Sullivan's Last Stand
“A setup for what? To make it look like the man fell off the wagon?” She stared at him in frustration. “For crying out loud, Sully, it doesn’t make sense. For one thing, who knew we were coming here today? Who would have expected you to barge in illegally the way you just did?” A strand of hair had escaped from her clip, and she blew it away from her eyes with an impatient breath. “Let’s check out the rest of the house before we jump to any conclusions. Maybe he’s in the bedroom with an empty bottle of vodka, sleeping it off. Maybe the rye was for a friend.”
Without waiting for him to respond, she pushed past him with more annoyance than the situation warranted. With a muttered oath, he grabbed her arm and stopped her.
“I’m armed. You’re not. I’ll take point position and you bring up the rear,” he said tightly. “In fact, I’d prefer it if you stayed right here.”
“Forget it. I’m a real woman, not one of your bimbos,” she retorted. “If you’re going to lead, lead, but I’m coming with you.”
He wasn’t happy about it, she knew. Too bad, she thought as she shadowed him from room to room, hanging back a little as he cautiously entered each one. She wasn’t happy with the situation, either, but her reasons were harder to figure out. Why did his loyalty to the man who worked for him, however misguided she might see it as, irritate her so? They entered the bathroom, and she was jolted out of her thoughts.
“Wait a minute,” she said as Sullivan turned to leave. “There’s something odd here.”
“What?” He shrugged and looked around. “There’s nothing out of place.”
“That’s just it,” Bailey said slowly. “Hank’s a single guy, and the rest of the house is as untidy as you’d expect it to be. But this bathroom’s immaculate. The taps actually sparkle, for heaven’s sake.”
“And the floor’s been washed.” He looked down, and then over at the towel rack. She followed his glance.
“Not even a facecloth,” she said, frowning. “What does he use to dry himself with?”
“A towel, like everyone else does.” His eyes darkened. “But towels can be used to mop up blood, too.”
She felt an icy chill settle over her as his words sank in, and it was all she could do to stop herself from backing instinctively out of the small room. Had a man been killed here? Had he been killed so violently that his murderer had had to get down on his hands and knees after the deed and scrub every square inch of the floor to remove all traces of his blood? The bath was a combination shower, she noted. There were plastic rings on the rod, but no curtain. Had it been pressed into grisly service as a makeshift shroud by someone desperate to dispose of a body?
She was letting her imagination run away with her, Bailey told herself sharply. What they had here was an empty house, an empty bottle and an empty bathroom. Combined with Jackson’s absence from work and the little she knew about him, her first guess had to be the right one.
But Sullivan wouldn’t accept that. He seemed willing to stand by the missing Jackson no matter what.
And that was what stung, she realized. His loyalty to a man who worked for him was unshakable. His loyalty to her had been limited to three days, at most.
“I’m checking out that last room,” she said shortly, turning from him back into the small hallway. “What is it, some kind of den?”
He was right behind her, but the door was only a few feet away, and before he could stop her she’d opened it and stepped into the room impatiently. That was as far as she got.
Her eyes widened in shock as she surveyed her surroundings, and behind her she heard Sullivan swear under his breath as his arm went around her and he pulled her closer to him.
It had once been an office, but now it was a disaster area. A computer lay smashed on the floor, and a filing cabinet was tipped over on its side, its drawers removed and upside down nearby. Drifts of paper covered every available surface, obviously ripped from the empty file folders that were scattered about. Whoever had done this had been in a murderous rage, Bailey thought shakily. He’d been looking for something, and either he hadn’t found it or the fact that he’d had to search for it in the first place had prompted him to trash everything in sight. She took a hesitant step forward, and then looked down.
She was standing on one of the few file folders that still seemed to contain something. Moving her foot, she bent down and picked it up.
“Plowright,” Sullivan said tersely, reading the typed label out loud. “Angelica’s case. Is his report all there?”
Bailey flipped open the folder and leafed through the neatly numbered pages. “It seems to be,” she said slowly. “Whoever did this, he couldn’t have been searching for Angel’s file. We’d better call the police.”
