The Strategist (30 page)

CHAPTER 51

Camille had barely settled into the passenger’s seat of Detective Sullivan’s car when a sudden pull on the brakes almost sent her flying into the dashboard.

“Oh my God, what is it?” Camille frantically asked as she looked around for the
animal or worse yet, the child that Sullivan had slammed on her brakes to avoid hitting. When she saw nothing, she settled back in her seat. “Why did we stop?”

Sullivan was quiet as they idled in the middle of the street.

“What are you looking at?”

“That car over there,” Sullivan finally said. “It looks like Graham’s.”

Camille looked toward the school parking lot a few hundred feet away where she saw a car that looked exactly like the one they were in. She couldn’t help but roll her eyes. “Fantastic.”

“What is he doing?” Sullivan muttered.

“Maybe he’s having engine trouble. Maybe he’s found a date. Maybe he’s hiding from the world. After the run-in you two just had, why do you even care?”

“Because something is wrong.”

“We don’t have a lot of time. At least that was what you told me when you showed up at my house. I don’t want to sound insensitive, but I personally couldn’t give two shits what Detective Graham is–”

“Wait a second,” Sullivan cut in, pointing to the DPD patrol car parked in the adjacent loading dock. “Is that Officer Davies?”

“I don’t really see why it matters.”

“It matters,” Sullivan said as she put the car in reverse.”

“What are you doing?”

Camille got her answer when Sullivan pulled into the school entrance.

“I’m sure Walter isn’t going to be the least bit happy to see me again, but I have to be sure.”

“Sure of what?”

Sullivan said nothing.

When they pulled up next to the Crown Victoria and saw Detective Graham slumped down in the driver’s seat, the an
swer became horrifyingly clear.

“Oh my God,” Sullivan shouted as she rushed out of the car.

Camille quickly followed suit. She could see the blood before she even made her way to the driver’s side where Graham sat. Once she reached it, and could see the full scope of what had actually happened to him, she felt sick to her stomach.

Sullivan reached inside the car and put two fingers up to Graham’s neck. Camille couldn’t tell whether she was checking for a pulse or attempting to stem the flow of blood from the gaping wound just below his jaw line. Both gestures seemed useless.

“Damn it, Walter. How did you let this happen?” Sullivan said, trying to choke back emotion. She cradled his neck for a moment longer, as if she still hoped he could offer a response. When he didn’t, she lifted her head out of the car and pointed at Camille. Her hand was covered in blood. “My two-way is in the car! Can you bring it back here?”

Camille was frozen, just as she had been months earlier in Daniel Sykes’ basement. She had been too late to save Agent Sheridan, but she had cradled him in her arms like there was still a chance. She had heard the girl’s desperate cries for help. But she couldn’t move. Even after she heard the first gunshot and one of the girl’s cries had gone silent, Camille still could not bear to remove her hand from the wound in Agent Sheridan’s forehead. The pressure from her grip had managed to stop the bleeding and she tried to convince herself that if he didn’t lose anymore blood, he could be saved. But she was lying to herself and she knew it. The truth was that she was in the mi
dst of a panic attack so severe that the only thing keeping her from disconnecting completely was the feeling of Sheridan’s blood on her fingers. Sitting in the middle of that cold, dank dungeon that reeked of death and decay, hearing screams of pain and terror echo off the gray cobblestone walls, applying pressure to her dead partner’s wound was the only tangible thing left in a situation that had become darkly surreal. And now that same panic was setting in again. Only this time, she didn’t have anything tangible to hold onto.

“Camille!”

Sullivan’s voice was little more than a distant echo, drowned out by those screams in the basement and the subsequent gunshots that silenced them forever.

“Camille!” She was shaking Camille’s shoulders. “I need to stay with him! Please get my radio from the car!”

Camille nodded then ran to Sullivan’s car as fast as her numb legs would carry her. She found the radio in the compartment between the driver and passenger’s seat. On her way back, she glanced over her shoulder. That was when she got her first good look at the patrol car that Sullivan had noticed earlier. The driver’s side door was open, and Camille thought she could see someone looking in her direction through the open window. As she got closer to Sullivan and Graham, she looked over her shoulder again. This time she was positive she saw someone staring at her. He wore sunglasses that matched the dark tint of his uniform. And now he appeared to be holding something out of the window. It looked silver but it could have been black. It looked like a pair of binoculars, but it could have been a gun.

