A Good Kill

by John McMahon

“The rule about you not working,” Fuller said to me. “It’s not to jam you up, P.T. It’s to give you time to process. To heal.”

  At another time or from another person, I might’ve appreciated this. Might’ve nodded in understanding or even taken time off voluntarily.

  But nine months ago, Fuller had sat at my bedside and accused me of being a dirty cop. He told me I was gonna rot in jail.

  “Go to hell, Bird,” I said.

  4

  The sun was going down, and the sweet smell of lilacs from the nearby forest was strong in the air.

  Abe had an address on a piece of property that our shooter, Jed Harrington, owned in the foothills south of town. He’d gotten a patrolman at the station to write up an affidavit, and it had been hand-carried to a judge.

  When I got into Abe’s SUV, he showed me the signed warrant on the screen of an iPad.

  Abe had always been old-school. White lined legal pads. Yellow number-two pencils.

  “When the hell did this happen?” I motioned at the tablet. “You caught up with 2010 technology?”

  Abe rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I guess it must’ve been during one of your suspensions.”

  I grinned at him. Touché.

  We headed out then, moving slowly around a gaggle of media vans and black and whites, spread throughout the school’s overflow parking lot. The place was a zoo, and it was good to put it in our rearview mirror, at least for the night.

  Out on 903, traffic was light. We drove through a rural area called Ridge Creek, where my best friend had lived when I was a teenager. I stared over at a Dollar General we’d rode our bikes to every week to buy junk food. In Mason Falls, we have all the dollar brands. Dollar General. Dollar Store. Dollar Tree.

  As we got closer to Harrington’s house, the conversation shifted to me and Remy.

  We’d been a team for eighteen months, but circumstances and a suspension had split us apart. Then last week, I got off desk duty and Remy finished up her time with County and transferred back to homicide.

  “Out of the furnace and into the fire,” Abe said. “You and Rem ready?”

  “Like riding a bike,” I said.

  We pulled into Harrington’s neighborhood, and media vans clogged the residential street. I flicked on the portable police light that Abe kept on the dash of his old Lexus.

  “Obviously you’re not the only one who knows this guy’s address, Kaplan,” I said.

  Abe laid on the horn, and the folks in the street separated, revealing two squad cars trying to handle crowd control.

  I’m always surprised with the atmosphere after a shooting. Concern and panic fade when a bad man with a gun is taken down, and the succeeding hours are often filled with a sense of morbid jubilation. “Circus-like” is how Remy once described the mood.

  We pulled into the driveway at 2944 Bluehaven and got out. Badged a couple journalists who were set up on Harrington’s lawn. The news guys acted giddy and pointed at the house like bookies examining a horse.

  I pointed at their camera gear. “On the sidewalk or the parkway, guys,” I said. “Otherwise, I gotta get patrol to arrest you. Impound your equipment.”

  Abe had found a house key in the gunman’s pocket at the school, and patrol had already cleared the home.

  “How about a comment on the shooting, Marsh?” a reporter named Raymond Kirios from the Mason Falls Register asked. I ignored him, and Abe closed the front door behind us.

  Inside the house, Abe flicked on the lights. The noise of the media was muffled, and Abe and I pulled our Glocks, just to be sure.

  “Police,” I announced, always double-checking in a situation like this. “Anyone home?”

  No response.

  We stood in a tiled entryway. A few lights on inside. We’d been told Harrington was single and lived alone, and patrol had verified this with a neighbor before going room to room ten minutes ago.

  To our left was a hallway that led to the bedrooms. Off to our right, we could see into the living room and kitchen, which were both empty.

  The house was a two-bedroom ranch style. The first room faced onto the front lawn and was the master. A simple bedroom. Nothing on the dresser except for a digital clock and a black cradle for an iPhone. A set of golf clubs leaned against one corner, and the bed was unmade.

  The second room was the spare, and the walls were lined in an old-timey wallpaper. In the closet, we saw women’s clothes. Two or three outfits in a small size. Two casual skirts and a blouse. Nothing else.

  I flicked the label on one of the skirts and saw the words “Rebecca Taylor.” I wasn’t a fashion snob, but could guess they each fell in the range of three to four hundred dollars. Someone hip, with good taste, but not loaded.

  Did Harrington have a girlfriend? A female roommate?

  We heard a noise and moved through the living room toward the back of the house. Through a sliding door, I saw a dog scratching at the glass. He was a mixed breed. Part retriever and part husky. Maybe thirty-five pounds. Tan with a white stripe circling his neck.

  I opened the door a few inches. The dog whined and wagged his tail. He had white paws and a smear of white on his nose. “What’s your name, bud?” I asked.

  I couldn’t let the animal inside the scene, so I stepped outside. Leaned over and checked his I.D.

  Beau, a bone-shaped metal tag read, along with a phone number.

  Standing up, I noticed a backhouse behind the place. The sun had fallen, and the evening was getting chilly. A light was on inside the small structure, and the door was left ajar. I wondered if patrol had cleared the casita.

  “Abe,” I hollered, and moved toward it. The dog followed me, and I kept my Glock out.