“Not yet.” He hunkered down, sifting through papers, scanning them quickly and then letting them fall to the floor again. He straightened and looked at her. “They’re what I thought,” he said briefly. “Hank normally wouldn’t keep confidential files here—this is his research for a book he’s writing on famous crimes of the last century. The Plowright file is the only one here that anyone could have been looking for, so why the hell didn’t they take it?”
“Because they didn’t want the report itself,” she said slowly, her mind racing. “They wanted the photos that went with it—the photos of the woman that Aaron was with last weekend. That’s what this is all about, Sullivan. Someone’s trying to conceal her identity, and it looks like they’ll go to any lengths to do so.”
She swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry. “Maybe even murder,” she added shakily, her eyes meeting his.
Chapter Three
“Let’s take it from the top again. Why the hell did you and your lady here break into the house anyway?”
They were back at Sullivan Investigations, where Sullivan had told the police they would be when he’d contacted them from the trashed bungalow on his cell phone. Bailey could guess why he hadn’t wanted to hang around waiting for the authorities to show up, and as soon as the two of them returned to the office her guess had been proved right. Giving a quick rundown of the situation to three of his top operatives, he’d grimly instructed them to drop whatever other cases they were on and start looking for their missing comrade.
His haste in getting a search under way was justified. Within minutes of the briefing session, two police detectives had showed up asking for him and Bailey, and it was clear from the attitude of the younger man of the pair that he was prepared to grill them all night if he didn’t get the answers he wanted. So far he’d concentrated his attention on Sullivan, but at this last query Bailey couldn’t keep silent any longer.
“Hold it right there, Detective Straub.” She pushed herself from the edge of the gleamingly polished conference table that she’d been leaning against and took a step nearer the man. He was fair skinned, with sandy hair that was already starting to recede, and at her interruption he turned a blank look upon her, as if he’d forgotten she was in the room. His partner, a man about Sullivan’s age, burly and solid, swiftly hid the flash of amusement that momentarily lightened his somber expression.
“I’m not anyone’s lady, Detective.” She bit the words off curtly. “I run an investigative agency of my own—Triple-A Acme Investigations. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?”
“It’s the first one in the phone book,” Sullivan added blandly.
She shot him an annoyed look. “I dropped by this afternoon to discuss an unrelated business matter with Mr. Sullivan. When he learned that one of his employees hadn’t been in to work for a few days and couldn’t be contacted, I suggested we continue our talk on the way to Jackson’s place so he could check the situation out.” She didn’t meet Sullivan’s alert gaze. “Frankly, I think he acted entirely appropriately. Our first thought was that the man had been taken ill and possibly needed assistance. It wasn’t until we saw that his house had obviously been searched that we knew the matter was anything more than just an employee laid low by a flu bug.”
She was lying through her teeth, Bailey thought in faint surprise, and until the words had actually come out of her mouth, she hadn’t known that she had no intention of telling the truth—the whole truth, she fudged weakly to herself. After all, she had come here originally to discuss business with Sullivan, not realizing initially that it would have any connection to the absence from work of one of his operatives.
If it did, she added mentally. Finding her sister’s case file at the man’s house wasn’t proof positive that the two disappearances were linked. It could mean quite the contrary, but that didn’t alter the fact that there was one other detail that she—and Sullivan, too, she now realized—hadn’t bothered to mention to the two detectives. She resisted the impulse to glance guiltily at her oversize shoulder bag, only a few feet away from her on a chair, but when Straub’s partner finally spoke, she wondered at first whether he’d somehow been able to read her mind.
“Seems strange that someone would go to so much trouble to empty filing cabinets when all they contained were historical research for a book,” he mused, propping one polyester-clad thigh on the conference table and fishing in the pocket of his disreputable sport coat for something. His hand withdrew, and in it was a paper-wrapped toothpick. With the same fascination that a mouse would give a snake, Bailey watched him as he slowly peeled the paper away, wadding it up into a tiny ball and looking around the room as if there was nothing more important on his mind right now than to find a wastebasket in which to throw his minuscule piece of trash. Not seeing one, he sighed and dropped the wadded-up ball into his pocket. Then he inserted the toothpick between his lips and gave it a thoughtful chew.
Straub looked as if he was about to burst into impatient speech again, but the man that Sully had called Fitzgerald gave him a glance and, with obvious difficulty, Straub bit back whatever he’d been about to say.
