He was smoother getting it done than Maggie expected. Maybe he’d seen the technique on TV, or maybe he was a natural. Whatever the case, they got into the SUV without him ever taking the gun off her. She couldn’t have run if she wanted to, and right now she wasn’t sure she wanted to. Bryant Gibbs was leading her to something, and the magnetic pull of knowing, of finding the solution, was like welcoming an old friend.
Gibbs directed her through the streets. At one point they passed the community garden and Maggie saw the housewife volunteers working. No one spotted her. She could have driven up on the curb and alerted all of them, but she opted not to. With every turn they made, the attraction to the truth grew more irresistible. She knew exactly where they were going.
“Stop here,” Gibbs said.
Maggie obeyed. She left the engine running. “Why are we at Carole’s house, Bryant?” She had to keep using his name. If she used his name it would subtly reinforce the notion that they had a relationship, that they were working together toward a common goal. He would be less likely to use the gun, at least until the moment arrived when she could take it from him.
Gibbs looked at the house. It was quiet from the outside, as if nothing untoward had ever happened there. Where were the police? Bryant must have waited until the crime scene was cleared, but she couldn’t believe they had vacated the premises. How had they kept this story from the press? Even the yellow tape on the front door was barely noticeable, placed discreetly like so much else in the Parish.
“Bryant? I asked you why we’re here.”
“Carole was one of my top earners. She was like Holly: doing the weird stuff, the harder stuff. And Carole’s husband, Philip? He got more out of it than anyone. But he was nosy, and looked into matters that weren’t his concern. Carole let it slip the last time I was with her.”
Maggie checked the rearview mirror. The street was clear. She hadn’t seen the security patrol on their ride, and it was nowhere now. It wasn’t around when Holly Gibbs was killed, and it hadn’t stopped Carole and Philip Strickland from dying. Now Maggie wanted it to stay away because this was handled. She could handle it. She breathed steadily and her heart beat in a regular rhythm.
“We’re gonna get out now,” Bryant said. “Then we’re going to go inside and get some things. I have a pretty good idea where he’s keeping them.”
“Whatever you want to do, Bryant,” Maggie said.
“Goddamnit, stop calling me by my name.”
“I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.”
They got out as smoothly as they got in. Bryant was careful, and steadier than she would have expected. He waited until she came around the nose of the SUV, then gestured at her with the gun held close to his body. The blood on his face was dry. “You stay ahead of me,” he said. “And when we get to the door, you turn your face to the wall while I get it open.”
She obeyed. They crossed the broad lawn, passed the little sign with the security company’s name on it, stepped under the cover of the eaves in front of the large front door. It had glass on both sides, and when Maggie moved to comply with Bryant’s directions, she was able to see inside to the foyer, which was clean and perfect and gave nothing away. This house didn’t look like a double murder had been committed here.
Bryant cut the tape with something sharp. She heard the edge slice through the adhesive plastic. Afterward he worked the lock. Maggie couldn’t see what he was doing. “How did you get inside my house?” she asked.
“The same way I’m getting into this one. With a key.”
“Where did you get a key to my house?”
“Enough questions. I’m opening the door. You go in first. There’s a table by the stairs. Put your hands on it.”
The door opened. Immediately a regular beeping sounded from just inside. Maggie went inside and her nose was filled with the scent of potpourri. She saw the small table cradled in the arm of a curving staircase climbing upward. On her left was the alarm system panel. The distance to the table was six feet. She was too far from him.
Bryant entered the code. The alarm went silent. He closed the door.
“You know how to do this pretty well,” Maggie said calmly. “You handle a gun like a pro. You know how to keep someone under control. Where’d you learn all that?”
“From cops,” Bryant said, and she heard the sharp tone in his voice. “They’re always talking, always wanting to show you this or that. The only thing they like more is taking my money. We’re going up the stairs now. Turn to the left, walk all the way to the master suite. Stop by the bed.”
