Hal felt slighted by the response. Though it had been going on for more than a year, he still felt the fresh sting when he butted up against the wall Hailey had built between them. What stung more were the lies and omissions. Maybe they weren’t important things. Maybe they were none of his business, but he used to think they shared more than other partners did.
He’d thought they were closer than any.
Now he wasn’t sure.
They’d been together seven years now, since she had returned from maternity leave after Camilla was born and they’d had only a few periods of separation since—when she gave birth to Ali, the five weeks he spent recovering from a shoulder surgery and the time she’d been out after John’s death.
In all that time, he had never felt more distant from her than he did now.
From across the room, Roger asked, “You get philosophy on any of the others?”
“Only to wage peace and not war,” Hailey answered, still moving.
“I guess that’s philosophy.”
“We’re not much into philosophy, Roger,” Hal said.
“Right, we’re more into names,” Hailey added and turned to pace the silent lab, her heels clacking on the floor.
As Hailey walked by, Hal took her gently by the shoulders.
“I’m pacing?”
Hal nodded.
Hailey exhaled and sank into a chair.
“Thank you, Hal,” Roger said. “Now I can think.”
Hailey rolled her eyes at them then turned to her phone. “Got a text from ballistics.”
Ballistics was working on the two bullets they’d dug out of the wall of Jim’s house.
“.38,” she said.
“Like in the note.”
“Maybe,” she said.
Hal found it hard to believe that Hailey hadn’t made the same connection, but he didn’t push. You’re going to have to push. He tried to follow the logic. “So Jim gets this letter yesterday and a button, along with a bullet. A dead gunrunner is found with an identical button. The last of these we’ve seen are more than a year old.”
“Sounds right to me,” Roger said.
“Why now? Why these guys?”
Hailey didn’t look over at him. “Jim isn’t pro-guns. He’s more moderate than most republicans. He actually believes in restrictions. It’s just the party politics that make it tough.”
“A republican voting for gun control would be outrageous,” Roger added.
“Seems like he’s in pretty heavy with the gun guys,” Hal said. “Can’t imagine they liked that vote.”
Hailey didn’t respond.
Hal tried to appreciate that Jim was her family now. She would want to protect him. But above the truth?
“How long now?” she asked Roger.
“We’re running the button from the senator’s house and letter concurrently,” Roger explained. “It’s faster to run both at once, but we’ve probably got another five or ten minutes.”
Hailey went to sit on the far side of the room and Hal leaned back, watching her through partially closed eyes, wondering what she was thinking, if she’d considered that Jim might, somehow, be involved. He wondered if she’d ever tell him one way or the other. Wondered if he’d have the guts to push her.
He’d never pushed his mother. To this day, she’d never told him whether or not she thought the allegations about his dad were true. She’d never openly denied them, never openly accepted them. Somehow she could ignore them like a neighbor she could avoid by not answering the doorbell. Hal was out of the house by then, attending the police academy in Alameda.
When he read the paper with the charges against his father, Hal ran. He ran. He just ran. Down from his house, four miles through the fancy part of Oakland where the houses were as large as city blocks, where the lawns were manicured and flowerbeds were as big as his whole front yard. He ran through the oak-lined streets while white people in fancy cars stared at him.
Ran back up under the freeway and into the desolate streets of Oakland, the place where black kids didn’t have a fighting chance, where instead of struggling their way toward the top, they simply made themselves at home at the bottom.
He ran through the place where his father had worked, the “war zone.”
Ten miles later, soaked and beaten, Hal had arrived at the police station, where his father had brought him from the time he was barely old enough to speak, to understand his father’s job.
He’d come to reclaim that joy, but he never made it inside the heavy glass doors.
They met him on the steps—his father’s captain and partner. Before he could get inside for a breath of air-conditioned air, they told him to walk back out, to leave it alone.
He wouldn’t. Couldn’t. He wanted to fight. He’d started a brawl and before he’d thrown a punch, he’d been handcuffed.
As a favor to his mother, a woman already grieving, his father’s partner had put Hal in the back of a squad car, still cuffed, and delivered him home.
Sitting in the back of that black and white, the grill separating him and the good guys, Hal had felt a penetrating suffocation, the terrifying sense that he’d never fill his lungs fully again.
By the time he got home, he was wheezing and choking so badly, his mother had wanted to take him to the hospital. The officers uncuffed him and he huddled on the front lawn, fighting to catch his breath.
He got down on hands and knees and pressed his face to the grass his father had tended with such pride—the same grass his father had circled in American flags every Fourth of July.
His father’s captain had agreed not to record the incident as long as Hal stayed away, to give him a final chance to make it through the academy if that was what he wanted.
His lungs had settled just fine once those cuffs were off and he was outside the car.
Seeing he was all right, his mother had gone inside and when he walked into the house, still drenched and hot, she had been sitting at the table, the paper he’d stuffed into the garbage can spread in front of her, the torn bits of print smoothed out, her pink fingertips blackened with ink.
