by Joel Goldman
I smiled, put my hand on his arm. “I can handle this, Troy. I was waiting to get it checked out until we took Marcellus down. The timetable has changed after tonight. Let’s catch whoever did this and then I’ll get checked out. Probably nothing a couple of weeks on a beach won’t cure.”
“Jack, you need to find out what’s wrong with you. We can run this case until you’re ready to come back.”
I didn’t know what was causing me to shake, but I had figured out that the longer I worked and the less I slept, the more I shook. I also knew that if I walked away now, my chances of getting back to this case or any case weren’t good. FBI agents don’t do anything involuntarily—especially shake uncontrollably. I didn’t have a hobby, a wife, or a mistress, no matter what Joy thought about Kate and me. Ex-agents do a lot of things. They become private investigators, security consultants, or suicide statistics. I wasn’t interested in any of those options. I looked at my watch.
“It’s almost three o’clock in the morning. I’ll go back to the office, get some sleep on my couch, and I’ll be fine. You wrap things up here. Bag the cash I found and start thinking about why someone would leave a few grand lying under a tree that money doesn’t grow on. We’ll have a team meeting at six. I want reports on the neighborhood canvass and preliminary forensics by then. Have someone pull all the surveillance video from the camera on the utility pole and the one inside the house. I want names put to faces.”
Troy looked at me, his face blank, unimpressed. “Jack, you’ve got to see a doctor. Now. Today.”
“I will. As soon as we find whoever killed the people inside that house. Am I clear, Agent Clark?”
Troy backed up a step. “Clear.”
The regional FBI office was located at Fourteenth and Summit on the west side of downtown Kansas City, Missouri. It was the first new regional office built after 9/11, and the lockdown security measures were re?ected in its remote location on the far side of the downtown interstate loop, the high wrought-iron fence encircling the rectangular two-story building, and the armed guard at the entrance to the parking lot.
The offices were laid out like an ordinary civilian corporation except for the crime lab, the body shop, the armory, and the room where agents practiced with a simulator how not to kill innocent bystanders during gunfights with the bad guys. The interrogation rooms were another upgrade over the civilian model. The emphasis was on efficiency and duty—gray carpet, off-white walls, any color of furniture as long as it was blond or black, pictures of presidents and FBI directors on the walls, and one wall reserved to honor the memory of fallen agents with their photographs.
Field agents and law-enforcement personnel on loan from other agencies worked in bull pens filled with modular cubicles. A life-sized cardboard cutout of John Wayne in full cowboy regalia complete with six-guns and chaps kept a lookout at the end of one corridor. The corner offices were reserved for upper brass, the one with the best view overlooking the con?uence of the Missouri and Kansas rivers belonging to Ben Yates, Special Agent in Charge of the Kansas City office.
Yates had been in Kansas City for six months, none of them happy. Like all other agents, he rotated through different offices. The lucky ones, including me, were able to choose our final posting, someplace we’d like to live after we retired. Yates was from New Jersey, had worked in Los Angeles, New York, and overseas. He made no secret of the fact that Kansas City was not on the glamour itinerary he’d mapped out, that he’d serve his time here, move on, and never look back.
Yates was married to the manual and fond of telling us to lean forward, a fitness freak who kept a log of his body fat. I didn’t know how much body fat I had, only that it was more than I had the day before. Yates was ten years younger than me, taller, and didn’t need glasses like I did to study crime scene photographs.
He rode us about our statistics—cases opened, cases closed, conviction rates. I didn’t care about the numbers. I cared about the victims. My only worry was getting it right for them. One case meant nothing to another unless a person, not a statistic, linked them.
When Yates rattled on about bringing closure to the families of murder victims, I wanted to puke. I knew better. Long prison terms, life without parole, even the death penalty, whether the courts or the criminals carried it out like Frank Tyler had, wouldn’t heal the holes in our hearts. Some wounds never closed. But killers could be caught. That was what I did. One case at a time.
