Heart of a Killer (32 page)

“No,” I said. “I had no idea. All I knew was that she had asked to meet with Dr. Jenkins, and did so. She said she wanted to understand everything that was going to happen. She never said she’d be the one to make it happen.”

“Would you have told me if you knew?”

“I haven’t really thought about it, but probably not.”

“Why not?” she asked.

“I guess because it was her right to do it, just like it would have been your right. And I would think that you’d understand what she did better than anybody.”

“It’s not the same,” she said. “I was saving someone innocent in Karen, someone who had done nothing to deserve her fate. My mother was saving me, and no one could describe me as innocent.”

“The governor just did. The facts just did.”

“I don’t mean innocent of Charlie’s murder. I mean truly innocent. You know what my mother had to go through because of me? I took away her life long before today.”

“I don’t agree,” I said. “But if you’re right, then you need to make the most of the life she’s given you.”

Sheryl didn’t ask me any of the details about how Terry pulled the whole thing off. She would have had to be tested, to make sure she was a match, and she would have had to have gotten the means to take her own life.

I couldn’t have answered those questions anyway, but I’m sure that Dr. Jenkins was very helpful to her. He’d probably never admit it, but at this point it really didn’t matter.

Sheryl planned to stay at the hospital with Karen, and in fact Dr. Jenkins said that she should be conscious and mostly alert in a relatively short time. Sheryl was getting ready to see her, and to tell her what her grandmother had done.

It would be a wrenching conversation, and not one I had any right or desire to witness. I said my good-bye, and left.

I got home and suddenly felt completely exhausted. I wanted to forget everything that had happened; I wanted to once again think about things that were of no consequence.

But I knew that was not about to happen, even if I were capable of it. It would be a long while until the media would let me forget. Sheryl’s story was a media sensation. It would have been so under any circumstances, but its direct connection to the terrorist attacks made it far more so.

I turned off my phone the moment I got home; the answering machine was already full and not accepting any more messages. I listened to them, and one was from Gerard Timmerman, asking that I return the call. I had no idea why he wanted to talk to me, and the truth was that I didn’t give a shit.

But to the degree that I could control it, I wanted to forget about at least the nuts and bolts of the case. So I set out to do it that very night. I had to write some final motions, some housekeeping details as Sheryl’s representative.

I wanted to get it over with, so I forced myself to go through the file. When I got to the photo of Hennessey that I had shown Sheryl, I remembered her reaction recoiling from it. Then I thought about Karen, having seen him all those years before, and being told by her father that Hennessey would change their lives for the better.

I moved on, but came back to Hennessey’s picture, because I realized what had been nagging at me when I presented the parole board with the document Karen signed, the one in which she said she had seen him with her father.

I called Sheryl, still at the hospital with Karen. Sheryl said that they had spoken, and that together they had a lot to deal with, but she thought Karen was going to be okay. She seemed less sure about herself.

Jenkins had also provided an additional update. The operation had gone very well; Jenkins called it a complete success. The dangerous part, dealing with the body’s efforts at rejection of the foreign organ, was still to come. But for the moment all looked good.

“Sheryl, there’s something I need you to ask Karen about, something that was in the file.”

“Can’t it wait until tomorrow?” she asked. “She’s been through so much.”

“Sheryl, trust me. This is one question that can’t wait.”

“Okay.”

“Terry had said that Karen was upset, because she saw the picture on television of the man that was murdered, and she had seen him before.”

“I know.”

“I need to know when that was. I need to know when Karen saw the picture of the murder victim on television.”

Sheryl put me on hold, and went to the next room to see if Karen was still awake. She came back less than two minutes later. “Just a few days ago. Earlier this week.”

I thanked her, said good-bye, and called Novack on his cell. He answered with, “I was just going to call you, lawyer. You okay?”

He was referring to my emotional well-being after what he knew was a difficult day. “I’m doing well,” I said, even though I had no idea if I was. “But I need to talk to you.”

“What about?”

“Nolan Murray.”

