Backfire by Catherine Coulter
Molly blew out a breath. “The jerk. What will happen to him?”
“Probably not much,” Harry said. “A bail hearing. Maybe a plea bargain.”
Eve said, “Now that the excitement’s over, Harry and I can start taking a look around outside. Agents Savich and Sherlock will be here any time now. If you want to go back to the hospital, Molly, go right ahead.”
Harry said, “I think it’d be a good idea for you guys to have some protection right now, not wait until Judge Hunt is home from the hospital. They can keep the Bobby Bacons of the world out of here.”
“The media, too,” Eve said. She’d assumed there’d already be coverage here. She’d been wrong. She pulled out her cell phone.
Sea Cliff
Friday afternoon
It was late afternoon and chilly, with only a few wispy tails of fog coming through the Golden Gate when Savich and Sherlock joined Eve and Harry in the Hunts’ backyard. Sharp gusts of wind blew off the water. It was too cold to think much about the incredible view.
Savich said to Harry, “The SFPD out front aren’t fooling around. They stopped us and looked us over pretty closely since they didn’t know who we were.”
Harry said, “There was a paparazzo here who caused a commotion only a half-hour ago. The police are here to keep everyone else off the property. Deputy Marshal Barbieri here—Eve—will be heading up security.”
Savich said, “Good to know. I can see from that police tape and the height of the stone wall pretty much where Ramsey had to be standing when he was shot. He said he saw a Zodiac anchored off his little slice of beach. He didn’t mention hearing anything, which means the shooter had to have motored in before Ramsey came out, and waited. Ramsey is about my height, and he was shot from the rear under his right shoulder blade, with the exit wound higher.” He looked over the wall and studied the terrain below. “Maybe sixty to seventy feet up from the rocks, with a steep angle down.”
“Have you heard about the rock with a newspaper photo of Judge Hunt tied to it, his face marked through with an X?” Harry said, and pointed.
“We’ve heard,” Savich said, looking over at the bush.
“The conundrum is, do we have two people, the shooter from the beach and someone else who dropped the rock up here? Seems like an awfully risky thing to do just to leave a message. There’s an active neighborhood watch, according to Mrs. Hunt, that she herself helped start five years ago. Even though it was near midnight, there’s a chance one of the neighbors would have seen a second perp.”
Eve said, “You can bet someone in a neighborhood like this one would have gone on alert if they saw a stranger near Ramsey’s property. I’d wager my Sunday hat if the shooter dropped the message, he came up the trail from the beach on Mr. Sproole’s property next door and over his fence into that backyard, since that’s the only trail for a good distance. And if he risked Mr. Sproole seeing him, then why would he bother to shoot him from down below in the first place? Why not right here, then drop the rock and head back down to that Zodiac? It’s a conundrum, like Harry said.”
Sherlock said, “Show me where they found that rock.”
Eve touched the leaves about halfway down the huge hydrangea and pushed them aside. “I wasn’t here, but that flag marks the spot, there.”
Sherlock turned to Harry. “You were here when the rock was found. Tell me how the rock was set under the hydrangea. Did it look carefully placed, or like it was simply tossed there, like an afterthought?”
Harry said, “The note attached to the rock was actually upside down and set partially into that soft soil. It looked freshly placed, not covered by any dirt or leaves. The forensic team didn’t find it until it was full daylight, because the rock was under the hydrangea.”
Sherlock stuck her hand in among the leaves, felt around with her fingers. Then she went down on her haunches and continued to carefully poke around inside the hydrangea.
She looked up and cocked her head to one side, something Savich had seen her do many times, a sure sign she was picturing what had happened. “How did the shooter know Ramsey would be outside, by himself, late Thursday night? Surely he didn’t simply hang around to see if his target happened to come outside? So did Ramsey have a habit of coming out here at night by himself? To look at the Marin Headlands, the Golden Gate?”
Eve pulled her cell out of her pocket and dialed. “Molly? Did Ramsey have a habit of spending a few minutes outside every night, before bed?”
