Backfire (27 page)

Eve’s condo, Russian Hill

Tuesday night

“You’ve got a burn just there.” Harry lightly touched his fingertip to a red spot on Eve’s neck.

She never looked away from him. “I could put some more burn cream on it, or maybe you could kiss it and make it well.”

“Not a good idea,” he said, and took a step back from her.

Harry, Eve, and Griffin had been treated by the EMTs at the Fairmont, had been pronounced good to go, had been debriefed at the Federal Building, and had showered and cleaned up at Harry’s house before he’d brought her back to her condo.

Eve felt punch-drunk, both hyped and exhausted. The weird thing was, this potent mix had her seeing Special Agent Harry Christoff with new eyes. The new eyes really liked what they saw.

Harry knuckled his own eyes. “I keep seeing Xu coming into the suite, and then I hear Griffin yell for him to get his hands in the air. Then everything happens so fast, all at the same time—the explosion of bright light and that god-awful noise, and fire everywhere.

“I still can’t believe Xu was carrying a flash-bang. And he knew exactly what to do with it.”

Eve said, “I want to learn how to use one. Talk about effective; my ears didn’t stop ringing for an hour. It was as if that light slapped right into my brain and I was as good as blind for five minutes.”

Harry said, “Xu certainly came prepared, you have to give him that.”

Eve said, “I don’t have to give him a damned thing. However, I wouldn’t mind shooting him in both knees. I guess you’d have to be in the military to learn how to use a flash-bang.”

Harry said, “No Flash-bang Escape Weekends for civilians?”

“Not that I’ve heard of. You want a beer?”

He shook his head.

Eve waved him into her living room, eased herself down onto the sofa.

Harry sat in the chair opposite her and gave her a brooding look over his steepled fingers. “I’m wondering if the State Department can get the Chinese government to tell us anything about Xu now that he’s blowing up hotel suites and killing people.”

“I doubt they’d even own up to knowing who Xu is. If we pursued it, accused Xu of being a Chinese spy, they’d claim he was probably an innocent bystander the FBI was trying to nail as a scapegoat. I’ll bet the State Department will back off, without more proof, and even then—”

Harry tapped his fingertips together. “I keep asking myself—is there anything we could have done to stop him?”

“If we hadn’t been blinded and mule-kicked, we could have put a dozen bullets in his chest. That would have ended things nicely. At least one of us got him in the arm. I wonder which of us it was. I don’t suppose the medical examiner will want to examine our weapons?”

“If it got out that the M.E. was going to check our SIGs, there’d be a pool started up to see which of us had popped Xu.”

She got up, went into the kitchen. She called out, “You want some Fritos and queso dip?”

Harry laughed. “Sure, why not? I can’t remember the last time we ate.”

Eve brought in a tray with a huge bag of Fritos and a bowl with the queso dip, steaming from the microwave, and set the tray on the coffee table. “Well, come on over and sit next to me unless you want to drag that chair over.”

Harry dragged over the chair opposite the coffee table.

Eve gave him a long look. “I usually like it when a guy is scared of me, but you? You won’t sit next to me on the sofa, you won’t even give me a mother’s kiss on my neck to make my owie better again.”

“Mama didn’t raise me to be stupid.”

She scooped up dip onto a big Frito. “Do you know I overheard Cheney saying you weren’t a nasty git any longer, only nasty.”

“When did you hear that?”

“At the hospital last Friday morning. I was standing in the corridor outside the ICU when you and Cheney came waltzing in.”

“What I really am is a mild-mannered agent, only no one will believe me. Okay, maybe it’s true I haven’t been too much fun for the past year and a half.”

“Amazing, we only met last Friday.”

“We’ve seen each other on the elevators, in the Federal Building garage.”

“Yeah, well, you pretended you were this tough guy who shaved himself with a hunting knife. Hard to reconcile that image with what all of us deputy marshals know to our guts, namely, that FBI agents are all wimpy clones made in the FBI factory.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“It’s common knowledge.”

“You want to know what FBI agents think about the fricking Marshal Service?”

She grinned at him. “Nope.”

When he opened his mouth, she raised her hand. “You asked and I answered, so keep quiet.”

He said, “The few times I’ve seen you, I always thought you were too pretty to be a marshal, since nearly all of them are ex-military buzz-cut hardnoses. And look at you—you wear that black-and-red getup with your butt-kicker boots so you can be one of the boys. Have you found they take you more seriously?”

