Playing Dead Part 2

"Daddy, I hate her!"

Claire didn't hate her mother. It had been a statement born of anger and frustration. Nor did Tom hate Lydia, but any love he'd had was a diminishing memory. Tom told Claire to stay at Missy's house and he'd talk to her after he spoke to Lydia. "Don't worry," he'd said. "Everything is going to be fine."

He didn't believe it. Claire didn't, either.

He parked his police-issue motorcycle down the street from their bungalow in South Land Park, not wanting the copulating occupants to hear the sound of his bike. He walked up to the front door rather than using the garage-door opener. An unfamiliar blue car-an older-model BMW-was parked in the narrow drive.

Tom inserted his key, but locked instead of unlocked the door. Claire hadn't said whether she'd gone into the house, only that she recognized the man's car. Why would the door be unlocked? Had Claire seen more than she wanted to admit?

Tom turned the key again and went inside, knowing instantly that something was very wrong.

He reached for his gun, its weight comforting as fear-laced adrenaline rushed through his veins. It was the acrid smell-not of s.e.x, but of death. Blood mixed with the lingering scent of gunpowder.

His rubber-soled boots made no sound on the worn wood floor of the narrow hall. The mirror over the living room mantel reflected his profile-hard, chiseled, tough. A cop. If he dared look at his eyes, they would have been a wild, fearful blue.

Every door was closed. The bathroom. Claire's room. The linen closet. The small guest room that Lydia used as an office. And the door at the end of the hall. Their bedroom.

Not closed, he noticed while approaching, but ajar. Pushing it open with his shoulder, Tom stepped over the threshold.

The queen-size bed, lit by the midafternoon sun oddly filtering through the half-closed blinds, was in disarray from a rowdy session of s.e.x. Both victims were naked, the male lying facedown on top of the female. Both b.l.o.o.d.y, the attack so quick and efficient that the male victim didn't have time even to think about a defense.

Lydia was on the bottom-had she seen the killer? No-she always made love with her eyes closed. At least she had with her husband.

Her dead lover was sprawled on top of her. Four bullets in his back, one in the back of his head. He certainly hadn't seen the killer. Tom hadn't seen so much blood since he'd been the first responder at a brutal Korean gang shootout in Del Paso Heights. Lydia was drenched in it. His and hers. The killer had placed a single bullet in Lydia's head. Why? Wouldn't he have known the bullets penetrated the man's body?

Of course, Tom realized with sick knowledge. He had wanted to make sure Lydia was dead. Just in case.

Tom had to leave. Call for help. Do something, dammit, anything but stand here and look at his wife dead and naked in the b.l.o.o.d.y arms of another man. He was a cop, he knew to leave the scene undisturbed. But he had a burning question. He had to know who. What man had Lydia turned to because Tom wasn't good enough? What man had slept with his wife? Did he know him? Was he a friend? Another cop?

Tom's eyes were dry, but his throat constricted as the brutal slaying of his wife hit him. She didn't deserve this, didn't deserve to die an adulteress.

Tom didn't touch anything. The man's face was turned away from the door. Barely breathing, Tom walked around the bed to look at his face. Pent-up rage ate at his gut. He would have yelled at Lydia had she been alive. He'd been prepared to confront her and her lover. Throw her out of the house. Now? Guilt and anger battled with a surreal sense that this could not be happening.

Tom stared at the dead man, one eye full of blood from the bullet behind it. But Tom recognized him-a man he'd never met personally but had seen in action in the courtroom. A prosecutor, Chase Taverton.

He turned to leave, to call in the murder, to give himself five minutes of fresh air before he told Claire her mother was dead.

Then he saw it. His personal firearm, a Smith & Wesson .357. On the nightstand, not in the drawer. He always stored it in the nightstand on his side of the bed.

It was on top of the nightstand, on Lydia's side of the bed.

His gun.

His wife.

Her lover.

This wasn't right. His gun was in the wrong place. Had someone used his gun to kill them? His feet were like lead as he stared, trying to make sense of what had happened in his bedroom.

He heard the front door slam. "Daddy?"

Claire.

He couldn't let her see her mother like this.

He quickly left the bedroom, pulling the door closed behind him. "Claire, don't-"

"What's wrong?"

