Guilty as Sin Read online

  TAMI

  HOAG

  BANTAM BOOKS

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Epilogue

  BANTAM BOOKS BY TAMI HOAG

  Praise for the bestsellers of TAMI HOAG

  Look for TAMI HOAG'S exciting novels of suspense

  Copyright Page

  To the Divas,

  for support in times of crisis and madness

  Justice has but one form, evil has many.

  Moses Ben Jacob Meir Ibn Ezra

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My heartfelt thanks first and foremost to legal assistant, sister writer, and friend Nancy Koester for acting as my guide into the court system. Your generosity in sharing your expertise and answering my myriad questions was greatly appreciated. Thanks also to attorney Charles Lee, assistant county attorney Steve Betcher, Judge Robert King, and everyone in the Goodhue County Attorney's office for allowing me a glimpse into your world and for answering my questions. My hand to God, the people in the Park County courthouse are pure figments of my imagination, but feel free to fantasize.

  PROLOGUE

  Time to die, birthday bitch.”

  Birthday. Thirty-six. The birthday Ellen had been dreading. Suddenly thirty-six seemed far too young.

  She flung herself up the stairs, stumbling as one heel caught an edge. She grabbed for the handrail, her fingers scraping the rough plaster of the wall, breaking a nail, skinning her knuckles.

  The stairwell was barely lit, drawing in the ragged edges of illumination that fell from the lights in the halls above and below. Security lights. They offered nothing in the way of security. In the back of her mind she heard a low, smoky voice, “Your boss needs to have a word with someone about security. This is a highly volatile case. Anything might happen.”

  She reached the third floor and turned down the hall, heading east. If she could make it down the east stairs—If she could make it to the walkway between the buildings—He wouldn't dare try to take her in the walkway with the sheriff's department mere feet away.

  “We've got you now, bitch!”

  There were telephones in the offices she ran past. The offices were locked. Her self-appointed assassin was jogging behind her, laughing. The sound went through her like a spear, like the sure knowledge that he would kill her. Pursuit may not have been his plan, but it had become a part of the game.

  The game. The insanity of it was as terrifying as the prospect of death. Beat the system. Wreck lives. End lives. Nothing personal. Just a game.

  She ran past Judge Grabko's courtroom and ducked around the corner that led back toward the southeast stairwell. Scaffolding filled the stairwell, cutting off her escape route. The scaffolding for the renovators. Christ, she was going to die because of the stupid plaster frieze.

  “Checkmate, clever bitch.”

  The northeast stairs looked a mile away. Midway stood the iron gates that blocked the skyway between the courthouse and the jail. She lunged for the fire alarm on the wall, grabbing the glass tube that would break and summon help.

  The tube snapped. Nothing. No sound. No alarm.

  “Oh, God, no!” She clawed at the useless panel. The goddamn renovations. New alarms going in. State of the art.

  “Come along, Ellen. Be a good bitch and let me kill you.”

  She grabbed the handle of the door to the fire hose and yanked.

  “You have to die, bitch. We have to win the game.”

  His hand closed on her arm.

  Her fingers closed on the handle of the ax.

  Journal Entry

  They think they've beaten us at our own game.

  Poor simple minds.

  Every chess master knows in the quest for victory

  he will concede minor defeats.

  They may have won the round, but

  the game is far from over.

  They think they've beaten us.

  We smile and say,

  Welcome to the Next Level.

  CHAPTER 1

  Monday, January 24, 1994

  He said it was a game,” she murmured, her voice whisper-soft, and tight with pain.

  She lay in a hospital bed, the deep purple bruises on her face a stark contrast to the bleached white of the sheets and the ash white of her skin. Her right eye was nearly swollen shut, the flesh the color of an overripe plum. Bruises circled her throat like a purple satin band where she had been choked. A fine line of stitches mended a split in her lip.

  The pain triggered flashes of memory—sudden, violent, blaring. A memory of pain so sharp, so intense, it took on qualities of sound and taste, the smell of fear, the presence of evil.

  “Clever girl. You think we're going to kill you? Perhaps.”

  Her throat being closed by hands she couldn't see. The instinct to survive surging. Fear of death riding the crest of the wave.

  “We could kill you.” The voice a silky murmur. “You wouldn't be the first. . . .”

  The air caught like a pair of fists in her lungs, then slowly seeped out between her teeth.

  Assistant County Attorney Ellen North waited for the moment to pass. She sat on a high stool beside the bed, a legal pad and small cassette recorder on the bedside tray to her right. She had met Megan O'Malley only days before. Her impression of the field agent for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension had consisted of a handful of ad-jectives: tough, gutsy, capable, determined, a small woman with fierce green eyes and a big chip on her shoulder. The first woman to break the male ranks of BCA field agents. Her first day on the job in the Deer Lake regional office had been day one of the Kirkwood kidnapping. Twelve days ago. Twelve days that had taken the previously innocent, quiet, rural college town into the depths of a nightmare.

