by Rachel Ford
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Jesus, Owen. You should have told me.”
“I didn’t think it had anything to do with the case. I still don’t.”
“Your brother’s brother-in-law borrowed money from a guy who maybe sold NRK his gun, and you don’t think that’s relevant?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t. I think it’s a coincidence.”
She snorted, part anger, part disbelief. “A coincidence? There are no coincidences in this line of work.”
“Sometimes there are. The pot roast in Keats’s pressure cooker? That was a coincidence, right?”
“Probably. But we’re not talking about that.”
“No. This is a coincidence though, too. Jason had no credit and a history of minor convictions. Nobody reputable was going to lend him money, right? So he goes to a guy – a guy he’s heard will give people loans. A guy who he has maybe – and this is all speculation, completely off the record – bought things from. Harmless things, but maybe not entirely legal.”
She pulled a face. “You think I don’t know the guy does drugs?”
I ignored that. “But this guy’s operation runs the gamut: drugs, cars, guns. He’s not big time, but he’s big enough. He’s got plenty of customers. He’s morally flexible: willing to play on either side of the law to get you what you want. Plenty of people who know about him. He’s discreet, he’s reliable, and he’s got just enough reputation to bring buyers in.
“How many people are there like that in Kennington?”
“Not many,” she admitted.
“So when NRK is looking for an untraceable gun, what’s the chance he’s going to show up on Travis’s doorstep?”
“Good.”
“For the same reasons Jason did. A coincidence, Detective. But you know what wasn’t a coincidence?”
“What?”
“His death. He’s the ninth NRK hit, Andrea.”
Chapter Forty-Two
I explained my theory. NRK had bought the gun – or, probably, the guns – from Travis. He’d expected untraceable weapons. Clean ones, with nothing to tie him to anything or anyone.
It was untraceable, but not clean. Now the FBI was involved. There was a possible trail. Which effectively meant not untraceable after all.
NRK wouldn’t have known who sold it to Travis. But he didn’t need to. He didn’t need to eliminate the entire chain.
He just needed to destroy the link back to himself: Travis.
So he shot him with another gun, a gun he hadn’t used on any of the nursery rhyme killing victims yet. A guy like Travis would have enemies. Guys like him died in questionable circumstances all the time. It was just how it worked. No link back to NRK or his killings.
She listened and drank her latte. Then she said, “Plausible. But we have no proof.”
“You’re the cop,” I said. “You’re the one who needs proof. I just need to figure out how it worked.”
She shrugged. “Okay. But even if you’re right, how does that help us? Travis is dead. The trail died with him.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Travis had to have a second-in-command. Maybe someone who took over the operation after him.”
“Whoever it is, he won’t talk. Travis didn’t talk when we showed up. His replacement will be just as tightlipped.”
“To you, maybe. To the feds, definitely. But to me? Maybe not.”
“Jesus,” she said. “Absolutely not. You’ll get yourself killed.”
“Look, Travis was a piece of shit. He sold this guy the guns that killed a ton of innocent people. He helped make those murders a reality. You’ll get no argument from me there.
“But he was a piece of shit you could have a conversation with, if it was in his interests. I’m not going to go in there looking to arrest anyone. I’m going in there to find out who killed their boss. If the new boss is half as reasonable as the old one, he’ll help me out.”
“Or he’ll kill you and take care of it himself.”
I considered. “I don’t think he’ll kill me. But he may take care of it himself.”
“Unacceptable.”
“Why?”
“‘Why?’” She was flabbergasted. “Are you serious? They’re thugs. It would be murder.”
“We want NRK off the streets,” I said. “That would get him off the streets.”
“I’m not having a bunch of thugs carrying out extrajudicial killings in Kennington.” She shook her head. “I can’t believe you’d even say that.”
“I’m not suggesting it. Believe me, I don’t want this guy to disappear. I want him to face the music. I’m just saying that the worst-case scenario still saves lives.”
“Absolutely not,” she said again. “No. You’re not talking to them, under any circumstances.”
“Are you arresting me?”
“Do I have to?”
I’d said it half-jokingly. But she was not joking. Not even a little. Her tone and gaze made that plenty clear. So I tried a different tactic. “I’m kidding. If I was going to talk to them without your sign off, I’d have done it already.”
She glared at me. I wasn’t making things better.
“But I didn’t. I don’t want to end up dead, Detective. If you think it’s a stupid idea, I won’t do it.”
“I do,” she said. “Very stupid.”
“Fine. I won’t do it.”
Her shoulders relaxed a degree. “Good.”
“I don’t need you putting another tail on me.”
She stared blankly.
“But there has to be something we can do.”
She thought for a long minute, her brow furrowing in concentration. “Let me talk to the feds, and the Chief. If they like your theory – and I do, so I think they will too – we can try hardball. Take the new guy in, scare him, cut a deal: a name for his release.”
“And if he doesn’t play ball?”
“We’ll have a backup plan. But he will. We’ll make sure it’d be stupid for him to do anything else first, then we’ll talk.”
All of which sounded like a lot of time and risk to me. A lot more time and risk than a conversation. But I nodded and said, “Okay.”
