The 14th... And Forever Read online

  “Merritt.”

  “...Dr. Merritt to his appointment.”

  “I’ll go with you and Ms. Paretti.”

  The officer turned to face him, her polite mask firmly in place. “That’s not necessary, sir. Since you didn’t see anything, we don’t need to detain you...or, uh, keep the senator waiting.”

  “I might not have seen the vehicle, but I did hear the shots.”

  “We’ve got sufficient confirmation of the shots, and we’re searching for expended bullets that might give us a clue as to the type of weapon used. Now, if you’ll just—”

  “It was a single-round semiautomatic Assault Kalashnikov, more commonly known as an AK.”

  This time, both the police officer and Angela gaped.

  “The AK-47 has a distinctive sound,” Merritt said calmly. “Easily identifiable to anyone who’s heard it before.”

  Hemmingway recovered first. She scribbled furiously in her notebook, then stuffed it in her jacket pocket.

  “Why don’t you give me the keys to the senator’s vehicle, Ms. Paretti? I’ll arrange to have it towed to district headquarters when traffic starts moving. In the meantime, I’d like you both to come with me.”

  Angela sighed in resignation. “All right. But let me call the office first and tell them we’ll be delayed. Again.”

  Moments later, she buckled herself into the back seat of a black-and-white police cruiser beside Merritt. The door slammed shut, the automatic locks clicked loudly. As she surveyed the thick plastic screen inset with wire mesh that separated the back seat from the front, the hair on the back of her neck prickled. She felt as though she were caught in a cage with Merritt.

  A small cage.

  He was so close. Too close. With just a slight angle of her head, she could see the fine lines webbing the corners of his gray eyes. The rebellious wave in his black hair that was almost tamed by his no-nonsense cut. The glitter of a tiny shard buried in the collar of his charcoal suit coat.

  “You’ve got a piece of glass in your collar. Hold still.”

  She plucked it free, then looked for somewhere to discard it. Since the cruiser didn’t appear to come equipped with ashtrays, she dug a wad of sticky tissue from her tunic pocket, wrapped up the sliver of glass and tucked it back in her pocket.

  “Thanks.”

  She nodded, waiting until the cruiser had turned and headed into the District before asking the question that hovered in her mind.

  “I wonder how many people can identify an AK-47 just by its sound?”

  “Probably about the same percentage of the population who can tell a ’93 Grand Prix needs a ring job by observing its exhaust plume.” He gave her an admiring smile. “I was as impressed as Officer Hemmingway, by the way.”

  She refused to let either his compliment or his smile distract her. “How do you know so much about guns?”

  “I did a tour in the navy.”

  “I thought sailors, you know—” she sketched some waves in the air “—swabbed decks and peered through periscopes.”

  “Some do,” he said easily, then nodded to a huge granite building on the right. “Is that the old post office building? I haven’t seen it since it was renovated.”

  Angela frowned at what she suspected was a deliberate turn in the conversation, but murmured an appropriate response. For the rest of the short trip to police headquarters, she struggled with the uneasy feeling that Jack Merritt wasn’t quite fitting into his goatskin the way he was supposed to.

  Chapter 3

  Second District headquarters buzzed with activity. Phones shrilled, keyboards clattered, and a steady stream of uniformed officers, handcuffed suspects, complainants and unidentified persons passed by the waiting area.

  Jack had no difficulty schooling himself to patience while he waited for the detective who’d been assigned to the shooting. Propping the back edge of the plastic chair against the wall, he folded his arms and allowed himself the pleasure of watching Angela Paretti pace the waiting room. Her glittery sneakers flashed a bright counterpoint to the scuffed tan tile floor and nondescript furniture as she covered the room in a graceful stride that was enough to make any man sit up and take notice.

  Any man.

