by John McMahon
I was leaning against the house. “I know,” I said. “But—”
“But nothing,” Remy answered.
I stared at her.
“Forget the call ever happened,” she said. “The GBI’s taking the case over anyway.”
For two years I’d been giving my partner shit for being too black and white in her thinking.
Learn to swim in the gray area, I’d said to her.
If she was letting me off the hook now, this was a new Remy. Drenched in so much gray I could hardly recognize her.
“That’s why Monroe said your name on TV,” Remy pointed out. “An hour after the shooting.”
I nodded. “Make me a hero, and I won’t turn on him.”
Remy stared at me, her face twisted. “But Tarticoft,” she said. “Something’s wrong, P.T. He was a paid killer. If he went after Lena and Jonas . . . who hired him?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about that since the night you shot him.”
“And you got nothing?” Remy flicked her eyebrows. “C’mon, P.T. I know you better than that.”
“I thought the attack on Lena and Jonas might be related to an old case,” I said. “Someone trying to get at me. But I was only on one investigation when Tarticoft drove them off the road.”
“Which was what?” she asked.
This was a time that predated Remy and me working together.
“A robbery at a liquor store,” I said.
“And you’re thinking what?” Remy asked. “Someone came at Lena to get you off that robbery?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was it a big heist?”
“Just the opposite,” I said. “Thirty-three dollars and a Cherry Coke were stolen.”
“It might have nothing to do with your wife then.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But the manager at the liquor store was lying to me, and I couldn’t figure out why. I kept circling back there. Harassing him.”
“So do you have a lead or not?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “The liquor store went out of business, Rem. It’s been abandoned. But I searched—a month ago—for who owned the property. Thinking I might ask the owner if I could look around the place. You know, re-jog an old memory?”
“Sure,” Remy said. “Who owns it?”
“An outfit called FJF Investments.”
“Should that mean something to me?”
“It’s a partnership,” I said. “But when I searched further, I noticed every legal document was authored by Lauten Hartley. Most signed by him. He owns the majority stake.”
“I know that name,” Remy said.
“The first time we saw Hartley was last Christmas,” I said. “A rich guy named Bernie hanged himself in jail. Lauten Hartley was the family attorney. Last person to talk to the rich guy.”
“Okay . . .” Remy said, waiting for more.
“Then in May, when that attorney Cat Flannery was suing the police department, a law firm came in to help. They worked pro bono against me and the department. You remember?”
“Johnson Hartley.” Remy nodded. “That’s how I remembered the name.”
“Lauten Hartley has made it personal with me, Rem, multiple times. And I don’t know why. In May, he tried to have me fired. Then I find out he owns this liquor store . . . ?”
Remy took this in, processing. “Could just be an attorney that hates cops. And him owning that store is coincidence.”
“Like I said,” I told Remy, “I don’t have much.”
“P.T.,” Remy asked, “you didn’t go investigating Johnson Hartley while you were suspended, did you? It’s a big law firm. Powerful clients, if I remember. Tell me you haven’t been spending your evenings stalking this guy.”
I pursed my lips. “I drove out to Hartley’s two or three times,” I said. “Sat on his house overnight. Followed him here and there.”
“Jesus,” she said. “What else?”
“Nothing.”
My partner leaned against the railing at the top of the front porch.
There is something poignant about the inadequacy of language to explain ourselves. The lack of words to make concessions that truly symbolize our transgressions.
I had lied to my partner: back then and again recently at the school. And while Remy was clearly a better person than me, she’d also abandoned me back in May. Now we were together again and walking through the messy swamp of it all.
“P.T.” She turned to me. “I’m sorry about the junkyard. I can’t imagine you finding out about the guy who killed Lena, and my response was that I was coming to take your badge.”
“Rem,” I said, “don’t apologize for that. You were doing your job.”
She stared at me, nodding.
“I’ll see you at work tomorrow,” she finally said. “This Harrington thing was a good kill, and it’s no longer our case. Doesn’t matter what Monroe said.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I keep coming back to that.”
She put on her jacket.
“In between other cases, we’ll start peeling back the layers on Tarticoft. This attorney Hartley too. If someone put a hit out on your family, we’ll find ’em. But when we do—we discuss what to do. Okay?”
“Yeah.”
Remy gave me a hard look. “Promise me, P.T. You don’t go rogue.”
“I promise,” I said.
Remy turned without another word and walked down to her Alfa. Got in and sped off.
12
I awoke to the sound of a loud vibration: metal against wood.
My cell phone must have fallen off the side table in the middle of the night and was skidding along the hardwood floor.
“Marsh,” I said, leaning a long arm over the side of the bed and grabbing it.
“We got a hot one,” Remy said.
I rolled over. Guessed at how long I’d slept by the amount of light filtering through the curtains.
“What time is it?”
“Seven twenty-two, sweetheart,” Remy said. “And people are dead.”
“Good dead people? Or bad dead people?” I asked.
Which were the opening words of a game Remy and I played sometimes.
“Double murder,” my partner said. “I’m fifteen minutes away. Get dressed.”
