by John McMahon
Vankle’s body started shaking then, and I knew from enough crime scenes that he was going into cardiac arrest. “No no no,” I said, but his body stopped moving, and I knew he was gone.
The area around me was a pool of blood, and I reached my hand under Vankle’s back, feeling a second exit wound.
He was dead.
I stared over at Marvin, who’d scooted a few feet away from my Glock.
I had run down Tarticoft, and Remy had killed him.
I had Hartley on the defensive after finding that skeleton under his property.
And now Marvin had taken out Vankle.
It had been a long two years for me since Lena and Jonas were killed. Two years alone, but the people around me had done the dirty work that they knew I couldn’t do. That I wasn’t able to. They gave me time to heal. To think.
And right now I was just thinking about one thing.
Vankle’s statement about his brother.
Because a new question haunted me.
Who the hell was Steele Vankle’s brother?
57
I sat back against the couch and waited as officers came up the steps.
Beau had snuggled beside me, and I could see his leg was cut. He barely barked when patrol busted through the front door and saw me bloodied up.
“Officer down,” Patrolman Atienza said into her shoulder mic. She moved across the room and kicked the gun farther away from Marvin.
“You okay, Marsh?” her partner, Ford, said as he moved toward Vankle’s body and saw the .45.
“Given the circumstances,” I said.
Atienza got Marvin to his feet. “My father-in-law,” I said. “He shot this man with my service weapon.”
Atienza moved Marvin out onto the porch without messing with the scene, and Ford leaned over, checking Vankle’s pulse to confirm he was dead.
“Let’s get you up,” Ford said.
“Only after you get someone on the line from Animal Control,” I said. “This dog saved my life, and he’s cut badly.”
“I promise,” she said. “Why don’t you grab him, and we’ll go out to the porch?”
By the time I got outside, there were three squad cars there, and Marvin sat in the back of one of them. I had someone check the bathroom and they found Purvis there, locked inside. Vankle must’ve put both the dogs in there while he waited for me.
“Is Marsh okay?” I heard a voice ask.
It was Chief Senza.
“He’s just beaten up,” Patrolman Atienza said.
A bus arrived, but I told them I wouldn’t go unless they loaded Beau in with me, so after some delays, they agreed.
Senza tapped on the hood, and the ambulance took off, headed to Mason Falls General.
Lonnie Fuchs from County Animal Services met us out front. The same guy who’d helped me adopt Beau.
I handed him over, and he told me he’d fix the puppy up real good.
Most of the bruises were on my face, and a doctor gave me something to help me rest. But before I dozed off, I grabbed the doctor’s arm. “Find my partner,” I said. “Tell her to listen to the 911 tape.”
By three a.m., I woke up in a hospital room, disoriented. Remy was sitting there, with that big-ass boot of hers up on the bed.
“You’re wearing the same clothes as yesterday.” I squinted. “That boot must be stinky.”
“Didn’t get a chance to shower.” Remy smiled. “And I got real close to you while you were out—just to make sure you were still breathing.”
“Creeper alert,” I said.
We laughed for a bit and then Remy got that serious look in her eyes.
“What is it?” I said.
“Do you remember the Instagram post with the Camaro?” she asked. “Vankle mentioned his ‘bro’ lent it to him for the prom?”
I nodded.
“I had this gut feeling,” Remy said. “So right away I checked all the makes of cars Lauten Hartley drove. Going back since he began driving.”
I lowered my head. “They’re brothers?”
“Half-brothers,” she said. “And with the 911 tape, Abe got a warrant. Hartley’s in custody, P.T.”
I stared at my partner. “So it’s over?”
Remy nodded, and the doctor came in. Checked some of my vitals.
“It’s hard to look at you, by the way,” Remy said. “You’re not as pretty as you used to be.”
“It’s hard to hear you walk with that peg leg,” I said. “You’re not as light on your feet as you once were.”
The doctor stared at the two of us, and Remy started laughing. It felt good to lighten the mood after all that had happened.
“I think he’s ready to go, Doc,” she said.
A few minutes later, I stood up wearily, and a patrol officer drove Remy and me back to my place.
At five-thirty in the morning, it was only Abe who was on the scene. He was sitting in my dining room, a chair turned backward, staring in at the living room floor. The place was covered in yellow crime scene markers.
“Steele Vankle,” he said as I came in. “Cool name.”
“It was,” I said.
“It’s a cool enough first name to stick in my memory,” Abe said. “Like after we raided that cabin, down in Three Barrels.”
I blinked. “Tarticoft’s cabin?”
This was the house of the hitman we’d been hunting. Tarticoft. The same man hired to drive my wife and son off the road. The one who Remy shot. “You told me months ago that there was no mention of Lena there in any of his files,” I said.
“There wasn’t,” Abe said. “And Tarticoft kept so much data on the folks he took out. Cash he sorted in envelopes. Research. The folks he killed—he tracked them for months.”
“So . . . ?”
