by John McMahon
“Before you say anything,” she said, “can you let me explain?”
“Sure,” I said. Standing there. Going over in my head how I’d shared things with her. Personal things that I hadn’t told anyone. Stories about Lena and Jonas.
“Will you sit down?”
“No,” I said.
“I dated Jed, okay?” She held her hands up, palms out.
“Jesus,” I said.
“I figured you knew,” she said. “Not the rest of the cops. But you. I figured that’s why you were hesitating getting involved with me.”
“Kelly,” I said, leaning against a metal railing that separated the patio from the street. “You lied to the police. To the school. To me.”
She touched my arm. “A teacher was dead, P.T. Kids would’ve been shot if you didn’t stop him.”
“I did stop him,” I said. “But do you know how much time we spent trying to figure out why the hell he went there?”
“It wasn’t fair,” she said. “Don’t you see? I would’ve been that woman who some guy shot up a school for. I didn’t know he was capable of violence.”
“So why did he show up?” I asked.
“How should I know?” she said. “We dated for five weeks. That was nine months ago. He was the first person I met in Mason Falls.”
“And you hadn’t seen him in nine months?”
“No, I’d seen him,” she said. “But we were over. Long over.”
There was something wrong. Kelly was trying harder to convince me about her lack of relationship with Harrington than her lack of connection to a crime. Did she think she was salvaging something that we had?
“So why’d he shoot Leaf Tanner?” I asked. “Jed had no history of violence.”
“I don’t know.”
“Did they know each other?”
“No.”
“Were you and Leaf involved?”
“No, I promise.”
I thought of the guys at the GBI who now held this investigation. And I’d gone out with Kelly. Jesus, I’d look like a rook.
“I would’ve been ruined, P.T.,” she pleaded. “One of those women who get Law & Order episodes made about them.”
“No,” I said.
“My name would’ve been a national joke,” she continued. “On late-night TV. And for what? It wasn’t going to bring Jed or Leaf back.”
I considered this. Was Kelly right?
“We wouldn’t have allowed that to happen to you,” I said.
“You couldn’t have stopped it. How did it go for you?” she asked. “The media—around your wife’s death?”
A particular image flashed in my head. A photographer who’d jumped the back fence and was taking pictures of Jonas’s empty swing set in the backyard. And me—destroying his camera equipment. I remember planting my hands around the photographer’s neck. And Marvin, who was there at the time, dragging me backward through the crabgrass, my right arm swinging wide.
“I’m calling for a patrol car, Kelly,” I said, pulling out my phone. “This isn’t my case. At a minimum, it’s obstruction of justice. But more than that, I can’t be the one you’re telling this to.”
She grabbed my hand then, her eyes intense. A single streak of resistant red in her hair hung across her cheek.
“I got caught up in something,” she said.
“Apparently,” I said. “Your ex came to the school with a gun.”
“No,” she said. “Something bigger than that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t call the cops, okay? If you do, I’m not gonna tell you anything.”
“Anything about what?” I said.
She was silent for a moment, and I waited.
“I came upon this guy, okay? He was spying on Jed. Outside his house.”
“What guy?” I asked.
But inside, I was thinking one word: bullshit.
“I went to Jed’s,” she said. “A couple weeks ago. Outside was this guy, binoculars in hand. Camera with a zoom lens. He had a gun tucked inside his jacket.”
“A guy you knew?”
“No.”
“He threatened you?”
“Not exactly,” she pleaded. “But a few days later, he showed up at my place. He told me I had to take Jed’s papers.”
I blinked. “What papers?”
“Jed was always talking about publishing some great piece, but he never did. He just talked and talked and accumulated paper after paper. I didn’t think he would even notice they were gone.”
I stared at Kelly.
Was she making this shit up as she went? Abe and I had looked through all of Jed’s papers in those boxes.
I bent my head. “And who was this guy?”
“He never told me his name.”
“What did he look like?”
“Handsome.” She shrugged. “White. Dark hair.”
“A handsome white guy?” I said. Half of Georgia fit that description. “Why didn’t you call the police?”
“I dunno,” she said. “He surprised me outside on the street. And in my house.”
“What kind of car did he drive?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Some SUV. Dark.”
“So you did what?” I said. “Stole Jed’s research? For what reason?”
“I was scared.”
“This guy offer you something? Pay you?”
“No.”
I squinted. “Nothing?”
“I didn’t think anyone would get hurt,” she said. “The guy made it seem like Jed was a danger.”
“To you?”
“To himself.” Kelly raised her voice.
“But you just said Jed wasn’t dangerous.”
Kelly’s eyes flitted left. Was she lying? None of this made sense.
“Jed never did anything with this research,” she said. “He was fanatical. And then that day at the school, he showed up.”
“The day of the shooting?”
“Leaf and I were talking in the back room during our free period, and there was a knock on the door.”
“You let Jed in?”
