergic to anything.”

“What kind of drugs was she taking?” the nurse asked, shining a light into Claire’s pupils.

“Stop that!” Claire exclaimed and batted at the nurse’s arms.

The nurse said, “I’ll need to restrain her. If she’s on PCP or—”

“She wasn’t taking any drugs,” Mitch said, taking Claire’s hands in his. “Claire, honey, hold tight. This nurse wants to help find out what’s wrong.”

“Don’t leave,” Claire said, her eyes frantic. She looked like a trapped and frightened animal, ready to bolt.

“I’m not going anywhere. I promise.” He said to the nurse, “Someone drugged her. I don’t know what with—it was probably something slipped into a drink.”

“Has she been drinking?”

“Half a beer, a couple hours ago.” He thought back to their argument at the Rabbit Hole. “She was rubbing her head as if she had a headache, but I don’t know if that means anything. She passed out while driving, has been alternately lethargic and intensely paranoid. Her muscles were stiff when we first brought her out of the river, her hands like this.” He made his own hands into claws. “And she’s been shaking the entire time.”

While Mitch talked, the nurse examined Claire’s vitals and eyes, then put an oxygen mask on. Claire had a bump the size of an egg on the front of her head, likely from when she hit the steering wheel, and small scrapes and cuts from Mitch pulling her from the car and hauling her up the slope. He took her hand. Claire was not a woman he ever expected to see in a hospital looking disorientated. Claire had far too much life and energy in her.

“You’ll have to leave us—” the nurse began.

Claire shook her head back and forth and tried to talk, but the oxygen mask prevented it. She squeezed Mitch’s hand, her eyes fearful and wild.

“Do a tox screen for psychotics, LSD, or Rohypnol. I think they’re detectable in the urine,” Mitch said.

The nurse eyed him suspiciously. “Do you know something more?”

“I’ve been in either the military or law enforcement for nearly twenty years. I’ve seen this kind of reaction before.”

“I’ll add the tests. I need to undress her to finish the preliminary exam and then send her to X-ray to make sure she doesn’t have any internal injuries. If you could please step out—”

Claire moaned, “Noooo.”

“Let me stay, please,” Mitch said. “She had a terrifying experience in the river.” So had he. Unwillingly, a picture of Claire, dead and bloated, trapped underwater in the truck, hit him and he became queasy. She’d been drugged, unable to fight back, unable to do anything but die . . . and she would have if they’d been five minutes later. The truck would have sunk and he would have passed by, unaware that Claire was drowning . . .

He pushed the image from his mind, stared at Claire’s scared blue eyes, squeezing her hands. They were so cold. But she was alive.

The nurse handed him a stack of papers. “Fill this out while I get her ready for the doctor. You can do it in triage.” She wheeled the gurney around a corner, then pulled a curtain around Claire.

“No wonder you’re so cold, sweetie,” the nurse said. “Your clothes are soaking wet.”

Mitch scrawled the information he knew—Claire’s name, address, birth date, employer . . . he skipped what he didn’t know.

“There’s a patient here about to go to surgery. It’s her dad. They need to talk before he goes on the table.”

“I’ll see what I can do, but I can’t promise anything,” she said. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know, wherever they prep someone for surgery.”

“Name.”

“Thomas O’Brien.”

“I’ll check.”

The nurse had put Claire in a gown, and wrapped her in blankets from a warmer. “I’ll be back.”

Mitch sat next to Claire. “Do you remember what happened before you went into the river?”

“River?” she mumbled through the oxygen mask. She squinted, then pulled the mask off.

“You should—”

“I can breathe.” She was still shaking, her skin ghostly. “Everything is too bright.” She kept her eyes squeezed shut.

“You’re in the hospital.”

“I know.” She took a deep breath. “It was strange. I knew something was wrong, but I couldn’t do anything about it. I didn’t even panic. It was like I was out of my body. That sounds so stupid.”

“Did anyone have the opportunity to drug your drink?”

