One Clean Shot

by Danielle Girard

  It worked.

  He fumbled to unlock the door, carried her inside and kicked it closed.

  This is a mistake. He slid his tongue into her mouth, palmed her backside and lifted her up. She kissed his neck and trailed her fingernails along his shoulders and back.

  He didn’t care. Not tonight.

  He dropped her in the center of his unmade bed and unbuttoned his shirt, watched as she shed her jacket, her sweater, her bra…

  His face against the creamy skin of her neck, he inhaled the smell of her—rose water on her skin and gardenia in her hair. Smelled it and remembered the night they’d met, the morning he’d asked her to marry him, the drive from their wedding to the coast for their honeymoon.

  Redwoods and dense fern, the sky threatened rain. Sam Cooke blasting from the radio, the two of them laughing. He pulled the memories in, wrapped them between his fingers with her hair and fought to let go of James Robbins and Blake and Fredricks.

  Let go of Hailey Wyatt.

  Some time later, he slept, empty, dark sleep without dreams.

  Chapter 18

  Trembling, Hailey made her way to the car, clenching her jaw and fists, holding it all in.

  Losing John.

  Losing Hal.

  Hailey revved the engine and squealed out of the parking structure, opposite from where she’d left Hal and Sheila.

  God, she was an idiot.

  She had driven away the one person she could trust completely.

  She was stuck living with a liar. Who knew how much of what Jim had said was lies. How could she trust him about the night John died?

  “I don’t know.” Jim had said, carrying Ali. The shaking. Liz screaming. Jim shouting.

  Then, John. The blood.

  So much blood…

  At the intersection of Van Ness and Broadway, Hailey hesitated. Why did Hal have to push? Why couldn’t he be more like Bruce?

  Bruce didn’t want the truth. He didn’t ask questions, didn’t push her too hard.

  He clung to the hope that they would end up together. That meant letting Hailey keep her secrets. Bruce knew that.

  Only Hal forced it. He had always been subtle. Until tonight. Now all the things she’d worried about since John’s death—they were all out.

  Because she had never pulled his case file.

  Never even thought to pull it.

  Hailey turned toward home.

  She needed to confront Jim—to see his face and gauge how many more lies were behind the ones she knew about.

  She was not playing along anymore.

  The house was dark when she parked in front and she wondered if the confrontation might have to wait until morning. She retrieved the scrap of paper from Jim’s shredder and the draft of the newspaper article by Donald Blake.

  As she came back into the hall, Jim was coming down the stairs, his bathrobe tied sloppily across his middle.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” he said.

  She held the sliver of paper in one fist, the letter in the other.

  “What’ve you got?”

  “Evidence.”

  He slipped his hand into the pocket of his robe. “You want to go downstairs?”

  She followed him into the den.

  Instead of sitting behind the desk, Jim sat in one of the big armchairs instead. It was the one closer to the place where John had died. That was how she thought of the chair.

  She took the other seat.

  “What is it?”

  She handed him the article, watched as he scanned the byline, the note, then read it. Convincing. As though he’d never seen it before.

  But he read too quickly.

  “Blake. You mentioned him earlier.”

  “You’ve never seen that before?”

  “Never.” His eyes didn’t waver. Nothing moved in his throat. He didn’t fidget or look away.

  She crossed to him and showed him the shredded piece. Laid it on the photocopy and slid it across the page until it fit like a puzzle piece over the full picture. “I found this in your shredder.”

  “My shredder?”

  “The one in your cabinet, Jim.”

  “Blake was killed in gang fire, Jim. After he wrote this. The dead gunrunner broke into Blake’s house. Dennigs, Wesson, Fredricks. You, Jim. It’s all related.”

  John. Was it possible John was part of this, too?

  She hadn’t thought about the night he died in so long. She’d worked so hard to push it from her thoughts. And now, it was right there. They had been fighting. Jim and John. Jim had called something bullshit. Horse manure. He’d said, “That’s a load of horse manure.”

  She pressed her palm to the painful pulsing in her chest. How she wanted to pick them up and leave. But where?

  “I didn’t kill Nick.”

  Nick. “But you haven’t told me everything. You know more about his death.”

  “I had no reason to hurt him,” Jim said. He didn’t deny it. He did know more than he was saying.

  She was done with him. “Don’t bother trying to convince me. From now on, Jim, don’t bother. I’m going to tell Hal. All of it.”

  “All of it?” he repeated. The reference was to John. Not trusting herself to speak, she only nodded.

  Dee appeared in the doorway. “You guys okay?”

  “I need to go to the station for a bit,” Hailey told her.

  “Liz is out,” Dee said. “She had book club tonight, but I’m here.”

  Hailey didn’t want to leave the girls. But she didn’t want to wake them either.

  “I can work in the kitchen in case someone wakes up.”

  “I’ll be back in an hour or two,” Hailey said. “Are you sure you don’t mind?”

  “Not at all,” Dee said. “I’ll be up twice that long working on a budgetary proposal.”

  “You should go to bed, Jim,” Dee told him.