  He speared the derelict across the room with a quick frown. The bag man ignored his pointed glance and leered at Angela like a shaggy, unkempt wolf contemplating a stray lamb. Jack had just decided to put himself between Angela and the seedy character when a lean, wiry black man in a rumpled blue shirt and a shoulder holster strolled down the hall.

  “Angie? What the hell are you doing setting yourself up for target practice, girl?”

  She turned, a grin spreading across her face. “Hi, Eddie. I was afraid I’d get stuck with you.”

  The detective chuckled. “Hey, at least we’re on the same side this time. How’s Uncle Guido doing, anyway?”

  “He’s retired. For good!”

  “Oh, yeah? Then how come we got a report that he was at the Mint again last week?”

  “He was just feeling nostalgic. Honest. He said he only wanted to watch the hundred-dollar bills rolling off the press.”

  The detective snorted. “Yeah, right! I’m telling you, Angie, I better not see a rise in reports of counterfeit C-notes floating around the city in the next few weeks.”

  “You won’t. Trust me, Eddie. Everything’s under control.”

  Listening to the exchange, Jack added another variable to the complex equation that was Angela Paretti. The woman certainly seemed to live in a world populated by distinctive personalities. Her legendary boss. Her famous brother. Now, apparently, Uncle Guido, the retired counterfeiter.

  “Dr. Merritt?” The detective approached, his hand extended. “I’m Ed Winters. I’d like to go over the statements you and Angie gave Officer Hemmingway, then we’ll get her working on a composite. My office is just down the hall.”

  Slinging her black leather purse over one shoulder, Angela led the way. Obviously, she’d been to Detective Winters’s office before. Jack hefted the briefcase he’d retrieved from the Chrysler and followed.

  The Second District detectives shared a large, noisy room at the back of the station. Taking one of the plastic chairs in front of a cluttered desk, Angela declined Winters’s offer of coffee. When Jack did the same, the detective picked up a single typed sheet, then hitched a hip on the corner of his desk.

  “We’re still running the metallic-gray Grand Prix through the computers. Anything you can add to the details you gave Hemmingway, Angie?”

  “Not really. The whole thing happened so fast. I saw the car and the gun barrel and the face all in the same instant. I probably wouldn’t have noticed the Pontiac at all if it hadn’t been laying down a trail of smoke.”

  “Yeah, bad valves.”

  “Bad rings, Eddie. Bad rings. There is a difference, you know.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  When she shook her head in mock disgust, he grinned and shifted his attention to Jack.

  “Let’s talk about the weapon. Why do you think the shots were fired from an AK-47?”

  “It has a distinct report. Louder and a little sharper than the U.S.-made semiautomatics.”

  “And you’ve heard that distinctive sound before?”

  He gave Winters the same answer he’d given Angela. “I served a hitch in the navy.”

  “The navy, huh?”

  “The SEALs.”

  “Infiltration and extraction or covert ops?”

  Jack shot him a swift look.

  “I spent a few years in military intelligence,” Winters said with a shrug. “I know, I know, a lot of folks think that’s a contradiction in terms, but I did manage to learn a thing or two about roles and missions.”

  Faced with the detective’s obvious knowledge, Jack reopened a chapter in his life that he’d closed a long time ago.

  “I was the hospital corpsman on an infiltration and extraction team. I just went along for the ride, to patch up who
ever needed it.”

  Winters’s expression indicated that he knew damn well a navy SEAL team didn’t take anyone along for the ride.

  “Now you’re chief moneyman for—” he scanned the typed report in his hand “—Children’s Hospital in Atlanta. Interesting career change.”

  “Treating wounds on the run isn’t exactly the kind of thing a man makes a career out of. After the navy, I went back to school and ended up in the business end of medicine.”

  “I see. Well, I appreciate the information you’ve given us. Wish I could tell you that AKs are rare around these parts, or that we’ll be able to track down the weapori used in this incident. Unfortunately, the street punks here are as partial to rapid-fire weapons as I suspect the gangs in Atlanta are.”

