CHAPTER
30
R ALEY LEAPED FROM THE WINDOW AND LANDED ON THE surface ten feet below.
He knew this old building because he and fellow firefighters had run practice drills in it. In this block of Broad Street, one of the oldest in the city, the buildings were jammed together, the backs of them converging to form a labyrinth of brick walls and a patchwork quilt of rooftops. He knew that a mere four inches separated this building from the one abutting it, and that a jump from the six-story window would put him on its rooftop.
The roofing material was old and spongy and made for an easy landing, but it didn’t provide good footing as he scrambled to stand up. Candy was already teetering at the edge of the roof when he shouted her name.
“Stop. Let’s talk about it.”
She turned toward him, putting her back to a drop he knew was straight down, fifty feet, give or take. “There’s nothing to talk about.”
“Only everything.”
The FBI agent had extended her the courtesy of cuffing her hands in front rather than behind her back. Raley saw that they were bleeding, lacerated by window glass. Pieces of glass were caught in her hair. Landing on the rooftop had shredded her stockings and left her with scraped knees. If she was even aware of these injuries, she gave no sign of it.
“There’s nothing more to talk about, Raley. You know everything. What you don’t know, your girlfriend does.” She hesitated, then said, “I’m sorta glad, you know. About you. Her. You deserve a break, after what we did to you.”
“Why’d you do it, Candy? How could you?”
“Because, dammit, Raley, you just wouldn’t stop with the questions about that goddamn fire. And the skinhead. Short of killing you, too, we had to do something. You wouldn’t give up.”
“You didn’t give up, either,” he said quietly. “You had all of them killed. Pat Senior. Jay. Your friend Jay.”
She smiled wryly. “Once I was in, I had to protect myself, my career.”
“You can give up now.” Not wanting to spook her into jumping, he moved closer an inch at a time, none of his gestures or movements threatening.
Her gaze jumped to something behind him. He took a glance over his shoulder. Two SWAT officers had rappelled out the window and down the side of the building and were crouched against the exterior wall, their rifles aimed at Candy.
“Stay back!” Raley shouted. Neither moved, but they didn’t lower their rifles. “Let me talk to her,” he pleaded in a softer voice. Turning back to Candy, he said, “Don’t give these guys the satisfaction. Surrender now. It’s over.”
“They don’t think so,” she said, looking down over her shoulder.
He couldn’t see over the edge of the roof to what was going on below, but he could imagine. He could hear police shouting for curious onlookers to move back. Sirens announced the arrival of emergency vehicles. Reporters and cameramen would have been jostling for advantageous spots from which to do their stand-ups.
Confirming what he guessed, Candy said, “This wasn’t exactly the news story I had planned for today.”
He heard the shift of boots behind him and knew that the SWAT officers had moved stealthily closer, but they weren’t charging forward. They were giving him a little more time to talk her out of jumping. But how much more time before they rushed her? How much more time before she decided to end their conversation on her terms?
“From a presidential appointment to this,” she murmured.
“I’m sorry it turned out this way for you, Candy.”
She came back around to him, her expression scornful. “Not really.”
“Yes, really. I am sorry. About all of it, starting with Pat Junior being assaulted in the park, the victim of a hate crime.”
The clap of rotors alerted them to the helicopter’s approach. She looked out across the rooftops, spotted the chopper coming in low, spotted other SWAT officers taking position on neighboring rooftops.
She turned back to Raley just as he froze in place. Using her distraction to his advantage, he’d taken baby steps toward her and was now only six feet away, almost, but not quite, within arm’s reach.
“I can’t escape, can I, Raley?”
He shook his head and dared to take another step. “No, but you don’t have to die.”
“No, see, I do. Everything I’ve worked for is gone. So what’s the point?”
And with that, she leaned backward.
Raley lunged. The humerus of his left arm snapped when he landed hard on the edge of the roof. The pain caused him to cry out. Or was it a cry of joy, because with his right hand, he was able to catch Candy’s left hand. Ignoring the pain in his arm, he held on. He looked over the edge and saw her kicking thin air, kicking the brick wall, trying to wrest her hand free.
“Let me go, Raley,” she shouted up at him. “For godsake, let me go.”
The SWAT officers moved to either side of him. One dropped his rifle and extended his hand toward Candy’s arm. But she was out of his reach. It was up to Raley to hold on. The cuts on her hand had made it slippery with blood, nearly impossible to hold on to, and yet he maintained his grip.
“Raley, please,” she groaned as she doubled her efforts to pull free.
