The Killing House

by Chris Mooney

  ‘The preliminary theory is that the bomb was placed on the first floor. The blast pattern suggests dynamite. You didn’t hear it go off?’

  ‘No,’ Fletcher said. ‘And I doubt the shooter returned to the house to plant the bomb, so it was detonated either by a timer or remotely by a beeper or a cell phone.’

  ‘Why plant a bomb?’

  ‘To destroy evidence. Is there any evidence?’

  Karim let loose a dark chuckle. ‘The storm dumped almost two feet of snow by the time it tapered off late yesterday afternoon. It’s going to be quite some time before the police find anything of value – it will be weeks before any information trickles my way.’

  ‘From your source.’

  ‘Sources. Now that the ATF is in play, the agent I know there will discreetly send me copies of the reports once they’ve been filed. The Colorado homicide detective has agreed to keep me in the loop. He knows that, when the time is right, I’ll give him the information he needs to make an arrest. These sort of high-profile cases come around once in a lifetime. They can make or break a career.’

  ‘So you intend on pursuing this.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I? I gave my word to Theresa Herrera that I’d look into her son’s abduction.’

  ‘And now her murder.’

  ‘And now her murder,’ Karim repeated softly. ‘There’s also a personal reason.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Like you, I don’t enjoy loose ends – or mysteries. I want to find this woman.’ Karim tapped a finger against the sketch. ‘I want to know what she was doing inside Theresa Herrera’s house.’

  ‘And you don’t believe Colorado is up to the task.’

  Karim shrugged. ‘Who’s to say? You know how it goes with small-town police departments. The best talent moves on to greener and more lucrative pastures, and what’s left behind is more often than not a midlevel offering of people who are constantly being threatened by yet another round of budget cuts, bureaucratic red-tape and superiors who are more concerned about advancing up the career ladder than rolling up their sleeves and doing actual work.’

  ‘Denver is assisting them.’

  ‘But that will last for only so long. Denver has its own problems, and as for the ATF … When it comes to bureaucracies, it’s been my experience that shit always floats to the top. I saw it happen at the Agency, and I know you witnessed it at the FBI. I’ve learned not to place my trust in such things.’

  Fletcher drank some of his coffee.

  ‘Theresa Herrera told me her husband had gone out that night with a friend. Has he shown up?’

  ‘The police have been unable to locate him,’ Karim said. ‘At the moment they have him listed as a “person of interest”. Until they find him – or what’s left of him, if he was inside the house when it exploded – they’re obligated to investigate the theory that he planted the bomb, which only benefits us. While they’re chasing their straw man, we can pursue this mystery woman who shot you without them looking over our shoulders.’

  ‘What can you tell me about Barry Herrera? I assume you conducted a background check.’

  ‘I always perform a thorough search on anyone looking to hire me.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He’s as clean as a whistle,’ Karim said. ‘The man was born and raised in Montpelier, Vermont, the only child of Marcus and Samantha Herrera. They both died of cancer – the father in 1978, the mother in 1984. Barry attended the local high school, where he excelled in academics and tennis. Brown offered him a scholarship. He graduated summa cum lade and moved on to the BU School of Medicine, where he picked psychiatry as his field of study. From there he, like many doctors, bounced around various public and private hospitals, working mainly with troubled children. In 1989 he met Theresa Henderson, an office assistant at a privately owned clinic in Raleigh, South Carolina. They married in 1993 and moved to Applewood, Colorado, in 1998, when he accepted a job.’

  ‘And the wife?’

  ‘Unremarkable. Born Theresa King in Danbury, Connecticut. Went to the public school and local college. Moved with a college friend to South Carolina, met Barry Herrera, married.’

  ‘How deep did you dig?’

  ‘As deep as I could,’ Karim said. ‘A routine background check provides a snapshot – a starting point. The real treasures, as you well know, are locked behind secured databases scattered all across the Internet. I assigned someone else to do the actual data mining. This person is as good with computers as you are.’ Then, with a sly grin, Karim added, ‘Maybe even better.’