I had called Yates on my way back to headquarters. His voice was sharp, his questions quick and pointed; he wasn’t groggy from sleeping, as I would have been. I left out the part about my shaking. Now that I’d had my debut before God and everybody, I’d have to tell Yates before he heard about it from someone else, but I wanted to do it in person, hopefully without special effects.
Troy woke me just before six. We set up shop in a large conference room. One wall was lined with dry-erase boards, another housed ?at-screen monitors linked to network, cable, and satellite feeds when they weren’t being used for in-house presentations or video conferences. Modular tables were laid out around the perimeter in a rectangular donut.
We were working with limited information since the preliminary forensics reports weren’t back. Troy posted the names of the victims on one of the dry-erase boards, adding names of their known associates, competitors, and enemies to the rapidly expanding universe of people to be tracked down, interviewed, and ruled in or out as suspects. I thought again about Troy’s speculation that Jalise Williams may have been the real target. We’d have to dig into the lives of all the victims to be certain of anything.
Ammara Iverson sketched a rough schematic of the neighborhood on another board, noting the houses they’d been to in the search for witnesses and the ones that warranted a second visit. Lani Haywood and Jim Day were studying the surveillance videotape, isolating freeze frames of people for whom we would need names and alibis.
I took a moment from studying the crime scene photographs to watch them work. They did their jobs with unhurried efficiency, making certain they didn’t miss anything. I waited until I made eye contact with each of them, offering a half smile and tilt of my head to reassure them I was okay and in charge.
I played with my pen beneath the table, hands shaking, testing my condition by repeatedly putting the cap on and then taking it off. I thought that if I could master the pen, I could get through the day. So far, the pen was winning.
“Ammara, what did you get from the neighbors?” I asked.
She finished her drawing, gathered her notes, and gave me a straight-ahead look. She was lean and muscular, a tribute to her days playing college volleyball, tall enough to rise above the net, strong enough to spike the ball right through the opposition. She wore her hair tightly cut, almost buzzed, against her brown skin, her jeans and T-shirt hanging on her lean frame with a casual elegance.
“Big surprise. No one saw or heard anything. They might even be telling the truth. It was raining pretty hard. Lots of thunder and lightning. Plus it was the middle of the night. No reason to be looking out their windows.”
“Did you talk to the people who lived on either side and behind Marcellus?”
She turned to the drawing of Marcellus’s block and the one immediately behind his to the west.
“LaDonna Simpson lives by herself on the south side. She’ll be eighty-one tomorrow. Goes to bed at eight o’clock. Slept through everything, which makes sense since she’s mostly deaf. Only reason she answered the door was that she’d gotten up to go to the bathroom when we came knocking. Wayne Miller has the house on the north side. He wasn’t home.”
“Where was he?”
“In jail. Bad checks. His girlfriend is staying there. Her name is Tarla Hicks. She was out partying. Came home after the shooting was over. Girl was so high I don’t know how she found her way home.”
“What about the house that backs up to Marcellus? The lights were on when I was in the backyard.”
“Belongs to Latrell Kelly.
Works at the railroad terminal in Argentine. Said everyone in the neighborhood knew what Marcellus was about. Said he stayed out of Marcellus’s business and never had any trouble with him. Said the storm woke him but he didn’t get out of bed until he heard the sirens. Guy’s no help.”
“Did you check him out?”
“Yeah. Port Authority confirms his employment. Supervisor says he’s quiet, does his job, shows up on time. No problems. No arrests, no convictions. A couple of traffic tickets. That’s it.”
“Dig deeper on him. I don’t want to wake up one day and see his neighbors on television saying how he always seemed so quiet before he started killing everybody in sight. And expand the canvass to cover a block in every direction from Marcellus’s house. Put together profiles of the residents. We may not find an eyewitness, but we might find someone who has heard something since the shootings that could help us. And see what you can find out about Jalise Williams. Was she cheating on Marcellus? Did someone wish she was?”