A gun?

Sullivan took the two-way radio and had begun her emergency relay before Camille could say anything.

“Code ten, code ten, I have an officer down! West side parking lot of Braswell Elementary School! I repeat, officer down!” Panic rose with each word Sullivan spoke.

As Camille glanced over her shoulder at the patrol car, her panic rose as well. The driver’s side door was still open, but she could no longer see the officer sitting inside. By the time she turned back to Sullivan, she felt the first sting just below her left shoulder blade. Before Camille could open her mouth to say the word ‘help’, she felt the second sting slide across her left cheek. She hadn’t realized that she was shot until she heard two more rapid-fire pops. Then she saw Detective Sullivan crumble onto the asphalt.

CHAPTER 52

S
o much for not killing anyone else
, Solomon thought with a hint of regret as he threw his PSG-1 into the backseat of the squad car. He knew that Detective Sullivan had most likely been killed right away. The first shot caused her to fall forward; the second sent her crashing into the ground. Camille Grisham was another story. She barely moved after the first shot and staggered backward only a few feet after the second. She cupped the side of her face before finally falling to her knees. He couldn’t be sure if either shot was clean enough to be anything more than superficial, so he approached the parking lot under the assumption that he still had work to do.

Before Solomon got the first shot off, he saw Sullivan talking into her two-way radio, which meant she was able to put in a call for help. He cursed himself for not moving in on them sooner, just like he’d been cursing himself for a lot of things lately. But it was too late to worry about that. Right now he had to focus on the task at hand, which was making sure no one in t
hat parking lot was left alive.

He climbed into his cruiser and drove the short distance to a parking lot that was completely empty except for two Crown Victoria’s and three law enforcement agents – two of whom Solomon felt confident were dead. The third one would soon be dead too.

Given the events of the day, it was very likely that Camille would be carrying the disk, or at least a copy of it, with her. But at this point, Solomon wouldn’t even bother to retrieve it. The cat had most certainly already been let out of the bag. The fact that Camille had a disk in the first place meant that Julia Leeds planned for such a scenario long before Solomon had gotten to her.

Throughout the entire ordeal, Elliott Richmond had operated under the false assumption that he was the smartest person in the room. He was the one with all the answers; the one pulling all the strings. But Julia Leeds had been a step ahead of him from day one. She knew exactly what Richmond was capable of, and she took steps to ensure that the world would know about it
should he ever decide to act.

And now the world would know, which meant this entire episode of Solomon’s life had been a complete waste of effort.

The more he thought about that fact, the more it angered him. He had done everything he was supposed to do. In the end, Richmond was the one who failed. Because of him, an easy job had deteriorated into an unmitigated disaster. Because of him, four people would end up dead. If Solomon felt that Elliott Richmond would do anything other than to toe the line of absolute innocence once he was exposed, he wouldn’t hesitate to make him the fifth. But Richmond was not a threat to him. Neither was Camille Grisham.

But he had to kill her just the same.

Solomon stopped a few feet from the car that Camille and Detective Sullivan had arrived in, got out of his own car, and listened. The only sound he heard was indecipherable chatter from Sullivan’s open radio.

With his Heckler and Koch drawn, Solomon inched his way toward the back of Sullivan’s Crown Victoria. From his current vantage point, he could see Graham slumped in the driver’s seat of his own car a few feet away. Detective Sullivan, and presumably Camille Grisham, were somewhere on the other side.

Solomon heard a scrape against the asphalt. Then a second, this one louder. He crouched down behind the car and listened. When he heard nothing else, he quickly stood up, realizing that he had taken a defensive position that was based on fear and nothing more. When he first encountered Camille outside of Julia’s house, then a second time in Mayor Richmond’s campaign headquarters, Solomon had seen something in her that was very formidable; a dark presence that she obviously went to great lengths to contain. Elliott Richmond had probably not seen it until it was too late. But Solomon saw it right away, and it put him on notice. Camille may have no longer had the seal of the FBI behind her, but she was still dangerous. He knew from personal experience that true darkness could never be contained for long, and he’d shuddered at the thought of being in Camille’s path when her efforts to contain the darkness within herself finally failed.

