The Kill Clause (3 page)

Kindell remained still, impervious to Tim’s questions, the smooth ovals of his closed eyelids like veined eggs.

•The garage door flew up with a bang, spilling light across the weed-dense grounds. Kindell stumbled out, propelled by Tim’s shove, his hands now cuffed behind him. Tim caught up to him quickly, fisting the chain between the cuffs and pulling it up so Kindell’s arms locked straight behind him. Kindell grimaced but didn’t cry out.

Bear and the others silently watched them approach. As Tim neared, Kindell tripped and went down, his knees and chest taking the shock of the ground. His grunt sounded like a bark.

Kindell struggled to stand up. He bore no bruises or signs of punishment. “You asshoe. You uckin’ asshoe.”

“Better watch your mouth,” Tim said. “I’m your best friend right about now.”

Bear exhaled in a low, cheek-puffing rumble.

Fowler glowered at Tim like a woman scorned. Gutierez and Harrison looked equally displeased.

“Can we have a second here?” Fowler said, the skin tight around his jaw.

Tim nodded, then followed the three men a few paces away from Mac and Bear.

“He’s a piece-of-shit motherfucker,” Fowler hissed.

Tim said, “No argument here.”

Fowler spit a brown stream into the brush. “You’re gonna let pieces of shit like this run loose in our town?”

Tim looked at him with a steady gaze until he turned away.

“What the fuck, Rackley? We were doing you a favor here.”

Gutierez smoothed his mustache with a thumb and forefinger. “This guy just killed your daughter. How can you not want to cap his ass?”

“I’m not a jury.”

“I bet Dray would have another opinion on the matter.”

“You’re probably right.”

“Juries suck,” Fowler said. “I don’t trust the courts.”

“Then move to Sierra Leone.”

“Listen, Rackley—”

“No,
you
listen.” Ten yards away Bear’s and Mac’s heads snapped to attention. “There’s an ongoing investigation here that you may have just fucked up in your eagerness to tie things up neatly.”

Harrison weighed in from above crossed arms. “It’s an open-and-shut.”

“He didn’t kill her alone.”

Gutierez blew air out through clenched teeth. “What the fuck is this?”

“Someone else was in on it.” Tim’s hand was jiggling back and forth, thumb tapping his thigh.

“He didn’t tell us that.”

“Well, then, it looks like you’ve exhausted your bag of detective tricks.”

Bear walked over, his boots creaking, leaving Mac with Kindell. He scowled at the others, standing protectively at Tim’s side. “Everything all right?”

“Your boy here is looking to complicate matters that aren’t complicated.” Gutierez glared at Tim. “You’re being emotional.”

“That’s for sure.”

“How do you know there was someone else involved?” Gutierez jerked his head at Kindell, still lying prone on the ground. “What did he say?”

“He didn’t say anything outright—”

“Nothing outright,” Harrison said. “A hunch, huh?”

Bear’s voice issued so low Tim felt it in his bones. “You’d better mind your
fucking
mouth after what he’s been through tonight.”

Harrison’s smirk vanished instantly.

“This is precisely why we don’t kill people without a trial.” Tim regarded the three men. “Call CSU. Start your investigation. Gather evidence.”

Fowler was shaking his head. “This is a fucking mess. Kindell heard us talking. Planning this out.”

Gutierez made a leveling gesture with his hands. “It’s fine. We’ll move forward with standard procedure. If the scumsuck wants to whine to the public defender, it’ll be his word against ours.” He glared at Tim and Bear. “All of ours.”

Tim debated informing Gutierez that the last thing he intended to expend energy on this night was Gutierez’s anxiety, but he didn’t want to give anything up to him.

Behind them Mac helped Kindell to his feet.

“You were never here,” Harrison said. “We stick together on this, no matter what.”

Bear gave a cough of disgust. They walked back to the vehicles, their breath visible in the cold air.

“You’re a lucky little motherfucker,” Gutierez said to Kindell, who’d finally found his feet. He poked him hard where his chest met his shoulder. “Did you hear me? I said you’re a lucky motherfucker.”

“Lee me alone.”

Bear circled his truck, climbed in, and turned over the engine.

Mac cleared his throat. “Tim, man, I am so sorry about…everything. You send Dray my condolences. I’m really sorry.”

“Thanks, Mac,” Tim said. “I’ll tell her.”

