Michael Prescott - Mortal Faults

“No, I didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“He got to me while I was in the hospital. He was the D.A., and he used his credentials to get in and talk to me alone.”

“And he threatened you?”

“No. What did he have to threaten me with? I’d already lost everything.”

“Then what…?”

“He told me-he told me he still loved me.” Her voice broke on the last words. “He told me he’d been wrong to break up with me. That he’d been planning to take me back-until everything happened.”

“Did you believe him?”

She heard the skepticism in Abby’s question. “I know what you’re asking. How could I be so naive?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, I did believe him. He said he forgave me for the children. He said it was all right. He said I hadn’t been myself when I did it. And that I shouldn’t blame myself or think of it as a sin.”

“I see.”

“He’s the only one who said anything like that. To everyone else I was the devil incarnate. Medea, the witch. But he told me it was all right. And they were his children. He’s the last person who should ever have forgiven me-but he did.”

“Yes.” Abby’s voice was very low. “He did.”

“It wasn’t just talk. He helped me, too. He arranged it so I was declared incompetent to stand trial. If I’d been put on trial, I would have been sent to prison for life. As it was, I went into the hospital, and I was out in twelve years.”

“Yes.”

“I never would have survived prison. Do you know what they do in there to-to people who’ve killed children? He saved my life.”

“I guess he did.”

Andrea sighed. “I’m sure you think I was just manipulating me. That he didn’t want me in a courtroom because I might say too much. But you’re wrong.”

“Am I? Then why did he send those thugs into your house yesterday?”

She knew the answer to that. “Because I screwed up.”

Abby looked at her. “You?”

“I started going to his events. I didn’t think he would recognize me, not after all these years, with a wig and dark glasses. But he did. I broke the rules.”

“What rules?”

“He promised to help me only if I gave my word I would never try to see him again.”

“If you gave your word, why did you start…?”

“Stalking him?” Andrea almost smiled.

“Attending his campaign rallies,” Abby said diplomatically.

“I don’t know. Something made me want to do it. It didn’t make sense. It was like-like I couldn’t stay away. Like I just had to see him.” She was touching her hair again-a nervous habit, but one she’d never noticed before.

“Did you hope to get back together with him?” Abby asked.

A shudder coursed through her. “No. No, of course not. I knew that could never happen.”

“Then… why?”

“I don’t know, Abby. I just don’t.”

“Okay, okay.” Abby reached out to steady her. “Sorry I pushed. It’s an occupational hazard for those of us with a psych degree. We keep trying to peel the onion.”

Andrea wiped her eyes. “Peeling onions makes me cry.”

“Yeah, I got that. But at least now you can mince garlic with no problem.” This was a joke, but Andrea couldn’t find the strength to smile. “Look,” Abby said more seriously, “go home, lie down, close your eyes. Just keep that phone nearby and turned on.”

“Okay. I still don’t understand, though. I don’t see what you could possibly need me for.”

“It all comes back to you, Andrea. Everything comes back to you.”

That was true, of course. Reynolds and the killers who invaded her home, and the FBI people watching her and tapping her phone, and Abby’s involvement-all of it came back to her, and to what she had done twenty years ago, her ineradicable past, which she could never escape.

Abby seemed to catch her mood. She smiled. “Hey, no worries. I’m on the case. I’m handling everything.”

“I wish I could be as confident as you are.”

“It’s a gift. Now get going. Those G-men must be getting antsy. And don’t do anything to show you’re on to them. Just act normal.”

“Normal.” This time Andrea did smile. “Yes, that’s me.”

She left the restroom, taking care not to look for the FBI men, as Abby had warned. But they were there, anyway. She knew it now, knew it even without seeing them.

They would always be there.

Tess arrived at the crime scene shortly before noon. The neighborhood was as unprepossessing as she’d expected. Crandall, in the passenger seat of the Bureau car, glanced up at the two-story apartment building in distaste.

“I lived in a place like this when I was starting my own business.” His expression indicated that the memory wasn’t a happy one.

“Didn’t you start more than one business?”

“Three in all. No success with any of them. I guess I was meant to be a fed. It’s in my genes.”

“There are worse things to be.”

“True. I could be a biker, like Dylan Garrick.”

“You could be dead, like Dylan Garrick.”

“That, too.”

It was the most he’d said to her today. He still mistrusted her for keeping Abby’s secrets. Tess couldn’t really blame him, but he would have to work with her now. Hauser, trying to keep a low profile on MEDEA, hadn’t wanted a swarm of L.A. agents descending on Santa Ana. He’d authorized only the two of them to check it out, while the rest of the squad worked the case from the field office in Westwood.

They climbed the stairs to Garrick’s apartment, identifiable by the yellow crime scene tape across the door. Tess stripped away the tape and unlocked the door with a key she’d obtained from the Santa Ana resident agency.

From behind her on the landing, Crandall said, “Carson wanted us to wait for him before we went in.”

Carson was the supervisory agent who managed the RA. He’d been driving behind them when they left Civic Center Drive, but apparently they’d lost him along the way. Tess wasn’t going to wait. “He’ll be here soon enough. Let’s look around on our own.”

She pushed open the door and went in, trailed by Crandall. The first thing she saw was the bloody stain on the futon where Dylan Garrick’s head had lain. There were spatter patterns on the wall. More dried blood was dimly visible on the soiled short-nap carpet. The body was gone, as were Garrick’s handgun and the pillow used to muffle the two shots.

Criminalists had gone over the apartment, dusting for prints and bagging fibers and other trace evidence. Tess saw black ferric oxide on some surfaces, silver nitrate on others. The walls and larger objects in the room had been decorated in more elaborate shades, from gaudy Pinkwop and Redwop powders that were processed with a portable laser, to fluorescent greens and oranges that luminesced in ultraviolet light. Whoever dusted the place had been thorough. Tess wondered if Abby’s prints had been among those collected.

In her career she had visited many crime scenes, enough of them to make the experience almost routine. But there was one she had never forgotten-the bedroom of the house she’d rented in a Denver suburb, where Paul Voorhees had been murdered by the serial killer Mobius.

Other shocks had shaken her life, but finding Paul was the one that lingered. She’d never felt the same about a murder scene. Other people could crack jokes and act casual in the presence of death. Not her. She stood in Dylan Garrick’s apartment as she would stand in a church-hushed and solemn.

In one hand she carried a folder of crime-scene photos from the morning conference. She slipped out a picture of the body and studied it, getting a better sense of how Garrick had been positioned. He’d been beaten before he was shot-pistol-whipped with his own firearm. The photo showed the damage to his face, including a broken nose that left a trail of dried blood snaking down to his upper lip. The gun itself, dropped on the floor, had dried blood on the barrel.