Fitzgerald was the bulldog to Straub’s high-strung fox terrier, she thought suddenly. With his big build running slightly to fat and his slow, deliberate movements, he gave the impression of being the stereotypical plodding cop.
But he was the one she had to worry about. His next comment, although it was phrased as an afterthought, made that abundantly clear.
“I know I don’t have to ask if you left the scene exactly as you found it, Sullivan. You’ve been in this business long enough not to be removing evidence, haven’t you?”
There was the faintest of brogues in his inquiry, and when Sullivan spoke his voice held an echo of it.
“Sure, Fitz, and you were right the first time. You don’t have to ask.” His attitude was as lazily unconcerned as the other man’s, but Bailey had the unsettling feeling that the real conversation between the two was as antagonistic as it was unspoken.
“I’ve changed, Fitz,” Sullivan went on, pulling out a chair from the table and straddling it backward. He folded his arms along its back and shook his head ruefully. “You still see me as that crazy lad I used to be, but those days are behind me. I’ve learned to play by the rules, now.”
“Is that so?” There was a harder note in Fitzgerald’s voice, but his expression was one of mild interest, no more. “The way I heard it, it took you entirely too long to learn that lesson, and it was an expensive one. But you seem to have come through unscathed.”
“The same way you came through that unpleasantness at that godforsaken little desert town unscathed,” Sullivan said softly. “Who the hell were we fighting that time, anyway, Fitz? I forget.”
His arms were still folded casually along the back of his chair, and his posture was easy and relaxed, but glancing sharply at his face, Bailey saw a muscle at the side of his jaw tense. Puzzled, she flicked her gaze back to Fitzgerald. There was a rigid stillness on his expression, and she saw that Sullivan’s words had meant something to him.
“The enemy,” the detective said shortly. “That’s all we ever had to know, Sully. But maybe we were always really fighting ourselves. You saved my life that night—except we never should have been so far away from backup in the first place, Terry, and you know it.”
Their eyes locked, and for a moment Bailey had the uncomfortable feeling that if she dared to step between the burly police detective and the big man lounging in the chair, it would be like intercepting twin laser beams. She’d known from Sullivan’s greeting of Fitzgerald that there was some level of familiarity between them, but now she realized that that familiarity ran much deeper than she had first suspected.
Fitzgerald had obviously served with Sullivan as a soldier of fortune. Unlike the graying Englishman she’d spoken with that day on the Common, it seemed he hadn’t approved of his methods.
“What the hell has this trip down memory lane got to do with anything, Donny?” Straub burst out, his limited supply of patience obviously depleted. “Whatever wars you two fought together in are long over, so why don’t we get back to the matter at hand here?” He turned to Sullivan. “I think we should go over your story one more time, mister. Maybe you’ll remember a few more details down at the station.”
He’d done what she had known instinctively would be foolish, Bailey thought. He’d interfered in whatever private battle was going on between Sullivan and Fitz, and suddenly the two ex-comrades were once again on the same side, united against him.
“Wars are never over, Petey boy,” his partner said in a deceptively silky tone. “Not that you’d know about that, since you never fought in one. If you had, you might have learned something about reading men. Sully here is lying about something, I’m sure of it—but I’d bet my next paycheck that he’s telling the truth when he says he doesn’t know what happened to his man Jackson.”
“Yeah? Well, any lie is grounds to take him in as far as I’m concerned,” Straub said tightly, his fair skin coloring. “Once we get him into an interrogation room, I’m willing to bet my paycheck that I can hold out longer than he can. I want some answers from your foxhole buddy, and I’m going to get them.”
Sullivan finally spoke. The edge of amusement in his voice was deliberate, Bailey knew. “I don’t think so, boyo. Wearing you down would be so easy it wouldn’t even be fun. You might be hell on grilling petty thieves and hookers, but you’re way out of your league with me. Your partner here will back me up on that one.” He glanced over at Fitzgerald, and the burly detective allowed a ghost of a grin to cross his features. He shifted the toothpick in his mouth and nodded.
“Thirty-seven hours of questioning by the leader of that insane rebel faction in the mountains, wasn’t it, Sully?”