She listened. “Thank you. That helps. I’ll tell you later, I promise. We’re still out here at the house trying to make sense of how this all happened. I’ll see you soon.”
She punched off, slipped the phone back in her red jacket pocket. “Yes, every night. Molly said it was a ritual, that Ramsey came out sometimes even in the rain. She said it made him feel blessed to be able to look out from his own Wuthering Heights, like it was the center of the world.”
Harry said, “That means the shooter, or the people who hired him, knew that. They had to know his family well, or they had to be watching his house long enough to be sure he would be there. Are the Cahills even a possibility? Could they have found out a detail like that about Ramsey’s habits from jail?”
Eve said, “You’re right. How many people could have known about Ramsey’s habits at night, in his own backyard? And Ramsey was shot within twenty-four hours of his closing down the trial. That’s a small window of opportunity for the Cahills.”
“So what is it you’ve been thinking about down there, Sherlock?” Savich asked.
She pulled her arm out of the hydrangea bush. “I’ve been thinking about why the picture, why the message. Someone seeing it sitting handily under the bush, not twenty feet from where Ramsey fell, might conclude we’ve got two people involved, as Harry said. But if the second man’s job was to plant the picture for the police to find, to make some sort of statement, why on the ground under the bush? And what message were they sending?”
“The first impression it leaves,” Eve said, “is that Ramsey was shot because of what he’d done as a judge, because of his reputation and what it means to people. The crossed-out picture is a sort of in-your-face sneer; that’s what Harry thought.”
“I suppose,” Harry said, “that it could be some kind of misdirection, to point us away from the trial or from some personal motive.”
Sherlock nodded. “Here’s the deal. I agree the Xerox itself could be misdirection, but what about where it was found? It makes it seem like there were two people involved, but the fact is there was only the shooter, and he was on the beach.”
Harry said, “Then how’d the rock get here? Did the guy climb up the cliff to drop it under the bush, then scramble back down to the beach and climb back aboard his Zodiac before the cops got here?”
Sherlock smiled. “There’s a freshly broken branch inside that bush, and I doubt it was one of our forensic team who broke it. Something heavy broke it from behind, from the rear, and it’s maybe two feet directly up from where the flag on the ground marks where they found the rock. That means the rock wasn’t just laid on the ground under the bush, it hit the bush hard.”
Savich said, “So it came from a distance.” He looked down over the wall again. “It’s too far down to throw it up and hit the bush with much force. But a small rock could easily be shot up here with a slingshot, say. One of those leather Trumark models they use to hunt jackrabbits and such. It would reach up here easily, aimed at the hydrangea, a nice big target. Good going, Sherlock.”
Eve stared at her. “How’d you think to even look for that?”
Sherlock said matter-of-factly, “There had to be a solution to Harry’s conundrum, and this was the only one I could think of. The shooter was careful, he studied Ramsey and picked his spot carefully, so it didn’t make sense he’d give up that advantage by climbing up the trail to drop a
“Amazing,” Eve said. “So much for our second perp.” But Harry wasn’t convinced.
Sherlock said, “Answer me this, Agent Christoff. If there was a second man, why didn’t he come out from his hidey-hole to make sure Ramsey was dead? No, what the shooter wanted was to kill Ramsey, and didn’t care too much if he missed with that rock. In the grand scheme of things, that attempt to sneer at us, to misdirect us, or whatever, wouldn’t have worked if we didn’t find the rock. So what?”
Everyone chewed on that. Harry said, “Okay, one shooter, then. I can’t get over the timing—Ramsey postponed the trial and he gets shot. It’s got to be the Cahills behind this, or someone they’re involved with. The timing makes it too coincidental, and I, for one, don’t believe in coincidences.”
“I don’t, either,” Savich said. “But as Sherlock pointed out, a stranger couldn’t predict Ramsey would be standing out here exactly when he needed him to, and so someone’s been studying him for at least a week, I’d say.”