But he no longer had to worry about that. Camille was not standing at the other end of a dark alley waiting to draw her gun on him. She was most likely sitting a few feet away in a pool of blood waiting for him to finish her off. He was anxious to oblige.

When he walked around the left side of the car, he saw Detective Sullivan lying motionlessly on her side. Her ivory blouse was stained red on the left side of her upper torso, as was her left leg just above the knee. The two-way radio was still tucked in her left hand. Solomon kicked the radio out of her hand, sending it hurling across the parking lot until it came to a rest in multiple pieces. Sullivan didn’t move.

Seeing no need to engage the detective further, Solomon moved to the front of her car, then to the right side. From there, he made his way to Graham’s. The smell of copper was thick as he passed the open window where his body had already begun to decompose. Pellets of shattered glass crunched under his boots as he rounded the front of the car, then up the other side. Solomon stopped there. His arm trembled before it involuntarily fell to his side, taking the gun down with it. It was as if the asphalt under his feet suddenly became quicksand and he was unable to prevent himself from being pulled under.

Camille Grisham was nowhere to be found.

CHAPTER 53

B
efore she made her way into the backseat of Detective Graham’s car, Camille had managed to pry the Glock out of his shoulder holster. She crouched down in between the seats as far as she could, covering most of her body with Graham’s oversized trench coat. Then she listened. Aside from the chatter on Detective Sullivan’s radio, she heard nothing, and for a time she thought the DPD officer, the man who had most likely shot them all, had left. Then she heard footsteps. She’d had a fleeting hope that it was a concerned passerby who could offer help. But passersby in this neighborhood were rarely concerned and they almost never helped. Her notion was confirmed when the footsteps stopped and she heard a thump that caused Sullivan’s radio to go silent. Seconds later she heard it skidding across the asphalt. The officer had apparently come to finish what he had started.

When Camille allowed herself a moment to think about who
m the officer could be or what his motives were, the name
Richmond
was the only one that came to mind. He was the only one with the motivation to do this, and he certainly had the resources to bring in a hired gun from within the police ranks to pull it off. Even before now, she had begun to suspect that there were many such hired guns within the department – Detective Graham being chief among them. But that was as far as her panicked mind would allow her to go. Right now it didn’t matter who the officer was or what his motives were. She had to find a way out of this.

It had been a couple of minutes since Detective Sullivan put in the emergency call, which meant that every available police unit within a five-mile radius would be descending upon them at any moment. Her gunshot wounds were painful, but they were superficial. All she had to do now was bide her time in here until she heard the sirens.

Bide your time
, Camille thought
. Just a few more minutes and they’ll save you. You certainly can’t save yourself. You can’t save yourself because you’re a coward. You don’t have the courage to fight. You never did. Cower in this backseat next to this corpse. Maybe if you stay long enough, you’ll end up just like him. Just like Agent Sheridan. Just like Jessica Bailey and Candice McPherson. They died because you cowered, the same as you’re doing now. There’s still a possibility that you can help Detective Sullivan. But you won’t, will you? You’re going to let her die too. If you let this pass, then you deserve nothing less than to join her. If you let this pass, then you’ll finally confirm to the world what you’ve always known about yourself – that you never deserved anything you had. Not the badge, not the gun, not the forgiveness, and certainly not Julia’s trust. She put her life in your hands so you could hide under this trench coat while the men who killed her are allowed to walk free? Of course she didn’t. Don’t wait for the sirens, Camille. Don’t you dare
.

Camille was overwhelmed by the thoughts pushing through her mind. But she was also stirred by them.
Pull this coat off and get out of this car
.

And that was exactly what she did, despite the tears clouding her vision, despite frayed nerves that ca
used her entire body to shake. She pulled off Detective Graham’s coat and lifted her head.

