3rd Degree (Women's Murder Club 3)
She shot a horrified look at him. The cough in her chest grew tighter. She fumbled around the bed for her new inhaler, but Mal blocked her hand. “What did you think, Michelle? We were in this just to knock off a couple of fat-cat billionaires? Our fight’s with the state. The state is very powerful. It won’t roll over and die.”
Michelle forced a breath. She realized in that moment that she was different from Mal. From them all. He called her a little girl. But he was wrong. A little girl didn’t do the terrible things she had done. She wheezed again. “I need my inhaler, Mal. Please.”
“And I need to know if I can trust you, honeybun.” He picked up the inhaler and twirled it in his fingers like a toy.
Her breathing was starting to get heavy now, ragged. And Mal was making it worse, scaring her like this. She didn’t know what he was capable of. “You can trust me, Mal. You know that,” she whispered.
“I do know that, Michelle, but it’s not me I’m worried about. I mean, we work for someone, don’t we, hon? Charles Danko isn’t forgiving, the way I am. Danko is tough enough to beat them at their own game. He’s a genius.”
She grabbed the puffer out of Mal’s hand and depressed it twice, shooting the soothing spray into her lungs.
“You know the cool thing about ricin?” Mal smiled. “It can get into your bloodstream a hundred ways.” He depressed his index finger twice, as though he was triggering an imaginary inhaler. He smiled. “Chht, chht.”
He had a glint in his eye she hadn’t seen before. “Whoa, now that would really get that chest of yours into a state, wouldn’t it, hon? Chht, chht.”
Chapter 72
IT WAS BEDLAM at the Hall that morning. As scary as it had ever been since I entered police work.
An A.D.A. being killed. August Spies’ victim number three.
By six A.M., the place was teeming with a hundred Feds: FBI, Department of Justice, ATF. And reporters, crammed into the fifth-f
loor news room for some kind of briefing. The front page of the Examiner had a big banner headline: WHO’S NEXT?
I was going over one of the crime scene reports from Jill’s killing when I was surprised by Joe Santos and Phil Martelli knocking at my door. “We’re real sorry to hear about Ms. Bernhardt,” Santos said, stepping in.
I tossed aside the papers and nodded thanks. “It was nice of you to come here.”
Martelli shrugged. “Actually, that’s not why we’re here, Lindsay.”
“We decided to go back through our records on this Hardaway thing,” Santos said, sitting down. He pulled out a manila envelope. “We figured if he was here, given what he was up to, he had to turn up somewhere else.”
Santos removed a series of black-and-white photos from the envelope. “This is a rally we were keeping track of. October twenty-second. Six months ago.”
The photos were surveillance sweeps of the crowd, no one in particular. Then one face was circled. Sandy hair, a narrow chin, a thin beard. Huddled in a dark fatigue jacket, jeans, a scarf that hung to his knees.
My blood started to race. I went up to my board and compared it with the FBI photos taken in Seattle five years before.
Stephen Hardaway.
The son of a bitch was here six months ago.
“This is where it starts to get interesting.” Phil Martelli winked.
He spread out a couple of other shots. A different rally. Hardaway again. This time, standing next to someone I recognized.
Roger Lemouz.
Hardaway had an arm around him.
Chapter 73
HALF AN HOUR LATER I pulled up on Durant Avenue at the south entrance to the university. I ran inside Dwinelle Hall, where Lemouz had his office.
The professor was there, outfitted in a tweed jacket and white linen shirt, entertaining a coed with flowing red hair.
“Party’s over,” I said.