I hung up and jumped in a cold shower. Let the water shock my system before turning on the hot. Tiny bumps on my arms disappeared, and my skin became more malleable under the warm water.
Getting dressed, I popped a K-Cup in the coffee machine and stepped outside. Lit a half-smoked Marlboro Red that I’d left by the front windowsill.
The last two days had been surreal.
The school shooting. Opening up to Remy about what happened in May.
I felt renewed somehow and took two long puffs before stubbing out the cigarette and leaving it there.
The air was muggy, but you could almost feel the heat burning it off. And you could sense that by afternoon it would be one of those days when you could smell the nitrogen sticks in the flower beds as you drove down residential streets. And that everything would be okay.
I grabbed the coffee and dumped it into my silver cup, seeing Remy’s Alfa pull up toward the curb.
As I locked the front door, I noticed my reflection in the window: my wavy brown hair had gotten long, and I wore a dark sport coat over a white button-down and black pants. One of my go-to outfits.
I got in Remy’s sports car, and the Alfa guzzled loudly away from the curb, its signature dugga-dugga-dugga rising from the back of the car.
“A new case,” I said aloud. A little surprised I hadn’t been moved to paid administrative leave. “Are we just vetting it, or is it ours?”
“Ours,” she said. “I got the call from the chief myself.”
I stared at Remy. Of the two of us, she was the junior detective and yet the call had come from Senza directly.
“I assume it came with a request to keep an eye on me?”
My partner’s face tightened. With the school shooting still not handed over to the state, Abe and Merle couldn’t take this one on.
“It’s okay, Rem,” I said. “So what do we know?”
“Patrol found a ’96 Chevy Caprice,” Remy said, “abandoned on the side of SR-914. Driver and passenger both shot to death, execution style, most likely from someone in the back seat.”
“Jesus.”
Remy glanced at her phone and then at me. “The driver’s name is Juan Vinorama. No I.D. on him, but he owns the car. His buddy in the passenger seat is still a John Doe.”
Ten minutes later, Remy steered her Alfa to the side of 914, about six miles northwest of Mason Falls. Ahead of us we saw the abandoned Chevy Caprice, a boat of a vehicle. Long and midnight blue, with a tan interior and a back seat big enough to deliver a baby in.
We got out and were briefed by Officers Ford and Atienza before gloving up and swinging the front doors of the Caprice open.
Standing by the driver’s side, my feet straddled the edge of the highway. I stared in at the two bodies, while Remy walked around the other way, which abutted an incline full of wormwood.
The guy in the driver’s seat was Latin and had been shot through the back of his head. I leaned over, examining his face. There was no exit wound, which meant the bullet must have found its final resting place inside Juan Vinorama’s brain. Or maybe its second-to-last resting place. Our medical examiner, Sarah Raines, would dig in there and remove it.
“Safety first, Rem,” I said. Tapping at Vinorama’s seat belt, which was strung over his chest and still plugged in, even though his keys were up on the front dash, rather than in the ignition.
“Someone they knew?” my partner theorized.
Remy and I looked at the man in the passenger seat, who was Latin like Vinorama, but heavier, with a chest like a keg and thick muscular arms. The big guy had taken a shot to his head, but the bullet had exited somewhere near his right eye, spraying blood and brain across the front and right windshield inside the car.
I examined both men from head to toe. The two wore cheap dress pants and plain white T-shirts. They sported inexpensive black shoes with rubber soles, as if they worked in a restaurant. Nothing about them screamed high-end, except for the fact that they’d obviously been hit by a pro.
“You think drug couriers?” Remy asked. “Maybe they crossed someone?”
Northern Georgia has had its fair share of drug trafficking in two categories: illegal and illegally manufactured. At one point three years ago, when sales were at their peak, the AJC reported that over 180,000 Georgians had an opioid problem. Which was like saying the entire city of Macon was hooked.
Remy had the back door on her side open, and I did the same on mine, letting the sunlight stream in. The plants on the hillside smelled of sage and were covered in whiteflies. Some of the insects had migrated over to the car and were stuck, dead, in the blood on the passenger windshield. It looked like someone had taken jelly and dusted it with powdered sugar.
I took a step back.
Behind the driver’s side, on the floor, was a pile of four T-shirts, still folded. I held up the top one and saw that they were thin, novelty-style shirts. “Five-dollar shirts,” my wife used to call them. The one I grabbed featured an illustration of an anthropomorphized worm climbing out of a bottle of Mezcal. The bubble near the worm’s mouth read, I don’t have a drinking problem. I drink. I get drunk. I fall down. No problem.
“You think these guys were living out of their car?” Remy asked.
On the back-seat floor on Remy’s side was an empty bag of Doritos and some Skittles wrappers.
“Looks more like a road trip,” I said.
I leaned in and checked the tags on the shirts. “These are all XXLs,” I said, motioning at the man in the passenger seat. “Maybe the big guy didn’t pack properly.”
