“Against the tyrannical federal government that wants to force you to have health care?”
“Force me to pay if I don’t, you mean.”
“These .223s are ammunition for an AR-15. Assault rifles are banned in the state of Massachusetts, Mr. Contrell.”
He snorted. “Typical gun hater! Due respect. None of you know shit about guns. I use this ammo in my hunting rifle, Chief. A Mossberg Patriot. Best in the world. I hunt deer, and I stick to the posted season. You got a problem with that?”
We had strayed off-topic. I had come to observe the Sixth Amendment, not to debate the Second.
“Let me cut this short,” I said, turning to the boy. “Chris Contrell, I am placing you under arrest for violation of the Massachusetts hate crimes statute, Mass General Law chapter 265, section 39.”
His look of outrage was comical. “You can’t do that!”
“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you can’t afford an attorney, one will be appointed to you by the court. Do you understand these rights as I’ve explained them to you?”
“This is such bullshit!”
I studied him, waiting.
His father said, “Chris—”
“Yes, fine, okay? I understand them. Jesus!”
I took Chris to the station and booked him, but we had to let him go a few hours later. DeShawn wanted nothing to do with the police, and the Grahams refused to press charges.
“It would just make things worse,” Millie explained.
“Wah sweet nanny goat ago run him belly,” Sylvester added.
“Excuse me?”
“It’s an old Jamaican saying,” Millie explained. “You know a goat eats a lot of things. They may be delicious for him right then, but they make him sick later. Things you do come back at you, Chief. That’s all. We like to stay quiet.”
“Besides, you know—maybe this will teach the boy something,” Sylvester added. “He does bad, we forgive.”
I sighed. “That’s very Christian of you, but I prefer punishment.”
We wound up cutting a deal: no formal charges, but Chris had to complete a state-mandated diversity awareness program, complete thirty hours of community service, and attend regular counseling sessions for six months.
It seemed like a reasonable compromise at the time. I should have known it was a mistake, just watching Chris’s superior little smirk at the conclusion of his hearing.
I called Bissell to follow up, but he didn’t want to hear it.
“Chris is a fine boy from an old island family. A superb athlete and a model student. I wish all our charges were as polite and respectful as Christopher Contrell.”
“Not to his father.”
“The family dynamics of a pupil’s home life do not concern us unless they adversely affect his scholastic performance or behavior. Whatever discord you may have observed, I would say that Lawrence Contrell is doing a superlative job.”
I gritted my teeth silently. “I don’t know how much more clear I can make this, Alan. The kid is a xenophobic creep. He has an arsenal, and he’s talking about going to war.”
“No, he’s an independent young man who believes in the Second Amendment. And he happens to disagree with you.”
After the hearing, Pete Geller, the Barnstable County DA, had remarked that Chris looked happy to be “getting away with murder.” I agreed with Geller, despite the hackneyed metaphor. When Chris brought his father’s AR-15 into school two days later, he was planning to commit real murder, mass murder.
And he didn’t care in the least whether he got away with it or not.
Chapter Six
The Enemies List
We were fifty yards out into the dark, choppy water of Tuckernuck Bank and angling toward Madaket Harbor before either one of us spoke again. “That coin Mark used in that strip game…it was a magic show prop, Todd,” Jane said finally. “Tails on both sides. You were always going to lose.”
—From Todd Fraker’s deleted blog
Roy Elkins sat on the hard plastic seat in the Washington, DC, Greyhound bus terminal thinking, “People who say revenge is futile just aren’t doing it right.”
He smiled, running a hand over his newly bald skull and down his baby-smooth cheeks. He looked the opposite of his old self, with the thick, wavy brown hair and the heavy stubble. He slouched now, too, and walked with a slight limp—a simple disguise of deflected expectations. The Roy Elkins currently on the Most Wanted List stood up straight with his chest puffed out and ran marathons for recreation.
