Deadlocked

Chapter 7

Mason and Abby Lieberman lay in bed late that night, windows open, begging for a breeze, the crickets too hot to make much noise. Electric power came and went, the mayor broadcasting an appeal for people to turn up the thermostat on their air conditioners to ease the demand for electricity. Mason's air conditioner went the mayor one better. It quit. He found a fan buried behind boxes in the attic, dusted off the blades, and set it on a TV table at the foot of his bed.

"It's an oscillator," Mason explained to Abby with due reverence, the fan pushing warm air at them. "Says so on the label."

"My favorite kind," she said, kicking the sheet off of the bed.

"We could go to your place," he offered.

"This is good," she murmured, snuggling close. "It reminds me of summer camp."

"You never went to camp," Mason said.

"I saw a special on the Discovery channel."

They were naked, glistening from lovemaking, Abby tracing the path of the scar on Mason's chest with her fingertip. It was an eighteen-inch raised track, pink, smooth, and shiny, short zipper scars bordering each side. He'd been stabbed in the heart, lost his pulse in the ambulance, dead on arrival. A surgeon opened his chest in the ER to stop the bleeding, massaging his heart, bringing him back before hypoxia cooked his brain. Half a day of open-heart surgery repaired his wounds.

"Does it ever hurt?" she asked him, the fan drying them.

"Nope," he told her. It was the same answer he gave her each time she asked, even though there were days when his chest was filled with a dull ache that pressed against his ribs. Normal, give it time, his surgeon said. Abby gave him a T-shirt featuring a beat-up biker scarred from stem to stern promising that chicks dig scars. He counted on that.

They'd been together almost a year, their relationship igniting when Claire invited Abby to Harry's birthday party the day after Labor Day. Abby owned a public relations firm, Fresh Air. Opportunity and crisis management she called it until the phone stopped ringing after she was caught up in the Gina Davenport case. Then she turned off the lights.

Josh Seeley bailed Abby out when he hired her to help with his race for the United States Senate, his first run for elective office, the primary scheduled for August 1. He was one of Kansas City's moneyed elite who decided that his balance sheet qualified him for office. Abby guided him through the fallout from murky business deals dug up by his primary opponent, Congressman Delray Shays. Abby accepted Seeley's offer to work full time for the campaign, shut down Fresh Air, and recruited Mickey Shanahan as an unpaid volunteer.

The loss of her business festered like a low-grade fever in her relationship with Mason. They told each other it was neither of their faults, more the rule of unintended consequences. No hill for their love to climb, Mason assured her, Abby nodding through gritted teeth. Abby told him that her credibility would be restored if Seeley won. Then she would reopen Fresh Air.

Mason propped himself on one elbow, Abby on her side facing him. She'd let her hair grow to cover the scar on her neck left by the same knife that had lacerated his heart. She recoiled whenever he touched her scar, the closed wound still raw. It was shorter than his, no more than a couple of inches, but jagged. It was a cut made as much to disfigure as to kill. Abby wore high collars, scarves, and turtlenecks year round.

Mason told her about his two new clients, gauging her reaction. He had promised her that he'd stay away from cases with deadly retainers, the kind of case that appealed to what she called his death wish. Not that he wanted to die, she explained. It was that he wanted to find out how close he could get to death to prove he was really alive. She'd been there with him the last time and had made it plain that she wouldn't go back.

Mason didn't argue with her. He called his knack for getting in over his head diving into dark water. He used to rationalize that it was a by-product of trying to find the kind of law he wanted to practice-big firm, small firm, good pay, or good works. That was part of it, but not the part that drove him to take chances they didn't prepare you for in law school.

Something was missing in his existence and he kept looking for it in close encounters between life and death. With Gina Davenport's case, he'd come as close to the line as he dared, risking not only his life, but also Abby's, chips he vowed not to play again. This case, he told her, would be different. It was only about money and memories.

"It's still murder," she told him. Mason didn't argue or complain when she held him so tight he thought his scar might tear open. He didn't tell her about Sonni Efron or the stone on his parents' graves, two wild cards he didn't have a grasp on. "Are you going to sue Whitney King?" she asked.

"If I don't fire my client first. I chewed Nick out about the e-mails he sent to King and I told him that he was on his own if he didn't stop."

"How did Nick take that?" Abby asked.

"About as well as any eighteen-year-old takes getting yelled at by an adult, but he got the point. He's not a bad kid and he hasn't had it easy, so I cut him some slack."

"So, are you going to file the lawsuit?"

"Sandra Connelly didn't give me much choice. If I don't file in the next couple of weeks, Nick's case will be barred by the statute of limitations. He's got a good enough case against King that I can't take that chance."

"What about Mary Kowalczyk? Can you get a pardon for her son?"

Mason flopped back on his pillow. "The case against King is tough enough. Finding witnesses fifteen years later won't be easy. Even if I find them, their memories may not stand up under Sandra's cross-examination. Plus the two investigating detectives are my closest friends. Sandra will make us look like coconspirators. That's a cakewalk compared to the pardon. All I have to do is convince a governor running for reelection to admit that he ordered the execution of an innocent man."

"Will you make it dangerous?" she asked, rolling away from him.

"No," he promised, stroking her side, feeling her muscles tense at his touch, both of them wanting to believe him. He wanted to tell her that it wasn't all up to him, but he knew Abby believed in a different kind of free will.

Abby got up, closing the bathroom door behind her. Mason slipped on a pair of boxers and stepped over his dog, Tuffy, a German Shepherd-Collie mixed breed, sleeping on a pillow under the window. He padded down the hardwood hall from the bedroom on bare feet to turn on the attic fan, stopping at a window on the front of the house, raising it open. A full-bodied oak tree, its leaves an early brown from lack of water, rustled in the thin current of air passing through its limbs. The branches fragmented his view of the street. A moonless sky had dropped a black curtain on the city.

