R.S. Guthrie - Detective Bobby Mac 03 - Reckoning (4 page)

Kelp’s voice was mocking. Still some energy left, which was good. Life had not quite defeated him. No matter how much we want to die, it is never easy when the moment comes. A jail cell and a male lover can suddenly look more attractive than the pain of death and the uncertainty of the afterlife.

If I couldn’t mature that idea, he’d eventually check out. He’d asked for me. It could be because he wanted to leave his mark in my head. I’d betrayed him. Guy probably had no friends, which was exactly why I went for “good cop” when we had him in for questioning. It could be as simple as it being his time to hurt me as I hurt him. Or he might have truly bonded with me. That happened, too. I could be the friend to talk him down. There was no way to be completely sure.

As tactical officers we listened to the tone, inflection, and examined (when we could see the person) body language. We relied on our training (old as it might have been), our experiences, our psychology, and our orders. Then we turned to our gut. And maybe we prayed.

“Why make this about your daughter, Gerry? That’s chicken-shit.”

Brighton’s eyes dilated and he instinctively reached for the phone.

“What did you say to me?”

“I said it’s a coward’s way to hurt an innocent little girl.”

Heighten the adrenaline level. It was a delicate measure. A fine, fine line. Keep him pumped up and alive without pissing him off so much he simply went too far in the other direction and exploded instead of continuing to converse to defend himself.

So many endings to consider.

“She’s not so innocent,” Kelp said. There was a vein of anger in his tone. Good. It wasn’t rage and the adrenaline was flowing.

“How’s that?” I said.

“Too much like her mother. A bitch.”

“I get that,” I said. “My ex is a complete stone wall.”

“Bet she lets you see your kids.”

“Nope,” I lied. “Two little boys. Lying bitch has them thinking their old man is a loser and a bad father. Drives me to the brink. It would drive
anyone
to the brink.”

“Shit,” he barked. “I can’t trust you.”

“I’ll tell you this,” I said. “And this is the god’s truth, I shit you not. I am the only friend you’ve got out here. Funny and fucked up as that may be, I do have the power to broker some kind of better deal here.”

It was partial truth. I might be able to keep the trigger-happy cops from wasting the suspect on inexperience alone. But I couldn’t tell a man who at his core wanted to die that Detective Bobby Mac could keep him alive. The sweat really began to run, into my eyes, stinging them. I made sure I was out of eyesight and wiped my face and head with an extra t-shirt another officer produced from her car.

“Do you
really
get what I am saying?” Kelp said.

“No, man. I don’t. I mean, every man has been screwed over by a woman, especially in a custody battle. Yeah, that I get totally. But this isn’t your wife, Gerry. She’s your daughter. Your
innocent
daughter. It isn’t
her
fault.”

“She’s a BITCH.”

“She’s a teen; she’s looking for any excuse at all to hate you. All of ‘em do. My sons are eighteen and nineteen. I call them the  ‘E Generation’”.

“What’s that?” Kelp said.

“Entitled.”

“That ain’t any lying right there, Macaulay. Fuckin’-A right, that is.”

“But here’s the thing, Gerry: we’re the adults. We were kids once. We thought we knew how every fucking thing worked. And your ex is using that fact, by the way—using it
against
you; just offering you up with an apple in your mouth. And I gotta be honest with you, this holding your daughter at gunpoint isn’t helping.”

“I guess.”

“Shit, if your ex was here I’d probably get fired for serving her up to you. Trade her for the little girl.”

Brighton actually smiled at that one.

“You’re smart, Gerry…you know? And in a way you’re right. But this is NOT the way we handle shit in an orderly society. As bad as it gets, we don’t resort to hurting
children
. This is still the same little girl you diapered, fed, took to soccer games—isn’t Shelly a hell of a player?”

Give her back her name. Kelp hadn’t mentioned it once. He needed to start thinking about her from his memories, not from the perspective of his illness. Shelly. His daughter. His little baby girl.

“Yeah. She’s awesome.”

“And I suppose she got that from your ex?”

“No fucking way. I worked with her every damn day.”

“Exactly, Gerry. And Shelly will remember that one day. Don’t steal her chance at having good thoughts about her old man. And don’t leave your ex talking to every newspaper, radio show, blog site, and tabloid that will listen that she’s always been right about you. Show now how much you love that little girl of yours.”

There was silence on the line for several beats.

“The front door,” Kelp said.

“Hold,” I said to the cops surrounding the home, raising my opened palm. “DO NOT FIRE. Hostage is exiting the building.”

Shelly Kelp came through the open apartment door, trembling, and was scooped up by a female S.W.A.T. officer.

“Gerry?” I said back into the phone. “That was a good thing, Ger. I want you to know that makes me proud of you.”