  “We’ve treated a few gang members at Children’s,” Jack admitted quietly. “The last one was seven years old.”

  “Yeah.” The detective dropped the report on the desk and rose. “Sorry your visit to our fair city got off to such an eventful start.”

  Jack’s gaze shifted to the tousle-haired woman edging her way past him to the door. Eventful wasn’t quite how he’d describe it.

  Winters snagged his suit jacket from the back of his chair. “I understand Angie was driving you to a meeting with Senator Claiborne. I’ll get one of the uniforms to drive you to the Capitol Building while she works on the composite.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  Angela jerked her head around.

  “I brought my briefcase,” Jack said calmly, forestalling her protest, “but I left my carryall in the car. There are some spreadsheets in it I want to review before my meeting with your boss.”

  “The senator is not going to be happy about this.” With that ominous warning, Angela marched out the door.

  Tough. Jack wasn’t particularly happy about this summons to Washington, either. Until he understood exactly what was behind the senator’s sudden “invitation,” he intended to play this game slowly and very, very carefully. He didn’t care if it took Angela the rest of the afternoon and half the night to complete the composite.

  Unfortunately, she made short work of it. While he and Winters watched from the back of the room, she described the individual she’d glimpsed with words and the extravagant gestures Jack was coming to recognize as part of her vivid personality. A civilian technician seated at a computer console translated both words and gestures into a visual imaging program. Within moments, a face took form on the computer screen. With each click of the mouse, the form took on more distinct characteristics.

  “Make the chin smaller.” She butted the base of her palms together to demonstrate. “More pointed. Yes! No! That’s too much. Good. Now flatten out the cheeks. Ummmm...not that square. Okay, you got it.”

  “Let’s work on the nose next,” the civilian tech suggested, clicking away. “Short?”

  “Longer.”

  “Thin?”

  “Thicker.”

  “Bulbous?”

  “Well...”

  “How about this one? I call it the perp’s proboscis. It seems to fit a lot of our clients.”

  An elephantine trunk suddenly sprouted on the face on the screen, and Angela gave a sputter of laughter. “No, it wasn’t quite that long or thick.”

  Correcting, agreeing, exclaiming, she and the tech worked together as though they’d always been a team.

  “She’s something else,” Winters commented with a shake of his head.

  Jack didn’t have any argument with that observation.

  “Have you known her long?” he asked the detective casually.

  “Just since we busted her uncle a couple of years ago. Well, I guess he’s more of a great-uncle. I was never quite sure of the exact relationship.”

  “The retired counterfeiter?”

  Winters snorted. “He wasn’t retired then. We suspect he put something close to two hundred thousand into circulation before we nailed him.”

  Jack gave a soundless whistle. “I’m surprised he’s already back on the street.”

  The detective hesitated, his cop’s instinctive discretion obviously at war with what Jack guessed was a matter of public record.

  “Guido didn’t do any jail time,” Winters said after a few moments. “He should have. He damn well should have. But our so-called expert couldn’t tie the bills we’d pulled off the street to the press the feds found in his hideaway in Maryland.”

  The detective’s dark eyes settled on the woman leaning over the console, her brown hair spilling over her shoulders.

  “Angie was right there with him, through the entire mess. She bailed him out, swore at the hearing that the family hadn’t seen a penny of any illegal income. She produced bank statements and a stack of unpaid medical bills that made the judge’s eyes bulge.”

  His gaze on Angela, Winters didn’t catch Jack’s slight stiffening.

  “The Parettis are old-country, know what I mean?” he continued. “Family business is family business, and nobody else’s. She didn’t like having to hang their personal linen out to dry in public, that was obvious. But her testimony convinced the judge that Guido didn’t roll the presses to help with Tony’s bills, which was the only motive we could establish.”

  “That was Guido’s motive? To help pay the costs of Tony Paretti’s medical care?”