He was spot-on about that, she thought.

“It’s the boots that win the day,” she said. “No one messes with the boots.”

“The fact is, though,” he continued after eating a Frito, “the unmarried FBI agents keep trying to figure out how to get your attention. Word is, you never give any of us the time of day.”

“Nope, you’re all pantywaists. Who wants to hang around a pantywaist with wingtips on his big feet?”

“Yeah, yeah, blah, blah. You know what it is about you—it’s that blond ponytail and those big blue eyes, makes all the guys want to take you home to Mama.”

“The blond ponytail wouldn’t have anything to do with it. Nope, Mama would admire my black boots.”

He laughed. “Maybe.”

She studied his face a moment and liked what she saw—the hard planes, the sharp cheekbones, and his eyes, green-as-the-Irish-hills eyes. There was an inbred toughness in him. She said, “You know, the past five days have made me understand a little why there were so many wartime marriages. Men and women thrown together in extraordinary circumstances—I guess to survive they needed to reaffirm they were alive by making connections, by making another human being matter to them so they were able to ignore death, if only for a little while.”

Harry said, “Nah, it doesn’t work like that.”

“What? Hey, that was all sorts of philosophical and you say ‘nah’? Haven’t you heard of the bazillion wartime marriages?”

“I think regardless of how people meet, they’re either meant to be together or they’re not.” He ate his Frito, then quickly dipped another into the dip. “I’m starving and I hadn’t even realized it.” He toasted her with it. “Thanks for the best Frito I’ve had in a week.”

“Nothing beats a Frito. So you weren’t such a nasty git before your divorce a year and a half ago? It was the breakup that made you into one?”

“I’ve always been nasty. The git thing, that’s all Cheney.”

“That’s why your wife left you?”

He paused with a Frito an inch from his mouth. “No.”

She cocked her head at him, said slowly, “No, that isn’t what happened, is it?”

“Why do you think that isn’t what happened?”

She said, “I’ve known you only a short time and one thing I see very clearly is that you’re not nasty. You’re an honest man, Harry. You say you’ll do something and you do it. You don’t make excuses when things don’t go right, and you don’t expect to hear any. That’s clearheaded, and it’s tough, but it’s not nasty.

“Well, maybe when I first met you I wanted to punch your lights out because you were posturing like a rooster. I think you enjoyed getting my reaction, you liked rubbing my nose in it, liked reminding me I was
only
the protection detail, not a member of the investigation team.” She ate another chip, never looking away from his face. “Not that I really mind posturing for the fun of it, mind you. You know one of the things I like best about you? You’re funny, you make me laugh. You have a good outlook, Harry.”

“I was shot three years ago in an aborted bank robbery.”

“Where?”

“At the Bank of America on Chestnut.”

She threw a Frito at him. “No, on your body? Where were you shot?”

He gave her a faint smile, stood up, and pulled out his shirt. She looked at a four-inch scar on his left side over his lower ribs. It had to really hurt, she thought. She’d never been shot, only punched a couple of times. She kept looking at him, couldn’t seem to drag her eyes away from that hard disciplined body.

He said as he quickly tucked his shirt back in and sat back down, “She freaked, and couldn’t get past it no matter what I said. Our three-year marriage went downhill fast when I refused to resign from the Bureau. Bottom line, it was her ultimatum.”

He picked the Frito she’d thrown at him off his sleeve. Then he looked at it in his hand and carefully laid it down on the tray. “I’d always heard it’s nearly impossible for cops to stay married—but I’d never thought about it, since my parents have been married forever. I mean, we were both good people, weren’t we? I was in love, and so was she. Before I asked her to marry me we talked about the high divorce rate among cops. I gave her all the stats, quoted a couple of articles. She scoffed at the idea that she—who had just passed the bar—could possibly be swayed by any of that. I told her my hours could be crazy and she said her hours wouldn’t always be her own, either, but she was nothing if not levelheaded, she’d have no problem dealing with the chance of violence bumping into our lives.

“To be honest, the entire time we dated, it was more or less nine-to-five for me. I went out of town only a couple of times to do some undercover, but it didn’t impinge much on our time together. But the threat, the reality of violence, it was always there, always lurking, and I knew it. I simply ignored it.

“I’ll tell you, Eve, it sucks to be a cliché.”

She wouldn’t want to be a cliché, either. He was right, what had happened to them was all too common, and maybe why she hadn’t ever set herself up in the marriage market again. “You want a beer now?”