No one had stopped him on the flight from Los Angeles despite a three-hour delay. He noticed two chumps from the Marshals Service scanning the crowds. One of them he’d worked with back in ’06—Kenny something, Rainey or Ranney—big, dumb by-the-book robo-cop. Their eyes had met for a second. No recognition.
It made Roy wonder about Superman—everyone always laughed at the fact that he fooled everyone with a pair of glasses. But Roy could see it working. Probably the suspicion skipped across the surface of people’s minds, like a flat stone across a still pond. They might have even thought, “This sounds fucked up, but Clark kind of looks like Superman.” Much the same way, Kenny Ignatz might have said to himself, “That limping bald guy reminds me of Roy Elkins.” Then: “Naaah. He looked right at me. No way.”
It was all so easy. That was the big secret. Escaping from jail, dodging a police dragnet, committing murder in plain sight… If people knew how easy it was to do whatever the fuck you wanted and get away with it, civilization would collapse completely. Roy shrugged—it might be fun to see that.
Lots of opportunities when civilizations collapsed.
Of course, he had needed help. What was that political treacle? It takes a village. To raise a kid, maybe. To bust a killer out of jail, all you need is a neighborhood. Or maybe just the neighborhood watch. Fatso didn’t need to spoon-feed him the plan—he’d had a version of the plan cooking away in the back of his mind since the indictment. But it was like boiling water for pasta—eventually the water steams away and the pot scorches. Roy’s plan didn’t work without money. Like what plan ever did? The Feds had seized all his bank accounts and found all but one of his getaway-stash hiding places. The weapons and passports there would help—he had to get to Zurich, to the Zurich Canton Bank, to that squat, ugly cement-grid-and-glass building at Bahnhofstrasse 9, to reclaim the big money. But the measly five grand stuffed into an ex-girlfriend’s old Sony Trinitron TV in an Inglewood basement? That would never do the trick.
So he had waited for fate to step in, and fate finally obliged him.
He had a visitor one rainy spring afternoon—his first one ever. And it was Fatty. He’d never seen the guy before, but he had obviously been studying Roy. He knew what Roy had done, and he knew what Roy was doing, and he seemed to know Roy’s plans, also. He knew about Henry Kennis’s girlfriend; he knew about Franny Tate and her boyfriend. Fatty knew everything.
Fatty had money, and he wanted to make a deal.
All Roy had to do was use his Boston connections to bust some con out of a jail in western Mass—the same way he was going to use his LA connections to bust his own ass out of Corcoran. He would need to give himself a head start—he had things to do on the way back East, but Fatty seemed to have figured out Roy’s itinerary, along with everything else. The convict back East, his name was Ed Delavane. Roy knew Delavane slightly. They had crossed paths years before, and somehow Fatty knew it. The guy had done his homework. You had to give him credit for that. Anyway, the money belonged to Delavane—his secret buried treasure, hidden somewhere on Nantucket Island, where Kennis lived. It all seemed very convenient, but Delavane would be coming for the loot, just like Roy.
The trick was to make sure that when Ed got there, the money was gone.
“On
ce you’re out, get a burner phone, and give me the number. When I know Delavane is free, I’ll give you the GPS coordinates for the dough.”
Roy had squinted into the wide, guileless face. “What do you get out of it?”
“I get Delavane.”
“How do I know you won’t take the money?”
Fatty had laughed. “Oh, I don’t need money, Roy. Money is the last thing I need.”
Roy believed him. Fatty had said he had to catch a ten thirty flight, but their meeting ran long. “Looks like you missed your plane,” Roy said, standing up to shake Fatty’s hand.
“I think they’ll hold it for me, Roy. I own the aircraft.”
Fatty’s smug “gotcha” smile made the whole thing real.
“Looks like you got a new best friend,” the guard said as he led Roy back to his cell.
