The Last Word (30 page)

Liandra turned her back to him and got into her Camry, a smile on her face that she suspected would stay there all day. She hoped he didn’t remember the bottle of wine that he’d given her because it was long gone, wasted on a take-out Chinese dinner she’d eaten alone, surrounded by moving boxes.

Her first stop of the day was going to be the liquor store to find a nice replacement bottle. Even if he did catch her in the lie, she knew he’d be too much of a gentleman to call her on it. Her next stop would be the department store to buy something slinky that would make her irresistible and test the limits of his gentlemanly behavior.

She was looking over her shoulder and backing out of her driveway, when his Bentley exploded, bursting apart in a fireball.

Liandra instinctively slammed on her brakes and ducked below her seat, her ears ringing from the blast. After a moment, her whole body shaking, she raised her head and peered out the car window.

The Bentley was completely consumed by fire, her view obscured by the thick black smoke rising from the car and the Dumpster, where the flames had already ignited the trash and were licking at the house.

Liandra got out of her car and ran across the street, but was immediately repelled by the heat and smoke. She stumbled back, nearly tripping over something at her feet. She looked down.

It was a severed hand, charred black.

Her horrified scream was lost in a choking cough that brought her to her knees.

Detective Mickey Katz had seen his fair share of shootings, stabbings, stranglings, and even a beheading, but this was his first car bombing.

The whole area outside of Jack Stewart’s house was a soggy, sooty mess. Stewart’s property was cordoned off with yellow tape. The neighbors, lookee-loos, and media were kept at the far end of the block by three uniformed officers.

It had taken the fire department about forty-five minutes to completely extinguish the fire, which had spread to the house, engulfing the garage. Just by doing their jobs, the firefighters had probably washed a good deal of the best evidence into the Denver sewer system.

Once the fire department released the scene, the bomb squad, the medical examiner, and the CSI guys came to collect whatever evidence was left. Everybody wore white jumpsuits, galoshes, gloves, and oxygen masks, except for Mickey Katz. He didn’t bother with the mask. He’d been smoking cigarettes since he was fourteen, so he doubted that whatever carcinogens, pathogens, or other gens were in the air were any worse than what was already in his body.

Half of Jack’s blackened remains were still belted into the passenger seat of his Bentley when Mickey arrived; the rest were spread out around the front yard. Mickey had spoken to the only witness, a lady realtor who lived across the street. She didn’t have much to say, and he didn’t have the heart to tell her that real estate values in the neighborhood were about to plummet. Murders will do that.

Jane Becher, the ME, had recovered most of Jack Stewart and was bagging up the last of him when Mickey walked over to get her preliminary assessment.

“What a waste,” Jane said, bumming a Marlboro off of him.

“It usually is,” Mickey said, lighting the cigarette for her.

“I’m talking about the car,” Jane said. “You’d think they would have had the decency to shoot him instead of trashing such a fine piece of automotive engineering.”

“You’re such a softy,” he said. “How soon can you confirm the ID?”

“Most of his jaw is intact and the dental records are waiting for me at the office,” she said. “I can have a report for you in the morning. Unless you want to drop by and pick it up tonight.”

“At the office or your place?”

“Depends if you’re back with your wife again,” she said.

“I’m not,” he said.

“That’s what you told me last time.”

He shrugged. “Does it really make a difference?”

She thought about it.

“Don’t come too late,” she said and walked off.

He watched her go, openly admiring the way her hips moved under her jumpsuit, and that’s when he saw the distraught white-haired old man arguing with an officer at the barricade. The old man appeared to be insisting on being let through. Mickey walked over to see what was up.

“I’m Dr. Mark Sloan,” the man said to the officer. “I’m a close personal friend of Jack Stewart’s. I need to know if he’s okay.”

The officer glanced at Mickey as he approached and tipped his head towards the old man. “This guy says he knows the deceased.”

“Deceased?” the old man said. The word came out as barely a whisper, almost like he’d spent his last breath to say it.

