The Witness (5 page)

While he waited he slid another one of the cookies from the tin he held. His sister never said she understood his preference to keep the birthday low-key, but her gifts always conveyed it. The cookies had been homemade and carefully stacked, the book underneath the tin one of the mysteries he favored. She knew him very well indeed. He reached to knock a third time. The door opened under his raised hand. The sight of Amy paused him midmotion; her blue eyes were half open, the lashes framing them heavy with sleep. “I woke you up.”

She gave a nod as she stifled a yawn with the back of her hand. “Yes, sorry. I didn’t sleep well last night.” She stepped back to let him into the room. “I just saw the news scroll by; you arrested him.”

“The next town over did: shortly after 1 p.m. at his cousin’s home.” She was slow coming out of the sleep, her eyes a bit puffy and her attention not very focused, but it was rather nice to see the lack of the tension he had feared. “I brought pizza this time with cookies and ice cream for dessert. Although maybe in the circumstances I should have brought breakfast.”

She laughed. It was the first time he’d heard the sound, and he rather liked it. “I love it all and I’m starved. What kind of pizza?”

He pushed the room door shut with his foot, wondering what she’d think if he mentioned she looked very young at the moment and he felt very old. Her feet were bare, and the faded blue sweatshirt she wore was from a college in Texas. “Half with everything, half cheese and sausage.”

“Both work for me.” She disappeared into the bathroom. He carried the items he held over to the table. She reappeared with a hairbrush, tugging out sleep knots in her long hair.

“This won’t go to trial, Amy; he’ll plead out to avoid the death penalty. When I left he was already talking with the district attorney.”

She lowered the brush and tossed it aside with a sigh. “I’m not sure I like that outcome for what he did, but I guess I can understand it. And that kind of news you could have sent someone else to tell me.”

He watched her, assessing her mood, and felt relieved enough to let himself smile a bit: not coiled so tight today, finding her footing, and beginning to regret her promise that he could have forty-eight hours; he should have expected that. “This case might be sorting itself out, but we’ve still got an unfinished conversation to have.” At the end of this particular day he wasn’t looking forward to it, but it was going to be had. There were times when the job had to dictate when he could ease back and when he couldn’t, and this was one of those collisions.

She joined him at the table and accepted the plate he handed her. She chose two pieces of pizza from opposite sides of the box and settled back in her chair to eat. “Why do you have to dig? Why do you have to know?”

“Because you’re running.”

She shrugged, her slim shoulders making the gesture an eloquent answer. “Running isn’t so bad. I had three good years here before chance put me in the spotlight. Maybe the next place I’ll get five or more. That’s a better alternative than another cop being dead. Your sister isn’t going to appreciate that need of yours to know when she’s burying you.”

She was pushing him away incredibly hard. That resistance told Luke a lot about her past in itself. “Either talk to me or I can run your prints to confirm your name and do my own looking.” He wanted her to trust him, but that wasn’t in the cards. She’d already taken too many hits in life that he knew about to easily trust. He’d settle for a neutral interview. “I’m not asking just to drag up grief for you. You’re in my town, running from a guy that scares the daylights out of you, and I care about the job and badge enough to do what I think needs done.”

She pushed away her plate. “It’s not that simple, Luke.”

“Nothing ever is.”

She rubbed her face and finally nodded. “Fine. Ask your questions. I’ll give you the abbreviated version of the answers.”

“Who wants you dead?”

“A guy named Richard Wise. He introduces himself with the phrase ‘Call me Rich, not Wise’ and laughs as he says it.”

“Why does he want you dead?”

“I have his money. He wants it back.”

The simplicity of it was startling. Luke looked at her and suspected where this was heading. “Go on. You said the guy killed a cop,” he reminded her gently.

The jump in her nerves was instant, working the fine muscles around her mouth, around her blue eyes. “Had killed, but yes, he ordered it. The cop got curious, asked questions, and was found beaten to death in his living room forty-eight hours later.”

“Why?”

“To have asked the questions he did the cop would have had to meet me. And they wanted to know where I was. So they beat the answer out of him. I was already a state away.”