A car crept down the block. An expensive sedan. Japanese or German, Mason guessed. The driver doused the headlights, slowing to a crawl when it reached Mason's house. The passenger window slid down. A sharp flash exploded from inside the car, the spit of a bullet barely heard. The first floor window directly beneath where he stood shattered along with his promise to Abby, setting off his house alarm.

Abby burst from the bedroom, clutching a towel over her body with one hand, her other hand clamped over her scar. Mason wanted to tell her that it was nothing, that it wasn't his fault, and that he was sorry. He stood in the hall looking at her shake, not saying a word because he knew it wouldn't matter.

The alarm company sent the cops. Mason and Abby were just getting dressed when they arrived, Mason in gym shorts and a T-shirt, no shoes. Abby marched down the stairs, past the cops toward her car parked on the street as she tucked her sleeveless turtleneck into her cargo shorts. Mason followed her, his bare feet slapping the concrete walk. Tuffy trailed both of them, her tail on high alert.

"Don't go," he said, catching her arm as she reached the curb.

"I'm not doing this again, Lou! I told you that."

"It was probably just some kids. There's no proof it has anything to do with this case."

"Are you delusional?" she demanded. "You're hired to prove Whitney King murdered two people, his lawyer tells you to back off, and someone tries to kill you. All in less than twenty-four hours. If it's not connected, you're the king of bad luck!"

"No one tried to kill me, Abby," Mason pled. "The house was dark. It was the middle of the night. The shooter was counting on no one being on the first floor of the house."

"Fine," she said, pulling her car door open. "Whoever did it wasn't trying to kill you. It was just their way of saying hello. You can live that kind of life, Lou. People killing and getting killed. You and Blues pretending it's all water off a duck's back. Well, it's not water. It's blood. I know. I killed somebody and the blood didn't wash off my back. It stuck. I can't do this any more," she added, her hands raised in protest. "I can't."

Abby drove away, her parking spot taken by an unmarked police car, two detectives joining the four uniformed cops already securing his house. Mason tugged at the rough growth on his chin, clawing heat-stunted grass with his toes as Tuffy rubbed against his thigh. The dome light came on as the detectives opened the door. Samantha Greer stepped out from the passenger side.

"My luck," Samantha said. "I come out here at two o'clock in the morning for a busted window. You're not even shot."

Mason and Samantha had dated intermittently, for hormonal reasons as far as Mason was concerned. He broke it off when Samantha said she wanted something more and Mason told her he was fresh out of anything else. Mason met Abby shortly after that. Samantha gave up any hope of getting him back.

Samantha had shoulder-length blonde hair, green eyes, and a compact body that he hadn't thought about in months. Facing her in the dark, flush from the heat and sex, his memories of her surfaced like the twitch of an involuntary muscle, compounding his guilt about Abby.

"You get paid the same whether or not I got shot, so don't complain," he told her.

"That Abby?" she asked, pointing to the car disappearing at the end of Mason's long block.

"Yeah. Shootings make her jumpy. She went home. You can talk to her tomorrow if you need to, but she didn't see anything. She was in the bathroom."

Samantha asked him, "How about you? What did you see?"

Mason told her, Samantha writing it down. Her partner, a rumpled, overweight, middle-age guy with a bad comb-over stood back, letting her handle the interview.

"What's it all about, Lou?" she asked him.

Mason ran both hands through his hair, shaking his head. "Beats the hell out of me, Sam."

"It usually does, Counselor. Go after any bad guys lately? Piss off any good guys with bad tempers?"

Mason grinned, one reaction Samantha could count on from him. She understood him and didn't try to change him. Then again, they weren't sleeping together anymore. Maybe, Mason thought, she'd be less casual about his capacity to find trouble if they were.

"You remember the King and Kowalczyk case, the two high school kids convicted of killing that couple, Graham and Elizabeth Byrnes?"

"Sure," Samantha said. "That was Harry's and Blues's case. I was just out of the academy. Ryan Kowalczyk was executed the other day, wasn't he?"

"That he was."

"What's that got to do with you?" she asked. As Mason told her, Samantha listened. This time her partner was taking notes. When he finished she said, "Are you telling me Whitney King was using your front window for target practice?"

"No. Like I told Abby, I don't buy the connection. It's probably some kids just horsing around."

"You think they borrowed Daddy's Lexus or BMW for a drive-by shooting at your house instead of picking up a dozen Krispy Kremes and calling it a night?"

"You think only poor kids get bored eating donuts all the time? he asked her.

Samantha nodded. "That work for you?"

"Has to," he said. "Mind if I switch gears?"

"This one isn't going anywhere," she said.

"Are you working the Sonni Efron case?"

"Matter of fact, I am. Why?" she asked.

Mason asked her, "Any leads?"

Samantha glanced over her shoulder at her partner. "Lou, say hello to Al Kolatch, my partner." Mason and Kolatch exchanged nods. "Al, remember this. Lou Mason never asks whether you've got any leads in a fresh murder case out of idle curiosity. Isn't that right, Lou?"

"Would it do me any good to lie?"

"No," she told him. "We've got nothing official yet, but we're following a number of leads. Why the interest?"

"Nothing special," he said. "Just one thing. Sonni Efron was a juror in the King and Kowalczyk case. She was murdered the same day Ryan Kowalczyk was executed. Interesting coincidence, don't you think?"

Samantha looked at Mason, the corners of her mouth flattening out. "Real interesting," she said. "Let us eliminate Kowalczyk as a suspect. Thanks for the tip. Go back to bed."