Mickey could have punched the officer for his stupidity. Apparently, Mickey’s feelings showed on his face. The officer thought he could improve Mickey’s impression of him by talking some more.

“I’m sorry, Lieutenant. I thought it was obvious he was dead vis-à-vis the bombed-out car and all.”

Mickey ignored the officer and lifted the crime scene tape. “Please come with me, Dr. Sloan.”

Mark ducked under the tape and walked unsteadily over to Mickey.

“I’m Lieutenant Mickey Katz, Denver PD Homicide,” he said, dropping his cigarette and grinding it out under his heel. “What was your relationship to Dr. Stewart?”

“Friends,” Mark mumbled, staring past Mickey to the burned-out Bentley. “Old friends.”

Mickey picked up the cigarette stub and bagged it so it wouldn’t be mistakenly taken as evidence. “Do you have any idea why someone would put a bomb in his car?”

Mark nodded, his eyes welling with tears.

“Are you going to tell me?” Mickey asked.

Mark nodded again. “But you aren’t going to believe me.”

 

The doctor was right. Mickey didn’t believe him. Mark’s explanation was the long, paranoid rant of a crazy person. By the time Mark finished his convoluted tale, they were sitting in an interrogation room at the station, each of them on his second cup of lousy coffee.

“So you’re saying Carter Sweeney and all the murderers you’ve put away arranged to have Dr. Stewart killed to get back at you,” Mickey said.

“There was no one else left I could turn to,” Mark said. “I thought Sweeney didn’t know about Jack, but I was wrong. Sweeney got them all. There’s no one left.”

Mickey finished his coffee and examined the paper cup like he was interested in the craftsmanship. He just needed a minute to think.

He’d had Mark checked out on their ride to the station. It had taken maybe two minutes before someone called back to tell Mickey that Dr. Sloan’s son was the cop who’d murdered the LA district attorney.

So Mickey knew some of the story already. What he didn’t know was that Dr. Stewart had once been part of Mark Sloan’s team of amateur sleuths.

“You came to Denver to enlist Dr. Stewart in your effort to clear your son and your coworkers,” Mickey said. “Is that correct?”

Mark nodded. “I called him yesterday from the road. We talked and he agreed to help. We were going to work out a plan. Instead, I got him killed.”

“If they wanted to kill him,” Mickey said, “why wait until now to do it?”

“They knew I was in Phoenix yesterday. Noah Dent probably called them, and they guessed where I’d be going next. Or they found out somehow that I’d been trying to reach Jack. It doesn’t matter. They wanted to have a big surprise waiting for me when I got here. They timed it for maximum shock value, which is why they couldn’t resist blowing him up in his Bentley.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Because it’s a Bentley,” Mark said. “As in Dr. Amanda Bentley.”

“You don’t think that’s just a coincidence?”

“There is no such thing as a coincidence where Carter Sweeney is concerned. Jack and Amanda used to work together. They were very close. I think he might even have been in love with her. Don’t you see how it all fits? Killing Jack in his Bentley was Sweeney’s idea of a sick joke. They want to break me, but they never will. They will only strengthen my resolve.”

“I see,” Mickey said.

What Mickey saw was that the hour and a half he’d spent with Mark had been a complete waste of time. He put his pen back in his pocket and stopped taking notes. They were worthless anyway.

“You say that like you think I’m crazy,” Mark said.

“To be honest, I have a hard time believing that Jack Stewart was murdered to prevent him from helping you.”

“Do you have a better explanation?”

“I understand Dr. Stewart came from a Mob family back east.”

Mark shook his head. “Jack cut himself off from that a long time ago.”

“Recent events suggest otherwise,” Mickey said. “Or maybe he was killed to send a message to one of his relatives. I don’t know. I’ve only been on this case a couple of hours.”

“Doesn’t it strike you as odd that Jack Stewart, my former protégé, was murdered only days after Sweeney was set free, I was fired, and my son, Amanda, Jesse, and Susan were jailed?”

“I don’t see the connection.”

“
I’m
the connection!” Mark yelled.