  “We think so. Tony’s accident pretty well wiped the Parettis out. He’s doing okay now with his string of automotive parts stores, but it was touch and go there for a while. His folks had to sell their home. Angela quit grad school and was working two jobs, and still the vultures were demanding—”

  Winters broke off, his gaze sliding sideways. “Well, you know how those things go.”

  “Yes,” Jack replied slowly, “I do.”

  That explained a lot of things, not the least of which was Angela Paretti’s antipathy toward accountants. Although he didn’t know the specifics of her brother’s injuries, Jack guessed Tony would have spent a week to ten days in ICU, minimum. After that, he would’ve required orthopedic and neuro specialists. Probably several weeks on a ward. Months in rehab.

  From what Winters had let drop, it sounded as though Tony’s medical insurance had contained one of those unobtrusive escape clauses governing hazardous occupations that no one ever noticed until it was too late. Assuming, of course, he had insurance at the time of his accident.

  A familiar weight settled in Jack’s chest. How many families had he worked with over the years who faced the same kind of crisis? The numbers clicked in his mind. Five years at Children’s, eleven at other hospitals. A hundred families a year, at least. Sixteen hundred desperate wives or husbands or parents or adult children, reeling under the double shock of their loved ones’ illnesses and the cost of their care.

  Although his position description at Children’s filled two typed pages, in Jack’s view, his duties boiled down to one basic function—providing a balance between the needs of the patient and the fiscal requirements of the hospital. He took fierce pride in the fact that Children’s had the highest charity-case ratio of any facility its size in the country. No child was ever refused treatment. No consulting physician was ever pressured not to admit a patient without medical insurance. Not on his watch.

  Admittedly, that hadn’t always been the case. When he took over the financial reins at Children’s, the nonprofit institution had been on the verge of going under due to fiscal mismanagement, excessive waste and outright fraud. He’d attacked all three, mismanagement being the easiest to rectify. The fight against waste was a continuing battle. Fraud...

  He rubbed the back of his neck. Fraud was the reason he walked the dangerous tightrope he now did. It was also the reason he was in Washington, watching a dark-haired woman paint pictures in the air with her hands.

  “I think that’s him,” Angela pronounced a few moments later.

  The civilian tech sat back in his chair, his hands still for the first time. “You sure? Step back and take another look.”


  She joined Jack and Ed Winters at the back of the room. Worrying her lower lip with her teeth, she squinted at the screen.

  “I don’t know. Maybe the forehead—? No, that’s him. I think.”

  Jack studied the face, searching for some physical characteristic that would suggest the young man who owned that face was capable of firing shots at stranded motorists. He didn’t find it. The kid could have been any one of the twenty-year-olds who worked as aides and orderlies at Children’s.

  “We’ll spread the composite around,” Winters said. “Hustle some of those green-shirted punks who call themselves the Horsemen in to take a look at it. Maybe we’ll get lucky and make a match. We’ll call you if we do, Angie.”

  “Good enough,” she said, slinging her purse over her shoulder. “Now I need you to point me in the direction of my car keys.”

  “They should be at the front desk. You want to call your mother before you go? You can use my office.”

  She winced. “No! Not now! It’ll take me an hour to calm her down when she hears about the shooting, and I don’t want to keep the senator waiting any longer.”

  The detective escorted them to the busy entrance lobby and retrieved the keys from the uniformed desk sergeant. He handed them to Angie, along with a pink slip.

  “What’s this?”

  “A bill for replacement of the rear windows. The captain had one of the rookies run the car by a repair shop while you worked on the composite. He figured it was the least your helpful, friendly metropolitan police could do for one of our nation’s elected officials.”

  “He figured it might take some of the edge off the senator’s righteous wrath, you mean,” Angela retorted.

  “Will it?”

  “Not a chance.”

  “That’s what I told the captain,” Winters said smugly.

  She laughed and tossed the keys in the air. “See you around, Eddie.”

  “See you, Angie. Tell Uncle Guido I’m watching him.”