Ronan raised his left eyebrow. He reached into the manilla folder Fitzgibbon had set on the coffee table and pulled out a photograph. With a no-nonsense look on his face, he showed it to Mary Lou. It was a picture of Walt Claxton manning the Tilt-A-Whirl. “Perhaps you should explain, William, or do you still go by Walt?”
The room was dead silent. Ten expected there to have been gasps of surprise and outrage, especially from Baxter, but all three people remained silent.
“DetectiveO’Mara, it’s not a crime to change your name.” Walt/William kissed the back of Mary Lou’s hand.
“Agreed,” Ronan said from behind clenched teeth. “However, embezzling money is a crime. So is laundering that money through an elaborate network of shell companies to finance the Conrad Group.”
Walt’s easy grin turned into a look of triumph. “If you could prove that, there would be police here to arrest me, but since they’re not, you can get the fuck out! You’re out of your jurisdiction,Detective.”
“There’s one more thing.” Fitzgibbon pulled out a second photograph from the folder. He set it down on the table in front of Walt and Mary Lou, who gasped, with her hands fluttering to cover her eyes.
“What the hell is this?” Baxter asked, sounding a bit queasy.
“This is a photo from your father’s autopsy. Take a look at the twin burn marks behind Kotter’s ear.” Fitzgibbon tapped the photograph. “Do you know what those are?” He looked back and forth between Mary Lou and Walt, who remained silent.
“They’re marks from a Taser,” Ronan said. “Notice they’re on the left side of Kotter’s neck.”
“My husband is dead. Let him rest in peace.” Mary Lou shook with emotion. “I’ve spent the last twenty years trying to keep these images from my son, and you walk into to my office and slam them down on the table. How dare you!” Mary Lou got unsteadily to her feet. “I’m calling security and then my lawyer. You’re not going to get away with this.”
“You’re the one who’s not going to get away with this, Mary Lou.” Ten paused, making sure the black widow’s attention was on him. “Kotter wasn’t alone on the Ferris wheel that night. Someone sat in the car alongside him. Someone heloved. Someone hetrusted. Your lover manned the controls and stopped the wheel at the top, where you proceeded to tase him and, with a little help from Walt, restart the ride when he saw the arc of electricity forced Kotter from his seat, sending him plummeting to the ground.” Ten brushed off his hands as if they were dusty. “Easy peasy, right? You killed your husband, which left you free to marry your lover and to live happily ever after with the money you embezzled, blaming Kotter for the theft.”
“You’ve lost your mind!” Mary Lou screeched. “I didn’t kill my husband! I was nowhere near the park the night he died. I was at a charity event. There are pictures of me at the gala. I would never kill Kotter.”
Tennyson’s gift showed him images of Mary Lou in an emerald-green dress, shaking hands with the governor and Boston’s mayor. If Mary Louhadn’tbeen in the seat next to Kotter, who had been? The vision hit out of the blue. Ten sat behind the giant desk in Kotter’s office. Ten heard Kotter say, “I’m selling the park. I’ve had enough.” The next thing he knew, Ten was riding the Ferris wheel, looking out over the entire park. A loud bellow issued from his seatmate. Ten turned to see a teenaged Baxter Brighthouse sitting next to him. “You promised the park to me! It’s mine!” Baxter shouted.
Before Ten knew what hit him, his body jolted with an electric shock. He felt the Ferris wheel jerk forward, and with a shove from behind, Ten was flying. Falling. Dying.
With his entire body shaking, Ten turned to Baxter. “Oh, my God. It wasyou!” Ten felt as if he’d been hit in the chest with a sledgehammer. Mary Lou isn’t the killer. You are.”
Baxter wore a self-satisfied grin. “It wasn’tjustme.” His eyes were on Walt, who looked as if he were about to breathe fire. “Walt manned the controls.”
“Shut the fuck up!” Walt cautioned.
“That’s exactly what I said to you the night I caught you forging a check in my father’s handwriting, isn’t it?” Baxter didn’t give Walt a chance to respond. “The signature was an exact match, but of course, I knew that. I’d known all along what you were up to.”
“This is all your fault. You and your fucking ghost stories ruined everything!” Walt charged toward Baxter. “If you’d just kept your damn mouth shut, none of this would have happened.”
Fitzgibbon grabbed the irate man before he was able to lay his hands on his stepson. “Sit down.”
Walt shook Fitzgibbon off and sat back down. “Baxter told me he’d keep quiet about the money I’d been systematically stealing if I did something for him in return.”
“That something was to help kill Kotter, which is what you wanted anyway, right?” Ronan asked. “His death freed you up to reinvent yourself, and after a suitable mourning period, you married his widow.”
“You knew about the money,” Ten said. His eyes were on Mary Lou. “You knew Walt was stealing. Why didn’t you stop him?”
Mary Lou started to laugh. She held on to her stomach as tears rolled down her face. It took her a few minutes to get herself back under control. “You’re all so stupid. Do you think either of these idiots could have pulled a plan like this off by themselves?”
“You were the mastermind.” Ronan looked to Fitzgibbon, who was nodding along.
“We have a winner! Although I prefer the term puppet master.” Mary Lou crowed. “I helped Walt embezzle the money. Kotter trusted me with the books. He never checked them once. It wasn’t hard for Walt to write the checks. He’s a world-class forger. We were going to run off and live the good life in Belize, just the two of us, until Baxter screwed everything up by discovering the missing money.”
“Wait, you were going to leave mehere?Alone?” Baxter’s hands balled into fists.
“Oh, grow up!” Mary Lou rolled her eyes. “While your father’s head was lost in the clouds, living hisdream”—she made air quotes over the last word—“I was the one telling you to trust no one. Rely on yourself. You chose not to listen to me and followed in your father’s footsteps.”
“I was fifteen years old!” Baxter shouted.
“It was your idea to kill your father. I was just going to run off with his money.” Mary Lou shrugged.