  Jim frowned but he didn’t argue. Instead, he padded towards the stairs.

  Hailey forced herself to turn and leave.

  She watched her rearview mirror down Broadway and through the tunnel, driving faster than she should have. The tears welled up, burning in her eyes. She needed to talk, to let it out. How long had she let this all build? Held it all in?

  As she made a left on Powell Street, she began to cry. The sobs came in a rush. She swiped at her eyes to clear her vision. How much she wanted to confide all of this in someone. She was suddenly desperate to tell it. Turned again on Green and, when she was sure there was no one behind her, she turned onto August Aly.

  “I didn’t kill Nick,” Jim had said. No outrage at the inference that he was involved.

  No shock at the accusation. He had known she thought it. So why not tell her what else he knew? If he wasn’t involved, who was he protecting? Dee had been in love with Nick. Surely he would want to find the person who had killed the man she loved.

  Parked in front of Bruce’s building, she dialed his number.

  “I’m downstairs,” she said. “Will you come get me?”

  Quiet on the line.

  Silence.

  “Uh—” he finally said.

  “I’m downstairs.”

  “Yeah,” he said, clearing the sleep from his voice. “I can’t.”

  “You can’t—” Hailey gasped. “You’re not alone.” Then there was a woman’s voice in the background, groggy, close to the phone. Curled against him.

  “Are you okay?”

  She didn’t answer. Why was she surprised? He’d been with other women before. But after John’s death, he’d promised they would be together. That he would wait for her to be ready.

  “Wyatt?”

  Still, she couldn’t bring herself to speak.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay? We can talk in the morn
ing.”

  “Don’t bother.” She slammed her palm into the wheel, punched the dash. “Goddamn it!” The car shook beneath the weight of her anger and she screamed until the sound stabbed in her throat.

  The door of Bruce’s building opened. He came out jeans and a Cal sweatshirt. The same clothes he threw on after they’d been in bed together.

  He’d been naked.

  Of course he’d been naked.

  She revved the engine and peeled from the curb.

  It wasn’t Bruce she needed.

  It wasn’t Jim.

  It wasn’t even John. Bruce had been right about that. Her marriage with John hadn’t been working.

  Hal. It was Hal she couldn’t lose.

  She drove back down Broadway, the tears drying on her cheeks as her cell phone buzzed on the seat. Bruce. She didn’t answer.

  Not ready to go home, she went to the other only place she could. The station was quiet when she arrived, strangely calm. She parked in back, took her gun from the glove, strapped on her holster and got out of the car.

  Music blared in the hallway of the basement. The door to Records sat open.

  A lab tech stood at a counter, typing on a computer, bobbing her head in a way that should have made typing impossible. She had beautiful dark skin and amber eyes. Hailey recognized her from the other day when she’d been pacing around the lab, waiting for the results on the prints from the button and the letter Jim had received when he was shot. How much had changed since then. She trusted Jim then. She and Hal had been okay. Where was he now?

  Hailey thought of Sheila, hoped Hal wasn’t still with her.

  The tech turned the music down.

  Hailey showed her badge and introduced herself.

  “I remember you from the other day,” the tech said. “I’m Naomi Muir.”

  “I’ve got something I need to run against existing evidence. If you can tell Roger I left it for him.” Hailey pulled the cork from her pocket, handed it to Naomi.

  “We’re not testing for prints?” Naomi asked.

  “No. Wine. I want to see if this is the same vintage as the one we’ve got in the Fredricks’s case.” Hailey gave her the case number and Naomi wrote it on the outside of a paper sack, dropped the cork inside and taped the top closed.

  “You the contact?”

  “Tell Roger to call me as soon as he can. Only me.”

  Hailey had never made a request like that. Every piece of evidence always went to either her or Hal. It was always who was available first. What would happen if Roger questioned it? Or if Naomi didn’t make it clear?

  If Roger told Hal…

  She’d have to come clean sooner.

  Either way, Hal deserved answers.

  And she deserved the repercussions.

  Naomi took down the instructions, confirmed her cell phone number and put the bag in the plastic bin headed to the lab. As Hailey left, Naomi turned the music back on.

  “Who is that?” Hailey asked.

  “Velvet Underground,” Naomi said. “Cool, huh?”

  “Very,” Hailey agreed though she wasn’t sure if it was cool or awful.

  The door to Records was locked so Hailey called up to dispatch to page the on-call officer. When the officer showed up he stank of cigarettes and cold, foggy night air. He shivered and rubbed his hands together. “Always happens the minute I get outside.”

  “Sorry, Simon.”

  “No worries, Lady Wyatt. Who you here for?”

  Hailey looked into the room, the metal shelves she’d stared at so many times, the case boxes she’d pulled and studied, created and added to. Closed. Left unclosed.

  Simon cleared his throat and Hailey looked up.

  “John Wyatt,” she said.

  Simon stepped backwards, whistled and spun on his heels then took a couple of steps and began to skate down the cement floor. Heelies.

  Simon set a box on the counter then opened the book and had her sign it out.

  “You okay, Lady Wyatt?”