Eve rubbed her hands over her arms. “Someone who followed him around for a week? That’s hard to take in.”
Harry said, “Okay, say it isn’t the Cahills. But the timing is still what it is—even if it was planned for some time, someone may be cashing in on a wonderful opportunity, since the Cahills are hanging over the crime scene like a black cloud.”
“Judge Hunt closing down the trial was mentioned on the local news at noon yesterday,” Eve said. “If someone had already planned to kill him, they moved very fast.”
“There’s another big question with the Cahills,” Savich said. “The way it looks now, there’ll be a mistrial because the federal prosecutor may have been compromised, and now he’s missing. Ramsey’s being shot doesn’t change that. It will all begin again for them, with a different set of players.”
Eve said, “Molly said that was one of the first things out of Ramsey’s mouth when he woke up. Why shoot him? A judge’s job is to be impartial, unlike the prosecutor who’d spent months preparing for the trial. What difference did it make to the Cahills who was sitting up there in the black robe?”
Eve looked over at the crime scene tape that marked where Ramsey had fallen. “Whoever it was made one big fat mistake.”
Everyone looked at her.
“The shooter didn’t manage to kill Ramsey. He failed. Now what’s he going to do? Try again? If it was the Cahills who targeted Ramsey, for whatever reason, they’ve already won, because he’s out of the picture for the near future. What if it was someone else?”
“That’s why we’ve got to protect him, Eve,” Harry said.
“No one will hurt Judge Ramsey Hunt on my watch,” Eve said. “No one.”
Sherlock said, “I’ll be checking on the Zodiac, and Cheney has feelers out for any word about a shooter for hire.”
“We need to talk to the Cahills,” Eve said. “Regardless, they’re certainly people of interest. It’s a place to start.”
Judge Sherlock’s home
Pacific Heights, San Francisco
Friday evening
Sherlock’s eyes were closed as she listened to Emma play George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue on her parents’ magnificent Bösendorfer grand piano, which had been purchased for Sherlock when she was about Emma’s age. When Emma hit the final notes, there was a long moment of silence, then applause, Sherlock’s parents the loudest.
“It’s been too long since I’ve listened to you play,” Judge Corman Sherlock said. “Thank you, Emma.”
Harry couldn’t believe what he had just heard. An eleven-year-old kid, her thick dark brown hair veiling her face, had knocked his socks off. How could those small hands play with such passion and purity, even reach all those racing chords, those endless runs and trills?
Evelyn Sherlock was still smiling. “That was grand, Emma. Thank you for the preview. We’ll be there to hear you at the symphony, of course.”
Emma gave them a small smile, but it soon fell away. “I don’t know how well I’ll play with Daddy in the hospital.” She looked down at her clasped hands. “He smiled at me this afternoon, but it was so hard for him, and I knew it hurt him.”
Eve said, “Say your dad can’t be with you at Davies Hall. We’ll fix it so he can be listening to you on a live feed.”
“But what if something happens? What if he’s still in the hospital? How could I play then?”
Eve said, “If he isn’t home—and believe me, that’s unlikely, since your daddy’s such a tough dude—we’ll take the live feed to the hospital and hook it up there. Can’t you see all the nurses and doctors, all the other patients cramming into his room to see you play? Believe me on this. Wherever your daddy happens to be in a week and a half, you know he’ll be right onstage with you.”
What a perfect thing to say, Savich thought. Eve didn’t even hint that Ramsey could possibly be well enough to actually attend her performance, and that was smart. He squeezed Sherlock’s hand.
Emma tried to smile at Eve. “That means I can’t make a single mistake.”
“You never do,” Eve said.
Sherlock said, “Do you like the Bösendorfer, Emma? My parents got it for me a very long time ago.”
“It’s too bad you aren’t here very often to play it,” Emma said. “Mrs. Mayhew—she’s my teacher—she says a piano has to be played or it goes stale.”
