Kill Fee

by Owen Laukkanen

  Maybe not the whole clan, Stevens thought, studying a picture of Paige Pyatt torn from the Star Tribune, but at least one family member was in deeper than expected.

  He walked through the rest of the house and out the back door, and stood in the sunlight and surveyed the yard. The forest seemed to creep nearly to the house, walling in the property and isolating it almost completely. Birds chirped and sang high in the trees, and a few early-bird bugs motored past, but otherwise, the whole place was silent.

  Stevens turned to McNaughton. “What’s through there?” he asked her. “How far back does it go?”

  McNaughton shrugged. “Not as far as you’d think. There’s a house directly behind this one about a hundred yards. A road about fifty yards to the right.”

  Stevens looked around. “Nobody saw the killer come in,” he said. “No mysterious cars parked in the driveway?”

  “Just the Benz.”

  “And the shooter left dirt and leaves by the back door, huh?” Stevens stepped off the porch and crossed the yard to the forest. There was underbrush, but the terrain was passable, and Stevens pushed his way into the woods as, behind him, McNaughton struggled to keep up.

  “Christ,” she said, between breaths. “Forgot you were the outdoorsy type.”

  They walked through the forest until they reached the road. It was a quiet side road, no curb. Stevens hopped across a slight ditch and stood on the crumbled pavement, looking around.

  There were houses nearby, on the opposite side of the street. Older bungalows, not as big as Cody’s. The trees weren’t as thick. Stevens walked the shoulder until he found what he was looking for. It had rained recently, and the grass was still damp. There was an imprint of two tires in the mud.

  Directly across the street, a child played with a ball on a grassy front lawn. He was a little boy, maybe six. Stevens crossed the street toward him.

  “Hi there,” he called. The boy froze. Looked at him once and then booked it around the house. Stevens walked to the front door and knocked. A minute or two later, the door swung open and a teenage girl peered out at him, a baby in her arms. Stevens showed her his badge. “Hi,” he said. “BCA. Looking into what happened across the way. I wondered if you might have seen anything.”

  The girl shook her head. “I didn’t.”

  “You were here yesterday?”

  She nodded.

  “Any chance the little guy was playing outside?”

  The girl thought about it. “Yeah, actually, he was. You want to talk to him?”

  She disappeared into the house before Stevens could answer. Came back a couple minutes later with the little boy in tow. Stevens hunched down at eye level, introduced himself. The kid hid behind his babysitter’s legs and peered out at him.

  “You see anything yesterday, guy?” Stevens asked him. “A car, maybe? Somebody walking in the forest?”

  The kid stared at Stevens, his face solemn. Then he nodded. Stevens nodded back. “What did you see?”

  “A man went into the forest,” the boy said. “Then he came back and went away in his car.”

  Bingo. “What—” Stevens paused. “What color was the car?”

  “Blue,” said the boy. “It was a blue car.”

  “Big car? Little?”

  “Little.”

  “What about the man? Was he young or old?”

  The kid turned away and buried his face in his babysitter’s jeans. “Okay,” said Stevens. “Did he have light skin or dark?”

  The little boy didn’t answer. He twisted away and hid his face. His babysitter clucked her tongue. “He gets anxious,” she said. “He doesn’t like strangers.”

  Stevens stood. “That’s okay,” he said. He handed the girl a business card. “Tell the parents I stopped by. Duluth PD might need a statement.”

  The girl took the card. “Sure.”

  “Sure,” said Stevens. “Okay.” He told the girl good-bye and walked back to the road, where McNaughton stood on the shoulder, waiting. The cop raised an eyebrow as he approached.

  “Anything?”

  “Got a guy coming out of the forest,” said Stevens.

  “Nice,” said McNaughton. “What else?”

  Stevens looked up and down the empty road. “Got a car,” he said. “Got a little blue car.”

  24

  Parkerson finished work for the day and stood up from his desk. He walked around to his door and peered out. The office was nearly empty; it was a quarter past six. Almost everyone had gone home.

