Powers of Arrest (21 page)

Chapter Thirty-six

Jill jumped when she had heard the knock. Then she walked hesitantly to the door.

Will assumed it was Dodds, but something inside tightened. “Wait!”

But it was too late. She flew back into the room so violently it was as if an explosion had happened. It was the sound Will had heard many times when a door was kicked down. A man came right behind her. He kicked her in the stomach and turned toward Will and Cheryl Beth.

He was tall, bald, and had a face that almost looked like a mask. But it was no mask: it was a younger man with an older face, one sculpted and creased by God-knew-what. Except for the dark eyebrows, he looked like Mister Clean. His clothes were Indian Hill preppy: expensive chinos and a light-blue shirt with a Polo logo.

Mister Clean was carrying a sawed-off shotgun and pointing it their way.

“Ah-ah-ah,” he said.

But it was too late. Will had his Smith & Wesson out and leveled at the man’s chest.

“Get the fuck in there, little whore.” He grabbed Jill by the hair and shoved her to the sofa, all the while keeping the shotgun pointed in Will’s direction.

“You weren’t easy to follow, Detective Borders, using your siren and all, but I did it, all the way from the marina. I sat outside waiting for you, and when I realized you didn’t have any of your cop buddies nearby, I decided to come on in. And what do I find: my little red-haired sex slave.”

Jill was crying and shivering, bent over with pain, her face hidden by her hair.

“And this must be the famous Cherry Beth I’ve heard so much about.” He stepped closer. For the first time, Will noticed the black backpack he was wearing. “This is going to be even better than I fantasized, and I fantasize a lot.”

Will kept the gun steady. It wasn’t the first time he had been on the wrong end of a shotgun. Thanks to years of training and experience, his insides were calm. Suddenly the dread of the next MRI, the possibility of another spinal-cord tumor, didn’t matter. The notion that he would join his father on the wall of police officers killed in the line of duty was over in a second. He had civilians to protect. Not only that, he had Cheryl Beth.

“Put down the gun, Mike. You’re under arrest.”

The man laughed, high-pitched and raw. “No, Detective Borders, you are going to hand me your gun, stock-first, please. That, or I’m going to blow off redhead’s head.”

“You might want to reflect on that, genius,” Will said. “You shoot her, I shoot you, multiple times, end of story.” He studied the man’s weapon: It appeared to be an Ithaca Auto & Burglar Gun, 20 gauge, with no stock and no more than a foot in length. It was rare but still lethal.

“You like my gun? It’s a collector’s item, very expensive. I stole it from my dad’s cabinet. An armed society is a polite society, right? Now…hand…over…your…fucking…gun!”

Will said quietly, “That’s not going to happen.”

Mike’s rubbery face held the exact same expression as the day when Will had first encountered him in Music Hall, on the way to meet the mother. Will realized that he had been talking to the wren in the miniskirt that day about her friend in pain and he had mentioned Cheryl Beth’s name. That’s where Mike must have misheard it.

“One way or the other.” Mike smiled. It was an ugly sight. “I have some things with me to make this fun. Had to bring duct tape. I was all out of handcuffs. But I’m going to make you watch, Detective Borders, make you watch your friend get raped, watch red get raped. As many times as I want. ‘Impotent’? You’ll find out. Then, I’m going to kill you as slowly and painfully as I can figure out. When all that’s done, I’m going to burn down this hole and disappear. Part of the art is knowing when to stop.”

Will would have shot him as he talked, but the shotgun was no more than two feet away. He wouldn’t survive the blast. He had to play for time, hope that Dodds would be there soon.

“Tell me why?” He felt his right quads getting tighter.

“Why?” Mike shrugged. “Killing each other is the only thing humans do really well. But to kill with style, that’s an art. To watch and listen as they beg and bargain and then scream. It makes me feel like God.”

“Every psycho says shit like that,” Will said, watching the man’s gun hand. He was half an hour past his Baclofen dose. All he needed was for one leg to start jumping. “Why Kristen Gruber? Why the nursing students? Why Jill?”

“Is that your name, sweetie? I hope you have some lube in the house, because you’re going to need it. So is Cherry Beth.”

Will wanted to look at Cheryl Beth, intuit what she was thinking, but he kept his focus on the man with the gun.

Mike cocked his head. “There’s never one single reason. I went after Kristen to get back at my dad, but she let me down. It could have been perfect, but it was spoiled. With Jill—what a cute name—I saw her and wanted her. Same with the brunette on the bike trail, only I didn’t realize I’d get three for the price of one. That was close to perfection. I have a thing for girls on bicycles, what can I say? Those pumping legs. But that wouldn’t make great art, would it? I want models that look vulnerable on the outside and yet are strong inside. What’s the expression? Strong at the broken places? The man I took to the graveyard? It was perfection. That’s why I chose you, Detective Borders. You and your cane.” He paused. “That, and you got in my way.”