The first thing she saw was part of Graham’s skull lying on the seat next to her. She wanted to scream, but something inside the hard-as-nails, Quantico-trained, Special Agent-In-Charge-of-Ridding-the-World-of-Everything-Evil-and-Impure Grisham would not allow it. It was a part of herself that Camille though
t she would never see again. Its appearance was sudden and surprising. And it was most-welcomed.

She sat Graham’s gun down on the seat while she used her good arm to slowly open the back door. The hinges squeaked as she did and she stopped halfway. “Shit,” she whispered as she held the door. She waited a few seconds and pushed again. The door opened the rest of the way without making a sound. With her left arm trailing uselessly behind her, Camille pulled herself across the back seat until she was out of the car.

Once her feet were under her, she reached back into the car to retrieve the gun, then gently closed the door, stopping short of the latch.

The only thing she saw in her immediate field of vision was the school playground some distance in front of her. Detective Sullivan’s car was on the other side of Graham’s, as was presumably Detective Sullivan. Camille’s only thought was to get to her.

Until she heard footsteps.

They came from somewhere behind her. They were slow, they were cautious, and they were searching. She crouched down against the car, the gun held high in front of her. As the footsteps drew closer, Camille’s index finger wrapped loosely around the trigger. When the footsteps stopped, her grip tightened. He was on the other side of Graham’s car, no more than a few feet away. And he was here for her.

Camille heard the faint scream of a siren somewhere in the distance. Then a second. But the sound was of no comfort to her. It didn’t matter if they arrived in five minutes or five seconds. The resolution to this situation was completely out of their hands.

It was squarely in hers.

Using every ounce of physical strength she had left, Camille lifted herself off the ground until her eyes were level with the car window. It was then that she saw him, standing directly in front of the window with his back to her. His arms were down at his sides and his broad shoulders appeared slumped. It was an unnerving sight, and for a moment, Camille was unsure of how to react. She slowly turned on her heels until her body was square to the window, then she pointed the gun through it, taking dead aim at his back. Presuming he was carrying a gun, she thought about taking a shoulder shot, disabling him enough so that he would drop it. But she couldn’t see which hand he held the gun in. Then she thought about aiming higher, creating a disability that was much more permanent. But shooting someone in the back of the head would never pass the self-defense test, no matter how loosely the term was defined.

Finally she stood completely upright, extended the gun as far in front of her as she could, and yelled. “Drop the gun and raise your hands where I can see them!”

From her new vantage point she could only see the man from the shoulders up. But she saw enough to know that he hadn’t budged an inch.

“I said put your hands where I can see them!” Camille staggered along the edge of the car until she could see his profile. When he turned his head to look at her, she gasped.

The young, red-faced officer she first saw in front of Julia’s house looked both amused and disgusted as he shook his head at her. But it was Camille who felt disgusted when she was hit with the sudden realization that she had met the officer a second time – with Elliott Richmond only a few hours ago.

“Let me guess,” he said with a pained half-smile. “You were hiding in the car.”

Camille kept her gun trained on him as she inched closer. She remembered he had called himself Solomon Gates. But Camille now knew that name was about as genuine as her use of Naomi Stephens had been. As she made her way around the car, she could see a gun dangling in his left hand. She extended hers further. “I said drop it, now!”

“You do a great impersonation of a cop. Has anybody ever told you that?”

The sirens were getting closer.

“So do you. Now shut up and drop the gun!”

He moved for the first time, subtly shifting his weight to his left side. His shoulder flinched slightly, and Camille knew instinctively that he was preparing to raise it. She fired her gun before he could. The shot landed square in the middle of his shoulder blade, the damage to his auxiliary nerve causing him to instantly drop the gun. He stumbled backward onto the hood of Sullivan’s car, cradling the wound. Camille knew the pain of getting shot in the shoulder first hand. The payback felt good.

She ran toward him as quickly as her heavy legs would take her. When she was mere inches away, she aimed her gun directly at his head, holding it so close that the end of the barrel nearly touched him.

“You should have listened when I told you to drop it,” she said, suddenly feeling every bit in control of the situation.

“I suppose I should have,” he answered in between labored breaths. Blood was beginning to seep through the fingers that he held up to the wound, and the skin on his muscular face was already growing pale. “You’ve got me Agent Grisham. Dead to rights.” He winced as he applied more pressure to his shoulder. “Is this the part of the interrogation where I spill my guts? Confess all the sordid little details?”

