Justifiable Means

  “He’s lying,” Larry said. “Pendergrast—Soames—whatever his name is, he’s lying. And so is the woman.”

  “Probably. Now prove it.”

  “The shoe,” Larry said, turning back to the cop. “You said his shoe matched the print in the attic?”

  “Yeah, but I ran it by the captain. He said it was too weak. Lots of people have that shoe. It might be different if we’d gotten a match on the fingerprints. But just between you and me—” He lowered his voice and looked around to make sure he wasn’t being overheard. “That lawyer, McRae, has been raising a huge stink about the department harassing Pendergrast. Says they’re thinking about a lawsuit when this is over.”

  Larry chuckled. “Tell him to stand in line.”

  “Yeah, well. If it was anybody but McRae. That brutality suit he filed for one of his low life clients a few months ago cost the city a mint.”

  “Come on,” Larry said, disgusted. “It was bogus and McRae knew it. Our guys were trying to restrain an addict so high on PCP he had the strength of a gorilla. That was by the book.”

  “But besides the money, the bad press hurt. The mayor already called the chief on this, Millsaps. He said if we lock Pendergrast up, it better be on something more than his shoe.”

  Larry groaned and glanced toward the two-way glass of the interrogation room. “Well, at least we can put some fear into him before we let him go.”

  McRae and Pendergrast sat talking quietly, their heads together, as Larry and Tony walked in. Pendergrast looked up at them with a smug grin. “Is there a problem, gentlemen?”

  Larry propped one foot on a chair and leaned on his knee, fixing his eyes on the man who sat waiting for them to admit defeat. “We’re not fooled, Pendergrast. Your little friend in there hasn’t convinced us of anything.”

  “Fine,” he said, throwing his arms open. “Then book me. What did you say the charge was? Breaking and entering? Stalking? You do have evidence, don’t you? Evidence strong enough to override my alibi?”

  Larry gritted his teeth. Ignoring the questions, he said, “We’re gonna let you go, Pendergrast.”

  “Soames,” the man corrected.

  Larry dropped his foot to the floor and leaned over the table, putting his face inches from Pendergrast. “I know who you are, Pendergrast. You’re a slimy nocturnal rodent who preys on innocent women, and I’m gonna see you put away if it’s the last thing I ever do. In the meantime, leave Melissa Nelson alone. Stay away from her, or I’ll personally see to it that you regret it for what’s left of your pathetic little life. Got that?”

  “Is that a threat?” McRae asked.

  “You bet it is.”

  Too disgusted to stay, Larry left the room and headed for his desk. A Federal Express package sat on top of it, its return address from the Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Department. Still seething, he tore it open and pulled out the file on Edward J. Pendergrast.

  Tony came out of the interrogation room, smirking as he headed for Larry’s desk. “Larry, I think you hurt Pendergrast’s feelings. He was downright wounded at what you called him. By the way, are rodents really slimy? I thought they were hairy, but—”

  “Take a look at this,” Larry cut in, unamused. “Pendergrast’s file.” Sitting down, he opened it.

  Tony grabbed a chair and rolled it over beside him. “Took long enough.”

  “Yeah, but it’s all here. Look at these pictures.” Larry picked up one of a young woman with blackened, swollen eyes, a broken jaw, and split, bloody lips. He often saw gruesome pictures, and saw even worse horrors face-to-face at crime scenes, but he never got used to it. And brutality to women always turned his stomach.

  He began reading the report. The woman who claimed Pendergrast had raped and beaten her had positively identified him. The report said that he’d been charged and questioned, but that he’d been released due to an illegal search of his apartment.

  As if he’d been directly involved in the case, Larry struggled with the indignation rising in his chest.

  The next photo showed a full body shot of a woman, her face bruised and cut, her eyes blackened, her lips swollen and bloody, and slashes and bruises up and down her legs and arms. Larry handed the picture to Tony and found the report. In this case, Pendergrast had been acquitted. Despite the victim’s insistence that Pendergrast was the man who’d raped and beaten her, the grand jury had felt that there wasn’t enough evidence to get a conviction. Anger reddening his face, Larry tossed down the report.

