DEAD MAN'S JUSTICE - A Place of Evil (Stone & McLeish Thriller Series of Stories Book 2) (9 page)

Chapter 19

Chang drove out of the cemetery at high speed - the gatekeeper at the northern gate looked shocked but could do nothing to stop them as they turned onto
Myrtle Avenue - he kept an eye open for the police on the way back, they were in luck, Finch hadn’t yet called the shooting in.

Shadow finally told Rachel, who was sitting looking out of the window and from her taut expression was obviously still in a rage, ‘You seem to forget that the guy, and Mac for that matter, were witnesses to Guy’s shooting. They could turn me in, and for all I know have already done so. I need to deal with them and quick.’

‘I should have known just how stupid it would be to get mixed up with you again. For your information Stone was arrested for Guy’s murder yesterday when he got in from Trinidad. Bloom says they have evidence and motif. Mrs. Randall bailed him out, but it ain’t over yet. This cop Ramirez has got it in for him.’ Rachel was lying. She knew full well that Maloof was up to something and that Stone had been sprung by Bloom, but she had to get Shadow off Stone’s case.

She was pretty sure he bought it.

Shadow was quiet for sometime thinking over what Rachel had said, ‘Bloom you say, might be a useful character. Keep me up to speed girl.’

Rachel said, ‘Take me home.’

Stone got first aid treatment back at the hotel; they cleaned and bandaged the wound which had stopped bleeding, but they told Stone that they thought it could do with some stitches. Stone brushed off their concerns saying he’d be fine, but thanked them for their help.

He and Mac had dinner in the hotel restaurant. They ate quietly and avoided discussing the problems which were obvious. They agreed on one thing though, they had to have a plan to deal with Shadow. They were convinced that it was he that was behind the shooting at the cemetery. Finding him and bringing him to justice was quickly becoming their number one priority.

Stone and Mac went back up to their rooms. It was already dark outside and as he had a thirtieth floor room Stone had left the drapes open. He couldn’t shut out one of his all time favorite views, the New York skyline at night. 

Stone had bittersweet feelings. He was just one day away from seeing Laura but a continent away from Karla, who, due to work commitments, had had to stay behind in the Caribbean. She had meetings in Barbados and there was a possibility of a new project in Grenada to design a new civic center.  Since the traumatic kidnap at the hands of the stalker, and the last minute rescue in St. Lucia, she had found that work was the best healer. Stone had wanted Karla to take some counseling but she had resisted saying she had put it all behind her. For the first two weeks she was able to vent her anger and release the hatred for her captor because she was dead and no longer a threat. There was a setback in her healing process when, to everyone’s surprise, not least her father’s, the stalker was found to be alive. Stone’s concern intensified for Karla and because there was substantial proof that the stalker was in the States and there was a watch on all international borders to prevent her entry into the country, he was fairly confident that she was in no danger. Nevertheless, for his planned one-week trip away from her he had installed round-the-clock, professional, armed security to shadow her every move.

Stone needed sleep, it seemed like his life was continuing to be just as eventful back home in New York as it had been in Trinidad. He settled back wondering whether he too needed round-the-clock armed security.

Chapter 20

Rachel couldn’t believe that she had allowed herself to be used by Shadow, again. She was at home and was sorting through a suitcase and came across the jacket she had been wearing when she left New York three months earlier to go back home to Trinidad. Things had certainly not panned out the way she had wanted them to and one love affair, two deaths and one failed kidnap later she was back where she had started.

She missed Randy, her brother, and regretted that in the short time she had spent with her father she’d managed to alienate him again, perhaps for good this time.

The jacket was crumpled and just before she threw it onto a pile for dry cleaning, she checked and emptied the pockets and found the card from a bouquet of flowers left by her sister at her mother’s grave. She’d taken it when she’d stopped by Maple Grove cemetery on her way to the airport for the flight to Trinidad.

She hadn’t seen Rebecca, her twin sister, since she and her mother left
Trinidad when Rachel was twelve years old. A bitter dispute between her mother and father had divided the family ever since.

Rachel stared at the message on the card, it had brought a tear to her eyes that day and once more now, when she read it again.

Happy Birthday Mommy…

You are never alone…

I will be with you always

All My Love

Rebecca.

She turned the card over and saw the name of the person who had order the flowers from the florists. It was a man’s name, Mark Fielding. She flipped the card back over and there was a number for the florists, Rachel decided to call it and someone picked up.

‘Hi, can you help me please? I have a card from a bouquet of flowers bought by my sister who I’m trying to find, the buyer’s name was a Mark Fielding. I need to contact this guy.’

