Backfire by Catherine Coulter
“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 herse
“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.”
San Francisco General Hospital
Judge Hunt’s room
Thanksgiving
Nurse Natalie Chase was divorced. Even though her ex was a real loser, she’d loved his name, and since she didn’t have any kids by him, she’d kept it. Thank heaven his gene pool wouldn’t continue through her. She had no close family, only a couple of cousins who lived in Boston, so she always volunteered for holiday shifts. She liked holidays; there was usually something special going on, and she didn’t have to be alone. This year she’d been invited to a Thanksgiving feast like no other she’d seen in a patient’s room, with Judge Hunt and his crew. They were breaking more visiting rules than she cared to think about, but nobody was worried about it, not since it was Judge Dredd and it was Thanksgiving.
Sure, she had to keep an eye on all her other patients, but most of them were with family, chowing down on turkey and dressing if they could. Even her elderly patient with Alzheimer’s was with his daughter, who was snacking on turkey and stuffing while she kept vigil. No one was alone today.
It baffled and angered Natalie that someone would want to kill Judge Ramsey Hunt. He was genuinely nice, a treat to the eyes, and, like everyone else taking care of him, she was thankful today of all days that Judge Dredd was doing so well. Another three or four days, she thought, and he should be well enough to go home. Home, maybe, but not back to his normal life. Not while there was a killer who might try for him again. She couldn’t imagine living with that, couldn’t imagine what his family was going through, knowing that a madman was still out there, waiting for another chance.
At first the TV news had showed a picture of a man, Joe Keats, who’d escaped from the Fairmont a couple of days ago, as the man who’d shot Judge Hunt. And today they were showing the picture of a woman instead, who was supposed to be the shooter. She looked, Natalie thought, a bit like her own mother.
Would there be another picture tomorrow? The news didn’t seem to have any idea why she tried to murder Judge Hunt and the FBI agent, but she knew that by the end of the day there would be talking heads arguing over every detail on TV and plastering the Internet with so many opinions even the mullahs in Iran would see them. She could already recite the words: “Anyone with any information about the whereabouts of either of these people—”
SFPD Officer Gavin Hendricks waved his hand in front of her face. “You look a million miles away. Another slice of turkey?”
She shook her head at him, smiling. He’d been guarding Judge Hunt for the past three days. He was a tall black man with a pitiful excuse for a goatee, she’d told him, and he’d laughed and said it was his father’s fault. She said, “If I eat any more I might pop a button, and that wouldn’t be cool at all. What if an emergency turns up? What if a patient sees me with my pants button popped open? It wouldn’t inspire much confidence.”
“You’re sure, Natalie?” Molly Hunt called out. “We’ve got lots.”
“Thank you, Molly, but if I ate another bite, I’d have to find a bench to sit on because my butt would be too big for a chair.”
Gavin laughed. Natalie saw Molly turn to her husband and touch his arm and then his cheek. She did that every few minutes. A lioness always watching.
The room should have been pandemonium with all the visitors—four guards, Judge Hunt’s family, three kids, and a slew of FBI agents. They’d wheeled out the second bed and taken advantage of the largest patient room in the hospital to set up several folding tables provided by the cafeteria, spread a tablecloth over them, and crammed in a dozen chairs. It was a wonder to see in a hospital room, Natalie thought. The table looked like a family dinner, with everyone in fine spirits, except that many of them were wearing guns and darting their eyes to the door if anyone approached.
Agent Sherlock, the FBI agent who’d been her patient just yesterday, was forking down some of the incredible sausage stuffing, laughing at something her husband said to her. Lucky, lucky woman, Natalie thought. Did she realize how near she’d come to death?
Not the time for grim thoughts, Natalie told herself. She looked back over at Officer Hendricks. He was coming her way, two slices of pumpkin pie on small Thanksgiving paper plates, with whipped cream on top. “I’ve decided both of us will trust our buttons not to pop,” he said, and held a slice of pie out to her.