“So one of those envelopes,” Abe said, “it just had a single Post-it inside. It said ‘Cash from Steel.’ No e on the end. Never knew what to make of it.”
“Tell me you’re not lying,” I said.
“Nope.” Abe shook his head. “The cash with it was a little light relative to what the others paid for a hired kill. Only five grand.”
And there it was. Nearly twenty-one months after the worst day of my life, I had the last piece of evidence.
“It wasn’t supposed to be a hit if you believe what Steele told me tonight,” I said. “Just a little bump. A car accident.”
Remy sat down next to Abe, and I thought about the robbery at the Golden Oaks in December 2017. I had gone into that liquor store one too many times and disrupted Vankle’s Oxy operation.
I stared at Abe. “Did Marvin get released?”
“Back home a half hour ago,” Abe said. “There’ll be questions, but he’ll come out the other side. No jail time.”
Abe stood up then, his eyes still on the crime scene. He had been a great partner to me for years. Always analytical on a scene.
“So I assume you’re headed to Marvin’s house?” He ran his hands through his hair, which he’d cut short recently and looked patchy. “This is an active crime scene, P.T. You can’t be walking in here.”
“I was gonna shower.” I pointed toward the back of the house. “I know it’s not protocol, but—”
“Go.” Abe nodded. “Then be off to Marvin’s.”
I nodded, but didn’t leave the room just yet.
The body was already taken, but someone had drawn white chalk marks on my wood floors.
“I think if you test-fire that .45,” I said, “you’re gonna see it goes with that injury to the skull found under the apartment in North Heights.”
“Christian Pelo?” Abe asked. “His mom’s been waiting in the lobby for a day now.”
“He worked at the Golden Oaks,” I said. “Back in 2017. If my theory holds, John Adrian killed Pelo with that gun. And
then Vankle killed Adrian with an overdose, to close the loop.”
“You’re gonna need to testify against Hartley,” Abe said. “You know that, right?”
“I’ll be ready,” I said. “Anything else?”
“Not on this case,” Abe said. “This old case . . . is finally closed. Just a lotta paperwork to do.”
I moved to the bathroom then, slowing peeling off the dressing that had been placed on my wounds in the hospital.
In the shower I let the water soak into my wounds and closed my eyes, as hot lightning danced under the pinks of my eyelids, the water pouring deep into places that touched my nerves.
After I got dressed in my bedroom, I rolled back the carpet and took the pile of papers from my floor safe. The ones I’d printed from Harrington’s file but never finished reading before I’d left for the bar.
I could hear Remy and Abe in discussion about Vankle and Hartley out in the living room. Apparently, while I was knocked out in the hospital, Abe had done the notification of Vankle’s mom. She was also Lauten Hartley’s mom.
“‘One son worked hard and the other hardly worked,’ the mom said.” This was Abe’s voice.
“That’s it?” Remy asked.
“Mom said Lauten loved his little brother. And he’d been cleaning up for him his whole life.”
“And little brother had probably been doing dirty work for big brother his whole life,” Remy said.
I came out with my duffel, and the two went quiet.
“I got a text from Lonnie at County that Beau is in great spirits,” Remy said, breaking the awkward silence.
“Well, that’s a piece of good news,” I said.
I turned to Abe. “Don’t mess up my house.”
“Don’t come back and mess up my crime scene,” he said in response.
I grabbed Purvis from the yard, walked down the steps, and got in the car. Headed to Marvin’s.
As I drove over to my father-in-law’s place, I thought of the craziness of the last ten days. Of the school shooting and the sting at the bar that had gone south. But mostly, I found myself thinking of Kelly Borland.
Had I been too hard on her?
A man had threatened Kelly with violence, and she’d agreed to do what she thought was best in order to survive.
Was it more than that?
Could I forgive her?
Or, like Remy said, was I making it impossible for anyone to live up to the bar set by Lena Marsh?
58
September 6, 5:32 p.m.
Kelly Borland dropped her keys into the blown-glass bowl near the front of her apartment and used the back of her left high heel to push the door closed.
It was a Friday night, and she laid a dress she’d just picked up, still in its dry-cleaning plastic, over the back of her favorite armchair.
She moved into the kitchen.
“Jesus,” she said, her voice caught in her throat.
The man she’d bumped into outside of Jed’s place. The one she’d caught spying on Jed. He was sitting in the dark in her living room.
His figure was half shrouded in darkness, his hair slicked back with product. He wore a gray shirt and dark pants, a black blazer over it.
“How the hell did you get in here?” she asked.
“Sometimes I use a five-in-one tool and go through the molding,” the man said flatly. “But that can leave a mess of wood shavings.” He pointed toward her bedroom. “You should lock your back windows more often, Ms. Borland. It’s a dangerous world out there.”
“I’m calling the cops.”
“No you’re not,” the man said.
She stared at him, her palms pressed against the white kitchen counter to steady her nerves. He had a handgun when she’d seen him outside of Jed’s place. Did he have that gun on him now?
“I need to get into Jedidiah Harrington’s house,” he said. “Except I cannot be on camera. I cannot be photographed.”