“Thirty-eight,” Sullivan said, frowning slightly. “Or maybe thirty-nine. That last hour was pretty much a blur. I was beginning to think you and the boys had taken a vote and decided to wash your hands of me.”
“When we finally showed up, I seem to recollect you were going through Al-Hamid’s family tree for him. It was hard to make out exactly what you were saying through a broken jaw and with the side of your face the approximate size of a football, but it appeared as though he was getting the gist. Something about a sheep, or was it a goat?”
Sullivan grinned wryly. “Hell, all I was trying to do by then was make him mad enough to get careless. It would have worked, too, if you and McGuire hadn’t barged in just when I was getting to the good part.” He glanced over at Fitzgerald. “Anyway, it all worked out in the end. I got the troop strength and materiel figures we needed, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, you did.” The faint amusement left the other man’s face, and his tone was quiet. “And you nearly got what you really wanted. Of course, that didn’t stop you from trying again.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Fitz.” Watching him, Bailey saw the blue eyes become instantly opaque, although there was no change in the easy good humor of his expression. “I got out alive—that time with Al-Hamid, and every other time.”
The detective’s gaze was steady and unwavering, and under it Sullivan looked suddenly away. “Don’t lie to yourself, Sully.” There was an odd intensity in his tone. “Lie to everyone else if you have to, but not to yourself. You did get what you wanted in the end, didn’t you? You’re a dead man walking,” he said softly, his voice pitched so low that Bailey had to strain to hear him.
The conference room was well lit and spacious, but all of a sudden she felt as if the walls were closing in on her and the lights had flickered and powered down. Dead man walking. What did Fitzgerald mean by that? Even as the question came into her mind, she knew it was unnecessary to voice it. The heavyset ex-soldier, with his deceptively stolid demeanor and his prosaically unimaginative manner, had simply put into words the impression that she had always told herself was too fanciful and melodramatic to consider. Fitz saw the same thing in Terrence Patrick Sullivan that she’d subconsciously seen the first time she’d laid eyes on him.
He was good-looking, charming and seemingly invulnerable, Bailey thought. But something had a claim on his soul, and eventually that something would call in its claim.
“Your Irish imagination is running away with you, boyo.”
Sullivan’s wry grin looked so natural that Bailey felt a momentary doubt. Maybe both she and Fitzgerald were wrong. Maybe Sully was exactly what he appeared to be on the surface, and what he insisted he was—a risktaker, yes, but with no more ulterior motivation behind his actions than an innate tendency to push situations to their limits, simply for the thrill of it.
“Next you’ll be taking a leaf from Quinn McGuire’s book of fairy tales and telling me that the wild geese have laid their mark on me. Is that what you think, Fitz—that they’re waiting to take me with them from some battlefield that still lies ahead? Because if you do, then you’re forgetting one thing.” His brogue thickened. “I’ve got no intention entirely of joining them in eternity. That’s why I walked away from the profession, isn’t it now? They can’t take me if I never go back, Fitz.”
His words were gently mocking, but, glancing surreptitiously at the man he was directing them at, Bailey didn’t see an answering smile on Fitzgerald’s face. Instead his eyes closed for an instant, as if in pain. Then he opened them again and fixed Sullivan with an unwavering gaze.
“They don’t have to. You’re already up there with them, Sully.”
“I thought we were here on an investigation, Donny.” Straub’s interjection was harsh. “What’s all this crap about freakin’ geese and battlefields and fairy tales got to do with anything?”
“Nothing at all, Detective.” Sullivan’s answer was just as harsh, but although he was apparently answering Straub, he didn’t take his eyes off Fitzgerald. “It’s a legend, that’s all. Your partner here likes to trot out his Irish fatalism once in a while. It’s all part of it, like the wearing of the green on St. Paddy’s Day, getting into drunken arguments with strangers over the Troubles and insisting that one day you’re going back to the old country for good. Like you so eloquently phrase it, it’s crap.”
His grin was tight. “And to be sure, I’d love to get together and lift a pint to Erin go Bragh sometime with you, Fitz, but right now I’ve got a business to run. If your baby pit bull intends to take me in for questioning, let’s go. I’ll call my lawyer and tell him to meet us down at the station. If not, then let me get back to work. Jackson was supposed to be looking into a case of industrial espionage this week, and I’m going to have to get another operative to take over the file.”
