A Good Kill

by John McMahon

  I came up with the dogs. Mostly with Beau, since he was leashed. Purvis was lagging behind us.

  “Hey,” she said. Then she stopped. Stared at Beau and then back at me.

  “Is everything all right?” I asked.

  “Where’s Purvis?”

  I turned, revealing my bulldog trailing behind us.

  “Oh, I was worried something happened to him,” she said. “I know you said he was eight.”

  I nodded. Bulldogs typically didn’t live that long, and people who know the breed are aware of this.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But he’s a survivor.”

  Beau had been skittish around Marvin a bit, but Kelly was a natural with animals.

  “His name’s Beau,” I said. “I, uh—adopted him from County. He was gonna get euthanized.”

  Kelly let him smell her hand and then rubbed him as I opened the front door. “Hello, Beau-Beau,” she said.

  She followed me in, and I wondered if this was what I thought it was. What Remy would call a “booty call.”

  Kelly wore black leggings and a scoop-neck tee. She held a Kroger grocery bag in her hand, which she put onto the counter.

  She pulled out a Dr Pepper and a bag of ice.

  “I know you don’t drink,” she said. “So instead of dropping by with a bottle of wine . . .”

  “Let’s break it open,” I said.

  She uncapped it and poured two of them. We went into the living room, where I took a seat in the La-Z-Boy and she sat on the couch, diagonally across from me.

  Kelly had seemed tense at the banquet, and more so now.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t tell if you were avoiding me at the dinner,” she said.

  “It’s not that,” I said. “With all the press there, I didn’t want a big story made out of it. You being where you were, on one side of the gun. And me on the other. And someone guessing we might be seeing each other now.”

  Beau came over and sat near Kelly.

  “So what does that mean about us?” she asked. “I’m always gonna be the girl on this side of the gun. I can’t change that.”

  I hesitated. She was right. And it wasn’t her fault that she was an art teacher, caught in the cross fire at a school shooting.

  “He likes you,” I said. Motioning at the dog. “So do I, I mean.” I hesitated. “I got some stuff I’m figuring out right now. A case.”

  “I figured you were off of work. After what happened in Atlanta.”

  I thought about the argument Remy and I had down inside the Golden Oaks. About what was holding me back. And if I couldn’t allow myself to care about a woman again.

  “This isn’t for work,” I said, wanting to be honest with Kelly. “This case is personal,” I said. “It involves what happened to my wife. There’s been a break.”

  “Oh wow,” she said. “That’s good, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s just—until I solve it . . .” I looked at her and then flicked my eyes downward.

  “It’s hard for you to concentrate on us,” she said.

  I nodded, and we went quiet then. After a moment, I noticed she was studying me.

  “Are you sleeping, Paul?” she asked, using my first name.

  “No,” I said. “No, I’m not.”

  “Then sit back.” She motioned at the La-Z-Boy.

  She moved behind me then and started rubbing the areas right by my temples. Then she moved her fingers along my skull, and by the fleshy areas above my neck.

  “Holy moly,” I said.

  “My magic massage,” she said. “If I keep going, you’re gonna zonk for ten hours.”

  “Ten hours is too much,” I said.

  A few minutes later, she kissed me on the cheek, and I heard her say “goodbye.”

  46

  By ten a.m., I had parked and was heading across the street from the overflow lot toward the precinct.

  I was still officially off of work, and had slept most of the night in the armchair where Kelly had left me. But it was Saturday, so it was a perfect time to sneak in and do a little personal research.

  Ahead of me, I saw Hope Duffy, from intake, heading out from the nightshift. Ten a.m. was late for her to be getting off, and she lifted her head when she saw me. Adjusted her course in my direction.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “I was hoping I’d see you.”

  I slowed as she approached. Hope’s hair had lost its usual bounce, and her eyes looked bloodshot. Something had dilled her pickle.

  “Want to guess where I just spent the last two hours, Marsh?” she asked.

  I shrugged. There are things you don’t raise your hand for in life. Just in case you’re right.

  “With my C.O. and a detective from vice,” she said. “You wanna guess why?”

  I stared at Hope.

  “Apparently,” she said, “I made a computer inquiry about a man named John Adrian.”

  “Oh shit,” I said.

  I’d made that inquiry on Hope’s account.

  Had Hartley tracked it down and caused trouble?

  “What did you say?”

  “Well, I was very careful in my phrasing.” She raised her eyebrows. “The kinda language I can go back on later, you know?”

  “Yeah,” I said. But I didn’t know what she meant.

  Go back on later?

  “Like whenever you discover whatever it is that you’re looking for,” Hope said. “Get another one of those awards . . .”

  I stared at her.

  “And then you can tell my C.O. how we were working together on the case,” Hope said, “the whole time.”

  “Together?” I squinted.

  “Well, you wouldn’t want anyone pulling records from the lobby camera, would you? Seeing you log in at my terminal.”

  “Just a thing partners like us do,” I said, changing my tune.

  “Good,” Hope answered. “Then you should know that John Adrian’s not our problem anymore. He’s dead, Marsh.”

  “What the hell?”

