One Clean Shot

by Danielle Girard

  The towel was saturated. Blood leaked between her fingers.

  His eyes fluttered closed as the paramedics pounded on the door.

  Rain struck John’s black coffin like sprays of tiny silver bullets. The air was bitter, the sky a gray so thick it looked to have been spread on with ash. The wind stung their skin through coats, threatened to tear the umbrellas from tight fists, and snapped the pages of the priest’s bible.

  Behind the damp of the rain were smells of earth, cedar mulch and a pungent rotting scent that reminded Hailey of tramping to the waterfall in Kauai on their honeymoon, plodding along in the wet mud with the ripe smell of rotting guavas beneath their feet.

  The girls clung to her long black coat. She held one under each arm. Hailey pressed her nose to Ali’s head, taking in the buttery smell of her scalp before standing straight against the battering cold.

  Even the bitter, angry wind couldn’t break through the chill she’d felt since John’s death.

  The rain slowed but the air remained heavy with dampness. The crowd was mostly faces she didn’t know although many were familiar—politicians and powerful business people who Jim worked with.

  The crowd of her friends was smaller.

  She was glad to see friends in the group. Jamie Vail, an inspector in Sex Crimes, stood with Tony and Zephenaya, the boy Jamie and Tony had recently adopted. Captain Linda James and Jess Campbell of the INS were talking with them. Three of John’s closest friends were pallbearers. The other three were Hailey’s friends from the station. There was her partner Hal, who could have taken the space of two men though he was just back from shoulder surgery, Cameron Cruz, who was as tall as two of the men on John’s side, and the homicide inspector assigned to John’s death, Tim O’Shea.

  They had divided themselves—John’s friends carried the right side of the casket, hers the left.

  His friends were polished, their suits dark, finely pressed, and high-end. Aside from Paul Selig, who had played college field hockey, they struggled with the coffin’s weight.

  The others, hers, wore their dress uniforms. They weren’t nearly as slick or polished but much more at ease with the job.

  Cops had buried men before. John’s friends had not.

  In the last five or six years, their marriage had been divided in much the same way.

  How much had changed since they were newlyweds, volunteering nights stuffing envelopes for Bill Clinton. Hailey had been new with the department and John had finished law school and taken a job in the DA’s office.

  At night, they returned to a tiny South San Francisco apartment and drank wine from big jugs of Gallo, using chipped mugs or two glasses that had come free with a bottle of Jamison she had bought him for their first Christmas.

  Those were days when John had dreamt of being DA, when he’d been proud of his newly promoted inspector wife, when they had devoured each other’s stories.

  When they had been on the same side.

  Before everything had changed.

  Staring at the box that held his body, Hailey struggled between cataloguing those moments, clinging to every memory of that man and feeling overwhelmed by anger at the man he was becoming. A facsimile of his father.

  When it came time to sprinkle dirt on the coffin, Hailey couldn’t step forward. She couldn’t let go of the girls who clung to her sides.

  Jim caught her eye.

  He looked at each of the girls and understood what she needed.

  He stepped forward in her place. Hailey watched the grief in his face. Losing John was something they shared. In some awful way, it had made her lean on him. That was okay. It was okay to need him right now.

  Ali gripped her mother tighter. Her pupils were too wide, her pallor too fair, as though that night was imprinted on her eyelids, visible at every blink. She slept with Hailey most nights, waking her with the smallest whimper, while Hailey whispered into her hair that Mommy was there, that Ali was fine. Praying that she was, that she would be.

  Camilla was more stoic, quieter.

  In some ways, Hailey worried about her more.

  The ceremony ended with the blessings of the priest John had grown up with, the one who had married them ten years before.

  Ten years and four months and three days before, when he had held them to honor and obey, to love and cherish.

  Hailey had failed John.

  And now he was gone.

  As the dirt struck the hard dark coffin, Hailey pictured John in his casket. The starched collar of his favorite Façonnable dress shirt, his best navy suit, the tie Hailey had chosen that brought out the green of his eyes, the one she noticed even in those days when she could hardly stand to look at him.

  Liz had suggested a lighter one.

  “No,” Hailey had said sharply.

  Liz looked surprised.

  “This one,” Hailey said more softly.

  Liz had deferred. Maybe she had understood Hailey’s need to dress him this last time or perhaps she thought it had simply been a power play, some attempt to recapture her husband from his parents.

  Something Hailey had failed at when he was alive.

  She shivered to think of him inside that black box. She would never see him again. Never touch his skin.

  Hal took hold of her arm and she was surprised to see the crowd walking away from the gravesite.

  Back at her in-laws’ home, people Hailey had never met showed up with lavish casseroles and ornate cakes and trays of food. Tom Rittenberg was there. A short heavyset man with a cane, he moved slowly, head down. He’d suffered a stroke a few months after his daughter—Abby Dennig—was killed. At John’s funeral, he seemed so broken, so much smaller than before. She remembered him from Jim’s political functions as a bit shy but happy—almost jolly. She had wondered then how Jim would change with John’s death. And Liz.

