Act of Betrayal (9 page)

“No, but I know your habits. You’re eating lunch at the Chinese place, Subway, or Pizza Hut. Got to be one of those three.”

“You’re right, Mr. Know-It-All. And did you also know that Lieutenant Wall is with me?”

“Christ, I’ll hang up. Don’t tell him it was me. I’m going AWOL for a few days. You said my name aloud, didn’t you? Shit.”

“Idiot. Even I’m not that stupid. I have privacy at the moment.”

“Oh, you’re in the John. Well, take your time, then. Just tell him you were freshening up. Men are trained not to question that.”

PJ, elbows on her knees, left hand holding the phone to her ear, squeezed the bridge of her nose with the fingers of her right hand. She couldn’t believe she was sitting in the bathroom having a ridiculous conversation with a man wanted for questioning in a murder—a man who had shared her bed, no less, although to her knowledge nothing had come of it beyond adolescent groping.

“Do you have any idea what’s been happening here,” she said, “while you’ve been gallivanting off to Chicago?”

“No, but I’m sure you’ll tell me in your own sweet way.”

PJ reined in her anger, and all of her many questions for him, and summarized in a few sentences the hit-and-run and the fact that he was a wanted man. She kept her voice low, imagining Wall with his ear pressed against the ladies’ room door.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “A girl dead. I’m so sorry to hear that. You’ve got to believe me. I had nothing to do with that girl’s death. I wasn’t even in St. Louis at the time. You believe me, don’t you?”

The pain in his voice was like slivers of glass twisting in her stomach.

“I want to, Leo. Why don’t you turn yourself in and explain everything?”

“I can’t do that, Doc. First he took my son, and now he’s framing me, and goddamn it, that girl died for it. I won’t let him get away with it. I swear I won’t.”

“Who? Who’s framing you? Do you know a Ginger Miller?”

“I shouldn’t have said that. Forget about that. Who’s Ginger Miller?”

She told him about the notes in Rick’s pocket, omitting their glued-together condition. There was no verbal reaction, but she could practically hear his brain ticking.

“I’ll be in touch,” he said. “Don’t tell Wall I called you. Give me three more days before you tell Wall anything. You can do that for me, can’t you? Three days?”

“Schultz! Give me something to go on,” PJ frantically whispered into the phone. “I can’t help you unless—”

“You stay out of this, Doc. This is way, way over your head. I didn’t kill that girl. I swear it. You gotta trust me. Three days, you hear me?”

The connection was broken.

PJ silently cried a few tears of frustration and helplessness, then splashed water on her face and went out to finish her lunch and somehow not blurt everything out to Howard Wall.

Schultz hung up the pay phone and sat in the booth for a couple of minutes, immobilized with grief and anger. It hadn’t occurred to him that the strike would be a triple whammy, even though the voice on the phone had warned of more to come. His son dead, an innocent girl’s life taken, and he himself framed for a cold-blooded murder. Rick’s horrible death was bad enough by itself.

If I was meant to be devastated, all right, you can stop already.

And he’d lied to PJ, probably just the first of many lies before this was over, one way or another. He had been in St. Louis at the time the girl was killed, not three hundred miles away in Chicago, as he had claimed. He’d been at the St. Louis airport, waiting for his flight to Dallas. He couldn’t tell PJ that, because he was afraid that doing so might put her life in danger from the asshole who was after him. The less she knew about his whereabouts the better.

It had been a busy night. From home he had driven to a place called Secure Archives, where he kept a rental box. Secure Archives offered private storage, like safe-deposit boxes for those who wanted access outside banking hours. The company offered a range of sizes, from something the right size to hold a few canceled checks or letters from a lover to room-size storage for businesses that wanted to keep their old records, or backups of critical computer files, off-site.

There was no night attendant at Secure Archives, but that didn’t matter. They had an elaborate security system that required a retinal scan plus an actual key. It wasn’t a cheap service.

Schultz carried the key in his wallet at all times.

