The Last Witness Read online

Byrth’s cell phone then made a ping! sound. He looked at it and saw that Sheriff Pabody had sent him the photograph he’d taken of the girl’s Pennsylvania Department of Transportation identification. He tapped the image and the ID filled the screen of his phone. He dragged his fingers on the screen, enlarging her head shot.

  “Wow,” he heard himself softly say aloud. “What a beautiful girl.”

  Framed in rich chestnut brown hair, the energetic, youthful face with a bright sensual smile seemed to stare out right at him.

  Then his mind flashed with the horrific image of the blue-black blotched flesh of the face that stared back at him from the drum of sulfuric acid.

  Could it be the same girl?

  That one was blonde. Or maybe bleached-blonde.

  And Glenn said the toll is at least ten.

  God help them . . .

  Byrth, as was his ritual, reached down and double-checked his .45s—the full-frame Model 1911-A1 in his hip holster and the smaller-framed Officer’s Model on the inside of the top of his left boot. Then he grabbed his Stetson and stepped out of the Tahoe.

  [TWO]

  Society Hill, Philadelphia

  Sunday, November 16, 8:57 P.M.

  “I’m sure the police will solve this soon, Mrs. McDougal,” Michael J. O’Hara said after shaking hands with the sad-faced silver-haired elderly woman and stepping to the sidewalk in front of her townhome. “Thank you for taking the time to speak with me. Nice to see you again.”

  The woman nodded wordlessly, glanced up and down the narrow tree-lined cobblestone street, then quickly shut her front door. He heard a solid clunk-clunk-clunk as she locked the three new dead bolts she’d had a handyman install only hours earlier.

  O’Hara looked six doors down the street to where yellow CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS tape roped off the sidewalk in front of Margaret McCain’s fire-damaged home. Arranged against the wall under a soot-covered window was a small makeshift memorial. It consisted of more than a dozen long-stemmed flowers and a bouquet of balloons floating above a pair of plush two-foot-tall teddy bears embracing each other.

  The night air had a heavy acrid burned smell to it, and that clung to his nostrils and the back of his throat.

  O’Hara felt his cell phone vibrating in his pocket. He pulled it out.

  “Where’s my cameraman?” he said into it, answering without introduction. “I’m going to do my live shot here at the scene.”

  The phone began vibrating again.

  “Hold on a sec, damn it,” he said.

  He looked at the caller ID. It read MARSHAL EARP.

  Finally! he thought.

  O’Hara put the phone back to his head, snapped, “Just get him here now,” then touched a key that broke off that call and answered the incoming one.

  “Matty!” O’Hara said into the phone. “You really must be embracing island time if ASAP means four hours. Just how the hell is life as a beach bum?”

  “Well, it was fucking great, Mickey,” Payne said, his tone bitter, “until Philadelphia raised its ugly head down here.”

  “Whoa! What do you mean?” He paused in thought, then added, “This wouldn’t have to do with the McCain girl, would it?”

  Payne was quiet for a long moment, then said, “What do you know about that?”

  “Screw you, buddy. The question is, What do you know about it?”

  “Not a damn thing. I wish I did, though.”

  “Oh, come on! Matty—”

  “I’m out of the loop, Mickey. Even Jason Washington won’t tell me what the hell is going on. All I know is what Daffy Nesbitt told Chad: that it was a home invasion. Amanda has been trying to reach Maggie for the last hour.”

  “The Black Buddha—the best homicide detective on the East Coast—is working a home invasion case? I don’t buy it.”

  “I agree. And I didn’t say that. Because I don’t know. I just got off the phone with him. For whatever reason, he says I can’t ask about it.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  Payne grunted. “That’s one way to put it. All I know for sure is that it’s starting to screw up what began as an amazing trip down here.” He paused, then added, “Why are you playing journalist? You’re supposed to be the boss now.”

  “I am the boss. But once a journalist, always a journalist, Matty. Write that down. It’s in my blood to chase a good story, just as it’s in your blood to chase bad guys. And when the home of a scion of a Philly family is firebombed and she’s missing, I’m personally going to cover the story.”