“I’m on it,” Ammara said.
“Okay, people,” I said. “What do we got?”
“Five dead and nothing else,” Troy answered.
“Nothing else is right. It’s daylight and we’re falling behind. Keep digging.”
Chapter Ten
Colby Hudson appeared in the doorway of the conference room at seven o’clock, his beleaguered appearance stopping everyone. He looked like he’d spent the night in the rain, his long hair matted and tangled, shirt clinging to his body, the bottom of his jeans streaked with mud. He was thirty-three but his pale complexion, red-rimmed eyes, and worn appearance made him look five years older, the price of working undercover.
That made him seven years older than my daughter Wendy in human years and at least eleven years older in FBI years. Either way, the age difference made me nervous, though that wasn’t the only thing that bothered me about their relationship. Colby delivered great intelligence that had led to a number of important arrests. That didn’t make him right for my daughter. Not because there was no one good enough for Wendy, though I had my doubts. It was because he liked undercover work too much. Living on the edge, pretending to be someone and something he wasn’t for as long as he had, can make it hard for a man to remember who he really is, or worse, the myth becomes the reality.
Working undercover didn’t mean that Colby lived with the drug dealers we investigated. Every contact he had was supposed to be monitored by a backup team. Every operation was tightly regulated. There was no freelancing. Most of the time, that worked. Agents could play the role and leave it behind when they went home at night. A few forgot the difference, forgot who they were.
I may have felt differently about their relationship if Colby was working undercover on something other than drugs. Wendy had started smoking dope when she was a freshman in high school, graduating to cocaine and pills by her senior year before we put her in a program. She got clean, relapsed, and was arrested twice for possession. The second program stuck and she’d stayed sober ever since. Dating Colby put her too close to her old life.
I’d made the mistake of telling Wendy of my concerns. She told me she was cured. I told her there was no cure. She said that I needed to let go. Then she told Colby what I had said and the temperature between Colby and me turned cold and stayed that way.
“That a new outfit?” Lani Haywood asked him.
Lani was a fifteen-year veteran, just tall enough to qualify for the Bureau but more than tough enough to stay. She had matured from sleek and fast to middleweight and steadfast, her senses of fashion and humor still intact.
“Business casual,” Colby answered.
He dropped his lanky frame in a chair opposite me, swiveling it around and straddling it, arms draped over the back, fingers nervously tapping the upholstery. He had the same no-sleep aura the rest of us did, only he was that way all the time. The rest of us only got the dead man’s glow when five people were murdered in the middle of the night.
“You look like you haven’t been home in a while,” I said, calmly laying the pen and cap side by side on the table. I put my hands in my lap, hoping they’d stay there. He had his own place but spent as many nights as he could at Wendy’s. I didn’t like it, not because I was a prude, but because it would be too easy for the people he dealt with to track him back to Wendy. I had raised that issue with Wendy as well, getting the phone slammed in my ear for my efforts. He turned away for an instant, making a crooked smile, not taking the bait.
“Last night was a good night not to go home. Just ask Marcellus Pearson,” he said.
“I didn’t get the chance. Your buddy, Javy Ordonez, know what went down?”
“He got word a couple of hours after it happened.”
“How’d he take it?”
“Not well. I was with him in the back room of this club on Central. One of his guys comes in, whispers in his ear. Javy tried hard to stay cool but he damn near pinched a loaf in his shorts.”
“Any chance he set it up?”
“If he did, he put on a helluva show. Said good night and hit the street. Told his people to stay loose but not to go home. You ask me, he was afraid that whoever did Marcellus would come looking for him next.”
“Were you wired?”
He looked away for an instant. “No.”
“You went in alone without a backup team to monitor you?”
“Wasn’t time. Javy called. Said he needed to talk about the buy I’ve been setting up with him. Said it had to be now.”
There were a lot of things wrong with what Colby had done, none of which I wanted to deal with at the moment.
“Makes you his alibi for the murders.”