“I opened the door, and there he was. This crazy look on his face. I told him I didn’t have the papers anymore.”
I pictured Jed Harrington, unhinged.
“Things escalated,” Kelly continued. “Leaf told him to take it easy. ‘Chill out, Cochise,’ Leaf said. And Jed took out a gun. And shot him.”
Kelly went silent then, but tears ran down her cheek.
Was she faking?
Was she pathological?
“I don’t want to lose what we have,” she said to me. “That’s why I stayed.”
“Stayed” meaning what?
I stared at Kelly.
Was any of what she was saying true? I mean, we’d been together for three days at Schaeffer Lake, and she never mentioned any connection to Jed.
“So that’s your story?” I said. “Dark-haired white guy in an SUV asked you to steal from Jed. Jed got mad and shot Leaf with a gun he brought to school.”
“It’s the truth.”
“And you thought you’d be in a Law & Order episode if you told us.”
Kelly’s face was angry now, and she violently wiped at the tears on each cheek.
I wasn’t sure what to believe. Maybe she shot Leaf Tanner. Maybe she and Jed planned it together. And then I’d shot Jed, leaving her to invent any story she wanted.
I pulled out my phone. Called for a black and white to take her to the station house.
“Are we finished?” she asked. “You and me?”
I wondered when and where I’d missed something. At the lake, Kelly had mentioned how fast she could leave town. Pack everything in one carload.
“We never got started,” I said. “This whole thing was built on a lie.”
I walked out to the street and called Abe. Let him know what had happened.
“Jesus H. Christ on a grain of rice,” he said.
It was impossible not to look like a fool on this one. But it wasn’t just me. Kelly had been the chief’s guest at the police banquet. She’d sat between Chief Senza and Mayor Stems. Abe and Merle had interviewed her. Even the GBI in the last week. And poor Leaf Tanner, who we initially had suspected of being involved . . . he’d done nothing.
A black and white rolled to the curb as I finished up with Abe.
I helped Kelly into the squad car. Told the blue-suiters that Abe Kaplan was waiting for her on the other end.
The patrol car left, and I knew there might be charges against Kelly. Obstruction. Theft maybe. The D.A. would have to decide on all that. It was hard to tell right now.
After they’d gone, I fired up my truck and sat there for a moment, trying to refocus on Steele Vankle.
There was one other address that the two Joans had given me. Presumed to be Vankle’s home address.
I drove over there and parked behind the condos, my eyes scanning the street. It was six p.m. and the sun was low in the sky.
Kelly, I thought still. What a mess.
Clear it from your thoughts, Purvis said. Focus. Purvis in my head again.
I loped around to the front of the complex. Under an open portico, I found mail with Vankle’s name on it, along with a #4, which was a ground-floor unit on the corner. I banged on the front door, but no one was there.
Walking around back, I jumped a small fence and found myself in a ten-by-ten yard that had a single flower planter and two patio chairs.
From the back, I could see into his place. A one-bedroom, furnished in a contemporary style. A small combined living and dining area. All of it looked empty.
I’d announced my presence to Vankle at the gym, but not given my name. And yet he’d called me “Marsh” on the roof. He knew me.
I made my way back to my truck and started it up. Finding a more strategic area to park, I watched the place. Grabbed an old Taser from my glove box.
This would be the way I’d take Vankle down.
Non-lethal force. To keep the nut from running with my cuffs on again.
53
It was close to eight p.m. by the time a noise woke me.
I had dozed off in my truck, and the buzzing sound was a text from Alvin Gerbin, from the crime scene unit.
Stuff in evidence bag is Oxy.
I stared at the words. The text was in regard to the bag of powder that I’d found under the Golden Oaks. Now I had a good idea of what was going on under the store. And it matched with the drug trafficking trends from 2017.
The sun had gone down, and all the residents at 891 Burke Street had their lights on. That is, except for Vankle, whose ground-floor unit was dark.
I was tired, but I didn’t want to go back to the precinct. Didn’t want to hear any bullshit about Kelly Borland and me.
I got home by nine and wandered the house, a nervous energy causing me to clean a full sink of dishes and put all my dirty clothes in the laundry.
The dogs moved underfoot, not barking. Even Beau, who was like a puppy half the time, sensed my mood and was somehow subdued.
I rang Marvin up, but got his answering machine.
“I need to get out of town,” I said to my father-in-law’s machine. “Go somewhere. Take a few days.”
I hesitated, trying to sound unaffected by the fact that the one woman I’d fallen for in the last year was a liar. “I was wondering if you can come by, Pop,” I continued. “Grab the dogs and watch ’em while I’m gone.”
I hung up and flipped open the cabinets where I used to keep the liquor. Nothing. Cleared out months ago by me and Marvin.