Will looked at him unimpressed. Then it was as if someone had inserted a key into his quads and they unlocked. His leg relaxed.

“Did the girl in Athens, Georgia, get in your way?”

“Very good, detective. She was my first. I made mistakes. But I learned. No, she didn’t get in my way. She was in one of my classes and I kept having a vision of killing her. One day I did. All the shrinks and medication my parents spent money on never changed me. Death is my art. I won’t be stopped.”

“But you’ve got to know when to stop.” Will started to wonder whose arm would tire faster. Mike looked very steady, those muscled arms doing well by him. Will was conscious of the instability of the rocking chair.

“You said it yourself, Mike,” he went on. “You’ve got to know when to stop. If you would have stopped with Gruber, we might never have caught you. Now it’s too late. How does that make you feel, Mike?”

Mike’s face tensed at the phrase he had probably been hearing from his father since he was three.

“Hand me the shotgun. Stock first.”

Mike’s face was growing redder with rage when Cheryl Beth said, “Mike!”

He swung his torso toward her, dropped the barrel of the shotgun forty-five degrees, and almost got out a reply. Then the room exploded and he lurched back, a red stain on the shirt where the polo logo once sat. Jill screamed. Mike screamed and struggled to regain control of the gun. It went off, an even louder blast, the load of shot hitting the floor. Cheryl Beth held out the .38, ready to fire again.

Two seconds had expired as Will shot him three times, nearly point blank, in the torso.

The shotgun dropped harmlessly from his hand as his body swayed backward and collapsed by the door. Will kept the gun trained.

***

His ears were still ringing even though the only sound in the room was Jill’s screaming. Cheryl Beth stood and started to the door. “I should help him.”

“No,” Will said. “Stand back. He might have other weapons.”

He was up, his legs miraculously working without the cane, walking slowly to the sprawl of a human being on the floor. Mike Buchanan lay face up, very pale. One leg was twisted beneath the other. His arms were clutching at his chest, which stuck out unnaturally because of the backpack he was still carrying.

Will bent down and got on his knees. He tried to ignore the sharp pain that immediately struck, patting down Mike’s shirt, pockets, pants legs, and shoes. He was clean. He nodded and Cheryl Beth was instantly on the other side. She checked his pulse and opened up his shirt. A blood pool was emerging from underneath him.

She said, “Stop screaming, Jill.” The young woman stopped. “Are you hurt?”

She said she wasn’t.

“We’re losing him,” she said. “If I had a surgical team here right this second…”

“Detective…”

Will looked at Mike’s face. It was turning alabaster and the premature wrinkles were fading. He struggled to breathe, the sound coming from his throat like the grinding gears of an old truck. Will had shot him close to the heart, into one lung, and probably near the aorta.

“What, Mike?”

He whispered. Will bent closer.

“Kristen…”

“What about her?”

“She…” He gasped, his speech slurred. “She was all ready…”

“All ready?”

“No…” And he repeated the word so softly that Will could barely hear it.

All ready for what?”

Will heard one last quick intake of air, and then the man’s eyes went black.

Chapter Thirty-seven

A month later, Will was back in the Homicide offices, and not as a visitor. Along with a medal of valor, he had gotten his old job back. Along with the medal, the chief had given him a dispensation for his physical condition in honor of solving the murder of Kristen Gruber. Fassbinder had retired suddenly and Skeen was taking the lieutenant’s exam. For now, she was the acting Homicide Commander. He sat across from Dodds, who was idly tossing a football in the air. The names of Gruber and Smith had been shifted to black on the white board. But plenty of other names were still written in unsolved red.

A folding knife had been found in Mike Buchanan’s backpack, along with duct tape, a gallon of gasoline, and matches. The knife had been sterilized, so it contained no blood or DNA evidence from the victims. After a search warrant had been executed on the house in Indian Hill, they found four pairs of women’s underwear, one pair of men’s underwear, and Gruber’s badge, keys, and wallet in a hidey-hole of the garage. The DNA matched the young woman in Georgia, Holly Metzger, Lauren Benish, and Noah Smith. There was more: photos of Lauren taken on the bike trail.

Kenneth Buchanan had been arrested and was being tried as an accomplice to rape and murder. They were working with detectives from Georgia to find out whether Buchanan had known about the Athens killing and had concealed Mike’s role in that, too. Buchanan’s former colleagues who went to Elder and Moeller quickly deserted him. Kathryn Buchanan resigned from the symphony.

