Confessions (32 page)

“When you think of something, badger breath,” she
said to Loftin, “let me know. If it's good enough, I might even use it myself someday.”

“Shut your fucking mouth.” The deputy struck Mariah, the vicious slap sounding like a rifle shot in the stillness of the room.

Her cheek felt as if it were on fire. But Mariah refused to give him the satisfaction of rubbing it. “At least we should probably discuss character motivation.”

“Dammit, Ben,” Fredericka complained, “if you mark her up, we're going to have a more difficult time setting up a believable scenario.”

“Hell, let me just take the bitch out and shoot her.”

“What a dandy idea,” Fredericka shot back. “Shoot her with a gun everyone in the damn town, including the sheriff, knows is yours. Will you call the state prison and reserve our cells? Or shall I?”

A scarlet flush rose from the khaki collar like a fever. “Hell, I wasn't going to shoot her with the .44. I was thinking more along the lines of a rifle. Make it look as if she were accidently hit by some poacher rushing deer season.”

Fredericka appeared to be actually considering that when a series of explosions rocked the room. The sudden noises appeared to be coming from the other side of the house.

“Jesus!” Loftin jumped. “What the hell is that?”

“You're the goddamn cop. Why don't you go see?”

She'd no sooner gotten the words out, when there was another volley of blasts. Then another. It sounded as if the entire National Guard had suddenly begun firing automatic weapons in every room of the house. Every room but this one.

Cursing, Loftin left the library in search of the source of the explosions.

“Sounds a lot like the cavalry,” Mariah pointed out
when she and Fredericka were alone. She had no idea what was happening. She only knew that now she was back to facing a single gun. Which, while not an ideal situation, beat the hell out of the earlier scenario.

“Shut up!” It was Fredericka's turn to be unnerved. Her usually modulated voice was as fractured as Mariah's had been earlier. Her eyes were hostile. She was finally scared.

Join the club, sweetheart,
Mariah thought.

Yet another explosion, even louder than the others, suddenly rocked the library and shattered the windows. The room began to fill with smoke.

Screaming, Fredericka spun toward the fireplace. Knowing she'd never have a better opportunity, Mariah yelled exactly as she'd been taught in self-defense class and flung herself onto the other woman's back. The pistol dropped from the Realtor's hand and went skidding across the oak floor.

They were rolling over the floor. Locked together in a death grip, legs wrapped around each other, hands reaching desperately for the gun. Time took on an eerie, slow-motion feel, like a violent scene from a Sam Peckinpah movie.

“Dammit, Freddi,” Mariah yelled when Fredericka's long nails raked painfully down the side of her face, feeling like needles against her skin. “I'm getting sick and tired of you!”

Forgoing the battle for the gun for a minute, she drew her right fist back and hit Fredericka smack in the middle of the face. There was a satisfying crunch beneath Mariah's curled fingers.

“You bitch!” The Realtor's voice rise to the stratosphere. She released Mariah in order to cover her face in her hands. Blood was spurting from between her fingers. “You broke my nose!”

“Pity,” Mariah gasped. She lunged for the Beretta and came up holding it in her hands. “After you paid that plastic surgeon so much.” She was on her knees, her breasts heaving, the gun pointed in Fredericka's direction.

“Maybe the prison doctor can set it.”

Mariah turned her head in the direction of the wonderfully familiar deep voice. He'd come! Just like in the movies. And beside him, hands cuffed behind his back, was Ben Loftin.

“It's about time you got here, Callahan.”

“Better late than never,” he drawled with a lazy ease that did not reveal the cold terror he'd experienced when he'd first seen those guns pointed at Mariah. He held out his hand. “How about giving me that?” he suggested quietly.

Mariah looked down at the pistol as if she'd forgotten she was still holding it in her trembling hand. “Good idea.” She was shaking so badly, she doubted she could hit the bookcase.

“I found the gun that killed Laura,” she revealed.

Trace glanced at the open, hollowed-out novel on the desk. “Clever,” he acknowledged, addressing Fredericka for the first time. “But Mariah already wrote that in
Murder by the Book.
”

“You actually know about that?” Mariah looked at him with surprise. It was one of her best works, but he'd never said a damn thing.

