A Blood Thing Page 21

  “No offense, Governor, but a man of Tyler’s . . . uh . . . limited intelligence and stunted emotional maturity, faced with a stressful and frightening situation, couldn’t necessarily be expected to handle things the way other people without his particular challenges would. But if you’re willing to believe that the authorities—and, more important, a jury—won’t find the evidence that has come to light so far to be persuasive . . . if you think he’ll be acquitted without the benefit of the video recording I have of me in Tyler’s clothes killing Sally Graham . . . then you’re more of a gambler with your brother’s freedom than I would be in your shoes.”

  Andrew wasn’t certain what was worse: the thought of the caller following Tyler around for God only knew how long, or the fact that what the man had just said, sadly, made sense.

  “So,” the man said in his robotic monotone, “are you ready to hear the new deal?”

  Furious and frustrated beyond measure, Andrew said nothing.

  “I’ll take your silence to mean that you’re willing to listen. First of all, thanks for letting Gabriel Torrance out of prison. However, it’s time to come clean: I don’t give a damn about Gabriel Torrance. He’s nothing to me. He’s just a prisoner whose felony was minor and whose time left to be served brief enough to compel you, Governor Andy, to compromise your famous integrity the tiniest bit. Gabriel Torrance was nothing more than a lever I used to pry the door open farther.”

  “What door?”

  “The door to Southern State Correctional Facility.”

  Andrew suddenly felt light-headed. He saw where this was going. He’d known where it was going all along. He had wanted to be wrong, but he’d known.

  “See, I need another prisoner pardoned. Start the paperwork tomorrow. He has to walk out of Southern State in less than a week.”

  Andrew said, “I can’t do—”

  “Of course you can,” the caller said. “You already have. I just need you to do it again. Just one more time. Cross my heart.”

  Henry stepped back into the conversation. “Why the hell should we trust you? We’re still waiting for you to turn over the video you showed Molly, and whatever additional evidence you manufactured against Tyler.”

  “Oh, Henry . . . you poor fool. This isn’t just about Tyler any longer. This is about you keeping your job and staying out of prison. And your esteemed brother not facing the greatest scandal a governor of this state has ever faced. And Molly? Didn’t I read in some article about Andy that you’re planning to follow in big brother Henry’s footsteps and become a state trooper? What are the odds of that coming to pass after this recording is made public?”

  Andrew closed his eyes and tried not to imagine the further damage this man could do to their family. He didn’t want to contemplate it.

  Molly said, “I don’t care about—”

  “Molly,” the caller said, “can you imagine the scandal? Can you fathom how this would rock Andy’s administration? Can you imagine the venerated Kane family name dragged through the mud? What would your father, the senator, say if he were alive today? Or your grandfather? He was also a senator, I believe. Or great-granddaddy Kane, author of several legal treatises and one of the most respected judges ever to sit on the Second Circuit? Or the one who came before him and made all the money you Kanes have been living off of for generations? Or take a moment to picture the glee of Andy’s political adversaries, and of all the neighbors jealous of your family’s wealth and status for years, and of the cops who were disciplined and even fired because of Henry’s Internal Affairs investigations. How they would all rejoice to see the Kanes brought low.”

  “I’m not agreeing to anything,” Andrew said, unable now to keep a defeated tone from his voice, “but who’s the prisoner this time?”

  “His name is Kyle Lewis. And I’m afraid you’ll find he’s not quite the choirboy Gabriel Torrance is.”

  Andrew took a long, deep breath. “I’ll call you back at this number in a day or two.”

  “Take your time, Governor Andy. Just know that the clock won’t stop ticking. Lewis has to be out within a week, or the entire Kane family burns.”

  The line went dead.

  No one spoke for a long moment. Both Molly and Henry looked like whipped pups. Andrew thought he probably looked the same. Finally, he said, “Henry, you know what to do. Look into this Kyle Lewis as quick as you can. Everything you can find out, like you did with Torrance. You have two days.”

