“Like a million bucks. You tell a great bedtime story, Dillon. Every bone in my body is humming ‘Ring My Bell.’ What in heaven’s name are you doing up? Helping my parents with the turkey?”
“No, Molly is keeping the turkey to herself. Your mom’s in the kitchen, though, making sausage stuffing for you carnivores and a nice cornbread stuffing for me. I woke up a couple of hours ago, realized we’d all overlooked something, and went to work on MAX.”
She studied his face. “You know who he is? The man who shot me yesterday? The man who tried to kill Ramsey twice?”
He climbed into bed beside her, pulled her against him, and kissed her hair. “It’s all pretty straightforward once you look at it the right way.”
He was big and warm, his heartbeat steady against her chest. “What do you mean, ‘the right way’?”
“Remember, it was you, Sherlock, who suggested a long prison stay fit the bill, someone who’d had time on his hands to plan the bizarre attacks on Ramsey. And we knew the person who had that note delivered to me at the Hoover Building had joked to Ted Moody about calling him the Hammer—prison slang.”
She nodded.
“And Dane and Ruth have been checking inmates released since the first of this year, looking to find a father or a brother, someone with a relationship to one of our cases who was out now, who could be looking for revenge.”
Sherlock said, “Ruth told me she and Dane were going nuts, that they couldn’t find a prisoner who fit the profile.”
Savich said, “There’s a very good reason for that. I realized the one case that remotely connected Ramsey to me was more than five years ago, though I wasn’t all that involved. Remember Father Sonny Dickerson, the pedophile who kidnapped Emma?”
Sherlock clearly remembered the obsessed ex-priest who’d sexually abused Emma until she’d escaped and Ramsey had found her and hooked up with Molly to save her. So much violence, so much deception, and it had all ended in Dickerson’s murder in the hospital. And now Dillon knew. Sherlock snuggled closer, waiting. She enjoyed a good punch line as much as he did.
“I did a search on all of Father Sonny’s relatives. His father’s dead, his only other sibling, a brother, is dead. There was only one relative left who wasn’t dead, and that’s Sonny’s mother, in jail for killing her husband. She’s the Hammer.”
That was a kicker. “You’re kidding me—Sonny Dickerson’s mom shot me in the head?”
“Yes. We all believed it was a man, of course, since everyone who saw her—from Ted Moody, who brought us that note in the Hoover Building, to the lady who rented her the Zodiac—described a man. We even heard what we all thought was a man’s voice on that telephone message to Molly, never doubted it was Xu.
“She’s got a gravelly voice she’s learned to control, and she knows how to disguise herself as a man. She let us believe all the attempts on Ramsey’s life were Xu until Tuesday, when she shot you with Xu on the ground under you.” Sherlock came up on her elbow. “I just can’t get over it—Father Sonny Dickerson’s mother. But, Dillon, why didn’t her name pop right out when Ruth and Dane did their search, no matter if she’s female?”
“Because her name is Charlene Cartwright. Like I said, she was in jail for ten years for the murder of her husband, evidently a miserable human being who not only abused Sonny and his now-deceased brother but also his wife, Charlene. She snapped and shot a dozen bullets in his face with his own gun.
“From the court transcript I read of her trial in Baton Rouge, I think her shooting him was justified. I don’t know why her lawyer didn’t plead self-defense, but he didn’t. He went for the SODDI defense—Some Other Dude Did It—but the jury didn’t buy it, and no wonder, since there was so much evidence against her. They wanted her to serve hard time, and so she did. She was given fifteen years, paroled after ten.
“Father Sonny was murdered when she’d been in prison for about five years, so she had ample time to figure out who to blame and how to carry out her revenge.”
Sherlock said, “Why did she target you? Of course I remember most everything about the case, but you were hardly involved.”
“That’s why I didn’t make the connection sooner. When I found her, I realized that she saw me as making it all possible because of the facial-recognition program I modified from my friend at Scotland Yard. Remember we didn’t believe the sketch we inputted into the program would pay off? But it did, the program spit Father Sonny out right away.”