Will passed his MRI with no new tumors. He had gained another year of bonus time. But, then, the one thing he had learned on this job was that we were all living on bonus time, only most people didn’t realize it.

The
LadyCops
producers moved their location to Florida.

“Pretty kinky about Kristen, huh?” Dodds tossed the ball hard at Will, who caught it. “Handcuffs, ball gags, sex toys. And such a wholesome face. No disrespect to a fallen comrade.”

“You have a dirty mind.” Will spun the football at his chest.

“Only thing that keeps me going.”

“I’m not a Cincinnati moralist,” Will said.

“Apparently not.” He fired a shot that hurt to catch.

“So are you going to Jimmy Buffett at Riverbend this weekend?”

“No,” Will said. “Cheryl Beth and I will probably take in a movie at the Esquire. And Grammers has reopened in Over-the-Rhine, so we’ll have dinner there. She’s going back to the hospital, you know.”

“Good. Give me back that ball.”

Will tossed it. “You’re the only black parrothead in Cincinnati.”

“That’s an unforgivable racial stereotype.” Dodds faked a pass, kept the ball. “There are at least four of us. You can’t really be a Cincinnatian unless you love Jimmy Buffett.”

“Why is that? We’re about as far from the tropics as you can get.”

The ball came his way, another expert pass. “Partner,” Dodds said, “That’s one of life’s mysteries.”

Skeen intercepted the next pass. She stood between their desks. “Don’t rest on your laurels, gentlemen.” She tapped the casebooks and files that rose several inches high. “They may not be exciting, but they need to be cleared.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Dodds said. “Send my poor bones back out into the fields…”

She bopped him on the head with the football.

“I like it when homicide’s boring,” Will said. “Anyway, he’s on call tonight and I’m out of here until Monday.”

***

Summer had settled its hot towel over the city, so Will took off his suit coat on the elevator ride down. When the doors opened, he noticed the woman talking to the guard. She saw him and immediately walked toward him.

She was tall, blond, and attractive, with a face you’d never forget. But it was one of those out-of-place moments, as if you saw the president serving slop at a chili parlor. It only lasted few seconds. Before he had never seen her so close. He had only seen her onstage, dressed in black, with the mournful cello between her legs.

“Detective Borders,” she said. “My name is Stephanie Foust.”

“I know,” he said. “I’ve admired your music for years. I’m so sorry about Jeremy’s death.”

When she heard the name, her composure melted, second-by-second, and she seemed to age in sudden bursts. Her eyes flooded with tears.

“I can’t…” She started to hyperventilate. He told her to slow down her breathing.

“When he told me he was going to marry that little bitch, I couldn’t believe it.”

“Ms. Foust…”

“We had been together for so many years! That he would do that. Marry that girl! She didn’t understand his gifts. She barely listened to real music. She saw him as a ticket to wear Prada. I tried to talk him out of it. We argued over and over.”

“Ms. Foust…”

“Then when I saw that man had been arrested, I couldn’t let him go to jail.” She pulled on his sleeve. “I didn’t mean to…”

“I know,” he said. “Now I want you to stop talking. You have the right to remain silent.”

“I know that!” For a second, the imperiousness of matchless talent handed out by God surfaced, then she started crying. He Mirandized her.

“Take the elevator upstairs,” he said. “Ask for Detective Dodds.”

He watched the elevator doors make her disappear and then walked out to the street, his cane steady, his right quads arguing with his brain. He thought about Cheryl Beth, a short drive and a bottle of wine away, and allowed himself a smile.

***

John ran down Observatory Avenue past the fine houses. The lights were on and the drapes open. The people inside seemed so happy in the cheerful light and the company of others. Even in a T-shirt and shorts, he was dripping sweat and sucking in the humid air in search of oxygen. Maybe if he lost weight running, he might be welcome in one of those rooms someday, and not because of his mom’s money and connections.

He thought about his stepdad. Will seemed happier than he had ever seen him. It was the girlfriend, of course. John had told him a week ago that he had decided to stay in Ohio and enroll in Miami, like Will. His grades from prep school were certainly good enough. Will was supportive. He seemed cooler when John said he wanted to be a Cincinnati police officer, like Will. But John knew if he got in shape and got a degree, the service of his grandfather and, yes, his
father
, would help him onto the force.

Will was the closest thing he had to a real father. He would come around.

John never got back his knife. He bought a new one and it seemed to weigh ten pounds as he jogged through the muggy night. He always had it with him. You couldn’t be too careful.