“If you try to do something to me there, Bryant, I can’t let you,” Maggie told him.
“What? Please. I get it whenever I want it, however I want it. I’m the king, lady. Up the stairs. And what did I say about my name?”
She took the steps with him behind her. She kept her hands where he could see them. “I thought kings didn’t like to share,” she said. “Holly was out there working for you. It must have been hard, knowing what she was doing. Makes you wonder if she really liked it when you were together.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. What we did made it better. Don’t you get it? It’s all about making life better. Hotter. Everything you think you know about all of this? It’s bullshit. You’re as much in the dark as everyone else. But it doesn’t matter. You’re my shield, because no cop is going to do anything with a cop’s wife on the line.”
They went to the master suite. Maggie walked forward until her knees touched the bed. “You don’t know my husband.”
“You think so?” Gibbs asked.
She heard him step close to her in the moment before he struck. The hard frame of the pistol clipped the side of her head and she saw explosions of white in her vision. Balance fled. Blood rushed in her ears. She reached for her temple, but before she touched it, she was gone.
Chapter 19
She woke up slowly. The floor tilted underneath her, swaying this way and that, an unsteady platform she had to cling to or be thrown from. She felt the carpet fibers clutched in her fingers. Her ears still rushed. She opened her eyes and tried to find focus.
Gibbs wasn’t in sight. Maggie rolled onto her back and tried to sit up, but the movement made her feel violently ill. She tried a different tack, grasping the edge of the bedspread and levering herself up on one knee until she could use the bed to support her as balance returned. Her skull throbbed.
The room had been tossed. The job was thorough, but amateur. A cop could take a room apart completely without destroying much of anything. Gibbs had torn everything to shreds. Pictures were off the walls. The bed was partly denuded, the mattress not on straight. He’d turned over the chairs and emptied every drawer. And now he came in the room and sat across the room from her with a ledger across his knees and the gun atop the leather cover. The door to the master bathroom was closed, but there was a bloody handprint two-thirds of the way down. Immediately Maggie knew it was Karl’s.
Maggie looked back to Gibbs, and he looked back at her with an intensity she hadn’t seen before. His hand rested lightly against the pistol, but wasn’t closed around the grip. Even so, he was too far to reach, and she was too unsteady to risk it. She sat on the bed instead, and from the corner of her eye gauged the distance to the bedroom door.
“Why was Karl here?” she asked.
“Good question. Why are any cops involved in my business at all? Until recently, everything was running smoothly. Sure, the kink is there, and that’s gonna bring out some of the freaks, but this wasn’t like that. This was about money, and money beats sex every time.
“Holly wasn’t the first casualty,” Gibbs said. “But nobody knew that. The first casualty from the women who worked for me was Melissa Mason. Her husband told everybody she left him. He got pictures of her body in the mail.”
“Why would someone kill her?” Maggie asked.
“I didn’t know. I thought it was a job gone wrong. I was freaked out, but tried to be even more discreet. I
didn’t know who I was reporting to. It was just business, and eventually I expanded my business. And maybe I didn’t report all of my profits.”
He still hadn’t touched the gun. Maggie didn’t look directly at it. Her vision was clearing, and her head no longer swam. The pain was still there, but that could be beaten.
“Then they came for Holly, and that’s when I knew this was about me.”
“The police wanted in on your business,” Maggie said. “Payment to look the other way.”
“Yeah. I don’t know exactly who, because I paid the way they asked: anonymous cash at a drop in a park in Castletown. Everything was fine. Then I get a call saying the price is higher now.”
“You didn’t pay.”
“No, I paid, but I guess I didn’t pay fast enough. That’s when they hit Holly.”
“And Carole? Her husband?”
Gibbs shook his head. “It’s not about payoffs anymore. It’s about taking over. That’s how I know it’s cops: They know my business, they know my women. They’re on the inside. They’re customers. They’ve destroyed my business, and they’ve murdered my wife. And if I’m going down, so are they.”