  Jamie was pulling her coat on by her desk. She smiled at Parkerson. “Need anything before I go, Mr. P?”

  Parkerson let his eyes wander over her body for a moment. Admired her smile, her long, coltish legs. “I’m fine,” he said, shaking his head. “Get out of here already.”

  Jamie winked and tossed him a little wave. Then she turned to go. Parkerson watched her until she’d disappeared down the hallway. Then he ducked back into his office.

  He sat down again in front of his computer. Shut down all of his work windows and opened the VPN he’d created, a virtual private network that would hide his activities from the office servers. He turned on a program he’d devised to cloak his IP address, thus preventing any prying eyes out in cyberspace from figuring out his location. Then, satisfied, he logged into the database.

  There had been some activity since Saturday’s job. Three new applications, all of them interesting in one way or another, each of them potentially lucrative. One was time-sensitive—a week on the outside. The other two could percolate.

  Three new jobs. And no sign of any slowdown. The program was a success, just as Parkerson had always known it would be.

  It had been six or seven years now since he’d dreamt up the scheme. Since he’d first recognized the profit potential in murder. The country was at war, and the economy was thriving. Death, Parkerson realized, was a commodity like anything else. There would always be a market. The trick was to exploit it.

  Murder for hire. The connotations were ugly. Some shady back-alley thug with a pistol and a duffel bag filled with dirty money. Some sad sack killing his wife for the insurance payoff. Sleaze. Desperation. And, above all, incredible risk.

  These days, though, a man could do anything from ordering pizza to finding a girlfriend online. Why not make killing just as simple? Quick and easy. Mitigate the risk. Murder with the click of a mouse.

  Parkerson devised a business model. An online database, efficient and anonymous. He’d farm out the killing. Keep his own hands clean. Let someone else do the risky stuff while he counted his money in the background.

  He’d searched for months for suitable assets. Common criminals wouldn’t do; they’d get greedy, or scared. They’d make mistakes, freak out at the first complication. Too imperfect. Too human. Parkerson needed better.

  He needed drones: cold, clinical, and totally malleable, capable of carrying out instructions quickly and self-sufficiently without ever compromising the program at large. What he needed were trained killing machines.

  He found them in steady supply. Two wars were raging. Young men and women were returning from the combat zones by the planeload, many of them psychologically scarred and extremely vulnerable.

  It had taken some time, but he’d perfected the formula. Young veterans, loners, traumatized by the war. He found them at veterans’ centers and army hospitals and reeducated them. It was a messy procedure, fraught with risk. Some assets didn’t take to the training, and Parkerson had realized very quickly that though he’d hoped to run the program without ever having to actually kill anyone himself, the assets’ seemingly boundless capacity for failure meant he was going to have to get his hands dirty, and often.

  The first candidate had hanged himself within hours of meeting Parkerson. The second had possessed a frustrating immunity to the reeducation process, and an equal
ly frustrating tendency toward attempts at escape. Parkerson had rewarded both men with unmarked graves, and in those early, messy months he’d buried defective asset after defective asset, all of them either too fucked up in the head or not quite fucked up enough for the job.

  Little by little, though, Parkerson had learned how to choose the right candidates. Mastered the training regimen. Slowly but surely, the attrition level dwindled. And, just as surely, the program began to thrive.

  Still, even the good assets came with expiry dates, no matter how good they were. This current kid, Lind, was on his fifth kill, geriatric in asset years, and Parkerson knew it was almost time to start looking for a replacement. In the meantime, though . . .

  Parkerson clicked on the first application, the time-sensitive client, and set about confirming the kill.

  25

  Stevens played a hunch and tried the Liberty counter first. It paid off.

  The clerk was a middle-aged woman. She smiled at Stevens, wide and friendly, as he approached the counter. Her smile faded somewhat when he showed her his badge. “Officer,” she said. “Geez. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m hoping you can find me a car,” Stevens told her. “A little blue car. Returned yesterday.”