She stared at him. She could feel her heart beating fast against her blouse.
“Do you have a key?” he asked.
“No.”
The relationship between Kelly and Jed had never risen to that level in the five weeks they had dated. And now it had been nine months. A couple texts exchanged. Pleasantries.
“Too bad,” the man said.
He stood up and flattened the wrinkles on his shirt with his hands.
Kelly glanced down at her car keys. She moved the Honda key between her index and middle fingers. Protruding out like a weapon.
The man turned toward her then, and Kelly’s mind raced. What had she done to deserve the luck she’d had in the last five years? First with her art, which had shown such promise, but didn’t sell. And then with men. Losers. Drunks. And here in Mason Falls . . . Jed.
“He’s not stable, you know,” the man said to Kelly. “Sooner or later, it won’t end well. Especially if these crazy lies he’s been writing get out. The people I work for—”
“Jed’s just a talker,” Kelly said, her knuckles white around the car key.
“You don’t know that,” the man said.
He stopped five or six feet from her. There was a bulge at his waist. Right side. Under his blazer.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” she said nervously. “He’s nothing to me.”
“But if you had a key, you could help him.”
“I don’t, though.”
“Or, if you could figure out some other way. Some way to get me what I need . . . it might be worth a hundred thousand to you.”
Kelly’s breathing calmed, and her eyes widened.
“Dollars?” she clarified.
59
I found Marvin asleep on the couch, a cup of tea on the table in front of him.
The hall clock read four a.m., and I found my way into the guest room that was once my wife’s room when she was growing up. Threw my duffel on the ground and fell onto Lena’s old pink comforter.
They’d cleaned me up real good at the hospital, and I’d caught two hours of sleep there, but I was fading fast.
I closed my eyes, and in a minute I was high above Mason Falls.
As I soared through the clouds, it was daylight and I saw the high walls of Condesale Gorge and the rocky canyons below it.
Like a bird, I followed east to where the water had been dammed up years earlier. Farther along the plain, I saw the red clay pits that were famous in this area, the burnt sienna color a residuum of what’s left when chemical weathering erodes the calcite and dolomite.
In my dreams I heard Jonas’s voice. Telling me it was okay to sleep. But only if I got through the rest of my work first. Only then could I move on. Could I let go.
“Look further,” he said. “Look further, Dad,” he repeated, and I woke with a start.
Purvis had found a place in the corner of the room, and he sat up, alert and staring at me.
I pulled my feet off the bed and touched the cold hardwood floors of Marvin’s house. Stared over at my duffel.
Taking the bag up onto the bed beside me, I grabbed the pile of papers that I hadn’t finished going through from Harrington’s stash. The stuff I’d gotten from my floor safe before I left home.
As I carried the pile out to the dining table, I noticed that Marvin had relocated from the couch and was now asleep in his bed.
I turned on the lights in the dining room and spread out the last few papers I had not yet gone through before I left to get drunk.
The first ten pages were a journal of sorts.
Jed Harrington had tracked where Monroe had gone for a period of weeks. He’d followed the governor to Atlanta and over to Macon. To Athens. And then up north into Tennessee.
The next two pages were black-and-white printouts of pictures.
The photos were shot at night and were grainy.
Pictures of someone taking pictures. At first I didn’t understand what I was looking at.
But as I got to the last one, I recognized a man. He worked for Monroe. A nebbish-looking administrative aide that I’d seen at some event.
In the picture, the aide sat in a sedan, a camera in hand, his driver’s side window down.
If Monroe had suspected that Harrington was the author of the blog I’d found, the governor might’ve sent one of his trusted guys to check out the reporter. To take pictures. And this guy had become the subject of a picture himself. Because Jed Harrington had caught him on camera.
I considered what happened next. Because if the governor suspected that Harrington was onto him, then Monroe would send someone more serious than an administrative aide. More dangerous.
This triggered a thought, and I grabbed my cell. Called the front desk at the precinct. Hope Duffy picked up on the second ring, working the night shift again.
“Hey, partner,” I said. “It’s P.T.”
Hope made a noise with her nose. She was still waiting for the payoff of being my partner.
“Hope,” I said. “Was Billy Walker there tonight? He’s a sketch artist we use.”
I wanted to know if someone had sat with Kelly Borland and drawn a picture of the man she’d claimed to see outside of Jed Harrington’s.
“Yeah,” she said. “He left maybe two hours ago.”
“The sketch,” I said. “It’s probably taped up in Abe’s office. I need a shot of it.”
“I can’t leave the desk for a half hour,” she said. “But if it’s taped up somewhere, I’ll text it to you.”
I hung up and looked at the rest of the paperwork I had on Monroe.
The pages at the bottom of the stack were a list of investment holdings.
First, a series of partnerships. And then, when it wasn’t clear what percentage Monroe owned of the partnership or who else owned it, Jed Harrington had painstakingly broken that down.
I traced my finger down the list, but they meant nothing to me.
