Beth locked the front door, and lowered the shade. If they were going to get Carrie to talk, they needed privacy, without intrusions. She went into the living room.
“Ready when you are,” she said.
Jon led Carrie into the living room, and had her sit in a wingback chair. Carrie was sobbing, and holding her head with her hands.
“Do you have any idea how much trouble you’re in?” Jon asked.
“I didn’t know there was a gun under the chair,” she blubbered.
“Of course you did.”
“I swear I didn’t.”
“You’re lying.” Jon knelt down, and spoke in her ear. “Do you think I wanted to shoot your son? Do you?”
“I don’t know.”
“I didn’t, and that’s the God’s honest truth.”
The first time they’d dated, Jon had confided to her the number of people he’d shot to death in his life. As a Navy SEAL, as a police officer, and now as a private citizen, he’d been forced to use deadly force many times, and the body count was high. Each time had been justified, but that hadn’t made the task any easier.
“Look at me,” he said.
Carrie gazed at him. The tissue was gone from her nose, her nostrils caked red.
“The gun was taped beneath your chair, ” he said.
“I didn’t know it was there,” she said emphatically.
“Are you saying that Dalton put it there without you knowing?”
“He must have.”
“You led your son to that chair, and had him sit down. Then, you stood with your back against the window so he’d have a clean shot. You knew the gun was there, and you knew what your son was going to do. That makes you an accomplice to attempted murder. You’re going down hard, Carrie.”
“No!”
“Do you like air conditioning? Well, you can kiss it goodbye, because the state prisons in Florida don’t have any. You’re going to spend the rest of your life roasting to death. Sorry, my friend. But that’s the way it is.”
There was an art to putting the screws to a suspect, and Jon had the routine down pat. Carrie shrank in her chair and balled her hands into fists. She was about to cave, and help them.
“My son was running the show,” Carrie said.
“How so?” Jon said.
“My son was evil. He slapped me around when he got liquored up, so I did whatever he wanted.”
“He was abusing you.”
“Yes. He was a monster.”
Dalton hadn’t been dead ten minutes, yet Carrie was already throwing her beloved boy under the bus. Jon had done his job; now Daniels needed to close the deal. She pulled up a chair and sat beside their suspect.
“Let me help you, Carrie, ” she said.
Carrie looked into Daniels’s face and waited.
“You shouldn’t be punished for your son’s transgressions,” Daniels said. “But right now, things don’t look good. You need to play ball with us. Will you do that?”
“What do you mean, play ball?”
Daniels leaned in. Their legs were nearly touching, and she could smell Carrie’s fear pouring off her skin. It had a stinky odor, like rotting garbage.
“Your son filmed a police detective having sex with a woman,” Daniels said. “His name was Sykes, and this film was used to blackmail him. Were you aware of this?”
Carrie said that she was.
“Two Russian brothers named Sokolov talked your son into doing this,” she said. “We want you to tell us what the arrangement was.”
“You mean the payment?” Carrie asked.
“That would be a good place to start.”
“They gave my son five thousand dollars up front, and five thousand dollars when he emailed the film to them,” Carrie said. “That was the deal.”
“Do you have their email address?”
Carrie’s mouth clamped shut. She shook her head.
“What about their phone number?” Daniels asked.
Carrie again shook her head.
“Would it be on your son’s cell phone? Or his laptop?”
“I don’t know where my son kept things.”
“Are you sure about that?”
Carrie folded her hands in her lap. She was holding back, which Daniels found strange. If Carrie wound up going to prison, she would most likely end up dying there. A jail cell was no place for an older person to live out their final days.
A crash behind the desk made them jump. Daniels went to have a look. Dalton had slipped out of the swivel chair, and hit the floor. A pool of blood had started to form and would soon engulf the entire area behind the desk. They needed to get a CSI team here to deal with the mess. But first, they needed to get Carrie to open up.
Daniels returned to her chair in the living room.
“He’s still alive, isn’t he?” Carrie sobbed.
“I’m sorry, but your son is dead.”
“What did I just hear?”
“His body is growing stiff, and he fell out of his chair.”
Carrie looked at the ceiling, and said a silent prayer.
“Are you going to help us, or not?” Daniels asked.
“I’m not going to say anything else,” Carrie said.
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to die.”
“You’re not going to die.”
“I will if I listen to you. They’ll kill me.”
“The Russians?”
“Damn straight.”
“You have nothing to be afraid of,” Daniels said. “One of the Russians is already dead, and we’re going to arrest his brother soon. They won’t cause you any harm.”
Carrie hissed at her. “You don’t know nothing.”
Jon stepped in. “Why don’t you educate us? What don’t we know?”
“You think there are just two Russians behind all of this? You don’t know nothing, and I’m sure as hell not going to educate you.”
“How many more are there?”
“Plenty.”
“Give me a number.”
“At least a dozen. That’s what Dalton told me. And one of them will slit my throat if I start talking to the likes of you. So screw your god damn deal. I’ll take my chances in court.”
Chapter 38
There was a loud banging on the inn’s front door. Lancaster said, “Let me get it,” and passed Beth his gun. He found four uniformed cops standing outside with their sidearms drawn. He opened the door and said, “Good evening, Officers.”
“We got a report of gunshots,” the officer in charge said. “We need to come inside.”
The officer in charge looked older than his years. The job was eating him up, the way it did most guys. Lancaster had been down that road, and felt bad for him.
“My name is Jon Lancaster, and I’m a private investigator. My partner is Special Agent Beth Daniels with the FBI. We had an altercation with one of the owners of the inn, a man named Dalton, which resulted in him being shot to death.”
“Who did the shooting?” the officer in charge asked.
“I did. It was self-defense.”
Another cop muttered, “Good riddance,” under his breath.
“Enough of that,” said the officer in charge. “Where’s your gun?”
“Special Agent Daniels has it. She’s in the living room with Dalton’s mother.”
“Was anyone else injured in this altercation?”
“No, sir.”
“Before we have a chat with Carrie and get her side of things, I want you to explain what Dalton was doing that led you to put that sorry son of a bitch out of his misery.”
Lancaster hid a smile. Everything was going to be all right.
“We had reason to believe that Dalton was secretly filming guests engaged in sexual activity, so we registered as guests, and my partner searched our room,” he said. “As expected, there was a camera hidden behind a mirror. We tried to interview Dalton, but he refused to talk. When Special Agent Daniels went to arrest him, Dalton drew a gun that was hidden under the chair he was sitting in. That’s when I shot him.”