The Woman (9 page)

Webster stood. “Enough talk.” He led Testler to the door. “Get on your way. Fly out tonight. You’ve got a job to finish.”

After shutting his hotel room door, Webster called Blue. “I’m on a hotel phone. It’s not private. Have you arrived?”

“Yes. I’ve located the property in which you are interested.”

“Good. You know what to do. Proceed immediately.”

* * *

As Testler had expected, Webster had not bought his argument that Darby should be left alone. He had also anticipated that Webster might send Blue or his other operative named Charlie. That had been why Testler had alerted Linda. Why he had left her money, a gun and a cell phone.

On the other hand, maybe it would be best if Blue finished Darby. Testler had saved Linda Darby once, and he left her the gun to give her a fighting chance against Blue. He didn’t want Linda to die, but he also didn’t want his name added to Webster’s hit list. One thing he did know, Linda Darby was facing a major challenge. In Testler’s opinion, Blue was Webster’s best operative, aside from himself of course.

Chapter 14

Ben McIlhenny had always wanted to be cop. His love for law enforcement had started as a child watching cowboy movies with his father. His favorite was Bill Elliott playing Red Ryder. Growing up in Montana, he never lost his love of cowboys and traditional westerns. But he also came to understand the job of law enforcement involved much more than just riding into town knowing that the saloon owner would be the head of the bad guys.

In his teen years he left Montana to move in with an uncle who lived in New Jersey where he obtained his bachelor’s degree in criminology, joined the Newark Police Department, eventually earning his detective’s shield. He wanted police work to be his life, and everything had gone wonderfully until one evening after an off-duty dinner and drinks with friends. That night, two unrelated events, occurring within less than one hour, intertwined to destroy his plans for a big time career.

While Ben stopped at an intersection, a kid rode up on his bicycle, leaning forward, his pencil-thin arms crossed over the handlebars. An NBA Nets tee-shirt creeping up his back revealed the handle of a gun jammed behind the waistband of his crack-revealing pants. At the next intersection, McIlhenny flashed his badge through the window and told the boy not to move. McIlhenny confiscated the gun, which still had bubble wrap on the barrel. The youth also had a box of bullets.

The kid had no drugs on him and had not been drinking. He swore that he and some other kids had just found a canvas bag full of handguns and bullets in an empty lot about ten blocks away. At first, he said he didn’t know the other kids, but later admitted belonging to a gang that Ben had already identified from the tattoo on the boy’s forearm.

A young nurse Ben had been seeing with some regularity had left a text message on his cell phone which he had read after leaving the restaurant. “I’m about to hop in the shower,” her message had said, “then I’ll be over. You’re forty-five minutes away from a night you will never forget.” He either had to let the kid go or call the nurse and explain, not tonight, honey, the job, you know. He wasn’t about to let that happen.

He kept the weapon and told the kid to get lost. Tomorrow he would follow up with the boy’s gang to try and recover the rest of the weapons. This plan wasn’t according to the book, but he wasn’t about to blow off his date with this nurse, particularly with her in the mood her message had promised. As the kid stood up on his pedals and rode away, he looked back over his shoulder, smiled, and flipped McIlhenny the finger. Had the fabulous nurse not promised a dose of home health care, McIlhenny would have gone after the kid, explained the word ingrate, and run him in for felony possession. For even a child, this would have been a serious charge.

After that, the rest of the night had gone quite differently because Ben McIlhenny had left his police radio on. Several blocks later, he heard a call reporting a domestic disturbance in an upscale neighborhood about two blocks west from his current position. He had to go. He could get there faster than any other officer. These complaints were often based on nothing more serious than a neighbor fed up with listening to swearing and breaking dishes, but other such calls involved out-of-control people who had turned violent. This meant a cop could walk into the middle of anything, anything at all.

