office. He said he was going back to pick them up, but he had a tire that was losing air, so I told him I’d come over and get him.” She stopped to take a sip from the glass of water the counter waitress had brought her. “When I got there, he was on the phone. He didn’t even hear me ring the bell, so I went inside. I could see him back in the kitchen area, and when he saw me he waved, you know, like ‘I’ll be with you in a minute.’ He got off the phone, and we started out of the house. We got as far as the top of the sidewalk when Luther showed up, started to yell at Brendan to drop the gun and let me go, and something about, it was all over, not to hurt me…” She rubbed at her eyes. “The next thing I knew, Luther was shooting at Brendan and Brendan fell…”
“Had you seen a gun in Brendan’s hand?” Will asked quietly.
“Not outside, but then again, I wouldn’t have. He was behind me. I knew that he had one with him, though. I saw him put it in his belt.”
“He needed a gun to go to the office?” Will frowned.
“A lot of agents don’t go anywhere without their Glocks; you know that, Will.”
“True enough.” Will stirred a packet of sugar into his iced tea. “Had you felt threatened, did you know that Brendan had pulled the gun?”
“I had no clue.” She shook her head vehemently. “I had no idea there was anything wrong until Luther showed up and started shouting at Brendan.”
“You said Luther was yelling at Brendan to drop the gun, to not hurt you, to let you go…”
“Right.”
“Did Brendan yell anything back at Luther?”
“It all happened so fast, I don’t…” She rubbed her index finger across her chin, a gesture he’d seen her use when she was deep in thought. “He called him a bastard. ‘Luther, you bastard.’ That’s the only thing I remember hearing him say.”
“That’s an odd thing to say, don’t you think? Under those circumstances?” Will frowned.
“I don’t know. He might have said something else. I was just so stunned, so startled, I was having a hard time figuring out what was going on. Everything happened so fast, Will…”
His phone rang, and he took it from his pocket.
“Fletcher.” He listened for a moment, then said, “I’m with her right now. Sure. No problem.”
He folded over the phone and returned it to his pocket.
“That was John. He’s on his way in from the airport.”
“Does he want me to meet him at his office?”
“No. He wants me to take you home and make sure you get some sleep. He’ll give us a call in the morning.”
She frowned. “You’d think he’d want to talk to me.”
“He does. In the morning. Right now, he wants to talk to Luther Blue.”
23
Luther sat calmly in the small leather side chair that faced John Mancini’s desk and waited for the interrogation to begin. He’d been there for almost two hours awaiting John’s arrival, in the company of Special Agent Harold Kimble, a man Luther considered to be stupid and without imagination. He might actually enjoy this.
“Okay, Agent Blue,” Mancini was saying as he eased himself into his own well-worn leather chair. “It’s been a long night for all of us, so let’s get to the point. What the hell happened?”
“I shot Agent Shields,” Luther told him. “I killed him.”
“We know that part, Luther,” John said, his face and voice both weary. “Let’s talk about why.”
“He was going to kill Dr. McCall.”
“Why would he want to do that?” John frowned.
“I’m thinking it was because she was-”
“You’re thinking? You don’t know?” Kimble rose half out of his seat.
“Sit down, Harold.” John motioned him back into his chair. “Let him finish.”
“I think it was because she’d been asking about the reports that were missing from the Bureau file of the investigation into Dylan Shields’s death.”
“Why would that have been a concern to Agent Shields? He and Dylan were cousins.”
“I believe it was because the reports would show that Agent Shields-Brendan-fired the shots that killed Dylan.”
“Agent Blue, you understand the seriousness of this accusation?”
“Sir, I understand full well. That’s why when I found the reports-”
“You found the reports?” Mancini’s eyebrows rose in tandem. “All three of them?”
“Yes, sir, Agent Lowery’s report, Agent Raymond’s report, and a memo from Agent Shields. Connor Shields. I found them by accident. I was looking through the McCullum file, and I found the reports in an envelope stuck in the back of the file. I immediately realized these were the missing reports-”
“How did you know about that? How did you know they were missing?”
“Sir”-Luther smiled benignly-“everyone in the unit knew about the missing reports. Dr. McCall had, at one time, asked just about everyone about them, especially the report written by Agent Lowery.”
“Had she asked you?”
“No, not directly, but I heard about it from several people. And then, with Agent Lowery having been found dead so recently, I thought I’d read over her report and see what the big deal was.”
“The big deal?”
“There was a buzz going around the office that there was something in her report that might have been the reason she’d been killed. So I thought if maybe I looked over the report, something might jump out at me.”
“And did something?”
“Not at first. I had to go back to the old file-the original file. It took me a few hours, but I figured it out.”
Mancini gestured for him to continue. It was all Luther could do to keep from grinning like a fool. He had the man eating out of his hand.
“The file contained the customary list of FBI personnel assigned to the op. It’s stapled in the front of the file. So that’s where I started. With the players. I heard that’s what Dr. McCall had done, so I did the same. I read through the file, read all the reports, to put the entire op into perspective. Then I read the other three reports again, in context. That’s when I realized several things.” He paused for effect. Mancini and Kimble were hanging on every word. He let them hang for as long as he could. “Agent Lowery’s report mentioned seeing Agent Brendan Shields leaving the building identified as Building A on the diagram.”
He looked from one to the other, then asked, “May I show you?”
“Please do.”
“If we could get the file in here? I left it on my desk, with the original reports.” Luther smiled weakly at John. “I made a copy of the three reports, but I gave them to Dr. McCall.”
“Why?”
“Because she’d been looking for them.”
“When did you give her these reports?”
“Tonight. After I… after the… after the shooting at Agent Shields’s.”
“You took them with you?”
“Yes. I wanted to confront him about why-”
Mancini held up a hand to stop him. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves.”
“I can run down and get the file, if you like.”
“Please…”
Luther hustled down the hall to his office, buoyed by his own enjoyment of the situation. He was relishing the spotlight, loving the script he’d written for himself. It was, he thought, quite simply brilliant. By the end of the night, he’d be hailed as a hero. He could hardly wait to get to the part where he’d explain how he’d saved Annie McCall’s life.
He returned with the file and opened it on Mancini’s desk.
“Okay, here’s the list of personnel, in front, then the list of documents in the file. I think everyone agrees that all the documents were here except for Agent Lowery’s report, a memo from Agent Shields-that would be Connor Shields-and a sketch of the scene from Agent Lou Raymond.” He looked up first at Mancini, then at Kimble, and said meaningfully, “Interesting, don’t you think, that both Agents Lowery and Raymond died suspiciously? She, murdered just last week, and he, a one-car accident on a dark stretch of highway?”
“How do you know Lowery was murdered?”
“Sir, everyone in this unit knows she was murdered.”
“And you found all three of those items in the McCullum file yesterday? Doesn’t that strike you as odd?” John leaned back in his chair, and Luther could feel his eyes bore through him.
“Yes, of course it does.” Luther nodded calmly. “I was thinking, if someone had gone to the pains to remove the reports in the first place, why didn’t they just destroy them? It makes no sense to hide them in another file, where they could be found, but who knows what this person was thinking? Maybe he’d just stuck them in there to get rid of them when someone else came in the room, and meant to go back to get them… I don’t know. I wasn’t the one who put them in there in the first place. I only found them.”