"We need to leave." Get her out of the house, protect the crime scene. Protect Claire.

"Is Mom gone? What happened? What-" Tom's little girl stared at the gun in his hand.

Fear crossed her young, pretty face. Was she afraid of him? No, not his Claire Beth. He'd walked into a nightmare.

"Claire, I came home and found her. She's dead, honey."

"Dead? Who? What happened?" She said the words, but confused and scared, hadn't comprehended what he meant.

His own gun had killed his wife. The shock hit him and he realized he was in serious trouble. He didn't want Claire to know but the truth was certain to come out.

"Claire Beth, we have to leave now. Your mother-G.o.d, I wish I didn't have to tell you like this-she's dead, honey. Someone killed her and Taverton. They're both dead."

Claire shook her head, her eyes wild, her jaw clenched in denial. "No. No! I don't believe you!"

Tom hadn't been holding her tightly enough and she broke free, stumbled around him, b.u.mped against the wall, ran to the end of the hall.

Sirens sounded in the distance. A neighbor must have heard the shots and called the police. How long ago?

Tom followed his daughter, reached for her as she flung open his bedroom door. She stared.

"Claire-"

She screamed.

Tom grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her to him. "We have to leave."

"Daddy-what happened? What did you do?"

"I didn't do anything."

Tears streamed down Claire's cheeks. There was doubt in her blue eyes. She didn't believe him. She didn't believe her own father.

"I would never do anything to hurt you."

"But-" She looked at the gun in his hand, her entire body trembling.

"I didn't kill your mother."

The sirens were closer. On their street. "We have to talk to the police. Tell them everything. The truth."

Claire's bottom lip quivered. She pushed away from him and ran from the house. Through the open front door Tom saw two patrol cars pull up. One cop-a rookie named Adam Parks-jumped out and ran to Claire, pulling her to safety behind the car, peppering the distraught girl with questions.

Tom holstered his service weapon and stepped from the house, hands in front of him, palms up. He was in uniform of course. He was on duty. Parks looked at him quizzically. "O'Brien?"

"This is my house," Tom said. "There're two dead bodies in the bedroom. I didn't touch anything." Not that it would matter, Tom thought. It was his house, his gun, his wife in bed with another man.

He knew what the crime scene looked like. He knew what these cops would think as soon as they saw the naked bodies.

Worse, he knew what Claire thought. How could he convince her he'd never hurt her mother?

Parks and another cop-Reynolds-went in and searched the house, came out, and said, "Detectives are on their way, and the chief of police."

Tom nodded.

"What happened?" Reynolds asked quietly. "You came home for lunch and found your wife in bed with another man? Just lost it?"

"I didn't kill anyone."

"It's just you and me, Tom."

Tom turned. He wasn't going to answer any questions. He knew better than to talk without an attorney.

Seventy-two hours later he was arrested on two counts of murder.

THREE.

When Mitch Bianchi trained in underwater forensics, he thought he'd find something he was not only good at, but enjoyed.

He was very wrong, at least on the latter point. He was good at it-combining his love and skill of diving with his innate law enforcement savvy. But recovering floaters was the worst job in the Bureau, even worse than his work identifying remains in the ma.s.s graves in Kosovo early in his FBI career.

But skill trumped desire every time in the Bureau, and this time Mitch had a stake in the investigation. If Oliver Maddox was dead, it gave Mitch one more direction to turn in his private investigation into the murders of Lydia O'Brien and Chase Taverton.

"You're quiet this morning," Steve Donovan said as he turned onto River Road heading toward Isleton, where Maddox's white Explorer had been found in the river. According to the sheriff's diver, the victim in the driver's seat had been there for a while. Four months? Possible. And it would confirm Mitch's suspicion that Oliver Maddox had found out something that made someone nervous enough to kill. Again.

"Just thinking."

"Funny how you never mentioned you were house-sitting for Nolan while he's at Quantico."

Mitch didn't show a physical reaction. "How'd you hear?"

"Nolan called in last week for some of his files and mentioned it in pa.s.sing. I remembered he lives only two blocks from Claire O'Brien. So I drove by a couple times, just to check it out, and surprise, I saw you sitting and talking with her at Starbucks Sunday morning. I didn't have a chance to call you on it in private until now."

