Riker opened the basement door and surveyed the deserted stairwell. He rolled the wheelchair through the doorway and down the stairs. The lower floor was a labyrinth with no helpful signs, and no elevator in sight. He knew he was facing east as he rolled the chair down a corridor which turned a corner and sent him south. He reoriented himself with every turn, hunting for the room to match the window with the broken glass. This section of the basement was pin-drop quiet, deserted in the lunch hour.
He settled on a door at the end of a long hall. On his way toward it, he passed the freight elevator which would open onto the service entrance in the parking lot. This was just too good to be true, and he flirted with the idea that God was on his side in this plan to batter a woman, to knock her senseless and carry her away.
He parked the wheelchair in front of the door at the end of the hall. Hunkering down, he used both hands to block the overhead bulb from the wide crack at the threshold. No light shone through from the room beyond. He pulled out a handkerchief and unscrewed the bare bulb over the door so the light from the hallway wouldn’t give him away in silhouette. Beneath the doorknob was a standard lock, nothing formidable. He applied all his strength to a twist of the knob to force the flimsy lock. The door opened quietly.
The long room was almost black. There was hardly any light from the rectangle of the broken window in the far wall. While his eyes adjusted, he was guided by the small penlight in Mallory’s hand.
She was completely absorbed in the contents of an open file drawer. He made out the dim shape of a desk lamp to her right. One of his hands went out to the lamp switch, and with the other, he grabbed Mallory by the shoulder and spun her around. And then there was light, but he was more startled than she was.
“Well, if it isn’t Jesse James,” he said, staring at the wide-brim hat shading her eyes. Her coat was laid open and now he could see the gun belt. “You got your geography mixed up, kid. This is the Deep South, not the Old West.”
Her face turned up and now he met her eyes. She was blinking in the light and wincing with real pain, her fingers working frantically to pry his hand from her shoulder. As his hand dropped away, the pain in her face lessened. He pulled the coat back and felt the bulk of the bandage beneath her blouse.
“Ah, Mallory, you took a bullet, didn’t you?”
She shook him off, saying nothing, only showing him she was not all that happy to see him again. He held up the pharmacy bag. “Dr. Butler’s prescriptions? I thought this crap looked familiar. Now what’s going on, kid?”
She took the pharmacy bag from his hand and checked the contents, as though she thought he might have stolen something. He knew she was stalling for time, hunting for a good lie.
“I’m looking for missing lab work my mother ordered on a patient. Any blood work would have been done here.”
That could be true. Mallory sometimes told the truth just to confuse him. Sheets of blue papers protruded from the oversized pockets of her long black coat. “What’ve you got?”
She ignored the question as she slid open another file drawer and continued her pilfering. It was awkward work, for she would not turn her back on him, and thumbed the files from the side of the open drawer. Now that she was on her guard, he had no hope of taking her by surprise, and he couldn’t rush her with the file drawer blocking him. “How’ve you been, Riker? You look like hell.”
“So? I saw the mug shot of you in the gingham jailhouse uniform. Now that was terminally cute.”
No reaction; she was deaf and blind to him.
Well, it took better bait than that to get a rise out of Mallory. “The FBI found your footprints in a classified system, kid. That’s a federal rap, real jail time.” Now he had her.
She smashed the pharmacy bag into her coat pocket. “I did not leave tracks in that computer. Those bastards have been trying to nail me for years.” She slammed the file drawer. “But they can’t prove illegal access – no way. If they can’t prove it, I didn’t do it.”
“Oh, yeah?” He pointed to her left shoulder where the wound was. “That was pretty careless, wasn’t it? But we’ll let the bullet hole slide, okay? The sheriff used your pocket watch to backtrack Markowitz. That was another screwup, kid, not ditching the watch with the rest of your ID. And then I saw the broken window – not your usual neat style. Was it your idea to park Charles’s car close enough to flag it for me? Oh, yeah, I can believe you got sloppy. I think the FBI does have something on you, maybe enough to prosecute.”
That put a small dent in her facade. The smallest doubt was all he needed to work with. “The feds send their compliments, and they want whatever you got on the New Church. You don’t give them what they want – they flood this burg with agents, and your own little scheme goes up in smoke.”
“They’re running a bluff. They don’t have enough probable cause to flood a Dayborn phone booth with agents.”
He leaned one arm on the file cabinet, testing the waters. She didn’t move away from him. “Mallory, they did me a favor. They held back your prints and they’re not looking to prosecute the computer break-in. Now I owe them one. You know this game.”
“You can tell them the New Church isn’t planning to overthrow the government. There are no assault weapons, no explosives, nothing bigger than a squirrel rifle. So they really have no excuse to blow up the town.”
“I need a little more than that.”
“The feds have a twenty-year-old file on the New Church. It may have dawned on them that it’s all bullshit.” She spoke to the open drawer as she pulled back file holders, stopping now and then to take one out for a closer look. “They had a profile on Babe Laurie as a brilliant and dangerous cult leader. Maybe they just found out he was the town idiot. If they did, they read it in his obituary. You wouldn’t believe how much the FBI paid for bogus information. I’m sure they tried to get better data from Internal Revenue, but IRS would never let them near an ongoing investigation.”
He knew Mallory couldn’t string that many words together without telling at least one lie. So there was no IRS investigation.
And now she was putting some distance between them, drifting away from the file cabinet.
“Okay, kid, tell me what IRS has.” Yeah, tell me a story.
“I can’t do that without admitting I was in another classified computer. Like you said, Riker – that’s a federal rap. Real jail time.”
“So? I’m gonna rat on you?” The distance between them was growing in tiny increments. He took one step toward her, and she brushed aside the long black duster to settle one hand on her right hip, exposing the gun. He recognized this as Mallory’s idea of being subtle.
You wouldn’t shoot me, would you, kid? Aloud, he said, “Give me something I can take back to the feds.”
“It’s a tax fraud scam. Babe Laurie’s brother is liquidating New Church assets into a financial holding pen. It’s all set up to feed into a foreign account.”
“So we’re talking big-time embezzlement?”
“It gets better. Malcolm is planning to skip out on the family. He just did a deal on all the lower bayou property. Sold it out from underneath his own relatives. They’ll be homeless and on the dole at the end of the month.”
“So that’s why you had to come back now. You didn’t want the locals to scatter till you nailed everyone in that mob.”
And now – time out for a little heartache.
She was coldly regarding him as a stranger, armed and dangerous. Was she seeing the same thing in his own eyes? Of course she was.
“So you figure Babe Laurie was in on the scam?”
“No,” she said. “Babe was a fool. Malcolm would’ve been crazy to tell him anything.”
“Suppose Babe found out about it? Good reason for Malcolm to do away with his little brother.” Tell me someone else could have done this murder. I’ll believe in you – even if I don’t believe you.