Playing Dead pb-3 Page 7

  Fifteen years ago fate had stepped in and saved him. He’d never admit that to the blackmailers, but sending him to assassinate Chase Taverton had changed his life for the better.

  * * *

  He’d followed Chase Taverton three days to get a feel for his routine. Taverton didn’t have one, other than working long hours at the district attorney’s office. He’d considered taking him out that first day, but the blackmailers were concerned about the circumstances of Taverton’s death.

  It was Judge Hamilton Drake who had proposed he should frame someone. Drake knew Taverton was having an affair with a married woman. He didn’t know who, but it was a not-so-secret secret in the building.

  It didn’t take the assassin long to learn the identity of Taverton’s lover. Taverton went to her house Monday during lunch, stayed just under an hour, then left. He did the same thing on Tuesday. While he was inside fucking the whore, the assassin carefully broke into Taverton’s snazzy BMW and read his schedule for the week. Taverton had “Lunch w/ L” written every day that week. Scanning back, he’d been having the affair for a long, long time. They even had a weekend trip planned in two weeks. The assassin called his blackmailers and suggested they wait until the trip to kill him.

  Negative. Taverton had to die as soon as possible. He was working a case that would get the judge and other important people in deep shit.

  So the assassin promised he’d be dead Wednesday by one in the afternoon.

  Lydia O’Brien was a nurse and she worked the night shift, twelve hours, from six p.m. until six a.m. four days a week. Her husband was a cop and left at seven thirty. The assassin didn’t know about a daughter until he broke into the house while the adulteress slept. That was the curse of rushing the job. He’d have known about the daughter if he’d had more time. He swallowed his nerves. It was as if he’d never killed before. But he’d never killed for reasons that weren’t. . more personal.

  He had his own gun, but he also knew cops. They always kept a gun in their bedroom. He wished he had more time-one day to steal the gun, the next to kill the prosecutor and his whore. But the blackmailers wanted no delays, which meant no more planning time.

  If he had to use his own gun, he’d have to leave it, otherwise the frame wouldn’t work. They’d try to trace the gun, but it was old, long ago stolen, and had no murders attached to it. He hoped to get his hands on the cop’s gun.

  There was nothing that connected the assassin to the two people he planned to kill. The blackmailers wouldn’t talk, because they had as much-or more-to lose. And he knew enough about why they wanted Taverton dead to keep them uncomfortable. He’d recorded his conversation with Harper and Drake just to be on the safe side. He didn’t want them to think he was expendable.

  He was too smart for that.

  He didn’t even live in Sacramento, he had no reason to be here, and he was staying under an assumed name in a hotel down in a seedy Stockton neighborhood forty minutes south of the capital city. He could disappear and the police would look for people who wanted Taverton dead. That’s why killing him with the whore made so much sense. The police would look at the obvious: her idiot husband. When the assassin told Harper about his plan to take out both Taverton and his lover, within twelve hours Harper learned that O’Brien worked solo. He was normally a training officer, but had no rookie currently assigned to him.

  A lot of things could go wrong. O’Brien could be on a call. Taverton could cancel his rendevous. But the assassin took comfort in the fact that he wasn’t connected to anyone and could slip away. If it all went south and the blackmailers exposed him, he’d have to disappear and assume another identity. Self-preservation was key.

  He refused to think about his own death.

  He waited until the working neighborhood was quiet. The old woman next door might be a problem, but the assassin came in through the garage door on the opposite side of the house, which was also the easiest lock to pick.

  Slowly, he walked through the house. Silence. The whore was sleeping. But if today was the same as the last two days, she’d be in the shower by noon. It gave him only a few minutes to find the gun and hide before Taverton arrived at 12:30.

  The house was homey and quaint. Nothing like the huge mansion where he’d grown up. Pictures on the walls of the family that lived there. Pictures. .

  His heart pounded as he stared at a photograph of the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. Her long black hair, her big, round blue eyes, her smile. . it was as if a huge spotlight was illuminating her framed picture. It was the sign he’d been searching for.