“Sure.” He got up with her to go to the kitchen. “Sorry to unload my sorry history on you. I didn’t mean to. Actually, I have no idea why it popped out.”

“Thank you for telling me.”

“How old are you?”

“I’ll turn twenty-nine on the twenty-sixth of January.”

“You ever get close to getting married?”

“Yeah, I was married, right out of college. It wasn’t long before I realized I wasn’t going to be the last notch on the moron’s belt. Truth is, after the moron, I don’t think any guy could make it past my dad and my brothers. They’d make hash of him.” She rolled her eyes. “They told me after my little misadventure—that’s what my brothers called my brief marriage—if any guy did me wrong again they’d bury him deep, never to be found.”

She got a couple of beers out of the refrigerator, handed him one. They clicked bottles and drank.

Eve said, “You ready to kiss my owie now and make it well?”

“Yes,” he said, putting his beer on the counter, “I think I am.”

Judge Sherlock’s home

Pacific Heights

Early Thursday morning

Thanksgiving Day

Sherlock opened her eyes to see Dillon standing over her.

A big smile bloomed because, quite simply, how could it not? Sherlock yawned and stretched. “What time is it?”

“A bit after six a.m. How are you feeling?”

Sherlock queried her head. The wound itself throbbed a bit, but there weren’t any voices inside her head screaming punk rock, and that was good.

“Like a million bucks. You tell a great bedtime story, Dillon. Every bone in my body is humming ‘Ring My Bell
.
’ What in heaven’s name are you doing up? Helping my parents with the turkey?”

“No, Molly is keeping the turkey to herself. Your mom’s in the kitchen, though, making sausage stuffing for you carnivores and a nice cornbread stuffing for me. I woke up a couple of hours ago, realized we’d all overlooked something, and went to work on MAX.”

She studied his face. “You know who he is? The man who shot me yesterday? The man who tried to kill Ramsey twice?”

He climbed into bed beside her, pulled her against him, and kissed her hair. “It’s all pretty straightforward once you look at it the right way.”

He was big and warm, his heartbeat steady against her chest. “What do you mean, ‘the right way’?”

“Remember, it was you, Sherlock, who suggested a long prison stay fit the bill, someone who’d had time on his hands to plan the bizarre attacks on Ramsey. And we knew the person who had that note delivered to me at the Hoover Building had joked to Ted Moody about calling him the Hammer—prison slang.”

She nodded.

“And Dane and Ruth have been checking inmates released since the first of this year, looking to find a father or a brother, someone with a relationship to one of our cases who was out now, who could be looking for revenge.”

Sherlock said, “Ruth told me she and Dane were going nuts, that they couldn’t find a prisoner who fit the profile.”

Savich said, “There’s a very good reason for that. I realized the one case that remotely connected Ramsey to me was more than five years ago, though I wasn’t all that involved. Remember Father Sonny Dickerson, the pedophile who kidnapped Emma?”

Sherlock clearly remembered the obsessed ex-priest who’d sexually abused Emma until she’d escaped and Ramsey had found her and hooked up with Molly to save her. So much violence, so much deception, and it had all ended in Dickerson’s murder in the hospital. And now Dillon knew. Sherlock snuggled closer, waiting. She enjoyed a good punch line as much as he did.

“I did a search on all of Father Sonny’s relatives. His father’s dead, his only other sibling, a brother, is dead. There was only one relative left who wasn’t dead, and that’s Sonny’s mother, in jail for killing her husband. She’s the Hammer.”

That was a kicker. “You’re kidding me—Sonny Dickerson’s mom shot me in the head?”

“Yes. We all believed it was a man, of course, since everyone who saw her—from Ted Moody, who brought us that note in the Hoover Building, to the lady who rented her the Zodiac—described a man. We even heard what we all thought was a man’s voice on that telephone message to Molly, never doubted it was Xu.

“She’s got a gravelly voice she’s learned to control, and she knows how to disguise herself as a man. She let us believe all the attempts on Ramsey’s life were Xu until Tuesday, when she shot you with Xu on the ground under you.” Sherlock came up on her elbow. “I just can’t get over it—Father Sonny Dickerson’s mother. But, Dillon, why didn’t her name pop right out when Ruth and Dane did their search, no matter if she’s female?”

“Because her name is Charlene Cartwright. Like I said, she was in jail for ten years for the murder of her husband, evidently a miserable human being who not only abused Sonny and his now-deceased brother but also his wife, Charlene. She snapped and shot a dozen bullets in his face with his own gun.