  “Did you say firebombed?”

  “Yeah. The accelerant was gasoline. One of the guys in on the crime scene—you can guess who—quietly told me Molotov cocktails.”

  “No shit . . .”

  “And I’ve got the scoop on whose house it is because my so-called competition hasn’t figured that out. It’s listed on the property records under a generic named trust, and neighbors aren’t talking to the media for fear they might be next. Old Lady McDougal just had three—count ’em, three—new dead bolts put on her front door. She said she wouldn’t have opened her door if she hadn’t known I was ‘a nice laddie.’ So, I know it’s Maggie’s, and I like Maggie and want to help.”

  “How do you know her?”

  “I can’t believe you just asked that. I know damn near everyone. It’s my job.”

  Matt grunted again. “Point taken. So, how?”

  “About a year ago she called me about my CPS stories, and said because of Mary’s House she wanted to continue our talks. . . .”

  —

  When Michael J. O’Hara had been the lead investigative reporter at The Philadelphia Bulletin, he wrote “Follow the Money,” a series of articles that blew open the City of Philadelphia Department of Human Services. O’Hara had spent months digging, and uncovered gross incompetence and graft. His front-page reports led to a wholesale revision of the department, including the resignation of long-entrenched top administrators.

  It also won O’Hara a Pulitzer Prize for public service.

  Curiously, his winning the prestigious award had been the beginning of the end of O’Hara’s long career in newspapers.

  The owners of the Bulletin had put their public relations flacks to work overtime, boasting that the Pulitzer proved their newspaper offered the highest caliber of reporting anywhere. Mickey’s redheaded mug was plastered on the sides of Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority buses and practically every billboard in town. But all that—and the perception of the PR having gone to O’Hara’s head—had created more than a little animosity among certain colleagues in the newsroom.

  A great deal of the friction was the result of petty jealousy on the part of the managing editor, Roscoe G. Kennedy, who took enormous pride in having earned a master’s degree from the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Kennedy knew that O’Hara was equally proud of having, as Mickey put it, attended the School of Hard Knocks.

  Mickey’s first job with the Bulletin was at age twelve, when he pedaled his rusty bicycle on a West Philly newspaper route, slinging copies of the afternoon edition at row house after row house.

  By the time Mickey was sixteen, one of his best buddies at West Catholic High School convinced him to add a sideline to his route—running numbers slips for Francesco “Frankie the Gut” Guttermo.

  That had worked out reasonably well, until Monsignor Dooley, who had made absolutely clear that he would not tolerate any immoral act, caught Mickey with the slips at school. The monsignor offered to go lenient on him if Mickey would confess his sins—and assist the monsignor in cleansing the school of the unholy filth that was gambling.

  Mickey, embracing the code of silence that was omertà, refused to rat out his buddy. And he damn sure knew better than to even mutter the name Frankie the Gut.

  Accordingly, the monsignor booted Mickey
to the curb, telling him not to come back until he was repentant and prepared to make amends.

  Mickey, turning to his Bulletin job to fill his now extra time, discovered that a newsroom copyboy position had opened. He was told that it was little more than a gritty gofer job, but it sounded like the best job on earth to someone who was looking at another bitter winter throwing papers from a worn-out bike.

  Against all odds—including being evasive about his proof of having graduated from high school early—he got the job and survived the ninety-day probationary period.

  Mickey had found the newsroom a fascinating environment. He not only did the lowly tasks thrown at him, he made sure he was conveniently in the line of sight when the assistant city editor looked around for someone to do last-minute work no one else wanted—research, fact-checking telephone calls, et cetera.

  Proving himself competent and reliable, he soon was given small writing assignments.

  Everything was going beyond his wildest expectations until, days shy of his eighteenth birthday, he was called into the managing editor’s office.

  The assistant city editor was there, and Mickey was convinced that this was the end of his run. But when he was shown the front page of the edition just off the presses—and the byline Michael J. O’Hara at the end of a very short article he’d researched and written—he found himself accepting a job offer as a very junior reporter.

