Racing the Devil

by Jaden Terrell

  “Great.” I tossed my briefcase onto the couch. “Shoot.”

  “You wanted to know if there was a life insurance policy on Amy Hartwell.”

  “Right.”

  “My friend says there was one. Half a million dollars.”

  “The beneficiary?”

  “Calvin Hartwell. Also, there’s a policy that ensures that if one of them died, the house would be paid for. The house is appraised at $250,000.”

  I whistled. “So Calvin is about $750,000 richer. And free to marry his soul mate.”

  Jay shrugged and took a sip of his water. “Sure beats having to pay alimony.”

  AS SUSPECTS WENT, Calvin Hartwell was a good one. He had motive, opportunity, and an alibi that was unreliable at best. With one wife missing, another dead, and a history of philandering, he was looking less and less like the Good Christian Man Glenda had called him. Had he decided to end his painful marriage and cash in on Amy’s life insurance at the same time? If so, it seemed the wages of sin were three-quarters of a million dollars.

  That afternoon, I stopped by Bluefield, parked a few doors down, and watched Cal Hartwell play softball with his girls. With only three of them, it was really just a hit, pitch, and catch practice session, with the three players alternating positions. Katrina loped around the bases, long legs pumping, cornsilk hair flying behind her. The younger, Tara, scrambled after the ball, a bright smile on her broad, sunny face.

  Calvin slid to third base as Tara scooped up the ball in her fist and flung it to him. He tipped it with his fingers and let Kat-rina fly past him toward home.

  I didn’t want to see him this way, warm and unguarded with his girls. I wanted him to be a villain.

  The game ended, and they disappeared into the house, the girls on either side of Calvin, each with an arm around his waist. There was no sign of the distance I’d noticed between Calvin and Katrina.

  I stayed long enough to make sure they’d gone in for the night, then drove by Maria’s place to pick up Paulie. On the way, I punched in Elisha Casale’s phone number. Paused, thumb poised over the “dial” button. Trust, she’d said. I didn’t seem to be very good at that, but pestering her wasn’t going to help me find Josh any faster.

  D.W. met me at the door with Queenie close behind. She hobbled over and leaned against my legs, and I stroked her head, knowing that the day was coming when the pain of her arthritis would outweigh whatever pleasure she got from the rest of her life.

  “Is she getting her arthritis medicine?” I asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Do you think you could increase it? She seems to be hurting.”

  “The vet said we could double it if we needed to.” “I want you to.”

  “Sure. We were going to try that in a couple days, anyway.” He closed the door behind me. “Before you call Paulie, there’s something I want to show you.”

  I followed him downstairs to Maria’s darkroom and photo gallery. Then he stepped aside to let me pass. The pictures from the picnic had been added to the collection. Paulie blowing out his candles, Paulie opening his presents, Josh sulking on the dock, Caitlin swinging on the swing set, her yellow sundress tucked around her hips. Wendy, shoving a deviled egg into Randall’s laughing mouth.

  D.W. grilling the hamburgers, a strained smile on his face. Me, playing my guitar on the picnic table. Me, holding Paulie on my lap. Me, talking to Randall. Me, licking birthday icing off my fingers. Me.

  D.W.’s voice came from behind me. “Sometimes I am so damn jealous of you.”

  When I answered, even I could hear the bitterness in my voice. “You have my wife, my kid, my house. Even my dog. What do you have to be jealous of, man?”

  “That’s just it. It’s your wife. Your kid. Your dog.” He gestured to the pictures. “She still loves you, Cowboy. She loves you more than she loves me. I know that, and I have to live with it, because I’ll be damned if I’m going to let her go. Just don’t rub my nose in it, okay?”

  I thought about it for a moment before I nodded. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, I thought. Divorce should be a clean severance, like an amputation. But what was it they said about phantom pains?

  “Hell of a world, isn’t it D.W.?”

  He nodded back, solemnly. “It is that.”

  ON SUNDAY, I DRESSED in jeans and a meerkat T-shirt Maria had given me, then went downstairs to find Jay and Paulie eating Cocoa Puffs and cinnamon toast in the living room. Queenie was stretched out at their feet like an Akita rug.

