Page 88 of Sting
He and Hick had discussed whether or not to try to connect with Panella, but decided in favor of postponing that redial until they had the phone hooked to every conceivable monitoring device. There was another solid reason for Joe’s delaying contact with Panella: He wanted to hear everything Jordie Bennett had to say first.
He asked her now about the tone of the conversations between Kinnard and Panella. “Did you get a sense that they’d ever met face-to-face?”
“No. The contract went through Mickey Bolden.”
“Did you overhear what they said?”
“Yes. Most of the time the phone was on speaker.”
“Did Panella ever give a hint of where he is?”
“No. None.” She reflected a moment. “It seemed surreal to be listening to two men bargaining over my life. Panella’s creepy voice.”
“Creepy voice?”
She described it to them and said, “It made him seem all the more monstrous when he agreed to pay Mr. Kinnard the two million.”
“Excuse me?” Joe said.
“Two million?” Hick exclaimed.
“That’s what Mr. Kinnard demanded and Panella agreed to it.”
Joe tried to wrap his mind around the staggering amount. Kinnard had gall to ask for that much. It had to be way above his normal rate. But then he would know that Panella was good for that amount and more. He said, “I’m more amazed than ever that Kinnard didn’t cash in.”
“You mean kill me,” she said, and when he nodded, she continued. “Last night, just after dusk, I became certain he was about to.”
“What made you think so?”
She glanced down at her lap, up at Hick’s gaze in the rearview mirror, finally coming back to Joe. “Just an intuition.”
“An intuition?” he repeated, ending on an inquisitive note to which she didn’t respond.
Her gaze, her demeanor remained evasive. Joe wondered what she wasn’t sharing. Hick was squirming with curiosity, too, but he didn’t press her. For right now, they wanted the overall picture. They’d hammer her for details later. He did, however, ask her what had led up to her stabbing Kinnard and how she’d managed it.
“He’d…he’d found an arrow. He thought he’d outsmarted me, that he’d found my secret weapon.”
“He didn’t know about the broken propeller.”
“No. I went back to it, and managed to pry it free from the crack between the boards, and…and…jabbed it into him as hard as I could.”
She stopped and lowered her head to stare at her clasped hands. Deputy Morrow had given her a bottle of hand sanitizer to clean them with, but bloodstains were still evident.
She described how Kinnard had pulled out the blade and she’d packed the wound as well as she could, how his condition continued to worsen throughout the night, how his fever spiked.
“Then that deputy sheriff arrived,” she said. “I begged Mr. Kinnard to surrender. I told him that I didn’t want to be responsible for another death. For anyone’s death, including his. That’s when he asked me for the name of the most senior FBI agent who’d interviewed me about Josh. He said he wouldn’t surrender to anyone else. I gave him your name. You know the rest.”
Joe was aware that she’d left a dozen or more gaps wider than the Grand Canyon, but she looked done in, and by now they were on the outskirts of the city.
He said, “Thank you, Ms. Bennett. I know you’re exhausted and that having to talk about the experience couldn’t have been pleasant.” He looked over at Hick. “You have anything specific to ask?”
“I do.” He addressed her in the mirror. “That unknown caller on Friday night. You said that before Kinnard hid your phone, he tried to reach the person.”
She nodded. “Like every other time, no one answered. He thought it was probably Josh who’d called me, trying to set up a rendezvous with either him or a messenger who would give me information about where he was going, something like that.”
“You told him it wasn’t Josh.”
“I told him I couldn’t be certain, but that I didn’t think so.”