I finished my coffee and asked her the last of my questions. I’d noticed a section in the coroner’s report about plant material and mud on Andy’s body.
No, she said, it hadn’t necessarily come from the park. It was consistent with the soil and plant life at the park, but it was also consistent with the soil and flora for miles around.
Yes, the same types of plant material had been found on Angela Martinez’s corpse. No surprise there, since there was plenty of it around her when she died: grass, ferns, wildflowers and weeds common to the area. The soil where she’d been left had similar levels of nitrates and the same rich blends and diverse types of organic material and minerals as those found on Andy’s body.
But when I asked about Mason Anderson’s body, she hesitated.
“What?” I asked.
“The short answer is yes, we found similar traces with him.”
“But?”
“But it wasn’t the same concentration. There was plant matter ground into the knees of Andy’s jeans, and dirt under Angela’s fingernails. None of that with Mason. Grime under his nails, but not soil.”
“Because he was killed in winter,” I said. “Not outside in spring. Not with grass and mud around him. With snow and ice.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. I think he was killed inside.”
“Why?”
She sipped her latte, like she was making up her mind about answering or not. Finally she said, “They found sawdust and hay dried into the blood and wounds. Not a lot of it. He was careful, but some got through anyway.”
I nodded, revising my theory. “So he was killed in some kind of outbuilding. Or at least, dismembered in one.”
She nodded. “And the sawdust and hay would have been there to absorb the blood. Because he bled out entirely: the on
ly blood we found was external. The stuff that dried onto his skin.”
“Any leads there?”
“Nope. The hay is local, but there are dozens of farms that produce it and sell it. So finding where it came from…”
“Needle in a haystack. So to speak.”
She didn’t find it amusing, but she nodded at least. “And many of those farms sell it.”
“He was the first one, Detective. NRK tested his mettle on him. He made sure he could get away with making someone disappear. He figured out how to kill efficiently. He had two steps with Mason – falling and dismemberment. He didn’t make it that complicated afterwards.”
She nodded. “I think you’re right.” Again she sipped her latte. Again, the battle between telling me and not waged itself across her features. And again she opted to tell me. “Mason spent time in a freezer. Weeks at least. Maybe months. Or, his pieces did, anyway.”
“How do you know?”
She shrugged. “Not really my wheelhouse. But it’s some combination of cell shrinkage and tissue damage.”
“Mason was his proving grounds,” I said, nodding confidently. “He figured out how he was going to do it with him.”
“Probably,” she said.
I thought about that for a while. I had one more piece of the puzzle. I could almost see the picture now. I was close. So very close.
“Well, Detective, I should get going. I’ll see you around.”
“Thank you for meeting me this morning.”
“Anytime.”
“And Owen?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t do anything stupid. Please.”
I didn’t plan to. But I did mean to go talk to Travis’s replacement, whoever he was. I knew she thought that was stupid. I didn’t.
Stupid would be waiting for the police and FBI bureaucracy to agree to take action, and then to form some kind of plan, and finally to act on it. Stupid would be thinking goons like Travis’s would talk to cops.
No, I decided. I’d be seeing them soon.
As it happened, I saw them sooner than I expected. I was on my way back to my vehicle when I spotted a guy by the trail. A graying guy with a police bearing.
My tail.
He seemed to be waiting there and watching. He would have been invisible from the coffeeshop. It was only because of my angle on the other side of the street, right by the parking garage, that I could see him at all.
Had he missed me, then? I didn’t know how. I’d walked right past him. I hadn’t seen him, but he should have seen me.
I stepped into the parking garage and ducked out of sight. I waited for him for a long minute. He didn’t show. Maybe he knew he’d been made. Maybe his job was just to make sure I went back to my car.
I headed deeper into the garage. My footsteps echoed through the concrete enclosure, bouncing off the low ceiling and the thick pillars. I was thinking about the guy.
I recognized him, of course. He was the one Clark had assigned to me. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d seen him somewhere else, too. Somewhere outside of the case. Or maybe not outside of it, but outside of that contact.
Had I passed him at the station, when I’d gone to talk to Clark that first time? Had I seen him around the building then?
No. I was pretty sure of that. So where…?
I pulled out my phone and loaded my browser. I brought up Google.
A sound like a footstep pulled me from my thoughts. I glanced up. There were vehicles parked by mine: a tuxedo black 71 Camaro facing me, and a sagging green pickup of indeterminate make on the other side.
There were guys by them too. A big guy with a raw, ugly hump in the middle of his nose where it had been recently broken.
Tiny.
He had four guys with him. I recognized three of them from the shop, and one of them from the delivery of Jason’s truck. All Travis’s guys.
They started to move toward me. An ambush. I didn’t know how, but they’d figured out where I was. And they’d been lying in wait for me while I had coffee with the detective.
Which told me three things.
First: Clark had been right. These guys weren’t about to have a civil conversation.
Second: the guy outside the coffeeshop hadn’t been there for me, and he wasn’t my tail. If he was, he would have wised up to the fact that I was about to be jumped.