“I’m at Cindy’s. Come on over.”

It took me almost an hour to get there; the traffic was backed up because of an accident on the bridge. I was getting more than a little tired of driving to New Jersey; it sort of defeated the purpose of living in New York.

I was concerned about the conversation I was about to have with Novack. He was not going to like what I had to say, that was a given. But I needed him to consider it fairly and carefully, because I needed his help if I was going to get anywhere with it.

Cindy had made sandwiches while waiting for me to get there; I was hungry but did not want to do anything to delay my conversation with Novack. “Remember the letter I presented from Karen? The one where she said she had seen Hennessey six years ago, with her father?”

“Of course.”

“She said she saw Hennessey’s picture on television, after he was murdered.”

Novack started to nod, then stopped himself, and said, “Damn.”

“Right,” I said. “Hennessey’s picture was never released to the media. He wasn’t even named as the victim. You wanted to hold that back.”

“So what did she see?”

“Well, it turns out that she saw the picture on TV earlier this week. She didn’t see Hennessey; I’m betting she saw Laufer. Which means that Laufer was with Charlie Harrison six years ago.”

Novack thought about it for a few moments, and then said, “I assume you have a theory about what this means?”

“I’m working on one; you can help me flesh it out.”

Novack turned to Cindy. “I think we’ll hold off on the sandwiches for a while.”

Novack and I agreed I should talk to Emerson, so I called him the next morning. It was Saturday, so he was off, but I left word at the precinct that it was urgent they get in touch with him, and he called me back about a half hour later.

“Listen, would you have time to talk to me for a few minutes? I’ve been going over my notes on the case, and there’s a couple of things that don’t make sense to me. I think you might be able to clear it up.”

“Can’t it wait until Monday?”

“It can, but I’m pretty anxious to get this off my plate. And Monday I’m going to have to start looking for a job.”

“Okay, sure,” he said. “Maybe an hour?”

“Great. You want to meet for coffee?”

“I’m doing some work around the house,” he said. “Why don’t you come over here?”

He gave me the address, and then said, “It won’t take long, right?”

“I promise.”

An hour later I pulled into his driveway on Thirty-eighth Street in Paterson. He came onto the porch to meet me, a smile on his face. “I don’t suppose you know anything about electrical wiring?”

“You’re not supposed to play with it while you’re taking a bath,” I said. “That’s pretty much it.”

He smiled again. “Thanks, that’s just the kind of expertise I needed.”

I followed him in and we sat in the den. “So what’s on your mind?” he asked.

I came straight to the point. “My client’s daughter said she saw a picture on television of a man who was murdered. It upset her because she saw the same man with her father a long time ago.”

“Who was the murdered guy?”

“Well, that’s what’s got me stumped, and I can’t ask her for a while, because she just had a major surgery. I assumed it was Hennessey, but then I realized that his picture wasn’t released to the media. Based on the time frame of when she saw the picture, I’m thinking now it must have been Laufer.”

He looked puzzled. “Why would Laufer have been with her father?”

“Beats me. And her father said the man was going to give them a lot of money, or something to that effect. So if it was Laufer, then it would mean he was working with Nolan Murray.”

He shook his head. “Makes no sense. Laufer fingered Murray; he put us on to him in the first place.”

I nodded. “Right. And if for some reason it was all a setup, and Murray wanted Laufer to put us on to him, how could he know we’d go to the school and interview Laufer?”

“He couldn’t, so it falls apart.”

“How did we get to Laufer in the first…” I caught myself in midsentence, and stopped.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Nothing, just thinking out loud,” I said, then stood up. “Well, I guess with Laufer and Murray both dead, it doesn’t much matter anyway. Thanks for your time.”

I started for the door, but his words stopped me. “Hold it, Wagner.”

I turned and saw that he had a gun in his hand, and he was pointing it at me. “Do you realize that the entire country was trying to figure it out, and you’re the only one that did?”

“Right now I’m not feeling too good about that,” I said.