  ‘Anything jump out?’

  ‘No. Nothing.’

  ‘Financials?’

  ‘Barry made a good living, so the wife stayed at home. They had a reasonable mortgage, which they paid on time every month, along with their credit card and car loans. They invested in their retirement accounts and saved a tidy sum for an emergency. No suspicious payments or withdrawals. They were a boring, upper-middle-class couple living the American dream.’

  ‘Until someone abducted their son.’

  ‘Yes,’ Karim said sombrely. ‘Until that.’

  ‘Did you meet him?’

  ‘No. I was scheduled to meet him and his wife yesterday at their home. I never spoke to the man on the phone, only his wife. She was the one who initiated contact.’

  ‘Did he share his wife’s belief that her son was still alive?’

  ‘She never mentioned anything to the contrary.’

  ‘What did she say about her husband?’

  ‘Just that he was busy. That in the last two years he spent more time away from home, burying himself in his work as a child psychiatrist. What happened to their son put a strain on their marriage. These things often do.’

  Karim, Fletcher knew, had first-hand experience with such matters.

  For years Karim had maintained a rather bonhomie relationship with his ex-wife, Judith, often travelling to England to share holidays with her extended family, who still welcomed him into the fold. Their son had wanted to attend high school in the States, and at age fifteen moved across the pond to live with his father.

  Jason Karim was seventeen years old when he was abducted on his way home from a private Manhattan school. Karim had endured five dreadful, nightmarish days before his son’s body turned up in an alley in the Bronx. Karim flew to London to deliver the news to his ex-wife.

  Judith blamed him for their son’s murder. Jason should never have been allowed to navigate his way through such a dangerous city, especially at night. Karim acquiesced to his ex-wife’s wishes to have their son buried in London. But Judith had attended neither the wake nor the service; she’d suffered a breakdown and was now confined to a private hospital paid for by Karim.

  Karim still made semi-annual pilgrimages to visit Judith, who had retreated to a cocoon of fantasy, telling doctors that her son was alive, travelling the globe as a hedge-fund manager. Despite medication and therapy, she still regularly picked up the phone, dialled an imaginary number and pretended to speak to her imaginary son, his imaginary wife and her two imaginary grandchildren – a boy named Bradley and a girl named Clare.

  Karim had used his personal loss as a turning point. The ghost of Jason Karim was both the inspiration for, and a silent partner in, his father’s enterprise of helping fellow victims who called on him for assistance. Each case he solved, each missing child he recovered, provided not only a purpose to his life but also helped him to manage the considerable guilt he dragged like shackles through his days.

  ‘Clearly something has aroused your curiosity,’ Karim said. ‘Otherwise, you wouldn’t have asked me to fly out and personally hand-deliver a portable mass spectrometer.’

  Fletcher finished the last of his coffee, thinking about the manila folder in front of him, wondering where he should start.

  ‘Meet me in the dining room,’ he said.

  13

  Fletcher placed the empty cup inside the sink on his way to the foyer.

  Mass spectrometr
y, the method of identifying a substance’s chemical composition by separating its gaseous ions, had evolved considerably since its first application in the late 1950s, when it was used to analyse amino acids and peptides. The bulky equipment, which once took up an entire room of a forensics lab, had now been compartmentalized into a single, portable unit that could be carried to crime scenes and used at airports to detect and identify explosives, chemical-warfare agents and environmental toxins.

  Fletcher placed the heavy plastic case on the dining-room table. He snapped free the latches and, from the padded foam lining, removed a heavy, rectangular unit, along with a small netbook computer and assorted cables.

  As he set up the equipment, Karim hovered close by, peering through his bifocals like an anxious chemistry professor watching a student mixing potentially volatile chemicals.

  ‘Aren’t you about due for another cigarette, Ali?’

  ‘What happened to your concern about my health?’

  ‘I value my personal space more. Please, have a seat.’ Fletcher retrieved the two evidence bags from his trousers pocket – the spent cartridge and the slug he’d removed from his vest – and placed them on the table. Then he returned to the foyer and opened the closet door.

