Defensive Wounds (39 page)

For a moment the boy seemed to think about it, either wondering if cooperation would buy them time to think of something else or realizing that his life had been turned inside out and left a pale imitation of what it had been, all due to someone who professed to be his closest friend. Did he owe that person protection?

Neil Kelly finally spoke up. “Coral, put the gun down. It's over.”

“It is nowhere
near
over, Neil. How can you even say that?”

Neil?

Neil?

Theresa turned to him, but even as her lips formed the question—
How does she know your name?
—she saw it. And wondered how she could have missed it all this time.

“I'm sorry, Theresa,” he said.

The words hung in the air, like a familiar song sung in a different language, making it difficult to understand why the lyrics seem unintelligible to you. Theresa stared at him, waiting for comprehension, waiting for the pieces to fall into place just as they had with Ray's guilt in Jenna Simone's murder.

None of this explained where Neil Kelly came in.

“Who are—” she began. Then, “Ah.”

“Isn't he the cop?” William asked in the silence.

“Mom?” Rachael asked. She had calmed in her mother's presence, enough to take calculating glances at her assailant that made Theresa's skin crawl, as if Rachael were sizing Coral up for an overthrow. Rachael was strong, athletic, and might underestimate the skinny woman holding the gun. But that strength faded again in light of the cavalry's apparent defection.

Theresa said to him, “You're a transplant. You've only been here three years, which means you moved to Cleveland right around the time Jenna died.”

He nodded. “She was my niece.”

Theresa looked from him to Coral. A minor resemblance, in the snub nose and dimpled cheeks, easily missed on Coral's whipcord frame. Theresa couldn't blame herself for not seeing it. She did blame herself for not seeing a host of other things. His utter, out-of-proportion shock when she first told him of Rachael and William. His vehement certainty that Marie Corrigan deserved to die. His equally vehement certainty that Marcus Dean was innocent. Just as with Ray and William, it tortured him to think his friend might suffer for his own crime, even of omission … Had he kissed her on his houseboat only to distract her from the DNA results that pointed to Dean?

The great relief when she'd shifted her suspicions to Dennis Britton.

How when she'd told him that Coral Simone had Rachael in the tower, he should have asked, “Who's Coral Simone?”

Even Coral, who had slipped in the occasional Irish slang, learned from their grandfather. “Cub” for boy, “molly” for wimpy.

The simple fact that Neil should have told the entire investigation team that a hotel employee had been tried for an earlier, similar crime. Frank and Theresa had been trying to protect Rachael. Neil shouldn't have been similarly circumspect. But he couldn't have his fellow officers looking into the Simone murder, revealing his own connection to the dead Marie Corrigan. “That's why you were so vehement that I should get Rachael away from William,” Theresa said.

“Yes! I really did care. I didn't want you to suffer the way my sister did. The way
I
did.”

“And I thought you just wanted to get into my pants.”

He smiled at her, sickly and worried and with a gun held loosely in his hand, but he smiled. He had to be looking for a way out of this. Quietly, she said to him, “Don't do this, Neil. You can still step away. Coral's a grieving mother—they'll take that into consideration.”

Wrong thing to say. Walking away from revenge for his niece's death was not an option but a sentence in itself, and he grasped the gun a little more tightly and pointed it a little more in her direction. “No matter what else happens, my career is over, we both know that. My life has ended here today. I might as well take that little bastard with me.”

“Neil—”

“I'm sorry you and your daughter have to see this, I am. But it's too late now.”

Coral and Neil had two guns and three murders between them. Theresa had no weapons, a daughter, and someone else's son to look out for. The only available way out involved a seven-hundred-foot drop. The sun was sinking fast, sucking the light from the air as it fell. Frank was a prisoner in the Justice Center, and she had no police radio with an “alert” button, only a cell phone she'd never have a chance to get at to call for the backup Neil had refused to summon. She was out of options.

She said to Coral—she could no longer make herself look at Neil—“So what are you going to do? Kill me
and
two kids, somehow convince yourself this is justice? Destroy three people who never did a thing to you?”

“Of course not,” Neil said. “Nothing's going to happen to you, Theresa.”

Both women ignored him.

Coral gestured to Rachael with the gun's barrel. “You want to make a deal to get your daughter out of here. Well, this is the deal. You say this kid didn't do it, fine. Get me the one who did and you can have these two back without a scratch. You would do the same thing if it had been
her
lying on his living-room floor, with her clothes ripped off and her head bashed in.”

“Coral—”

“Look me in the eye and tell me that's not true.”

“You can't ask him—”

“Look at me!”

Theresa swallowed. “I would want exactly what you want. But I wouldn't expect anyone else to help me.”

Then William straightened; it could only have been an inch but seemed much more. He rested both hands on the platform and told Coral, “Even if he did what you say, I'm not leading him here like a deer to a blind. That might be him, but it's not me.”

“You don't think so?” Coral got a fresh grip on her gun, still pointed—alarmingly—at Rachael's midsection. “Then she dies.”

“Then I take you with me,” Rachael said, and wrapped one hand around Coral's wrist. She gazed into the woman's eyes and added, “It's a long way down.”

“Let her go, Coral,” Theresa said, moving closer as quickly as she dared. Neil Kelly did nothing to stop her, so she put one foot on the bottom step. “If you want Ray, we'll get him. We'll get him into a court of law where he'll have to make a full confession, tell the world everything he did. But let Rachael go.”

