One Clean Shot

by Danielle Girard

  Hailey shivered.

  “It was never loaded,” Jim went on. “He’d only gotten three bullets and he always hid them separately. He thought they were worth something. The jackets were covered in green enamel, the way German bullets were during World War II. He called them his emeralds.

  “One night, when he was really drunk, I took the gun out to play with it in the dark.” He paused. “A little girl… Dottie.”

  Hailey felt fear at where the story was going. John should be next to her. Did he know this? Was she learning something about his family that he’d never heard? She took a drink from the glass, cringing at the clinking sound of the ice.

  “A black girl,” Jim went on. “Those hut communities were mixed then. She appeared beside me. Scared me so I dropped the gun. She got to it first, took off running with it.

  “Her older brother was a bully, a kid as big as a truck, skin so dark you could hardly see his eyes. And mean. Just angry and mean. Their dad hadn’t come back at all and rumor was he’d been released from the army but just hadn’t come to get the kids or their mother, who was a fragile little lady, not much bigger than me and Dottie.”

  Something creaked in the hall and Jim frowned and rose, crept from the room and returned a minute later.

  “Does Liz know this story?” Hailey asked.

  He shook his head. “No one does.”

  So John didn’t know. Would it have changed how he saw his father? Would it change it for her? “Dee?”

  “Well, yes. Dee knows because she was there. And there is one other person who knew.”

  Hailey waited, but he shook his head as though the answer would have to wait.

  She sensed it already, how the story would end. Wished she were under her covers, asleep.

  How many more secrets could she keep?

  “So Dottie took off with Dad’s gun. She was wearing a pair of khaki pants rolled above her ankles, pants that had been her brother’s. Rolled up like that hid the places where he’d torn through the knees. The only things I could see in the dark were her bobby socks, a dirty white color, the little lace ratty along the top.”

  Jim squinted as he spoke, his eyes partially shuttered, as though he were describing a picture he had in his head. One he’d had for more than sixty years.

  “She stopped once or twice, pointed the gun at me, yelled ‘Bang. Bang.’ Like some sort of joke…

  “I couldn’t keep up with her. The only thing that kept me running was the thought of what would happen if her brother got hold of that gun, or if my father woke up the next day and it wasn’t there.

  “The place was so dusty, it was like running through a swarm of flies. We reached the lot where the older kids used to play with one punctured ball that the whole place shared.

  “It was empty.

  “I was so thankful that her brother wasn’t there, but she didn’t stop. Dottie kept running, laughing and calling back to me that I was a sissy boy because I couldn’t catch her.”

  Jim took a long drink. “Finally, she slowed down enough for me to lunge at her, knock her down. I held her down. I was so angry and she just kept going on. ‘You just mad because you can’t run fast as a girl,’ she said.” His lips narrowed. “It was true, too, but I wanted her to take it back.”

  He paused and raised his glass. The crystal caught the fire’s light, like faceted stones of red and orange in his fist. “I pointed the gun at her—to scare her.”

  Hailey drained her glass, preparing for what Jim would tell her. Seven years old. Camilla’s age.

  He cupped a hand above his eyes as though shielding his face from a bright light. Hiding his emotion. Jim rarely showed emotion. Visions of the night John died—the shot, Jim’s scream, Ali in his arms.

  Hailey felt herself trembling, something inside knocking and shaking. She wanted to leave, to run and instead she gripped the arms of the chair, held still.

  Jim patted his face as though splashing water on his skin. His eyes were red, the skin beneath them flushed. “Dottie and I struggled for a couple minutes, me on top of her, trying to get her to tell me I wasn’t a wimp.” He sighed. “The things that mean so much when you’re a kid.” He stopped, stared back at the fire and his face burning with adolescent shame.

  “What happened, Jim?”

  “A few minutes later, she pushed me off and got up, turned away. She was just stronger than me. Not much bigger but stronger. She called my dad a no-good drunk.” His face trembled and he cupped a hand over his mouth. “God, he was a no-good drunk, but hearing her say that made me shake with fury. Part of it was that she was a girl.”

  Hailey could imagine the fear he’d had of his father, the punishment that would come from losing it. The drinkers were the worst. Of all the killers she’d dealt with, the ones who abused alcohol were the meanest.

  “But I think the bigger part of it was that she was black. It’s a terrible thing, that kind of hate.” He straightened his back as though preparing to receive the verdict in his case. “I pointed that gun at her and I pulled the trigger.”

  Hailey collapsed back into the chair. “Oh, God.”

  “I don’t remember looking down at it, figuring out where the trigger was or anything. And I’d never shot a gun before.” He met her gaze. “I’ve never shot one since either. I’ve got no idea how I did it, but I wanted her to be sorry and I pointed it at her. It exploded, knocked me flat on my backside, hit my head on a rock. When I got up, stunned, I tried to find her in the dark. For a second, I thought she’d run off, but then I saw her socks. Those white socks. When I saw the blood, I pissed my pants and ran like hell.”

  “She died?”