He was smug in spite of the situation and it infuriated her. Camille took another step toward him. Even though the barrel of her gun was now pressed firmly against his sweaty temple, he didn’t give an inch of ground. “You can start by telling me your real name. I know it’s not Solomon Gates, and Officer Davies doesn’t ring particularly true either.”

He smiled thinly. “Starting with the basic stuff. I like that. The only problem is those sirens approaching don’t give either of us much time. You can ask fifty questions until they slap the handcuffs on you, or you can end this the right way.”

“What the hell do you mean, slap the cuffs on me?”

“Two dead detectives. You holding a gun up to a police officer’s head. You’ll be lucky if they don’t shoot you on sight.”

“I didn’t kill anybody, asshole. And you’re not a real police officer. If they didn’t realize that before, they certainly will now.” Camille pressed the gun harder into the side of his head.

“Maybe. But maybe not. Why wait for them to arrive to find out? If the roles were reversed, I’d certainly kill you.”

“Isn’t that what Elliott Richmond sent here to do in the first place?”

His smile broaden
ed. “A gentleman never tells.”

“Answer the question!”

“Were you always this aggressive an interrogator, Camille? I bet you were really tough, especially with that serial killer of yours. How long did it take to get a confession out of him? If you employed the gun-up-to-the-temple technique, I imagine it didn’t take long at all.”

Camille thought about Sykes and her three separate interrogations of him. He toyed with her every step of the way, offering only the tiniest kernel of information before later disavowing his testimony altogether. This went on for each emotionally draining four-hour session, until the third one, when he recounted their meeting in Alexandria, then followed that up by listing the names of four women and two teenage boys he killed in the interim. That was how the interrogation began. It was also the last thing Camille heard before she ran out of the room in tears, and ran away from the FBI in shame.

Right now another killer was trying to toy with her in the exact same way. But if this was an interrogation, it was certainly not going to end the way the last one did.

Without giving a second thought, Camille took the gun away from his temple and put it under his chin, pushing up until his head went backwards. “Right now I don’t care about Richmond, I don’t care about the disk, I don’t care about you trying to kill me. I only want to know one thing. Were you the one who killed Julia?”

He gagged as Camille pressed the barrel deep into the soft flesh of his chin. She eased up enough to allow him to speak.

“We don’t have time for this. My friends are almost here.”

Camille could see the approaching lights out of the corner of her eye. She was distracted for no more than a millisecond, but that was all the time he needed. She felt the blow to her chest before she saw it coming. It wasn’t hard, just enough to send her reeling backward a few steps. But it gave him the leverage he needed to grab her arm with one hand and bend her wrist back with the other, causing her to drop the gun. Even after being disabled by a gunshot, his strength was overwhelming. She bellowed in pain as he pressed down on her wound then kicked her in the ribs. This blow sent her careening onto the pavement, landing on her wounded arm. She let out another wail of pain. Then through blurry eyes, she saw him bend down to pick up his gun.

Soon he was standing over her, staring straight into her eyes. His gun hung low on his side. Pain shot from Camille’s arm to the rest of
her body like streaks of lightning and she could barely keep her eyes open. But she kept focused on him. If she was going to die, she wasn’t going to die a coward. She bit down hard on her bottom lip to stop it from quivering and lifted her head off the asphalt. She didn’t flinch, even as he lifted his gun and pointed it at her face. 

The sirens that were once barely a whisper in the distance had now become deafeningly loud. The
man, whose real identity she would probably never know, looked at the approaching police cars, then looked back down at her. For the first time she saw something in his face that resembled fear. “You want to know if I killed your friend?” he asked in an almost solemn voice as his hand tightened around the gun. “Why don’t you ask her yourself.” 

Camille had just begun to close her eyes in anticipation of the impact when she heard a battered female voice shout: “Put it down now!”

Before Camille could open her eyes, she heard a gunshot.

When she finally summoned the courage to look up, she saw the officer writhing on the ground. He was cradling his hand underneath his chest. The gun he had tried to kill her with rested a few feet away from him.