Trying to come up with a lame excuse or lie would only damage Mitch's friendship with Steve. "You knew I was looking into O'Brien's case."

"I didn't think you were playing with O'Brien's daughter."

"It's not like that, Donovan."

"Don't jerk me around, Bianchi. You're playing a dangerous game here. Meg will draw and quarter you if she finds out you're working the O'Brien case after you were removed. The only reason you're on this a.s.signment is because you're the only diver we have in-house."

"It's complicated." Mitch had to tell Steve the truth. In some ways, he was grateful that Steve had confronted him. Mitch could use a fresh mind to go over the details.

"We have a twenty-minute drive," said Steve.

"We'll talk later. I need to lay it out for you. I still don't know enough to draw any solid conclusions."

Steve's mouth tightened. "Don't screw with me anymore."

"I won't."

"Seven o'clock, tonight, Fox & Goose, and you're paying."

"Fair enough." Mitch didn't want to meet at the Fox & Goose-he and Claire were supposed to go there tonight to listen to friends of hers who had a band-but Mitch wasn't picking Claire up until eight. An hour with Steve, then he could drive the five minutes to Claire's place. Steve would be long gone.

He planned to tell Steve all about his deception. Everything from his research into the O'Brien-Taverton murders to O'Brien saving Mitch's life to Mitch befriending Claire under false pretenses. The truth about everything, except for how close he and Claire had become over the last couple months. Mitch couldn't acknowledge to Steve-to anyone-that his feelings for Claire had moved far beyond professional interest.

They drove in awkward silence. Mitch looked through his notes on Oliver Maddox. He first learned of O'Brien's connection with the law student through the prison visitor logs. Mitch had looked for Maddox after the prison break, ostensibly because O'Brien might have tried to contact him. But he'd been pulled from the O'Brien case almost immediately. Politics or jurisdictional grandstanding, he didn't know which. He should have stopped then, but when Mitch found out that Maddox had been missing since a week before the earthquake, his instincts told him something was rotten. He put a BOLO on Maddox with his license plate and description.

Now they had Oliver Maddox's car and a grossly decayed body at the wheel. After four months the victim would be impossible to positively identify at first glance. h.e.l.l, a floater after twenty-four hours was green and sloshy and hard to ID.

Mitch's instincts told him it was Maddox. Disappeared without a trace, and now his car was found underwater.

Accident? Or murder?

The narrow, two-lane road to Isleton that followed the meandering Sacramento River was one of the most dangerous in the county. Accidents were common, especially during rain or the deadly fog that often descended upon the San Joaquin Valley. There was no guardrail to protect a motorist from going into the river. Once in the water, most accident victims didn't survive.

The California Delta covered over 738,000 acres. Hundreds of miles of waterways cut through the Delta, the water coming from the Sierra Nevadas through not only the Sacramento River, but numerous smaller rivers and creeks. They all eventually converged before merging with the San Francis...o...b..y. Isleton was a small river town of fewer than a thousand residents in the southwest corner of Sacramento County. It was known for its annual summer Crawdad Festival and not much else. Mitch didn't want to think about what those crawdads had done to the body in the Explorer.

Maddox's vehicle had been found in the river two miles north of the city limits. The Sacramento River flowed steadily, but today's current didn't look too bad.

A crowd had gathered alongside the river: local cops and their FBI team. Steve pulled up next to the emergency vehicles and said, "Ready?"

"Always," Mitch replied.

They got out and a deputy sheriff-Clarkston on the badge-approached with the sheriff's diver. The local diver was older than Mitch and a foot shorter, graying, with a craggy face and unusually large hands. "Harry Young. Thanks for coming out."

They shook hands, exchanged credentials, and Young said, "I didn't disturb the car. It's a white 1998 Ford Explorer, registered to Oliver Maddox. A missing person report was filed by Tammy Amunson on January 23 of this year. One victim in the driver's seat, been under for a time-eyes gone, fingers missing. A lot of critter damage, but the trunk and limbs are intact. No visible wounds, seat belt intact and engaged, windows down or broken on impact."

"Was there any evidence along the riverbank of a car going into the water?"

"If there was, it's long gone. Four months, rain, weather, growth."