“Where did this happen? When?”

“Detroit, four years ago.”

“You sound certain of what happened.”

“Certain enough to have bailed out and run for my life again.” She reached for her drink and just held it, lost in the thoughts that absorbed her. She shook her head. “I hate talking about this, Luke.”

She got up and paced across the room, finally stopping to lean against the dresser, her arms crossed protectively across her chest. “I got out of the army when I was thirty-three. That was mistake one; I should have made it a career. I rented a place in New York from a friend while I looked for a job I might like. That was mistake two. I’d been in town about a month when I met an accountant at a party and liked him. Greg Southerland—rich family, ambitious, loved to laugh. We started dating. That was mistake number three.”

It wasn’t what he expected, her expression. Not nervous or worried, but sad, heartbreakingly so. “Over time I began to realize he worked at home a lot, that he’d have business meetings at odd hours on short notice. After a while I suspected Greg was doing work for a bookie on the side, but he’d wave me off or have explanations. His family seemed entirely aboveboard, not the kind to have raised a guy who would skirt the law. But he died, I was concerned on the how, and I knew where the books he worked on at home were kept. I took them.”

“Greg had only one private client: Richard Wise.”

She nodded.

“You didn’t turn the books over to the authorities?”

“It wasn’t that simple. Everything is in those books: serioussized bets, bribes, payoffs, fixed cases. Richard Wise would take a bet on anything, or for a price get you out of whatever trouble you were in. Cops are implicated—federal, state, local—whoever Richard Wise needed to manipulate who had a price. Including Greg’s father.” She looked over at him then, and the cop in him understood the trapped look in her eyes.

“That just made it worse, Luke. Greg was in deep at the end by his own choice, but somewhere along the way it must have started because his father crossed with Richard Wise.” She walked the length of the room again, stopping to shift her jacket back onto the bed where it had half fallen off. She finally turned back to him. “I have been turning the information over to the federal authorities. Very carefully, and only as they are able to use it. I turn that pipeline of information on too fast and someone carrying a badge who’s dirty comes back to slap at me. Or Greg’s father realizes I’m still alive, and I get squeezed by the one person who could probably influence me to forget what I have.”

“You’ve been doing it a long time.”

She nodded. “Long enough. The entries are getting old enough the information has almost run its course. Which is one reason Richard Wise is so desperate to find me. The last step in the process is to seize his money; the accounts have sat out there while the people he’s corrupted are slowly brought down.”

“That’s your hold on his money? The account numbers?”

She bit her lip as she nodded. “It took a year to realize the only lists of account numbers in existence were in the books I had. Greg had moved most of the money the week before he died. Maybe that was part of their normal security steps to keep the accounts below the radar of authorities. Maybe it wasn’t. But without the account numbers and authorization codes the money might as well not exist; it’s unreachable. But until Richard’s organization is fully rolled up, turning the account numbers in to the authorities is not something I’m willing to do. The numbers pass through the wrong hands and that money is gone without a trace. Too much money sits there, just a breath away from this guy’s reach.”

Luke understood those risks as well as the reality. “The fact that you are the only source for the account numbers has helped keep you alive.”

“Yes. He’d have sent a sniper after me a long time ago if he didn’t need what I alone have. This plan has worked for years and it’s entering the endgame. We wait until all the people are identified; then the money is swept in. The books come into a trial—authenticated, original, and many entries in Richard’s own handwriting—and there won’t be a place left for him or the people he’s corrupted over the years.”

The location of the books and account numbers was something Luke was not ready to ask. “I need to walk for a while and think.” He wanted to promise her it would be okay, that there would be answers for this, but he wasn’t one to make hollow promises. Bad cops meant trouble at a level he hadn’t even considered. He picked up his jacket. “Catch some of the news; finish dinner. I’ll be back in half an hour. You’re not going to be moving on me?”

“I’ll be here.”

“Good enough.” He tugged the hotel-room door closed behind him and took the stairs down. He pulled out his gloves. The air was cool tonight, and it would rain again before morning, he thought. He walked east.