“Drink? I wasn’t drinking. I didn’t even have half the beer—” She stared at him and it was as if her memory returned and she remembered who he was and that he’d lied to her. Her entire expression changed, from worried and confused to guarded.

She averted her eyes. “I want to go home.”

“The nurse is getting the doctor. We need to find out who drugged you and why. Why’d you go to Isleton in the first place?”

“You think I’m going to tell you?”

“We’re on the same side.”

“Are we?”

Sitting next to her, Mitch spoke softly. “I told you my father was a prosecutor. I had tried to please him, never did. And then—” Mitch took a deep breath. “When he died, I went home to help my mom clear out his office. I went through his private files. Found information that he knowingly prosecuted three innocent men.” He remembered that weekend. Everything he’d believed about his father, a man of honor and truth and justice, vanished. He’d been trying his entire life to understand why he and his father were constantly at odds, feeling guilty that he didn’t want to follow his dad into law. The arguments they used to have about everything!

“I got two of the men out of prison by turning over the information to the new D.A. But one of the men was already dead. He’d spent ten years in Corcoran for a murder he didn’t commit, because, according to my father, ‘I knew he was guilty of other felonies, but we didn’t have the evidence.’ ” All the lectures about the Constitution and the rights of individuals and government, all destroyed after Mitch read that.

“I think your father is innocent. I don’t know how, but everything doesn’t add up. I think you have more information than we do. Why’d you go to Isleton today?”

“I was trying to find out what got Frank Lowe and Taverton killed. I thought that would lead to their killer. Did you talk to Professor Collier?”

“We have agents working all airports, monitoring his passport and credit cards. We’ll find him.”

“Unless he’s dead. I found out something else about Collier. He worked for the same law firm that represented my father fifteen years ago. Then, while doing pro bono work for the Western Innocence Project, he reviewed the case files and determined that the Project shouldn’t get involved.”

“That sounds like a conflict of interest.”

“Not legally, but ethically, yes. Thing is, Randolph Sizemore didn’t believe me at first. He said Collier would have recused himself.”

Claire rubbed her forehead, closing her eyes. “Oh, God, my head hurts.”

“I’ll get the nurse—”

“I’ll be okay.”

She still looked like death warmed over, her hair damp around her face, but she was no longer shaking.

“I talked to the cop who arrested Lowe back then,” Claire said. “I planned on talking to the judge who arraigned him, because Abrahamson thought he’d be most likely to have been privy to a plea agreement with the D.A.’s office. But the biggest puzzle so far is the missing coroner’s reports.”

“What missing coroner’s reports?”

“Taverton and my mom. They’re gone. No hard copies, no electronic copies. They were replaced by blank pages. And the tech who headed up the autopsy left right after the trial for another jurisdiction. I have a friend at Rogan-Caruso tracking him down.”

“He’s not going to confront him—”

“No.
She
isn’t a PI or a cop. She’s going to call me, and then—”

“You’re not—”

Claire interrupted. “I’m giving you this information because I know my father’s innocent, and if you’re actually telling me the truth, and you also believe he’s innocent, then you can help prove it. But don’t tell me what I can or can’t do, and don’t pretend that you care.”

His chest tightened. “Claire, you need to listen to me. Believe me. Befriending you started out as a job, but it became more than that. You know it. The way I feel—”

“I don’t care how you feel, Mitch. You lied to me. I don’t love
you.
I loved who I thought you were.”

The nurse came in with a doctor. “Agent Bianchi, you’ll have to leave for a while,” the doctor said. “I need to examine my patient.”

“I’m not staying here all night,” Claire stated emphatically.

“Let’s see what we have here before we decide that.”

“You can’t keep me against my will,” she said. “I’m feeling much better.”

Mitch reluctantly left. He leaned against the corridor wall and rubbed his eyes.

“Well, that was interesting,” a familiar female voice said only feet away from him.

He looked at Meg. It was rare for him to see her like this, silky blond hair hanging loose down her back, devoid of makeup, looking young and beautiful and like the woman he’d fallen in love with all those years ago.