Takeover - Lisa Black [84]
Bobby didn’t waste time with sarcastic preambles as Lucas would have. “First of all, my dad had to skip town when I was a kid because you guys were going to arrest him for robbing a jewelry store, which he didn’t do. It was some other guy who lived on the same street and kinda resembled my father. So he had to leave town and never come back.”
“I suppose that’s what Mommy told him,” Patrick muttered. Cavanaugh glared at him, and he shut up.
“Then you guys could barely get your charges to stick the first time, so you sent me as far away for as long as you could on a probation violation.” He made buying drugs sound akin to jaywalking, and in his mind it probably was. “My mother had a heart attack after a month. You put my mother in her grave over a damn probation violation.”
Bobby sounded agitated, and on the monitor they could see him pacing back and forth in front of the reception desk. They did not want a hostage taker agitated. Cavanaugh’s voice seemed to walk a precipice, sympathetic without falling over the edge into a valley of schmaltz. “That must have been very hard on you.”
“I couldn’t even go to her funeral.”
“What about your brother?”
A pause. “My brother turned me in. He was the one who called you guys.”
Cavanaugh waited. On the screen Bobby had stopped pacing, and now he leaned on the desk, hanging his head as if worn out. Jason returned and took a seat but did not speak.
“I hated him when they sent me to Atlanta.”
“Do you still hate him?”
“How could I? He was right. I was destroying our mother—her hair went gray during my first term. She worried about me day and night. I would have killed her eventually if you guys hadn’t beaten me to it. He was right.”
“So now you think he did the right thing?”
“He tried to protect Mom. I can’t blame him for that. But I never got a chance to tell him, because you bastards killed him, too.”
Cavanaugh exchanged a frown with Patrick. “What do you mean by that?”
“What do you think I mean? He got picked up on a DUI charge, and two guys in the holding cell with him beat him to death. The guards threw him in with the biggest psychos they could find and then looked the other way.”
“When did this happen?”
“A few weeks after you sent me to Atlanta.”
“Your brother was arrested for DUI?”
“My brother never drove drunk in his life—the jail cops wanted to get back at me, and I’d been sent out of reach. So they took the only person I had left.”
Patrick retreated between the stacks and pulled out his Nextel. He had already called Records for a criminal history on Eric Moyers—clean—but wanted to double-check. He listened to Cavanaugh and Bobby’s conversation while he waited.
“How did you find out about this?”
“A buddy of mine, the guy who drove my car down to Atlanta and put it into storage for me—he told me.”
“What’s your friend’s name?”
“I’m not going to tell you! You’d go and harass him, too. Forget it, he’s got nothing to do with this. What?” He spoke this last word away from the receiver, but loudly, apparently shouting to Lucas. The response sounded like a distant murmur to Patrick. “Lucas wants to know if the truck is here yet.”
Cavanaugh looked at Jason, who nodded a yes.
“It will pull up any minute now—that’s why you need to stay on the line with me. You obviously feel very bad about your mother and brother.”
“I’m alone now. How would you feel if I came into your house tonight and took out everyone but you?”
“At the moment I’m very confused, though, because as far as I know, your brother is not dead.”
“Yeah, sure. Did you wave your hands over his grave and bring him back to life?”
“Have you been to his grave?”
“No-o-o.”
“Is there any chance your friend was mistaken?”
“You’re just playing with my head. You think I don’t know that? I should believe you over a friend? You’d tell me the sky was orange if it made me toss down my guns and let