Colby leaned forward. “I’m telling you, Jack, he was so scared he needed a diaper, not an alibi.”
“That was almost four hours ago. Where’ve you been since then?”
“Talking to people. You know the kid that was shot on the corner in Quindaro the other day?”
“Name of Tony Phillips. Worked for Marcellus,” Troy Clark said.
“Right,” Colby said. “Javy had the kid popped. Gave the job to one of his new boys, Luis Alvarez.”
“Why would Javy take the chance of starting a war with Marcellus?” I asked.
“Are you kidding me?” Colby asked. “Those two guys are like North and South Korea. They been staring at each so long, every now and then one of them has to make sure he’s still got the balls he thinks he has.”
“Marcellus sent the Winston brothers to hit back for the Phillips kid. We’ve got that on the surveillance tape from the camera in the ceiling fan,” I said.
“Rondell and DeMarcus caught up to Luis,” Colby said. “Beat the shit out of him, left him for dead. Only he didn’t die. He’s in the ICU at Providence. If he lives, we may be able to make a deal with him, put a case together against Javy for capital murder. With Marcellus and Javy both out of the picture, we might have to find another line of work.”
“What if Javy was putting on a show for you?” I asked. “What if this all started with Luis Alvarez shooting Tony Phillips? Javy ?exes his pecs so Marcellus retaliates. Javy decides to win the war the quick and dirty way.”
Colby shook his head. “Javy’s not a good enough actor to turn white, which he did when he heard what went down. If he set it up, he’d have been cool. With Marcellus and the Winston brothers gone, there’d be no one left to challenge him. No one with the balls or the backing. He’d have been pouring shots of cold Grey Goose for everyone.”
“Where does that leave us?” I asked.
“Looking for someone Javy Ordonez was afraid of— someone with the balls and the backing,” Colby said.
“Could be Bodie Grant,” Jim Day said. “We don’t have much on him. Just Rondell and Marcellus talking about him on the surveillance tapes. The guy is supposedly doing business with Javy Ordonez. We haven’t had a chance to run any of that down yet.”
“What about Bodie Grant?” I asked Colby. “Javy say anything about
him.”
Colby shook his head. “Not much. Just enough to figure out they’re probably working together. Javy wants what Bodie is selling and Bodie wants Javy’s market. The two of them probably figure to give Marcellus a run for Quindaro.”
“If you ask me,” Troy said, “we should be looking for someone who knew about the camera in the ceiling fan. The killer doesn’t turn off the power to the house, we get the whole thing on tape. I don’t believe in that much luck, good or bad.”
“That’s a small club,” Colby said.
“Not so small,” I said. “Not when you count all the people besides the five of us who could have known even if they shouldn’t have known.”
“I’m not saying there was a leak,” Troy said, “or, that if there was, it was one of us. No way do I believe that. It’s not a perfect theory, but it does explain the lights going out. You can’t ignore the possibility.”
“That’s just one piece of what happened,” I said. “Colby says that Javy Ordonez was pushing Marcellus, maybe with help from Bodie Grant. The tapes corroborate that. We don’t know what Marcellus was doing with his money. We got a killer that thought part of this thing through, but not everything, and who may not have been after Marcellus at all. Jalise Williams could have been the target and the others just collateral damage. Either way, the killer left behind enough of a mess that says he’s either a sloppy pro or a lucky amateur.”
“Bottom line?” Colby said.
“It’s an hour later and we still don’t know shit,” I said.
“Is that what you are going to put in your report?” Ben Yates asked.
He was wearing a dark navy suit, fresh white shirt, and pale blue tie. Same outfit every politician in Washington wore. He was standing just inside the conference room door, listening quietly.
A quick tremor shot through my upper body like a burst of static electricity, followed by two more in rapid succession, each lasting a few seconds and impossible to miss. Colby’s eyes went wide, mouthing a question he held back. I shot a glance at Troy, catching him making eye contact with Yates, who answered with a barely perceptible nod.