  Then, twenty years later, looking at his proud mother seated at the front table in the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria in New York City, O’Hara found himself giving an acceptance speech after being awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

  He did not think life could get any better—he was being paid to do a job he loved, and one he did damn well, while helping those who couldn’t help themselves, such as the orphans and the abused stuck in the morass of Child Protective Services.

  Then, mere days after returning from New York, he was told in no uncertain terms: “Face it, Mickey, those bastards are screwing you.”

  The giant of a black man delivering this news—one Casimir J. Bolinski, Esquire—happened to serve as legal counsel and business agent to heavy-hitting professional athletes.

  Casimir “the Bull” Bolinski had also been Mickey’s coconspirator at West Catholic running Frankie the Gut’s numbers slips.

  If Mickey had given in to Dooley the Drooler, Casimir would have found himself also booted out of school—thus ending the Bull’s path to a Notre Dame scholarship and, more critically, his career playing for the Green Bay Packers. And without that high pay of pro ball, Casimir would not have been able to afford to study law in the off-seasons, then become a sports agent after retiring his helmet and shoulder pads.

  A highly successful agent, he represented the best of the best. He was ultimately earning far more off the field than he’d ever been paid to play.

  And for all that, the Bull said, “I can never adequately repay you, Mickey.”

  The Bull, however, did try—by taking him on as a client. And the post–Pulitzer Prize employment contract that Bolinski negotiated for O’Hara with “those bastards” at the Bulletin was far beyond anything Mickey thought possible. It included compensation consistent with, the Bull announced, what he found other winners of the Pulitzer were being paid, as well as a fat expense account, a new company vehicle, and more vacation days than Mickey thought he could ever use.

  The contract also included language for an exit clause—one that would prove critical.

  Roscoe Kennedy and Mickey O’Hara had been having what euphemistically could be described as “creative differences” over the treatment of Mickey’s exclusive that was about to be the Bulletin’s lead story. It was about Sergeant M. M. Payne having shot two robbers after they almost killed a couple in a restaurant parking lot. It was accompanied by a photograph O’Hara had taken of Payne—wearing a tuxedo, cell phone in one hand and .45 in the other—standing over a dead robber.

  Kennedy had written a snide “Wyatt Earp of the Main Line Shoot-Out” headline, defending it by saying that the photograph made Payne look like the bloodthirsty gunslinger he really was. O’Hara called him out for twisting the moniker Mickey had given Matt as a compliment, then for using the story in an attempt to publicly ridicule a cop who was doing his job.

  And then he punched Kennedy.

  Bolinski, who happened to witness the whole incident unfold, carried Mickey out as Kennedy yelled before the whole newsroom unflattering descriptions of O’Hara—and that he was fired.

  The contract, however, proved solid. It provided Mickey with a paid thirty-day break, one he decided to use by traveling to France. A fugitive from Philly—Fort Festung, who’d been found guilty in absentia for murdering his girlfriend and leaving her body to mummify in a trunk—was enjoying the French’s refusal to extradite anyone sentenced to death. O’Hara felt that the outrage warranted a book. He needed research, and dragged along Matt Payne, who after the shooting also found himself with time on his hands.

  When the Philly courts allowed Festung’s sentence to be reduced to life behind bars, France gave in to the extradition—and Mickey O’Hara got a picture of Sergeant M. M. Payne arresting the fugitive Festung.

  While Mickey wrote his book, the Bull found him new employment as the publisher and chief executive officer of an Internet start-up venture—CrimeFreePhilly.com—backed by very deep pockets. It not only allowed O’Hara to be in charge of doing what he did so well, it also gave him a platform and an audience far greater than anything the Bulletin ever could have. And it had allowed him to develop other news reporting properties.