“I told you I'd seen some of your shows.” He glanced at the scowling Realtor, who was sitting on the floor, her hand pressed tight against her nose, which continued to bleed. “My guess is that I'm not your only fan.”

Trace Callahan a fan? Would wonders never cease. For one of the few times in her life, Mariah was struck absolutely speechless.

Enjoying her surprise, Trace turned to his deputy. “I
guess this means you're off the force, Loftin.” The moment he'd been waiting for for six long months was proving every bit as sweet as anticipated.

“Hey,” the red-faced deputy complained, “I'm not taking any murder rap. Not when I didn't pull the trigger.”

“Shut up, Ben,” Fredericka warned. She glared at Trace. “I have nothing to say to you until I speak to my attorney.”

“That's your right,” he agreed with a careless shrug. He turned back to Loftin. “How about you, Ben? You want an attorney? Or do you just want to clear the air?”

“I wanna make it clear that I didn't kill the Fletcher broad. It was all Freddi's idea.”

The woman's look was as sharp and deadly as a stiletto. “Dammit, Ben—”

“Freddi and Fletcher had this deal, see,” Loftin continued, ignoring Fredericka's repeated warning. “They were going to make big bucks subdividing the Fletcher ranch.”

“The Prescott ranch,” Mariah felt obliged to point out. “It was my grandmother Prescott's. Then Laura's. And now mine. It has never belonged to any Fletcher.”

Loftin stared at Mariah for a long moment, obviously unable to understand her gritty complaint. “Whatever,” he grunted finally. “Anyway, Fletcher, he had this side deal going. He bought up all the vacant land along what was going to be an access road to the development from the highway and once the project was announced, he was going to turn it over at triple the purchase price.”

It made sense, Mariah thought. For years, Alan Fletcher had been financially dependent on his wife. Now he'd found a way to make his own fortune.

“Goddamn it, Ben.” Freddi looked as if she were about to have a stroke. “I'm warning you—”

“Shut up, Freddi,” he shot back. “I'm fed up with
taking orders from you. And I'm damned if I'm going to hang for a murder you did.

“The only kink in the plan was that Laura Fletcher turned out to be goddamn stubborn,” he continued, obviously eager to spread the blame around. “She kept refusing to sell the damn land. No matter how bad things got.”

“You stole the cattle,” Mariah guessed, earning a sharp glance from Trace who was obviously not thrilled with her interrupting Loftin's confession. The guy was on a roll; Trace was waiting for him to crap out.

“Figured if we ran her into the red, she'd be willing to sell out. But when she took out that damn mortgage, it looked as if it were going to take longer. Problem was, the ragheads were getting impatient.”

“The Kuwaitis,” Mariah explained to Trace, and to J.D., who'd joined them in the den after having followed Trace's instructions to throw the confiscated cherry bombs down the chimneys and air vents. The young deputy was practically swaggering as he put a pair of handcuffs on Fredericka Palmer. As she heard the metal click around the woman's wrists, Mariah experienced a rush of satisfaction.

“That's when Freddi decided to take matters into her own hands. She killed the Fletcher broad. Then, to make it look as if the murder had been committed during a burglary, she also shot the senator.”

“Using a smaller caliber revolver and placing her shot where it wouldn't do much damage,” Mariah said, slanting Trace an I-told-you-so look. “I knew Alan was guilty.”

“Not in the beginning,” Loftin said, surprising Mariah. “'Course, after he recognized Freddi, the night she murdered his wife and shot him, he had no choice but to keep his mouth shut. 'Cause of the land deal.”

“So he was an accessory after the fact.” Mariah wondered why Alan hadn't just come forward in the beginning and decided that he hadn't been willing to risk his presidential campaign.

“You called it,” Loftin said. “Problem was, the senator's girlfriend wasn't some airhead bimbo. The gal figured things out from some papers she found mixed up with the senator's Fourth of July speech. When she was in danger of becoming a loose cannon, I was brought into the deal.”

