The Scapegoat, page 25
“Stay where you are!”
“This seems familiar, doesn’t it? You can’t cover both of us, Marks. You shoot me, she shoots you. We die together. You turn your gun toward her again, she shoots you, you die alone. Neither of those work for me, do they work for you?”
Marks was thinking about it, but he didn’t want him to think too much, he wanted to keep things moving.
“I’m going to offer you the same deal I started with. Take the money and leave. Amy stays with us. You get what you want, we get what we want. No hard feelings. Just know there’s no version of this where Amy Tremaine leaves here with you.”
Between them, the gun dipped a couple of inches.
It was heavy.
“All right, but you’re coming with me to the stairs. Call it insurance.”
“Works for me.”
They started back along the beam.
Now Marks had three things to look at; Coombes, Sato, and where he was putting his feet behind him. To keep things interesting, Coombes used the opportunity to close up on the other man again.
The automatic zipped up to his chest.
“Back off, Coombes!”
He fanned his hands as if in surrender, but he stayed where he was, just out of reach. As long as Marks was thinking about him, he wasn’t thinking about Sato, and whether she could actually pull the trigger.
They were ten feet from the stair exit now.
He figured Marks planned to use him as a shield from Sato, then shoot him and disappear down the stairs. A gut shot, something she’d have to deal with instead of pursuing Marks.
Sato was watching him, looking for instruction.
The building was one long dead end, and as good a hiding place as it was, it offered no escape routes once discovered. Either Marks had thought the risk of being discovered was low and he could wait out the manhunt above the city, or he wanted to be caught and lacked the nerve to give himself up.
“You couldn’t do it, could you?”
“What?”
“You came here to pick up the money and kill Amy. But you couldn’t do it, so you called Tremaine, started that bullshit second ransom. It was a stall.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He knew he was right, but it didn’t help him.
Marks had been in a few tight spots recently and had managed to survive each time with a mixture of skill, ruthlessness, and luck. Why would he assume this time would turn out any different?
Coombes brought his left hand up to his face and wiped the blood away from his nose and chin, then swung his hand to the side to shake off the blood. Marks smiled, his head turning to follow the movement of his hand and the arc of blood droplets that flew out from his fingertips. It felt like two whole seconds passed before Marks turned back to look at him and saw that he’d moved forward again and a split second later when Coombes’ right fist struck his face, twisting him around.
Marks had to windmill his arms to stay on the beam and as he did this, he fired a round from the Dessert Eagle into the sky. Before he could recover, Coombes popped him again, right between the eyes. It was a solid hit, forcing Marks to take several fast steps backward. He began to slip on the beam and pushed off sideways to the platform that surrounded the stairs.
He landed badly, his knees making a hard impact on the steel. Marks grunted in pain and pulled himself slowly to his feet, his jaws clenched tight. He began to lift his gun toward him when Sato called out.
“Hey! Wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
Marks backed away toward the stairs.
“We’ll finish this dance another time, Coombes.”
“I don’t think so,” said a deep voice. “That pressure you are now feeling against your spine is a Remington 870. Drop the piece and put your hands behind your back.”
Marks glanced wide-eyed behind him.
“Drop it! I just climbed a million goddamn steps and my trigger finger is getting real twitchy, you know what I mean?”
Marks dropped the gun.
Sato moved across to cover Marks while he was being cuffed. Coombes saw him slump, relaxing into the arrest. The relief of submission, something he’d seen many times before.
Becker stood behind Marks holding nothing but a flashlight.
“Becker, buddy, am I glad to see you.”
“I’m technically still a cop until midnight.”
“You don’t stop being a cop, you just stop getting paid for it.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
He turned back toward Amy Tremaine.
As far as he was concerned, she was the real reason he was here. With Marks and his huge gun dealt with, the roof of the building seemed to shrink. He moved quickly across the lattice of steel beams to where she was still hanging mid-air.
The rope was wrapped around and around her body, then it went up over a horizontal beam, then back to where it was tied off at the side against another beam. The rope was thin, it didn’t look strong enough to take a person’s weight and he didn’t much care for the way the rope was bent over the sharp edge of the steel.
He pulled Amy Tremaine toward him with both hands. Her eyes were close to his, wide with terror and slick with tears.
“Amy, my name’s John. I’m a detective with the LAPD and I’ve been working with your dad to get you home safe.”
She had the tape over her mouth, but it looked like she understood.
He turned his head to the side and nodded to Sato. She unfastened the rope from around the steel support and let it slowly out as he carried Amy back toward the stairwell.
Adrenaline still flooded his system and she felt as light as a feather.
Coombes was about halfway across the roof when the wind returned, blowing fast through the structure. His arms instinctively tightened around Amy. He saw only her face; he couldn’t see where his shoes were positioned on the steel. Her eyes locked on his, pleading with him to make it all stop. He returned her gaze and did a slow blink.
I’m a professional, ma’am, I got this.
They were being pushed backwards, along the beam toward the edge. He could feel the steel moving past through his sneakers.
