He looked from one to the other, then asked, “May I show you?”
“Please do.”
“If we could get the file in here? I left it on my desk, with the original reports.” Luther smiled weakly at John. “I made a copy of the three reports, but I gave them to Dr. McCall.”
“Why?”
“Because she’d been looking for them.”
“When did you give her these reports?”
“Tonight. After I… after the… after the shooting at Agent Shields’s.”
“You took them with you?”
“Yes. I wanted to confront him about why-”
Mancini held up a hand to stop him. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves.”
“I can run down and get the file, if you like.”
“Please…”
Luther hustled down the hall to his office, buoyed by his own enjoyment of the situation. He was relishing the spotlight, loving the script he’d written for himself. It was, he thought, quite simply brilliant. By the end of the night, he’d be hailed as a hero. He could hardly wait to get to the part where he’d explain how he’d saved Annie McCall’s life.
He returned with the file and opened it on Mancini’s desk.
“Okay, here’s the list of personnel, in front, then the list of documents in the file. I think everyone agrees that all the documents were here except for Agent Lowery’s report, a memo from Agent Shields-that would be Connor Shields-and a sketch of the scene from Agent Lou Raymond.” He looked up first at Mancini, then at Kimble, and said meaningfully, “Interesting, don’t you think, that both Agents Lowery and Raymond died suspiciously? She, murdered just last week, and he, a one-car accident on a dark stretch of highway?”
“How do you know Lowery was murdered?”
“Sir, everyone in this unit knows she was murdered.”
“And you found all three of those items in the McCullum file yesterday? Doesn’t that strike you as odd?” John leaned back in his chair, and Luther could feel his eyes bore through him.
“Yes, of course it does.” Luther nodded calmly. “I was thinking, if someone had gone to the pains to remove the reports in the first place, why didn’t they just destroy them? It makes no sense to hide them in another file, where they could be found, but who knows what this person was thinking? Maybe he’d just stuck them in there to get rid of them when someone else came in the room, and meant to go back to get them… I don’t know. I wasn’t the one who put them in there in the first place. I only found them.”
He flipped open the cover of the file and took out the three documents under discussion. He handed them in turn to Mancini. “Here’s the sketch Lou Raymond made of the scene, showing where everyone was at the time of the shooting. Here’s the report from Melissa Lowery, and the memo to the file from Connor Shields.”
He gave John a minute to look over the documents, then said, “You’ll notice Brendan Shields is not listed on the personnel list, and his name does not appear on the diagram Lou made showing where everyone was standing. But Lowery notes that she saw Brendan exiting the building-the building from which the shots were fired that killed Dylan Shields and badly injured his brother Aidan-right after she and the others arrived on the scene.” He leaned over the desk to point to a section on the back of the report. “As you can see, Brendan was noted carrying a high-powered rifle in one hand and a rifle case in the other. Lowery’s report notes he told her that he’d gone into the building to see if he could apprehend the shooter, but found the building empty of all except Bureau personnel at that time.”
John studied the sketch.
“Here you see who all went into the building; Lou places them all right here.” Luther pointed to the sketch showing six stick figures representing each of the agents who had gone into the building after Dylan had been shot. “Brendan is not represented on the sketch.”
“So we have one report indicating that Brendan was on the scene, in the building, with a high-powered rifle-despite the fact that his name does not appear on the list of assigned personnel. And we have a sketch by a fellow agent that doesn’t place him on the team that went into the building, yet he was seen coming out right around the time that some of the other agents arrived on the scene.” John rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “It is incriminating.”
“And, sir, you have the report from Connor Shields there.” Luther pointed to it.
“The significance of that is…” John skimmed the report. “Of course. I remember. Connor was supposed to have been on this op with Aidan. At the last minute, we pulled him off to sent him to…” He hesitated. “We needed him someplace else that night. We sent Dylan in as a substitute because he and Connor look so much alike that even-”
He stopped in midsentence, took off his glasses, and rubbed his eyes.
“They looked so much alike, even someone in their own family couldn’t tell them apart in the dark.” Luther finished the sentence.
“You seem to be implying that Brendan thought he was killing Connor,” John said thoughtfully.
“I think the evidence could be interpreted that way.”
“Why would Brendan want to kill Connor?”
“I guess you would have to ask Connor that, sir.”
“I guess I will.” John nodded. “In the meantime, let’s get back to what happened tonight.”
“Yes, sir. I went to Brendan Shields’s home with the copies I’d made of the reports.”
“Was he expecting you?”
“Well, I’d called him earlier in the afternoon, and-”
“Did you tell him what you’d found?”
“Not in so many words, but I may have implied it. I probably did.” Luther appeared contrite for a moment. “In retrospect, I should have kept my mouth shut about that.”
“What time was that?”
“Late afternoon, early evening. Maybe around six or so.”
John gestured for him to continue.
“Anyway, I called him again, just a few minutes before I arrived. I’d been to his house once before, but wasn’t sure of where to turn off Capital Road. He told me he was just leaving, and that now wasn’t a good time for me to come by. He tried to brush me off, but since I was almost there-”
“Did he give you directions then?”
“No…”
“You said you weren’t sure where you were going. How did you find the house?”