  Sitting on the top shelf were several small plastic toolboxes holding various forensics supplies. It took him a moment to find what he needed.

  ‘This slug,’ Karim said as Fletcher entered the dining room. ‘It looks like a 9-mm round.’

  ‘It’s been modified.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  Fletcher placed the toolbox next to the MS device. ‘The cartridge,’ he said, pulling out a chair, ‘is a wildcat.’

  ‘I’m not well versed in ballistics, so you’ll have to explain it to me.’

  ‘The term refers to a cartridge that isn’t mass-produced. More specifically, a wildcat is a cartridge that has been modified in some way in order to optimize a certain performance characteristic such as efficiency or power.’

  ‘So it’s a home-made round?’

  ‘That was my initial suspicion, but the components show no evidence of shoddy craftsmanship. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.’ Fletcher opened his toolbox and continued to speak as he collected his items and placed them on the table. ‘While the slug contains a manufacturing stamp I don’t recognize, given the superior craftsmanship I’m inclined to believe the round was created by someone who specializes in custom-made ammunition.’

  ‘And the mass spectrometer will show you how the gunpowder was modified.’

  Fletcher nodded. ‘My hope is that it will give us a unique chemical fingerprint, which will allow us to trace the owner – once we’ve identified the manufacturer.’

  Hands covered in latex and the empty cartridge pinched between his fingers, Fletcher rubbed a cotton swab along the inner brass wall to collect the gunpowder residue. Karim came around the table to watch, then, thinking better of it, lit a fresh cigarette, entered the living room and began to pace across the oriental carpet. Sometimes he paused to examine a painting or charcoal drawing, standing in such a way as to keep Fletcher’s progress within his line of vision. Then he resumed his pacing.

  Twenty minutes and two cigarettes later, Karim noticed that Fletcher was leaning back in his chair.

  ‘What is it?’

  Fletcher didn’t answer. He propped an elbow on the table’s corner, resting his chin on a thumb as he rubbed his index finger across his bottom lip, staring at the computer screen.

  Karim marched back into the dining room and, standing behind Fletcher, bent forward to read the results.

  The mass spectrometry software had failed to identify the sample.

  ‘I was told these portable units have a limited library,’ Karim said. ‘I’ll have this sample tested in New York. My forensics people are at my lab right now. The mass spectrometer we have there is hooked up to a software library that can identify every –’

  ‘That won’t be necessary.’

  ‘You know what this is?’

  Fletcher nodded.

  ‘Human ash,’ he said.

  14

  A cool silence enveloped the dining room.

  Karim broke it a moment later. ‘Someone’s cremated remains were packed inside that ammo cartridge.’ He spoke slowly, as if having trouble finding the correct words. ‘That’s what you’re telling me.’

  Fletcher nodded, his gaze fixed on the computer screen. He didn’t doubt his findings. Mixed in with the gunshot’s chemical components, its primer residues and organic compounds, were the unmistakable chemical signatures of human ash – phosphate, sodium, calcium, chloride, sulphate, silica, potassium and magnesium.

  He read them off one by one for Karim’s benefit. Karim, however, still seemed unconvinced.

  ‘The concentration levels of each leave no room for debate,’ Fletcher said. ‘Minute quantities of beryllium and mercury are also present, as well as –’

  ‘I believe you.’ Karim drew heavily on his cigarette. ‘Could our lady shooter have loaded the ashes herself?’

  ‘If she had the proper tools and the proper knowledge, yes.’

  ‘I can tell by your tone you don’t think she did.’

  ‘You have to know exactly what you’re doing or you’ll risk a misfire. Why risk it when you can hire a company to do it for you?’

  ‘There’s a company that performs this … service?’

  ‘I know of only one. It caters to hunting enthusiasts.’

  ‘You mean gun nuts,’ Karim said. ‘Is this legal?’

  ‘Perfectly legal.’

  ‘Let me guess: this company is based in the South.’