  Her friends from the department also came to the house after the service. Cameron brought green chili enchiladas. “My favorite comfort food,” she’d said. Linda James brought tiramisu. Jamie and Tony brought a lasagna he’d made, while Hal came with a potted hydrangea.

  Hailey was so thankful for them. Thankful for the way they looked at Liz and Jim’s house—as though it was a museum… or a prison.

  They were her people.

  Even Bruce Daniels came. Hailey thanked him but only briefly. Too afraid that Jim would realize that for the six months before his son was shot, Hailey had been in love with another man. A man now standing in his home under the guise of mourning his son.

  Until the few final moments of John’s life, Hailey had no longer loved her husband, often couldn’t find a way to like him.

  In those last moments, Hailey had loved John more than she had ever loved anyone.

  Then he was gone.

  When the officers left—all but Hal—Hailey had wanted to go too. Hal stayed, letting Camilla and Ali climb over him, turning them upside down and tickling their bellies until Ali got the hiccups from laughing so hard. It was the first Hailey had seen them laugh since John’s death.

  Hailey fought not to cry.

  When the girls were finally asleep, tucked into the bed they’d all shared those first days, Hal sat with her on the front porch, in the muggy, cold San Francisco air, and drank coffee in silence.

  Chapter 1

  One Year Later

  Between the time apart for Hal’s shoulder surgery and her absence following John’s death, Hailey had spent part of last spring readjusting to working beside Hal. Not to mention that her neck had ached for weeks.

  Hailey made it a rule never to stand closer than two feet from Hal while talking to him. She developed a chronic ache in her neck when they first started working with him. It was from all the looking up at him. Barefoot, Hal was six-four where she was five-four in shoes with heels.

  Hailey was a pale white, the col
or gracious people call alabaster and others call pasty, while Hal was so dark-skinned black that unless his eyes were open wide enough to catch the whites, they melted into the shadow between his cheeks and nose. Her head was a mound of dark curls, Hal’s shaved bald. Despite the physical differences, Hal had never acted in a way to suggest that he was bigger, stronger, or better even though he was at least two of the three.

  More and more, Hailey thought he was three for three.

  Monday morning, after working all weekend, Hal announced that they had a lead on the Dennig murders. Several weapons matching ones stolen from Dennig Distribution more than a year before had turned up in the arrest of a local weapons dealer. The Triggerlock group—who handled weapons-related crimes—was putting together a sting.

  Hal pushed the DA’s office to resubmit their request to exhume the body of Nicholas Fredricks.

  Monday afternoon, when Hailey was practically asleep on her feet, Hal came into the department like a storm, waving a piece of paper. “They approved the court order.”

  Hailey took a sharp inhalation. “They’re letting us exhume the body?” They had been waiting a year to get access to Fredricks’s corpse. His fingerprint had been found on both the NRA buttons found at the murders—Dennigs’ and Colby Wesson’s up in Sacramento.

  “Yep.”

  It had been fourteen months since the Dennigs were murdered. There were defensive wounds on her, lacerations on him that were consistent with a letter opener she kept in the car. COD on her was strangulation, exsanguination for him. Crime Scene Unit, CSU, had ruled out other blood types, but the vehicle had contained no fewer than thirty unidentifiable prints and a dozen hair samples that didn’t belong to the victims or their kids.

  According to several of their friends, the couple had been in the midst of a divorce at the time of their deaths. The scene suggested the two had killed each other.

  The Dennigs had two children, both girls. Just like she and John had. Now those girls had no parents. Who was taking care of those girls? They had family. But it wasn’t the same. Kids needed their parents. It was the kind of case Hailey would have been a bulldog about. Except for the timing…

  At the time, Hailey was also working a serial rape case alongside Jamie Vail and trying to solve the murder of one of their colleagues.

  She never should have caught that case.

  Only she did because Jim had insisted.

  Murder by spouse was the right call, based on practical assumptions. Locard’s principle—the simplest explanation was usually the right one.

  This time it wasn’t.

  Abby and Hank Dennig had no more killed each other than John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

  After Hailey had closed the investigation, a sheriff up near Sacramento linked a suspected suicide to the Dennigs’ murders via a partial fingerprint on a small, round anti-NRA button.

  It was identical to a button found in the minivan where Abby and Hank Dennig were killed.

  The Sacramento victim was a Wesson, relative of the original Wesson in Smith & Wesson.

  The print matched a man named Nicholas Fredricks, who worked for a local organization on gun violence. He was a big lobbyist in Washington, DC for stricter gun regulations and he’d had the ear of some very powerful people.

  Before he was shot and killed.

  Fredricks made a great suspect with one small problem.

  Fredricks had been dead for twelve years.

  Now, over a year after the three murders, they still only had the two partial prints, each on a button.

  The court approval to disinter the body of Nicholas Fredricks meant the investigation could finally move forward.

  Hailey looked at the time on her phone. She was half tempted to go pull him out of the ground now.

  “I’ll let the cemetery know we’re coming tomorrow morning,” Hal said as though reading her mind.

