Taking Liberty (20 page)

___________________________

I was sucked out of the blackout with a slurp, feeling woozy.

“What the hell do you think you’re playing at, Quinn?”

I was seated in a big comfy chair in a nicely-appointed lounge area. Propped up on plumped pillows. Around me, a series of opulently-decorated rooms were visible through open doors, each with panoramic views out over the nighttime marina and on to the Pacific Ocean. The place looked like something straight out of a French Renaissance château. Heavy brocade drapes and dark wooden floors. Foreign landscapes in gold frames, hung against embossed wallpaper. There was even a grand piano with its lid raised and sheet music ready to be played.

The world came into focus, like sunshine after a storm. There was a man in a Pink Floyd tour tee seated opposite. Stripy lounge pants. A gun on his lap. My gun.

“So here we are once more,” Mason Stone spoke as I heaved myself a little straighter in the chair. “I’ve poured you a cup of tea; it’ll take the edge off things.”

There was a fine bone china cup sitting on a matching saucer, placed on a small ornate side table next to my chair. A tan-colored liquid almost to the brim.

“Milk and sugar,” he added. “The way it’s meant to be drunk. None of that wishy-washy see-through stuff that tastes like ditchwater.”

My lips peeled into a snarl. “I’m not here for a tea party, Stone. Give me back my gun.”

“And put myself in harm’s way?” He tut-tutted. “I don’t think so, Quinn. Clearly, not with the mood you’re in. Remember what happened the last time I left you alone with a loaded weapon? Been there, done that. Got the tee shirt with the bullet holes in it.”

“We both know I made a mistake. I’ve learned my lesson.”

“So I can see. You turned over a new leaf, but felled the tree to do it. Is that how you meet and greet people these days?”

“Only those who mess around in my life.” I kept my snarl visible. “You set me up, you son of a bitch.”

Lines emerged on his brow. “Don’t be so bloody melodramatic.”

“You knew it was George, up there on that beach. You knew he’d been murdered.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Quinn. I wasn’t sure. Not for definite. I was betting my money on your son being the killer, not the victim.”

“So you sent me there to confirm it.” I blew superheated breath through my teeth.

“I was shocked to hear the truth. Seriously, Quinn, I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Just tell me everything, Stone. From the beginning. Start with how you came to know George was The Undertaker.”

He spread his hands. “It was easier than you think. I’m surprised you missed it. I was reviewing The Undertaker Case files –”

“Looking to catch me out.”

“– looking to fit together pieces of the puzzle.” He let out a long sigh. “It’s not you versus everybody else. The world isn’t out to prove the mighty Quinn wrong.”

“Why were you snooping into my case?”

“By that time it wasn’t your case. You were off doing Disney World and topping up your Floridian suntan while everybody else was picking up the pieces of your fallout. I had no interest in The Undertaker Case. I’d heard about it. But it was closed. It was only when one of our SACs sent me the files to look at –”

“Which SAC?”

“Does it matter?”

I made a face.

“Our Special Agent in Charge at the Las Vegas Field Office.”

“Hugh Winters sent you my case files?”

“Together with a note saying he believed you’d made a right pig’s ear of it. He felt the case needed reviewing. I agreed to take a look. I didn’t expect to find anything – certainly not a different suspect. As far as Director Fuller was concerned, the Bureau had caught his niece’s killer.”

“Harland Candlewood – who later died because of the beating he got from Winters’ henchmen.”

“Albeit after incriminating evidence was found in his hotel suite and he subsequently resisted arrest.”

“That’s a bunch of horse crap and you know it.”

“Not according to the official report. At that point in time, Candlewood was the prime suspect. Not only was there a booby-trap bomb inside his suite, he was also the CEO of the company whose employees were being picked off by The Undertaker. Right then and there, he was good for it all.”

“It doesn’t excuse their murdering an innocent man.” I got to my feet and started pacing, burning off nervous energy. “Besides, this is inside out. Winters believed Candlewood was guilty. Why did he push for the case to be reopened?”

“Simple. He cited yours and Inspector Maxwell’s failed apprehension of a suspect in the Stratosphere Tower
after
Candlewood had already been hospitalized as his prime reason.”

Sonny Maxwell’s police report had somehow found its way onto Winters’ desk and alarm bells had rung. Winters would have subpoenaed the CCTV recordings for the cameras in and around the Stratosphere’s observation deck. Found that they’d been deactivated minutes before our fatal face-off which had seen
The Undertaker
seemingly falling to his death. No doubt he’d questioned Sonny about it. Learned that she hadn’t glimpsed the suspect’s face.

“Winters has a personal agenda.”