McIlhenny pulled to the curb, the situation was as he expected. He was first on the scene. The front door of the home stood open a few inches. He didn’t have his police issue. Rather than take it on his dinner engagement, where he expected he might do some heavy drinking, he had left it in his locker at the station. He loaded the handgun he had taken from the kid with the bullets he had gotten at the same place. Most likely, he wouldn’t need the gun, but domestic calls sometimes went sideways. He stuffed the confiscated weapon behind his belt, quietly closed his car door, and moved toward the house while stabbing his arms into the sleeves of his blazer.

Through the bedroom window he saw a man pistol whipping a woman. The woman had collapsed down onto her knees. Her face was pulp, a bone protruded through her cheek. Still the man continued using the gun barrel to rain down blows to her head and neck. Then the man picked up a two-liter plastic Pepsi bottle and stuck the gun barrel into the neck of the bottle. McIlhenny considered breaking the window and ordering the man to stand down, but such a course might lead to a gun battle. Instead, estimating he had sufficient time, McIlhenny took off for the front of the house where he eased the door open. Inside, he hastened down the Persian carpet runner that centered the hallway. His hand tightened on the boy’s gun.

By the time he reached the bedroom door, the man, having wrapped duct tape around the barrel of the handgun, was busy holding the bottle steady between his thighs while twisting the tape around the neck of the plastic bottle.

“Newark, PD,” McIlhenny hollered. “Drop the gun. Kick it over here. Get your hands behind your head. Do it. Now.”

The man spun toward McIlhenny, sweat flying from his hair. One hand held the roll of duct tape, the unfinished Pepsi silencer in the other. His face dotted with the woman’s blood.

“Don’t,” McIlhenny warned. “You won’t make it.”

The man froze in that position, half twisted at the waist, one corner of his mouth curled. McIlhenny knew the man was weighing his options. Then he dropped the gun, kicking it away. With the plastic bottle partially taped on the end, the gun didn’t kick very far.

McIlhenny ordered the man onto his knees. Next, he had the suspect—suspect hell, he had watched the blows pound the beauty out of the woman’s face—scoot back to the far wall keeping his hands still behind his head. After quickly looking around, McIlhenny picked up a hunk of lingerie that had been torn from the woman’s body, and used it to pick up the odd-looking customized gun.

The woman lowered her head and collapsed onto the carpet. It didn’t surprise McIlhenny who could only imagine the woman had stayed in the kneeling position by habit. She went down silently. No moan. No audible exhalation. As a tent would after someone had jerked the center pole.

With the butcher compromised, McIlhenny took a closer look at the woman. The side of her beaten-in head no longer gushed blood. He placed his fingers on her carotid artery. She was dead.

A moment later, McIlhenny had the man’s gun in his hand, the bottom of the Pepsi noise suppressor blown open. The scum sat slouched against the wall. Dead like the woman only he had died more mercifully. The bullet had entered just above his right eye, too quickly for him to have seen it coming. McIlhenny had pulled the trigger without recalling his conscious decision to do so. True to its purpose, the plastic bottle had swallowed the residual blowback.

Other officers could arrive at any moment so McIlhenny wiped the gun clean, pressed it into the dead man’s hand, and then dropped it on his dead lap. Then McIlhenny left. From what he could see outside, once the loud arguments had stopped, the neighbors had lost their curiosity. The next officers to arrive would easily put together the facts: the woman had been beaten to death by the dead guy and that animal had subsequently been shot by a third unknown person. The homicide guys would go through the motions, figuring the bastard got what he deserved, and then file the case among the unsolved.

To McIlhenny’s surprise, the U.S. Marshall’s Office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation took control of the case. Over time, he learned that the woman had been in the Witness Protection Program, and that the man was a New York mob enforcer, and the woman’s ex-husband. She had foolishly contacted her mother and the suspicion was that the mob had maintained a tap on her mother’s phone.

Three years later, McIlhenny resigned at the request of the Newark Police Department for repeated drunkenness on the job. After going through rehabilitation, McIlhenny had moved to the west coast and secured a uniform job with the Bradford city police. Two years later, he successfully applied for the position of police chief of Sea Crest, one of the state’s lowest paying senior law enforcement positions. He had been the only applicant for the job.