  He’d made three major moves in his life. The first was when he dropped out of college after killing-accidentally killing-Jessica. Each time he made a move, he had heeded a sign. But nothing had been nearly as powerful as this. There was nothing like this girl.

  She was his fate.

  Now he felt good about killing Taverton and the whore. What was that slut doing sleeping around? She had a daughter, someone who looked to her for moral guidance, someone who needed her. And what about her husband? He was either a stupid fool or he didn’t care. Either way, he deserved to go to prison for his ignorance.

  That would leave the daughter. She would need his guidance. A strong shoulder to cry on.

  He would stay in Sacramento for the black-haired beauty.

  He waited in the girl’s room while her mother slept. Carefully, with gloves, he went through her things. Discovered her name was Claire from the colorful animal letters on her door. Her room was cluttered but not messy. She’d made her bed before leaving for school. She was a good girl. There was no real theme or color scheme-her down comforter was red with several throw pillows in all colors. One of her walls was painted bright pink, the others sky blue. She had movie and teen heartthrob posters on the walls. In the corner was a basket with stuffed animals.

  In his search, he learned she was a freshman at St. Francis, an all-girl Catholic high school. There were dozens of snapshots of her with her friends on a large corkboard on one wall.

  A worn floppy bear on the bed with one eye missing.

  A white bathrobe hanging on the back of the door.

  A shelf lined with well-read books, thin romances as well as thick fantasies, like Tolkien’s trilogy.

  On her nightstand was a photo of Claire dressed up for Halloween as Princess Leia, with her father as Darth Vader. It was a few years old, judging by the newer pictures with her friends. Princess Claire didn’t have breasts yet.

  He knew he shouldn’t, but he took one of the pictures from her wall of friends. There were at least a hundred pinned up. After her mother was shot dead, would Claire notice that one was missing?

  He also took a pair of her panties. Bright pink, like her wall. Lacy. The underwear a teenage girl would wear to feel like a grown woman, but still in her favorite little-girl color.

  A loud, metal grinding sound vibrated the house, and he tensed. Then came the sound of running water through pipes in the wall that separated Claire’s bedroom from her parents’.

  Realizing the noise was simply an old plumbing system, he left Claire’s room and stood outside the master bedroom, looking through the open door. The adulteress was in the shower, evidenced by the sound of water hitting flesh. He quickly strode across the room, looked under pillows, under the bed, then in the nightstand drawers.

  He grinned. He was right: There was a gun.

  He returned to Claire’s room before her mother finished with her shower. He sat on her bed and waited. Waited for the perfect time to kill.

  He imagined a life with Claire.

  The assassin turned off the icy water. Fifteen years had passed and now he was an important part of Claire’s life. But if Tom O’Brien knew what Oliver Maddox knew, he, too, could put together the truth of that long-ago day. And if that happened, the assassin’s well-planned life would crumble around him.

  Then he’d be forced to kill Claire. He refused to leave town without her, and he knew she wouldn’t go
with him voluntarily.

  EIGHT

  Nelia was napping, her back to him, while Tom sat at the table near the covered window reading over the letter he’d written to his daughter. Nelia had wanted to deliver it for him, but Tom wouldn’t allow it. The more she risked exposure, the greater her chance of being tried as an accessory.

  Wasn’t that what he was using Claire for? To have Claire become an accessory to help him find Oliver Maddox? To help him prove his innocence? Was it a double standard? He’d told Nelia that Claire’s training and resources made her the perfect person to dig for the truth. And on the one hand, that was true. But Tom also desperately wanted Claire to learn for herself that her father was innocent. She was a doubting Thomas, had to see it to believe. She’d always been like that, and he wanted her to figure out the truth so she’d believe him. He didn’t want to hurt Claire or get her in trouble. He hoped that if worse came to worst, the fact that he was her father and she was a distraught daughter would weigh in her favor if things got hairy.