  Hailey nodded.

  “You take it easy now.”

  She nodded again and carried the box to the elevator, rode it up to the fourth floor and walked toward Homicide, praying she could get to one of the interview rooms, unseen. The department was silent and she went straight to the far interview room and locked the door.

  Sitting in a cold steel chair, she stared at the case information. The file number was printed on the front: H, for homicide, and the numbers 5987513.

  Below that, John J. Wyatt.

  She stared at the unopened box. His clothes would be inside. The slug they’d taken from the wall where it had sunk three inches after exiting his back, between the thoracic vertebrae T4 and T5, the shot a through and through. Entered the lower left side of his chest, punctured his lung, nicked his vena cava and exited through his spine.

  Photos of the scene, of him on the table.

  The autopsy.

  Before the funeral she’d opened his shirt to see the Y-shaped wound that Shelby Tate had so carefully re-stitched on John’s chest. The red puckered stitches were purple and blue on the edges where the yellow thread bound them.

  The blood had been cleaned off.

  The pictures of him at the scene would be worse. Gory. Blood was everywhere. On the floor, his clothes, on all of them. Blood on her hands from trying to stop the bleeding.

  Then, on his face when she’d held his cheeks and kissed him good-bye.

  Her clothes would be inside the box, too. The blouse she’d been wearing, her slacks.

  Reports. Diagrams.

  She could handle this. She had to.

  The worst would be the pictures, but they were images she knew.

  Images she went to sleep and woke with.

  Hailey cut the seal on the box and pulled the top off the box. She lifted out the thick brown folder and set it on the table.

  She would do what she should have a year ago. What she had forgotten to do. No. She had known this file was here. She had chosen to ignore it.

  Because ignoring it was easier than reliving that night.

  And now she had no choice. She had lost her partner. She had lost her best friend. She had to find a way to get him back, to make this right.

  She would read the file on John’s death from page one.

  Chapter 19

  At four in the morning, Hailey was still sitting in the empty interview room, mapping trajectories across the copies of the crime scene drawings from the file.

  John was six-foot.

  According to the autopsy report, the gunshot wound had an upward path of approximately fourteen degrees.

  If John and his shooter were standing close, the shooter was someone about John’s height. The gun would have been held at chest level, aimed up slightly, raised toward the heart. Increase the distance and maybe the shooter extended an arm.

  Then, the angle might’ve flattened for someone his own height. There was no stippling around the wound, so the gun wasn’t fired closer than twelve inches. If she took into account the blood spatter and the angle the slug made in the wall, there was a way to figure it out, but the measurements were complicated.

  Using a small metal protractor and an old ruler on the photos, she couldn’t be exact. On top of the poor tools, Hailey had never been good at math. In theory, she understood how this was supposed to work, but she couldn’t do it. Not alone.

  She wanted to go over to ballistics and have them enter it all into the computer, run it. She wanted to fast-forward through the time it would take to have answers. Answers to questions she had waited more than a year to ask.

  Nowhere in the file did the investigators make any supposition as to how tall the killer was, or how far away John had been from the bullet. But it changed everything.

  An intruder.r />
  An average male.

  Jim had requested the police leave their family out of it. For the sake of the grieving mother and the grieving wife, he had said. For the fatherless children. “For me. For all of us. Get what you need, ask your questions and let us be.”

  The police had done that. Of course they had.

  Senator Wyatt had asked.

  They’d gathered evidence and talked to everyone who had been there.

  But the police only talked to everyone who had been there in Jim’s version.

  Liz and the children were upstairs, getting ready for bed.

  Jim and Hailey were in the kitchen.

  John, alone, was in the study when the intruder had found him, shot once and run.

  In Jim’s version.

  She closed the files and took her copies, returned the box and went home.

  Hailey would have to ask for help, something she should have done over a year ago. Right now, the only answer she had was maybe.

  Maybe it was Jim.

  Maybe Jim had shot his son.

  Even if it felt wrong, she had no idea what Jim was capable of. This was the thought that bounced in her head as she drove home.

  Dee was at the kitchen table—still dressed from the day— working on her laptop. Printed spreadsheets covered the table. She removed her reading glasses and rubbed her eyes.

  “The girls okay?”

  “Not a peep. I looked in on them about an hour ago. Sound asleep.”

  “I love watching them when they’re sleeping.”

  “They are precious. I used to babysit John when he was their age.”

  Hailey wondered if Dee had imagined she would have a family. If she’d planned one with Nick Fredricks. Some time maybe she’d find a way to ask.

  She wondered how the evening had gone with Jim. Had they talked about Nick? No one knew them both better than Dee. “How did Jim and Nick get along?”

  “They were both stubborn men with strong opinions, so they butted heads a fair amount.” Dee closed the laptop. “I heard your conversation earlier. It isn’t my business, but I want you to know that Jim and I were together when Nick was killed. But even if we hadn’t been, Jim isn’t a killer. He barely survived what he did to Dottie.”

  Hailey had never considered how much Dottie’s killing had affected Jim. “Nick knew about that.”