  “How could they acquit him? Didn’t they see the pictures? She gave a positive ID. How could they ignore that?”

  “Apparently there were no fingerprints, no physical evidence at all that he was the one who had done it. Plus he had an alibi,” Tony said, reading the report. “The only hard evidence was her identification, but they didn’t believe she got a good look at him because it was dark.”

  “It’s the way he looks,” Larry said. “He looks too prosperous, too good-looking. If he were a scruffy-looking homeless man with a tattoo, he wouldn’t have been acquitted.” As he spoke, Larry flipped through the file and found a picture of the girl before the rape. She was pretty and blonde, smiling at the camera, looking nothing like the abused portrait after Pendergrast had made his mark. She looked like a happy young woman with a future. She had probably never even dreamed what would happen to her one day.

  “Says here she killed herself shortly after he was acquitted,” Tony said matter-of-factly.

  “Killed herself?” Larry grabbed back the report, read of the suicide, and felt even sicker as he turned back to her smiling portrait. “What’s her name?” he asked wearily.

  “Uh . . . Sandra Hayden,” Tony said. “She was married, no kids. About twenty-three when it happened.” He looked over Larry’s shoulder and studied the photo pensively. “I wonder if she killed herself because of the rape.”

  “Probably,” Larry whispered.

  Tony flipped further, until he came to the newspaper clipping of her obituary. “Married to Jack Hayden for six months,” he read. “Buried in Pensacola where she’d lived all her life.”

  Larry looked up from the picture. “Did you say Pensacola?” He glanced at the obituary. “That’s where Melissa is from.”

  Tony frowned, trying to put things together. “Pendergrast came from Santa Rosa County. Isn’t that near Pensacola?”

  “Next county over.” Larry read on, intrigued but apprehensive. “Says Sandra Hayden had just started working at a department store in a mall. Noticed the guy following her days before he made a move. He broke in one night when her husband was working the night shift. He apparently beat her and left her for dead.” He hesitated, swallowed, then forced himself to go on. “But she woke up after he left, showered and cleaned up everything, then passed out again from loss of blood. She never called the police. Her husband found her near death the next morning and took her to the hospital.”

  Tony flipped through the file, looking at the other documents. “Here’s the police report of her suicide.” Larry took it, scanned the contents, then shook his head and dropped it on the desk.

  “What?” Tony asked.

  Sometimes Larry wished he had a different job. “Her younger sister. That’s who found her. She had slit her wrists in the bathtub.”

  “What a way to say good-bye,” Tony muttered.

  Larry glanced back at the room where they had interviewed Pendergrast moments ago. “We were too easy on him. He was working us. He knows the system too well.”

  “He must,” Tony agreed. “I can’t believe they let him go. We need to talk to Sandra Hayden’s family. Find out anything that’s not in the report. Anything about him we might need to know. Let me see the obit.”

  Still deep in his dismal, angry thoughts, Larry slid the newspaper clipping across the desk. “Okay,” Tony said, poising his pen to jot down her parents’ names. “Nancy and Jim Nelson, of Pensacola.”

  For a moment the name didn’t sink in. It wasn’t until La
rry watched Tony write it that it penetrated. “Did you say Nelson?” Larry asked, reaching for the obituary.

  Tony looked up, the significance of the name finally registering. “What are you thinking?” he asked.

  A slow ache began at Larry’s temples and spread to his forehead. He took the clipping and began to read. “Sandra was survived by both parents and her younger sister . . .” His voice broke off and the words just waited there like a live grenade.

  Tony detonated it. “Melissa Nelson,” he said.

  Larry felt as if he’d had his body blown up from the inside out. His head throbbed, and he couldn’t think.

  “Oh, man,” Tony said, staring at the words. “I don’t believe this.”