  The woman frowned. “Make and model?”

  “Afraid not,” Stevens said. “Would have been rented sometime between Saturday and Monday morning. Probably to a young guy, brown hair, medium build.”

  The woman punched something into her computer. Then she stopped. “Wait a second,” she said. “The skinny kid, right? Really pale, rented a Kia?”

  Stevens shrugged. “You tell me.”

  She nodded. “Has to be. This guy flew in yesterday afternoon. Rented a little Kia, blue, like you said. Dropped it back a couple hours later and flew out again.”

  Stevens couldn’t help grinning. “Couple hours, you said?”

  “Three hours, at the most. He was twenty-five, maybe. Nice guy, I guess. Didn’t seem to want to say much, though. And his eyes.” She looked at Stevens. “There was something spooky about him, I remember it now. Like he was looking through me, you know?”

  “That’s our guy. You have his reservation on file?”

  “Yes, sir.” The woman typed something else into her computer. Then she frowned. “That’s strange,” she said. “I could have sworn this guy rented a minivan.”

  Stevens peered over her shoulder. “But he didn’t.”

  “Not according to the file, he didn’t.” She squinted at the screen. “Whatever. In any case, his name’s Alex Kent. Lives in Chicago.”

  Alex Kent, Chicago. Allen Bryce Salazar, Council Bluffs. Another alias, maybe. Windermere would want it, regardless. “You mind printing that out for me?” Stevens said.

  “Not at all.” The clerk pressed a button and her printer fired up beside her. She stared at her computer for a second. Then she looked at Stevens. “What’s this about, anyway?”

  Stevens met her eyes. “Murder,” he said. “A man was killed yesterday. We think this kid here’s the perpetrator.”

  The woman gasped. “My Lord.”

  “You said it.” Stevens took the printout. “Anyway, much obliged. You figure this Kent guy flew home to Chicago?”

  “Chicago?” The woman frowned again. “No, that’s the other thing. I snuck a glance at his itinerary when he dropped off the car. I’m quite certain the young man was headed back to Minneapolis.”

  26

  The Criminal Investigative Division was all but empty. Windermere sat in her cubicle, where she’d sat for most of the day, staring at her computer screen and trying to figure out a way around the Department of Defense’s involvement in Triple A Industries.

  As Windermere had told Stevens the day Spenser Pyatt was murdered, she wasn’t much of a motive person. Where Stevens found endless fascination in exploring the reasons why a criminal committed his particular crimes, Windermere had long ago decided she couldn’t care less, as long as the right person was arrested.

  Now, though, with the question of who at an impasse, Windermere found herself circling back to the why. Spenser Pyatt had been murdered, shot by an anonymous sniper. The sniper had disappeared and left a maze of disjointed clues behind him. So maybe it was time to focus on why Spenser Pyatt had died. Who stood to gain from his death?

  The elevator doors dinged across the office. Windermere ignored them. Mathers, probably, returning with dinner. Windermere’s stomach growled its anticipation. She ignored it, too.

  Spenser Pyatt had controlled a media empire. He’d been a very rich man. It was natural to suspect that his wealth had played a role in his demise. From what Windermere and Mathers could figure, though, the guy was crystal clean: in fifty years of business, he’d never once been linked to any untoward activity, illegal or otherwise, and his will had remained unchanged for over a decade. Pyatt’s wife and children would divide up his empire; there were no unusual life insurance policies or spurned lovers looking for payouts. By any account, Spenser Pyatt had been a remarkably simple man, and scrupulously honest to boot.

  A shadow loomed above Windermere, blocking her light. “You bring the peanut sauce?” Windermere said.

  “Must have forgotten it.” A new voice. Not Mathers’s. Windermere looked up and saw Kirk Stevens standing above her. He flashed her a grin. “Mind if I sit?”

