“I’m talking about the recording you made when you were bugging Catt’s apartment.”
LaFleur’s eyes opened wide. “Me?” he said. “Bugging?” He looked surprised, almost horrified, at the accusation. “There must be some mistake. I never made any recordings, so if you don’t have any more questions, I’m going back to bed. Have a nice life.”
“Look,” Kylie said, “we understand why you don’t want to help us catch the man who murdered Catt.”
“You understand?” he barked. “Then why the hell did you come back?”
Kylie squared herself off in front of LaFleur. “Because the man—no, make that the two men—who killed Sebastian Catt are about to kill an innocent woman. A woman as innocent as your wife. Hattie died doing the right thing. And if she knew you were standing in the way of our catching two murderers, she’d rip that oxygen line right out of your fucking nose.”
Horton started coughing and didn’t stop.
“Are you all right?” I said.
“No.” He moved away from the door and wheeled the cylinder back into the room. He sat down at his dining room table/desk. “Get me some water, will you?”
I went to the sink and got him a glass of water. He drank it slowly, then took a series of big drags on the oxygen. The coughing stopped.
“Mr. LaFleur,” Kylie said, “I know I pushed you hard, but the two men you’re protecting are about to kill an innocent woman. We’re racing against the clock to stop them, and right now, you’re the only one who can help us.”
“Who is she?”
“Her name is Rachael O’Keefe.”
“The bitch who killed her kid?” he wheezed.
“That bitch was found not guilty by a jury of her peers—another one of those freedoms you took a bullet for—and the real killer was caught last night and confessed everything.”
“The real killer? Nice try, missy, but I don’t buy it. How dumb do you think I am? O’Keefe is big news, and I got nothing else to do but watch CNN all day. First they tell you O’Keefe is guilty, then they say she’s not guilty, and then they say she went and got herself kidnapped. I can’t keep up with this girl. And now you’re telling me the real killer confessed? What a crock.”
“It’s true,” Kylie said.
“Then it’d be all over the TV. I didn’t hear nothing last night. Maybe it’s on now.” He picked up the remote.
“It won’t be on TV,” I said. “We’re trying to keep it from leaking, because if it breaks, the two men who kidnapped her won’t try to bleed a confession out of her. They’ll cover their ass and kill her on the spot.”
He dropped the remote and shook his head. “Cops lie all the time. Why should I even trust you?”
“I don’t give a shit if you trust us,” Kylie said, shaking a finger at him like an angry schoolmarm. “You either tell us what you know and help us stop an innocent woman from being murdered, or you can clam up, turn on the TV tomorrow morning, and spend the rest of your life trying to live with the biggest mistake you ever made.”
The room was silent except for the sounds of a lonely old man sucking in bottled air. He needed time, and we gave it to him. The photo of him and Hattie on their wedding day was still on his desk. He picked it up and stared at it.
“I’d been bugging Catt for months,” he said, not looking up from the picture. “It was easy enough to set up. Even in my condition. I was hoping he’d say something that might incriminate him, but he lived alone, so he didn’t do much talking. Mostly phone calls, but nothing that would connect him to Hattie’s murder.”
He set the picture down. “But I didn’t give up. It became my life’s work. It’s all I did, all I thought about. How to make him pay. I thought about killing him, but I knew what Hattie would say. Don’t sink to his level. So I just kept at it. And then one night—it was around eleven o’clock—I heard someone ring Catt’s bell and walk down the hall to his door. I put my headset on. It was two cops. At least they said they were cops.”
“Do you think they weren’t?” I said.
“Don’t know; don’t care,” he said. “The one tells Catt that they want to take him in for questioning. He says, ‘For what?’ The other guy says, ‘You’re a registered sex offender. What do you think? Do you want to cooperate and come along nice, or do we cuff you and drag you out of here?’”
He turned to Kylie. “Sound familiar? Same bullshit, different cops. I was hoping he’d put up a fight so maybe they’d rough him up a little, but he went without a whimper.”