  In her efforts to crack the case, the chip had been effectively knocked off Megan's shoulder and smashed, and Megan along with it. She had come too close to unraveling the puzzle. Beneath the covers, her damaged right knee was elevated. Her right hand was encased in a cast. According to her doctor, the hand was badly smashed, and he despaired of the “poor darling little bones” recovering, even with the meticulous attention of a specialist.

  Megan's transfer from Deer Lake Community Hospital to the Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis was scheduled for Tuesday, weather permitting. She would have been transported the night of her ordeal, but Minnesota had been clutched in the grip of a January storm. Two days later Deer Lake was just beginning to dig out from under ten inches of new snow.

  “He said it was a game,” Megan started again. “Taking Josh. Taking me. Fooling everyone. We fooled you all along, he s
aid . . . We, always we . . .”

  “Did you at any time hear another person in the room?”

  “No.” She tried to swallow and her face tightened against a new wave of pain.

  “We've calculated all the moves, all the options, all the possibilities. . . . We can't lose. Do you understand me? You can't defeat us. We're very good at this game. . . . brilliant and invincible.”

  Eight-year-old Josh Kirkwood had disappeared from outside the Gordie Knutson Memorial Ice Arena after hockey practice on an otherwise normal Wednesday night. No useful physical evidence left behind. The only witness a woman casually glancing out her window half a block away and seeing nothing to cause alarm: a little boy being picked up from hockey practice; no sign of fear or force. The only trace of him left behind had been his duffel bag with a note tucked inside.

  a child has vanished

  ignorance is not innocence but SIN

  A game. And she had been used as a pawn. The idea brought Megan a rush of useless emotions—anger, outrage, a hated sense of vulnerability. The only satisfaction was in the fact that they had spoiled his little coup de grâce and now Garrett Wright was sitting in a cell in the Deer Lake city jail.

  Garrett Wright. Professor of psychology at Harris College. The man the media had pulled in as an “expert witness” to attempt to explain the twisted workings of the mind that had perpetrated this crime. The Kirkwoods' neighbor. A respected member of the community. A volunteer counselor of juvenile offenders. A man above reproach.

  But though Wright had been apprehended, there was still no sign or word of Josh.

  “You were blindfolded?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn't actually see Garrett Wright.”

  “I saw his feet. He has this habit of rocking back on his heels. I noticed it the first time I met him. He was doing it that night. I could see his boots when he stood close enough.”

  “That's not exactly a fingerprint.”

  Megan scowled at the assistant county attorney, her temper cutting through the haze of drugs and pain. Goddamn lawyers. Garrett Wright had drugged her, terrorized her, abused her, humiliated her. He may well have ended the career that was everything to her. A decade in law enforcement, a degree in criminology, a certificate from the FBI academy—she was a damn good cop, yet Ellen North could sit here, every blond hair in place, and calmly question her as if she were just another civilian as blind as Lady Justice herself.

  “It was him, the son of a bitch. He knew where I was going. He knew I was that close to finding him out. He caught me, beat the shit out of me, wrapped me in a sheet of evidence proving he stole Josh—”

  “We don't know yet what the bedsheet will prove,” Ellen interjected. “We don't know whose blood is on it. The lab has a rush on it, but DNA tests take weeks. The blood could be Josh's or not. We have the blood samples from his parents. If the DNA analysis shows the blood on the sheet could be from a child of Paul Kirkwood and Dr. Hannah Garrison, we've got something we can use. We might just as easily have a red herring. It would make more sense for the kidnapper to try to throw us off his trail—”

  “It makes his kind of sense,” Megan argued. “He believes he can get away with anything, but he underestimated us. We got him dead to fucking rights. Whose side are you on?”

  “You know what side I'm on, Megan. I want to see Wright punished as much as you—”

  “You can't even come close.”

  She couldn't argue the point. The bitter hate that laced Megan's tone was indisputable. The emotion Wright had forged and hammered within her with every blow was something deeper than Ellen could even imagine. It was a victim's private rage compounded by the humiliation of a proud cop. Ellen knew that her own personal, moral hunger for justice was a pale appetite in comparison.

  “I want him convicted,” she clarified. “But the case against him has to be airtight. I don't want his attorney to see even a hairline crack. The stronger our case, the better our chances of squeezing the truth out of him. It could mean getting Josh back.”

  Or finding out the whereabouts of his body.

  She left that line unspoken. Everyone involved in the case knew the chances of finding Josh Kirkwood alive. Wright and his accomplice, whoever that accomplice might be, could not afford to let go the one person who could identify them absolutely as the kidnappers.

