Catherine Coulter - Split Second

Savich thought about this. “You know, Ben, lots of people have affairs that don’t even lead to divorce, much less attempted murder. We have no idea if this has anything to do with Mr. Patil’s shooting. Why not hold off awhile until we can get more? I sure wish I had more time to help out, but what with Kirsten Bolger wreaking havoc, I’m up to my neck in alligators.”

Ben said, “Not a problem. I was thinking I’d wait awhile anyway, keep even closer tabs on Mrs. Patil. Now I’ll add Krishna Shama to the active surveillance list.”

Savich punched off and stepped out of his office to see Lucy and Coop heading toward the CAU conference room. As he walked in behind them, he heard Dane Carver saying to Ruth and Ollie, “Our girl ran her feet off and managed to escape Kirsten. Sheriff Stovall said he couldn’t get over it.”

“She what?” Lucy asked.

Dane nodded to Coop and Savich, then turned to her and smiled. “Good to see you walking around, Lucy. You don’t look too bad. That bruise on your jaw adds color.”

“If purple’s your thing, I’m the girl of your dreams. Now, Kirsten went back to kill Ann Marie Slatter?”

Dane said, “She did, indeed, and Ann Marie managed to survive the encounter intact. Sheriff Stovall said Ann Marie was on the high-school track team; he remembered her as a strong middle distance runner. Well, that girl ran her heart out. Kirsten couldn’t catch her; all she could do was keep firing at her, but she missed because Ann Marie was too far away and she was juking around. She ran a couple of miles, flat out, all the way to the sheriff’s office. He and his deputies were after Kirsten right away, but of course she was long gone.”

Coop said, “I want to meet this girl.”

Dane said, “I do, too. Ann Marie insisted she wanted to stay in a locked cell until they caught Kirsten, told Sheriff Stovall she’d never talk to him again if he didn’t let her curl up on a jail cot.”

Ruth said, “Smart girl.”

Savich waved Dane to continue. “Sheriff Stovall is getting ready for more news vans to roll into town pretty soon. Ann Marie Slatter is going to be quite a celebrity now, the heroine of Whortleberry. Since the sheriff decided he couldn’t let her take up residence in one of his two cells, we’re taking Ann Marie and her mother, Libby, to one of our apartments on Mulberry Street, keep that poor kid safe until we get Kirsten. Talk about the resilience of youth—she’s thinking about getting an agent to sell her story to the movies.”

There was some head-shaking laughter at this.

Then Dane said, “By now Kirsten has dumped the Silverado, probably somewhere near town. Sheriff Stovall has his deputies asking everyone around town to check their vehicles, help them with finding the Silverado. Bottom line, Kirsten’s dropped her MO, and she’s killing at will, or trying to, to show us she can. She’s a danger to everyone now, including us, but particularly you, Savich. You’re the face of the people after her.”

Savich nodded. “Thanks, Dane. Please keep us posted. We’ll all watch our backs.” Savich turned to Lucy, studied her for a moment, and seemed satisfied. He asked Coop, “Okay, let’s get to Lucy now. What have you guys got for us?”

Coop said smoothly, “Along with the ring in the safe-deposit box, Lucy told me there was also a letter addressed to her from her grandfather. We went by Lucy’s house to get the letter, Savich, and guess what? It was gone.”

A letter? You never told me about a letter. A sin of omission is still a lie, and I hate lies. What Savich was thinking was as clear to Lucy as if he’d spoken aloud, pointing a finger at her. How could he ever come to trust her again? When he spoke, though, his voice was smooth and calm. “So, your grandfather wrote you an explanation of the ring. That makes sense. Okay, so the letter has disappeared? Where’d you leave it, Lucy?”

She said, “About the letter, Dillon, maybe I should have told you when you came to my house—”

He raised a hand, cutting her off. “I know about it now. Tell us where you left it.”

“I folded it carefully and slipped it in the back of a book on UFOs on a shelf near my grandmother’s desk two days ago. It never occurred to me it wouldn’t be safe there. I don’t think anyone had looked in there in years.”

Savich tapped his pen on the table. “That means someone knew the letter existed, or maybe suspected it existed. They took it before the attempt on your life. If you had died, Lucy, then there would be no evidence there ever was a letter, so there would be no possible clues leading to them. Either that or the people were looking for the ring, and when they found only the letter, they assumed you had the ring with you.”

Coop said, “We didn’t see any obvious evidence of a breakin. It occurred to us someone might have bugged the house, since they seemed to know so much.”

“We’ll get a countersurveillance team over there to check for bugs, look more carefully for signs someone was poking around your grandmother’s study. Lucy, can you think of anyone who could have known about the letter?”

“Maybe someone at the bank or the law office. Otherwise, I only told Coop about it yesterday. We didn’t mention it to my relatives last night.”

Savich leaned forward now, and looked at her dead-on. “Why did you take so long to admit there was a letter, Lucy?”

Coop took her hand, squeezed it, a simple thing, really, but it steadied her, kept one of her endless apologies from popping out of her mouth. She said frankly, “I believed I should keep the contents of the letter private, since it was about my family and the events happened so long ago. Since there wasn’t any question about who killed my grandfather, it was no one’s business.”

Savich nodded. “Okay, Lucy, point taken. But now it’s a different ball game. Tell us all as close as you can what the letter said.”

She looked at each of the agents in turn, then said, “The bottom line was that my grandmother told my grandfather about the ring right after the death of my mother. He wrote about how she kept talking about the ring, about if only she’d had it with her, the ring could have saved my mother, and then she showed him the ring. He wrote that in her grief, my grandmother became obsessed with the ring and he feared for her sanity, and so he stole it. He said he couldn’t destroy it since it was my birthright, but he knew my father wouldn’t want me to have the ring, and so he was leaving it to me along with this letter to open after my father’s death. Of course, he never realized my father would die so young. He believed I’d be reading his letter when I was middle-aged. That’s about it.”

“He called it your birthright,” Ruth said. “A birthright implies it was something incredibly special, and only for you.”

Ollie asked, “What exactly happened to your mother, Lucy?”

“She was struck straight on by a drunk driver. My grandparents were in the car behind her.”

Savich said, “If your grandmother had only had the ring with her, she could have saved your mother? How could a ring stop a drunk driver from hitting your mother’s car? Did your grandfather’s letter tell you what those supposed powers were?”

“He wrote I wouldn’t believe him if he did.”

And then, of course, Savich asked the most important question of all. “Do you have any idea now what those powers are?”

As far as I can tell, I see absolutely nothing at all special about the ring. Or, if there is, I can’t figure it out. Believe me, I’ve tried to find out why anyone would want this ring badly enough to want to kill me for it.

Lucy wished she could say that whopping lie out loud, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She looked at him, mute for a moment, white as her shirt, the purple bruise on her jaw in stark relief. She said slowly, trying to lie clean, “No, I have no idea why the ring is so special. As I said, my grandfather didn’t tell me because he said I wouldn’t believe him. But someone believes the ring has some sort of power, and that someone believes he may know what it is.”