Coombes crouched down to make their wind profile as small as possible. Their movement slowed but did not stop. He was running out of time, they couldn’t be too far from the edge.
It was a rare opportunity for a homicide cop to save a life and he wasn’t going to give it up lightly. He was going to take this all the way to the end.
There was no point looking at the approaching edge if he could do nothing about it. Instead, he looked into the eyes of the woman he was holding. She’d stopped crying now, and was looking peacefully back at him.
He felt his shoe catch on something, a bolt or a rivet, and their drift backward stopped. He turned to the side and saw Sato holding fast against the upright, her hair blowing across her face. You could hold yourself against an upright all day, all night.
Grace was safe, and it was all he needed to know.
The wind took close to five minutes to ease off and he spent all that time looking into Amy Tremaine’s green eyes. They were giving each other strength, he realized. There was nothing sexual, or creepy about it. Just two humans bonding at the edge of a 500-foot drop.
When the wind dropped away, he wasted no time in carrying Amy back down the beam toward safety. The wind could return at any time and he’d had about enough of it.
In the safety of the concrete stairwell, he peeled the tape slowly away from Amy’s mouth. Her lips flared up red and puffy as the adhesive pulled at them.
“Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!”
Coombes nodded and said nothing. He found gratitude difficult to deal with and always had. He removed the rope as Marks looked calmly on.
“That psychopath was going to kill me!”
Marks laughed at that, but said nothing.
He’d unwound the rope from her shoulders down past the bend of her elbow. She was wearing a light pink T-shirt with a cartoon character printed on it. He assumed it belonged to Cassidy Stone, swapped for the blue shirt the other woman had died in.
“You’ve had a tough week, Miss Tremaine.”
“Looks like I’m not the only one.”
Coombes smiled. “I’ll live.”
“And it’s Amy, like you said before. Not Miss Tremaine.”
Once he got the rope past her hips the rest fell away onto the floor.
He took out his cell and dialed Harlan Tremaine, then passed it to Amy. It rang six times before he heard the former governor answer with a fearful, yes?
“Daddy?”
It was the only thing he heard her say, because she started to sob and Coombes left her to it as he helped Becker wrestle a handcuffed Marks down the stairs.
40
They were set up for Nathan Marks in interview room 4. Coombes went out into the hallway to watch him arrive. He’d had Marks stewing for an hour in holding to soften him up. The former Marine was now wearing shackles on his wrists and ankles with chains up the front of his body connecting everything together. The setup required Marks to walk in a shuffling motion as he was led down the hall and into the room.
The chains were a message, in case his new surroundings didn’t get the job done. His old life was over. The task for him now was to get used to it and not waste Coombes’ time believing there was still a way out.
Once Marks was seated, the chains were drawn forward and connected to a post on the table, at which point the uniforms that had brought him from the cells backed out the room.
“Are the chains really necessary?”
“You’ve tried to kill me twice, Mr. Marks. There won’t be a third time.”
“I’m unarmed.”
“As am I. Let’s get to it, shall we? I’m told that you’re waiving your constitutional right to have an attorney present today. Why’s that?”
Marks shrugged. “Why pay someone $500 bucks an hour to tell me not to say anything?”
“You can’t use lack of legal counsel as a defense.”
“It’s not going to matter.”
Coombes opened a leather folio and took out a legal waiver and a duplicate then placed them on the table in front of Marks, followed by a pen. There was a line at the bottom with a cross next to it and the other man signed both documents without reading any of the text. It could’ve been a typed-up confession for all he knew.
He gathered up the signed papers and glanced down to check that Marks had used his real name and not Nolan Sawyer or some other name. If he signed using the name of a Dodgers second baseman the document would be worthless, along with the whole interview.
Satisfied, he returned everything to his folio.
“All right,” he said. “Interview of Nathan Marks by Detectives John Coombes and Grace Sato. Today’s date is Friday, February 28th 2020. Time 8:15 p.m.”
Coombes sat opposite Marks, while Sato remained standing over to one side, arms folded. He took a moment to pull out his notebook and straighten his suit.
He’d been rotating the same two shirts for four days in a row, and while he’d been able to use the hotel laundry service, he was convinced that he must cut a disheveled appearance on camera.
“I’ve got to admit that I’m not sure where to start, Mr. Marks. How about we begin with the kidnapping of Amy Tremaine. How did that come about?”
He’d started with something Marks couldn’t deny, having been found with both Amy Tremaine and the ransom money. Once a ball was rolling, it was easier to keep it rolling.
“It all started with that damn dog.”
Marks fell silent for a long moment. Coombes did nothing to interrupt it.
“I was out for a run minding my own business when this dog shoots across the sidewalk in front of me and gets clipped by a motorcycle. The guy floors it, leaving the dog at the side of the road howling. I couldn’t have that, so I carried it to a place a mile away.”
Marks took them through the story of his unexpected hero act at the veterinary hospital, taking out the would-be thieves with a fire extinguisher, then leaving the name of another man to avoid legal problems.
