Final judgment

SEVENTY-EIGHT

Blues prowled through the house to make certain no one had stayed behind. He and Mason carried Lila and Fish inside and laid them down in separate bedrooms.

Back in the den, Mason and Kelly stood facing one another. Mason saw a woman he once thought he’d loved, a woman whose life he’d saved and who had saved his life. Still, he didn’t know her and wasn’t certain whether he even recognized her.

“Let’s have it,” Mason said.

Kelly ran her hands through her hair like she was trying to pull off a mask. Nothing changed except her features softened with weariness and relief.

“The FBI asked me to come back a few years ago. They’d been burnt by too many agents who had been bought by drug dealers or foreign governments. They told me my background would give them an edge.”

“Because you had had a partner who was dirty and that made you suspect as well?”

“The higher-ups wanted someone they could send in to work with agents who were under the microscope. Even though I was cleared, they made sure I still had a bad reputation when I came back. I played on that by looking the other way, dropping a hint that I was open to something extra. If the agent reported me, we backed off. If the agent invited me to the party, we ran out the string.”

“Why go back? Why put yourself through that?”

“When my partner went down, he took part of me with him. I wanted that back.”

“Was Brewer one of the bad boys?”

“Very bad. We tried to nail him a few years ago, but we couldn’t get anything solid.”

“Was that when the two of you raided Ed Fiori’s office right after he was killed?”

Kelly nodded. “Brewer claimed he was working a confidential source inside Fiori’s organization, but we suspected he was on Fiori’s payroll. We had heard a rumor about Fiori’s taping system and, when Fiori was killed, Brewer said he wanted to check out whether his source was incriminated on the tapes.”

“And you wanted to know if Brewer was on the tapes,” Mason said.

“There was no informant. Brewer was after the same thing. There were only a handful of tapes left when we got there and Brewer wasn’t on them. Fiori’s nephew, Vince Bongiovanni, had gotten there ahead of us and taken most of the tapes. When we asked him for the tapes, he said he had destroyed them out of respect for his uncle’s memory.”

Mason almost asked her if she had found the tape of his meeting with Ed Fiori, but let it go. It didn’t matter anymore since his confessionals with Detective Griswold and Rachel Firestone.

“Bongiovanni told me he kept the tapes. I have a feeling he may have used some of them to settle a few of his cases,” Mason said.

“Comes as no surprise. My bosses in D.C. thought Al Webb and Brewer would be a good match. I hadn’t worked with him since Fiori died. We were both assigned to the investigation. He was already working on Fish’s case. Brewer came on to me and I didn’t discourage him,” she said, looking away. “I just pretended he was someone else.”

Mason took a deep breath. He didn’t want to ask who but was glad she didn’t dismiss her relationship with Brewer with a goes with the territory nonchalance.

“Brewer reached out to Webb,” Kelly continued, “and let him know he was available at the right price. Webb lowballed him and Brewer threatened to bust him on the spot. Then Webb came up with the conversations between Brewer and Fiori on a CD and Brewer took the money.”

“Did Webb get the CD from Bongiovanni?” Mason asked.

“I doubt it. Webb and Bongiovanni hate each other. Webb must have found a secret stash of Fiori’s tapes that we had missed. That’s when Brewer asked if I wanted in. He said if we got the tape, we could level the playing field with Webb and become his partners instead of his employees. I told him yes.”

“Webb gave the CD to his lawyer for safekeeping,” Mason said. It was a guess, but he made it a fact. Kelly didn’t deny it. “Which one of you stole it?”

“You’re lucky it was me. Brewer would have killed you and Lari Prillman.”

“Did Webb cut you in?”

“He wasn’t happy about it, but he did.”

“That’s a lot just to nail an agent that’s in the bag for a guy skimming from a casino.”

“Skimming and bribery are crimes, Counselor.”

“So is selling fake IDs to terrorists,” Mason said.