  ‘Alabama, I believe.’

  ‘Of course,’ Karim added in a sour tone. While he had a permit to carry a gun, he rarely did. He detested firearms, believed their availability and the ease with which they could be obtained in the United States – through simplistic forms and substandard background checks, especially in the Southern states, where owning a firearm was as common as carrying a wallet – had directly contributed to the country’s rapidly rising crime levels. The notion had been firmly cemented in Karim’s mind by his son’s murder. Jason Karim, after enduring a savage beating, had been shot to death with seven hollow-point rounds.

  ‘So instead of sprinkling Uncle Bobby’s ashes at sea, in a garden or what have you,’ Karim said, ‘you pay to have his cremated remains stuffed inside shotgun shells so you can go out and, what, shoot yourself a Thanksgiving turkey? Then everyone gathered around the holiday table digs in comforted by the idea of having a tiny part of Uncle Bobby digesting in their bellies, is that it?’

  ‘I’m not debating the merits of such a service, Ali. I’m merely telling you it exists.’

  Karim examined the ash dangling from his cigarette. He flicked it into his coffee cup and said, ‘I’d thought I’d seen everything. The world we live in now …’

  Karim shook the disgust from his face and looked around the dining room before his gaze settled on a reproduction of Marie-Denise Villers’s Young Woman Drawing. He stared at the angelic face, at her intense but gentle dark eyes and the golden corkscrew curls dangling across her small shoulders, as though waiting for her to validate his feelings.

  ‘Will the Denver crime lab discover this?’

  ‘Depends on the expertise of the forensics staff,’ Fletcher said. ‘If someone recognizes the cartridge as a wildcat, he or she may decide to run testing. But they won’t find anything.’

  ‘Because the crime scene has been contaminated by the bomb.’

  ‘And the snow. By now it’s already washed away the residue needed for testing.’ A pause, then Fletcher added, ‘You can’t extract any DNA from these ashes.’

  Karim blinked in surprise at hearing his thought spoken out loud.

  ‘The cremation process destroys the phosphodiester bonds that hold DNA nucleotides together,’ Fletcher said. ‘All that remain are the chemical signatures listed on the computer screen.’

/>   Karim’s cell phone rang. ‘Excuse me for a moment,’ he said, pulling his BlackBerry from a rumpled pocket.

  While Karim conducted a near-silent conversation with the caller on the other end of the line, Fletcher took out his smartphone, connected to the Internet and searched for companies that specialized in placing cremated remains inside ammunition. As he suspected, there was only one such company, and it was based in Alabama. He clicked on the link for the company website.

  Sacred Ashes, based in the town of Dunbar and formed by two former game wardens, billed itself as a cost-effective memorial for the outdoors person. Page after page extolled the benefits of using their service – the virtually non-existent ecological footprint compared to interment; the significant savings that would be made by opting out of purchasing traditional funeral services, casket, burial plot, gravestone or urn. One pound of human ash and a payment of $1,500 provided 250 cartridges for either a shotgun or a pistol. The rifle enthusiast had to make do with 100 cartridges. All the ammunition came in standard calibres. An additional payment of $100 provided the mourner with a finished handcrafted ammunition box that was ‘mantel-worthy’.

  Fletcher was reading through customer testimonials when Karim returned to the line. ‘That was my contact in Colorado,’ Karim said. ‘They found Barry Herrera – or, more specifically, his head.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Sitting on a tree limb about half a mile from the blast site.’

  ‘So the husband was either close to the bomb or right on top of it when it went off.’

  Karim nodded. ‘At least now we know he was inside the house that night.’

  ‘He was alive when the bomb detonated.’

  Karim’s brow furrowed. ‘You told me you didn’t see him.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Fletcher said. ‘When Theresa Herrera answered the door, she was frightened but composed. She wouldn’t have been able to maintain her composure if her husband was dead – or if she knew about the bomb.’

  ‘What I don’t understand is why the shooter allowed Herrera to answer the door in the first place. Why not just wait for you to leave?’