I sat down in the back seat of the car, directly behind Juan Vinorama. At a touch over six foot, I could see just above his head, making the driver about five foot eleven. Probably a hundred and fifty pounds. I glanced to his friend, who clocked in at over two bills, but was shorter. He had a hard, rectangular face, from what I could make of it through the bloody mess.
“Bam.” I held up my finger like a gun, pointing at Vinorama over the back seat. “Bam,” I said again, pointing at an angle at the John Doe in the passenger seat.
Remy sat down in the back seat on her side, next to me. She moved her gloved hands along two lines that ran from back to front, across the center of the back-seat vinyl, in between us.
The two marks were dimpled impressions, each less than an inch wide and ten inches long, right in the center of the seat. Like where a person would sit in the middle, if there were three sitting in the rear.
“Something heavy?” she theorized.
I nodded, agreeing, and my eyes moved to a smear of reddish-brown blood that had stained through the passenger seat, from front to back. Beside the mark, the material that made up the seat back was torn up.
“What do you make of those marks?” I said, pointing at the dark spots on the back of the passenger seat. The lumbar area behind the big guy.
“Probably an errant third shot. Guy bled through from front to back,” Remy said. “Bam, bam. And then, bam.” She imitated what I had done, but added a third shot through the seat cushion that landed in the passenger’s lower back.
“Sure, but why?” I asked. “If Biggee was already shot in the head, why hit him again?”
Behind us, I heard an engine shut off and glanced up at the Caprice’s rearview mirror. Sarah Raines, the local M.E., got out of the crime scene van, along with Alvin Gerbin, her tech.
“I dunno,” Remy said. “Maybe the first shot was at the lumbar area. Then the head.”
I climbed out of the Caprice just as Officer Atienza walked up.
“Detective,” Atienza said. “Results came back from the prints on the passenger. His name is Miguel Dilmendes,” she said. “Thirty-two years old. From Cocoa Beach, Florida, just like Vinorama.”
“Brevard County,” Remy said, her mind a steel trap. “It’s got the sixth-highest drug overdose rate in the state of Florida.”
I stared at my partner. The thing you have to understand about Remy is that she not only skipped a grade in junior high, but graduated college in three years. This made her the third-youngest rookie patrolman to come out of the academy and the youngest to make detective in Mason Falls. And while I was downright impressed by both those facts, her parents did not find her occupation to be a source of pride.
They didn’t think much of the police and had imagined their daughter could be a doctor or a scientist. Someone who left their community for some time and then returned to Mason Falls, a symbol to others that anything was possible. Instead, she was stuck with me.
“I thought Brevard was the fifth highest for drugs,” I teased. “Sixth? You sure?”
My partner rolled her eyes at me.
The two men being from Brevard County probably meant this was just another death in the drug war. Bad guys killing other bad guys.
The M.E. walked up, her blond hair pulled back in a hair tie. She had on booties and a crime scene onesie, today in blue.
“Detectives,” she said. “Busy week.”
I smiled gently at Sarah. She and I had dated for a few months, until I realized I hadn’t been ready to date anyone at the time.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
Alvin Gerbin, her tech, loped along behind her, a flowery blue XXXL Hawaiian shirt over a white tee.
Remy and I took a step back toward the rear of the Caprice to let Sarah and Alvin get at the bodies.
The Caprice had whitewall tires that looked bleached, and I remembered arresting a guy for robbery back when I was in patrol. He’d been caught stealing five bags from a Dollar General, and all he had to show for it were ten boxes of baking soda and eight packs of those rectangular Mr. Clean erasers. From my interview with him, I learned that those were the secret to beautiful whitewalls.
I stripped off my gloves and turned to Remy.
Most people know that detective work largely happens in the first twenty-four hours after a murder. What they might not know is that most of the early work comes from human intel, not medical evidence. The medical findings come in later and help more in court. In proving out hypothesis and in conviction.
“Let’s let ’em get the bodies out of there, Rem.” I pointed. “Get the Chevy towed into the mod yard. Print it. In the meantime, you and I can start chatting up these guys’ families and friends.”
“Agreed,” Remy said. “Maybe we can find out what the hell these two were doing so far from home.”
“And if they’re low-level schlubs,” I added, “why did they die in such a high-level way?”
13
By ten forty-five, I was at my desk in the precinct, my head buried in my notes from the crime scene.
Juan Vinorama’s license and car were both registered in his Florida hometown, so I’d called up a Cocoa Beach detective from the roadside before Remy and I left the scene. The detective had offered to do a courtesy notification at the address on file with the DMV, and now I stared at my phone, seeing a text come in from the cop in Florida.
Bogus address on Vinorama, Detective. Same with Dilmendes. Sorry. No one to notify.
Remy came in holding up the jackets on our two dead guys. “I got yearbook photos,” she said.
But as I glanced over, something bizarre moved in front of my field of vision. Far off, across the squad room.
Chief Senza was escorting Lauten Hartley on a tour.
Lauten Hartley. The lawyer.
The same one who Remy and I had just talked about last night. The guy who I theorized had contributed to the worst day of my life.
