Deadlocked

Chapter 51

Mary reached out her hand, steadying herself against the fireplace, turning away from Father Steve, the enormity of his confession beginning to sink in. She staggered to the rocking chair, collapsing into it as the chair bobbed back and forth.

"Whose murder?" Mason asked.

The priest looked at Mason as if the question demanded he extract a chamber from his heart to answer it. Then he looked at Mary who was holding herself as she rocked.

"Whitney called me this morning and asked if I knew where you were. I didn't know whether that was because he wasn't involved in your disappearance or whether you had somehow escaped. I told him I hadn't seen you since you left the church that Wednesday. He told me he thought you would come to church today and told me to call him and tell him if you did."

Mason stepped to the front window, looking out at the quadrangle, having learned that Whitney usually made his phone calls when he was close by, the call giving the false impression that he wasn't.

"So he knows that Mary is here," Mason said.

"When I saw you come in this morning, I came back to the rectory to call him because I didn't think I had a choice. But I didn't call him."

"Why? So you could wait until you got Mary back here and she couldn't get away?" Mason asked, squaring around at the priest.

"No, Mr. Mason," Father Steve said, hanging his head. "I realized that if I called him, I would be crossing a line between hiding behind my vows and giving up someone to evil. I couldn't do that even though I'd spent the last fifteen years pretending there was a difference. I was afraid Whitney would come looking for Mary no matter what I told him. That's why I was in such a hurry. I decided to give Mary something to protect her. To do that, I have to break my silence and my vow to protect the sanctity of confessions."

Father Steve took off his coat, laying it on the arm of the sofa. He knelt on the floor where he pulled up four bricks from the middle of the hearth, stacking them next to the fireplace screen. He reached down between the floorboards into the crawl space beneath the floor and retrieved a tightly wrapped oilskin bundle tied at both ends with knotted twine. He slipped the twine off the bundle and unrolled the oilskin, spilling a tire iron onto the hard floor.

Mason knelt alongside the priest. Using the tips of two fingers like a giant tweezers he raised the tire iron up by one end and laid it back on the oilskin. Cradling it in the protective cloth, he picked it up for a closer look. The oilskin had saved it from rusting too badly. Freckles of orange rust mixed with dark splotches that were burrowed into the imperfect surface. Holding it to the light, he caught the reflection of what could be a hair embossed in the open cup that was used to grasp lug nuts on a wheel.

"Where did you get this?" Mason asked him.

"Victoria King gave it to me," Father Steve said as he stood. "After the trial."

"Why didn't you turn it over to the police?" Mason asked. "There could have been fingerprints or blood or tissue that would have proven Ryan Kowalcyk was innocent. How could you bury a murder weapon under your fireplace for fifteen years?"

"Do you have children, Mr. Mason?" the priest asked.

"No."

"Imagine that you had two children and they were both drowning, but you could only save one. Which one would you choose? It's an old dilemma, the stuff of a college philosophy course, until you actually are faced with it. What would you do?"

Mary came out of her chair. "You had to choose between my Ryan and Whitney and you chose him because his family had money and we had nothing! May you rot in hell!"

Father Steve's wide round face blanched at Mary's bitter curse.

"That will be for God to decide, Mary," he said, his crushed voice resigned to his fate. "Though I expect you'll get your wish. But it wasn't just about that. I didn't know whether this tire iron would prove that either boy was guilty or innocent. I convinced myself the jury had made that decision. My decision was about choosing between my vows and Victoria King."

"Victoria King is the only child in that moral dilemma," Mason said.

"That's where you are wrong, Mr. Mason. My vows, my faith, my church. That was my other child. That was my life. That's what I thought I was choosing by keeping silent about Victoria."

"I don't understand," Mason said. "Victoria had nothing to do with the murders of Graham and Elizabeth Byrnes."

"You're correct. She didn't," Father Steve said. He wrapped his hand around the cross hanging from his neck, closing his eyes in a moment of silent prayer, Mason reading his lips as he mouthed God forgive me. "Victoria King killed her husband. With this," Father Steve said, taking the tire iron from Mason.

"You mean this isn't the tire iron used to kill the Byrneses?" Mason asked.

Father Steve wrapped the tire iron back in the oilskin, holding it at both ends. "She never said, but I've always assumed that it is."

"Then," Mason said, pacing the small room, "Whitney had to have given it to her. He got rid of his bloody clothes at Ryan's house but hung on to the murder weapon. He must have given it to his mother. She kept it so that the prosecutor couldn't use it to convict her son. But why did she kill her husband?"

"Because my father was going to ruin everything," Whitney King said as he walked into the room.

King was wearing a black suit jacket over a shirt and jeans. The jacket was cut too full and hung unevenly on him. Mason finally recognized it as identical to the one Father Steve was wearing. The butt of a gun poked out of a side pocket. King held another gun in one hand, waving it at the three of them.

"Over there," King said, pointing them toward the sofa.

The priest sat in the corner of the sofa, moist half-moons of sweat under the arms of his rumpled white shirt. His face continued to pale, the pasty shade running through the fleshy folds of his neck, nearly matching the color of his collar. His eyes darted between King and Mason as he licked his dry lips, swallowing hard, his mouth involuntarily puckering for a smoke. Mary chafed at being so close to him, arching her back, setting her jaw with a stiff fury.

Mason didn't move, forcing King to divide his attention. It was a small advantage, but survival was often the sum of slim chances. He only had one card to play, but he waited, choosing the moment.

"Father Steve's clothes aren't a good look for you," Mason told King. "I'd stick to cross-dressing."

King laughed, his chuckle low and guttural. "The Catholic Church isn't known for its fashion sense. I'll give you that. And this rag," he said, sniffing the fabric, "smells like shit, but it was the best I could find in Father Steve's closet while I was waiting for you to get here. My luck, I had to pick a chain-smoking priest."