He turned her story over in his mind. He’d been a cop a long time. Truth or fiction? Every story had that kind of basic check to it. His gut said truth. Even the part with her not suspecting the guy she was dating was dirty. Innocence made even normally smart people blind. She hadn’t thought Greg could be breaking the law, so she didn’t see all the pieces until after it was over.

God, she’s in a lot tighter place than I’d imagined. A man after money he sees as stolen from him, with no conscience for what actions he’ll take to recover it—I don’t see the defuse point. Most situations have one, but this has spiraled on for so many years that even putting Richard Wise behind bars isn’t going to address the threat she has run from for so long. He’ll want her dead. Behind bars or not, he’ll want his justice. And there is nothing that can be done to keep an evil man from plotting evil
.

There were times being a cop meant knowing how limited the law and justice could be. Justice was possible, but safety for Amy—she’d been right to run. If there were enough bad cops under the influence of Richard Wise, then Amy had been right to assume she was more safe long term out on her own than under the protection of the authorities. At least she was turning in the evidence she had, helping good cops clear away the turncoats lurking in their midst, helping end the corruption Richard Wise had created.

Amy hadn’t told him everything. He’d been a cop too long not to accept that and factor it into his thinking. She’d touched on the important points; he was reasonably sure the core of her story was in front of him, but the rest of the story she hadn’t said would be the worst part. It was human nature to tell the hard and painful stuff in order to try and create a barrier to keep from touching the deeper agonies. He accepted that reality because he had to and wondered who, if anyone, she’d ever talked to about the fullness of what had happened.

Fixing the problem wasn’t a reasonable expectation given what he’d heard; so what did he do with what she had told him? Luke walked for blocks, lost in his thoughts, and then retraced his steps.

Amy opened the hotel-room door for him when he knocked, and then she walked back across the room to where she was repacking her suitcase.

Luke closed the door and leaned against it, watching her. “Why haven’t you taken the money and disappeared with it yourself?”

She stopped to look over at him. “I see why you made deputy chief. You don’t miss much.”

“How much is there?”

“Just over twenty million.”

She folded a top and added it to the case. “I’ve thought about it. I’ve also thought about giving the money back to Richard to buy my freedom, but he’d just kill me for having taken the books in the first place. I’ve thought about tapping the cash so I could better disappear, changing my name again and again, disappearing into Europe somewhere with the best security money could buy.” She shrugged. “It’s blood money. Call it an oversensitive conscience or the fact I believe in heaven and hell. I take the cash, and I’m on a moral path I could probably never come back from—the money is too seductive.”

She opened a drawer in the dresser. “There’s the practical reality too. I’m a dollar sign for whoever finds me first, and with all the money or just part of it, I’d always be hunted as a means to the cash. I trusted a guy that turned out to be the bookkeeper for a criminal—my sense of self-protection hasn’t been very good in the past. I just want to be free again to start over. I’ve paid for my mistake for half a decade; it’s long enough. Another year and the cops will safely have everything I do. Freedom is worth more than any amount of money when it’s the one thing you don’t have.”

“Why did you tell me? You could have stopped anywhere along the way with less information or wrong information—enough to put me on a wrong track while you left town.”

“I made a choice.” She gave him a weary smile as she echoed his words of yesterday back to him. “I could have been dead in that shooting yesterday. If I die, those books, the account numbers, are gone for good. There are no fail-safes, no people who know bits and pieces, no lawyer holding an envelope with instructions on it for if I die. Over the years, that hasn’t bothered me because we were so far from the endgame. A lot of the people bribed in those records have been on the fast track to the top—I never thought they could be brought in. But the end is in sight now, and I’m not so comfortable having no backup plan.”

“So I’m your backup plan?”

“If I write that ‘if I die’ letter, I have to leave it in safe hands and address it to someone. Think about it hard for a couple months, if you want a lawyer holding a letter like that addressed to you. Just the existence of the letter could be life threatening. If they find me I’m under no illusions I will keep my mouth shut. They’ll get the location of the books from me. The day my body is found you get a letter, and now the both of you are racing to the same place. I personally wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of such a letter. But I’ll ask if you want to be and let you think about it long and hard.”