He climbed into the truck and they drove off, leaving the four deputies and Kindell behind them, standing out from the night in carnival flashes of watery blue.

BEAR PULLED UP
to the curb, and Tim moved to get out, but Bear grabbed his shoulder. It had been a silent ride home. “I should have stopped you. Stepped in. You were in no shape to make that kind of decision.” He squeezed the wheel.

“It wasn’t your responsibility,” Tim said.

“It’s my responsibility to do more than stand around while my partner maybe kills some mutt in a moment of justifiable rage. You’re a federal agent, not some yokel deputy.”

“The boys just got a little fired up.”

Bear struck the steering wheel hard with the heels of his hands, a rare display of anger. “Stupid pricks.” His cheeks were wet. “Stupid, stupid pricks. They shouldn’t have dragged you into it. They shouldn’t have jeopardized the investigation.”

Tim knew Bear was turning his grief to anger and throwing it at the nearest target, but he also knew he was right. Tim spoke to the words, because he knew if he touched the grief right now, he’d come apart. “Nothing happened.”

“It’s not done happening yet.” Bear wiped his cheeks roughly. “And we don’t know what those idiots did before we got there, how well they secured the scene. They weren’t looking for accomplices. They weren’t looking to build a case. It’s not like they were dotting their i’s and crossing their t’s for the DA. It’s not like they were expecting a trial.”

“They’re gonna have to be aboveboard now. After we’ve been there.”

“Great. So in addition to the case being tied to their competence or tremendous lack thereof, we are, too.” Bear shuddered hard, like a dog shaking off water. “Sorry, I’m sorry. You got enough on your plate.”

Tim managed a faint smile. “I better go check on my yokel-deputy wife.”

“Shit, I didn’t mean that.”

Tim laughed, and then Bear joined him, both of them still wiping their cheeks.

“Do you want me to…Can I come in?”

“No,” Tim said. “Not yet.”

Bear was still idling at the curb when Tim closed the front door
behind him. The house was dark and empty. Two holes had been kicked through the living room wall, leaving jagged edges in the dry-wall. Though Tim had left Dray with two of her friends who’d come over to help with Ginny’s party, he was not surprised to find the house silent. When Dray was upset, she handled it alone. Another trait she’d learned from four older brothers and six years and counting on the job.

He passed through the small living room into the kitchen. The simple interior had been improved upon over the years by Tim’s meticulous attention. He’d torn up the floors and laid down hardwood in the halls and bedrooms and replaced the brass-plated and faux-crystal chandeliers with recessed lighting.

On the counter sat Ginny’s cake, uncut, the top puddled with wax. Dray had insisted on baking it herself despite her lack of prowess in the kitchen. It was uneven, sloping left, and the frosting had been applied and reapplied in a failed attempt at smoothness. Judy Hartley, their next-door neighbor and a recent empty-nester, had offered to assume baking duties, but Dray had refused. As she did each year on Ginny’s birthday, she’d taken the day off work to pore over borrowed cookbooks, determined and stubborn, pulling cake after cake out of the oven until she’d produced one she deemed acceptable.

Dray wasn’t there, though the cabinet where they kept the liquor stood open. The handle of store-brand vodka was missing.

Tim walked quietly down the hall to their bedroom. The bed, neatly made, stared back at him. He checked the bathroom—also no luck. He tried Ginny’s room next, across the hall. Dray was sitting in the darkness, the half-gallon bottle between her legs, the glow of a Pocahontas night-light discoloring one side of her face. On the carpet before her sat the cordless phone and her PalmPilot, the backlight still glowing.

Her face was gaunt, drawn in by grief. Three years ago she’d red-handed a fifteen-year-old kid fleeing a Ventura office building with an armload of laptops. He’d tried to throw down with a nickel-plated .22, and she’d double-tapped him; when she got home, her face looked not quite so bad as it did now. Her head was bowed slightly, in thought or drunkenness.

Tim closed the door behind him, crossed the room, and slid down the wall beside her. He took her hand; it was sweaty and feverish. She didn’t look up, but she squeezed his fingers as if she’d been barely holding on for his touch.

He stared at Ginny’s twin bed. The wallpaper, unrestrained yellow and pink flowers now muted by the darkness, had been perfectly aligned so it didn’t mess up the repeat at the room’s corners.