Mason put it together, shaking his head. "You were wearing Father Steve's jacket when you shot Sandra. Just to make me think it was him. What was the point? You were going to kill me too."

"I never plan on things going exactly like I planned. I just plan on winning no matter what happens," King said. "Turns out Sandra was right. You're a hard man to kill."

"Sandra figured out that your mother had killed your father. That's why she asked Dixon Smith to find out why your mother had been at Golden Years for so long. She was going to tell me and you couldn't let her do that."

"Sandra's firm has represented my family for years. One of the partners suspected that my father's death wasn't an accident. No one else at the firm would listen to him so he buried a confidential CYA memo in my father's files. Unfortunately, Sandra found the memo. Fortunately, when she told me about it, she also told me about the gun you kept in your desk."

"Using your laptop to call her was a neat trick," Mason said. "No phone records and you could call from anywhere. My backyard or the bike path behind your office building."

"C'mon, Mason. Give me some credit. You think I'm lugging around a laptop computer? Here," he said, pulling a palm-sized PDA from his jeans pocket, an earpiece with microphone wrapped around it. "WiFi. The future is now. Slick, don't you think? Besides, everything gets old after a while if you don't give it some flair," he added, stuffing the PDA back in his pocket.

"Even killing people?" Mason asked.

"Especially killing people," King answered. "The end is always the same. It's the journey that counts."

Mason's gut instinct that the Byrneses murders were a thrill killing was right. Whitney King had whet an appetite that couldn't be satisfied. "Is that why you murdered the Byrneses? For the joy of killing?"

"That's too easy an answer," King said. "When Ryan left to go find a gas station, I started talking to the wife. I came on to her and the husband didn't like it. He and I got into it. He came after me with the tire iron, but he slipped on some gravel and dropped it when he tried to catch himself. I picked it up and started swinging. I didn't even think about it. She froze. It was like chopping wood. I didn't appreciate the rush until it was over. Getting away with it was like coming in my pants all over again."

Mason forced himself to act like a lawyer, hide his outrage long enough to get the facts. "But why go after the jury? They acquitted you."

"Some of them said I was innocent because they believed it. Those were the ones I could trust. The others did it for money. I'd never trust someone like that. Give them enough time, and they'll come back for more."

"The jury was deadlocked," Mason said. "How did you get to them?"

"My family had a lot of money," King said with a shrug of his shoulders. "We found the weak jurors, the ones who needed the money badly enough. It wasn't that hard."

"You were only a kid," Mason said. "You couldn't have pulled that off. Did your father do it? Did he have an attack of conscience and tell your mother he was going to the cops? Is that why she killed him?"

King smiled at Mason, his lips flat and bloodless. "You are such a conventional thinker, Mason."

"Your father couldn't have gotten to all the jurors," Mason said. "That was too risky. Someone would have refused to go along or turned all of you in. How did he know which jurors to go after?"

King's smile faded. "It doesn't matter now."

"He doesn't know," Father Steve said, biting the words off as if each was dipped in poison.

"It doesn't matter!" King shouted at the priest, taking a step toward him, sweeping the gun back and forth between Mason and the priest. "So shut your fucking mouth!"

"You don't know, do you? You never knew!" Mason said with sudden understanding. "Your father died without ever telling you and you couldn't stand taking the chance that whoever it was would turn on you. So you started picking them off one by one. You had to stretch it out all these years so the cops wouldn't link the killings. You probably liked that part, didn't you, Whitney? It gave you something to look forward to."

"Like I said, it doesn't matter," Whitney told him.

"It does matter," Mason said. "You've been feeling the heat. That's why you took the chance of killing Sonni Efron and Frances Peterson so close together. That's why you took a potshot at my house and shot Sandra Connelly. You're coming unglued."

King wiped a trickle of sweat from his brow, forcing a smile. "Loose ends, that's all."

"In that case, there are two that you missed. Janet Hook and Andrea Bracco."

"Wrong again, Mason. Andrea's body has never been found. As for Janet, that bitch is a three-time loser no one will ever believe, especially while she's doing time. I'll clean up this mess," he said, pointing his gun at Mason, Father Steve and Mary. "And everything will be back on track."

Mason decided not to tell him that Blues was going to talk to Janet Hook. Her story might turn out to be Mason's epitaph. Instead, he played his last card. "We've got your mother," he told King. "You want her back, let us go."

King smiled again, this time like a child about to get his wish. "Give me that," he said to Father Steve who was still holding the tire iron. "I've been looking for this for a long time. My mother would never tell me what she did with it. Giving it to a priest for safe keeping; now that's brilliant."

He unwrapped the tire iron with his left hand, keeping his gun pointed at them with his right. Hefting it for a moment like a baseball player reunited with a favored bat, he suddenly swung it in a wide arc, smashing it against Father Steve's temple.

"Good as new," King said, as the priest crumpled to the floor.

Mason charged King who sidestepped him, slamming the tire iron into Mason's ribs, sending Mason rolling onto the floor, grabbing his side, his breath coming in painful gasps as his lungs pressed against broken cartilage. Before he could get up, King was standing over him, pointing a different gun at him. It was the one Mason had seen sticking out of King's jacket pocket.

"There's an old limestone horse barn at the south end of Penn Valley Park. All that's left are the outer walls. The city built some kind of theater inside the walls. Meet me there in thirty minutes or Mary dies. Any cops show up and Mary dies," King said, then fired the gun squarely at Mason's heart.

Mason's body went rigid with fifty thousand volts of electricity, shaking violently as the current dissipated. His jellied limbs were useless as he watched King grab Mary by the arm, squeezing until she cried out.

"And don't forget to bring Mom," King said as they left, the tire iron under his arm.