  “If we can present Wright and his attorney with a strong enough case. If we can threaten them with a murder charge and make them believe we can make it stick even though we have no body, then Wright might give us Josh. We can force his hand if we're careful and clever enough.”

  “We thought you were a clever girl, but you're just another stupid bitch!” A disembodied voice. Never rising above a whisper, but taut and humming with fury.

  She trembled. Blind. Powerless. Vulnerable. Waiting. Then the pain struck from one direction, then another, then another.

  A cry of pain, of weakness, of fear started in the heart of her, and Megan struggled to choke it off in her throat.

  “Are you all right?” Ellen asked with quiet concern. “Should I call for a nurse?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe we should quit for now. I could come back in half an hour—”

  “No.”

  Ellen said nothing, giving her a chance to change her mind, though she didn't expect that to happen. Megan O'Malley hadn't got where she was in the bureau by backing off. The BCA was the top law-enforcement agency in the upper Midwest. One of the best in the country. And Megan was one of the best of the best. A good cop with the tenacity and fire of a pit bull.

  Ellen was counting on that fire. She had a meeting with the county attorney in an hour. She needed Megan's statement and time to fit it into the game plan she was formulating in her head.

  She wanted her ducks in a row when she sat down across the table from her boss. Rudy Stovich could be unpredictable, but he could also be herded. In her two years in Park County, Ellen had honed her shepherding skills to the point that they had become instinctive, reflexive. She didn't know that she even wanted the Wright case, and still she was aligning her strategy.

  “Will you be handling the prosecution?” Megan asked, working hard to even out her breathing. A fine sheen of sweet glazed her forehead.

  “I'll certainly be a part of it. The county attorney hasn't made his final decision yet.”

  “Well, hell, why rush? It's only been two days since we made the collar. Initial appearance is what—all of hours away?”

  “The bond hearing is tomorrow morning.”

  “Will he charge it out or wimp out and go for a grand jury?”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  The media loved to make much of grand jury proceedings. As if the word “grand” somehow implied “better” or “more important.” A grand jury hearing was a prosecutor's showcase—they got to present their evidence with no interference from the defense, no cross-examination of their witnesses. There was no need to prove anything beyond a reasonable doubt; all they had to show was probable cause that the defendant committed the crime. The grand jury had its uses. In the state of Minnesota only a grand jury could hand down first-degree-murder indictments. But, as yet, they weren't dealing with murder, and the thought of handing the fate of this indictment into the hands of two dozen citizens made Ellen's palms sweat.

  The members of a grand jury could do whatever they wanted. They didn't have to listen to the prosecutor's argument. If they didn't want to believe Garrett Wright was capable of evil, he would walk. She could only hope that the ego appeal of doing a solo act in front of a grand jury didn't override Rudy's common sense.

  Stovich had survived more than a decade as Park County attorney not so much by his legal wits as by his political wiles. More comfortable with civil law than with criminal law, he handpicked the few felony trials he prosecuted, choosing them for their political value. His courtroom style was dated and clumsy, with all the finesse of a vaudeville player. But Rudy's constituents seld
om saw him in a courtroom, and as a glad-handing, ass-kissing backwoods politician he was without peer.

  “Is Wright talking?” Megan asked quietly.

  “He isn't saying anything we want to hear. He insists his arrest was a mistake.”

  “Yeah, right. His mistake. Who's his lawyer?”

  “Dennis Enberg, a local attorney.”

  “Is he just a lawyer or is he an asshole lawyer?”

  “Denny's okay,” Ellen said, flicking off the tape recorder. She'd been in the system too long to take affront. The distinction was one she had made herself from time to time. And, having come from a family of attorneys, she was long since immune to lawyer jokes and slurs.

  She slid down off the stool and reached for her briefcase. Megan was slipping away from consciousness. Exhaustion and medication were going to end the interview whether she was finished asking questions or not.

  “He's your basic ham-and-egger,” Ellen continued. “He does the misdemeanor prosecutions for the city of Tatonka, gets pressed into service as a public defender here from time to time, has a decent practice of his own. You know how the system works in these rural counties.”

  “Yeah. Mayberry RFD. So what're you doing here, counselor?”

  She shrugged into her heavy wool coat and worked the thick leather buttons into their moorings. “Me? I'm just here to do justice.”

  “Amen to that.”

  Ellen had spent her entire twelve-year career in the service of one county or another. Much to the consternation of her parents, who had wanted her to follow their footsteps into the lucrative life of tax law. Hennepin County, which encompassed the city of Minneapolis and its wealthy western suburbs where she had grown up, had swallowed up the first decade of her life after Mitchell Law in St. Paul. She had immersed herself in the hectic pace, eager to put away as many bad guys as she could. Veterans of the overloaded Hennepin County court system had taken in her enthusiasm with the knowing skepticism of the war weary and speculated on her burnout date.