Tim thought about Ginny’s last few minutes of life, then about where he might have been at the corresponding times. Putting his weapon away in the gun safe when she was snatched from the street. Driving to the store for pink candles when the dismemberment began.

That he couldn’t give Kindell’s partner a face was an added torment, another mockery of his imagined control over his world. The notion of kinship to this end was beyond sickening—two men bent on the destruction of a child, two men joined in ripping apart a young body. He pictured Kindell’s dopey face and wondered if there was a special place in hell for child-killers. He indulged himself in imagined tortures. He had never been a religious man, but the thoughts found their way out from the darker recesses of his mind, the shadowed corners hidden from the light of reason.

Dray’s voice, calm, but hoarse from crying, forced him from his thoughts. “I was here alone tonight, this night, sitting with Trina and Joan and Judy fucking Hartley, getting the other kids off home, waiting to hear about the positive ID, calling our relatives so they wouldn’t have to hear it from…or read about it in…” She raised her head sluggishly, bangs sweeping over her eyes. She took another slug from the bottle. “Fowler called.”

“Dray—”

“Why didn’t you come to me?”

He wouldn’t have thought his grief would have left room for shame, but there it was, undiminished. “I’m sorry.”

The distance between them he registered as an aching in his stomach. He remembered how they’d fallen in love, hard and terrifyingly fast. Neither of them had ever learned to
need
as adults—both had endured childhoods that had disappointed them, punishingly, for relying on anyone—yet there they were, fixed on each other with an unyielding, constant focus, staying up all hours talking and pressing against each other in the flickering blue glow of the muted TV, driving across town to meet for lunch because they couldn’t make it from morning to evening without each other’s touch. Every detail of the first months shone with clarity—how he’d steer
and
shift with his left hand so he wouldn’t have to let go of hers with his right in the car after dinner, a movie, a night walk on the beach; the soft noise she made when she smiled, just short of a laugh; the way her face hurt when she blushed after a compliment—pins and needles, she claimed—and she’d have to massage out the bunched cheeks above the grin with her fingertips until he finally started doing it for her. Just last week he’d pulled her in for a slow dance when Elvis came crooning
on late-night reruns; Ginny had alleged nausea and retreated to her bedroom.

And now he was in the same room with his wife but could barely sense her through the darkness, which had grown soupy, infused with hurt and foulness and stopped-up grief.

He struggled to find words, to reconnect. “I got the call. We were three miles away. I had to go, to see.”

“Okay. So you went.”

He took a deep breath. “And he confessed.”

She was trying to soften her voice, but he could hear the frustration in it. “Tim, you’re the father of the victim. You were illegally called to the crime scene to commit a vengeance killing. Explain to me how him confessing to you is the least bit useful.” She lowered the bottle to the floor with a thunk. “That man took our daughter and
violated
her.
Took her apart
. And you went to him, you risked the crime scene and the arrest, and then you let him walk away.”

“I think he had an accomplice.”

Her eyebrows rose and spread. “Fowler didn’t mention that.”

“Kindell said he wasn’t
supposed
to kill her, as if there had been some previous understanding between him and someone else.”

“He could have just been saying he didn’t
mean
to kill her. Or that he knew it was illegal.”

“Maybe. But then he started to refer to someone else—a
he
—but he caught himself.”

“So why aren’t Gutierez and Harrison looking into
that
?”

“They weren’t aware of it, obviously.”

“Are they looking into it now?”

“They’d better be.”

Ginny’s bedside clock emitted a soft chime, announcing the hour; the sound struck Tim sharp and unexpected, a stab to the heart. Dray’s face seemed to crumble. She quickly took another pull off the bottle. For a moment they’d indulged the illusion that they’d set aside the personal, that they’d been two cops talking.

Dray wiped tears from her cheeks with her sweatshirt cuff, which she’d pulled over her hand like a girl. “So the crime scene is muddled up, and now there’s a possibility that the killer isn’t the only killer.”

“That’s about right, unfortunately.”

“You’re not even angry.”

“I am. But anger is useless.”

“What isn’t?”

“I’m trying to figure that out.” He wasn’t looking at her, but he heard her take another gulp from the bottle.

“All your training—Spec Ops and Combat Engineering and FLETC—you should have known to prioritize under pressure. You should’ve known not to go there, Timmy.”

“
Don’t
call me Timmy.” He stood and wiped his palms on his pants. “Look, Dray, we’re both wrecked right now. If we keep this up, it’s not gonna go anywhere we want it to.”