  “Apparently vice has been trying to turn him as a C.I. for some case up in Shonus,” she said. “But three a.m. this morning, patrol found their potential confidential informant dead at some flophouse. Ten points of black tar in his arm. The needle still hanging there.”

  Ten points was a full gram. And a gram of heroin was enough to kill two men, especially if it was cut with fentanyl, which we’d been seeing a lot of in Mason Falls these days.

  But more than that, my brain was swelling because of the timing.

  Last night Hartley had been cornered by Deb Newberry from Fox 11 about that property where Christian Pelo was found.

  Hope turned and moved past me to this little yellow Fiat she drives.

  “Good luck, partner,” she said. “Do us proud.”

  I stood there, feeling nervous and numb.

  If Hartley had the kind of nerve to go after my wife, it wouldn’t take much more to kill someone like Adrian on his own crew. Poison him before he could be flipped by a cop.

  Had I gotten arrogant? Moved too fast at Hartley last night?

  47

  Instead of going into the station house, I got back in my truck and drove to Remy’s place.

  She buzzed me up, and I took the elevator to three. When I got there, she had left the door ajar and was on the couch in her living room, her foot in a boot.

  “You’re not gonna believe this,” I said. “Last night we corner Hartley, right? Connect him to Adrian. Thinking we’ll smoke out Adrian and he’ll give us dirt on Hartley?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Adrian’s dead, Rem.”

  “What?” she said.

  “Overdose,” I told her.

  “Hartley,” she said. “The
fucker got to him.”

  I stood up and started pacing, not sure if I’d made the wrong move last night talking to Hartley at the police function.

  “I’m not sure what our next play is,” I said. “Adrian was our link back to 2017. Back to the liquor store.”

  “Then we find another link.”

  “Yeah.” I nodded, moving in circles like a shark around Remy’s dining table. “Except I don’t have any other leads, Rem.”

  “P.T.,” Remy said. “Hartley’s like this ghost architect, you know? Moving behind the scenes. The problem is—he’s seeing the whole chessboard, and we’re not.”

  “Sure,” I said, grabbing a chair from her dining table. “You got an idea on how we see more?”

  “I’ve been thinking about what you mentioned—how Hartley interjected himself in the Meadows lawsuit with the department back in May. Why’d he do that?”

  “To take me out,” I said.

  “Yeah, but why then?” Remy asked.

  “We don’t know.”

  “Maybe we do,” she said. “And we just haven’t tied it all together.”

  “What are you thinking?” I asked.

  “In May, Marvin and his P.I. were stumbling around in Burna,” Remy said. “That’s what you told me, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They met that lady who got her car stolen.”

  “Grazia Lauroyan,” I said. “Her car is the Dodge Aries that ended up killing Lena and Jonas.”

  “So Marvin’s P.I. tracked that car back to where Lauroyan worked.”

  “Check,” I said.

  “Then what?” Remy asked.

  “The P.I. probably talked to the neighbors. He went next door to Lauroyan’s upholstery shop and ran straight into Kian Tarticoft, our hitman, whose taxidermy business was next to her shop. The P.I. asked her about the car. And inadvertently, he spooked him. Tarticoft up and cleared out.”

  “Which is not good if you’re Hartley,” Remy said. “’Cause you think, here’s this assassin you hired to kill a cop’s family. And now the cop’s father-in-law and his P.I. are getting close to that assassin. And that kinda crap’s gonna lead back to you.”

  “Shit, Rem.” I ran my hands through my hair, realizing something about the timing.

  “The day Tarticoft cleared out his machine shop,” I said. “It’s the day before Johnson Hartley joined the suit against the department. Agreed to work pro bono.”

  Remy flicked her eyebrows at me. “So now we’re seeing the whole chessboard like him. Tarticoft didn’t just disappear from your radar. He disappeared from Hartley’s radar. And Hartley had to do something about it. He had too much to risk if Tarticoft talked.”

  I thought about this. About my father-in-law, Marvin, being on a trail that could lead from Tarticoft, the assassin, right to Hartley. The next day Hartley joined in on the lawsuit to get me fired.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That tracks.”

  “So Hartley tries to marginalize you,” Remy said. “To get you fired by suing the department. But instead, they don’t fire you. And I kill Tarticoft.”

  “Hartley’s loose end is tied up,” I said. “And I’m suspended.”

  “His problems are over,” Remy said. “Except you don’t go away after May. You got demoted, but you’re still sniffing out Hartley. Camped outside his house. Following him. So he gets a new idea. Maneuvers into a place to run the police board. Figures P. T. Marsh’ll do something stupid sooner or later. And then he’ll have you out on official grounds.”

  “Hartley’s making moves to counter moves we don’t even know that we’re making.”

  “We know we’re making them,” Remy clarified. “Just not against him.”

  “So what now?” I said. “Adrian’s still dead.”

  “Sure,” Remy said. “But Hartley can’t be pulling all this shit off by himself. Especially if that powder under the liquor store was drugs. He’s gotta have a crew, P.T. You got any leads on who else works with him?”

