True Blue (9 page)

“I thought you
wanted
me to take the job.”

“I’m talking about Roy Kingman. You shouldn’t be hanging out with
him
.”

“Why not?”

“We haven’t cleared him as a suspect in the Tolliver murder, that’s why. You’re on probation. That means avoiding all contact with people of questionable character.”

“But that’s the reason I am hanging out with him. To keep tabs on him.”

“You could be passing time with a killer.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“You were undercover then.”

“I’m sort of undercover now.”

“You’re not a cop anymore.”

“Once a cop always a cop.”

“That’s not how it works. And I thought we had this discussion?”

“Maybe we did.”

“I’m working the case, Mace. You start poking around then it might get all blown up. And that hurts you and me. You need to focus on moving forward with your life.”

Mace sat back and said resignedly, “Okay, okay, I hear you.”

“Good, I’ll hold you to that. So when do you start with Altman?”

“Two days. And he wants me to move into the guesthouse on his property.”

Beth looked surprised. “I thought you’d stay with me for a while.”

“I can actually do both. Hang here and hang there when work requires it.”

“Okay,” Beth said, her disappointment clear.

“I’m not abandoning you.”

“I know. It’s just been two years without you. I need a big Mace Perry fix.”

Mace gripped her sister’s arm. “You’ll get it. We have a lot of catching up to do.”

“Before we get all blubbery, Mom called. She’d like to see you.”

Mace punched a pillow she was holding. “That’s actually the only thing that
could
make me cry. When?”

“How about tomorrow?”

“Will you come with me?”

“I’ve got a full schedule, sorry.”

“Does she still live on the plantation with all the slaves?”

“The last time I checked she was paying her staff a living wage.”

“And hubby?”

“Firmly under her thumb and usually not underfoot.”

“How about instead of doing the visit I run naked through Trinidad in northeast with ‘DEA’ stenciled on my back?”

“Might be safer, actually. Oh, Lowell Cassell said hello. And he also said, ‘You tell Mace that there is indeed a heaven and Mona Danforth will never make it there.’”

“I knew I loved him. So what did he find?” She added quickly, “I’m not poking around, just curious.”

“Tolliver was raped.”

“Sperm leave-behind?”

“Yes. He also found a couple of foreign pubic hairs and a bit of fiber. There were also soil stains on Tolliver’s clothing.”

Mace rose. “Well, I guess I should get some sleep if I’m going to survive Mom. You turning in?”

Beth had pulled out her BlackBerry and was answering e-mails. “Just two hundred and sixty-three to go.”

“You still answer every e-mail in twenty-four hours?”

“It’s part of the job.”

“You still never turn it off, do you?”

Beth looked up. “Like you ever did?”

“I had some fun.”

“I’ve had fun too.”

“Yeah, your ex was a real barrel of laughs. I lost two years, sis, you lost eight.”

“I’m not saying it was all Ted’s fault. My career—”

“It wasn’t like he didn’t know that going in.”

Beth stopped thumbing the BlackBerry. “Get some shuteye, you’re going to need all your energy for Mom.”

Juanita the Cow was waddling toward her, Lily White Rose with the nineteen teeth right behind. Juanita carried a wide smile along with a Smith & Wesson .40, while Lily White had her gutting knife. Mace tried to start her bike, but the ignition wouldn’t catch. The two women started to run toward her.

“Shit!” Mace jumped off the bike and sprinted to the woods, but her boot caught in a bump in the dirt and she fell sprawling. By the time she turned over the women were standing over her.

“No big-sis bitch to help you now, baby,” cooed Juanita.

Rose said nothing. She just cocked her blade arm back, waiting for the word from the queen bee to plunge the serrated edge into Mace’s jugular.

“Do it, Lily White. Then we got to get the hell outta here.”

The blade flew down with a speed that Mace was not prepared for. It hit her square in the neck.

“No!”

Mace fell out of the bed. She felt warm blood spurt out of her nose as it smacked against the nightstand. She landed awkwardly on the carpeted floor and just lay there.

Blind Man, who’d been asleep on the floor next to where she’d fallen, licked her face and gave off little mournful noises in her ear.

“It’s okay, Blind Man, I’m okay.”

She finally rolled over, sat up, and backed her way into a corner. She squatted there in a defensive ball, her hands made into fists, her eyes looking out at the dark, her breath coming in waves of uneven heaves. Blind Man lay in front of her in the darkness, his thick reddish nose probably taking in each and every dimension of her scented fear.

An hour later she was still there, her spine digging into the dry-wall that her sister had painted a soothing blue especially for her return. Only she wasn’t thinking of Juanita or the gut-chick Rose. Her images were of herself, strung out on meth, huddled in a corner, her body going through shit it had never suffered before.