  —

  “Okay, Matty, I’ll give you the journalist’s Who, What, Where, When, and Why. Here’s the lead of my story tonight: ‘Margaret McCain, the twenty-five-year-old scion of one of Philadelphia’s founding families, remains missing tonight following what Philadelphia Police are calling a home invasion that left her Society Hill town house engulfed in flames late last night.’”

  “That’s pretty straightforward.”

  “Wait. There’s more. Last sentence of lead: ‘Police are withholding comment as to whose body was secreted from the scene after the medical examiner’s van was parked in the closed garage of the McCain residence.’”

  “Really? I hadn’t heard that detail either. That’s curious.”

  “Yeah. Curious. My source did say it was a female.”

  “Okay, look, Mickey, that reinforces something I thought. Which is (a) I agree with you that if Jason is on the case, it’s being treated as a homicide—if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, et cetera, et cetera—and (b) because Jason wants to know if we hear from Maggie—and is being quiet about it—then he’s saying that she didn’t die in her home. Other than that, I have nothing.”

  There was a long moment’s silence, then O’Hara said, “Okay. Thanks.” There was another pause, and he added, “Then who do you think it is the ME bagged and tagged?”

  “I have no idea, Mickey. I wish I did. I could call Dr. Mitchell—he has to have finished the autopsy by now. Or even Javier, his tech. They might tell me. But then that’d probably get me in hot water with Jason. He specifically told me no questions.”

  “When the hell did you start caring about getting in hot water, Matty?”

  “Hold one. I’ve got a call coming in. It may be Amanda.”

  O’Hara listened to silence as Payne checked his phone screen, then heard him say, “When it rains it pours.” O’Hara then saw movement across the street. When he looked he saw Detective Anthony Harris leaving a town house. Mickey knew Tony well, including that he’d worked in the Homicide Unit years longer than Matt’s total time with the police department.

  Bingo! Mickey thought.

  Then he heard Matt back on the phone: “Okay, Mickey, where were we?”

  “More proof it has to be a homicide,” O’Hara announced. “Harris just appeared down the s
treet, coming out of a residence.”

  O’Hara started walking in that direction.

  “Tony!” he called out, then said into the phone, “I’ll call you back, Matty.”

  No sooner had O’Hara ended the call and slid the phone into his pocket than he saw a glow from the phone in Harris’s hand, and then Harris putting it to his head.

  O’Hara heard him say, “Hey, Matt. What’s up?”

  I’ll be damned, O’Hara thought.

  Harris made eye contact with O’Hara as he said, “That puts me in a tough position, Matt. Jason said everything goes through him. Everything. Period.”

  [THREE]

  Little Palm Island, Florida

  Sunday, November 16, 9:12 P.M.

  Matt Payne looked at the phone number of the call that had just rolled into his voice mail. It was from area code 713. He tried to place it as the voice-mail message began to play.

  “Howdy, Marshal . . .”

  Jim!

  “. . . If you can break free from that beautiful better half of yours, I’d appreciate you calling me. I’m following a lead in the Miami area right now, then another up your way.” He paused, and there came an overwhelming whine, what sounded like a jet aircraft passing nearby. He then went on: “I’m giving you a heads-up, Matt. It’s gotten worse—beyond CATFU. Call me.”

  Beyond Completely And Totally Fucked Up? Payne thought.

  What the hell could that be?

  About two months earlier, Texas Rangers Sergeant James O. Byrth had come to Philadelphia—with his huge white Stetson that Payne had dubbed The Hat—hunting a vicious drug-cartel member who was trafficking in young girls, guns, and illicit drugs. Deputy Police Commissioner Coughlin had assigned Payne to work with Byrth.

  Juan Paulo “El Gato” Delgado and his ring had left a trail of dead bodies from Texas to Philadelphia—and there kidnapped Dr. Amanda Law, not knowing she was in any way connected to Payne—before a shoot-out that found Delgado dead and Amanda rescued.

  Payne regularly recalled one of the last things that Byrth had said when Payne dropped him at Philadelphia International Airport: “Come visit us in Texas, Marshal. We’ve got plenty more bad guys like Delgado. And it’s only going to get worse.”