  “Bugs Bunny, Daddy,” Paulie said, pointing at the TV. “What’s up, Doc?”

  I bent down for a milky kiss, and squeezed onto the couch next to my son. The phone shrilled, and Jay reached across Paulie and me to answer it, which meant he was still hoping for a call from Eric.

  He held the receiver to his ear, and his crestfallen expression told me it wasn’t Mr. Perfect on the other end of the line.

  “It’s for you,” he said, and handed me the receiver.

  It was Birdie Drafon.

  “Mr. McKean, I hate to bother you,” she said. “But I think something is wrong at Amy’s house. I mean, the Hartwells’.”

  “What do you mean, something’s wrong?”

  “Well . . .” She sounded tentative. “It may be nothing. But Calvin and the girls didn’t go to church today. The car is still out front. That isn’t like him.”

  “Maybe he’s sick,” I suggested. “Or one of the girls is.”

  “Yes, I thought of that. So I went over to see if there was anything I could do. And there was no answer. It was . . . so quiet, Mr. McKean. Too quiet, if you know what I mean.”

  “Ms. Birdie, have you called the police?”

  “Oh, no. It isn’t anything I can put my finger on. The police would think I was just some hysterical old loon. It just feels wrong somehow.”

  “All right. I’ll come and check it out. Do the Hartwells have a dog?”

  “No. Calvin doesn’t like hair on the furniture.”

  “One more thing, then.” I was already sliding off the couch. “Do you happen to have a key to the house?”

  The Colt was tucked away in the top of my closet, like it always was when Paulie was around. I pulled it down and loaded it, then tucked it into the Galco small-of-back holster and strapped it on. Regretfully, I untucked the meerkat shirt and tugged it down to hide the gun.

  So much for sartorial eloquence.

  “Can you take Paulie home for me?” I asked Jay. “There’s something I have to do, and I’m not sure how long it will take.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Is it about the Amy Hartwell thing?”

  “It’s about the Hartwells. I don’t know if it’s about the thing.”

  Thirty minutes later, I strolled up the walkway to the Hartwell home, Ms. Birdie’s key in my pocket. With a handkerchief around my hand to keep from leaving fingerprints, I rang the bell.

  No answer. I wasn’t surprised, but a hollow feeling settled in my gut all the same.

  Ms. Birdie was right. It was too quiet.

  With the handkerchief still in hand, I pushed the key into the lock and turned it. Cracked the door open, and the stench of human waste rocked me back a step.

  “Cal?” I called. “Calvin Hartwell?”

  I stepped inside and closed the door behind me, knowing there would be no answer.

  Cal slumped on the couch, one hand still gripping the Browning Hi-Power. I knew, even before I saw the spray of blood on the wall and on the couch behind his head, that he was dead. He hadn’t begun to decay, but his muscles had relaxed, releasing the contents of both bowel and bladder. Beneath the smell of feces and urine was the delicate scent of potpourri.

  I circled the body, careful not to touch anything, and looked at the entrance wound. The bullet had entered beneath the chin, and there was a ragged, oozing asterisk where the explosion gases had expanded between the skin and the bone and blown out a starburst around the bullet hole. Beside him, spattered with droplets of blood
, was a crumpled piece of paper that said, “God forgive me.”

  His eyes were glazed and unblinking. I didn’t need to check for a pulse.

  Instead, I peered into the kitchen and the den, then took the stairs two at a time to the second floor, where the bedrooms must be.

  First room on the right, the master bedroom. I pushed the door open and glanced inside. Empty. I didn’t waste my time there, but my mind registered the shoes lined up neatly on the floor of the open closet, the clothing arranged by color and type, everything ordered with military precision, except for the bed, which was still rumpled. Odd. A man like Cal, I’d have thought he’d make the bed before he offed himself. He would have wanted to leave everything in order.

  The next room was a bathroom, empty.

  The next door had a sign on the front. Rainbows. Butterflies. A smiling teddy bear carrying a basket of something. Berries, maybe. Or wildflowers. Tara’s Honey Tree, it said.

