Defensive Wounds Read online

  Theresa tried to take her eyes off her daughter, with nothing to hang on to except the woman who was threatening to kill her in order to force a confession from her boyfriend. If Coral pushed, she might grab the cables—Would they even hold …? Theresa made herself stop. Concentrate. Then she started to talk.

  “The bloody streaks on Jenna’s shirt—three and a half lines. They’re finger marks. Ray is missing half of his index finger.” She asked William, “When did he lose that?”

  The boy choked, coughed, then pulled himself together with visible effort. “Grade school. He was helping his dad mow the lawn—”

  “Ray was with you that night, wasn’t he? He was at the dance with you, because you did everything together. Ray has been riding your coattails since grade school. He told me so himself.”

  “Ray wouldn’t—”

  “He also told me, ‘I should never have gone to that dance.’ Not ‘William shouldn’t have gone,’ but ‘I shouldn’t.’ What do you remember about that dance, William?”

  “I … I remember going. But Ray couldn’t kill somebody—”

  “Speak!” Coral Simone demanded, surprising Theresa. But this didn’t mean she subscribed to Theresa’s theory. She merely wanted to wring every detail out of her daughter’s last day on this earth. “What happened at the dance?”

  “Ray was there, right?” Theresa pressed.

  “Yeah … I picked him up. Jenna was there, other kids. I think we talked to her … then, I don’t know.” His body gave a jerk from time to time, first in one direction and then another as if both wanting to run and wanting to protect Rachael, neither possible under the threat of Coral Simone’s .40-caliber.

  “You were drugged, William. Traces of Rohypnol were found in your blood—your blood, not Jenna’s.”

  “His lawyer made that up,” Coral interrupted.

  “The prosecutor would have tested the samples again if he thought that. William, do you remember taking any drugs that evening?”

  “No, I wouldn’t—I never took stuff like that. Why would I?”

  “Exactly. Why would a randy teenage boy drug himself? But Ray could have slipped it to you. You appeared drunk, Ray asks her to help him get you home. She’d have done something like that, wouldn’t she?” Theresa asked Coral Simone. “You said she never wanted to see another kid get in trouble.”

  The mother nodded. Slowly. But she didn’t put the gun down, nor did she relax her hold on Rachael’s arm.

  Neil Kelly hovered behind Theresa, a warm mass at her elbow, waiting to see if she could talk Coral’s finger off that trigger.

  Scheherazade, only spinning tales to save a daughter’s life this time. But they weren’t just tales … The more she talked, the more she convinced herself. “So there’s Ray and Jenna, feeling like Good Samaritans. You’re passed out. Your parents aren’t home. This is Ray’s plan, his big chance. He makes his pass. Now, Jenna is a sweet girl, but let’s face it—she can have her pick of any boy in the class. She isn’t about to suck face with a loser like Ray, is she?”

  “This isn’t true!” William said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “Ray has Klinefelter’s syndrome, doesn’t he?” she asked him, receiving a blank look in reply. “It’s when a male has an extra X chromosome. Instead of XY, he’s XXY. It’s characterized by abnormal body proportions, which makes him look sort of droopy though he’s of normal height, and enlarged breasts though he’s not really overweight. Most commonly it causes infertility, which is why no sperm was found on Jenna. DNA can also be found in seminal fluid, but sexual problems are common with Klinefelter’s, too, so likely he couldn’t even produce that. This would have caused him a great deal of frustration, especially liking Jenna as much as he did. And he did, didn’t he?”

  She was guessing, but the look on William’s face told her that she was guessing right on every point.

  “He always talked to her,” Coral admitted. “Jenna mentioned him now and then. He’d ask her out, ask for her help with his homework, linger at her locker. She laughed about it—not to be mean, she just didn’t think anything of it. All the boys acted like that with her.”

  Theresa went on. “You said he came to her funeral, cried harder than anybody. He cried again this morning—the sight of Sonia’s body completely unnerved him, because it brought back bad memories of Jenna’s death—because he was there.”