Blood-slicked skin slipped a fraction of an inch against his palm. His shoulder socket burned with the effort of holding her. His left arm was useless, the pain searing in its intensity. But he gritted his teeth and held on.
“Let go!” she screamed. “I ruined your life, you fool!”
In that instant, he couldn’t think of a single reason why he shouldn’t open his hand.
Their eyes connected. In hers he saw the hopelessness he’d experienced when his life was shattered by her treachery. Driven by single-minded ambition, she had destroyed his life and, for a time, robbed him of all hope.
He held her gaze, staring straight into her eyes as he felt her hand slipping, slipping, slipping, out of his grasp.
Special Agent Miller of the FBI said, “It think that’s it.” He silently consulted his partner, Special Agent Steiner, who gave a nod of agreement.
Miller, a.k.a. Butch, switched off the camcorder. “Thank you, Mr. Gannon. I appreciate your willingness to do this tonight. It could have waited until tomorrow.”
“I wanted to get it over with,” Raley said.
“Gentlemen?” Miller turned to Detectives Clark and Javier, who’d been invited to sit in on Raley’s deposition. Between them they hadn’t said a dozen words throughout the whole proceeding.
Clark asked, “When do we get a copy of the video?”
“First thing tomorrow,” Miller replied.
Javier stood and, without a word, headed for the door. Clark gave them all a curt nod, then followed his partner out.
“Assholes,” Raley said under his breath.
“They get perturbed whenever we horn in on their case,” Miller said, seemingly unfazed by the detectives’ sullen rudeness.
Raley wondered what the two federal agents would think of the nicknames he’d given them. Oddly, each name fit the man—at least as the pair had been portrayed in the movie. Of the two, Miller was more easygoing. Steiner was more sinister. His eyes were sharp and seemed to miss nothing. On appearance alone, he could easily have been mistaken for a hit man.
Steiner had been studying Raley closely for the last several minutes. Now he said, “You don’t look so good.”
Raley knew that to be true. They were sequestered in a small room in the FBI office on Meeting Street, just blocks from where the dramatic events of the afternoon had taken place.
Before the lengthy interview began, he’d caught a glimpse of his reflection in the window. His skin looked pasty. His left arm was in a cast and supported by a sling, his palms were abraded from when he’d landed on the roof, and there were several cuts on his face and arms from broken window glass. George McGowan had given him a black eye that was swollen and tender.
He didn’t even resemble the man he’d been a week ago, but not all the changes were the results of today’s physical ordeals. They also went beyond shaving his beard and trimming his hair. The real change was internal. It had to do with finally settling the matter of all that had happened five years ago. And a lot to do with Britt, who was sitting beside him, close, attentive to his weakening condition, attentive to everything.
“Are you holding up all right?” she asked now, her concern showing.
“Yeah.” He squeezed her hand, which he’d been holding throughout the deposition. For almost three hours he’d talked into the camcorder, telling the FBI agents and the two Charleston PD detectives the whole story, repeating what he’d babbled in a verbal shorthand on the race from George McGowan’s estate.
There in George’s study, it had taken him several seconds to assimilate that the two men whom he’d mistaken for assassins were actually federal agents. He’d dropped George’s pistol as instructed, but he’d made certain they understood, in a very short amount of time, that Candy Mellors was the instigator of several murders—which he was surprised to learn they had already deduced—and that Britt’s life was in imminent danger.
Reacting swiftly, Steiner had offered to wait for other officers to come and take George into custody. Meanwhile Miller had sped toward downtown and, along the way, notified the police of the crisis situation and coordinated an operation to end it, they hoped without casualties.
Raley had insisted on going with Miller and said he would only follow in his own car if the agent refused to take him along. Miller had conceded. It was during that drive—which had seemed agonizingly long—that Raley had told him a sketchy version of everything George had confessed.
Over the last one hundred eighty minutes, he’d given a more detailed account, providing answers to the agents’ many questions. Miller had another, which he asked now. “How did you and Ms. Shelley join forces?”
“I kidnapped her.”
Miller and Steiner glanced at each other with raised eyebrows. “Care to expand on that, Ms. Shelley?” Steiner asked.
“Is it relevant?”
“You tell me,” the agent replied. “Is it?”
“No.”
The two agents looked at each other again. Steiner raised his shoulder in a shrug. Since Raley and Britt were sitting shoulder to shoulder and thigh to thigh, Raley doubted the agents would arrest him for committing that federal offense.
“I have a question for you,” Raley said. He was ready to get out of here. His arm was throbbing, his eye was making his whole head hurt, he badly needed another pain pill, but he didn’t want this meeting to conclude until the agents had all their answers, and he had his. He didn’t want to wake up tomorrow morning dreading another go-round of Q and A.
