Mitchell Reece, practical as ever, held his left hand to his face to protect himself from the blast – and her spattered blood -and then he pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER FORTY
In the hushed conference room the metallic click was as loud as the gunshot would have been.
Reece's eyes flickered for a moment. He pulled the trigger three more times.
Three more clicks echoed throughout the room. His hand lowered.
"Fake," he whispered with the tone of someone observing an impossible occurrence. "It's fake."
Taylor wiped the streaming tears from her face. "Oh, Mitchell."
Burdick stepped forward and firmly lifted the gun away from him.
Taylor said, "The gun's real, Mitchell, but the bullets're just props." She shook her head. "All I had was speculation. I needed proof that you did it."
Reece leaned against the wall. "Oh, my God!" He was staring at Taylor. "How?" he whispered. She'd never seen such shock in anyone's eyes – pure, uncomprehending astonishment.
"A lot of clues. I finally put together today," she said. "What got me wondering was the poem, Linda's poem."
"Poem?"
"The one that Wendall left as her suicide note. I read it in the hospital and, you know, everybody thought it was a suicide note. But nobody really understood what it was about. It was a love poem. It wasn't about killing herself, it was about leaving solitude and loneliness and starting a new life with somebody she loved. Anybody who was going to kill herself wouldn't leave that as a suicide note. Danny Stuart, her roommate, said she wrote it just a few days before she died."
He was shaking his head. "Impossible. You couldn't make that kind of deduction, not from the suicide note back to me."
"No, of course not. It's just what put the idea in my head that maybe she didn't kill herself. But then I started to think about everything that'd happened since you'd asked me to help you find the note, everything I'd learned. I thought about you nudging me away from the other suspects and toward Clayton. I thought about what kind of strategist you were, about Clayton's womanizing, about how it would be easy for you to get a gun from one of your clients in the criminal pro bono program. Your trips to Linda's grave. I had my private-eye friend check out your mother. Yes, she was a paranoid schizophrenic. But she died four years ago. Oh, Mitchell, you looked me right in the eye and lied. I felt like crying when you told me about your mother." Still, he held her eye, not a flicker of remorse in his. "Then," she continued, "I called the Boston US attorney's office. Your friend Sam hasn't worked for them for four years. You faked that call to him from the street in front of your loft, didn't you?" Her anger broke through. "You're a pretty fucking good actor, Mitchell."
Then, calming, she continued. "Hard evidence? You yourself helped me there – that first day I met you, when you mentioned that the records in law firms reveal all kinds of information about where people've been and how they spend their time. I went through the time sheets going back a year and figured out exactly what happened. It's all right there. You and Linda working together, taking time off together, logging travel time to clients on the same date, joint meal vouchers. Then Linda's time drops and she takes sick leave and files insurance claims because she's pregnant. And not long after that she dies."
"Then I found the Genneco security system contract negotiation files. And, yeah, it was checked out to Donald. But if he'd used them to get access to the botulism he sure as hell wouldn't use his own name. Then I asked Mrs. Bendix to find any other files Donald had supposedly checked out recently. There was one – an insurance claim. Where a car went off the road and looked like it was going to sink in the reservoir in Westchester but ended up on a ledge of rock that kept it from sinking. In exactly the same place we drove into the reservoir that night. You needed to make it look like Clayton was desperate enough to kill us so he'd be desperate enough to kill himself. Right? Am I right?"
Reluctantly he nodded.
"Oh, sure, a lot of people had motives to kill Clayton. Thom Sebastian and Dudley and Sean Lillick and Donald here. Even Donald's wife. And probably a dozen other people. But I decided you were wrong – when you told me that motive is the most important thing in finding a killer. No, the most important thing is finding the person who has the will to murder. Remember your herald, Mitchell? Preparation and will? Well, of all the people in this firm, you were the only one I believed could actually murder someone. The way you destroyed that doctor on cross-examination you had a killer's heart I could see that."
"But even then I wasn't absolutely sure. So I called Donald earlier tonight and we arranged this little play of our own – to find out for sure."
"You don't understand," Reece whispered desperately. "Clayton was pure evil. There was no way to bring him to justice otherwise. He -"
Taylor's hand flew up toward him, palm out. "Justice?", she raged. "Justice?" She sighed and lowered her head, speaking into the microphone hidden under her collar.
"John, could you come in please?"
The door opened and John Silbert Hemming entered. Reece stared up at the huge man as he gripped Reece's arm tightly and stepped protectively between the lawyer and Taylor.
The man said to her softly, "You could have stopped earlier, before he tried to use that." Nodding at the gun. "We had enough on tape for a conviction."
She was looking into Reece's evasive eyes as she said in a whisper, "I had to know."
The handcuffs went on quickly, with a crisp, ratchety sound.
"You can't do this!" Reece muttered bitterly. "You have no legal authority. It's illegal detention and kidnapping. And that fucking tape is illegal. You'll be subject -"
"Shhhh," John Silbert Hemming said.
"- to civil liability and criminal charges, which I'll pursue on the federal and state levels. You don't know the kind of trouble -"
"Shhhh," the big man repeated, looking down at Reece ominously. The lawyer fell silent.
Seeing Reece standing in front of her, oddly defiant, even angry at what they'd done to him, she wondered if she was going to scream, or slap him, or even reach for his throat with her hands, which seemed to have the strength, more than enough, to strangle him to death.
Reece said, "Taylor, I can make you understand. If you'll just -"
"I don't want to hear anything more."
But she was speaking only to John Silbert Hemming, who nodded solemnly and escorted the lawyer out into the firm's lobby to await the police.
She spent an hour giving several lengthy statements to two humorless detectives from Police Plaza. She refused a ride home from gallant John Silbert Hemming but promised that she'd call him about their opera "date," a word that she pointedly used.
"Looking forward to it," he said, ducking his head to step into the elevator car.
Taylor walked slowly back to her cubicle. She was almost there when she heard the sound of a photocopier and noticed. Sean Lillick copying sheets of music on the Xerox machine near the paralegal pen. He looked up and blurted, "Taylor! You're out of the hospital? We heard you were totally sick."
"Back from the dead," she said, glancing at the music, the copying of which he was probably charging to a client.
"You're all right?"
If you only knew.
"I'll live."
He nodded toward the manuscript paper. "Take a look. My latest opus. It's about Wendall Clayton. I found all of these pictures and papers and things in his office the other day and I'm writing this opera about him. I'm going to project pictures on the screen and get some Shakespearean text and -"
She leaned close and shut him up with an exasperated look. "Sean, can I give you some advice?"
He looked at the music. "Oh, these're just the rough lead sheets I'm going to arrange them later."
"I don't mean that," she whispered ominously. "Listen up. If Donald Burdick doesn't know you were Clayton's spy yet, he will in about a day or two."