Maggie noticed his pupils were enlarged. He was on edge.
“The question was whether I could prove it without a doubt. Audio is good. Video is better. But you know what really gets people like you off? Corroborating evidence. Two people who tell the same story. Problem is, Philip’s not alive to tell his side of it. But I have this.”
He tapped the ledger again. Maggie risked a more direct glance toward the door. She could make it. She nodded to the ledger. “You have what you need in there?”
“I do. Put what I have together with what he had and you have a case. Police corruption. Murder. You and me, we’re going to go get the rest of the evidence. You’re more important than ever now.”
“How can you be sure you’re right?” Maggie asked.
He’d taken something while she was out. It could have been anything, from street drugs to something gotten with a prescription. Sometimes they were almost the same thing. He said he liked cocaine. “When Philip got involved, he started talking to all my ladies. It started with Carole, but he branched out. He wanted it all: where, when, who, what. He said he had it written down and all recorded. Exactly what I didn’t want, but I let him do it when he promised to keep it hidden and on paper. And now I’m glad he did, because it’s my proof, don’t you get it? It backs up everything I figured.”
“You have blackmail material?”
Gibbs made a face. “I’m not a blackmailer. Blackmailers are scumbags. I’m not a scumbag.”
“I didn’t say you were. So what are you going to do, Bryant?”
“We’re going to get the rest, and then I’m going to use you to get the story out.”
“What—?” Maggie started.
Something banged downstairs. A foot struck against wood, and then again. The distinct sound of a doorframe shearing followed, and then a bellowing voice. “Police! Get down on the floor and put your hands on your head!”
Maggie moved. She surged toward the door, aware of Gibbs springing out of his seat with the gun, the ledger falling to the floor. He shouted, but she ignored him. “Second floor, second floor!” she yelled. “White male armed with a handgun!”
She saw a uniformed cop in the foyer. Two more men bulled in behind him, black and white. They looked up and Maggie saw Karl and Mike. Karl called her name.
Gibbs caught up to her when she was two steps from the top of the stairs. He grabbed her by the hair and pulled sharply. Her scalp shrieked with pain and she felt some hair come loose. She crashed back against him. He put the gun in her ear and whispered, “Told you they were watching me.” Then he raised his voice. “Cops! Back off or she dies! I’ll kill her!”
“Stay back,” Karl commanded the uniformed officer. He had his weapon out. Mike held his low to his side. When Karl addressed Gibbs, he did so in a smooth tone. “Nobody needs to get hurt. Maggie, are you hurt?”
“I’m fine. Relax.”
“I will kill this bitch. And you’ll deserve it!”
Karl put his foot on the bottom step. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but take it easy, okay? Nobody’s going to kill anybody.”
Maggie felt Gibbs’s body against hers, muscles electric with tension. His breath came sharply in her ear, just above the muzzle of his Glock. She saw Karl rise one more step. She set her feet apart slowly. Gibbs noticed nothing.
He whispered into her ear, his voice barely audible: “There he is.”
Maggie started to move, but stopped when she saw Karl come up another step. She felt Gibbs touch her hip.
“Everything’s cool,” Karl said.
“Back off and do what he says,” Maggie told Karl.
Gibbs spoke up, louder than before. “Yeah, do what I—”
Gibbs didn’t finish. Maggie drove her heel down on Gibbs’s instep, and pivoted in the next moment, driving the gun up and away from her head. It discharged into the ceiling as Gibbs stumbled, his foot broken. He reeled, but his scream was cut off by the thunder of Karl’s service weapon. Gibbs toppled over with a hole punched in his skull.
Chapter 20
Maggie sat in the back of an ambulance with a thermal blanket wrapped around her. An EMT had made a dressing for the injury to her temple. She still had a terrible headache, and they told her she would need to go to the hospital for X-rays and tests. That was fine for now.
The house swarmed with people. She saw Mike Cooper on the lawn.
