Playing Dead_ A Novel of Suspense - Allison Brennan [44]
The voice of Mitch’s father came back and Mitch swallowed the anger and disgust that arose every time he thought back to the files he’d found in his father’s office after he died.
Steve stared at Mitch, his dark eyes unreadable. “Okay. You’ve convinced me, not of his innocence, but that maybe there’s something here worth looking into. But I want your assurance that you’re going to be a cop first. You see Tom O’Brien, you don’t let him go.”
“Of course. In fact, I want to find him first. I’m worried when he’s in police custody he’ll end up dead. If we have him, we can protect him until we find out what Maddox had uncovered.”
“And if it doesn’t have anything to do with O’Brien?”
“I’ll live with it.”
“Good.” Steve leaned back, crossed his legs. “You know, before you came to Sac two years ago you had a reputation for being a hard-ass, but you’re a softie at heart, Mitch. Hell, you and I both know that guys like O’Brien can crack and take the whole family with them.”
“But it wasn’t a murder-suicide. It was a double homicide with the daughter just down the street.”
“O’Brien had a history,” Steve reminded Mitch. “Written up several times, probation twice.”
“For roughing up suspects.”
“And that justifies it?”
“No, but the first suspect was a child molester, and the second suspect had beaten his wife to a pulp. Kicked her with steel-toed boots. She had a miscarriage and nearly died.”
“So he’s known to snap. What’s the difference when he sees his wife in bed with another man? He snaps, has his service pistol on, shoots them.”
“Without a fight or confrontation? And he didn’t use his service weapon. It was his personal firearm. And it was left on the nightstand. And according to his report, the gun was found on his wife’s side of the bed next to an open window.”
“There were no footprints or fingerprints on or near the window,” Steve said. “He could have opened the window and made it look like an intruder. Put the gun down because he heard his daughter come in.”
Mitch was off and running now. “C’mon, Steve, don’t you think that it’s odd there were no fingerprints on the windowsill? Like it was wiped?”
“O’Brien could have easily wiped it to set up his story, or maybe his wife was one hell of a housekeeper.”
“How could O’Brien get to his gun in his night-stand—where both he and his daughter testified he kept it—without the lovers seeing him?”
“He moved it beforehand.”
“That was the prosecution’s argument.”
“It makes sense.”
“What if the killer was in the house when the wife brought in her lover? Retrieved the firearm and waited for them to get naked, then killed them?”
“O’Brien could have done the same thing. Maybe he knew about the affair, was following her, was in the house—didn’t expect his daughter to come home.”
“But he talked to Claire on the phone. While he was in the house killing her mother? He planned it all out, but didn’t give himself an alibi? Now that is stupid. You have to look at the photos. It looks like an execution.”
“The work of a cold-blooded killer,” Steve countered. “A man who can kill his wife and her lover while his daughter waits for him down the street.
“The job is still the same,” Steve continued. “We apprehend O’Brien and put him back in prison. We’re not the judge, or the jury, or the appeals court.”
“He’s out of appeals.”
“And the Western Innocence Project dumped his case, too. They must have realized there was nothing to it.”
“And Oliver Maddox, the law student working on it, is dead and has been since before the earthquake, if the autopsy goes like I think it’s going to go tomorrow,” Mitch said. He sat ramrod straight, looking at his nearly empty pint of Guinness. He’d been in front of the Office of Professional Responsibility so many times it was almost a joke. Disobeying orders or not following established protocols. He had friends in high places, though they’d only protect him for so long. But every rule he broke was because he was searching for the real truth in the cases he worked. Professional? Maybe not. Responsible? Mitch didn’t see