The FBI never solved the Newark case, but, unknown to the Newark Police, the feds had a voice-activated audio tape running in that house, that night. A year after McIlhenny became the chief of Sea Crest he received a voice print matching his voice to the voice of the unknown man who had killed the hit man in Jersey. McIlhenny didn’t recall having said, “You no-good piece of shit,” but his voice was on that tape saying just that. He had said it immediately before the muffled roar of a bullet tore the creases out of the end of the soda bottle.

Not long after, McIlhenny heard from a man who made it clear the time had come for Police Chief Ben McIlhenny to pay the piper. The threat included a promise: After we have finished our business in Sea Crest, you will never hear from us again.

The chief had no reason to believe that promise, but he had little choice if he hoped to sustain his rebuilt life. The next Sunday night, he followed his first order by installing electronic surveillance equipment inside SMITH & CO.

He also realized, now, that decision had started the chain of events that had led to these deaths and put Linda Darby in harm’s way.

Chapter 15

The visit from Police Chief Ben McIlhenny last night had made it impossible for Linda to remove the images of the brutality that had been inflicted on Cynthia. Last night, not wanting to rely on the gentle service of the morning sun coming through the blinds, Linda had set her alarm. If Ben didn’t come by early, she would go find him. She needed to know what he had found out at SMITH & CO. The answers had to be there.

Linda put a bagel in her toaster oven and got out the cream cheese, then stopped. She had no appetite. Fortunately, on mindless remote, she had set the coffee to come on in the morning. She dropped the still warm bagel into the trash, and poured what would become the first of three cups of coffee into one of her white ceramic mugs silk screened with a pictograph of Oregon’s rocky coastline.

By 9:30 she had lost her patience waiting to hear from the chief. She grabbed her purse and headed for the door. With the knob in her hand, she pulled back startled by the knock of an unseen hand. After gathering control of her emotions, she opened the door to find Ben McIlhenny standing on the other side.

“Good morning, Linda, I hope you got more sleep than I did.”

“Morning, Ben. I’m surprised you had trouble sleeping. I thought you law dogs could sleep through anything. Let me get you a cup of coffee. I just turned off the pot, but it’s still plenty hot.” With the chief two steps behind, she headed for the kitchen, asking over her shoulder, “Have you already been to SMITH & CO.?”

“Went last night.”

“I thought you were going this morning?”

“That had been the plan up until my deputy called last night after he got a missing person call from Wilbur Sharp, an old man that lives three miles out of town on Windward Road. Turns out Wilbur’s son had called him, wondering if the old man had seen his son’s wife. She hadn’t been home since leaving for work the day before yesterday. Guess where the daughter-in-law worked?”

Linda stopped pouring, her trembling hand holding the pot over the partially filled cup. “SMITH & CO.”

“SMITH & CO.”

Hearing the chief repeat the name, Linda thought it odd that no one ever pronounced it as Smith and Company. Their small, nondescript door sign read, SMITH & CO., and the whole town, knowing nothing else about the enterprise, had always referred to the business just that way.

Linda sat Ben’s coffee on the bar in a mug that matched her own, while he pulled out one of her bar stools and sat down.

“So?” Linda said while picking up a bowl of fruit. He shook her off. “You can’t just say you went there, talk to me. What did you find at SMITH & CO.?”

Ben took the bowl of fruit she still held from her shaking hand and put it on the counter. “They were all dead. Alice, the missing daughter-in-law, and two others shot twice: heart and head, just like Cynthia.”

“God help us, Ben. First Cynthia. Now . . . what’s going on?”

“Tell me about it. With the two in the alley, I’m dealing with six murders after none around here in what, four-hundred years or something?”

“Are they all connected?”

“Logic says they are. The bodies are up in Bradford for autopsies, but the cause of death for all of ‘em is pretty straightforward. Ballistics has told us the two in the alley were killed with the same gun. Cynthia was shot with the same caliber, but a different weapon. We won’t know for a while about the three in Cynthia’s office. Don’t repeat the part about the two shots to the head for the fellas in the alley versus one in the head and one in the heart for the others. We’re holding that back to help identify the shooter.”