The three guards at Corcoran had been easy to bribe. The idea there was not using money. You want to bribe someone, find out what they want the money for. These mooks wanted to be cops. The youngest kid had given up after he whiffed the exams; the oldest had taken early retirement and regretted it. Middle bear had been caught lifting a couple of eight balls from the evidence locker. He ratted out his pals and skated, but he still missed the life. They all knew Roy, or at least knew of him the way aspiring military snipers knew of Nick Irving or Chris Kyle. Roy was a legend, a closer, “the terrier,” the LA Times had called him, because once he got a case in his teeth, he never let go. He still had friends in RHD, and the guards knew it. A word from him to them could change their lives—for better or worse.
So they played along.
Now, two were in lockdown, and one was dead. There was a lesson there for the two saps headed back to Corcoran in orange jumpsuits: If someone wins your confidence by making you feel confident? He’s a confidence man.
And you’re the mark.
As for the rest of it? His pal in Boston was happy to clear the ledgers, and the guards at Cedar Junction—two punks he’d taught and covered for at the Academy—were just as clueless and hungry as their LA counterparts. Roy’s Inglewood DL and passport said Dominick Bardo, and Dom was ten years older than Elkins, clean-shaven and bald.
Done.
As for the murders, Roy’s private itinerary, no one expected them, so they didn’t know how to react. Roy’s first targets: two working moms and a housewife. He’d kept track of them from prison, detectives’ wives, spouses of the traitors who’d landed him in jail, the straight arrows, the square shooters.
The enemies list.
The Realtor lady worked from home—early retirement.
The hausfrau was puttering in her garden—now she’s fertilizing it.
Three taps each. The third victim was trickier, a schoolteacher. Schools had turned into fortresses since Roy started serving time. So she had to be lured outside. Fake police call, husband in the hospital—Roy knew how to make it convincing. He’d done it for real plenty of times. She ran out, and he tapped her in the parking lot. That made three for three, like trap-shooting clay pigeons.
Hennesy should have been the tough one—NSA big shot, security expert, superspook. The NSA Headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland—a twenty-minute commute south of the city with two dedicated exits off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway—would have made the job next to impossible with its dozens of watch posts and checkpoints bolstered by state-of-the-art total surveillance technology. No one got in there without a clearance, and no left without a pass. But Hennesy was recovering from a bad case of the flu, working from home this week, and living in DC had made him lazy. He lived by habit—just like everyone else who wasn’t waiting for a bullet. Hennesy’s crucial habit, the lethal one on this particular day, was his mid-morning dash across the street to Starbucks for a grande latte and a slice of caramelized apple pound cake.
Roy dropped him jaywalking across the street while he waited for a pickup truck to move past. The three-car crash and the angry fanfare of car horns when a taxi braked for the body were all the cover Roy needed for a clean escape. A murder that creates its own diversion?
Sweet.
Roy pulled out his burner Nokia and checked the time. He had another hour before the Boston bus. He stood and stretched. Then he wandered aimlessly out of the Greyhound station into the dense, warm, humid DC afternoon and strolled through President’s Park and the Ellipse, lost and invisible in the swarm of tourists.
The next job would be trickier. The first ones were people he knew in big cities where he had connections and anonymity. Now he was headed for a small town where he was a stranger. Still, he had Fatty on his side—a freak with his own crazy agenda, maybe, but their plans dovetailed perfectly, and that was all that mattered.
He sat down on a bench halfway along the reflecting pool between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, comfortable with the proximity. They were pragmatists, Lincoln and Washington—and killers, too. You had to be a killer if you wanted to be president. No one had ever served in the White House without getting blood on his hands.
He pulled out his battered spiral notebook and took the luxury of crossing the last name off his list in advance—Henry Kennis, soon to learn the meaning of suffering and loss, a lesson he’d never forget from a teacher who had never forgotten him. Roy liked the sound of that phrase; it was like a little poem. Kennis would appreciate it. He wrote poems, supposedly. Elkins smiled. Maybe he’d write it down on a card and pin it to Jane Stiles’ chest, right next to the bullet hole.