She’d never seen any of them, none of the bandits who’d snatched her out of an alley where she had set up an observation post on a drug distribution center in Six D. After they’d injected her multiple times with stuff for three days running she didn’t even know her own name. The next thing she vaguely remembered was climbing in and out of cars, holding a gun, going into stores and taking what didn’t belong to any of them.

Once, shots had been fired. She recalled pulling the trigger on her weapon by instinct, only no round had come out of the barrel; turned out her weapon wasn’t loaded and never had been. She was finally arrested holding an unloaded Sig and enough evidence to put her away for a long time while the rest of her “gang” conveniently had disappeared.

So the little sister of the D.C. police chief was busted for armed robbery while caked on meth. Some dubbed her the Patty Hearst of the twenty-first century. The arrest, the trial, the sentencing, the appeals galloped by in a blur. Mona had gone for the carotid, and the female legal threshing machine had come within one appeal of putting Mace away for twenty years at a max a thousand miles away from D.C. She’d argued forcefully that Mace had gone so deeply undercover that she had eventually succumbed to the dark side. Mace remembered sitting in the courtroom watching the vitriolspewing DA pointing her finger at her and pounding the counsel table demanding that this “animal” be sent away for good. In her mind, Mace had killed the bitch over a hundred times. Yet when she finally had gotten the twenty-four-month sentence, just about everybody had turned on her and her sister.

When the van that had taken Mace in shackles arrived at the prison the news trucks were all lined up. It seemed the warden was reveling in the national spotlight, because he’d personally escorted Mace through the gauntlet of media and the hostile crowd. Trash was thrown at her along with insults of every conceivable degree of vulgarity. And still she’d shuffled along, her head as high as she could hold it, her eyes dead ahead, staring at the steel outer doors of her home for the next two years of her life. But even for tough Mace, the tears had started to gather in her eyes, and her lips had started trembling with the Orwellian strain of it all.

Then the crowd of onlookers had suddenly parted and a tall figure in full dress blues and four stars had marched out and started walking right next to Mace. The stunned look on the warden’s face showed that this development was totally unexpected. The crowds stopped screaming. Nothing else was thrown at Mace. Not with Chief of Police Elizabeth Perry with her gun and her badge striding right next to her sister, her face a block of granite as she stared down the crowd, willing them from hostility to numbness. That image, that final image of her sister next to her before Mace entered the house of hell, was really the only thing that had kept her going over those two years.

It was with this last thought that Mace finally fell asleep right on the floor. Two hours before dawn, she woke with a start, staggered to the bathroom, washed the crusted blood off her face in the bathroom, and got back into bed. Exhausted, she slept for nearly three hours, until her sister gently shook her awake.

Mace sat up in bed, looked around the room with an unsteady gaze.

Beth handed her a cup of black coffee and sat next to her. “You okay?”

Mace drank some of the coffee and lay back against the head-board. “Yeah, I’m good.”

“You look a little out of it. Bad dream?”

Mace tensed. “Why? Did you hear anything?”

“No, just thought it was probably normal. Your subconscious probably thinks there are still bars on the doors and windows.”

“I’m fine. Thanks for the java.”

“Anytime.” Beth rose.

“Uh…”

Beth looked down at her. “Something on your mind?”

“I remember what a media circus it was when I went to prison. I was just wondering.”

“Why there wasn’t a media army camped outside on your return?”

“Yeah.”

“The easy answer is you’re old news. It’s been two years. And every day there’s some national or international crisis, big company collapsing, people getting blown up, or some psycho with automatic weapons and body armor gunning people down at the local mall. And since you’ve been away hundreds of newspapers have folded, existing ones have cut their staff in half, and the TV and radio folks usually chase stuff far more bizarre than you to get the big ratings. But just in case, I sort of pulled a reverse strategy on the media grunts.”

Mace sat up. “What do you mean?”

“I offered to make you available to them for a full interview. I guess they figured if it was that easy, why bother?”

“That’s pretty slick, Beth. Busy day today?”

“Nope, didn’t you hear? Last night all crime miraculously went away.”

Mace showered and changed and checked her hair, face, and clothes in the mirror. Then she got mad at herself for even doing this. No matter what she looked like, her mother would find something wrong with her appearance. And frankly, it would be easy pickings for the woman.

Minutes later she fired up the Ducati. Immediately, Blind Man started howling from behind the door. She smiled and revved the gas. Soon she was heading due west, left D.C. proper, and entered Virginia over Memorial Bridge. As she cut in and out of traffic, Mace started to think about the upcoming encounter with the woman who had given birth to her over three decades ago.

Part of her would take prison again over that.

