“Look around,” the girl said. “Let’s take language off the table.”
“Somebody wanted you on the street,” Shaw said.
“Yessir.” He eyed the glass of rusty water sitting on the coffee table. “Can I?”
Shaw nodded. The man downed it in gulps, wiped his lips. He paused and lowered his head. Shaw wondered if he’d be sick. But he controlled the sensation. Breathing deep. Slowly.
“But who and why? One idea occurred to me. Yesterday, I wentto see the head of one of the crews. Guy named Dom Ryan. The two of us, we had an arrangement a few years ago when I was running OC cases. He helped me take down a couple of the really bad crews. I looked the other way on a few of his deals. So yesterday I paid him to make some calls and find out if there’d been any special service orders involving me.”
Parker frowned and Shaw said, “He means contracts. Professional killing.”
Merritt continued, “Ryan found out that, yeah, somebody’d ordered a hit. My name was attached. ButIcouldn’t’ve been the target.”
Shaw said, “Nobody’s easier to kill than a con in prison. You’d get shanked in the yard and that would be it. Questions wouldn’t be asked.”
“Exactly. The hit had to be you.” He was looking at Allison.
“Me?” she gasped.
“Whoever got me released made sure I had a motive: I was supposed to be furious at you. The triggermen would make it look like a murder-suicide. I’d kill you, then myself.”
Bewildered, Parker asked, “What do you mean ‘furious’?”
“That was the other reason I knew my release was bogus. The letter from you to the discharge board, telling them not to let me out, that I was dangerous.”
“What letter?” Parker said. “I never wrote anything.”
He glanced at Shaw again, then to the backpack. Shaw nodded and Merritt retrieved some sheets of paper. “The letters about my release. Look at the last one.” He handed them to Parker and she flipped through them.
“This’s forged,” she whispered.
“I know.” He said to Shaw, “It’s all about how I hurt Alli and Hannah, was abusive all our marriage.”
Parker stared at the letter. “No, no, no...”
“I was an asshole, sure, but only for the last couple of years.”
Shaw remembered that Parker had said the marriage was good until the Beacon Hill shooting and his descent into drugs and drinking. And that he never physically hurt either of them.
“And that last paragraph.”
Parker skipped to the end. She frowned. “What on earth is this?”
“It says how she knows some secrets of mine that I don’t want revealed.”
She gave a pallid laugh. “Secrets? You? Makes it sound like you were mixed up in the corruption scandals.” She looked at Shaw. “He was the most honest cop on FPD. When he started, on Vice, on the riverfront? More pimps went to jail for trying to bribe him than running girls. Oh, and the day he was shot? He’d just found twenty thousand dollars of payoff money, skimmed from the cleanup fund. Hidden in a dead drop at a construction site. He could’ve pocketed it. But the first thing he did when he came out of surgery was tell his captain about the cash.”
Merritt said, “And look at the bottom of the letter. The redaction?”
Shaw saw two thick lines under the woman’s name.
“It’s not very redacted.”
She held it up. “You can see the address of our rental. Whoever did itwantedyou to know where we lived.”
“I was supposed to go there right after I got out. Didn’t matter if I was going to warn you, or kill you myself, or just visit. The point was to get me to your rental house. The triggermen’d be waiting. They’d do the job.” He shrugged. “I didn’t know all this then. All I knew was: contract hit, you were the target, and I couldn’t trust police or anyone else. I had to find you both, get you out of town, until I figured out who was behind it.
“I didn’t have your new number, emails, social media. I couldn’t find you anywhere online. I had no idea where you were. And who was there to help me? Marty Harmon, your mother? They wouldn’t believe a word I told them.”