  Windermere felt her breath catch, involuntarily. Hated herself for it. Hated the fact that a married, middle-aged cop could get her off her game. She blinked and shook her head. “Be my guest,” she said, pulling a chair over. “You get lost or something? What are you doing all the way out here, Stevens?”

  Stevens dropped a piece of paper on her desk. Then he sat and waited. Windermere tried to stare him down before curiosity got the better of her. She picked up the paper and read it. “I don’t get it.”

  It was a printout from a Liberty rental agency in Duluth. The airport, it looked like. Some guy from Chicago had rented a Kia for a couple hours yesterday. Alex Kent. Windermere scanned the page. Found the payment information and stopped cold. “Triple A Industries,” she said. “Holy shit.”

  Stevens frowned. “Wait, what?”

  “Who is this guy, Stevens?” she said. “What’s his story? How’d you find him?”

  “Triple A Industries,” he said. “What does that mean?”

  Windermere exhaled, impatient. “This guy paid with a corporate credit card registered to Triple A Industries. So did Allen Salazar, though he swears he’s never heard of the company. And Triple A’s in some shady business. So what gives? How did you get in on this?”

  Stevens leaned forward, his brow furrowed. “I don’t know about Triple A,” he said, “but that guy Kent murdered Spenser Pyatt’s cousin up in Duluth yesterday.”

  “What?” Windermere stared at him. “You kidding me, Stevens?”

  “Or maybe he didn’t,” Stevens said. “Probably he’s just like Salazar, a scapegoat. Either way, Pyatt’s cousin was murdered. Strangled to death, and it looks like the same killer as Pyatt. And that’s not even the weird part.”

  Windermere pushed back her chair. “Hold up,” she said. “Back to the beginning. You working this case?”

  “My SAC’s good friends with Pyatt’s son, Mickey,” Stevens told her. “Mickey called in a favor. SAC sent me to Duluth to look things over, see if the family’s in any danger.”

  Windermere raised an eyebrow. “And?”

  “And I don’t know, Carla. None of this makes sense.” He shook his head. “But I found out a couple of things. First off, Elias Cody—Pyatt’s cousin—had a major crush on Pyatt’s wife. Like, obsession.”

  “Okay,” said Windermere, “and the second?”

  “The second.” Stevens grinned. “After killing Cody, our murderer flew back to Minneapolis.”

  27

  I don’t get it,” said Ma
thers. “Does this mean you guys are partners again?”

  The junior agent had returned with dinner a few minutes after Stevens’s arrival and found the BCA agent in deep conversation with Windermere. Now he studied the two agents over fried rice and chicken chop suey, his brow furrowed.

  Stevens glanced at Windermere. “Not exactly,” he said. “The BCA has an interest in the case. Mickey Pyatt’s pressing my boss to protect his family. And to find his dad’s killer. My boss knows I work well with Windermere. He wants me to keep an eye on your progress.”

  Windermere grinned at him. “So you’re a spy.”

  “Something like that.” Stevens shrugged. “Anyway, I’m here. And I brought you Kent, so I can’t be all bad.”

  “So where do we take this?” said Mathers. “What’s our play?”

  Windermere and Stevens swapped another glance. “I’m going to check on Paige Pyatt,” said Stevens. “Eli Cody had a hell of a collection of pictures.”

  Windermere nodded. “We’ll head to Chicago, check on Alex Kent. Odds are he’s just another scapegoat, like you say. But we’d better have a look.”

  “Good call,” said Stevens. “Save me the flying.”

  Windermere laughed. “How’d you get to Duluth, you big baby?”

  “Slowly and painfully.” Stevens stood. “I’d better get home. Nancy’s waiting. And it sounds like we’re all back on the road tomorrow.”

  Windermere took a bite of sweet-and-sour pork. “Get out of here, Stevens,” she said, chewing. “Keep us posted.”

  She watched him cross the office toward the elevators. When he’d pressed the call button he glanced back, and she grinned. “Good to have you back, partner.”

  Stevens smiled back, sheepish, and shot her a wave. Then the elevator doors opened and he climbed aboard.