“How did the FBI get in on this?”
Miller explained. “Routine investigations are conducted when a judge is nominated for the federal district court. Cassandra Mellors’s judicial record is commendable, noteworthy even, which is why she was nominated in the first place. No one expected to find anything out of whack.
“But one of our sharper data analysts brought to our attention that her name was tangentially linked to the investigation of one Suzi Monroe’s death. From that we learned about the fire, the heroes of it, and—oops—the arson investigator’s connection to the girl’s lethal overdose. We learned that, a year after the fire, one of those same heroes was fatally shot in an alley, which remained an unsolved murder.
“So now we have two mysterious deaths, and interestingly, the same people were involved. Again tangentially, but we thought it was hinky. So we dug a little deeper and started looking at Jay Burgess and George McGowan, along with Judge Mellors.”
“That’s what you were doing that night in The Wheelhouse.”
Miller nodded at Britt. “We knew Burgess was sick and didn’t have long to live, but we were keeping him under surveillance all the same. We followed him to the bar. The two of you met, seemed compatible, left together, went to his house.” Chagrined, he looked at Raley. “Steiner and I figured the guy deserved time with a pretty woman, so we knocked off for the night.”
Raley sensed how deeply the agents regretted that decision.
Britt asked, “After Jay was killed, why didn’t you come forward and let the local police know that you were conducting a covert investigation?”
“Well,” Steiner said, “for all we knew, you’d had a lovers’ quarrel with Burgess and snuffed him, just like the police suspected. It could have had nothing to do with the other matter. It was CPD’s jurisdiction, their homicide, their investigation.”
“Besides,” Miller said, “we didn’t want to tip our hand. If Judge Mellors was involved, we didn’t want her to sense she was being investigated and start covering her tracks. And Burgess was a cop. Men in blue can get funny about protecting their own, even their dead own. If they thought we, the bleeping Feebs, were trying to pin a conspiracy on one of their heroes, how much cooperation do you suppose we’d have got?”
“But then you went missing,” Steiner said. “That threw us.”
“You didn’t assume that I’d run away to avoid arrest?” Britt asked.
“It crossed our minds, but by then we’d done further background on you. Clean as a whistle. You didn’t seem the type to skip out, any more than you seemed like a lady who’d smother a guy.”
“Thanks for that,” she said.
“Frankly, we feared the worst,” Miller said. “We were afraid someone had removed you from the scene permanently.”
“Was I among the someones you suspected?” Raley asked. Neither agent picked up that gauntlet, but he wasn’t going to be deterred. “You came looking for me when Britt disappeared. Why? Why did you search my cabin?” He and Britt had already admitted to seeing them there.
“We wanted to talk to you about your old friends Jay and Candy, get a feel for you, get a read on how you felt about them.”
“My ass,” Raley scoffed. “If you’d only wanted to talk, you would’ve stuck around till I showed up.”
Caught in the fib, Miller blushed. Steiner coughed behind his hand. “Okay, we suspected you might have had something to do with Burgess’s murder.”
“And Britt’s disappearance,” Raley said.
Steiner nodded. “That, too. After everything we’d read and heard, we figured you might want vengeance against all of them, including Ms. Shelley. You had motivation, we wanted to check out your opportunity.”
“Did you have a search warrant that day?”
“No, but we had probable cause to go inside.”
“How’s that?”
“We looked in the windows and I saw the women’s clothing scattered across your bed. New clothing. Some of it still in shopping bags. None of our research into you included a woman currently in your life. So when we saw the clothes, we thought we’d better go inside and check it out.”
Drolly, Steiner said, “Turns out our instincts were right. You’d kidnapped her.”
Raley glanced down at Britt, who smiled up at him, then addressed the agents. “Once Raley explained to me how he’d been set up with Suzi Monroe, much as I’d been set up with Jay, we formed an alliance to get to the bottom of it.”
“We figured maybe you two had joined forces,” Miller said. “We saw no signs of struggle. And if a man is about to kill a woman, he doesn’t usually buy her new clothes first.”
Britt said, “We would have explained everything if you’d stayed and identified yourselves. Why did you leave? Raley’s truck was there, you knew we had to be close by.”
“The funeral. We had to get back in time for it. We wanted to see who turned up, gauge reactions and such.” Miller looked at Raley askance, a bit of egg on his face. “We didn’t know you’d marked us until you left the cemetery and it became obvious that you knew we were following you.” Then he looked at Britt. “Nice trick with the tires, by the way.”
