15 Seconds

Chapter Fifty

There wasn’t much Carrie and I could to do until we got more information on Vance Hofer, and that could take hours.

So we agreed that the best thing to do was to drive back out to the Fellows property and talk with him again.

This time I stayed in the car and let Carrie do the talking. What could I have offered, anyway, that was any more persuasive than a Jacksonville police ID?

Fellows was outside watering plants when we arrived. He didn’t seem exactly eager to see who it was who had come back a second time.

The conversation was brief. He was even more guarded and distracted than he’d been the day before, trying to ignore us. But Carrie showed him the photo of Hofer that Maryanne had sent me, which made him brusquely turn away, his glare pretty much saying, I think it’s time for you two to get the hell out of here now…

Then Carrie came back to the car with a look of frustration and disappointment on her face, but also a gleam of something promising too.

“Well…?” I asked her.

“He said he never heard of him. At first.” Carrie backed out of Fellows’s drive and continued about a hundred yards or so before stopping and turning to me. “But then he basically admitted he was lying.”

“How? What did he say?” This could save me!

“He asked to see my ID again. Then he told me, ‘Next time, come back here with a real cop, and I’ll tell you.’ ”

Carrie’s brother reached us back at the motel.

She put her hand on mine, motioning for me to stay silent, and put the call on speakerphone.

“Are you with someone, Carrie…?” I heard her brother ask.

My heart was beating so loudly I was worried he could hear me through the phone.

“Don’t worry about that, Jack. Tell me what you found?”

“You wanted to know if anything could have possibly made this guy resort to violence?”

“Yeah…”

“Well, find your ticket, sis. I think you hit the lottery.”

Carrie and I locked on each other’s eyes.

“I’m looking through it now. The guy lost his home, a year and a half ago. His wife died, which pretty much broke him. He’s been living in a trailer since. Not to mention his job… The past ten years he worked as a lathe operator in some metalworks plant in South Carolina which went under…”

“Do you happen to have the name of the place, Jack?” Carrie’s eyes lit up with anticipation.

I heard the sound of a page being turned. “Lemme see. Here it is. Liberty Machine Works. Bamberg, South Carolina. Mean anything?”

Carrie stared at me hard, her eyes expansive. “Yeah, Jack. It does mean something. That’s where Fellows worked as well.”

“Who?” her brother said through the phone.

“Never mind, Jack. Sorry.” But her look to me was lit with elation. And vindication. Fellows had been lying. He and Vance had worked together! That was how they knew each other.

That was how Hofer would have come upon the plates.

“That enough, or you need any more?” her brother asked, as if he were daring her to say yes.

“Keep it coming, Jack. You’re on a roll.”

“Seems your guy is an ex-cop as well. He was with the Florida State Police for almost fifteen years. Accent on ex, though-he was dismissed in an IA investigation back in 1999. He seems to have taken the fall for his role in an excessive-force incident.” I heard a whistle. “I’d say…! It says here he held down a burglary suspect and busted both his hands with a nightstick. All caught on film. It all happened back in Jacksonville. Right in your own backyard.”

“Jacksonville?” Carrie turned and fixed on me.

“That’s right. It was a joint investigation with your very own sheriff’s office there. Very public back then. There were other officers involved, but they were all cleared.”

Carrie’s gaze grew serious, and though she only shot me the briefest of looks, I knew what was on her mind. Because it was on my mind too.

“Jack, is there any mention there of just who those other officers were?”

I heard him leaf through his report. “A couple of reprimands maybe. Hofer seems to be the only one who was directly implicated. Dismissal. Loss of all benefits.”

I could read Carrie’s mind: If we looked it up, would Robert Martinez’s name be there?

That had to be how he and Hofer knew each other. From back on the force in Jacksonville. Did Martinez somehow owe him? For Hofer taking the fall?

Everything was beginning to fit together. It was kind of like peeling back a dark curtain and finding a secret, parallel part of your life you never knew existed, but one that was going on all the time, and eventually collided with yours.

Head-on.

It had to be Hofer. Everything fit! He knew where I was going and when. He’d taken the plates from Fellows’s garage and gotten in touch with Martinez, his old cohort from Jacksonville, who owed Hofer a favor. So Hofer got him to agree to pull me over. Scare the shit out of me!

And then he’d killed him! Killed his own friend. And then he went out and killed Mike. With a gun he’d probably purchased using my name.

All to make it look like it was me!

But why? Our paths had never crossed until he came in my office. I was a blank trying to put anything together from that time. He had looked at my photos on the credenza. Asked about my daughter…

“So, you got enough?” Carrie’s brother asked. “You find what you were looking for?”

“Yeah, Jack.” Carrie nodded somberly.

“In that case, I guess you don’t need to hear the kicker,” her brother said, with a slight note of teasing in his voice.

“The kicker?” Carrie said. “C’mon, Jack, no holding back now.”

“The guy’s daughter was just convicted on a vehicular homicide charge. Two months ago she ran over a mother and her newborn son. She pleaded guilty. Sentenced to twenty years…”

It suddenly hit me: Hofer had mentioned something about his daughter in my office. He was looking over the photos on the credenza. He’d noticed Hallie. He asked me-

“Apparently she was whacked out on OxyContin at the time of the accident,” Carrie’s brother said.

“Oh my God!” I suddenly understood why Hofer had asked me about my clinics. The pain centers… His daughter had been high on OxyContin at the time of her accident. Somehow he blamed me for what had happened to her. OxyContin had taken a piece of her life. Now he was taking mine.

“I know. . . !” I turned to Carrie. “I know why he’s doing this to me.”

“Who’s there with you?” her brother asked. He sounded alarmed. “Look, I know from Pop what you’re doing up there. You’re in totally over your head. Do you understand what you’re getting yourself into…?”

“I have to go, Jack. But it’s okay. I’m not-”

“Carrie, listen to me. I’m starting to get concerned that all this has gotten to you. After what happened to Rick and Raef… If you’ve got something to share, it’s time to turn it over. To me, or to the JSO. But you can’t be putting your neck out, least of all with someone like this.”

“Steadman didn’t do it, Jack.” Again, her gaze locked onto mine. “This other guy did. Hofer. I’m positive.”

I grabbed her phone and put my hand over the speaker. “I have these pain centers. Hofer asked about them. We prescribe Oxy, but only with a doctor’s scrip. But a lot of the others are merely shills, storefronts…” The color