  Hopefully, it wouldn’t come to that. If she could just find Oliver Maddox, then she could step aside.

  Tom rubbed his head. If Maddox had learned the truth about what happened, why hadn’t the kid turned it over to the police? Why had he missed his meeting with Tom the week before the quake? Someone must have scared him into hiding, or scared him into quitting the investigation. Maybe Tom was making a huge mistake bringing Claire into this mess.

  His lower back burned and he absently rubbed it. He didn’t have a lot of time. His days were numbered either way. The only thing that mattered now was that he didn’t die a guilty man. Claire had to believe he was innocent. Then, maybe, he could die in peace.

  Seeing Claire again had hurt. He hadn’t expected the physical pain in his heart, twisting his insides like a constrictor until it squeezed the breath from his lungs. The pain in her face, the distrust in her eyes. Claire was no longer the bright-eyed, too-smart-for-her-own-good, inquisitive daughter he’d been raising. As a child, she’d wanted to know how everything worked and why. She would marvel at something as basic as a toaster or as complex as the stars in the sky.

  At least once a week on a clear night, Tom and Claire went out in the backyard and looked at the stars. Tom made a point of learning about astronomy because it pleased Claire that he knew about the universe, and it pleased him to make his girl happy. When they went on their summer camping trip-without Lydia, who didn’t like sleeping in a tent-they often stayed up well past midnight watching the sky and talking. About everything and nothing. Sometimes they were just quiet together.

  Being a father had grounded Tom like nothing else in his life. His family was the most important thing to him. Lydia-he’d loved her, even after her infidelity. If that made him weak, he didn’t care. He’d have divorced her had he known about Taverton, not killed her. No matter how much anguish he endured because of Lydia’s choices, not for a second had he considered shooting her.

  It was a few days before Christmas when Oliver Maddox had visited Tom at San Quentin for the first time. Tom had lost hope that he’d ever be able to clear his name. His last appeal had been rejected. He was scheduled for execution on July 1. Six and a half months and he would be dead. Being convicted of a crime he didn’t commit had enraged him for years, but his anger had dissipated. He would be executed an innocent man, but surprisingly he’d come to terms with dying.

  What he couldn’t accept was that he would die a guilty man in the eyes of the only person he cared about.

  The guard led Tom through the North Seg section of San Quentin. Tom glanced at the cage that held Scott Peterson. Peterson looked up, gave him a brightly dazed smile, then went back to the book he was reading. There was a guilty bastard, Tom thought. People equated Tom with scum like Peterson. A wife killer. But he didn’t care about public opinion. Tom only cared about the opinion of one person.

  And, if he was honest with himself, he wanted to know who’d framed him. Who’d destroyed his life and why. Why, dammit?

  He hadn’t been sentenced to Quentin. He’d spent the bulk of his fifteen years in a secure area of Folsom, where the warden segregated cops like him from the general prison population. It was lonely, and he still wasn’t completely safe. There were multiple attacks on him, and he didn’t know if they were because someone had found out he was a cop, or if he’d racked up more enemies.

  When Tom’s last appeal was denied, the warden at Folsom asked if he would like to do a final good deed. He was asked to transfer to San Quentin to befriend a killer who police suspected of murdering more than the eight young girls he’d admitted to. Tom agreed.

  Terrence Drager didn’t tell Tom squat about the unsolved cases in the months Tom was in the North Seg talking to him. But after he was executed, one of the guards handed Tom a letter. “From Terry. Wanted me to give it to you after he went to hell. You’ll be joining him there in a few months.”

  The letter was a list of locations. Twenty-seven locations, each identified only by a month, year, and the color of the victim’s panties. Tom retched at the information.

  Tom sent the information to the Folsom warden. He hadn’t heard whether any of it panned out, or about when he’d be transferred back to Folsom. His work here was done, and even though the North Seg was safer for him than other areas of San Quentin, he didn’t feel secure.