  “This guy could just keep jerking your chain over and over, Andy,” Molly said. “You could give him what he wants again, and he could just turn around and ask for another prisoner’s release, then another’s, then another’s.”

  “I know that, damn it,” Andrew said. “I said that to Henry at the beginning. So I knew the risk. We all did. But I didn’t have any choice, did I? Not if there was any chance that Tyler . . .” He paused. Took a deep breath. “Look, I doubt his endgame is to see me empty Vermont’s prisons. I suspect this has all been about getting this Lewis guy out. I’m guessing his record is such that the caller knew I wouldn’t agree to pardon him unless I had absolutely no choice. With Tyler’s situation, and yours,” he said, looking at Molly, “and now Henry’s . . . and my own, too, having pardoned Gabriel Torrance in response to blackmail, well . . .” He trailed off.

  Molly nodded but said nothing.

  “So you’re going to release him?” Rebecca asked.

  He thought about Henry’s career being over, about his possibly going to jail; and about Molly’s own career in law enforcement ending before it even began; and his own time in office coming to a scandalous close. And, of course, he thought about Tyler spending the rest of his life in prison.

  “I don’t know yet. But I may not have much of a choice.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Two days later, after Henry had learned all he could about Kyle Lewis, there was one thing he knew for certain: the man was never going to be nominated for a humanitarian award. He was thirty-seven years old and over the course of three separate incarcerations had spent fourteen of his nineteen adult years behind bars. He had been convicted of heroin possession and distribution, second-degree arson, assault, resisting arrest, aggravated assault on a police officer, manslaughter, and other less serious but related offenses.

  Henry was about to head into the Pavilion to meet with Andrew to fill him in on all of this when his cell phone rang.

  “Henry Kane,” he said upon answering.

  “Kane, it’s me. Egan.”

  Henry had been expecting this call. He was glad Egan was being a good little mole. “What have you got?” he asked, though he already knew.

  “Somebody called in an anonymous tip.”

  “Isn’t it funny how they’re all anonymous?”

  “You know how it is; they’re getting more anonymous all the time. Nobody wants to get involved, nobody wants to testify, everybody’s afraid of retribution from the bad guys, nobody trusts us good guys.”

  “Nobody wants to be tied to his own bullshit story,” Henry added.

  “Hey, we take them with a grain of salt, Kane, you know that. But we’re not gonna ignore them. So you want to hear what I have to tell you or not?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “They found a bag containing a pair of jeans covered in blood.”

  “I assume DNA results aren’t back yet, but they typed the blood and it’s the same as Sally Graham’s.”

  “Yup.”

  “And they think the jeans are Tyler’s.”

  “Yup. And there were hairs on the pants, which they also sent off for DNA analysis, and they think those belonged to your brother and/or Sally Graham.”

  Damn. Though he hadn’t known about that second bag, the one containing the bloody jeans, he’d been just a few feet away from the thing in that parking lot behind the nail salon. It had been right there. “Okay,” he said. “Anything else right now?”

  “Nope.”

  Henry ended the call, then
texted Andy to tell him he’d arrived, albeit a few minutes late. He entered the Pavilion through the side entrance on Governor Davis Avenue, and though the security guards in the lobby knew him on sight, he still had to dump his weapon, badge, cell phone, and the rest of the contents of his pockets into a little plastic bin and pass through a metal detector. They also made him wear a visitor badge. As he was returning his belongings to the various pockets and holsters in which they belonged, Andrew replied to his text, telling him to meet outside one of the conference rooms. Henry asked a security guard for directions, and when he arrived, Andy was waiting outside a closed wooden door.

  “I don’t have a lot of time,” Andrew said in a hushed tone. He told Henry that on the other side of the door sat the director of Policy Development and Legislative Affairs, waiting to meet with him to review the latest draft of their new and dramatically tougher antiracketeering bill.

  “What do you have on Lewis?” Andrew asked.

  Henry gave him the rundown of the man’s criminal history.

  Andrew looked horrified. “What’s he in for right now?”

  “At the moment, he’s in for the aggravated assault and resisting.”

  “But not the manslaughter?”

