Mason believed that poker made you win with your strengths and fold with your weaknesses. Luck always plays a part, but even the luckiest lousy card player will eventually lose it all if he gives the cards enough time. Sullivan was a good card player, but it sounded like he’d hit a losing streak that would spread to the other partners, who depended on the business he brought in.
“Last night around eleven. We’d been playing poker.”
“Who else played?”
“Snow White and the seven dwarfs. All the regulars.”
“You were better company before you woke up. Or is this just a phase of your arrested adolescence?”
“Tell me what happened to Sullivan. After that and eight hours of sleep on something besides vinyl, I’ll charm your socks off.”
She answered without a sideways glance or a hint of humor.
“One of the locals found a body this morning. It’s been in the water overnight. The ID belongs to your partner. I want you to tell me if the body belongs to the ID.”
CHAPTER TWO
Her voice was pure matter-of-fact, as if she had told him to check the tires and the oil. He caught a quick dip in her shoulders, as if she was dropping her burden of bad news in his lap. Still, she said it with a practiced weariness that convinced Mason she was used to violent death. He wasn’t. He was accustomed to family deaths, natural causes, and ritualized grieving. Floating bodies were not part of Mason’s life-cycle resume.
Barring a freakish case of mistaken identity, Mason knew that Sullivan was dead. The odds of his ID being mismatched with a stranger were slim. Mason didn’t know him well enough to grieve honestly. Partners are harder to get to know than spouses or friends. Agendas overlap only on narrow ground.
His emotions were a mixed bag that didn’t include grief. He was more relieved than sorry. Sullivan’s suggestion that Mason destroy evidence in the O’Malley case would be buried with him. Mason could stay at the firm if he chose. Yet he couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for reversing his decision to leave. There was no glory in defending Victor O’Malley. His aunt Claire’s warning that he wasn’t cut out to fight over other people’s money, especially when the money was dirty, echoed in his mind.
His recurring dream of Tommy Douchant’s trial reminded him of unfinished business that he would have to complete on his own. Sullivan’s death may have shown him the way out instead of the way back in.
The sheriff would have told him if Sullivan’s death was accidental since there would be no reason to withhold that information. The likelihood that Sullivan’s murder was tied to the O’Malley case and perhaps to the documents Sullivan had asked him to lose swept through him like a convulsion.
He was shaken by the twin possibilities that the killer might want to eliminate O’Malley’s other lawyer and that the sheriff might suspect him in the crime if she knew what Sullivan had asked him to do. He felt his color drain and hoped the sheriff would attribute it to the grief he couldn’t summon. It occurred to him that he was probably the least likely person to identify Sullivan’s body.
“Why did you choose me?”
At last she surrendered a small smile.
“You weren’t my first choice. We found a key to a room at Buckhorn. It belonged to Mr. Sullivan. The hotel manager gave us a list of the rest of the guests from your firm. You were third on the list. The first two checked out at dawn.”
“Harlan Christenson and Scott Daniels.”
Harlan Christenson sat next to Mason at the poker table. A shock of white hair hung loosely over his forehead, accenting his coal black caterpillar eyebrows. Shaped like a badly stuffed pillow, he filled his chair to capacity and grunted his bets with a Scotch-scratched voice. Only his head and hands had moved as he’d peeled back the corners of his first three cards, praying for aces.
He was a grandfatherly patrician of Kansas City society, opening doors that Sullivan never could have knocked on. Where Sullivan was brusque and kept everyone at arm’s length, Harlan touched everyone. He shook their hands warmly and guided them to his office with his arm comfortably around their shoulders. Together they had built a powerful practice.
He was widowed and Mason was divorced, so he invited Mason to his farmhouse for dinner every couple of weeks after he’d joined the firm. They cooked out and tossed fishing lines in his pond, never really trying to catch anything.
Mason’s other best friend and law school classmate, Scott Daniels, had sat on his other side at the card game. Scott and Tommy Douchant had flipped a coin to decide which one would be best man at Mason’s wedding. Scott had called heads and won. Tommy claimed he’d used a two-headed coin, a charge Scott never denied.
Scott had started with the firm when they graduated and was now second in command in the business department, which Sullivan ran. Ten years after graduation, he still carried 175 pounds rationed along a swimmer’s V-shaped frame. His eyes were robin’s-egg blue with the shell’s dull finish. Fine dark blond hair, slicked back, etched an undulating hairline along an angular, sallow-cheeked face.
Kelly asked, “Any idea why they left so early?”
“Scott had to get ready for a closing on Monday. Harlan said he had a noon wedding.”
“And that left you, Mr. Mason. What were you and your partners doing at the lake?”
“Having our annual retreat. Lawyers, legal assistants, and administrative staff getting away from it all but not each other.”
She pulled in at a marina called Jerry’s Port. The water rolled with a slight chop stirred by the steady boat traffic of the lake patrol.
Mason’s chest tightened along with his throat as he wondered if he’d recognize Sullivan’s body. He remembered a wrongful death case he’d handled in which the victim had drowned. A body left in water long enough swells up like an inflatable doll, stretching the features into a macabre mask. The pictures of the deceased in that case had led to a rash of tasteless jokes in his office, none of which he could recall.
Mason followed Kelly to a sheriff’s department patrol boat. She drove, while he hoped the spray off the lake would help him keep his cool. Soon she turned toward shore, aiming at a sign that read
Knee-high grass had been tramped down into a rough carpet leading from the water’s edge to a short, squat, rumpled man wearing dirty brown coveralls. He could have been half man, half stump, sitting on a log next to a tarp-covered shape that was roughly the size of a body.
“Mr. Mason, say hello to Doc Eddy, Pope County coroner,” Kelly said.
“Damn shame, Mason, too bad.”
He wiped his hands on his pants before pulling back a corner of the tarp. Sullivan’s lifeless eyes stared unblinking into the still rising sun. Heat, water, and death had stolen his attraction and intimidation. Oily engine exhaust mixed with the swampy smell of brackish water and the sickly sweet odor of decomposing flesh. Mason’s stomach pitched and yawed as he lost last night’s dinner.
He stumbled a few yards away while the aftershocks rocked his belly, and his head slowly stopped spinning. Kelly appeared at his side and pushed a towel into his clammy hand. He was surprised at the softness of her skin when their hands brushed against each other.
“Listen, I’m sorry. There just isn’t an easy way to do this. Is it Sullivan?”
The metamorphosis from “him” to “it” suddenly seemed natural. “Yeah, probably-don’t know. You better ask his wife.”
He was fresh out of smart-ass. Dead bodies, Mason realized, are hell on humor.
“We tried to reach her in Kansas City. No one answered.”
“That’s because she’s here-at the lake. They have a place in Kinchelow Hollow near Shangri-La. We’re having brunch over there at eleven this morning.”