“All right, that’s it.” Straub’s fair skin was mottled with anger. He took a step toward the chair that Sullivan was lounging in. “Call your lawyer now, mister, because you’re under arrest—”
“For God’s sake, Pete, put the cuffs away,” his partner cut in tiredly. “Until we know what he lied about, it’s hands off.” The big man looked at the toothpick he was holding with sudden distaste, and then he sighed. “You know, Straub, I’m just counting the days until Tarranova comes back from maternity leave and you get assigned as temporary partner to some other hapless soul.”
“When she does, Fitz, come back and pay me another visit.” Rising easily from the chair he’d been straddling, Sullivan shoved it in under the table, the innocuous gesture clearly signifying that the meeting was over. “She’s a sweetheart, besides being a damn good cop, and I wouldn’t mind seeing Jennifer again. But from now on keep this rookie away from me and my people, understand?”
“I understand, Sully.” Fitzgerald’s voice lost its weary tone and took on a harder edge. “Don’t worry, I won’t return unless I have to.” He stood in front of Sullivan, as if sizing him up. “Just seeing me brings it all back, and you can’t live with that, can you? You never could.”
“See you around, Fitz,” Sullivan said shortly, walking to the doorway of the conference room and ignoring the other detective. “You know the way out.”
“Yeah, I do.” As Straub shot a black glance at Sullivan and stalked out of the room, Fitz hesitated. For the first time his attention focused on Bailey, and she felt oddly off balance under his intent scrutiny.
“You lied, too, Ms. Flowers,” he said softly. “You didn’t just come here on business. Take my advice and let him go, lady. He’s gone already.” The blue eyes narrowed on her searchingly. “But maybe you already knew that,” he said, so quietly that Bailey realized Sullivan, a few feet away, wouldn’t have heard him. “You can’t save him, you know. No one ever could.”
“Maybe no one ever tried.” The words came from her mouth unthinkingly, and in just as low a tone as his. “Or maybe they just didn’t try hard enough.”
The big detective shook his head slowly. “You’re as doomed as he is if you let yourself believe that. He can’t change the road he’s on. Don’t go down it with him.”
As Sullivan glanced over impatiently from the doorway, Fitzgerald gave Bailey one last look, and then turned from her. Without another word, he strode past his ex-comrade and was gone, leaving behind him a sudden silence.
Very carefully, Bailey walked over to the conference table. Pulling out a chair, she lowered herself into it, her movements slow and deliberate. The atmosphere in the room seemed close and heavy, but despite that she felt oddly chilled. She hugged herself for warmth and realized with a small shock that the fine hairs on her skin were standing up.
She didn’t blame Straub for being confused. She had no idea what that conversation had been about. She didn’t even know what her part in it had meant.
Why hadn’t she laughed off Fitzgerald’s cryptic warning, or at least asked him to explain what he’d meant by it? Why had she answered him the way she had, and so promptly?
Maybe they didn’t try hard enough…Her lips pressed together in a line and she sat up straighter in the chair, feeling a flicker of anger catch somewhere deep inside her. She wasn’t here to save Terrence Sullivan, dammit. She’d come here to get some answers about what had happened to Angelica. Admittedly, she’d also hoped to gain some closure on her former relationship with him by finally learning the truth about why he’d needed to tear her life apart so completely a year ago, but that had been for her own sake, not his.
She looked up as he moved from the doorway and met her eyes, his own as unclouded as if he’d already forgotten the scene that had just taken place with the two detectives.
“He knew we took the file.” He perched on the edge of the long mahogany table and looked down at her, one corner of his mouth lifting. “Well, maybe he didn’t know what we took, but he knew we had something from Jackson’s house. Fitz doesn’t miss much.”
“I’d already come to that conclusion.” She didn’t match his light tone. “What was the legend he was talking about? What are the wild geese?”
“ Who are the wild geese, darlin’,” he corrected her, shrugging. “They’re the souls of mercenaries who die in battle, if you’re inclined to believe in that sort of thing. I’m not. Fitz and Quinn McGuire, another of my old comrades, are.”