  I pushed the door open a crack and peeked through. Brightly colored patchwork bedspread, yellow curtains, shelves filled with books, dolls, and antique teddy bears.

  The little girl was sprawled across the bed, one leg dangling over the edge. Her arms were thrown up over her head, as if she’d been struggling when the gun went off. Her cheeks were streaked with blood and tears, and her nightgown was drenched with red.

  Damn it. Damn it to hell.

  I’d spent seven years solving homicides, seen death’s thousand ugly faces, but the kids still got to me.

  Somehow my legs carried me across the room. My fingers felt for a pulse, found her skin cool beneath my hand.

  Too late for CPR, too late for anything.

  Damn Cal.

  I turned away sharply and crossed the hall, where a crayoned sign on the door was decorated with hearts, flowers, and a unicorn with a glittered horn. Katrina’s Magical Kingdom.

  With a mixture of hope and dread, I opened it.

  My mind let me see white lace curtains and a white lace canopy over a bed draped with a white lace-and-satin coverlet. A cut-crystal teardrop dangled from the window, splashing rainbows across the room and over unicorn music boxes, unicorn posters, unicorn figurines, stuffed unicorns.

  Only then would it let me see the splashes of red across the pillow, the spray of blood against the headboard, the thin, hunched figure half-covered by the bloody bedspread. At twelve, she was almost a woman.

  It looked like she might never make it.

  “Oh, Jesus,” I heard myself moan.

  I knew it was hopeless, but I pressed two fingers to her neck and felt a faint flutter, like the kiss of a butterfly.

  She was alive.

  I CALLED 911 AND FRANK CAMPANELLA, then jerked open a dresser drawer and snatched out a white Mickey Mouse T-shirt. Katrina had a single oozing entrance wound and an exit wound that had left a halo of blood on the pillow around her head.

  With nothing to do but worry and wait, I held the shirt against the wounds and tried to picture the sequence of events. Cal, stricken with guilt, decides to kill himself. But he has his daughters to think of. He could send them away, but how will they survive without either parent? How can he leave them?

  He steps into Katrina’s room and fires the gun into her head at point-blank range. Then he goes into Tara’s room. Awakened by the earlier shot, she struggles against her father, but to no avail. He presses the barrel of the gun to her temple and pulls the trigger. She falls back, and, enraged by her defiance, he empties the gun into her chest. Finally, he goes into the living room, writes his plea for forgiveness, places the barrel of the gun beneath his chin, and blows his brains all over the wall behind him.

  End of story.

  End of guilt.

  Only, it didn’t quite make sense. The unmade bed still bothered me, as did the bloody stains on Tara’s gown. One bullet to Katrina’s head—that might have been an act of desperation, or even, in some twisted way, mercy. But someone had emptied a magazine into Tara’s body. That kind of overkill said something very different.

  I remembered Cal’s face at the memorial service as he hustled his children away, the way he had gotten out of the car at the school for one last hug, the way he had looked playing softball with his daughters in the front yard. And I knew that, whatever his flaws, Cal Hartwell had loved his girls.

  Then there was Amy’s murder, which had taken months of planning. A man who could arrange his wife’s death coldly and efficiently and set up an innocent man to take the blame was not a man who would be driven to suicide by guilt.

  Blessedly, the ambulance arrived, and I was hustled out of the way so the paramedics could do their jobs.

  I was never so glad to turn over a task to somebody else.

  I met Frank and Harry in the living room, where they were examining Cal’s body with their hands jammed in their pockets.

  Obeying the first rule of a crime scene: Don’t touch anything.

  Harry nodded as I came over to them wiping the blood from my hands on the handkerchief. He said, “Things not exciting enough for you, you have to go looking for trouble?”

  I grimaced at him, but something uncoiled from around my heart. If he was joking with me, he wasn’t thinking of me as a murderer. I said, “The younger daughter’s dead. Older one’s still hanging on, but I don’t know for how long.”