  I pulled a pile of paperwork from my satchel. The stuff I’d printed at the precinct the other night when I had Hope’s log-in.

  Remy saw me scanning a police report. “Does Hartley have a record?”

  “No,” I said. “But he had some altercation with patrol back in 2004. He was young, but . . .”

  I stared at a particular paper, making a connection.

  “There was a passenger in the car with Hartley,” I said. “During this beef he got into.”

  I paged through the old police report. “Hartley is twenty-eight back then. The other guy in the car is eighteen.”

  “Family?” she asked.

  “Different last names.”

  “A friend?” Remy asked.

  “I dunno,” I said. Moving to the next page of the police report.

  “A special friend?” my partner continued, stretching her booted leg. “Hartley’s twenty-eight and this guy’s eighteen?”

  “The passenger’s name is Steele Vankle,” I said, finding what I was looking for. “Nowadays he’d be in his thirties.”

  I paged back through my six-by-nine notebook. “The lady at the apartment complex where Christian Pelo’s skeleton was found. She said Hartley comes by with a muscular blond guy. His right-hand guy. She said he had an odd nickname. ‘Iron,’ she thought.”

  Or Steele.

  Remy sat up. “So Steele’s known Hartley for fifteen years then?”

  “And he was working with Hartley in 2017 when Pelo’s body was buried,” I said. “According to Maria, the apartment manager, Steele was the one who wheelbarrowed all the dirt into that basement to cover up Pelo’s body.”

  “So if we’re thinking John Adrian killed Christian Pelo two Christmases ago,” Remy said, “Steele may have done Hartley’s dirty work and killed John Adrian last night.”

  I flipped my chair backward and sat down, leaning over the back and thinking this over.

  “It’s a unique name,” Remy said, her eyes on her phone and her thumbs moving fast.

  Remy handed her cell to me. On it was Steele Vankle’s Instagram page.

  I flicked through the images. He was midthirties like we thought. White and handsome, with blue eyes and blondish-red hair that fell to his shoulders.

  Half of the pictures were of him, training at a gym. The cowbell thing. The big rope. There was also a low-quality video from 2005 of Vankle wrestling in some homemade octagon. It was in the shape of an old four-by-three TV screen. Must’ve been uploaded to Instagram years later.

  In the last shot, Steele Vankle stood in front of a red Camaro from the ’80s. I stared at the caption below the photo. Always wanted one of these since my bro let me drive his to the prom, it read. Vintage and cherry red. The post was from eighteen months ago.

  I zoomed in on the license plate.

  “Well, we got a plate,” I said. “If we run it, we’ll have an address.”

  “Sure,” Remy said. “But then Hartley might know you’re coming again. What you need is a way to find this Steele Vankle guy. But off the books. A hundred percent off the books.”

  “I got an idea,” I said.

  48

  I was back at the precinct in fifteen minutes, but entered the building through the mod yard and took the elevator down to the bowels of the place. Threading my way through a series of corridors, I got to a small glassed-in office with the words “Data Collection” stenciled in white type on the window.

  D.C. was a group that had begun last year with two employees, both named Joan, each of whose title was “police records specialist.” Their current job was to assist patrol and detectives with data-based research. To enter warrants into the system and help with protection orders and other paperwork that kept cops sitting behind a desk instead of out on the street.

  “Hello, Joans,” I said, entering the
office.

  Both women were blond with brown streaks in their hair. One was in her early thirties and donned a conservative pantsuit and blouse, while the other was late forties with spiky hair and a lot of handmade jewelry. Remy constantly accused me of not knowing which one was Joan Snow and which was Joan Reinhardt. Until I confessed that my partner was right, Remy wasn’t giving up the answer.

  “There’s the big hero,” the older Joan said. “And gracing our little basement office.”

  She got up and gave me a hug, and the younger Joan followed after.

  “How’s our girl doing?” the younger Joan said, referring to Remy. Every woman in the building loved my partner.

  “She’s recovering nicely,” I said. “I think she’s gotta take a few months off of running, but she’s in a boot as of this morning. I’ll tell her you were asking.”

  “What do you need, hon?” the older Joan asked. “You on your own while Rem’s off?”

  “I am,” I said, grabbing a black rolling office chair and sitting down. “I wasn’t sure if you’d be here on the weekend.”

  “You’re in luck. We back up all the servers, once a quarter on a Saturday. What can we help with?”

  “Well, I got a weird question for y’all.” I hesitated. “You know that unpopular license plate scanner program we had going last year?”

  “You mean the original reason we have jobs?” Older Joan smiled.

  Under the old chief, the city had invested in technology that installed scanners mounted to four police cruisers. The cops who drove those black and whites went about their day like normal, but while they worked, three high-def cameras mounted on their roof took photographs of every parked car they passed: the vehicle, their passengers, and the plates. The system was even smart enough to package the pictures together so you had a location on the car, its profile shot, and the license plate, all in one folder.

  The original plan was that if a car’s plate came across as stolen, an officer was alerted and a squad car dispatched into action. Through tickets and impounds, the program would pay for itself in three years.

  “We’re not still running that, are we?” I asked.