When I finally stopped moving, I went outside and sat on the porch. Beau was clawing at the front window, so I tied his longer leash to a pole out front and let him sniff the entirety of the porch. Eventually he settled down and sat a few feet to my left. His eyes were always on me, a protective stare, and I thought of Jed Harrington.
A loose thread had been scratching at the inside of my brain for the last hour, and a row of questions were lining up, not all of them with answers.
Kelly Borland had lied, sure.
But I had also known something was off about her.
I had avoided getting involved with her physically, and it was more than just about Lena.
Kelly’s story about the papers at Jed’s place, and the photo of the boxes that leaked out to the media.
Could Kelly have been the one who leaked that shot out to Fox TV?
And if so, why? To seal Jed’s fate as a crazy person?
I remembered going through those boxes in Jed Harrington’s casita the night of the shooting. The empty ones. Wondering if something important might have once been inside of them.
The few reporters that Merle had interviewed said Harrington had had a rough year, but had recently settled into a new rhythm. He was writing something big again. Two of them guessed it was a book.
Opening my satchel, I went through my notes from the night that Abe and I spent at Harrington’s house after the shooting.
I read through a list of everything I’d catalogued from his backhouse, scanning down to the last note I’d written when channel eleven broke the story and released that picture of Harrington’s place. The one that marked him as crazy.
On my home computer, I found the article by Raymond Kirios in the Register, from the day after the school shooting. It detailed everything that was known at the time, from Harrington’s past embedded with the military, all the way up to the moment I shot him.
Reading it with fresh eyes, I stared at the photos inside his backhouse that first appeared on channel eleven. Of the gun rack and the banker’s boxes.
And I noticed something.
The boxes marked G.U. on the sides—in the picture in the Register—they were piled in a neat line, parallel to the grout lines, and they sagged with weight.
But when I got to the backhouse, those same boxes were empty.
I stared up at a crack that ran across my dining room ceiling. It curved around the area where the chandelier hung, and I remembered a hundred promises to Lena to patch that crack.
Purvis lay on the floor nearby, and I paced in a circle around the dining room table, tossing that rubber ball from one hand to the other.
The only possible answer has got to be the truth, my bulldog huffed.
The photo from the Register must’ve been taken at some earlier time.
Before the shooting.
Like before Kelly cleared out those boxes, if I believed her story.
I remembered seeing the letters G.U. on the boxes, and then searching for a similar reference in Harrington’s Rolodex.
All I’d found was a chicken scratch of two paw prints.
I typed “GU,” “writer,” and “Jed Harrington” into my Web browser and hit Enter, looking for an exact match to those expressions, all in the same web link, if it existed.
As usual, a lot of hits came up, but only one entry had all three items perfectly as I’d written them.
Clicking on it, I was brought to a conspiracy theory website, one that specialized in politics in the southeast, mostly Georgia and Alabama.
I searched within the page and found multiple references to “GU,” each of them referring to the two letters as if they represented some website or blog.
When I searched within the website for “Harrington,” I found a single entry hidden in a back-and-forth between two folks on a comments page.
Do you think that a reporter might be the author of the Government Unrest blog? Someone not working right now, like Geno Sommers or Jed Harrington?
I didn’t know who Geno Sommers was, but my eyes lit up seeing Jed Harrington’s name. I also wasn’t familiar with a blog called Government Unrest. But now I realized what “G.U.” stood for. Was this Harrington’s blog?
Finding it on my browser, I scanned the blog’s articles. The author was listed as “Anonymous,” but he or she took on every level of government and tackled multiple issues, from voter fraud to bribes taken to unfair state bidding practices.
And in ninety percent of the blog entries, the author, who went unnamed, targeted one person more than anyone else.
Governor Toby Monroe.
I hadn’t breathed in a minute, and I forced air in and out of my lungs.
“Shit,” I said aloud.
When Governor Monroe had called me on the roof at the school, he’d acted as if Harrington was some unknown madman.
Could Jed Harrington be the author of this blog?
The articles were highly speculative. They made jumps in logic that were not too different from how the editor of the Register had described the work Harrington had submitted.
But the blog also alluded to a trove of support documents in an archive, all at the author’s ready. Was this real? Or some bullshit threat?
Looking around the home page, I saw a tiny red period down at the bottom, nearly hidden in a field of black. When I hovered my mouse over it, it became a clickable link.
Selecting it, a window popped up, asking me for a password.
I stared at the box.
I’d taken a security course last year in Atlanta, and there had been a lecture on the most commonly used passwords by Americans.
I typed in “123456,” and hit Enter. The box went blank.
I typed in the word “password.” Not that either.
Then “welcome.”
Then “admin.”
Harrington was unmarried. No kids. No girlfriend. I thought of the dog and typed in “beau.” A warning came up:
One more attempt before password locks
“Damn it,” I said aloud.
I wore another circle into the floor around my dining table, staring at the award for heroism that I’d received for the school shooting, which was parked in the center of the table.