  “Mason Falls Police,” I announced. Wandering across a wide square of dirt and crabgrass.

  “On your six,” Abe said, coming up behind me.

  I pushed open the door with my dress shoe, scanning the place with my Glock. It was empty, but a TV had been left on, the volume muted. The place was small, but enough space for one person. That is, if you removed the fifty banker’s boxes that were piled in the middle of the room.

  “There’s an episode of Hoarders waiting for their next location scout,” Abe said.

  I stepped around the boxes, which were stacked in layers, three high. The room sported a pullout couch, an oak rolltop desk, and an upright wooden gun rack with five weapons behind a glass door.

  On the local Fox channel, the news played.

  Governor Toby Monroe yapped away, his face pained—a look that he’d probably practiced in front of a mirror. I saw a shot of Falls Magnet Middle School and tapped up the volume so I could hear what Monroe said.

  “And although we mourn the loss of a great educator,” the governor said, “we are fortunate to have policemen like Detective P. T. Marsh. He saw this madman almost kill three young girls and did his job to keep them safe.”

  I glanced at Abe. It wasn’t good public policy to call out a cop by name. Especially the day of.

  “Did you hear that?” I squinted.

  “Your buddy.” Abe shook his head. “Still has a man crush on you.”

  Abe knew about some of my past interactions with Monroe over the last two years.

  But he didn’t know about the incident in May, when I’d asked the governor to use his influence to help find the address of the man who killed my family. No one except Monroe and I knew about that.

  The TV displayed a picture of me. A photo from five years ago. I stood outside the court building on 5th Street in slacks and a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows.

  “You look good,” Abe said. “Young. Ripped.” He patted my stomach. “What happened?”

  I flicked off the TV and walked over to the gun case. Through the glass we could see two Rugers, one AR-15, and two pistols.

  “You got those keys sti
ll?” I asked.

  Abe moved through Harrington’s key ring, getting to the right one.

  He unlocked the case, and I reminded Abe that with a school shooting, the Feds would be called in. And that maybe we should wait on going through the weapons.

  “Why don’t we send a picture to Senza,” I said. “Find out who he’s already contacted.”

  We texted the boss. Then we decided that Abe would inspect the bedrooms while I went through the common areas in the house and the room back here in the yard.

  Our goal was simple.

  The killer was dead already, and there’d be no trial. But school shootings fall into a category that requires meaning. The question of “why” was still unanswered.

  Did Jed Harrington have some beef with the school?

  Or was it with this science teacher, Leaf Tanner, and the school was simply the location for their standoff?

  Abe and I walked back to the house, and I started in the kitchen.

  I examined the pantry cabinets, moving my gloved fingers around cans of chili and spaghetti sauce and canisters of Pringles.

  As I moved into the living area, I found no notes of any plan Harrington had to enter the middle school. No diagrams or pictures of the school. A handful of magazines covered the coffee table, and the bookcase held fiction hardbacks: the latest from B. J. Graf and Karen Dionne.

  Before I moved to the backhouse, Abe poked his head in.

  “Anything?”

  “So far, zilch,” I said. “You?”

  He shook his head. “No pictures of middle school kids. No relatives or family that appear to go to Falls Magnet.”

  I had been away from my phone, and I saw Abe’s iPad set up on the dresser in the bedroom. “Did Remy or Merle send us something?”

  “Yeah.” Abe nodded, grabbing the tablet. “You wanna hear?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “The gunman’s full name is Jedidiah William Harrington,” he read. “Grew up in Macon. Went to high school there. After that, got a degree in journalism.”

  “From where?”

  “Tulane,” Abe said. “He worked in Atlanta at the AJC. Then made a leap to The Washington Post.”

  “Impressive.”

  “They embedded him,” Abe continued. “On and off for four years with the troops in Afghanistan.”

  “Four years is a lot,” I said. “I had a friend who was embedded. After twelve months he couldn’t take it. He started seeing ghosts, you know?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “The faces of dead people,” I said. “But on those around him. Strangers in the street. Except their faces were changed.”

  Abe took this in, nodding.

  “Where was Harrington working lately?” I asked.

  “He wasn’t,” Abe said. “Unemployed, last two years.”

  Abe scrolled down through other notes. “Guy’s never been married. Co-owns the house with his sister, Maryanne.”

  I thought of the clothes in the spare bedroom. “Those are her things?” I asked. “In the closet?”

  “Figured so,” Abe said. “I went onto Facebook. She’s petite, and the dresses were all smalls. Merle’s contacted her. She lives in Oklahoma and is flying in tomorrow.”

  Abe put down his iPad. He had defined cheekbones that sat high on his face, and each one was home to six or seven tiny red freckles. Back when we were partners, I once heard a call girl compliment him on those cheeks. In fact, she offered her services for free. Which my partner turned down, at least in front of me. Maybe he circled back later.

  “All right,” I said. “I’m headed out back. You need anything, shout.”

  I walked into the backyard, where Beau, the dog, was waiting for me. He had one blue eye and one brown.

  Over the top of the one-story house, I could see the lights of news cameras and hear the murmur of reporters, still out front.

