The Scientology Murders. William Heffernan

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СКАЧАТЬ I think they were the last words he ever spoke.”

      Vicky avoided Harry’s eyes. She knew his history. She glanced through a doorway to an adjoining room. She could just see the crossed ankles of the elderly woman who had let them into the apartment. Vicky guessed the woman to be somewhere in her eighties. She was small and frail and Vicky had helped her to a chair before they went to examine the body. It was hard to imagine her plunging a heavy eight-inch butcher knife into a man’s chest.

      She turned to Harry. “Are you thinking Grandma?”

      He nodded. “We better talk to her.”

      Harry Doyle was six one with enough lean, hard muscle to fill out a fairly large frame. He had wavy brown hair and penetrating green eyes but he was far from a pretty boy. There was a ruggedly handsome look about him, but one that also warned of someone who should not be pushed too far. Yet those features quickly softened when a sense of playfulness came to his eyes and a small, infrequent smile appeared at the corners of his mouth. Vicky knew that Harry’s “gentler side,” as she liked to call it, had a strong effect on her and it surprised her that he seldom used it while working.

      Vicky by contrast was tall and slender with light brown hair that fell halfway to her shoulders, pale brown eyes that looked as though they could swallow you whole, a straight nose, and a mouth that seemed just a bit large, a bit sensual. Overall it gave off a soft look. In the six months they had worked together, Harry had learned that it was pure deception. The woman who had become his homicide partner—after spending four years with a sex crime unit—was as hard as nails when she had to be.

      “Maybe you should let me talk to her,” Vicky said.

      “Are you implying that I’ll scare her and you won’t?”

      Vicky grinned at him. “I could be.”

      Harry snorted at the idea. “That’s only because she doesn’t know you.”

      When they entered the adjoining room they found the elderly woman busily working a pair of crocheting needles, her fingers moving methodically, almost without thought. She had thin white hair and a heavily powdered face, a wasted attempt to hide the nest of wrinkles that covered her cheeks and forehead and neck. She had bright, clear blue eyes set deep in her head and Harry thought he detected a note of resigned fear resting there.

      Vicky knelt in front of the woman, whose name was Delilah Moon. “I’m afraid you were right,” she said. “Your grandson is dead.”

      The woman slowly nodded. “Good,” she said.

      The word startled Vicky, but she quickly caught herself. “Did he hurt you?” she asked.

      Delilah Moon lifted her blouse displaying deep bruises on her stomach and ribs. “He hurt me whenever he was drunk and I wouldn’t give him the money he always wanted. He was drunk most of the time, and I refused to give him money most of the time.”

      Harry knelt down beside Vicky. “Did you stab him, Mrs. Moon?” He spoke the words softly.

      “I did.” The old woman’s jaw was set and Harry could tell it was something she felt no regret over, something she would have done again.

      “How did you happen to have the knife?” he asked.

      The woman began to rock in her chair and Vicky reached out and laid a hand on top of hers.

      “After the last time he beat me I started carrying it around. If he got out of control an’ I thought he was gonna hurt me, I’d wave it at him and he’d usually back off.”

      “And this time he didn’t?” Vicky asked.

      “That’s right.”

      “Did he say anything to you when you stabbed him?”

      The woman’s mouth tightened and her lips pursed. “He called me a nasty name,” she said.

      “What did he call you?”

      “He called me an old bitch.” Her jaw tightened. “But he won’t be doin’ that no more. An’ he won’t be beatin’ on me neither.”

      Harry called social services for a caseworker and left Mrs. Moon in the care of two female deputies and the corpse in the hands of the medical examiner. Then they went to the state attorney’s office and laid out their case along with the lengthy rap sheet the victim, Charlie Moon, had assembled in his twenty-eight years on earth. The assistant state attorney, a short, fat man named Julius North, said his office would interview Mrs. Moon, but that he could see no reason why the elderly woman would be charged. “The newspapers would crucify me,” he said. “Besides, it sounds like she did the county a favor by bumping the bastard off.”

      * * *

      Back at the office, Harry and Vicky spent an hour writing up their reports, and it was just past ten p.m. when Harry’s personal cell phone rang with a call from his adoptive mother, Maria Doyle.

      “Hey, Mom, what’s up?”

      “Harry, oh, Harry.” The fearful timbre in her voice immediately set his hair on end. “Harry, somebody shot Jocko. He’s in Morton Plant Hospital in downtown Clearwater. They’re just taking him into surgery.”

      Harry felt his legs go weak. Jocko was the only father he had ever known. “How bad is it?”

      “Is very bad. They say he lost much blood.”

      “Do the Clearwater cops have somebody with you?”

      “Yes, a nice young girl.”

      “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

      Harry told Vicky what had happened and headed for the stairs.

      “I’ll go with you,” she called after him.

      * * *

      With siren and lights they made the hospital in eighteen minutes.

      “You go,” Vicky said. “I’ll secure the car and catch up.”

      Harry found Maria in the surgery waiting room, her face haggard; her hands in her lap nervously twisting a handkerchief. He sat beside her and placed an arm around her shoulders.

      “Have you seen a doctor since they took him into surgery?”

      “No, no one,” she said.

      “Where was he shot?”

      “In the back. Two times. Then whoever does this pushes him in the water.”

      “The water? Where was he?”

      “When they found him, he was hanging onto a ladder in a little marina downtown.”

      “Why was he at a marina?”

      “You remember Joey O’Connell?”

      Harry nodded. Like his adoptive father, O’Connell was a retired Clearwater cop, who left the job on a disability. O’Connell had been shot in the spine while trying to stop СКАЧАТЬ