Page 97 of Nowhere to Hide
“Exactly, so why should you let Timothy Hanson haunt you any longer? Kramer’s already talking, but it’s not too late to add your voice.”
“Don’t listen to her! She’s lying to you!” Levine yelled in the background, clearly now free of his gag.
“I’m telling you the truth, Dean. You can trust me. Todd’s clearly unstable, coming over here to your house and resurrecting the past, going on about his conscience haunting him. But he wants you to shoot him. He doesn’t care what happens to you after you do. What he did thirty-three years ago really messed him up. Can’t you see that?”
A few seconds, then, “Yeah, I do.”
“Dean!”
“So, please, don’t let someone else bully you. This can all end right now. Will you surrender peacefully?”
“Yeah, I’ll come out.”
“No!” Todd cried out in the background. “Don’t listen to her lies!”
“I’m finished with you,” he said, clearly speaking to Todd. “I’m coming out, hands in the air.”
“Surrender your gun on the front step, lock your hands on your head, and back up three feet,” she told him.
The call was dropped, the front door opened, and Dean Finley stepped out just as he said he would. He surrendered his gun and did as she said.
There was no sign of Todd Levine.
She watched through the monitor as ERT officers breached the home. Soon after, they were walking back out with Levine.
She also saw that Eric had pulled up just in time to witness the surrender. He walked over to the cruiser where Levine was being loaded into the backseat and spoke to him through the opened door. While Sandra couldn’t hear what was being said, she read defeat and disappointment from Eric’s stance.
A few minutes later, Eric shut the door on Levine and headed toward her. She’d stepped out of the vehicle to greet him.
“Thank you, Sandra, for getting them out alive,” he told her.
“It was always the plan. You all right?”
“I will be, but I want to follow them back to the station and start on the interrogation.” Eric turned to go back to his car but pivoted around. “What do you say we meet up for drinks tonight at La Gioia?”
There was no way she’d turn down her favorite Italian restaurant. “Let’s make it dinner too. A late one. Say, seven thirty or eight?”
“It’s a date, at eight.” He smiled and walked away.
Sandra was smiling as his form retreated. Another day when no one died, and the bad guys would pay. They didn’t get much better.
EPILOGUE
SATURDAY, ONE WEEK AND TWO DAYS LATER…
Sandra entered the coffee shop and took a seat near the window. Her stomach was anxious, and she’d wait for her company to show up before she placed an order at the counter. Her gaze was split between watching the door and the news on the TV mounted on the wall. The volume was off, but the closed captioning was on. It was all about the Hanson scandal.
The news became public after the arrests were made for the orchestration of Susan Crawford’s crash. While there was no tangible evidence to tie Kramer to the murder of Roger Simms, his confession did that for itself.
Eric confirmed after speaking with Todd Levine, Simms’s murder was the furtherunspeakable thinghe couldn’t put on paper. Though the recording he’d made covered that transgression.
Edward Hanson came through surgery and was expected to make a full recovery. While he was lucky from one angle, he and his legacy company took a huge financial hit. With the Hanson name ruined, stock values plummeted. Edward never admitted to knowing about the survival clause on his parents’ prenup, though why would he? And his knowledge, or lack thereof, hadno bearing on the outcome. The Carmichael family was about to be one hundred and fifty million dollars richer.
Rhonda Stein, Timothy’s secretary before Susan, and Sabrina Brown both stepped forward armed with the courage to break their NDAs. Timothy had raped Stein and paid her to keep quiet afterward. Brown admitted Timothy had made sexual advances and touched her inappropriately. Both women’s stories went viral, and in true MeToo fashion of a few years ago, more women who worked with Timothy Hanson came forward. This led to a law firm stepping up and starting a class-action lawsuit against Hanson Property Development Inc. Despite their billions, the Hansons were going to feel the blowback from this too.
Eric told Sandra that he’d offered to mentor Cindy Moore, and the brass approved. As Eric told her last night at dinner, the young officer had already passed the detective’s exam. The advancement really came down to her hard work and dedication to resolving a thirty-three-year-old case. Sandra was happy for Moore because shooting right to the Homicide Branch rarely happened.
It really was unbelievable that if Ryan hadn’t demanded answers about his mother’s crash, there never would have been justice. Her crash would have remained buried, and Ryan wouldn’t have received closure. As a side note, the detective who had questioned Ryan found out why he’d requested her. He said that anyone who kept ERT from storming into the hospital for twelve hours was a negotiator he wanted to work with. It was nice that he thought to give the lead negotiator credit for that, but it took the whole team.
