by Chris Culver
The door’s sharp metal edges bit in the burned palm of my right hand as I lifted it. Smoke wafted around me as I muscled the door open. The night was quiet outside. If I could get to my car, I could get out of there and get to somewhere safe. Behind me, the house had started crackling and popping as wood burned.
I darted forward, crouching low and staying in the shadows wherever possible. When I reached my car, I started to open the door but stopped when I caught movement in my peripheral vision. There was a man to my right. He had his back to a tree, and his left hand was cocked back near his cheek. I blinked twice, sure my eyes were deceiving me.
He had a freaking bow and arrow.
“Police officer,” I yelled, unholstering my firearm and raising the barrel toward him. “Drop your weapon.”
Immediately, gunfire rang out from my left. Tree bark near the archer exploded as rounds thwacked into it. The archer ducked low but didn’t take his eyes from his target. He was young and had brown skin. He could have been in high school. I shook my head and kept my weapon pointed at him.
He was about twenty-five yards away, which I presumed was well within the reach of a competent archer. At a firing range, I could hit a man-sized target nine out of ten times at that range. It was a lot harder in the field with someone shooting back, but this guy’s weapon was about four hundred years out of date. I had him dead to rights.
“Drop your weapon now.”
He slowly pivoted toward me.
“Don’t do this,” I called, taking a step forward. A fresh volley of shots thudded into the tree behind which the archer stood. He adjusted his stance. No one had ever pointed a bow and arrow at me like that before, but I recognized a man taking aim at me when I saw it.
I didn’t let him loose an arrow.
The sound of my firearm reverberated through the trees around me as I squeezed the trigger. The first shot missed. The second clipped his arm. Somehow he kept his bow up. There was a grimace on his face. With each shot, I found myself praying that he’d just go down. He didn’t, though. I fired again, and then again—seven shots in total—closing the distance between us with each shot. When he finally fell, I was no more than thirty feet from him.
“Target down,” called a voice from the woods to my left. “We’re clear.”
I slipped my firearm into the holster on my belt and turned around as something inside the house crashed. There were flames in the windows now. I walked to the archer and found a black-clad FBI agent already leaning over him, feeling the archer’s neck for a pulse.
“It was a good shoot,” he said without looking at me. “Where’s Agent Havelock?”
My voice caught in my throat. Whether that was from the smoke I had inhaled or something else, I didn’t know. I coughed, though, to clear it.
“He was shot in the neck. He didn’t make it, and I couldn’t get him out.”
The agent looked at me, then. He stood quickly.
“Jesus, you’re covered in blood. You shot?”
“No, this is Havelock’s blood,” I said. I drew in a breath and felt the adrenaline begin to wane. My hands started trembling, and I felt cold. “I tried to keep him alive. It didn’t work. Where’s your team?”
The agent drew in a breath. “I’m it.”
Meaning, we had lost a lot of FBI agents tonight. If I had heard him say that at any other time, I probably would have had some kind of emotional reaction. Now, though, he might as well have told me he just searched for new car insurance. I felt empty.
“I’m sorry.”
“Me, too,” he said, standing from the body and allowing me to have a good look at the man I had shot. The moment I saw his face, I felt my shoulders drop. I swore and ran a hand through my hair.
“Don’t feel bad for this guy. He took out three FBI agents tonight. He got what was coming to him.”
“I’m not mad because I shot him,” I said. “I’m mad that I didn’t get to question him. He drove the getaway car this afternoon for a kid who murdered eight people in Indianapolis.”
Chapter 37
Since neither of our cell phones worked out there, we had to search the woods for Agent Hanson’s body and his satellite phone. It didn’t take long. Hanson had an arrow in his back, which, by its placement, had probably pierced his lung. I couldn’t remember having worked a murder involving a bow and arrow, but I had worked a lot of murders involving shots to the chest. Even if we had gotten to him right away, we were so far from a major hospital that he probably would have died on the way.
The agent I was with—Scott Kaler—used Hanson’s satellite phone to call for help. We had a medical helicopter hovering over us in ten minutes and an FBI helicopter overhead very shortly thereafter. The Bureau helicopter helped us pinpoint the location of the other two tactical officers who had died. One had been killed by a bow and arrow, while the second had been shot. We sent the medical helicopter away without it having to land. The dead didn’t need their services.
The entire evening felt surreal. The house continued to burn, but thankfully, the nearest trees were far enough away that they didn’t catch fire. I moved the Mustang I had borrowed so its gas tank wouldn’t heat up and explode, and then I sat on the hood while the first responders arrived.
I didn’t know Agent Havelock well. I never even knew whether he had a family or a significant other. I knew him only as an FBI agent willing to do whatever it took to get his job done. He believed in his agency, though, and he believed in the men and women who worked for him. For now, the best way I could honor his death was to close the case we’d started. Knowing the little I did about him, I thought that would be what he wanted.
When the FBI arrived, it came in force, bringing generators, powerful lights, dozens of agents, and a portable command truck from which Havelock’s deputy could oversee the investigation. The moment they saw me, their forensic technicians took my blood-soaked shirt, jacket, and pants as evidence and gave me a pair of navy blue sweatpants and matching sweatshirt.