  William tried one last protest. “But then how did he get home? I drove us to the school.”

  “He walked. He said you and he had been friends since you walked to school together in grade school. He doesn’t live far from you,” she guessed, and William didn’t disagree. “It’s a perfect solution for him. Your car is at the school, Jenna’s car is in your driveway, he can drop the murder weapon in the woods or maybe bury it on the way home. No one at the school will remember that you arrived at the dance together, because no one ever pays any attention to Ray, right?”

  “He would never have done that to me!” Anger had finally erupted. The boy turned red, and his fists balled. He seemed to have completely forgotten about Coral’s gun, about Coral. “He’s the only one who stuck by me, the only one who didn’t drop me like last year’s BlackBerry model. He would never have let me go to jail for something he did. Never!”

  “I’m sure it tore him up,” Theresa agreed gently. “He said he went to your trial every day until his mother made him stop. He spoke of Marie Corrigan as if she were a saint, because she saved your life. When you were acquitted, no one was happier than Ray was, right? Not your parents, not even you.”

  She was proving William innocent, relieving him from a lifetime of infamy and Coral Simone’s justice, and the kid only appeared younger and more vulnerable than she’d ever seen him. Knowledge of Ray’s betrayal had decimated him, shredded the one last piece of comfort he’d been able to salvage from the previous three years.

  “So you see, Coral—you would have executed the wrong boy.”

  At last the too-thin woman lowered the gun a few inches. “That’s a lot of theorizing.”

  “Yes, it is. But I don’t think it will be hard to prove. All we have to do is ask Ray. He’s been carrying the weight of his guilt for three years, and he’ll be only too relieved to shed it.”

  Coral appeared to ponder this, the pallor in her face brightened only slightly by the rosy cast of the setting sun. Theresa didn’t dare look at her own daughter, or she might not be able to keep herself from rushing the platform and the crazed woman on it.

  “You really think so?” Coral asked, barely audible over the evening breeze and still not ready to accept this new view of life. She had spent three years planning William Rosedale’s destruction, and now it had all been for nothing.

  “Yes.” Theresa breathed out. This would work. Coral was coming down, both literally and figuratively.

  Then, reversal. Coral took a new grip on the gun, pulled Rachael an inch closer to her, and said, “Let’s find out. Call him.”

  William stared at her, uncomprehending. “What?”

  “Your little friend Ray. Get out your phone and call him. Tell him to come here.”

  “No.”

  “He murdered my child.”

  William’s mouth worked without sound for a moment, and then he said, “He’s not here anyway.”

  “He’ll come back. He’d crawl across broken glass just to hover in your orbit. Call him.”

  “He went home,” the teen insisted. “His mother picked him up. She won’t let him drive, and the bus makes him nervous.”

  Another reason for Rachael to date this boy: He couldn’t lie worth—

  “He left her naked and bloody for strangers to poke and prod so that all the other kids could talk about it on their MySpace pages. And then,” Coral added with a quick and fatal slice, “he let you take the blame for it. Bring him here, and you and this girl can walk away.”

  For a moment the boy seemed to think about it, either wondering if cooperation would
buy them time to think of something else or realizing that his life had been turned inside out and left a pale imitation of what it had been, all due to someone who professed to be his closest friend. Did he owe that person protection?

  Neil Kelly finally spoke up. “Coral, put the gun down. It’s over.”

  “It is nowhere near over, Neil. How can you even say that?”

  Neil?

  Neil?

  Theresa turned to him, but even as her lips formed the question—How does she know your name?—she saw it. And wondered how she could have missed it all this time.

  “I’m sorry, Theresa,” he said.

  CHAPTER 39

  *

  The words hung in the air, like a familiar song sung in a different language, making it difficult to understand why the lyrics seem unintelligible to you. Theresa stared at him, waiting for comprehension, waiting for the pieces to fall into place just as they had with Ray’s guilt in Jenna Simone’s murder.

