It never fails, he thought as he watched the dark liquid in the clear plastic cup begin to slosh back and forth, threatening to spill all over the tray table. Turbulence always seems to hit just after the beverage service comes by. He picked the cup up, holding it a few inches above the table, compensating for the bucking and rolling of the plane.
He glanced out the window; through the bright white clouds he could see snatches of the northernmost tip of the Mojave dessert. He would be home soon.
The cup still in his hand, he leaned his head against the seat and closed his eyes. It had been a busy few days in the east, and sleep had come at a premium. Things seemed to be finally falling their way in this investigation and he found it hard to turn his brain off, no matter how tired he was becoming.
He sighed loudly then sat perfectly still. He felt a hand on his forearm and opened his eyes to see his seatmate, an older grey-haired woman with a kindly face, staring at him in concern.
"I'm sorry," she began apologetically, "but does turbulence make you nervous?"
He stared at her, momentarily confused, then smiled with a short laugh. "Oh, ah, no, ma'am, ah, no, it doesn't. I was just thinking about something else."
"Oh, I see," she said, nodding with a relieved smile. She winked at him. "It doesn't bother me either. I always think, well, if it's my time to go, at least I'll be going with a lot of other people."
His eyes widened slightly and there was a brief pause before he nodded. "Ah, a good point… I never thought of it like that."
She patted his arm. "You go back to your thinking and I'll leave you alone." She turned back towards the small movie screen hanging in the aisle a few rows ahead and put her earplugs back in.
Smiling, he took a sip of his Coke then put the cup on the table. The turbulence had passed. He laid his head back again and closed his eyes.
If Gordon Mercer actually was the person who beat Leonard Cord to death, they still had a long way to go before they could put a solid and unshakeable case together. He knew they would get only one shot to prove that Mike Stone was innocent and that someone else had actually committed the crime. They couldn't afford to make any mistakes. The petition for Mike's release and for charges to be brought against Gordon Mercer, for the same crime, had to be beyond reproach; not just airtight but hermetically sealed.
Stan Rogers was going to continue to work the investigation from his end. He and Milo Drabinsky would keep tabs on both Gordon and Eleanor Mercer, and Rogers was going to check firearms purchases in both Pennsylvania and Maryland, and perhaps beyond. He had postulated, probably correctly, that a man of Mercer's stature would perhaps need the persuasive power of a firearm to control a man the size of Leonard Cord. It seemed a very perceptive suspicion and Steve was more than impressed and pleased with the contribution from the Philadelphia detective.
He sighed once more, opening his eyes and looking out the window. South, he knew; he was looking south. Somewhere, beyond the horizon but no doubt under the same clouds, was the Correctional Institution at Tehachapi. He wondered how his old partner was doing.
# # # # #
Mike slowly pushed the book cart between the shelves. He still wasn't supposed to be lifting the heavy books, but if he used his right arm and gritted his teeth, the ache in his chest wasn't too bad. Besides, most of the books were fairly light.
He had seen but hadn't really talked to Ben Driscoll since Sunday dinner. The younger man was working highway clean-up detail and spent long hours away from the institution. They had managed to exchange a few words in the mess hall during morning and evening meals.
So Mike had kept to himself, working in the library during the day, then retiring to his bunk after dinner, mostly to read, when he could get his mind to concentrate long enough.
His two most recent phone calls to Jeannie had been particularly draining. He was trying so hard to project positivity when all he really wanted to do was cry, tell her how much he missed her and beg her forgiveness. But he couldn't do that, he knew. He couldn't put the burden of his guilt onto his only child, to make her have to live with worry and fear for the next three years.
He couldn't ruin her life too.
Taking a deep, unsteady breath, he opened his eyes, picked up another heavy tome and put it on the shelf.
# # # # #
Steve closed the front door behind him, let the flight bag fall to the floor, tossed his keys on the side table, then crossed the room, pulling off his tie as he dropped heavily onto the sofa. He glanced at the answering machine. A red '23' was flashing.
With an annoyed sigh, he allowed the back of his head to flop onto the couch; this was going to take awhile. He pressed Play, picked up the pad and pen on the small table and began to take notes.
Most of the messages were from students and fellow faculty members plus a couple of hang-ups. "Twenty-five" came the mechanical voice. He had put the pen down and was rolling up his right sleeve when Dan Robbins' voice came out of the small machine.
"Steve, call me the second you get in. We've got something. I'm in the office."
Sitting bolt upright, his sleeve forgotten, Steve picked up the black phone and balanced it on his knee as he dialed the number he knew he would never forget. "Come on, come on," he muttered impatiently as he waited for the line to connect then he heard the click of an answered phone.
"Homicide, Inspector Robbins."
"Dan, it's Steve –"
"Oh, great, yeah, um, give me a second," Dan said quickly, and suddenly the line went dead; he knew he had been put on hold.
He barely had time to pull the handset away from his ear and glare at it in annoyance when there was another click and Dan said quickly, "Sorry about that, I wanted to take the call in Mike's – I mean, Roy's office. He's not here."
"What have you got?"
"Well, believe it or not, we think we have Gordon Mercer flying from Washington to here and back again."
"What do you mean you think?"
"Okay, so what happened is, Dan and Bill were working on the list again and they found some names that they'd flagged but no Mercer. Then Dan had the brilliant idea of finding out what Mercer's mother's maiden name was – it's Fitzgerald, by the way – and one of the names that was flagged was an Allan Fitzgerald." Dan paused, letting the information sink in.