Inside his rental box there were a hundred gold coins, shiny mint condition American Eagles. He loaded the coins into a small carry-on bag that he kept in the trunk of the Pacer. It had taken him years, with his limited financial resources, to accumulate the coins. Another reason for the length of time was so that the funds were never missed by his wife, Julia. She probably would have gotten the wrong impression. When a man saves up money and hides it from his wife, it usually means hanky-panky.

Fanny Obermeier, a first-class fence for gold and gems, didn’t even grouse too much when she was awakened at midnight by a phone call from Schultz. Late-night phone calls were not unheard of in her business. In consideration of their long-term friendship, she gave him seventy-five cents on the dollar for the coins, on the condition that he not spread that outrageous fact around or her other clients would want the same deal. Fat chance of that.

Getting three sets of false identification wasn’t quite as easy. It took him five hours and used up not only ten thousand dollars of his cash fund (he got the bulk discount for purchasing more than two) but a couple of favors called in as well.

He had dropped his car off in front of his house, resisting the temptation to go inside and pack a few things, even personal mementos, all the little things that defined his home life. What was the point? If he made it back, they’d be there waiting for him. If he didn’t, well, it wasn’t as if he had anybody to inherit them. It dawned on him that he was a dead branch on the family tree now, with no one to carry on to the next generation.

Schultz walked a couple of blocks and got on a bus. He rode from place to place, transferring often and checking for a tail. As he rode, he began the process of compacting his grief and anger and fear into a tight little ball that took up residence in his gut. There would be time for all that later, assuming there was a later. When he was sure he wasn’t being followed, he took the public rail system, the MetroLink, to the airport. He chose his first destination by looking at the monitors that listed departure times. It turned out to be Dallas.

What had started out last night as a random thought when he sat in the bar with PJ—that someone was after him and had used his son’s death as the opening shot in a vicious game—had turned into the stomach-churning truth. He had dismissed that thought as paranoia until he heard the message on his answering machine, and the thought had sprung out like a hunting cat lying in wait. He was being targeted, indirectly at first, through his son and a girl who was a stranger, but that was bound to change. Whoever was after him wouldn’t hesitate to use his loved ones against him. They already had, in fact. That meant Julia was in certain danger. He had dealt with that with a phone call to her, setting in motion a plan they had discussed years ago. She had poked fun at the time, only five years into their marriage, and he had grown increasingly annoyed at her reluctance to take the possibility seriously.

In his many years of detective work, Schultz had encountered some of the vilest misfits of society, and put a lot of them away in prison. But prison terms didn’t last forever, and inevitably some of those criminals walked the streets again. In most cases, long prison sentences had turned them into ineffectual old men with no fire in their bellies for revenge. But all it took was one. One son of a bitch who blamed Schultz for having the audacity to throw a kink into his criminal doings, and who carefully tended thoughts of vengeance over the years.

As far as PJ was concerned, he thought he could keep her out of harm’s way, if she would just listen to him for a change.

He wondered if he could do the same for himself.

Schultz went to the departure gate, getting there just in time for boarding. He was on the second leg of his trip to anonymity, flying from Dallas to Philadelphia.

His small carry-on bag seemed to pull at his arm. The weight of a child-size coffin and a family’s grief were packed inside, ever since his phone call with PJ when he learned about the death of Caroline Bussman.

The flight attendant glanced at his boarding pass as he entered the airplane, smiled, and said, “Have a nice flight, Mr. Anderson.”

He had a window seat. Trying to keep his breathing even and steady, he watched Dallas grow small beneath him. His chest hurt, and he thought he knew why.

A hand had reached out from his past and was trying to squeeze the life from his heart.

T
HE AFTERNOON CRAWLED BY
for PJ. She sat at her desk, enhancing her simulation and waiting for news, her mind busily constructing scenarios that would explain the conversation with Schultz. She had gotten through the remainder of lunch with Wall by hurriedly finishing her sandwich and then telling him that she was upset over the death of the girl and would appreciate being left alone for a few hours—things were moving too fast, she said, and she needed some time to catch up. He gave her an odd look, but accepted what she told him at face value. It was, as far as her memory served, the only time in her life that she had trotted out her “fragile feminine nature”—a fiction that some women keep on tap for situations they’d rather avoid. It probably wouldn’t have worked with anyone at the department except Wall, and she wasn’t even sure it had actually worked on him. He was probably just humoring her.