The line was still open, I could hear the sound of the world echoing in it, so I knew he hadn’t hung up, but Kelp said nothing for the longest time. Then, in a whisper that could have been anyone’s voice if I didn’t know what I knew and hadn’t heard it too many times before said, “Just a reminder you’re still in this with us,
MacAulay
. And we’re far from done.”

The true monster, Rule
.

Then the connection went dead.

The single gunshot from within the house didn’t surprise anyone there who wasn’t green as grass.

But I was the only cop left wondering who the real Gerry Kelp had been and if he’d originally been capable of murder at all.

Ten Months Earlier, The Black Dahlia

“GOOD TO see you, Mac,” Cindy Wu, our crime scene sketch artist, said as I crunched across the frozen ground of the small amphitheater with the Capitol Building rising above us like a mountain spire.

“You, too. What’re we looking at, Cindy?”

“Female victim. Uh, halved. Looks like she’s in her mid-teens: sixteen, seventeen. Always hard to tell with these young ones today. Heavy ligature marks on the throat, wrists, ankles. I’m putting my money on hanging as cause of death. The rest of the team is held up in a meeting. They’ll be here within the hour. Figure with the low temperatures the M.E. will need to get her back to the morgue anyway and thaw her to place T.O.D. Both sections are hard as stone.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. Worst I’ve seen on the job,” she said, going back to her measuring.

“Me, too.”

“The mouth is sliced from ear-to-ear.”

The victim was cut in half so cleanly it was nearly surgical, meaning the murderer knew what he or she was doing. I wasn’t making any assumptions on this one. No fuck ups. No mistakes. That place inside me that wells up for the victim really went into overdrive. Shit, I actually felt like crying. I stared at the open, striking green eyes. That was it. She reminded me of Amber. The girlfriend I’d once been forced to kill in self-defense.

I ached, and it wasn’t just the frigid air.

I walked the small amphitheater setting. The Capitol Building was actually across the street but it was so large it felt like the naked victim’s halves were lying on the very steps of our state’s towering symbol.

My bones continued to ache. Now it
was
the cold. Weather forecasters had the high temperature hovering in the low teens. The sun was out, which helped, but I had never been a fan of the cold months. Denver was a well-kept secret; we saw a lot of sixty-degree days in the middle of winter. Unfortunately we saw our share of days like this one. A dry cold. People joked about “dry heat”, which was silly to argue—the problem in Denver on a hot day was that we were a mile closer to the sun than most cities and we had over three-hundred and fifty sunny days a year. You wouldn’t think a mile in terms of a ball of heat ninety-two million miles away would be significant.

It was. Denver sun on the skin made air temperature nearly completely moot. The
feeling
was easily twenty degrees hotter than the official “temperature”. The sun slipping behind a summer storm cloud instantaneously erased the extra twenty, just that fast.

The sun in winter, however, was much lower in its elliptical, so it didn’t bring you that extra twenty when you could really use it.

 “Who called it in?” I said to Cindy.

“Taxi driver. She saw the upper half first. Thought it was a homeless drunk in need of an assist. She phoned in an ambulance before she walked over. Good thing—they took her to Swedish for a psych eval.”

“First respondents?”

“Pair of uniforms from the First. Over there.” She motioned to a gaggle of police huddling to keep warm next to the barricade.

I walked over and recognized one in the group right away.

“Quaid,” I said, smiling.

“Shit, Mac, never seen you out in the cold like this. Not since patrol anyway.”

“Fuck you.”

Olson Quaid smiled wide and grabbed my hand with his own. He was the supervising officer on scene. “Just bustin’ your balls. What’re left anyway, old man.”

I
was
old. Fifty next month. Mornings like that I felt a hundred.

Quaid owned a nice Beechcraft inboard. He had a cabin up at Grand Lake and spent every weekend trolling for Mackinaw. He’d held the state record for three years, pulling one just under fifty pounds in 2004. Then in 2007 another guy beat his catch trolling at the Blue Mesa Reservoir—it outweighed Quaid’s fish by only six ounces. I knew those half-dozen ounces were a sore, sore subject.

“You still up on the lake summers?” I said. “Looking for those extra six?”

“Speaking of ‘go fuck yourself’.” Quaid smiled. “Hell yes, I am. Been a few since you came up.”

 “I’ll take you up on it if that’s an official invite,” I said. “Pining away for the warmth of summer as we speak.”

“It is. Bring the brood.”

“You got it, pal.”

 “Guess you’re looking for the boys who got here first? This is Rico and Gibbs,” he said, pointing to two officers standing to his right.

“Detective Bobby Macaulay, gents,” Quaid said. “He’s good shit.”

“Detective,” the cop named Gibbs said. I nodded.

“I know you,” said Rico. Not in that friendly way; more like,
and screw you
.

“Officer Rico?” I said, a look of confusion shrouding my face. He did look vaguely familiar. Not from the job, though.

“That’s right. Ned Burke was my T.O. and I used to bowl on the same team. He was my friend.”