  “Nope. He did seven years for that. Eight months after he got out, he went back in for aggravated assault on a police officer.”

  “Well, that’s something, at least,” Andrew said. Henry knew it would have been harder for Andrew to justify pardoning Lewis if he were presently serving time for killing someone. The victim’s family would have been understandably upset and would have—again, understandably—been vocal about its displeasure. “How much time does he have left on his current sentence?”

  Henry hesitated.

  “Let me have it,” Andrew said.

  “Seven years left on a fourteen-year sentence.”

  Andrew winced. “Seriously? That much? This is bad.”

  “It’s not good,” Henry conceded.

  “Our blackmailer was clever.”

  Henry thought he knew what his brother was thinking. Andrew never would have considered pardoning Lewis if he hadn’t been coerced into releasing Torrance first, thereby giving the blackmailer significant leverage.

  “He’s a smart dickhead,” Henry said. “I’ll give him that.”

  Two staffers turned a corner and headed in their direction, causing them to pause their conversation. The staffers nodded deferentially to Andrew as they passed, and Andrew nodded back politely. When they were around a corner and out of earshot, Andrew looked at his watch. “Damn, I’m twenty minutes late for this meeting. What else do we know about Lewis?”

  Henry handed him a copy of a mug shot. On seeing Lewis’s face, Andrew asked, “Why am I not surprised?”

  In the photo, Kyle Lewis looked as though he wanted to break the neck of whoever had taken his mug shot. His eyes were dark and cold. Below the left one was a tattoo of a black teardrop, often meant to symbolize that the tattooed person had killed someone. A three-inch scar left a white line through the beard stubble on his right jawline. Across his throat at the level of his Adam’s apple, the phrase No Regrets was tattooed in shaky cursive script. Both tats had almost certainly been the work of a jailhouse tattoo artist.

  “He also has EWMN on the knuckles of both hands,” Henry said.

  “The true classics never die, do they?”

  Given their collective experience with the criminal justice system, they both knew EWMN was a common tattoo among a certain element, standing for Evil, Wicked, Mean, and Nasty. Located on the knuckles meant it would be the last thing a victim would see as he was beaten unconscious.

  The conference room door opened, and a fresh-faced, uptight-looking aide in a necktie that seemed to be cinched far too tight poked his head out, saw Andrew, and quickly withdrew.

  “He wants to tell you to hurry your ass up,” Henry said, “but he probably thinks that would be a bad career move.”

  “Come on, Henry, give me the rest.”

  “Tons of priors, as you know. A long history of violence, including some ugly altercations behind bars early in his long career as a prisoner. However, on the plus side . . .”

  “There’s actually a plus side?”

  “There is. He’s only killed one person that we know of, and that was years ago and, quite possibly, mostly unintentional.”

  “Quite possibly? That’s not a huge help here.”

  “It was an altercation in a bar that got out of control. One witness said Lewis wasn’t the aggressor. Still, he got hit with a manslaughter charge, and the prosecution made it stick.”

  “Probably wasn’t too hard. How’s he been behaving in prison?”

  “According to his prison record, he’s not exactly a model prisoner.”

  “How bad?”

  “Worse than most, but not as bad as the worst.”

  Andrew sighed.

  “The thing is, I’ve been looking hard into him,” Henry said, “and I can’t imagine how he could have pulled all this off. Like Gabriel Torrance, he doesn’t seem to have anyone on the outside. No family. And with him pissing away most of his life behind bars, he never spent long enough on the outside to make any friends.”

  “Well, someone wants him out. Former criminal associate, maybe?”

  “Always been a loner. When he dealt drugs, he was low-level and didn’t have ties to anyone. Never had partners in any of the trouble he got himself into.”

  “Visitors in prison?”

  “That’s where it gets interesting. Only two. The poor schlub of a public defender who drew his dog of a case originally—and lost, of course—and another lawyer who visited just once, a little over a year ago. The lawyer’s name? Wesley Jurgens.”

  “Jurgens?” Andrew said, frowning. “He’s Gabriel Torrance’s lawyer, right?”