The copies of the notes from Ginger were tacked on the corkboard on the wall directly in front of her. PJ wondered what the forensic handwriting analyst would have to say. She knew that the report might include insights into the personality of the writer, and even her state of mind at the time the notes were written. Interesting, and certainly a contribution to the psychological profile PJ would attempt to develop for Ginger, but not the crucial items she wanted to know. Age couldn’t be accurately determined by graphology, or left-handedness, or even, with absolute certainty, the sex of the writer. Nor could it snap a picture, which is what PJ really wanted: something solid to hold in her hands.

PJ made a note to herself to check on the possibility of boyfriends for Rick. They had been going on the assumption that Ginger was a woman, but the handwriting couldn’t prove that conclusively, and the assumption could blind them to other possibilities. Maybe there were homosexual contacts before or during Rick’s prison stay.

PJ wished she could talk it over with Schultz. Since he had come blazing back into his son’s life after years of opting out of parental responsibilities, Schultz had been watching the young man closely. He might know about homosexual inclinations, even if he had pushed those observations under the rug and she had to pry them out of him. He might even know Ginger, or at least point them in the right direction. But he was off on some inexplicable adventure of his own, and she had no way to communicate with him until he initiated the contact.

His conversation with her had been disturbing in a number of ways. She didn’t mind him running to Julia’s—in fact, it seemed a compassionate thing to do—but he could have let her or someone else know what was up. Notifying someone seemed so basic that it was hard to believe Schultz hadn’t done it.

But I’ve never seen him in these circumstances. Not even close.

She thought it was totally wrong of him not to face up to the hit-and-run charge. If he had been with Julia in Chicago, then there was a simple explanation for the crime that had occurred in St. Louis, one that didn’t involve him. His car had been stolen and the thief, maybe drunk or high on drugs, had accidentally struck the child. Everything could be cleared up. But disappearing made him look guilty.

Could he have done it? PJ wanted to trust him, but she remembered that Wall had told her about drinking binges when things went sour for him. He could have run the girl down after a full night of drinking, and be in denial about it.

When her phone rang, she jumped. Schultz? Would he call her at the office?

“Dr. Gray, it’s Julia Schultz.”

“Mrs. Schultz,” PJ said. Her mind was clicking fast, trying to make the best of the opportunity to speak to anyone named Schultz. “I’m so glad to hear from you. Have you spoken to Leo lately?” She slipped the question in innocently, she thought.

“No, not since noon, when I drove him to the train station.”

“The police haven’t contacted you yet?”

“I already know about my son’s death,” she said, her voice cracking slightly. “Leo told me, and then he came up here. We talked all night. I was so glad to see him.”

“So you haven’t heard the latest? Where are you now?”

“I’m at the lakefront with my friend James. We’ve been watching the sailboats. I wanted to get away from the house.” There was a pause. “Heard what latest?”

“Why are you calling me now?” PJ countered.

“Leo asked me to call you this afternoon and tell you he was on his way back to St. Louis. His train left at one-thirty. I don’t know how long it takes for the trip.”

“Mrs. Schultz, I have some more news. I hate to spring this on you, but it’s vital that you know. A little girl died this morning after being struck by a car. The police are fairly sure it was Schultz’s car.”

There was a longer pause. “That’s not possible. He wasn’t there. I got a call at three A.M. to pick him up at the train station. He was with me until noon. He wasn’t even in St. Louis this morning.” Her voice had gotten shriller with each sentence.

“Take it easy, Mrs. Schultz. I’m sure there’s a good explanation, but right now it appears that Schultz’s car was the vehicle involved. And he was tentatively identified as the driver.”

“That can’t be!”

“It’s important for you to know that the Chicago police are looking for you for questioning about him. You need to tell your story. I want you to get off the phone now, and call the police. Tell them where you are. You’ll be picked up in a few minutes, I’m sure. The best thing you can do for Leo is tell the police—”