As Loftin went on to explain how Freddi had promised him wealth and political assistance in winning his long-coveted job of sheriff for killing Heather Martin, Mariah was amazed at the lengths the woman who was already wealthy had been willing to go just to get her hands on even more money.

“You also ran Ms. Swann off the road,” Trace said after Loftin had explained, with some pride, Trace thought, how he'd gotten in with a passkey and drowned the aide while she was taking a bath. Once again, the senator had not been apprised of the plan beforehand.

“She inherited the ranch,” Loftin said simply, as if that alone were reason enough for taking a human life. “And she was turning out to be as damnedly stubborn as her sister.”

“It's a Swann family trait,” Mariah muttered. “You know. Kinda like greed is a Palmer trait.”

She looked at Freddi. “Did you trash my house?”

“I did.” Ben volunteered again. “On Freddi's orders, after you told Fletcher you'd found evidence in the house.”

Avoiding Trace's sharp look, Mariah thought about her sister. And her sister's baby. Both dead because Fredericka, Alan and some Kuwaitis wanted to build a fucking golf course in the pines.

“Would you just take these two slugs to jail where they belong,” she said to Trace. She could feel her temper snapping. “Before I decide to take that gun back and sentence them both to some good old-fashioned frontier justice.”

Trace knew the feeling all too well. He remembered the day he'd had to testify in court about the shooting. He'd remembered looking the scumbag who'd killed Danny, furious that the guy didn't reveal an iota of remorse for having struck down a vital, warmhearted young man in his prime. A man who'd left behind two daughters and a wife pregnant with the son Daniel Patrick Murphy never knew.

Although he'd always believed in the system, even knowing firsthand that it was intrinsically flawed, at that moment, Trace had been sorely tempted to put a slug right through the smirking bastard's cold black heart.

“They're on their way,” he said. He turned to his deputy. “J.D., take Ms. Swann home. I'll book these two, then go over to the lodge and pick up the senator.”

“I want to go with you,” Mariah insisted.

She'd been through a helluva lot today. Trace admired the way she was holding up. He also knew that she'd be wrung out once she came down from the adrenaline rush nearly dying can instill.

“Sorry. But you're going to have to sit this one out.”

Trace didn't really expect any trouble from Fletcher, but then again, he and Danny hadn't really expected to get blown away while investigating what had appeared, on the surface, to be just another drive-by homicide.

Mariah was seething with impatience. “Dammit, Callahan—”

“Shut up,” he said without heat. In no mood to argue, he took her arm and led her away from the others.

“My rules, remember?”

“This isn't fair!” She was the one who'd been saying all along that Alan was involved. She was the one who'd found the murder weapon. It was only right that she be along for the final scene.

“Life isn't always fair,” Trace reminded her. He raked his hands through his dark hair. The need to protect her had stopped being professional a very long time ago. “Look, Mariah, I've never been as frightened as I was when I saw those two holding you at gunpoint. I don't want to go through that again.”

“You said it yourself,” Mariah argued, her eyes touched with frustration and a lingering anger. “Alan doesn't have the guts to shoot anyone.”

“That's my belief. But I'm not willing to put it to the test.” He wanted to put his arms around her and crush her to him, to ensure himself that she was, truly, alive and safe. Instead he had to content himself with running the back of his hand down her cheek.

“I know how much you want to be in on Fletcher's arrest, but there is no way that I'll risk your life that way again.”

It was then that Mariah realized that Trace was blaming himself. The same way he had when he thought he'd hurt her. The same way he'd overreacted when he'd returned to the hospital, found her missing and mistakenly thought she'd been abducted.

His voice was a lush, low ribbon of sound, wrapping around her, warming her to the core. And even as it soothed, Mariah heard the core of steely strength and knew she was licked.

“Will you come by after you pick Alan up?”

“Absolutely.”

It wasn't the answer she wanted. But, Mariah reminded herself, the important thing was that Alan Fletcher would be behind bars, where he belonged.

“You win.” Her shoulders slumped, but her chin came up, just as he'd expected. “But you're not going to stop me from being at Alan Fletcher's arraignment.”