After that, I mostly sat and thought.
It would take the FBI a while to get up and running. From what I understood, Agent Havelock had kept our investigation compartmentalized so that only people directly involved with it knew about it. Combined with his disagreement with his own agency’s counterterrorism division, this could get ugly very quickly. I was content to stay out of it. My department had enough office intrigue; I didn’t need to involve myself in the Bureau’s office politics.
I stayed at the crime scene almost four hours and led agents from the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility through everything Havelock and I had done. They listened to what I had to say, but they reserved judgment and said very little. Even when staying silent, though, their body language spoke volumes about their thoughts: Havelock and I had screwed up.
If he had lived, most of the scrutiny would have fallen on Havelock’s shoulders. With his death, the blame would fall on a lot of people.
Eventually, Havelock’s deputy, the second-most powerful special agent in the Indianapolis field office, walked to me. I was sitting inside my borrowed Mustang, watching the team work. He nodded to me, and I got out of the car. The agent was probably in his early forties and had neat brown hair parted on the left side, dark blue eyes, and slightly inset cheeks His hands were in the pockets of a dark blue windbreaker. He was taller than me and quite a bit larger. He looked like a professional football player approaching middle age.
“Lieutenant Rashid,” he said, holding out his hand. When I reached out to shake it, he squeezed hard and refused to let go. I had to squeeze back to keep my knuckles from cracking. “I’m Special Agent Garret Russel. Kevin Havelock was a friend of mine. He spoke highly of you.”
“He was a good man,” I said, trying to pull my hand back. The agent didn’t release his grip.
“He was my kid’s godfather and the best man in my wedding,” said Russel, finally dropping my hand. His eyes were hard and angry as they stared into mine. “I just thought
you should know.”
“I’m very sorry for your loss.”
He looked down and then stepped closer to me. “You were his partner on this operation. You left him in there.”
“There was nothing I could—”
“Shut up,” he said, interrupting me. I didn’t want a fight, so I let him talk. “Kevin was my friend, and you let him die. I don’t give a shit about your excuses. You let my friend die. That’s it. That’s all I’ve got to say to you. Now get out of here before I do something you’ll regret.”
I slowly took a step back and nodded. Before I could get in my car, he cleared his throat.
“To be clear, you’re off this case, and your consulting position within the FBI is terminated as of this moment.”
“I understand,” I said.
“If you keep investigating, I’ll arrest you for obstruction of justice,” he said. He leaned into me and lowered his voice. “And if I find out you were negligent or complicit in my friend’s death, you won’t like what’ll happen to you. Is that clear?”
I gritted my teeth and balled my hands into fists before speaking.
“You’re pissed. I get that. You have every right to be pissed,” I said, standing straighter and holding my ground. “That doesn’t give you a right to threaten me. Agent Havelock died standing right beside me. I wish it hadn’t happened. Agent Havelock died doing his job, though. It could have very easily have been me. I’m sorry he’s gone, but his death is not my fault.”
His eyes looked at me up and down. “We’ll see. Now get out of here. If I need you, the US Attorney’s Office will call you.”
I wanted to tell him off, but that wouldn’t help anybody. Hopefully, he’d calm down and realize that I had done what I could to help Havelock. The operation had gone sideways. We should have gone in with a bigger team, we should have brought a helicopter to the site…we should have done a number of things differently. The bottom line was, though, that we had done the best we could with the information we had. If Agent Russel refused to acknowledge that, he was at fault.
I got back in my car and drove east toward the city before pulling into a rest stop near Plainfield. At that time in the morning, there were a few long-haul truckers sleeping but very few cars. The FBI may have wanted me off this case, but this wasn’t just their case now. We had a lot of dead people in Indianapolis at Kim Peterson’s house, and we needed to find out who killed them before anyone else died. If I happened to find Jacob Ganim’s murderer along the way, so be it.
I called my boss at IMPD. Captain Mike Bowers answered after a few rings. His voice was distant and sleepy.
“Ash,” he said. “It’s five in the morning. What do you want?”
“Anybody at the Bureau call you recently?”
He sighed and lowered his voice. “What’d you do?”
“Kevin Havelock is dead. A couple other agents I didn’t know died as well. We were ambushed while searching a house early this morning.”
Bowers didn’t say anything, but I heard him exhale a long, slow breath.
“You all right?”
“I made it through okay,” I said. “I’ve been removed from the investigation we were working, but I’ve got information we need to move on.”
“Did you share it with the FBI?”
“They’re not interested in talking to me right now, which is why I need you to call their liaison. Kevin Havelock and I were working an antiterrorism case. He was convinced something bad was coming our way. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but he was right. We’ve got a lot of people dead already, and we’re going to have more unless we act.”
Bowers paused.
“You’re going to have to be a little more specific than that.”
“The guys who killed Agent Havelock stole assault weapons, pistols, blasting caps, and detonators from an idiot who shouldn’t have had them in the first place. I don’t know what they’re doing, but the Brown County Sheriff’s Department has a suspect in custody who does. I need him brought to Indianapolis and put in a box. I’ll interrogate him as soon as I can.”