  “She died,” he said as though the words caused physical pain.

  Hailey leaned forward and set the glass down. Jim tipped his own to his lips until the amber disappeared. Then he set his down, too. He was crying.

  John’s death. Only that first night. That was the only other time she’d seen Jim cry. “No one heard the shot?”

  “That field was out from the huts, close to the old train tracks. Trains passed by at all hours and if anyone heard the shot, I always figured they thought it was a train or a car on the freeway a few blocks down.”

  “What did you do?” Hailey asked.

  “That night? I ran home with the gun and got my mom. She was the one who could handle that sort of thing though Dad happened to have sort of sobered up that night, too. Relatively, anyway. Mom told Dee to stay in the hut but she followed us. Dad decided to tell the police that he’d done it, been playing around with the gun just like I was and it went off accidentally. Mom begged him to tell the police the truth, but he’d made up his mind.”

  His father had sacrificed himself for his son. Of course he had. That was what a parent did. It was what John would have done, too. Anything for their kids.

  “God, that night is still so clear. Mom and Dee crying, Dad trying to sober up and me standing there in wet pants, thinking I loved my dad more then than I ever had before.”

  They sat for a few moments in silence. Hailey thought about the boy who had been shot at the police station—Dwayne Carson. Seventeen.

  How many young victims had she seen in her time in the department?

  Too many. Way too many.

  “That’s why I did what I did that night,” Jim whispered.

  She didn’t want to talk about John. “Who else knew?”

  Jim looked up. “Who knew what?”

  “Who was the other person who knew about Dottie? Aside from Dee.”

  His shoulders dropped, folding in until they nearly touched.

  “If you never told anyone, who did?” Hailey remembered what he’d said, that Dee had felt guilty. “Dee. Who did she tell?”

  He shook his head. “She’d never tell anyone.” His expression faltered, a frown tugged at his lips. “Never again.
”

  “But she told someone once.”

  He nodded.

  “I need to know who it was, Jim, who she told.”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed against the thin skin of his neck like a knife carving a path. “Nicholas Fredricks.”

  “Damn,” she whispered.

  Chapter 11

  Hailey came out of the den and ran almost straight into Dee. She jumped backwards.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you.” Dee peered into the den. “I just got back from dinner with Tom and I was checking on Jim.”

  “I’m big enough to take care of myself,” Jim snapped at his sister.

  Dee didn’t seem fazed but left him alone. This was the third or fourth night in a week that she had been out with Tom Rittenberg. She seemed different, too. Less serious, a little more relaxed. Things with Tom must have been getting serious.

  Hailey followed her toward the kitchen. How long had she been there? “Did you hear our conversation?”

  Dee sat at the kitchen table. “I know he was talking about Dottie.” She fingered her locket. “And Nick.”

  “Nick.” Dee knew him, too. More than knew him. Hailey studied the locket, the way she worried it. Hailey didn’t think she’d ever seen Dee without it. Dee caught Hailey staring at the necklace. “The locket was a gift from him.”

  Dee and Nick were together. “You met through Jim?”

  “No. We met through some mutual acquaintances in DC. He came back here for me. He’d gotten a teaching position at Cornell. We were going to go there together in the fall. We had started talking about getting married.”

  “And then he was killed.”

  “Yes.”

  A twelve-year-old murder. John’s aunt was in love with a man who was killed. How had she never heard about it? John had never so much as mentioned that she’d been with someone. Jim, she could see keeping it quiet but why hadn’t John told her? Did he not know? And Liz? “I’m so sorry, Dee. I didn’t know.”

  “It’s a long time ago.”

  Twelve years didn’t seem that long. Ali would still be in high school. Camilla would be in college. They would still be missing their father. “I don’t think I’ll ever get over John’s death.”

  Dee looked up. “No. I don’t imagine you will.”

  The words struck hard. The weight of them was in their honesty. Of course she wouldn’t get over John. But she had expected Dee to say something different, something canned like, “It gets easier.”

  But maybe it didn’t.

  The cop in her took over. “Can you think of anyone who would have wanted to hurt him?” Hailey asked.

  “If I knew who might have killed him, I wouldn’t have kept it to myself.”

  “Of course not.” It was a stupid question. She would want to find his killer as much as anyone.

  “But he did have a way of getting people worked up,” Dee admitted.

  “How so?”

  “Nick saw things differently. He’d come from Ireland where his family was very poor. America was this wonderful place where things would be different, where they could finally have enough. And it was that way for his parents. They had enough to provide for their kids, to feed everyone. For them, that was a lot. It was enough.”

  “And for Nick?”

  She smiled softly.

  “He wanted this country to live up to that ideal he had in his mind. He wanted to see it the way his parents did. After high school, he worked in the police department. Three of his cousins were already on the force. He wasn’t interested in being an officer, so he took a job with administration. He worked with their press office and did a bunch of things until someone realized how well he wrote. After that, he wrote all sorts of things for the department—speeches mostly but press pieces and articles for Times and the Post about the complexities of holding people to the law but not limiting their freedom.”