“I’m aware of that. You and his wife had something going on, and Winters took umbrage. It didn’t cloud my judgment.”

“The trouble with that son of a bitch is he can’t move on. It was a long time ago, before I was married.” I stated it for the record, to be clear. “And long before Angela married the prick.”

“No love lost there, I see.”

“You don’t know the half of it. So what happened?”

“Remember the hotel surveillance tape you got from the Ramada Inn on Vermont?”

We’d seen our first glimpse of
The Undertaker
in fuzzy black-and-white. A hotel security camera had filmed him skittering across the Hollywood Hotel parking lot, frame by frame, taking another of his victims, a down-and-out called Helena Margolis, to her doom. The recording had been made on old VHS tape. Scratchy and low-res.

“We sent it over to the Crime Lab for processing.”

“Which they did. But for one reason or another it got filed away with the rest of the evidence. Perhaps after the case was closed and you quit. The image they managed to pull out was still grainy, but it was good enough to run through face recognition software and give us a hit.”

“George was in your system?”

“He was arrested on a class B misdemeanor a few years ago, for patronizing a prostitute.”

I hadn’t known. Not something he’d ever tell me.

“There was a ninety-seven percent chance the face on the Ramada surveillance tape belonged to George Quinn, your son. It was too coincidental to dismiss. I went through the rest of the case files with fresh eyes. There were things the killer did, moves he made, details he left behind that only someone who knew you personally could have done. I was left with only one conclusion.”

George Quinn was
The Undertaker.

“You must have had an inkling.”

I shook my head. “Sometimes we’re too close to something to step back and see the bigger picture.”

Truthfully, I’d had no suspicion George was the killer. Who would entertain the notion of their own flesh and blood being a psychotic murderer? Sure, he’d given us moments of concern over the years – doesn’t every son? George had been born with a condition, but not one which stopped him functioning normally in society. In our eyes, he’d overcome earlier drawbacks. He’d struggled through academia, but had blossomed out in the workplace. No reason to ever suspect he was a killer. Even when our investigation had traced
The Undertaker
back to our home State of Tennessee, even when he’d used a set of my old handcuffs at a crime scene, even when he’d left one of my prized cufflinks on a body buried under a silo in Jackson, even when one of his former psychiatrists had turned up as an old homicide in Philly, I’d failed to connect. Either that, or my unconscious mind had protected me from the truth, pulling close the cloak of denial.

 “How did you link George to Westbrook?”

“He used a flagged alias.”

“Westbrook.” I nodded. “He was a cop, who went missing. He was on the Bureau’s database.”

“Three months after Westbrook went into the system, his details showed up on a flight from Newark Liberty to McCarran. It was flagged for the Bureau to look into – which we did. Apparently, Westbrook had paperwork permitting him to escort and transfer a mentally ill prisoner through Liberty.”

“Jamie.”

Stone nodded gravely.

I hadn’t spoken her name in a while and my throat crackled like an old vinyl LP record.

Jamie Garcia, my police partner during our hunt for
The Undertaker
, had traveled under her own steam to Staten Island, to investigate a strong lead. She’d tracked down a possible survivor – the one that got away, as we knew her – intending to speak to her in person. As far as I’d known, Jamie had arrived in New York in one piece. Then, shortly thereafter, she’d slipped under the radar and we’d lost all contact. The next I’d seen of her was as a hostage of
The Undertaker
in our fatal showdown at the Stratosphere Tower, over one thousand feet above the glittery Las Vegas Strip. An encounter that had cost Jamie her life and me my sanity.

“He flew with Jamie from New York to Las Vegas.”

“Using Westbrook’s identity to facilitate his passage. We put a request to the Las Vegas field office to intercept him on his arrival at McCarran. But your manhunt for The Undertaker was in full swing at the time and the request got pushed down to the bottom of the priority list. That’s where Westbrook’s trail went cold.”

“Until he booked a hotel room in Alaska almost a year later.”

“Bingo.”

There was ice in my belly. Stone had known about George and his serial killing habits long before he and I had first met on that hazy dawn at the Sanibel Beach. While I had been looking under the wrong rocks for my obsessions, Stone had found
The Undertaker’s
true identity. Undoubtedly, Stone had looked into me, too. Discovered I’d quit the LAPD for sunnier skies. Then he’d played a waiting game. The only certain fact in his arsenal for tracking
The Undertaker
being the killer’s use of Westbrook’s ID. He’d known if he waited long enough, the ID would be used again. And when it was, Stone would be there to catch the Westbrook impersonator:
The Undertaker
– George Quinn, the killer, my son.

Like all great investigators, Mason Stone had the cunning of a fox and the patience of an ambush predator.