Without a word, she motioned him to sit across from her where a tall glass of water waited. He chugged the water and as soon as it hit his stomach, he stumbled outside to retch. He sat on the front step, then, and cried, his tired, tight stomach heaving until his mother finally emerged from the house to join him.
“You’re going to upset your sisters, Hal. They’ve been through enough. We all have.”
“It isn’t true. It can’t be.”
She sank onto the stair beside him, using the railing to lower herself down. “It don’t matter one way or another now, baby.”
“They set him up.”
She stared at her stained fingers and ran her palms over them. “Maybe.”
“What about his name? What about our name?” He nodded toward the house. “You’re going to stay here and just let them print that shit.”
“No, son. I ain’t. I’m going to go down and stay with David and Becca for a while. They got no kids and plenty of space.”
Los Angeles. She was moving across the state, away from their friends and family. “You just going to give up?”
“I don’t see it that way, Hal. I see it the opposite. I’m moving on.”
“What about his pension?”
She shook her head. “Don’t think we’ll be getting that but we’ll make do without it.”
“What about—”
She stood then, wiped her hands across her sweatpants where they made little black hash marks like she’d been keeping score. “Your sisters will be back soon. They went to get some boxes. Don’t be talking this nonsense to them, you hear?”
He had wanted to ask her what he was supposed to do, where he fit now with his whole family down south and him up here, him i
n the academy, setting out to follow in his father’s footsteps. He’d always considered it an honor, a legacy to be a cop, but that was all different now.
How could he go back there without knowing the whole truth about his father’s death?
What choice did he have but to return?
Leaving the academy was as good as admitting to his father’s guilt. He owed it to the family to go back and hold his head high, reclaim their family’s name. If they would let him.
On the day he returned to the academy, his captain had summoned him. In full dress uniform, he’d gone into the office, prepared to leave this dream behind with dignity.
His captain sat behind the desk, hands folded on a leather blotter while his lieutenant leaned against the far wall and spoke. “We hope you’ll finish the academy, Officer Harris.”
He’d never felt such intense relief. He would stay. They wanted him to stay. There, he could prove himself. “Yes, sir,” he’d answered.
“Some of the men are going to have heard the news,” the captain said. His skin was as dark as Hal’s, peppered with tiny moles that you could only make out standing face to face with him. But his eyes were oddly light for such a dark man. It gave the impression that he held special powers—like he could see past words simply spoken to the truth behind them. “You understand, Officer Harris?”
His stomach went taut, his breathing skittish. “Yes, sir.”
“There are plenty of men with stories like this one. You have to decide how to handle it, whether you’re going to fight his battle or yours,” the captain continued.
“Yes, sir.”
“I need to know whose battle you’re fighting.”
It would not be about his father but about him. “Mine, sir.”
“It won’t be easy.”
“I know, sir.”
The captain and lieutenant shared a glance as Hal stared at his lap. He held his chin high, eyes open and focused on the flag in the corner of the room.
His father had loved that flag.
Every year, in the last days of June, his father would line up flags all along the border of the yard, more than a hundred of them, one right beside the next, with just enough distance between them so that when the wind blew they had the space to stretch out.
If it rained, he’d take them down and put them back up as soon as it dried out again. If he were on patrol when the rain started up, he’d call from the car and tell Hal to do it.
At the end of July, when Mama finally convinced him that the holiday was over, he took them down again, sat in the living room and rolled them one at a time, fastening each with a rubber band and laying them in a box with the words “patriot day” printed on one side. The box then went up into the attic until the next year.
Hal wondered what would become of his father’s flags.
“Dismissed, Harris,” his captain said and rose from his chair.
Hal pried his eyes from the flag. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
And with that, he had gone to face his classmates, to wait for one of them to make mention of his father, steeling himself for the fight. There had never been a single word.
Hal jumped at the sound of his name.
“Wake up!” Roger shouted.
Hal sat up, blinked then rubbed his eyes.
“That’s why I pace,” Hailey told Roger. “Otherwise I end up asleep.”
Hal stood and stretched. “What is it?”
“Nicholas Fredricks’s print is on the button,” Roger said.
Of course it was. They’d known it, hadn’t they? He rubbed his eyes.
“Again,” Hailey said. “We’re waiting for results from the letter.”
Just then, a bell rang from the computer.
“We’ve got a match,” Roger announced.
“Okay, Chuck, tell us what we’ve won,” Hal added, trying to shake off the heaviness he always felt thinking about his father.
Hailey made room for him behind Roger’s chair and they stared at the computer screen where a small hourglass emptied and filled and emptied again.
“Come on,” Hailey whispered.
The screen went black and a name appeared in bold white letters.
Roger clapped. “Well, look at that. It’s your dead guy again.”