“Thank you.”
“When you came charging out of your rooms after her, why didn’t you identify yourselves as FBI?”
“Would you have believed it, raised your hands, and surrendered?” Miller asked.
Remembering him chasing after Britt wearing nothing but his underwear, Raley smiled. “No.”
“I shouted ‘FBI,’” Steiner said, “but you gunned the car. I didn’t have my ID, my weapon, nothing to convince you, and you were aiming that cannon at us.”
“Lucky I didn’t shoot.”
“Yeah, lucky. Today, too.”
Reminded of when he’d faced off against them in George’s study, Raley asked, “What’ll happen to George McGowan?”
“Well, we’ve got the video of your interview with him, but a good defense lawyer will argue it’s not admissible. Except for that cigarette lighter, all the evidence is circumstantial. He’s got big money behind him, so he may be able to buy himself an acquittal.”
“Or maybe he’ll stick to his confession,” Steiner mused aloud.
“Why would he?” Miller asked.
Raley knew why. George might prefer prison to the hell on earth he was living with Miranda and Les. Either way, the man’s situation was pathetic.
“Pat Wickham has said he’ll back up Raley’s statement,” Miller said.
“He no longer has to be afraid of retribution from Candy Mellors,” Britt said. “She had him living in fear for himself and his family.”
In his deposition, Raley had related how he and Britt had ambushed Pat Jr. outside the gay bar and admitted to seeing the agents there. Miller had explained that they were acting on the same hunch that Pat was hiding his sexual orientation and that his secret was somehow linked to the other events.
He and his family had been located at a lake resort in Arkansas. At present, he was in custody, charged with obstruction of justice. Raley felt sorry for him actually, and hoped that, if he was convicted, a merciful judge wouldn’t send him to prison. Raley felt even more compassion for the younger man’s wife and children, perhaps the only real innocents in the whole affair. Their lives would be affected by the scandal; there was no way to avoid it.
“Johnson was apprehended on his way to McGowan’s place,” Miller informed them. “He and Smith are well known to the bureau, by a variety of names. They’ve been flying under the radar for years, protected by people in high places for whom they did dirty work. We’re glad to have them. Neither will ever know another day of freedom.”
“At least Johnson won’t have Cobb Fordyce’s murder on his résumé,” Britt said.
A hospital spokesperson had announced earlier that evening that the attorney general’s condition had improved. Following surgery to remove the bullet, he had regained consciousness. He had recognized his wife and had even spoken her name. Doctors were cautiously optimistic. It remained to be seen how much impairment he would suffer, but at least he was alive and, for the time being, stable.
“As for Cassandra Mellors…” Steiner paused and looked meaningfully at Raley before continuing. “Her superficial wounds have been treated, but the doctors are concerned about her state of mind. She’s being kept at the hospital for observation. She’s under suicide watch. There’s a guard outside her door, a nurse and a police-woman inside the room with her.”
Raley nodded.
A heavy silence descended over them. It was finally broken by Miller. “Nobody would have blamed you, or second-guessed you, Mr. Gannon. The SWAT officers would have attested to your effort to save her. They said that, even at risk to yourself, you refused to let go.”
“He would never have let go,” Britt said. Raley looked at her. Her eyes were soft and liquid. “Not in a million years.”
His throat seized up with emotion over her understanding. He could no more have let go of Candy’s hand and sent her to her death than he could have sprouted wings and flown off the roof. So he’d held on against impossible odds, fighting the relentless pull of gravity and his own physical limitations, maintaining his grip on her slippery hand, and gradually, painfully, pulling her up until the SWAT officers could catch her arms and haul her onto the roof to safety.
And arrest.
“Brave, you jumping out that window after her,” Miller remarked.
“Not brave at all.” Raley explained his familiarity with the building. “I knew when I went through the window I wouldn’t have a long fall.”
“Well, still…,” Miller said, “nobody else jumped through it.” After another brief silence, he stood up quickly and made himself look busy by stacking his file folders. “That’s all for now. Those detectives may want to take their own deposition. You’ll probably be subpoenaed to testify in the upcoming trials. But as far as we’re concerned, we’re finished for now. Go home. Lie down before you fall down.”
With an effort, Raley stood up. Britt helped support him as he shook hands with Miller. “I’m glad I didn’t shoot you.”
The agent grinned. “Me, too.”
Steiner offered to drive them wherever they needed to go, and they accepted. But as they exited the building, the agent drew up short and exclaimed, “What in the Sam Hill…?”