Shaw nodded. The man downed it in gulps, wiped his lips. He paused and lowered his head. Shaw wondered if he’d be sick. But he controlled the sensation. Breathing deep. Slowly.
“But who and why? One idea occurred to me. Yesterday, I went to see the head of one of the crews. Guy named Dom Ryan. The two of us, we had an arrangement a few years ago when I was running OC cases. He helped me take down a couple of the really bad crews. I looked the other way on a few of his deals. So yesterday I paid him to make some calls and find out if there’d been any special service orders involving me.”
Parker frowned and Shaw said, “He means contracts. Professional killing.”
Merritt continued, “Ryan found out that, yeah, somebody’d ordered a hit. My name was attached. But I couldn’t’ve been the target.”
Shaw said, “Nobody’s easier to kill than a con in prison. You’d get shanked in the yard and that would be it. Questions wouldn’t be asked.”
“Exactly. The hit had to be you.” He was looking at Allison.
“Me?” she gasped.
“Whoever got me released made sure I had a motive: I was supposed to be furious at you. The triggermen would make it look like a murder-suicide. I’d kill you, then myself.”
Bewildered, Parker asked, “What do you mean ‘furious’?”
“That was the other reason I knew my release was bogus. The letter from you to the discharge board, telling them not to let me out, that I was dangerous.”
“What letter?” Parker said. “I never wrote anything.”
He glanced at Shaw again, then to the backpack. Shaw nodded and Merritt retrieved some sheets of paper. “The letters about my release. Look at the last one.” He handed them to Parker and she flipped through them.
“This’s forged,” she whispered.
“I know.” He said to Shaw, “It’s all about how I hurt Alli and Hannah, was abusive all our marriage.”
Parker stared at the letter. “No, no, no...”
“I was an asshole, sure, but only for the last couple of years.”
Shaw remembered that Parker had said the marriage was good until the Beacon Hill shooting and his descent into drugs and drinking. And that he never physically hurt either of them.
“And that last paragraph.”
Parker skipped to the end. She frowned. “What on earth is this?”
“It says how she knows some secrets of mine that I don’t want revealed.”
She gave a pallid laugh. “Secrets? You? Makes it sound like you were mixed up in the corruption scandals.” She looked at Shaw. “He was the most honest cop on FPD. When he started, on Vice, on the riverfront? More pimps went to jail for trying to bribe him than running girls. Oh, and the day he was shot? He’d just found twenty thousand dollars of payoff money, skimmed from the cleanup fund. Hidden in a dead drop at a construction site. He could’ve pocketed it. But the first thing he did when he came out of surgery was tell his captain about the cash.”
Merritt said, “And look at the bottom of the letter. The redaction?”
Shaw saw two thick lines under the woman’s name.
“It’s not very redacted.”
She held it up. “You can see the address of our rental. Whoever did it wanted you to know where we lived.”
“I was supposed to go there right after I got out. Didn’t matter if I was going to warn you, or kill you myself, or just visit. The point was to get me to your rental house. The triggermen’d be waiting. They’d do the job.” He shrugged. “I didn’t know all this then. All I knew was: contract hit, you were the target, and I couldn’t trust police or anyone else. I had to find you both, get you out of town, until I figured out who was behind it.
“I didn’t have your new number, emails, social media. I couldn’t find you anywhere online. I had no idea where you were. And who was there to help me? Marty Harmon, your mother? They wouldn’t believe a word I told them.”
“So that was a lie somebody told David: about the prisoners you’d told you wanted to kill me.”
“What?” he scoffed. And didn’t bother to state the obvious: that was part of the setup too. To support the claim that he was in fact murderous.
Merritt slicked back his thinning blond hair, and his face deflated. “Then I made my mistake. Oh, man, did I screw up. I paid Ryan again — this time to help me find you. He says sure. And what does that prick do?”
Shaw said, “Called up the triggermen and whoever hired them and cut a deal. You gave Ryan the leads you’d found, and he sent them right to the killers. And when they found a lead, Ryan sent it to you.”
“That’s right. He didn’t have any quote ‘contacts’ in the county, like he promised me. It was those two.” An angry nod toward where Suit and Jacket waited atop the hill in front of the cabin. “I thought you might go to a women’s shelter. Ryan told them. They went to check it out. Thank God, you weren’t at any of them. Who knows what they would have done to the staff?
“And they were the ones that saw Han’s selfie and figured out about the motel. They told Ryan. He told me. I was heading up there when you got away.”
Bitterness flooded his face. “I might as well’ve been texting the triggermen directly.” Then a shake of the head. “I found the name Frank Villaine and thought that might be a lead. Could Ryan find the address? He did and gave it to those two, as well as me. He hoped the murders would go down there. But you were gone.”
Hell of a coordinated plan, Shaw reflected, wondering again who was behind it.
Merritt gave a grim laugh. “And finally... finally, I got it that something was wrong. They needed to get me to where they’d tracked you down — for the murder-suicide — at Timberwolf. But how did Ryan’s contacts know you were there?
“Just didn’t seem right. I went up there but stayed out of sight. I saw them burning the camper. And I saw you escape. And just after that, she got there.” A nod toward the front, where Donohue’s body lay. “The guy in the suit handed her an envelope. I went after you on foot. Then I got a text from Ryan, some bullshit about your being spotted in the cabin here by local police or somebody. Of course, the truth was the triggermen’d found you and told him where. I slipped around them and came through the woods from the north.”
Shaw asked, “And no idea who put out the contract?”
“No. Ryan said he tried, but — bullshit. He lied and took my money.” Merritt gazed toward his ex-wife. “So why? Why would somebody want you dead? All I could think was it was some project you’re involved with at HEP.”
Parker grew thoughtful. “Well, I’m the only one who could finish the fuel rod containment vessel on schedule. To find somebody else and bring them up to speed, the Pocket Suns’d be delayed at least a year. That might be the end of the company.”
Colter Shaw, however, had another theory. He said to Merritt, “So. You go to Ryan and ask about a special services contract.”
“Right.”
“And word comes back there is one — and your name’s attached.”
He nodded.
“But Allison’s not ‘Merritt.’ She kept her maiden name.”
Silence for a moment. Then Parker gasped. Merritt whispered, “Hannah?”
The girl’s eyes narrowed.
It was only a sixty, sixty-five percent hypothesis but it seemed logical.
“Why?” Merritt asked.
“I don’t know. Not yet. Maybe you witnessed something...” A thought occurred. “Maybe you photographed something. One of your selfies. At the fishing lodge, they burned your phone and computer. Why go to the trouble unless they wanted your files destroyed?”
At this thought he upped the likelihood to seventy-five percent.