Hal stepped back. Hailey cursed.
The screen read “Nicholas A. Fredricks.”
Nothing. Again. It was time to dig up Fredricks’s body. At least then, they would know how someone was using his prints. “Guess we’re going to be digging up a dead guy today. I best go change my clothes.”
Hailey closed her eyes with the look of someone considering the possibility of not opening them again.
Hal knew exactly how she felt.
They needed a break in this thing.
Chapter 5
Hal drove toward the cemetery while Hailey sat beside him, silent. They had reviewed the case that morning, but there was nothing new to go on. Dwayne Carson was still being held at the station. There was no word from his attorney, Martin Abbott—if Abbott was really his attorney at all.
Officer Shakley, who had been shot in the building yesterday, remained in critical condition. The dead gunrunner had been identified as Jeremy Hayden. The records department was running a full background check and known associates.
As Hal turned in through the cemetery gates, Hailey struggled to focus on something that felt so distant, so far in the past. Abby and Hank Dennig had died fourteen months ago. Hailey could still picture Tom Rittenberg with his cane at John’s funeral, a gentle giant moving through the services. It was obvious that his grief was still raw. She had interviewed him in the course of the investigation and he had been earnest and forthright, anxious to help. More than a year later, they still had nothing. She owed him something, some answers.
When Hailey thought of the Dennig murders, she thought of John. Their deaths had happened so close together. The Dennig murders had happened before John’s death—in another lifetime. Hailey thought about the Dennigs’ orphaned girls. Where were those girls now? Who took care of them?
At least she had Liz and Jim. Those kids had their grandfather. Tom Rittenberg would make sure they were cared for.
But that wasn’t the same as having a parent. The girls had grown so close to Liz. Hailey felt so different from her mother-in-law in so many ways, but the girls were completely at ease with her. And she was good with them—no. She was great. Patient, kind, loving.
That was what mattered.
At their morning department meeting, Marshall had been relatively quiet. That was never good news. Usually, he started meetings with a little banter, shooting the shit about the game the night before. Not today.
This morning, Marshall made sure to remind the team that closing the case had been her error and one that she had a chance to fix. He also expressed that the case belonged to her and Hal. Jim’s part in it was currently need-to-know only. At the conclusion of the meeting, Marshall held her and Hal back. “I don’t think anyone needs to know about Senator Wyatt.”
Hailey and Hal reviewed what they knew about Nicholas Fredricks, starting with his emigration from Germany when he was fourteen. He was an average high school student in Brooklyn before he went to work in the administrative offices at the New York City Police Department.
According to the records, he quit abruptly after about fifteen months and moved to Washington to work for a liberal senator of New Hampshire. Fredricks left the department just ten days after a veteran NYPD officer shot a sixteen-year-old black boy on a school playground. The officer claimed the boy had drawn a weapon, but no weapon was ever found.
Fredricks never had a formal education past high school. He had a clean record other than an arrest in 1970 for the use of explosives in a riot against gunmaker Smith & Wesson.
The case was dropped because
the police couldn’t prove the explosive device belonged to Fredricks.
The riot against Smith & Wesson linked Fredricks to Colby Wesson but only theoretically. According to the investigator up in Sacramento, Wesson didn’t join the family business until after Fredricks was killed.
Even if it did link Fredricks to Colby Wesson, the two would have been opponents. How did it make sense that they would be victims of the same killer?
As always, that was the part where both Hal and Hailey got stumped. And the case file was as cold as they came. The inspectors who handled the case were both retired now, but neither remembered anything noteworthy.
They spoke to two witnesses in the days following the shooting. Both were residents of the street. The houses on the street where Fredricks was killed were all set up from the street like Jim and Liz’s. One man said he saw a black man shoot Fredricks. The other said it was a couple of young white kids. Both witnesses had looked out their front windows. Both were over sixty and admitted to being nearsighted. One lived in a house that was twenty-six steps off the street. She had been looking out her bedroom window on the second floor. The other was working in his study, which was on the third floor of his home.
In terms of potential eyewitnesses, Fredricks couldn’t have met death on a worse street. Not to mention that he died before the days where everything was filmed—no traffic cameras, no bystanders with their cell phones recording.
And the investigators hadn’t gotten anywhere with Fredricks’s clients either. They had searched his recent correspondence, interviewed a number of the politicians and their staff. There was no evidence that anyone had a beef with Fredricks. One politician had been quoted in the murder file. “Nick knew the rules of the game and he played it well. Even if you didn’t agree with him, you respected the way he thought.”
According to the investigators, the quote was from one of Fredricks’s opponents.
Hailey had a call into the New York Police Department to ask about the circumstances of Fredricks’s abrupt departure from his job, but she wasn’t hopeful.
Hal stopped against the curb and turned to her. “You ready?”
She nodded, fingering the albuterol inhaler in her pocket.
One Clean Shot Page 7