‘I’m sorry Ma’am it’s not our policy to give out…’

‘I know, I know, let me explain. The guy ordered the flowers for my sister, my twin sister. I haven’t seen her for almost thirteen years. I’ve had no contact, this is the first link I’ve…’

‘I wish I could help you Ma’am I really do but…’

‘Please find it in your heart to help me, there’s no other way I can get to her, all I need is an address. Will you…please?’

There was a short silence, the lady at the florists was thinking it over and decided there was no harm in helping her, she did sound quite desperate.

‘Okay, I shouldn’t be doing this, hang on a second let me check my book here…’ Rachel heard a clunk, she had obviously put the phone down and she could hear the lady thumbing through some pages and after a short while she picked up the phone again. ‘Ma’am, the address is, have you got a pen? The address is…1189,
34th Street, Brooklyn.’

‘Thank you so much, you don’t know what this means to me.’ Rachel ended the call and resolved to visit the address. She felt a wave of nervous excitement pulse through her and ordered her limousine. She fixed herself up and was so nervous she stumbled over chairs and dropped things clumsily because of her anxiety. She tried to calm herself down.

Maybe today will be the day, she thought, when she would be reunited with Rebecca.

Chapter 21

Stone’s second visit to the 113th precinct was in very different circumstances from the first. For starters he was in the front seat of a Porsche 911, not jammed in the back of a squad car between two overweight cops. Mac had driven because Stone’s arm was still painful and bandaged up. The gunshot wound, although primarily a superficial graze, had jarred his arm and there was probably some damage to the muscle, which he was determined to make light of,
‘he’d got more beat up falling off his bike when he was a kid,’
he told Mac.

Mac wasn’t convinced.

They was both dressed properly for the weather, and not, like Stone had been, as if pulled from a summer vacation commercial, dressed in shorts and flowery shirt. He and Mac had on knee length overcoats and at six-five and wearing his Barbados shades, whatever the weather, Mac looked more like FBI than the FBI.

The first person they bumped into who gave them his usual
‘You’s criminals are all the same,’
glare, was Officer O’Reilly. He was an old fashioned
‘Guilty until proven innocent,’
type of cop.

Stone asked for Detective Finch and O’Reilly motioned towards the CID room, then thought better of it and escorted them down the corridor, up the stairs to the first floor. He opened a set of double doors and called out to Finch to tell him he had visitors. It was a little after
eight a.m., Finch hadn’t been in long and was pouring himself a coffee.

‘Want coffee guys?’ asked Finch.

‘No, we’re good, thanks. We just had hotel breakfast.’ Stone patted his stomach as if to imply they’d overeaten.

‘Did you bring the memory card? I’ll get Tariq to take a look at the photos whilst I’m making out the incident report.’

Mac sat down next to Tariq’s desk and took out the memory card from his inside pocket and handed it to him.

Finch asked Stone how his arm was then ran through some personal details and wrote the body of the report, reading aloud, and Stone chipped in where necessary.

‘Does Ramirez know about the shooting?’ asked Stone.

‘Yeah, I reported into him after we left the cemetery but you can probably guess his reaction.’

‘Hmm the guy’s got me down as the killer of Guy Randall and until the real one walks in and slaps him on the face, I’m suspect number one.’

Tariq was scrolling through the shots taken by Mac and asked what he was looking for. Mac pointed to his pc screen and told him which car to zoom in on. Shadow’s car had crawled in front of the long line of limos and once Tariq knew which one he got to work.

‘Can you blow it up a bit?’ asked Mac, leaning over his shoulder.

‘Sure.’ Tariq was using a Mac Book pro and pinched his thumb and forefinger and spread them out until the open window filled the screen. On the fifth shot the barrel of a hand gun was clearly visible.

‘See. There. That’s the weapon and you can just see a hand, although it’s a little dark. Can you do anything about it?’

‘Yeah, I can digitally enhance it and lighten it up a little. Let’s see.’ Tariq clicked an icon at the top of the screen and kept clicking until the interior of the car was brighter, with more definition.

‘Look.’ Mac was looking at shot nine and a face was coming into view from the back seat. At first all you could see was a blurry profile of someone. Mac thought it was a woman’s face.

Stone was listening into their conversation and went around to Tariq’s desk to have a look for himself. Tariq continued to enhance the shots one by one and the details were getting clearer and clearer. It was a woman’s face but it was still too indistinct.

‘Can you sharpen that up Tariq?’ asked Stone.

Tariq clicked around from icon to icon, enhancing and using special techniques to sharpen each pixel. The face was now clear for all to see and Mac and Stone exchanged a knowing and anxious look.

It was Rachel Parker.