“Do you think the Gershwin sounded stale?”
Emma shook her head. “No, it sounded perfect. I’m used to my Steinway, but I like this piano, too. I wish Mama were here.”
Eve said, “Look at the big picture, Emma. Your daddy needs her attention right now more than we do.”
Emma thought about that and nodded. She touched middle C. “The action’s perfect.”
Evelyn Sherlock said, “Emma, would you like to have Lacey play for you?”
Emma’s eyes shone. “Oh, yes. Do you know Bach’s Italian Concerto?”
Sherlock rolled her eyes. “I haven’t played that killer in a long time. I can feel my fingers yelling at me not to try it.”
Harry said, “Tell your fingers to man up. I’d sure like to hear you play, Sherlock.”
Sherlock took Emma’s place at the black piano bench. She played some scales, ran some chords, and realized the feel of the keys on this magnificent instrument was a deeply embedded memory that came back quickly. Still, she wasn’t about to try the first movement, far too wild and hairy without practice. She played the second movement, slow, evocative, and sorrowful. As she played, she felt the power of the music burrow into her. When she finished, Sherlock slowly lifted her hands from the keyboard, letting herself settle for a moment, another embedded memory she would thankfully never lose.
Emma jumped to her feet. “Oh, goodness, that was beautiful. I can play that movement, but not like that, not like it makes everyone want to cry.”
“The last time you played that second movement for me, I cried,” Eve said.
“You’re easy, Aunt Eve,” Emma said, and gave her a fat kid grin.
“Yeah, your music is my downfall.”
Sherlock hugged her. “You’re eleven years old, Emma. You’ll make everyone weep when you have more life under your belt.”
—
Molly arrived at nine o’clock to take the children home. Savich brought down Cal and Gage, both deeply asleep, one draped over each shoulder. He saw Molly speaking quietly to Sherlock. Molly even managed a smile. Excellent. Then it was his turn.
An SFPD black-and-white was parked across the street to follow Molly home.
Sherlock asked, “What were you talking to Molly about, Dillon?”
“Ramsey was more lucid this evening. He described the Zodiac to Molly again.” He cupped his wife’s face in his big hands. “Cheney will find it. Now, I don’t think I woke Sean up
Russian Hill
Friday night
It had been a lovely evening, Eve thought, as she unlocked the front door of her condo on Russian Hill, only a ten-minute drive this time of night from the Sherlock home on Mulberry in Pacific Heights. She couldn’t get over Agent Sherlock playing the piano like that. She pictured Agent Savich—no, Dillon, he’d told her—his eyes never leaving his wife’s face. He said that after you shared a dinner of barbecued pork spareribs and finger licking, only first names sounded right. “But you’re a vegetarian,” she’d said to him. “You didn’t eat any of those delicious ribs.”
He said, “Licking your fingers is the operative image here.”
Eve wondered what Harry had thought of the odd evening—an FBI agent playing Bach, and no talk of who had tried to kill Ramsey. When she’d mentioned that to Dillon, he’d said only, “Don’t you think your brain does better when it gets to stir a different kind of stew for a bit?”
Good people, she thought, full of life, so much of it. Some people seemed to have more of life in them than others, and that included Sean, brought downstairs after dinner, beaming at all of them in his Transformers pajamas.
She saw Harry in her mind’s eye, frankly astonished when Emma had played Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Then he’d closed his eyes and leaned his head back on the chair cushion as he listened to Sherlock play that incredibly sad second movement.
She heard a noise, something close, something dangerous—she jerked around, her hand going to the Glock at her waist. Harry said, raising his arms, palms toward her, “Don’t shoot me. It’s only ten o’clock. I thought we should talk. Sorry to alarm you, I thought you saw me following you here.”
Her heart was pounding. She couldn’t make him out clearly, but she recognized his voice. “I can’t believe I didn’t hear you sooner. I can hear ants nesting. I never noticed you behind me, and here you were driving that hot Shelby.”