  Frank looked up at me and blinked. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

  I showed him the key. “Lady down the street called me, said there was something weird going on, but she didn’t want to call the police, since it was just a bad feeling. Birdie Drafon.” I gave him the address.

  Frank’s bushy eyebrows merged into a V at the bridge of his nose. “You think Hartwell did this to himself?”

  I shook my head, shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought so at first, but . . .”

  “But?”

  “He didn’t seem the type.”

  “You can’t always tell.”

  “That Hartwell’s handwriting?”

  Frank leaned over the couch and peered down at the paper. “Too soon to tell. Plain block letters. Not too many distinguishing characteristics. Harry, you ready to start with the photos?”

  “Uh huh.”

  Frank and I stepped out of the way while Harry photographed the crime scene. Standing in the doorway, he began to his immediate left, then panned around the room, taking overlapping shots. Between each shot, he stopped to painstakingly label each one. When he had completely circled the room, he went to the opposite wall and took a shot of the place where he’d been standing. Then he started on the body.

  “You know I have to look into you on this,” Frank said.

  I didn’t know what to say to this, so I kept quiet.

  The paramedics hurried past us with a gurney, an oxygen mask over Katrina’s face. Outside, the street was beginning to fill with police cars as the uniforms, the medical examiner, and the other significant personnel arrived on the scene. There was a van with the Channel 3 logo on the side.

  Surprise, surprise.

  I nodded toward the van. “Looks like you’ve sprung another leak.”

  “She’s a stunner,” he said. “Too bad she’s a cockroach.” He stared out at the chaos that was swiftly forming in the Hartwells’ front yard.

  Harry came out, blinking in the bright sunlight. “We won’t know for sure until we do the gunpowder residue tests whether Hartwell did it or not. You ought to hang around until it’s done.”

  “Harry. You don’t think . . .”

  “No.” He gave me a half-smile. “Just, better safe than sorry.”

  They tested my hands and let me wash them when it was clear that I hadn’t discharged a firearm recently. Then I cooled my heels at the kitchen table while Frank and Harry processed the scene. It felt strange. I knew that evidence was being placed in bags and tagged, that a technician was swabbing Cal’s hands with a five percent solution of nitric acid and checking the swabs for traces of nitrates, barium, and antimony, the presence of which
would prove that Cal had fired a gun shortly before his death. I wanted to be part of it all, not relegated to the kitchen hiding from the cameras.

  While I waited, I tried to envision what had happened in the Hartwell house and how it related to Amy’s murder. With Cal dead, the equation had suddenly and dramatically changed.

  After awhile, Frank came in and said, “He did it.”

  “Gunpowder residue?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It doesn’t fit.”

  “Well, maybe we’ll get lucky, and Katrina will be able to tell us what happened.”

  “Maybe.” I thought about the spray of blood on the headboard and knew the girl wouldn’t be talking soon. If ever. “Any of the neighbors hear anything?”

  “Nada. Not a thing.”

  It didn’t mean much—maybe the neighbors were sound sleepers—but it made me wonder if whoever had done this had used a suppressor.

  I was as certain now that Cal was innocent as I had been sure before that he wasn’t.

  Maybe the killer, or killers, had overpowered Cal.

  Maybe.

  But sitting there in the kitchen, knowing Cal had fired the Browning, I imagined a different scenario.

  I LEFT THE HARTWELL HOUSE and trotted over to Ms. Birdie’s. From the Channel 3 van, Ashleigh called my name, but I pretended not to hear her. She started after me, but a couple of uniformed policemen blocked her path.

  Ms. Birdie’s eyes welled with tears when I told her the news.

  “How much more must that poor child endure?” she asked, when I got to the part about Katrina. “Will she be all right?”

  “I wish I could say. Head shots are unpredictable. She could make a full recovery, or she could have varying degrees of brain damage.”

  “I don’t know what that means. Are you saying she could be a vegetable?”

  I sighed. “Ms. Birdie, it could mean anything.”

  She picked at a loose thread on her sleeve. “I can’t believe Calvin would do such a thing. He wasn’t a good husband, but he wasn’t a bad man.”