  After a moment, Larry got enough control of his faculties to find his voice. “What does it mean?” he asked in a quietly desperate voice. “Pendergrast rapes and almost kills Melissa’s sister. Then he comes after her?”

  “Doesn’t fit,” Tony said, his voice growing less surprised and more excited. “He was here first, remember? She got a job working where he worked. How could he have orchestrated that?”

  “Well, why would she?” Larry demanded. “You think a woman who’d seen her sister after she’d been left for dead by some guy would deliberately hang around with him afterward?”

  Tony was in his element. This was the kind of mystery he loved to solve, the reason he had become a detective. “All right, let’s look at what we’ve got. This happened three years ago, when Sandra Hayden was twenty-three. Melissa would have been twenty then.”

  “Right.”

  “So what do we know?” Tony went on, getting to his feet and pacing across the floor as he thought it all out. “We know that Melissa changed her major to criminal justice, right?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Well, maybe that was in response to the fact that the criminal justice system let her down. Or maybe it was out of anger. It’s like a person with leukemia who decides to be a doctor. They want to fight the thing that has become their enemy.”

  Larry hated the high Tony was getting from this. And he hated even more where it was leading.

  “So she gets out,” Tony continued, “takes a job with the FBI, and uses the resources there to locate the guy who did that to her sister.” Tony pointed at the photo.

  “Now wait a minute.” Larry said, resisting, getting to his feet to relieve his growing tension.

  Tony shook his head. “No, listen for a minute. It’s just a theory, but it fits. Let’s say Melissa was obsessed with finding this guy and getting revenge. Now she knows where Pendergrast is working, what name he’s using, everything. So she quits the FBI. You got to admit, that bothered us from the first.”

  “So you’re saying she sought him out, so she could get a job working where he worked?” Larry asked angrily. “Why? To what end?”

  Tony studied the picture of Melissa’s beaten sister again, then brought his troubled eyes back up to Larry. “What if it was to set up another rape—one with so much evidence that he couldn’t walk away from it this time?”

  “You’re out of your mind,” Larry bit out. “She saw what he did to her sister. She would never put herself in the position of letting him do it to her.”

  “I didn’t say she did. I said she set him up. It’s the perfect revenge. He winds up getting tried for a crime that he really committed—just not to her—and gets put away. All she has to do is choreograph things a little—plant some evidence here, plant some evidence there. The truth is, this thing might have gone down just like Pendergrast said it did.”

  “Hold it right there.” Larry leaned over his desk, seething. “Look at these pictures. This man is a monster, and you’re making her out to be the criminal.”

  “Maybe they’re both criminals.”

  “And what is her crime? Getting raped?”

  “No. Lying about it.” Some of the other cops were clearly listening, so Tony lowered his voice. “Look, it makes perfect sense.” He got up and turned his chair backward and sat back down, but Larry kept standing. “To her, it’s justice. He gets put away for something he’s really done twice. She makes sure the justice system doesn’t drop the ball this time. Just think about it. He probably terrorized her sister until she killed herself, and never served any time for it. Maybe Melissa wanted to set up enough evidence this time that he couldn’t go free. Think about the night of the crime. She was so cooperative, so helpful. All the evidence was perfectly laid out—except for one thing. Even knowing all she knows, especially after her sister experienced all of it, she still showered before she could be examined. So that evidence was inconclusive. The doctor couldn’t even say for sure there had been a rape at all!”

  Larry kicked his chair, and it rolled into the desk next to his. The cop sitting there on the phone jumped. “So how do you explain the lipstick and the prints in the attic?” Larry demanded. “Do you think she set that up, too?”

  Tony thought about that. “Probably not. I think Pendergrast may be after her now. If somebody set you up for something you didn’t do, you’d probably want to get even, too. In fact, if he’s been calling her parents, it sounds like he’s put two and two together himself and figured out who she is. The ‘next time for real’ message could have meant that the next time, he’d really rape her. I’d say your friend is in a lot of danger right now.”