  None of this explained where Neil Kelly came in.

  “Who are—” she began. Then, “Ah.”

  “Isn’t he the cop?” William asked in the silence.

  “Mom?” Rachael asked. She had calmed in her mother’s presence, enough to take calculating glances at her assailant that made Theresa’s skin crawl, as if Rachael were sizing Coral up for an overthrow. Rachael was strong, athletic, and might underestimate the skinny woman holding the gun. But that strength faded again in light of the cavalry’s apparent defection.

  Theresa said to him, “You’re a transplant. You’ve only been here three years, which means you moved to Cleveland right around the time Jenna died.”

  He nodded. “She was my niece.”

  Theresa looked from him to Coral. A minor resemblance, in the snub nose and dimpled cheeks, easily missed on Coral’s whipcord frame. Theresa couldn’t blame herself for not seeing it. She did blame herself for not seeing a host of other things. His utter, out-of-proportion shock when she first told him of Rachael and William. His vehement certainty that Marie Corrigan deserved to die. His equally vehement certainty that Marcus Dean was innocent. Just as with Ray and William, it tortured him to think his friend might suffer for his own crime, even of omission … Had he kissed her on his houseboat only to distract her from the DNA results that pointed to Dean?

  The great relief when she’d shifted her suspicions to Dennis Britton.

  How when she’d told him that Coral Simone had Rachael in the tower, he should have asked, “Who’s Coral Simone?”

  Even Coral, who had slipped in the occasional Irish slang, learned from their grandfather. “Cub” for boy, “molly” for wimpy.

  The simple fact that Neil should have told the entire investigation team that a hotel employee had been tried for an earlier, similar crime. Frank and Theresa had been trying to protect Rachael. Neil shouldn’t have been similarly circumspect. But he couldn’t have his fellow officers looking into the Simone murder, revealing his own connection to the dead Marie Corrigan. “That’s why you were so vehement that I should get Rachael away from William,” Theresa said.

  “Yes! I really did care. I didn’t want you to suffer the way my sister did. The way I did.”

  “And I thought you just wanted to get into my pants.”

  He smiled at her, sickly and worried and with a gun held loosely in his hand, but he smiled. He had to be looking for a way out of this. Quietly, she said to him, “Don’t do this, Neil. You can still step away. Coral’s a grieving mother—they’ll take that into consideration.”

  Wrong thing to say. Walking away from revenge for his niece’s death was not an option but a sentence in itself, and he grasped the gun a little more tightly and pointed it a little more in her direction. “No matter what else happens, my career is over, we both know that. My life has ended here today. I might as well take that little bastard with me.”

  “Neil—”

  “I’m sorry you and your daughter have to see this, I am. But it’s too late now.”

  Coral and Neil had two guns and three murders between them. Theresa had no weapons, a daughter, and someone else’s son to look out for. The only available way out involved a seven-hundred-foot drop. The sun was sinking fast, sucking the light from the air as it fell. Frank was a prisoner in the Justice Center, and she had no police radio with an “alert” button, only a cell phone she’d never have a chance to get at to call for the backup Neil had refused to summon. She was out of options.

  She said to Coral—she could no longer make herself look at Neil—“So what are you going to do? Kill me and two kids, somehow convince yourself this is justice? Destroy three people who never did a thing to you?”

  “Of course not,” Neil said. “Nothing’s going to happen to you, Theresa.”

  Both women ignored him.

  Coral gestured to Rachael with the gun’s barrel. “You want to make a deal to get your daughter out of here. Well, this is the deal. You say this kid didn’t do it, fine. Get me the one who did and you can have these two back without a scratch. You would do the same thing if it had been her lying on his living-room floor, with her clothes ripped off and her head bashed in.”

  “Coral—”

  “Look me in the eye and tell me that’s not true.”

  “You can’t ask him—”

  “Look at me!”

  Theresa swallowed. “I would want exactly what you want. But I wouldn’t expect anyone else to help me.”

