who was making the same mistake again.
He remembered her differently, as beautiful, brave, and unfairly accused. It was who he wanted to see and, at the time, who he had wanted to love. She’d walked away from him then; Mason had believed that she had too many wounds to heal to make a permanent place for him in her life. Now he realized he just wasn’t her type. He checked his bitterness with the knowledge that she might think otherwise if she knew about Judge Carter. If he was going to step on the toes of people with clay feet, he’d have to start with himself.
The side street he’d chosen led him into a subdivision. He didn’t think Kelly or Brewer was following him and he doubted they had backup for that purpose. Whatever they were up to, they had to be doing it on their own. Still, he didn’t want to take any chances. His cell phone rang as he made another unnecessary turn.
It was Kelly Holt. “Where are you?”
“Just leaving my office.”
“For a guy with two dinner dates, you’re getting a late start.”
“Lucky for me, one of them cancelled.”
“Cancel the other one. We need to talk.”
“Call Mickey and make an appointment. I’ve got a busy day tomorrow. Maybe end of the week.”
“Stubborn and stupid could get you hurt,” she said.
“Then you should be right there with me.”
“It was you!”
“Yeah,” he said softly, dropping any pretense. “And it was you too.”
“It’s not the way it looks.”
“Like the song says, who should I believe? You or my lying eyes?”
“It’s complicated,” she said.
“I’ve hung too many things on that hook and I don’t have room for anything else.”
“Don’t do this.”
“Too late. We already did,” he said and hung up.
His cell rang a moment later, this time Rachel Firestone’s name was displayed on the screen. He’d turned her loose on Dennis Brewer the night before but doubted that she’d found out more in the last twenty-four hours than he had found out in the last twenty minutes.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“That seems to be everyone’s favorite question. What happened to hello?”
“What’s the matter? Are you lost? Who else is looking for you?”
“You’re the only one that matters. I was lost until you found me. Any luck with Dennis Brewer?”
“You know what happens when a reporter starts asking if anyone knows whether an FBI agent might be dirty? Phones start ringing and none of them are mine. The publisher doesn’t like hearing from the U.S. attorney.”
Mason had met the publisher, David Phelan, a passionate man who was rumored to have ink in his veins instead of blood. “Roosevelt Holmes called David Phelan?”
“And demanded that the paper kill my story and that I turn over my notes and sources or get ready to tell the grand jury why I won’t.”
“What did Phelan tell him?”
“He told Roosevelt to go fuck himself. Then he told me that I better be right or I could go fuck myself too. Am I right?”
“It’s looking that way. There are still a lot of loose ends.”
“That’s why I was calling you. One of them may have just gotten nailed down.”
“Which one?”
“The reporter whose desk is next to mine covers the cops. All he does is listen to the police scanner waiting for something to happen. A little while ago, he picked up a report of a dead body and went to the scene. He called in and told the editor to save him some room for tomorrow’s Metro section. I overheard the editor’s end of the conversation. The editor asked if the victim had been identified, and then he repeated the name out loud. That’s when I called you.”
“Who was it?”
“Mark Hill.”
He caught his breath. Blues had been right. “Where was the body found?”
“Troost Lake. Meet me there?”
He exhaled slowly. “Yeah,” he answered, thinking of Samantha Greer’s birthday celebration while not looking forward to calling Abby.
“Remember,” she said, “it’s on Paseo, not Troost.”
“I know, and it’s not really a lake either.”
SIXTY-FIVE
Abby hung up in the middle of Mason’s explanation. Right after he told her that a key witness had just been found murdered. She wasn’t interested in the details or why he had to go the scene instead of reading about it in the paper like everyone else. He knew why but couldn’t tell her because she didn’t give him the chance and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.
If she’d let him, he would have told her that a case is a living, breathing organism conceived in conflict. It is a wild, uncontrollable adolescent while the facts are being fleshed out by the rule of unintended consequences. As it matures, lawyers may rein it in with pleadings and tactics and courts may squeeze it with orders until it surrenders its last gasp, but those days were weeks or months away. Tonight, he had no control over it. All he could do was hold on.
Troost Lake was a triangle of brown water lying between Twenty-seventh and Twenty-ninth Streets, the long leg of the triangle parallel to Paseo. The full name of the street was The Paseo Boulevard, though Mason had no idea what the north-south artery had done to earn that formal distinction.
The lake was a quarter mile east of Troost Avenue, both the lake and the street the legacy of a Dutchman, Benoist Troost, one of Kansas City’s earliest physicians and civic boosters. Defeated for mayor in 1853, he had organized the city’s premier newspaper in 1854 and helped found the Chamber of Commerce in 1857. Mason read the doctor’s abbreviated biography on an historical marker near the south end of the lake well behind the yellow crime scene tape that kept him away from the cops working Mark Hill’s murder.
Mason doubted anything would be named after him, though, given a choice, he preferred a couple of kids to a strip of concrete or a muddy patch of water. Troost Lake may have been named to memorialize the good doctor, but it had become a favorite burial ground for dead bodies owing to the terrain and the demographics. The Paseo was elevated above the lake and the surrounding trees provided additional good cover. The area was part of the urban core where too many people saw violence and death through eyes dulled with repetition. Outrage succumbed to resignation as the city shrugged its shoulders.
Rachel met him, wearing a sheepskin coat and a muffler knotted at her throat. The night had turned damp, moisture seeping through his jacket with the cold. He shifted his weight from side to side to keep warm.
“What do you think?” she said.
“Samantha Greer is working the case. That’s her over there,” Mason said, pointing to the right angle of the triangle. It was the heaviest wooded corner of the lake, least likely to give up its victims until fishermen returned in the summer. “I can’t get close enough to talk to her.”
Mason felt a hand on his back and turned around. “How about I take you a little closer?” Detective Cates said. “Sorry,” he said to Rachel.
Klieg lights mounted on ten-foot stands illuminated the site where Hill’s body had been found, warming the water enough to boil a ground-hugging fog. A forensics team moved slowly across the invisible grid they had laid down over the scene, lifting each square by its roots, shaking and sifting it for evidence. A diver in a glistening black wet suit waded out of the water, carefully pinching the butt of a gun between two fingers. An ambulance waited at the north end of the lake, its back end open and ready to receive the body.