Tim opened the door and stepped out. Dray’s voice followed him out into the cool hall. “How can you be so calm right now? Like she’s just another victim, someone you never knew.”

Tim halted in the hall and stood, his back to the open door. He turned and walked back in. Dray’s hand was over her mouth.

He ran his tongue across the points of his teeth and back, waiting for his breath to stop hitching in his chest. When he spoke, his voice was so quiet it was barely audible. “I understand how upset—how destroyed you are. I am, too. But don’t ever fucking say that.”

She lowered her hand. Her eyes were shell-shocked. “I’m sorry,” she said.

He nodded and withdrew gently from the room.

•In the bedroom Tim spun the dial on his gun safe, then removed a Spec Ops–issue p226 nine mil, his favored .357 Smith & Wesson, a hefty Ruger .44 mag, and two fifty-round boxes of nine-mil and .44. He kept a broader ammo range on hand for his .357, as it was his duty weapon; he opted for the wad cutters over the copper-jacketed rounds and the duty 110-grain hollow-points. The service issued the S&Ws with three-inch barrels, as they were often carried concealed.

When he entered Ginny’s room, Dray still had not moved. “I’m so sorry,” she said again. “What a fucking thing to say.”

He knelt, placed his hands on her knees, and kissed her on the forehead. It was damp. The sharp smell of alcohol lingered about her face. “It’s okay. What’s that they say about rocks and glass houses?”

Her lips pursed, not quite a smile. “Don’t throw glass houses if you live in a rock.”

“Something like that.”

“You need to go shoot.” She wasn’t asking; she was offering.

He nodded. “Come with me?”

“I need to sit here for a while and look at nothing.”

He moved to kiss her forehead again, but she tilted back her head and caught his lips with hers. The kiss was hot and dry and edged with vodka. If he could have crawled into it and lived there, he would have.

The garage housed Tim’s silver M3 BMW—a car confiscated by the service under the National Asset Seizure and Forfeiture Program—and
his workbench. Tim threw his ordnance in the trunk and backed out, careful to dodge Dray’s Blazer, parked in the driveway. He drove to the outskirts of town, then turned onto a dirt road and followed it up a few hundred yards.

He pulled the car onto a flat dirt apron and left it running, angling the high beams downrange, where a cable stretched between two stakes, about five feet off the ground. Tim removed a stack of targets, a mix of color-coded Transtars and old B-27s, and strung them along the cable. Then he sat in the dirt, jammed the Sig mags, and readied the speedloaders for the wheel guns. Six bullets locked into the cylindrical base of each speedloader, tips sticking up like fangs, spaced to correspond with the caliber holes in the wheel.

He was left-eye dominant but right-handed, so he drew from a high-ride right-hip holster. Shoulder holsters were discouraged by the service because the cross-draw presented a hazard on the firing line, but Tim preferred the up-and-out anyway, not liking the time given up on a cross-draw. They didn’t call shoulder holsters widow-makers for nothing. He started with the Sig, doing some quick-draw plinking at three yards to warm up his reactive shooting. Then he moved to seven yards. Then ten.

His shooting was remarkably precise, having been learned in urban-warfare courses and perfected in Malibu’s Maze at Glynco. The aptly named shooting course features pop-up and swinging targets that prospective deputies attack with live ammo through a confusion of strobing lights, blaring music, and amplified screams. The vibe is so invasive, the surroundings so surreal, that grown men have emerged weeping. Once outside, deputies subdue actors playing felons; a Juilliard dropout had once gotten a little too method with Tim, jawing off and sinking his teeth into Tim’s forearm, and Tim had knocked him cold.

His breath misting in the sharp February cold of the higher altitude, Tim shot and shot. When he’d burned through the nine-mil ammo, he switched to his .357 and toed the concrete ledge at twenty-five yards.

He struck a modified Weaver, a forward-leaning fighting stance, his feet shoulder width with his left leg forward. The landscape reflected his mood—the barren stretch of dirt and rocks, the twinning cones of the headlights boring through the night, brief throws of light in a vast, dismal universe. The paper targets alone picked up the glow, floating rectangles of white, bobbing like fruit on a tree. The emptiness of the dark opened him up like a gutted beast, and he stared into the void. All
that stared back was a row of eyeless, two-dimensional combat silhouettes, fluttering on the cable.