She blinked and Karl was there. “What are you doing here? Aren’t you on desk duty, pending investigation of your accident at the crime scene?”
He shooed the EMT away and hugged her. “I could never sit at a desk knowing you were in danger,” he said. “I don’t care what the repercussions are for me. I was so scared and I am so glad you’re safe.”
“I’ll always be fine,” Maggie said. “I’m the chief.” She smiled faintly, but doing it made her hurt. She wanted sleep, but first they had to find out if she had a concussion. Sleep with a concussion might never end. “Got to watch my people work.”
“You know, I’m not even going to argue,” Karl replied. “As long as you’re okay.”
Maggie looked at him. She searched his face seeking something she wasn’t sure about herself. She wanted to ask him questions, and she wanted to see his reactions. Guiltily she realized she wanted to see him on the other side of an interrogation table, and herself opposite him. What did he know? When did he know it? What was Bryant Gibbs trying to tell her?
Instead, she said, “You’re still a good shot.”
“Tops in the unit.”
“Don’t brag.”
Karl’s expression turned serious again. “You talk to your mother?”
“Yeah, they loaned me a phone. The girls are fine. She’s fine. I told her to have someone come by today and change the locks. Gibbs isn’t coming back, but that doesn’t mean no one else will.”
He glanced away. She thought she saw something then, but it was hidden when he turned back to her. “No one’s coming, because Gibbs is the one. I don’t know what he wanted with you, but it’s pretty clear he did his wife, then Carole and Philip.”
“She was definitely working for him. One of his better earners, he said.”
“I don’t doubt it. He had a key to their house and he knew the alarm code. He’d been in there plenty of times before. If he got around the way you said he did, it’s likely he was in the sack with Carole on a regular basis.”
“He had a key to our house, too,” Maggie said. “Was I sleeping with him?”
The question was delivered with no emotion, no accusation. Maggie put it to him directly, the way she would with a suspect in interrogation. In such a situation, empathy was essential. If the subject thought they were being grilled by someone already convinced of their guilt, they’d shut down. The accusations came later, when trust was built.
She watched him closely without appearing to do so. The narrowing of his eyes, and the way his lips pressed together. He shifted on his feet. Only a little, but she noticed. She could tell he wanted to look away again, buy a second or two to formulate an answer, but she also saw he knew what she was thinking, and he couldn’t do it without being caught. “I don’t know how he got our key,” he said.
“You knew him before all this started?”
“No, I didn’t know him.”
“His wife?”
“What is this? Am I the suspect here? I didn’t know either of them before the day Holly Gibbs was killed. I didn’t hear any of the gossip about them, I never even spoke to the man at a party. He was a total stranger to me. And he was to you, too, right?”
Maggie didn’t fire back right away. When she spoke again, it was the same as before: no investment, no passion. Anything she felt she kept inside. He’d know she was doing it. Maybe it would make him angrier. Maybe it would do something else. She said, “So we don’t know where he got the key, but he had it. And he came looking for me. He came for me specifically. I don’t know why that is. Why would he do that, Karl?”
She saw him stamping out an internal fire. He assembled a calm face, but he had never been as good at it as she was. “He knew you were a cop’s wife. He knew you were my wife. He thought he could use that if he had to. But he was wrong. He messed with the wrong lady. And the wrong man.”
“I’m going to want to talk about this some more when we’re home again,” Maggie said. “I don’t want there to be any secrets here. We’ll talk and we’ll put it all on the table. I don’t care what it is.”
Karl breathed sharply through his nose. “I’m telling you there’s nothing to hide. It’s because he was the doer and I was the investigating detective. If Mike were still married and living in the Parish, Gibbs probably would have gone after Kelly. It’s bad luck, that’s all.”
“Okay,” Maggie said.
“Okay?”
“Okay. Tell them I’m ready to go.”
He kissed her on the forehead, gently. “Don’t die on me, all right?”