“I don't want to wait!” Coral shouted, her voice climbing to a shriek. She'd been in too much pain for too long, and rationality had slipped out the back door. “I've waited for three years! What did the courts do for me? Where's
my
justice?” She looked at Rachael as if seeing her for the first time, then back to Theresa. Then she got to the real heart of the matter: “Why do you get to have a daughter if I don't?”

Rachael grabbed the gun.

Coral tried to wrestle it back, shoving at her with a sharp thrust of one shoulder.

Rachael pulled, lost her balance.

Theresa took the last two steps without thinking, reaching toward them, feeling the tiniest flick of Rachael's hair before it brushed against the loose cable railing, the sensation still on her fingertips as she watched both Coral Simone and her only child disappear over the edge.

Theresa rushed the edge of the platform. Her body absently grabbed the cable to keep herself from following, though her mind no longer cared. She heard William's cry of agony as if it were part of the wind and looked down just in time to see Coral Simone's body strike the edge of a lower roof, rebound, tumble outward in one slow movement, and keep going.

Then she realized that the falling bundle of denim and blond hair that was Rachael had been stopped. William had cried out not in loss but in pain as his right arm caught the girl's falling weight, and now she dangled from the deck's outer wall.

Theresa realized later that she had literally catapulted off the platform, heedless of the gusting wind, to leap over both the side railing and William to land on the narrow walkway. But in the instant it took her to straighten up and rush to the outer wall, Neil Kelly had beat her to it, slamming into William and reaching over to grab Rachael's fashionable leather belt. Together they hauled the girl to safety. The entire moment lasted perhaps two seconds, but Theresa couldn't even calculate how many eternities passed before she wrapped her arms around her child, both of them too terrified to scream, cry, or even breathe.

Finally William's groans distracted her. Only then did she notice the odd angle of his right arm. She and Rachael helped the boy to a seated position, and Rachael's feverish
Thankyouthankyouthankyou
s helped to distract him from the pain.

Neil Kelly had climbed the platform and stood gazing downward, leaning precariously outward to get a glimpse of his sister's body.

“Neil,” Theresa said.

He leaned farther.

“Neil,” she said again, much more sharply, and this time he looked.

He thought about it. She could see him debating the option.

She held out one hand. “Come down.”

After another moment he did.

Then, holstering his weapon in favor of his radio, he calmly reported their location to the dispatcher and that there had been a death. He requested an ambulance as well as other officers.

He turned to Theresa.

She should be grateful, she knew. But all she could say was “About damn time.”

Angela arrived with plenty of help. Paramedics arrived with a nylon sling and eased William's arm into it.

Neil Kelly handed Theresa his gun, requested the police union attorney to which he was entitled, and then leaned against the deck's inner wall and waited quietly while his colleagues secured the scene and set up some lighting. Theresa watched Angela struggle with herself over whether or not to cuff him, then decide against it. She left a uniform at his side instead.

All this activity made for close working quarters, and Theresa found herself next to him while the EMTs bound up William's shoulder, Rachael holding his other hand.

She shouldn't say anything to Neil, she thought. She should just let him enjoy the view of the city lights and the coursing water beyond them. It might be his last glimpse for a very long time. And she shouldn't say anything, period.

But of course she couldn't stop herself. “Whose idea was it? Yours or hers?”

He stared at her. “You think I
knew
?”

“Stop playing me, Neil.”

“I'm not—shit, if I
had
known, I would have stopped her!”

Theresa gazed at him, searching his face for any sign of untruth, but she didn't know him that well and had never been able to read people like a book. That was why she stuck with inanimate things, like microscopes and dead cells.

“I didn't even know about this convention. Coral comes here for lunch with her group every so often. She must have seen an advertisement or heard about it from the staff.”

Theresa nodded. And when Coral realized or found out that her company provided the keycards for the hotel, it must have seemed like destiny. A plan began to form.

“I didn't know defense attorneys even
had
conventions until we got the call for Marie Corrigan's death. I knew she'd been his lawyer, of course—I'd come here to support Coral, attended the trial—but I figured at least two percentage points of this city's population hated that bitch, so I didn't think … I went over Coral's to tell her. She acted surprised. We had a drink to celebrate.” His expression grew pensive, now that he had a moment to think back and connect dots. “She wanted to hear all about it. The hotel room, what Marie's body looked like. Yeah, I shouldn't have been discussing an open case, but she's my
sister
. I swear, Theresa, she never gave me the slightest idea that she already knew all the answers.”

Theresa rested her head against the cold brick, watching the lights at Browns Stadium. Wrong season for football—probably a high-school graduation. She kept six inches of space between their bodies, but it wasn't enough. She could still feel the electric pull of his flesh, the smell of his aftershave. “What about Bruce Raffel?”

“I didn't recognize him at the scene, but when I saw his photo in a suit and tie, he looked familiar. I'd attended a few days of the trial, and I must have seen him. At that point I began to wonder, yes, but—you couldn't even call it suspicion, only this little gnawing worry in the pit of my stomach. And there seemed to be other connections between Raffel and Corrigan—sex, past cases, Dennis Britton. I didn't ask Coral about it. I didn't want to know.”

“If you had, Sonia Battle might still be alive.”

“Do you think I don't know that?” The words couldn't come out fast enough; he seemed to choke on each one. “Coral attended every second of William's trial. She'd arrive an hour early, wouldn't leave until the attorneys did. Sat there through every recess, every sidebar. I was with her the day Sonia came in during a break and thanked Marie for taking the case. Once the jury's gone, attorneys don't really pay much attention to who's around them. Sonia laughed and said William would wind up on death row if she had tried it. She
laughed
. Coral went to the ladies' room and threw up.”