  “Yup.”

  “But he didn’t originally represent Lewis? Only hooked up with him a year ago?”

  “Looks like. Hell of a coincidence.”

  “Sure is. I assume you tried talking to Jurgens again.”

  “Left nine messages over the last two days till he finally called me back this morning.”

  “Let me guess . . . he asserted privilege again.”

  “That was way too obvious to call that a guess.”

  “The mere fact that he’s representing both Torrance and Lewis isn’t privileged,” Andrew said, “but whatever he talked about with them would be. And if our mysterious caller hired him to represent them both—”

  “Then all three of them would be clients and arguably entitled to attorney-client privilege. Hypothetically, of course. That’s what he told me.”

  “Wait, he admitted that he was hired by someone to represent them both?”

  “Of course not,” Henry said. “He just said that, hypothetically, in that situation, all three such people would be clients.”

  “And he wouldn’t be able to talk to you about his communications with them.”

  The conference room door opened again, and again the kid in the tight necktie leaned his head out.

  “All right, Joel,” Andrew said with a looser grip on his patience than he’d had the first time Joel peeked out. “Tell them I’ll be right in.”

  The aide drew his head back in quickly and pulled the door shut.

  “Is that kid the boss of you?” Henry asked.

  “Let’s wrap this up, Henry. Kyle Lewis is obviously a horrible person.”

  “But . . . it’s been years since he’s killed anyone, or even assaulted anyone that we know of other than a cop who might have even deserved it—if he was anything like some of the cops I know—and possibly a few fellow inmates.”

  “He’s a violent criminal,” Andrew said grimly. “And if I don’t start the pardon process within the next few hours, he’ll never get out in five days.” Which was the blackmailer’s deadline, of course. “As it is, I’m pushing it.”

  “So you’re gonna do it?”

  “Given
his criminal record and bad behavior behind bars, he sounds largely immune to rehabilitation, which makes him a lousy candidate for a pardon.” Andrew shook his head. “More important, he’s a dangerous man. If I pardon him, and he does something . . .”

  “If it makes you feel any better, we’ve had round-the-clock surveillance on Gabriel Torrance, and he’s been doing a whole lot of nothing. Taking long, meandering walks, eating fast food. He went to the movies once. But he hasn’t caused any trouble and doesn’t look like he’s planning to.”

  “Torrance is Mother Teresa next to Lewis. And if the blackmailer is to be believed, he was never part of the plan anyway, other than to get me to pardon Lewis. But if I let Lewis out, and he hurts someone . . .”

  “But if you don’t let him out . . .”

  “I know . . . Tyler.”

  Not to mention me, Henry thought, and Molly, and even you, Andy. But he didn’t say any of that. “We’ll keep eyes on him 24–7,” Henry said instead. “I’ll have Dave Junior put guys on him round the clock. If he’s part of some plan—”

  “Of course he’s part of some plan. That’s the blackmailer’s whole game, isn’t it? We just don’t know what that plan is. Because you—” He cut himself off.

  Henry frowned. “Because I’m the cop, and I haven’t found the bad guy yet?”

  “I wasn’t going to say that.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Henry said, unconvinced. “Listen, if Lewis is part of some plan, Dave Junior’s guys will catch him at it. They’re good, Andy. Most of them were cops. They know what they’re doing. They’ll figure out what this guy is up to as soon as he gets up to it. And they’ll stop him if they have to. I promise.”

  Andrew shook his head in frustration. “Damn it, why didn’t I turn this all over to the state police at the beginning?”

  “Because I talked you out of it,” Henry said, shaking his head and feeling his stomach twist.

  “No, you simply advised me,” Andrew said, and he sounded sincere. “It was my call. And I think I made the wrong one.”

  “But you can’t come clean now, Andy. I know you. There’s a little voice in your head telling you to. But you know you can’t, right? Whether you come forward or that asshole does it, it would be equally bad for all of us. And either way, if that happens, you wouldn’t be able to pardon Lewis, which would mean the blackmailer disappears with the evidence we need to clear Tyler.”