Joel Goldman - Motion to Kill

Dazed, Mason raised his head. Kelly was sprawled facedown in the dirt. Mason crawled to her. She was conscious, her hands digging into the soil. He rolled her over, pulling her into his arms. Tears ran down her soiled cheeks as the flames swept through her cabin.

Above the roaring blaze, Mason heard more automatic fire. He looked in the direction of the shots and saw Camaya riddle the tires on the Trans-Am and the pickup from the open passenger window of the Escalade. As they sped away, Blues ran after them, emptying his magazine, his shotgun useless at that distance.

Kelly stiffened, clotting off her tears. She and Mason were stunned by the power of the blast but otherwise in one piece. The searing heat from the fire drove them from their rock pile. Once clear, she called out the rest of the Pope County Sheriff’s Department, the fire department, and Doc Eddy.

Blues and Mason walked the quarter mile to the county road to wait for them. Kelly stayed behind, a lone silhouette framed by the inferno devouring her hiding place. Incandescent shadows swarmed through the trees like extras in a low-budget horror movie before evaporating into the black sky.

The rescuers and the rescued worked through the night stamping out the few burning embers that had drifted into the trees. By daylight, the fire had consumed itself.

Brilliant tracers of pink and orange crept into the morning sky as the last tendrils of black smoke drifted away.

Soot stained and weary, Blues, Mason, and Kelly poured themselves into a deputy’s car and joined the procession back to town. Tow trucks dragging the Trans-Am and the pickup bounced along, bringing up the rear.

Riley and Sandra, their faces pinched with fatigue, were waiting in front of the courthouse when they pulled in. Sandra was stretched out on the wide stone handrail using her arms for a pillow. Riley lay across the stairs like the hypotenuse of a triangle. Mason had the feeling that the morning wasn’t going to get any better.

“Hi, honey, I’m home!” he called out with more good cheer than was fair.

He figured the one who answered was probably still alive. Sandra rolled off her perch and reeled Riley to his feet.

“You folks okay? The deputy told us what happened when you called in,” Riley said.

Kelly walked into Riley’s waiting arms and he held her, rubbing her back. She pulled away a moment later.

“A little shell-shocked, Riley, that’s all,” she said. “Any luck?”

“Well, I’ve got an answer, but it’s not the one you expected,” Riley said. “There’s nothing else on the porno disks.”

“What do you mean?” Mason asked.

“The only thing on those DVDs is people doing the horizontal mambo and switching partners faster than you can say ‘Swing your partner, do-si-do.’”

“That doesn’t make any sense. There has to be something else. You’ll just have to keep looking until you figure it out. It’s been a long night. We’ll all get some rest and start fresh this afternoon.”

“I’m sorry, son. There’s no point in it. I spent half the night looking, and there just isn’t anything else there.”

Mason took a deep breath and shoved his hands in his pockets to keep him from shaking Riley until he made some sense.

“What in the hell are you talking about? People are getting killed for those damn disks, and you’re trying to tell me it’s all a big mistake? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Son, no one’s getting killed for the skin flicks. Now, Johnny Mathis-that’s a different story entirely,” he said.

“Johnny Mathis?” Kelly asked.

“Yup. It’s not a commercial CD, like an album you’d buy. Somebody copied the songs onto a blank CD.”

“They put it in a CD case from a Johnny Mathis album to make it look like the real deal,” Sandra added.

“I was playing it on a boom box while I was fiddling with these other disks,” Riley continued. “Right smack in the middle of my wife’s favorite tune, he hit that high note-kinda like a warble-then it cut out. Nothing. So I got to wondering about Mr. Mathis and I decided to run some tests on his CD.”

“Riley found two documents that had been imaged onto the CD. We printed them out,” Sandra said, handing copies to Blues, Kelly, and Mason.

Each document consisted of a single page. The first listed the shell companies O’Malley had set up to borrow money from his bank and identified the owners. Sullivan owned half of each of the companies. O’Malley owned the other half. The document would have made St. John’s case against him.

“These must be the documents Sullivan wanted you to destroy,” Kelly said to Mason.

“I don’t think he wanted me to destroy anything. I think he was just testing me to find out which side of the line I walked on. There was no way he could know if every copy of this had been destroyed. Especially if it had been imaged onto a CD. Besides, he wasn’t the only one who knew about this. O’Malley knew. They were partners. What’s on the other page?”

“Another list,” Sandra said. “I recognize the names of some of the companies involved in the fixtures deals. But there’s also a list labeled ‘accounts.’ Each account is a combination of letters and numbers. I don’t know what they mean.”

Kelly scanned the second document. “It’s a combination of bank account numbers and passwords. Offshore banks in the Cayman Islands use the codes to identify account holders and give them access to their accounts without using names. When I was with the FBI, we spent a lot of time breaking these codes down so we could trace laundered money.”

“So break these down,” Mason said. “It’s the key to the fixtures deals. We’ll follow the money and find out who started all of this.”

“It’s not that simple. You just can’t hold the numbers up to a mirror and read them backward. But this is another reason for me to go to Chicago. I’ve got friends there who can decipher them.”

Kelly led the way to the Home Style Cafe on the west side of the square for breakfast. The restaurant was filled with regular customers who made it part of their daily ritual. The men in denim shirts and blue jeans were stretching their last cup of coffee before starting their day. The storefront was dusky brick, unchanged for the last forty years. Kelly and Mason slid side by side into a booth while Sandra, Blues, and Riley chose the counter.

“Why do you think Sullivan imaged those documents onto a CD with Johnny Mathis?” Kelly asked.

“He was hiding them in plain sight. Anyone who found the CD case would see the Johnny Mathis label and think it was nothing important. If they opened the case and saw a disk without a Johnny Mathis label, they might get suspicious and listen to it. There was enough music on the CD to make most people assume there wasn’t anything else on it, but it took a true fan like Riley to listen long enough to find the documents.”

“I respect the man and his music,” Riley said from his seat at the counter.

Mason continued. “Sullivan knew that St. John had him cold when St. John served the subpoena on him. The fixtures documents were his trump cards. Sullivan was going to offer a trade to St. John. Somebody else found out. They must have been looking for the documents when they broke into Sullivan’s house last month.”

“And Harlan was going to try his own version of let’s make a deal. Now they’re both dead,” Kelly said.

The sun flattened out against the water-spotted window. Kelly rested her elbow on the ledge, chin cupped in her hand, her eyes set on some distant place. The sad weariness Mason had first sensed in her had spread in the hours since her cabin burned. She hadn’t talked about it and didn’t have to. It was the last link to her father. He’d died long ago, but now he was truly gone. Mason tried to comfort them both by holding her close. She pulled away, her melancholy smile telling him that he was not what she needed right now.