Eventually Steve said softly, "Mercer's middle name is Allan, isn't it?"
He could almost hear Dan's smile over the phone. "You bet it is."
"Holy shit," Steve breathed into the mouthpiece, his heart suddenly starting to pound.
"Okay, so," Dan finally continued, "we don't have confirmation yet that it is Gordon Mercer, but it's a place to start. And right now we're kind of at a loss on how to confirm it… I mean, it was two months ago, no one is going to remember what a passenger looked like, especially if he was trying to remain anonymous."
"But that also means, right, that he has another I.D. So that means that maybe all this is a lot more calculated than we first thought." A silence settled over them as they both took a few seconds to take in this new wrinkle. "I, ah, I'm gonna have to call the guys back in Philly and Hagerstown and see if they can use their snitches and CI's to find out if Mercer used the services of a known counterfeiter."
"Yeah, that's a good idea."
Steve exhaled loudly. "Holy shit, Dan," he said again, "that's great, that's brilliant. Good work."
"Hey, it was Dan's idea but, yeah, another nail, eh?"
Steve laughed.
"What?"
"Ah, nothing… it's just the same analogy I used yesterday, but with a different twist. I'll explain when I see you."
"Okay," Dan said slowly, chuckling. "So, ah, so when's that gonna be?"
Steve sighed. "Well, I kinda gotta show up at Berkeley tomorrow or my job could be in jeopardy," he explained, only half in jest, "but I hope to get out by four and I can probably get into The City by five. Can you get the guys together, well, those that can, and we can go over what we've all come up with?"
"Steve, I know you've been busy, and I don't know how to break this to you, but tomorrow's Thanksgiving. So you won't have any classes or lectures, I can pretty well guarantee that," Dan chuckled.
Steve had let his head drop back against the couch again. "Damn it, I totally forgot. Shit." He sighed heavily. "And that means that we're not going to get anything from any government agency until at least Monday now…" His frustration was easy to hear on the other end of the line.
"Yeah," Mike's partner said slowly. "Well, I tell you what. Dan said Bonnie's invited all of us, well, those of us without a wife or a girlfriend or a significant other, over for dinner tomorrow. So that would be you, me and Norm. Maybe the four of us can put our heads together for a few minutes after dinner and then everyone can get together on Friday. How does that sound?"
Steve was quiet for so long that Dan eventually ventured, "Hey, are you still there?"
"Um… ah, yeah Hey, Dan… I think I have a better idea…"
"Okay, what's that?"
Steve cleared his throat. "Why don't, ah… why don't you and I drive down to Tehachapi tomorrow? Prisoners are allowed visits on Thanksgiving… "
"Do you think Mike put us on his contact list? He sounded like he didn't want to see us while he was in –"
"Yeah, we're on his list, I'll guarantee it. And your badge'll get us in tomorrow, even though we haven't booked ahead."
"But it's Thanks-"
"I know, I know," Steve cut him off, "it's Thanksgiving and the place'll be packed… But I want to take the chance… don't you?"
The silence was now coming from Dan's end of the line. "Yeah… yeah… I'd like to take that chance."
Steve nodded to himself, a warm smile lighting his face. "Okay, so why don't I pick you up –"
"Steve," Dan interrupted, "nothing against your Porsche, man, but there's more room in my Jeep and, besides, I'm more rested than you are. Why don't you get your ass over here around 6 or a little later and we can hit the road right away. The sooner we get there, the better our chances of getting to see him, right?"
"Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. Look, ah, I'm gonna go to bed right now, I'm beat. Hey, ah, thanks for the good news about 'Allan Fitzgerald' – I needed to hear that, I really did. I know we got some potentially great leads back east, but I had a lot of time to just… think, you know, on the plane. And all I could see was Mike lying in that hospital bed, telling me to forget everything and just get on with our lives and I, ah… I can't live with that and I know you can't either."
# # # # #
It was Thanksgiving. All that meant to him was he didn't have to work in the library and they would be serving some kind of turkey product for dinner that night. It was a 'day off'; he would have loved to be outside watching basketball but it had decided to rain for the first time in over a month and the temperature was hovering near 50.
So he stayed on his bunk, trying to read 'Shogun', watching as various and sundry dorm-mates were summoned to the large visitors room in the main building. The mood in the entire facility was upbeat for a change.
He had just returned to his bunk after lunch and was stretched out, the large paperback of the James Clavell novel in his hands, when one of the guards, Mackey, appeared at the entrance to the low-walled, four-bunk cubicle and cleared his throat.
Mike looked up, surprised. He slipped the bookmark, which had been lying on his chest, between the pages as he sat up, tossing the paperback on the blanket.
"Mike," Mackey said cordially with a nod, which the inmate returned. "I don't know if you were expecting anyone but, ah, you have visitors."
Mike frowned. "What?"
"Yeah," Mackey nodded with a shrug, "there's two younger guys in the visitors room for you. They've been waiting since about 10 o'clock. It's a zoo out there, but they finally got a table."
The stunned inmate covered his mouth with his hand, his gaze unfocusing. He didn't move for several seconds then looked up at Mackey and nodded, getting slowly to his feet. As he followed the guard out of the dormitory towards the main building, he began to shake.