***
Franny Tate sat motionless at her desk on the sixth floor of the Homeland Security complex on Seventh Street SW. She had a fine view from her office across the Potomac and over the leafy suburban streets of Arlington, Virginia. From where she sat, it might as well have been a forest down there, the leaves still dense and green in early September. Normally she loved that serene vista. This morning she saw nothing. She felt nothing. Her grief was sudden and absolute, a bag thrown over her head. She was suffocating. Her hand was on the telephone, but she didn’t know who to call. There was no one she could bear to talk to. Still, arrangements had to be made. There was no one else to handle them. Mark’s parents lived in Costa Rica, and his brother had been killed in Afghanistan three years ago. There was a sister, Carol, but she was languishing in some high-end rehab resort in Northern California. She couldn’t organize a change-of-address card.
Finally, Franny understood how Carol Hennesy must feel all the time—helpless and paralyzed and useless and inept.
Mark was dead. Mark was dead.
If you repeated words often enough, they started to lose their meaning. Franny had read that somewhere. The words started to look like random syllables in another language. Mark was dead.
Mark was dead.
It wasn’t working. Her eyes burned, but no tears came. She gripped the phone harder. If she let go, she’d start shaking and keep shaking until she shook herself to pieces. She gasped, trying to inhale. It was like breathing through a straw.
This made no sense. They had gone to breakfast this morning at Lincoln’s Waffle Shop; he had kissed her on the street less than two hours ago. They had seats for Turn Me Loose at the Arena Stage tonight. The tickets were in her purse.
She pulled the air in, forced it out. Someone did this, Dale Briscoe had told her when he called. Mark was shot twice in the chest as he crossed the street, with one more in the head when he was down—a mob hit, an execution.
Just like Chuck Obremski’s wife.
And Ted Miner’s wife.
And Pete Stambaugh’s wife.
She felt her chest clenching with rage. It felt good. Rage, she could deal with. Rage kept you moving. Rage was fuel.
Chuck had called from Los Angeles on Friday afternoon. Franny’s secretary had left the message on her desk. The notation was “urgent,” but she had found that what was urgent for the LAPD could generally wait
until Monday morning, so far as Homeland Security was concerned. Plus Chuck liked to talk, and Franny hated the dreaded “catch-up” chitchat when she had a thousand things to do and no time to do them.
He had texted her on Sunday: Roy Elkins is out. Call me.
It was a little early for parole. Had the President pardoned him?
Eight years ago, working with an LAPD-FBI task force that included Chuck and Henry Kennis, Franny had helped put Roy Elkins away. She had fallen in love with Henry during the course of that investigation, but they were both married. Four years later, she was working for DHS when a series of bomb threats brought her to Nantucket. Both of them were divorced by then, and they rekindled their affair. But Henry was never going to leave his little sandspit, and Franny was a DC lifer. So they moved on. Then Franny met a genius NSA encryption specialist named Mark Hennesy. He had a killer smile, Redskins season tickets, and a degree from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. They became pals. They fell into bed with each other. Sex was athletic, competitive, impersonal fun. Then it got serious. She fell in love and so did he—more like jumped, he told her. Like base-jumping together off the same cliff.
The parachutes opened, and he gave her a ring. That was six months ago.
But she still kept in touch with Henry. He had found someone, also—a writer named Jane Stiles. Franny had checked out her books, cozy mysteries, and looked at her dust-jacket pictures—attractive woman. Henry and Jane were engaged, due to be married in a couple of weeks.
So, happy endings all around.
Then, the news this morning, finally, a lost weekend late. Roy Elkins had escaped from jail during a routine transport from Corcoran to the federal courthouse on Spring Street in downtown LA for another parole hearing. Three guards had helped with the escape. Two of them were in custody, and a third had been shot trying to escape.
Franny stood and walked to the window, thinking hard about Roy Elkins. He had murdered his girlfriend after a bad breakup, but skated on the 187 rap with smoke and mirrors—and a unified RHD behind him. He was one of their own. Franny had gathered a lot of evidence, but it was all circumstantial. She knew only a slam dunk would work with a high-profile case like his. It turned out Elkins was selling drugs as well as using them. They wound up convicting him on felony drug trafficking and racketeering charges.
Nantucket Penny Page 7