  “Sounds good.” Liz was taking the girls to Cirque du Soleil, which meant she’d be home with Jim and Dee. They’d probably be working, which might give her a chance to get caught up at home, too. She’d sold the house she and John had owned a few months after his funeral and moved in with Jim and Liz. Her work schedule made living alone with the girls impossible. Not without being able to afford live-in care. Which she could not.

  Surprisingly, living with Jim and Liz had been comfortable, enjoyable even. Even if it took some time to get used to how Liz liked to make every dinner a formal event. The house was easier when Liz wasn’t around—more casual. Unfortunately, that often meant that the girls weren’t there either.

  Parked outside her in-laws’ house, Hailey took two puffs off her albuterol inhaler then mounted the steps to the front door.

  Inside, Jim was seated in the kitchen, eating a sandwich on a paper plate, drinking Chateau St. Jean Cabernet Sauvignon Cinq Cepages from a crystal glass. Hailey sniffed the air. “Tuna?”

  He nodded. “You want some?”

  “I think I’ll pass,” she said. “That’s quite a combination.”

  He smiled. “I know. A terrible waste of a good vintage, but I was starving.”

  She shrugged out of her jacket and hung it on the back of a chair. She and John used to banter this way—casually teasing each another. She would never have imagined having this kind of banter with Jim. Even more amazing, she enjoyed him.

  One on one, he was surprisingly kind. And funny. He had John’s quick wit.

  She’d been so angry with him for getting her assigned to the Dennig murders. He’d been looking out for a friend. If they’d had this kind of relationship when the Dennigs were killed, she would have offered to take the case. She would have wanted to help him.

  John would have loved to see them like this.

  “You want me to make something else?” she asked.

  “Oh, goodness, no,” he said. “This is fine. There’s more in the fridge if you want some.”

  “Thanks.” Hailey made herself a sandwich while Jim finished his.

  He refilled his wine glass and she wondered if this was the first bottle. Lately, she had noticed Jim was drinking more. Had it started with John’s death? She couldn’t recall now. “Wine?” he offered.

  She set her plate on the table across from him. “No, thanks.”

  “There’s beer in there. The kind you guys like,” he added.

  You guys. As though John were still alive. She still woke some mornings, expecting him beside her in the bed or to come in from the bathroom.

  Sometimes she still woke up angry about something he’d said or done to realize that he was dead.

  “Christ,” Jim muttered.

  Hailey searched for an excuse to leave the room. But she didn’t really want to be alone either. John would always be in this room. She sat at the table while Jim got a Pyramid Hefeweizen from the refrigerator.

  “You want a glass?” he asked.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Didn’t think so.” He set the bottle in front of her and sat back down, pushing the paper plate with the crumbs to the center of the table and running his thumb along the dark rim of his wine glass until the crystal sang.

  Hailey drank from the cold bottle, thinking Jim would bring up John. There was no longer the sharp pain of new loss when she thought of her husband. What she felt now was a heavier ache. Even when she wanted to talk about him, the ache was still there.

  With Camilla and Ali around, the subject of John became silently forbidden unless one of them brought him up. When the girls asked about him, his death, heaven, his bones—and the questions sometimes seemed limitless—they all answered. They followed the advice of the child psychologist and told the girls they would always answer their questions.

  Over the course of the months, the torrent of questions had dried up. The questions now caught her off guard like ghosts hovering in closets.

>   “Rittenberg came to see me today.”

  She was wrong. It wasn’t John that Jim wanted to discuss—it was his friend Tom Rittenberg, another man who had lost his child. His daughter, Abby Dennig, was the victim of the killer they were still hunting. Hailey had met Tom Rittenberg a few times. He’d done well in the insurance industry and since retirement, he’d become very involved in supporting local politics. He was short and a little round with reddish cheeks that made him look a little like Santa Claus—something Camilla had pointed out at a fundraiser once.

  She took a bite of her sandwich and said nothing.

  No question, this was going to be about Nicholas Fredricks.

  “He told me about the court order.”

  Hailey said nothing. The order gave them authority to disinter Rittenberg’s daughter, Abby, as well as her husband if they found the need.

  “No one likes to think about their child being dug up.”

  Hailey drank from the bottle. “I don’t imagine anyone likes to think about them being buried.”

  “Touché.”

  Hailey pushed her half-eaten sandwich away. “We’re not looking at the Dennigs, Jim. Just because we have authority to disinter the Dennigs doesn’t mean we will. At the moment, I can’t see a reason why we would. We’re only interested in Fredricks right now.” She would never have shared these details with Jim a year ago. Tom Rittenberg had lost his daughter. Jim would be thinking of John. Tom and Jim had each lost their only child—within a month of one another.

  It was Jim’s turn to be quiet.

  “Did he say he was going to try to stop us?” Tom Rittenberg was a powerful businessman with close ties to the political heavyweights in town, including Jim and the mayor. He’d also been president of the NRA for a time, something Hailey had held against him when they first met. Now, she wished he were still their president. His gun politics were a lot more reasonable than the guy leading the NRA now, who was practically suggesting they arm their kindergartners.

  “He didn’t mention being opposed to it,” Jim said.