He was Clark’s tail. I thought back to all the times I’d seen him – all the times I’d assumed he was following me. I’d been meeting Clark, every time. I thought back to her blank stare when I mentioned a tail. She hadn’t confirmed it because she had no idea what I was talking about.
Third: The graying guy was NRK. And Andrea Clark was the next victim. The little piggy who had none.
Chapter Forty-Three
I had two immediate problems. When I’d left Clark, she had maybe a third of a drink left. She might finish it, and she might not. Either way, it wouldn’t be long before she headed out down the trail. Right toward the Nursery Rhyme Killer.
But Travis’s guys were close and getting closer. I could try to run. Maybe I’d make it. Maybe they’d shoot me in the back if I tried.
I stayed where I was, and dialed Clark’s number. It rang once and went straight to voicemail. Her greeting started to play. “You have reached Detective Andrea Clark.”
Tiny kept walking. He was maybe fifteen yards away, the four guys spread out evenly to form the arc of a half-circle. “Drop the phone, asshole,” he said. His voice came out strangely muffled.
“I’m unable to come to the phone right now. If this is an emergency, please dial 9-1-1. If not, please leave a message after the tone.”
The beep sounded, and I said, “It’s me, Owen. Andrea, do not go outside. You’re the fourth little piggy. NRK is waiting for you.”
“Drop the phone, asshole,” Tiny said again, angry but strangled.
“He’s an older guy, gray hair, cop like bearing. He’s on the trail. Do not go out,” I finished. Then to Tiny, I said, “Sorry, what?”
One of the guys from the shop took a step toward me, out of formation: a big guy, balding and paunchy. “Put the phone away, asshole.”
So I did. I figured I’d conveyed everything I could to Clark, and right now I needed to deal with these jokers. “Listen, guys, I really don’t have time for this. The Nursery Rhyme Killer is across the street –”
“Shut up,” Tiny said. A muffled grunt of a command.
I took stock of the group. So far, anyway, none of them had drawn guns. Maybe they had them, and weren’t planning to use them unless they had to. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe they thought five to one odds were all they needed.
“Tiny,” I said, “I’m happy to kick your ass any time you want. On a regular basis, if you like. Or a rotating basis: you one day, these dumbasses another. But I need to go now.”
They weren’t persuaded. “You killed Trav,” Tiny said, in the same slurred way. At least, I was pretty sure that’s what he said. It was hard to tell past the broken jaw. The last part came across crystal clear, though. “Now we’re going to kill you.”
It surprised me. It shouldn’t have. These weren’t exactly Einstein and Co. But Travis had taken care of things where we were concerned. As motives went, I had none. None that I’d known about while he was alive, anyway.
So I said, “I had nothing to do with that. The Nursery Rhyme Killer –”
The balding guy said, “Shut the hell up.”
We weren’t talking our way out of this, then. I shrugged. “Have it your way.”
Tiny nodded, and the four guys moved in. They were all big, and all quick on their feet. The balding one reached me first. He was already a few steps ahead of the rest of the dumbass brigade.
He didn’t stop and he didn’t slow. He charged me, leading with a mean right hook. He didn’t have a guard. He wasn’t worried about defending himself, because he was counting on a dogpile: him and his buddies all reaching me at once.
He w
as maybe a second and a half off. Not much time, but more than I needed. I spun out of the punch’s arc and grabbed his wrist as it passed. I kept moving, kept spinning fast and hard, driving my free hand into his elbow joint.
All kinds of things popped and snapped and tore at that. He screamed in agony.
Then there were three guys bearing down on me all at once. I shoved the bald guy aside and stepped to the left, into the void he’d left. I didn’t want to leave my back unguarded.
The others changed their trajectory, following my movements. Tiny stayed where he was. The bald guy floundered around on the ground.
Three-to-one. Not insurmountable odds, but these weren’t lightweights, and this wasn’t the movies. I kept moving, not fast, but not slow enough to be boxed into anything.
The three guys could have been clones at varying stages of the same life span. Two were on the younger side, early and mid-twenties respectively.
The other one was probably still young – mid-thirties somewhere – but a hard life had started to show up in his face. He had lines and weathering in his red face, and a little bit of extra heft around his midsection.
I figured he’d have more experience, but he’d tire out faster than his younger, leaner peers. I moved for him, just a quick feint. He jumped backward.
The other two guys moved in, crowding toward me, fists swinging: a jab from one, a hook from the other. They were too far away to connect, but they were working together. Putting up a unified front. Come for one of us, you’ll get all of us.
“Stand still,” Tiny slurred, “you damned coward.”
The guys paused for a fraction of a second at the sound of the boss’s voice and his muffled speech. They might have been getting orders. They needed to decipher them.
I, on the other hand, didn’t give a shit what Tiny said. I pulled right, fast and hard. The guy with the hook was still drawing his arm back into position for a second hit. My left elbow reached the side of his head first.
A huge blow, a crashing blow. The kind of blow that crushed cartilage and bone, and probably busted his ear drum. Blood started to leak down the side of his cheek. He staggered, his balance all askew because I’d smashed his vestibular system.
