David Kent - The Triangle Conspiracy

“What did she say when she called? What did she tell you?”

“Jesus, you just don’t give up. Probably why you’re so good in Department Fucking Thirty. You get your teeth into someone and shake them around until they cough up whatever you want. Yeah, she called. Said she wanted me, needed me. There was some sex talk. Like you said, she played to my weakness.”

“And you went to her.”

Sean nodded. “She was a crazy woman. I’ve never seen anyone make love like that. Though I guess you really couldn’t call what we were doing making love. It was fucking, pure and simple. I was so drunk I couldn’t keep it up, but she kept at it until I came. Then, a few seconds after she rolled off me, she started slapping me and hitting me and screaming at me to get out.”

Faith watched him. To her great surprise, a tear rolled down her brother’s cheek, unchecked.

“I mean,” Sean said, “I’m not stupid enough to think we were in love or anything like that. It was too raw, too…I don’t know what the word is, maybe primal? But I thought we had a connection. That’s why I tried to see her during that week you had her in the safe house. I just wanted to feel that connection. There at the end, I didn’t understand it. It’s like…it’s like she knew she was going to die and wanted me to be blamed for it. Someone somewhere will match up the semen sample from inside her with my DNA, and they’ll be after me.” He looked sidelong at his sister. “Just like you are.”

“They’re already after you, Sean.” Faith stopped walking. They were so close to the port of entry building that they could hear the air-conditioning unit humming. Mexico was only a few feet away. “They found your Jeep. There was blood in it. They’re betting it’s Daryn’s and are probably running the tests right now. They found your gun. They’ll be doing ballistics.”

Sean sighed. “And your boyfriend will come after me with a vengeance.”

Faith felt as if she’d been punched in the stomach. “No,” she said slowly. “He won’t.”

“Oh, they gave some other Bureau hack the case, then.”

“No, Sean. Scott is dead.”

Sean whipped his head around.

“Scott was murdered yesterday, shot in the head while he worked on his case notes at his condo.” Faith blinked at him. She felt her own tears welling.

“Oh Jesus,” Sean said. “And you think I did that, too.”

Faith reached out and grabbed his shoulder, spinning his entire body around. “What the hell is the matter with you? Can you think for just one minute about something other than yourself? Are you even capable anymore of considering anything except how it affects you ? Jesus Christ, Sean.” Faith’s voice rose steadily. “I loved him! I loved him, and he was decent and honest and smart and funny, and he was shot in the head!”

Faith’s composure cracked, and the floodgates opened. The tears began to stream down her face.

“I found him!” she shouted at her brother. “I found his body, and I had to leave him. Because of all this, I had to leave him right there, like his body was so much garbage, just to be cleaned up later. He showed me respect and kindness, and, goddammit, love! He showed me love, like no one else ever did. And there he was, lying dead on the floor, and I left him there!”

A door opened at the port of entry building, and a burly Hispanic man in a khaki uniform came out. His holster was unbuttoned, his hand on the butt of his weapon.

He took a few steps toward them, then Sean turned to face him.

“Irish?” the man said. “Sean Kelly?”

“Hey, Mike,” Sean said.

“What are you doing down here? I heard you were-”

“It’s a long story, Mike. Sorry to disturb the peace. This is just a little family matter. This is my sister.”

The guard looked uncomfortable. “Hey, Irish, I need to ask you back off from the port, okay? Do I need to make a phone call here?”

“No, no, I don’t think so.”

Mike nodded. “You’ll be safer back up toward town, Sean.”

“Right. Thanks, Mike.”

Sean backed a few steps away from the border. Faith followed after a moment. The guard went inside. Faith noticed his hand had never left the butt of his gun.

“Jesus, Faith,” Sean said softly. “I didn’t-”

“And yes, to answer your question,” Faith said, “I thought you’d done it. I thought you killed Daryn out of some kind of booze-induced sexual obsession with her, and I thought you killed Scott because he was getting close to you in the investigation.”

Sean lowered his voice to a whisper. “How can you think that of me? I mean, this is me, Faith. Anyone else, yeah. They’d look at the evidence and figure it was pretty conclusive. My car, the blood, the gun, the semen. But how could you think that?”

“What have you given me to disprove it? Huh? You’ve lost your job, you’re desperate, out here searching for some senator’s daughter. You’re drunk all the time, you don’t listen to anything I say. You’re sick, Sean, and when people are sick they’re not the same people anymore. You’re not the brother I grew up with.”

Sean scuffed the sand at his feet. He was silent for a long moment, then he said, “I didn’t kill her, Faith. God as my witness, I didn’t kill Daryn and I didn’t kill Scott.”

“I know you didn’t kill Scott. Your friend AJ verified that you were here when Scott was murdered.”

Sean nodded. “But you don’t believe me about Daryn.”

“I don’t know what to believe.” She looked him in the eye. “But I know this: you’ve been manipulated, very carefully and very skillfully manipulated into the position you’re in. I think Daryn was too, though there are some things about her I still don’t understand.”

“What do you mean, I was manipulated?”

“Franklin Sanborn.”

“But I thought you couldn’t find any evidence that he even existed. Hadn’t you decided that Daryn and I made him up?”

Faith shrugged. “For a while, I was leaning in that direction. I couldn’t find him. No one could. He was a ghost.”

Sean looked off into the distance. “That night, the night Daryn was killed. Sanborn followed me after I left her apartment, after we’d…he followed me. He found me passed out in the parking lot of a truck stop. He told me if I hurried, I might catch the real killer. It’s like he was taunting me, daring me to go.”

“I know who he is,” Faith said. “I figured it out when I found that book you pulled out of my shelf at home.”

Sean looked at her, the question on his face.

“The Secret Six by Edward Renehan. It’s about the Civil War.”

“Oh, I remember that. I remember thinking, ‘Since when is my sister into reading about the Civil War?’ ”

“I’m not. That book was sent to me.”

Sean nodded briskly. “There was an inscription, something about ‘until we meet again.’ I thought it was strange, but I was wasted so I didn’t think anything else about it after that.”

“Franklin Sanborn,” Faith said. “I know now that he’s real, all right. Not by that name, of course. He has more identities than I want to think about, and I’d thought he was gone for good. You see, when I knew him, his name was Isaac Smith.”

THEY WALKED A FEW STEPS TOWARD SASABE.Sean stopped at the first yard they came to. It was fenced with barbed wire, and a few chickens wandered through it. “Isaac Smith,” he said. “That name doesn’t mean anything to me.”

Faith sighed. “Do you remember last year, when the chief justice of the Supreme Court resigned?”

“Yeah. Cole, wasn’t it? Something about a family crisis. It surprised everyone, because he was relatively young, as Supreme Court justices go.”