“Ned was a good man,” I said.

Burke was my partner for a lot of years. A father to me. He died of a heart attack, away from the job.

“IS a good man. Always will be,” Rico said.

“You want to keep breaking bad, Rico? I say it’s too fucking cold out here for this shit. I’d be happy to see you down at the gym, though, you feel like you want to go a few rounds.”

“I used to try and get him to slim down,” Rico said. “Get healthier.”

“So?”

“So you were his partner.”

“Get to the point.”

“Just seems like someone should have had his back is all.”

“I had his back every day, hoss. There’s a line here and you’ve just about stepped on it.”

“Yeah? You pulling rank?”

“I never pull rank. I walk the walk. You box? I find it a great way to settle bad blood without getting asses suspended. Like the lake next summer,
that
invite is for real.”

“Easy guys,” Quaid said. “Gibbs. Take the detective over there and give him your report. Rico, shag your ass over to my car. We need to have words.”

Gibbs and I walked over toward the victim.

“You two arrived at the scene first?” I said.

“Yep. Female taxi driver called it in. She was really shaken up when we got here.”

“Anyone else around? Witnesses?”

“No. Too early, I guess.”

“You set up the barricade, taped off the crime scene?” I said.

“Yeah, we called in backup to handle pedestrians and the crowd.”

It was good work. I’d seen too many crime scenes compromised by lazy uniforms.

“Good job,” I said. “This place is already hopping.”

“Is there anything else, Detective?”

He was curt, to the point. Professional but not wanting to concede anything else because of his partner. The blue line. I got it. And I liked him right away.

“No, nothing else. Like I said, Gibbs, thanks for preserving the scene.”

“Have a nice day,” he said, spun, and walked away.

Rico’s words had stung me. He was an asshole but he was saying things my own conscience had whispered to me a hundred thousand times. Burke had been everything to me, especially on the job. I loved him. We try to help our loved ones but too often we’re the last ones capable of effecting change. In the end I’d chosen to be the best partner and friend I could while letting him make his own adult decisions on the rest. He liked his donuts, he liked his Philly cheesesteak, and he enjoyed an occasional pastry at
Wholly Cannoli Café
.

I once heard on talk radio the guy say “I don’t care if giving up donuts adds two years to my life or not; sounds like two more years with no donuts.”

That didn’t mean I gave myself a pass. Had I really believed it was going to kill him before he had a chance to enjoy a retirement and pension he’d earned fifty times over, I’d have put up a blockade between my best friend and bad food.

But because I thought he might just be right, Rico didn’t get a pass either. That’s not the way men do things, or at least not my way. Respect begets respect. Disrespect, particularly when mentioning the deceased—the
beloved
deceased—got your ass handed to you. I prayed silently that Rico chose to take me up on my boxing invite and made a mental note to reach out to him on the subject in a few days if I didn’t hear from him first.

Less than twenty minutes later Margaret Duchamp, CID boss, and her charges arrived. They canvassed the area, a for-real crack forensics team that was as good as any I’d heard about. The weather made no difference to them. It only changed the methodology. Duchamp was a bitch but they wouldn’t miss a fiber, not if they had to dig it from the Colorado snow with a pair of tweezers, thaw it, wait patiently for it to dry, and then go to work.

I’d seen them do it and likely they’d be doing it now.

There was nothing left for me to do here. I needed to go back to the warm precinct, drink some bitter, strong, hot coffee, start combing missing persons reports, and wait for the M.E.’s report. Once I had prints I could at least try to confirm the identity of the victim. I agreed with Cindy Wu: it was pretty clear the young lady had died from being hung. The cutting in half and disposal there at the Capitol building had likely occurred postmortem but clearly at another much warmer location.

A few days later I sat at my desk, sitting on my still-frozen ass waiting for identification because of the perpetual backlog at the County Coroner’s office. On the computer screen in front of me was a travel website with some nice tropical thumbnails; places a cop could decompress with his family. Or at least that was what my wife Amanda was hoping for.

The triplets were almost ten and she felt like we needed a vacation, just the two of us. We’d gotten married after returning from Idaho an entire decade back and never did take a honeymoon. Amanda took her new FBI assignment in stride, a sacrifice fly for the team. She worked often in tandem with the Secret Service in Denver chasing counterfeiters. In her capacity with the FBI itself, she was Special Agent in Charge of Financial Crimes, which meant rooting out white-collar criminals. I was happier with all of it, though it felt more than a little wrong; why should she be forced to hunt down egghead nerd biscuits? Because she was a woman? Bullshit. Amanda was a stud. A better shot than me by far; superior investigative instincts; no fear.

But I had to admit I didn’t want her in harm’s way. In a perfect world she’d be at home and not working. I was no misogynist. I just loved her
so much
and I could not imagine a world where I had lost
three
women I cared for so deeply.