  Tom learned later that Oliver Maddox had identified himself as an attorney working for Tom’s counsel, which was the reason why they were left alone in the interview room. Tom’s hands and feet were shackled, and a chain secured him to the floor. He’d never get over the feeling of being a caged animal. And still, bulletproof glass separated Tom from Maddox. They spoke through closed-circuit phones.

  On the other side of the glass was a boy-well, he was probably in his mid-twenties, but he didn’t look more than eighteen. He had close-cropped hair except for a long tail in the back, and silver wire-rim glasses. “Oliver Maddox,” he said. “Thank you for agreeing to see me.”

  “Your letter was interesting.”

  Though the guard stood outside the door once Tom had been secured, Tom didn’t believe for a minute that the guards didn’t listen to the allegedly “privileged” conversations.

  Oliver had sent Tom a letter asking for a meeting. Tom didn’t know the kid, but he identified himself as a new lawyer working for the Western Innocence Project. “I have reviewed all your case files and identified several oddities,” he had written. “I believe that you were wrongly convicted and would like to discuss a possible appeal.”

  When Tom received the letter last month, he read it over and over in disbelief. After all these years, he had lost hope that anyone would learn what really happened that day.

  It didn’t make him feel any better that God knew the truth. Tom had a few choice words to say to the Almighty, and expected when he said his piece he’d be spending additional time in purgatory, which certainly couldn’t be worse than prison.

  But now, an outsider believed him. Believed he was innocent. He met with Oliver Maddox.

  “I’m still working on getting to the governor,” Oliver said, averting his eyes. Tom wondered if Maddox was telling the entire truth. “I’m hoping he’ll not only stay your execution but release you.”

  “Why?”

  “I think once the governor sees the evidence, he’ll realize that you were framed.”

  “I mean, why are you helping me?”

  “I think you’re innocent.”

  Tom stared at the kid. This stranger believed Tom hadn’t killed his wife and Chase Taverton. He was helping him for only one reason: It was the right thing to do. He was a young idealist. Tom hadn’t met one of those in a long, long time.

  “Do you know, in your gut, that I am innocent?”

  Oliver’s expression bespoke sincerity. “There was an article in a law-review magazine about your trial, your appeals, everything. There were several irregularities in the investigation, and when I reviewed the case files I thought
for certain that the Western Innocence Project would get behind it. But my advisor felt there wasn’t enough to get a stay from the governor or a new trial.” Oliver shook his head. “The Project wants wins. DNA evidence, a new witness, lack of due process, something solid.”

  “Not the word of a man convicted by a jury of his peers.” And his daughter, Tom thought.

  “If Lydia O’Brien was the target, then your guilt would make more sense. She was your wife and she was having an affair. On the surface, it seems logical. Do you know how many men kill their wives in any given year? There were-”

  “I know.” He didn’t need to hear it again. “The husband, the boyfriend, the ex-boyfriend always top the suspect list.”

  “Right. Well, have you ever considered that maybe Chase Taverton was the target?”

  Tom shrugged. “For years I tried to make it about Taverton, but it didn’t make sense to me. No one knew I was coming home that day. I was on lunch break when Claire called me. How could someone plan it so that I would be in the vicinity at the time they were killed? It was an unknown, as far as the killer was concerned.”

  “What happened when you took a lunch break?”

  “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “I mean, did you call it in? Tell anyone you were off the clock?”

  “Of course. I called dispatch.”

  “And did you do this the same time every day?”

  “Roughly. Depended what calls I’d been on, what I was doing.”

  “Who knew when you were on lunch?”

  “I guess everyone on the clock. I reported my unit number and where I was. I had to keep the radio on in case I was called to a scene, but it was just background noise.”

  “What about your partner? Where was he?”

  “I was on day shift, I didn’t ride with a partner. I often had rookies with me-I was a training officer-but I was studying to make detective, and I hadn’t had a rookie in weeks.”