“You haven’t worked with Dr. Stewart in years and he had nothing to do with Sweeney’s arrest.”

“All that matters is that Jack worked with me once, that I cared about him, and that he was the only one left who could help me,” Mark said. “
That’s
why he had to die.”

“It’s an interesting theory, one that I’ll definitely keep in mind,” Mickey said, rising from his seat. He would call Detective Morales in LA and get the real story on Mark Sloan once the doctor had left. “Thanks for taking the time to talk with me. I’ll have an officer drive you back to your car.”

“I knew you wouldn’t believe me,” Mark said sadly.

“I believe you’ve lost someone you care about and that it happened during a very stressful time in your life,” Mickey said. “You have my sympathies.”

“I don’t want your sympathies,” Mark said. “I want Carter Sweeney back on death row.”

The venerable 112-year-old Brown Palace in downtown Denver was a big step up from the Super 8 in Quartzsite and the Ramada Inn that Mark had stayed at on the road somewhere on his way up from Phoenix. For one thing, neither of those hotels employed a full-time historian, though the wino who was urinating into a potted plant in the lobby of the Ramada when Mark arrived might have qualified.

There were seven hundred pieces of ornate wrought-iron grill-work that ringed the grand lobby of the Brown Palace from the first floor up to the seventh. Two of the wrought-iron panels were upside down. One of those panels was installed incorrectly by design, to symbolize the imperfection of man. The other was put in wrong out of spite by an angry worker, thus proving the meaning of the first improperly installed panel.

Mark felt like one of those panels—old, flawed, and spiteful. He was sitting in his dark room, looking out the window at the volcanic granite walls and Gothic spire of the Trinity Methodist Church across the street, when there was a knock at his door.

He looked through the peephole and saw three men standing in the corridor. The one standing closest to the door looked like a male model, the kind who posed as businessmen in magazine ads for European cars, fine suits, and first-class air travel. There were just enough dashes of gray in his hair to make him seem established, respected, and educated but not so many that he seemed old.

The two men standing deferentially behind him at the door were muscular and had faces that had been reshaped over the years by fists. They were clearly his bodyguards.

Mark opened the door. “Yes?”

“Dr. Sloan,” the man said, “I am Elias Stewart, Jack’s uncle. May I come in?”

Mark stepped aside. Elias turned to his men.

“Wait for me in the suite,” Elias said and then came into Mark’s room.

Mark closed the door and faced his guest. “I’m sorry about Jack.”

Elias nodded. “He admired you, Dr. Sloan. You were a major influence on his life.”

“And his death,” Mark said.

“That’s why I am here,” Elias said. “I was in Seattle on business and came here as soon as I got word. They had to use dental records to positively ID him. You understand what that means? He was practically cremated by that bomb. We can’t even give him a decent burial. That isn’t right.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“How much do you know about our family, Doctor?”

“You’re very close,” Mark said.

“I meant about how we earn our living.”

“Your primary interest is in the scrap metal business,” Mark said. “Your other business ventures are varied.”

“That’s a polite way of putting it,” Elias said. “But there is no need for such niceties between us. You know who and what I am. Jack loved his family but wanted no part in scrap metal or our other less legitimate enterprises. We understood that.”

“Even when he was helping me and my son solve homicides?”

Mark sat on the edge of the bed facing Elias, who took a seat in one of the two easy chairs.

“We don’t do a lot of business in California, and we did even less while Jack lived out there, to minimize the potential for conflicts,” Elias said. “I believe Jack felt that by helping you in your investigative pursuits he was doing some kind of penance for the sins of his father. And his uncle. But if he had any resentment towards us, he never expressed it. We respected him for that. We knew where he drew the line and he knew where we did.”

“It’s good that your differences didn’t drive you apart.”

“It wasn’t easy, for him or for us. We were relieved when he left Los Angeles and gave up his detective work for you,” Elias said. “But it was one of those old murder investigations that got him killed, wasn’t it?”

Mark shook his head. “It wasn’t anything he did for me that got him killed. It was what he might do. But most of all, they killed him because they knew it would hurt me.”