  “Sounds like someone we should be listening to now.”

  “They still teach his articles in a few criminal law programs.”

  “He left the department abruptly, right? What happened?”

  “The police take a call that a kid was hanging around the grounds of an inner city high school. It was late at night and there was no one else around. Caller said he might have a weapon. Officer responds—this is before the days of cameras and cell phones recording everything. Kid gets shot. Officer swore he had a gun but there’s no gun on the scene and no one else to corroborate his story.”

  Hailey could already hear the end of the story. The police wanted to cover it up. “Nick was supposed to write about it.”

  Dee nodded. “A speech for the police chief actually.”

  “And they wanted him to lie.”

  “More like misdirect,” Dee said. “It was to prevent a riot, they told him.”

  “He refused,” Hailey guessed.

  Dee’s fingers were trembling as she touched the locket again. “He refused.” She wiped her eyes. “It’s ancient history now,” she said. “Tom says I need to focus on the future and try to put it behind me.” She retrieved a prescription bottle from her purse and shook out two small yellow pills. “It’s harder than it should be.”

  Hailey wondered what the medication was.

  She took the pills with water and took a deep breath.

  Maybe it was something to help her sleep.

  Hailey wanted to find a way to reach out, but Dee gathered her things and walked from the kitchen as though they’d been discussing the weather. “Good night,” she called as she headed down to her basement apartment.

  “Good night, Dee.”

  Hailey spent much of the night awake, staring at the ceiling. She couldn’t shake the story of Dottie’s death and she didn’t know what to do with it.

  She was desperate to talk to Hal.

  But how could she? Doing that would be betraying Jim, betraying John.

  Her relationship with Hal used to be so simple, so honest. She had trusted him with everything.

  Until the affair with Bruce started.

  She didn’t know how to tell him. They didn’t share those kinds of things, never had. Even through Hal’s divorce, they hardly spoke of relationships outside of work. What Hailey knew about his ex-wife, Sheila, had come from other sources.

  She wanted to support him, to be helpful—but she didn’t know how to breach it. In the end, they never had a real conversation about Sheila.

  So how could Hailey possibly tell him about an affair?

  And why would she?

  John’s death made things that much more complicated. Now Jim. There was no way to avoid telling Hal.

  The letter Jim got when that bullet was fired linked him to Nicholas Fredricks.

  That linked Jim to the other deaths.

  Which linked Jim to their investigation.

  Which meant she had to tell Hal. Immediately.

  Would Hal believe Jim’s version?

  Hailey believed Jim because she had to. Since John’s death, Jim was the only person she could speak with openly.

  It was by sheer chance that Jim knew more of her secrets than anyone else. But after a year of living with him, it felt like design, too. It felt right to confide in John’s father.

  Getting Hal to trust Jim would be more difficult. Their job brought a natural distrust of people with money and power. It wasn’t simply a matter of jealousy. It was that people with money and power used it to try to control the police. And they did things like pick which investigator they wanted on a certain crime—the way Jim had called in a favor so Hailey would land on the Dennigs murder.

  She also knew that John’s death added to his distrust of Jim. An unsolved murder was not something people took lightly—especially people like Jim. Whatever Jim did—whether he called all the time or let the police handle it without interfering�
��it all looked suspicious to Hal.

  Just as it would have looked to her if she were in his shoes.

  It didn’t help that she’d bagged on having a drink with him to go out with the Rookie Club.

  Likely impossible.

  Those were her first thoughts when she woke, feeling both groggy and panicked.

  Her cell phone battery was dead. She’d forgotten to plug it in the night before.

  The alarm didn’t go off.

  Jim was already gone when she came downstairs. She had wanted to talk to him.

  Nicholas Fredricks had known about Jim’s childhood shooting incident and he had used it to manipulate Jim. Which meant he’d probably used the same tactic on others. The case file on Fredricks’s murder suggested Fredricks was known for playing fair, but what he’d done to Jim wasn’t exactly fair.

  Maybe Fredricks had put someone in too tight a squeeze. But Fredricks had been dead twelve years. Any information about who he had worked for was long gone by now.

  The note Jim had received when he was shot made reference to the old correspondence with Fredricks as well as “an old special,” the gun that was used to shoot Jim.

  The logical conclusion was that Nicholas Fredricks had told someone else about Jim’s past.

  That person was their best suspect in all of these deaths.

  Now, she had to figure out who that was.

  Hailey arrived at the station and was headed up to her desk when Hal caught her in the stairwell. “You get my message?”

  “You get mine? About Regal.”

  “Not now,” he said. “Did you get the message I left this morning.”

  She shook her phone like a dead light bulb. “No juice and one of the girls must have taken my car charger.”

  “You read the paper this morning?”

  She’d gone to bed late, woken up late. “No,” she said, dread slowing her down. “Why?”

  “Come on.” He started down the stairs.

  “What’s going on?”

  Somewhere above, a door clanged open.

  “I’ll take care of it, Captain,” came O’Shea’s voice.