The story was familiar to Coombes, but he made notes as the story unfolded to prevent Marks from knowing when he was getting new information.
“A couple of nights later, I’m out on another run. I see these fliers around the area it all happened. A picture of the dog with the word REWARD in big capitals across the top. It was the owner wanting to give the man that saved his dog a $1,000 reward. I realized I couldn’t claim it, I gave a false name. Part of me suspected it was a police sting to capture me. I’d seen the news, those guys I hit were in a bad way. A month passes. I’m over it. I meet Cass at a bar-”
“Just a moment. This is Cassidy Stone?”
“Right. I tell her about that night, thinking it would impress her, that she’d go home with me. I was half in the bag and not thinking straight. I figured if I didn’t make something happen soon, I was just going to call it quits and head home.
“But it did impress her. She became obsessed. With the story, with what I did, then with the injustice of not being able to collect the reward. Cass thinks maybe there’s another approach.
“I already proved that there are some wealthy owners out there, it was just about finding the right ones. Next thing I know, we’re kidnapping dogs and making thirty thousand a week.”
Coombes made a note find the right ones and glanced back at Marks.
“What led you to start kidnapping people?”
“Money of course. It was almost the same amount of work but much more lucrative.”
“How many were there before Amy?”
Marks looked up like he was counting in his head, but whatever number he reached, he didn’t share. There was a flicker of what looked like pride in his eyes, before he remembered where he was and his face fell.
“It doesn’t matter, none of this matters.”
It was the second time Marks had said it didn’t matter. Coombes sensed that the other man was taking more stock of his situation and was keen to keep things moving.
“Why did you kill Mavis Kent?”
“I don’t even know who that is.”
“The lady you stuffed into her own freezer.”
Marks laughed. It sounded all wrong, fake.
“Shit, I forgot about that! We really liked her house, that’s all.”
Coombes sat back.
For the first time, he questioned whether Marks was working an angle. Perhaps going for a diminished responsibility defense by acting crazy in an interview. Even waiving his right to an attorney fitted that profile.
“When you were talking about the dogs’ owners you said that you needed to find the right ones. I assume that was the case with the people too?”
He shrugged, wordlessly.
Once again Marks dodged the question about other kidnappings.
“Information you got from Elizabeth Walton.”
Her name put energy into Marks.
“Not true. I knew all those donor people myself from my time working for Tremaine, she had nothing to do with it.”
“Then why did you kill her?”
Marks clenched his teeth hard together, fury burning in his eyes.
”I didn’t.”
“Let me get this straight. You expect us to believe that you kidnapped Amy Tremaine, half-drowned her on camera; that you froze an old woman slowly to death; that you killed Cassidy Stone in front of us…but that you didn’t kill Elizabeth Walton?”
“That’s right.”
“Why would we believe that?”
“Because she was important to me.”
“And your girlfriend wasn’t?”
“Oh, please. Cass was never my girlfriend.”
“The two of you had a physical relationship, Marks. The air in the bedroom of that house was saturated with it. I could’ve cut it with a knife.”
“Look, we had sex, so what? It didn’t mean anything to me and it certainly didn’t mean anything to her. It passed the time. She was pretty good at it, you know?”
“Was Elizabeth Walton good at it?”
Marks hung his head then simply nodded. This was his weak spot.
“Were you in love with her?”
Marks nodded again. Coombes saw tears roll down the other man’s cheeks and drip onto the table. He didn’t see a lot of criminals crying, but he saw plenty of victims’ families crying and that’s what Marks looked like.
“Is that why you beat her head off a floor and strangled her to death?”
“NO!”
“Sure, you did. She found out about the kidnapping plan and you had no choice.”
“That’s bullshit! I would never-”
“So, it was about the other men? You got jealous and lost it.”
“What other men?“ Marks turned to Sato. “Is this a good cop - stupid cop routine? Lizzie didn’t have time to see anyone but me and she wouldn’t have even if she had. She knew her way around the track, sure, but she was traditional. One man at a time.”
Coombes moved his eyes slowly over Marks’ face.
He saw no doubt, only anger.
“And you were that man?”
“Is this because she was older than me? Look, we had a connection, she made me laugh. She was smart. She read books. She didn’t spend every waking moment with her face in her cell phone. Most people thought we were the same age anyway.”
“You miss my point. On the one hand you say that you loved Elizabeth, on the other you’re having sex with a crazy ex-con just to pass the time.”
“I can’t help you with your hang-ups, Detective.”
The interview was getting away from him so he glanced at Sato to take over.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s take a step back. Help us understand. Imagine for the moment that Elizabeth is still alive and you’ve still got your millions of dollars. What was your plan? Was she part of your future?”
“What difference does that make now?”
“Indulge me.”
“We were going to move to Vancouver. I told her I’d inherited money and I was just waiting on it coming through. I said it was a lot, that neither of us needed to work again. She was all-in. The charity stuff wasn’t doing it for her any more. She said things were so bad now that nothing the foundation did made a difference. That they were trying to empty the Pacific with a shot glass.”