Mac had taken so many shots with the Nikon motor drive that they looked like a movie film advancing across the screen frame by frame. From the first frame to the final frame she could be seen stretching a hand forward towards the gun.

‘The hand was actually touching the gun at the time it was fired,’ said Tariq. ‘Look at this frame, there’s a red glow just at the end of the barrel, which is when the shot was fired.’

‘If she hadn’t have done that Stone you might have been history,’ said Finch who was now standing behind Stone and Mac. 

‘Go a little further Tariq,’ asked Stone.

Tariq moved down the frames as quickly as he could. The car had advanced now until it was tangential to the camera at ninety degrees and the driver and passenger alongside him was coming into view.

They were all riveted to the sequence and frame-by-frame, and inch-by-inch, the driver’s face, which was also the shooter, became clear. It was a Chinese guy.

‘No prize for guessing who that is,’ said Mac.

‘What do you mean Mac? You know him as well?’ said Finch.

‘Oh yeah-h-h. That’s Chang, Shadow’s sidekick. Almost got me killed at the siege in San Fernando, it’s a long story.’

‘Tariq if you clear up just a few more frames for sure you’ll see a black guy sitting beside Chang who will be wearing shades,’ said Stone. ‘It’s the killer of Guy Randall.’

Tariq’s fingers were clicking away furiously and in less than ten seconds the frames began to clear. The man sitting on the other side of the Chinese guy was Shadow, and was exactly as Stone described.

Stone, Mac and Finch were huddled around Tariq’s computer and they all stared at the last chilling frame showing the gun still protruding out of the gap above the window, Chang’s expression was one of anger as the outstretched hand of Rachel Parker had just ruined his shot and just behind Chang was the menacing image of Shadow, the gangster who had order the hit. 

At that moment the doors swung open and Senior Detective Eduardo Ramirez entered the room and they all turned their heads in unison to look at him. Finch felt obliged to advise his boss what was going on.

‘Sir, Mr. Stone and Mr. McLeish came in to make out a report about yesterday’s shooting.’ Ramirez’s eyes flipped to look at Stone’s arm, which he’d put in a sling at the hotel. ‘Mac was able to get off shots of the car as it cruised by, it’s interesting stuff Sir,’ said Finch.

‘Yeah, to who? For all we know it could have been staged.’ Stone could feel his blood pressure rising.

‘But the footage shows the killer of Guy Randall, a…Chad Loman, a.k.a. Shadow.’ Finch was trying to remain professional.

‘It proves nothing,’ retorted Ramirez.

‘Sir, Stone was nearly killed, if he hadn’t…’

‘Look Detective, Stone…’ Ramirez flicked his head across to look at Stone. ‘Is still under investigation for murder, don’t you forget that. Now finish the report and see me, we’ve got work to do.’

Stone’s fuse was lit, he responded angrily at Ramirez’s flippant dismissal of the shooting. ‘What is wrong with you? You have nothing on me yet you are still convinced that I’m a killer. And where’s the evidence bag that Mac brought in yesterday? Why aren’t you following that up? We’ve practically laid the guy on a plate for you,’ said Stone.

Ramirez walked over to Stone, he took the matchstick from the corner of his mouth and waved it around like a weapon as he spoke.

‘There is no evidence bag, and this little scratch here…’ Ramirez pointed to Stone’s arm, ‘is a diversion to put us off the scent. You’re guilty Stone, it’s just a matter of time.’

Finch didn’t know what else to say, to tell Ramirez what he thought would have been gross insubordination and he could make his life difficult for stepping out of line.

Stone jabbed back at Ramirez, ‘There’s something going on here Ramirez and it stinks. The bag was delivered here and recorded at the front desk.’ Stone told Mac they were leaving and they started for the double doors, he turned around for one last punch before leaving, ‘If you can’t do your job we’ll do it for you, I’ll bring Loman in myself.’

Stone and Mac left the precinct.

‘Boss?’ said Scarface.

‘Yeah go ahead, you still at the precinct?’ asked Maloof.

For the second time the dark four by four SUV with smoke grey windows had managed to park up at precinct #113 without being noticed.

‘Yeah but they’re on the move again, driving a dark blue Porsche 911.’

‘What the hell is Ramirez doing, he’s had too much time now. Follow them Habib, don’t lose them.’

‘Don’t worry Boss I’ve got a tracker on them.’

‘Good. Report in later. We may have to pay Ramirez a visit.’

‘Okay Mr. Maloof.’

Maloof flipped the phone closed and replaced it in his inside pocket. He took out a cigar, clipped the end and lit it up. He stood looking out over the east river watching the tugboats and barges, contemplating what to do next. Maloof had other, serious business to attend to and needed the Stone situation resolved. It was dragging on too long.