Though he’d died when Mace was only twelve, Benjamin Perry had left quite an impression on his younger daughter. Mace could vividly recall sitting in her father’s small den doing her homework while her dad put together his legal arguments, oftentimes reading them to her and getting her input. She had wept harder than anyone at his funeral, the casket closed to hide the gunshot wounds to his face.

As she flew past lavish estates residing majestically on hundreds of acres, Mace knew that her mother had ascended to this level of wealth principally by design. She had methodically hunted and then snared a fellow who’d never worked a day in his life but was the only child of a man who had earned a fortune large enough to allow his offspring to live decadently for several generations. By then both daughters were grown and gone, for which Mace was enormously grateful. She was more coach fare and Target than private wings and Gucci.

Beth had gotten her height from her mother, who was several inches taller than her husband. Mace had always assumed that she inherited both her father’s average stature and his pugnacity. Benjamin Perry’s career as the U.S. attorney in D.C. had been tragically cut short, but during his tenure he’d prosecuted criminals through some of the most violent years in D.C. history, quickly becoming legendary for his scorched-earth pursuit of bandits. Yet he also had a reputation for always playing fair, and if exculpatory evidence came along, defense counsel always saw it. He had told Mace more than once that his greatest fear was not letting a guilty person go free, but sending an innocent one to prison. She had never forgotten those words, and that made the appointment of Mona Danforth to her father’s old position even more difficult for her to accept.

Benjamin Perry’s murder had never been solved. His daughters had taken various cracks at it over the years, with no success. Evidence was lost or tainted, witnesses’ memories faded away, or they died. Cold cases were the toughest to solve. But now that she was out of prison Mace knew, at some point, she had to try again.

A few miles past Middleburg proper she slowed the bike and turned off onto a gravel path, which would become a paved cobblestone road about a half mile up. She drew a deep breath and pulled to a stop in front of the house. They called it by some Scottish name because hubby was Scottish and took great pride in his clan back home. While Mace and Beth were there previously he had even entered the room dressed in a kilt with a dagger in his sock and a bonnet on his head. That had been bad enough, but the poor fellow had caught his skirt on the sword handle of a large armored warrior standing against one wall, causing the skirt to lift up and reveal that the lord of the manor wore his kilt commando style. It was all Mace could do not to blow snot out of her nose from laughing. She thought she had carried it off fairly well. However, her mother had sternly informed her that her husband had not taken kindly to Mace rolling on the floor gasping for air while he was desperately trying to pull his skirt back down to cover his privates.

“Then tell Mr. Creepy to start wearing underwear,” Mace had shot back in earshot of her stepfather. “I mean, it’s not like he’s got anything down there to brag about.”

That had not gone over very well either.

As she rounded a bend the manor came into full view. It was smaller than Abe Altman’s, but not by much. Mace walked up to the front door fully expecting a uniformed butler to answer her knock. But he didn’t.

The thick portal flew open and there stood her mother, dressed in a long black designer skirt, calf-high boots, and a starched white embroidered tunic shirt over which a gold chain was hanging. Dana Perry still wore her whitish-blond hair long, though it was held back today in a French braid. She looked at least ten years younger than she was. Beth had her mother’s facial structure, long and lovely, with a nose as straight and lean as the edge of an ax blade. The cheekbones still rode high and confident. Her mother cradled a comb-teased Yorkie in one slender arm.

Mace didn’t expect a hug and didn’t get one.

Her mother looked her up and down. “Prison seems to have agreed with you. You look to be lean as a piano wire.”

“I would’ve preferred a gym membership, actually.”

Her mother pointed a long finger at her. “Your father must be turning over in his grave. Always thinking of yourself and never anybody else. Look at what your sister’s accomplished. You’ve got to finally get it straight, little girl, or you’re going right down the crapper. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Do you actually want me to come in, or will your ripping me a new one on the front porch satisfy as a visit so I can get back to the real world?”

“You actually call that garbage pit of a city the real world?”

“I’m sure you’ve been tied up the last two years, so I can understand you not bothering to come see me.”

“As though seeing you in prison would’ve been good for my mental health.”

“Right, sorry, I forgot the first rule of Dana, it’s all about
you
.”

“Get in here, Mason.”

She had lied to Roy Kingman. Her father hadn’t named her Mason. Her
mother
had. And she’d done it for a particularly odious reason. Chafing under the relatively small salary her husband drew as a prosecutor, she’d wanted him to turn to the defense side, where with his skill and reputation he could have commanded an income ten times what he earned on the public side. Thus, Mason Perry—Perry Mason—was her mother’s not-so-subtle constant reminder of what he would not give her.

“It’s Mace. You’d think after all these years you might get that little point.”

“I refuse to refer to you as a name of a weapon.”

It was probably a good thing, Mace thought as she trudged past her mother, that she could no longer carry a gun.