“From the court transcript I read of her trial in Baton Rouge, I think her shooting him was justified. I don’t know why her lawyer didn’t plead self-defense, but he didn’t. He went for the SODDI defense—Some Other Dude Did It—but the jury didn’t buy it, and no wonder, since there was so much evidence against her. They wanted her to serve hard time, and so she did. She was given fifteen years, paroled after ten.

“Father Sonny was murdered when she’d been in prison for about five years, so she had ample time to figure out who to blame and how to carry out her revenge.”

Sherlock said, “Why did she target you? Of course I remember most everything about the case, but you were hardly involved.”

“That’s why I didn’t make the connection sooner. When I found her, I realized that she saw me as making it all possible because of the facial-recognition program I modified from my friend at Scotland Yard. Remember we didn’t believe the sketch we inputted into the program would pay off? But it did, the program spit Father Sonny out right away.”

Sherlock said, “So Charlene read about the facial-recognition program, saw your name and your connection to Ramsey, and decided you were the one who fingered her son, that without you, he wouldn’t have been caught, which is totally wrong. Father Sonny tried to take Emma again in Monterey. In the end, that’s what brought him down.”

“Yeah, but we’re talking a very angry woman here.”

“Angry but irrational,” Sherlock said. “She used you as her focus, the hub of the wheel. She was going to punish you by killing those who mattered to you, as you had hurt her by supposedly killing her son.”

“Looks like. I guess there was no way she could know Father Sonny kidnapped the wrong little girl when he took Emma since he was ordered killed by Emma’s grandfather for it. She must have believed Ramsey killed him, that I and everyone else protected him, covered it up, and that’s why he was number one on her hit list.”

Sherlock recited, “
For what you did you deserve this.
I wonder how many lines she played around with before she came upon this one. It sounds highfalutin, doesn’t it? Like God is going to smite you and you deserve it. Why isn’t her name Dickerson?”

“It was a common-law marriage, and she kept her maiden name—Cartwright. She served her ten years in Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women in Saint Gabriel, outside of Baton Rouge, until four months ago when she was paroled, completely rehabilitated, and, citing her exemplary behavior, willing to do whatever was asked of her, according to the warden himself. She was, naturally, a clerk in the prison library, spent many hours in there ‘studying,’ according to the parole board records.”

Sherlock said, “And I was second on her list after Ramsey? To hurt you?”

Savich nodded. “She must have decided to put Ramsey on hold, since she realized there was no way she could get to him again in the hospital, not after the elevator debacle.”

He shook his head. “I can’t get over her preparation for that attempt. She even took Boozer’s blood, remember, because she wanted us to think she was wounded, and that she was a man. She wanted to play with us.”

“And Boozer described a man as well.”

“Well, we thought Xu was a woman for a very long time, what with that Sue name mix-up. Turns out we were wrong on both counts.”

Sherlock said, “That stunt in the elevator. Amazing, what she did.”

“She failed, thanks to Eve and Kevlar.”

Sherlock said, “Dillon, how do you know it was Charlene, though? I mean, for sure?”

“There were samples of her handwriting in the trial record. They matched the notes she sent us. And she’s wanted in Louisiana again, for cutting out on her parole officer two months ago.”

Sherlock said, “She must have been following the FBI van, no other explanation for why she was there and ready to shoot just when I was out and visible at the Fairmont.”

“She would have had no idea you’d jump out of the van and go after Xu. That part of it was lucky for her.”

“Lucky for both of them,” Sherlock said. “And isn’t that a happy thought?”
If her aim had been a hair better, I’d be dead.
Sherlock’s hand was a fist on his chest. He felt her fingers tangle in his chest hair. He pressed lightly, flattening her palm.

Savich said, “I’ve got her photo. It will make a huge difference knowing who we’re looking for. You know, Charlene doesn’t look like a killer, not really. I saw two photos, one before her trial and one taken two years ago. She didn’t look beaten down anymore, like a battered wife. She looked fierce, the set of her head and shoulders was proud, like she was on a mission for justice, like some old Joan of Arc.”

Sherlock pushed off the covers. “Let me see.”

“No, you stay put. I’ll bring MAX in here to show you.” He felt her hand moving over his chest. He leaned down, kissed her.

“No, don’t bring in MAX just yet,” she said against his jaw. She kissed his throat. “Not yet.”