“Everybody who knew anything is dead,” he said. “Except you. And your client’s daughter. I’ll have to take care of her before I leave.”

I knew I was talking to someone who had killed hundreds of people, and had been willing to kill hundreds of thousands. But the idea that he would kill Karen somehow seemed to cross some ridiculous line that I had in my mind, and I couldn’t take it anymore. “You are a piece of shit,” I said.

He laughed. “For a lawyer, you’ve got some guts. But unfortunately for you, I can create people, and I can make them disappear. You are going to join the disappearing group.”

He started to raise the gun, and the room exploded; SWAT team members came in from everywhere. If anyone yelled “Freeze!” I sure as hell didn’t hear it. Emerson turned toward one of the smashed windows, but before he could point the gun he was cut down by what seemed like a thousand bullets.

The next thing I knew, Novack was alongside me. “Well done, lawyer. You even had me believing it.”

“The guy could have shot me. There had to be an easier way.”

“I told you, he wasn’t someone to leave a paper trail. We needed him to implicate himself, and he sure did that.”

I nodded, I had known he was right, and events confirmed it. “I’m going home now,” I said.

“Nope. You need to make a statement and get debriefed. All that good stuff.”

“I’ve watched an amazing woman die, I almost got shot, and I have no job. It’s been a rough twenty-four hours. I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said, and I left.

Epilogue

I will be famous for the rest of my life. That’d become clear already. Everybody told me that the combined stories of the terrorist attacks and Sheryl Harrison were going to stretch my fifteen minutes of fame closer to fifteen decades. It was going to take some getting used to.

It’d only been a week since Nolan Murray was killed; I still found it hard to stop using his name and call him Emerson instead. In any event, I hadn’t returned to real life yet. It felt like I’d been debriefed and interviewed by every department of the United States government except the post office, and when I hadn’t been talking to them, I’d been busy avoiding the media.

For a guy who never liked the media, it seemed like Novack had been doing round-the-clock interviews. I’d actually learned some things I didn’t know by listening to him.

For instance, Novack said that an examination of Hennessey’s financial records showed that he joined Emerson’s group just before Charlie Harrison was killed. That was probably why he was hired in the first place, and why Laufer was the one that Karen had seen with her father.

Charlie must have gotten greedy and tried to extract more money than Emerson was willing to pay, so it became necessary to hire extra muscle. Once Hennessey was aboard, he stayed, and probably was very useful when other problems came up that couldn’t be solved by computer.

Emerson’s creation of the Nolan Murray persona was brilliant. He must have killed the real Murray, maybe he had Hennessey do it, and then erased his life on computer. He appeared to make a mistake, leaving only the college transcript in Maine, but that was intentional. It gave him the chance to re-create Nolan Murray and then have Churchill take his place in death.

Emerson also was in a perfect position, as a local cop, to monitor police activity if it were closing in on “Murray.” That was why most of the early murder-frauds were done locally.

Once he moved to the “big stage,” the national attacks, he could have done it from anywhere. My guess was he insisted on only speaking to Janssen about the attack on the nuclear plant because Janssen was operating out of the police station, giving Emerson a vantage point to learn what was happening from both sides.

At the very end, Emerson had given Garrett the lead that sent him to interview Laufer’s ex-girlfriend. She was lying, paid off by Emerson, and she would have been killed later on, had Emerson lived.

Gerard Timmerman called me three times, wanting me to come in and talk about my position within the firm. That fame I mentioned had apparently made me very employable, probably even “partner” material. Which would be good news, if I had any interest in it at all.

My uncle Reggie wanted me to join him and thereby double the size of his firm. Maybe I’d talk to him about it, after a while. I knew I’d eventually have to do something; I was just going to push it off for as long as possible.

Dr. Jenkins called me a couple of days after the surgery, to apologize for being so cryptic before I went into the second room with Sheryl. All he had said was that I shouldn’t let Sheryl take the pills, that it was “too late.” He had promised Terry he would keep her secret, so he couldn’t say more, yet he also couldn’t allow Sheryl to take the pills.