Bowers inhaled deeply. “Have your suspects made specific threats?”
“We found a warehouse by the airport in which they made explosives. I think they’re tied to the terror group who attacked Westbrook Elementary and the president. They like spectacles, and we’ve got the Indy 500 in a couple of hours. We need to move.”
“Christ in a handbasket,” said Bowers. He paused. “Are you sure about this? Because if you’re wrong, we’re all going to look like idiots.”
“If I’m wrong, yeah, we’ll look like idiots. But if I’m right and we don’t do anything, our image will be the last of our concerns.”
Bowers sighed. When he spoke, his voice sounded more resigned than angry.
“All right. We’ve got almost a thousand officers assigned to the Speedway, but I’ll call the chief and see whether we can get some more. I’ll also call Homeland Security for assistance and the Brown County Sheriff’s Department about a prisoner transfer.”
“We need this guy as quickly as possible. Tell them to go lights and sirens.”
Bowers grunted. “I have done this thing a time or two, Ash, but I appreciate your enthusiasm.”
“Yeah, sorry. I know,” I said, softening my voice. “Thank you. I’m on my way downtown.”
He grunted again and hung up. I put my car in gear and started driving south toward downtown. Years ago, I had had a desk in the homicide unit’s bullpen in the City-County Building. After being promoted to lieutenant and given command of the major case unit, I had needed an actual office. Unfortunately, my department didn’t have the space, so it borrowed a storage unit from the prosecutor’s office and put a desk inside it for me. To call it a shithole would have been insulting to public restrooms everywhere, but it was home away from home.
In just a couple of hours, the entire city would turn into a veritable parking lot as race fans made their way to the Motor Speedway, but that early on a Sunday morning, it was passable. I parked in the secured lot near my building, took the elevator to my floor, and sat down at my desk.
Television detectives oftentimes turned interrogations into battles of wits in which they tricked suspects into saying things against their interests. Real life wasn’t like that. Interrogations were about leverage and using that leverage to show a suspect that confessing was in his best interest—even if it never was. It was all theatrics and lies, and I was pretty good at it.
This case was going to be a little different. Butler al-Ghamdi was fifteen years old. Nassir hadn’t introduced me to him, but I thought I had met him in Kim Peterson’s basement, right before he hit me in the face with a folding chair and escaped in a Toyota Camry. Even if he hadn’t committed those murders, he had involved himself in a conspiracy to murder four FBI agents. We had this guy dead to rights. He’d die in prison.
And it wouldn’t matter to him.
I had worked a lot of murders involving teenage shooters under the influence of older people. Just three or four years ago, I picked up a fourteen-year-old boy who had murdered a seventeen-year-old girl and her nineteen-year-old brother. He had never seen either of them before, but he hid behind some trash cans at their house and then shot them both as they came home from the grocery store with their grandmother.
We found the murder weapon within moments of arriving at the scene, and we arrested the kid an hour later based on the grandmother’s ID. Eventually, we found the shooter’s footprints and fingerprints at the scene, we found gunpowder residue on his hands and clothes, and we got video footage of him at a convenience store half a block from the shooting five minutes after the shooting. We even had multiple eyewitnesses in nearby houses ready to testify that they saw the shooter running from the crime scene. The case wasn’t airtight, but it was close.
And yet, the kid refused to tell us why he did it.
The prosecutor’s office offered him a sweetheart deal: If he rolled over on the shot-call
er, we’d charge him as a juvenile. He’d spend the next six years in a facility for juveniles, but he’d get out on his twenty-first birthday with a high school diploma and a potential future. Instead of taking that deal, he spat in our faces and said he’d never talk. The prosecutors charged him as an adult, took him to trial, and won. He was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.
That kid will never again see the sun set as a free man. He’ll never get married, have children, have a career, or do any of the things that make life worth living. What’s more, he knew he could avoid that future if he just told us who gave him the order to kill those two teenagers. He refused, though. He thought it was more important to protect his boss than to protect himself. When he grew up and realized what he had lost, I was pretty sure he’d regret his mistake and wish he could do it over again. It’d be too late, though.
I didn’t know Butler al-Ghamdi, but I knew kids like him. He believed in a cause and was willing to forfeit his life for that cause. Given time, I had little doubt he’d realize he had made a mistake, but I didn’t have time to give him. I needed him to talk now, which meant I needed a different kind of leverage on him than I’d typically get on a suspect.
I needed him to hurt.
Butler al-Ghamdi was from Mount Vernon, Illinois, so I looked up their police department on my computer and gave them a call. My request was odd, but the watch commander agreed to it. It was all I could ask for.
After my phone call, I locked my office and walked to the City-County Building, where IMPD had its official headquarters. Thousands of people worked in that building, so it took a while to get an elevator up to Captain Bowers’s floor. There, I found him in his palatial office, talking to somebody on the phone. He put his hand over the receiver.
“Your suspect’s on his way. Get a cup of coffee, go to the conference room, and have a seat. I’ve got morning briefings, but somebody will let you know when al-Ghamdi gets here.”