  Then William straightened; it could only have been an inch but seemed much more. He rested both hands on the platform and told Coral, “Even if he did what you say, I’m not leading him here like a deer to a blind. That might be him, but it’s not me.”

  “You don’t think so?” Coral got a fresh grip on her gun, still pointed—alarmingly—at Rachael’s midsection. “Then she dies.”

  “Then I take you with me,” Rachael said, and wrapped one hand around Coral’s wrist. She gazed into the woman’s eyes and added, “It’s a long way down.”

  “Let her go, Coral,” Theresa said, moving closer as quickly as she dared. Neil Kelly did nothing to stop her, so she put one foot on the bottom step. “If you want Ray, we’ll get him. We’ll get him into a court of law where he’ll have to make a full confession, tell the world everything he did. But let Rachael go.”

  “I don’t want to wait!” Coral shouted, her voice climbing to a shriek. She’d been in too much pain for too long, and rationality had slipped out the back door. “I’ve waited for three years! What did the courts do for me? Where’s my justice?” She looked at Rachael as if seeing her for the first time, then back to Theresa. Then she got to the real heart of the matter: “Why do you get to have a daughter if I don’t?”

  Rachael grabbed the gun.

  Coral tried to wrestle it back, shoving at her with a sharp thrust of one shoulder.

  Rachael pulled, lost her balance.

  Theresa took the last two steps without thinking, reaching toward them, feeling the tiniest flick of Rachael’s hair before it brushed against the loose cable railing, the sensation still on her fingertips as she watched both Coral Simone and her only child disappear over the edge.

  CHAPTER 40

  *

  Theresa rushed the edge of the platform. Her body absently grabbed the cable to keep herself from following, though her mind no longer cared. She heard William’s cry of agony as if it were part of the wind and looked down just in time to see Coral Simone’s body strike the edge of a lower roof, rebound, tumble outward in one slow movement, and keep going.

  Then she realized that the falling bundle of denim and blond hair that was Rachael had been stopped. William had cried out not in loss but in pain as his right arm caught the girl’s falling weight, and now she dangled from the deck’s outer wall.

  Theresa realized later that she had literally catapulted off the platform, heedless of the gusting wind, to leap over both the side railing and William to land on the narrow walkway. But in the instant it took her to straighten
up and rush to the outer wall, Neil Kelly had beat her to it, slamming into William and reaching over to grab Rachael’s fashionable leather belt. Together they hauled the girl to safety. The entire moment lasted perhaps two seconds, but Theresa couldn’t even calculate how many eternities passed before she wrapped her arms around her child, both of them too terrified to scream, cry, or even breathe.

  Finally William’s groans distracted her. Only then did she notice the odd angle of his right arm. She and Rachael helped the boy to a seated position, and Rachael’s feverish Thankyouthankyouthankyous helped to distract him from the pain.

  Neil Kelly had climbed the platform and stood gazing downward, leaning precariously outward to get a glimpse of his sister’s body.

  “Neil,” Theresa said.

  He leaned farther.

  “Neil,” she said again, much more sharply, and this time he looked.

  He thought about it. She could see him debating the option.

  She held out one hand. “Come down.”

  After another moment he did.

  Then, holstering his weapon in favor of his radio, he calmly reported their location to the dispatcher and that there had been a death. He requested an ambulance as well as other officers.

  He turned to Theresa.

  She should be grateful, she knew. But all she could say was “About damn time.”

  CHAPTER 41

  *

  Angela arrived with plenty of help. Paramedics arrived with a nylon sling and eased William’s arm into it.

  Neil Kelly handed Theresa his gun, requested the police union attorney to which he was entitled, and then leaned against the deck’s inner wall and waited quietly while his colleagues secured the scene and set up some lighting. Theresa watched Angela struggle with herself over whether or not to cuff him, then decide against it. She left a uniform at his side instead.

  All this activity made for close working quarters, and Theresa found herself next to him while the EMTs bound up William’s shoulder, Rachael holding his other hand.