  Larry grabbed his chair and shoved it viciously behind his desk. “It’s a theory, Tony. It’s not fact. You have nothing to base it on. Just a feeling.”

  Tony shook his head. “I’d say, based on Melissa’s relationship with one of Pendergrast’s previous victims and the fact that she chose to withhold that crucial bit of information from us, I have probable cause for suspicion here. And I can get to the bottom of it, too—unless you’re intent on standing in my way.”

  Larry clenched his jaw. “Hey, I’m in this for the same thing you are. To get to the truth.”

  Tony nodded. “But you’re too involved with this woman. Look at you. Maybe you don’t want to see the truth. In fact, I’d say this is disturbing you a lot.”

  “You’re disturbing me!” Larry shouted. “I’ve never seen anyone so intent on proving the victim’s the criminal. If this elaborate story of yours is anywhere close to the truth, I’ll find out!”

  “And how do you plan to do that?”

  “I’m going to ask her,” Larry said.

  Tony laughed and shook his head. “Yeah. Like she’s really going to confess it to you.”

  Larry rubbed his temples and started to pace. “I’ll start with asking about her sister. She can’t deny that. After that, she may tell a story that makes yours look ridiculous. Maybe it happened just like she’s told us all along.”

  “Ask her,” Tony agreed. “And then we’ll measure her story against the facts, and see which one we believe.”

  Melissa couldn’t relax or assume that Soames didn’t know where she was. He seemed to know everything. He always had.

  She lay in her hotel room bed, listening to the noises of people in the rooms on either side of her, their televisions blaring, their muffled exchange of voices, their footsteps going up the hallway, the ring of the elevators. All the while, she clutched a knife in her hand—and decided to buy a gun tomorrow.

  As night turned into dawn, and her numb, exhausted mind registered the sun peeking between the blinds, she asked God if he was still out there somewhere.

  Her only answer was silence.

  “I hope I’m around when God proves to you that you’re wrong.” Larry had sounded so sure when he’d said that, but Melissa knew she wasn’t wrong. There were some crimes too despicable to atone for, some people who weren’t worthy of forgiveness—and she knew herself to be one of them. Not because she was evil, but perhaps because of the way she had responded to evil. Now she wished she didn’t believe in God at all. It made the void too deep, the expectation of his wrath too dreadful, the separation from his love too gaping.

  Even before that
separation, though, she had lost all faith in God’s ability—or willingness—to protect her. He had failed to protect others, and he would fail her as well. She needed protection, but she wasn’t sure it was to be found anywhere. She was a target now—right at the center of the bull’s-eye.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  There was no answer when Larry knocked on the hotel room door, and for a moment he felt relieved. Melissa wasn’t there. Maybe he could postpone this for a while. He turned to leave, then stopped. Where was she? She’d been terrified to leave the room, knowing that Soames would be back on the streets in a matter of hours.

  He glanced up and down the hall, then stepped closer to the door. “Melissa,” he called quietly, knocking again. “It’s me. Larry.”

  He heard movement then, and the door cracked open. Over the chain lock, Melissa peered out. “Oh, thank goodness. You scared me to death.”

  She closed the door and opened the chain lock, letting him in. “I wasn’t expecting you,” she said. “When you knocked, I was sure he’d found me.”

  “We did have to let him go,” Larry said.

  Her skin looked pallid, and her blonde hair was mussed, as if she hadn’t given it a thought all day. She wore no makeup, and her blue eyes seemed paler, more fragile. There were shadows under her eyes, and he doubted she had slept last night. He felt drawn protectively toward her, but he held back. “Have you eaten, Melissa?”

  “No,” she said. “I was afraid to go out, and I didn’t want to open the door for room service.”

  “Why don’t we go get something?” he asked. “You’ll be safe with me.”

  She sighed and shoved her hair back from her face. “Well, I guess I can’t stay locked up in here forever.” She went for her purse and room key, then paused and looked around. “I’m running out of money, anyway. I’ll have to go home soon.”