  Standing at the threshold of the casita, I stared in at the four dozen banker’s boxes in the middle of the room. I wondered if Harrington did his research and writing out here.

  I started at his desk first, sitting down and pulling open each drawer.

  In the top one, I found an old-style Rolodex, with individual index cards, loosely attached on a center spindle. I pulled one card out and stared at the chicken scratches on it. The writing was a combination of numbers and letters. Some code probably used to hide the names of Harrington’s sources. A reporter’s system, old-school and secret.

  I continued flipping through them.

  Not every card was like this. On one I found his sister’s name, Maryanne Harrington Liggins, along with various phone numbers, some of them crossed out over the years. The index card was sun-faded, and I wasn’t even sure if this was a recent system Harrington was using.

  I moved to the second drawer and found a molded ceramic picture frame made of two letter B’s at the bottom and a big square at the top. The glass inside the frame had been cracked, but underneath was a picture of Jed Harrington, along with his dog, Beau.

  In the picture, Harrington donned a Tulane T-shirt and overalls and leaned on a long Ruger. I recognized June Lake in the background.

  I wondered who took the photo. Who went hunting or camping with Beau and Jed? Was it his sister? Would she be able to tell us what set her brother off?

  In my experience, the families of criminals are often as confused as the rest of us as to the evolution of their criminal sons or daughters. A mother sees her kid’s life in flashes: her son as an infant, crawling on a rug. Then a boy in third grade, excited to go to school. And suddenly a nineteen-year-old, held without bail for killing his best friend over twenty dollars.

  I took more items out of the drawers. Pads of paper and pens and little tchotchkes collected over the years. None of them led to any connection between Harrington and the school. No reason for him to be at Falls Magnet.

  I moved to the boxes next, which were full of file folders that corresponded to various stories that Harrington had written over the years. They ranged from research on corruption to drug trafficking to pieces he’d written about soldiers’ lives, adjusting after a return from the Middle East.

  I thought of the teacher who’d died, and I texted Remy to find out if Harrington and Tanner knew each other. The answer came back fast:

  No evidence to show that. And no one in the school recognizes Harrington.

  After working my way through the grouping of boxes on the right, I inspected the left dozen, closest to the door. Each had the same initials on the box tops: G.U.

  Those boxes were all empty. No manila file folders in them. No papers at all.

  I walked over to the Rolodex and looked through the G’s.

  An index card read G.U. in the upper corner, written in red Sharpie. But there were no other markings on the card, other than a chicken scratch of two paw marks.

  I glanced at all the file boxes, now spread throughout the room. Among all the investigative pieces Harrington had done, I’d found no articles about corruption at any school board. Nothing about science education to tie him to the dead science teacher.

  I heard a noise and stepped into the yard.

  The dawn smelled like night-blooming jasmine, and the cobalt sky showed pops of yellow. It always shocks me how much time passes at a crime scene. Now, at almost six a.m., a familiar face was coming toward me.

  Mandelle Clearson was an Atlanta PD detective who I knew from two previous cases.

  In the first one, I’d helped him find a murder suspect who was hiding in Mason Falls, thinking the area was too rural for APD to chase him. Then earlier this spring, Mandelle had returned the favor and helped me with a case down in Little Five Points, his home precinct.

  “Mandelle,” I said as he approached. He was nearabout fifty and my build, with salt-and-pepper hair. “What are you doing here?”r />
  Mandelle explained that he was one of a dozen detectives in Atlanta who was a liaison for the ATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, a division of the Justice Department.

  “When a high-profile case involving a gun comes up,” he said, “they cover my O.T. and send me around the state.”

  “So you heard the shooting was in Mason Falls?” I asked.

  “I did.” Mandelle nodded. “Figured you’d appreciate a friendly doing the gun trace.”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  Mandelle told me he’d just come from my precinct, where he’d inspected the .38 that Harrington had used to kill Leaf Tanner. Now Chief Senza had sent him here, to go through the rest of the reporter’s armory.

  I showed Mandelle the gun case, and he explained that once he had the serial numbers, he’d work with ATF staff in Martinsburg, West Virginia. They’d liaise with the gun manufacturer, who’d supply the store or distributor who peddled the weapon.

  “From there, everything is old-school,” Mandelle said. “On a piece of paper in the gun store. The 4473.”

  “What’s the timing on a trace like that?” I asked. “Start to finish?”

  “Normally two weeks,” Mandelle said, laying the guns atop the white banker’s boxes as he spoke. “But in a school shooting, we’ll have results back in twenty-four hours.”

  My phone pulsed.

  Staring at the screen, I saw a group text to Remy, Abe, Merle, and me. The sender was Chief Senza, and it demanded that we all be at the precinct in an hour.

  “Looks like you guys got lucky, though,” Mandelle said.

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “With this stockpile.” He motioned in particular at the AR-15. “If he’d brought any two of these to that school, a lot more people could’ve been hurt. Kids. Teachers. Cops.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Which made me wonder: Why hadn’t Harrington armed himself better?

  I told Mandelle I had to get in to work, and grabbed a blue-suiter from out front to sit on the backhouse. Make sure no journalist snuck over a fence and started snapping photos.