The Kill Clause

by Gregg Hurwitz

  “—dare you put my husband into that situation. Or at least you could have given me—your colleague—the courtesy of a phone call.”

  “We thought he’d be able to handle it,” Fowler said.

  “Because he’s a male?”

  “No, because of, you know, the military stuff.”

  “Military stuff, right. So he’s got no feelings.” She pivoted to face the detectives, swaying drunkenly. “What’d you find on the accomplice lead?”

  Gutierez, the front man, addressed her like a politician—hands spread and calming, condescension masquerading as avuncular reassurance. “We’re looking into it. But we don’t think it’s as strong an angle as your husband does.”

  “The conspiracy theorist,” someone muttered.

  Fowler took note of Tim’s approach first, and then the others turned as well, everyone except Dray. “Let me tell you something.” Dray was slurring now. “You can throw shit at me all you want. But you say one more thing about my husband, I’ll knock your teeth down your goddamn throat.”

  The bartender was out from behind the bar, following Tim, but Mac waved him off. “It’s okay, Danny. He’s with us.”

  “Is he?” Gutierez said quietly. Two of the deputies eyed Tim and whispered something back and forth.

  Tim addressed only his wife. “C’mon, Dray. Let’s get you home.”

  Finally noticing him, Dray took a step and, losing her balance, sat down abruptly. Mac put an arm across her back to stabilize her, his hand resting on her shoulder. The others flanked her in their chairs protectively.

  Mac’s free hand fluttered in a calming gesture. “Hey, Tim. No offense, huh? We thought it would be good for her to be out right now, given—”

  “Shut up, Mac.” Tim’s eyes didn’t leave Dray. Her head was tilting. The others looked not many drinks behind her. Her eyes closed, she tilted her head into the cup of her hand. Tim bit down, the corners of his jaw flexing. “Andrea. Please let’s go.”

  She moved to rise but only got so far as to lean heavily on the table.

  Fowler picked up an empty shot glass, held it up like a scope, and eyed Tim through it. “Next time someone goes out on a limb for you, you might want to respect that,” he said, slurring slightly. “Me and Tito went out for you, man.”

  Mac removed his arm from around Dray and stood up. Mac possessed effortless good looks, his hair tousled just so, day-old stubble touching his cheeks—Tim was all exertion and discipline by comparison.

  “Listen guys, we’ve all had a long night here,” Mac said. “Let’s just take it easy.”

  “Yeah, let’s go easy on the Medal of Valor winner,” Harrison said.

  Gutierez snickered. Tim’s eyes shot over in his direction. Steeled by the others’ expectations and the row of empties on the table before him, Gutierez stared back. “Take a hint, pal. Your wife’s fine here. We take care of our own.”

  Dray mumbled something angrily.

  Tim turned and headed for the door. Behind him he heard a chorus of murmurs.

  “—good at walking away—”

  “—better keep moving—”

  Tim reached the door and threw the dead bolt, which gave off a metallic clank. The bar fell silent. He walked back down the length of the bar, the few remaining drunks watching him from their stools.

  He reached the cluster of deputies and turned to the bar, facing away from them. He removed his Smith & Wesson, still encased in its belt holster, and set it on the bar. His badge-heavy wallet followed. His jacket he hung neatly on a high-backed stool. He cuffed his sleeves neatly, two folds each.

  When he turned, the deputies had sobered a few notches. He walked over to Gutierez. “Stand up.”

  Gutierez shifted in his chair, leaning back, trying to look tough and unworried, and not succeeding at either. Tim waited. No one spoke. Another deputy took a sip of beer, set his bottle down on the table with a soft thud. Gutierez finally looked away.

  Tim put his jacket back on, grabbed his gun and badge. He stepped around the table, but Dray was already rising to meet him. She leaned heavily on him, 135 pounds of muscle and gear.

  He hooked an arm around her waist and navigated her to the door.

  •He undressed her like a child, crouching to pull off her boots while she leaned on his shoulders. When he tucked her in, she threw the sheets back, sweating. He kissed her on her moist forehead.

  She looked up at him, her face unlined and youthful in the dark. Her voice quavered. “What did he look like?”

  Tim told her.

  He wiped her tears, one cheek with one thumb, then the other.

  “Tell me what happened. In the shack. Every detail.”

  He told her, fighting back his own tears at times, wiping hers throughout.

  “I wish you’d killed him,” she said.

  “Then we would have lost our chance at the truth.”

  “But he’d be dead. Gone from this planet. Eradicated.” More tears than Tim could keep up with. She took his hand, squeezing it in both of hers, letting her tears streak down her temples to the pillow. “I’m angry. So angry. At everything. Everyone.”

  His throat was closing, so he cleared it once, hard.

  “Are you gonna go to sleep?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  She drifted off for a moment, then opened her eyes. “Me neither.” She smiled sleepily.

  “I’m gonna go watch a little TV. I don’t want to thrash around and keep you up.” He smoothed the hair gently out of her eyes. “At least one of us should get some sleep.”

  She nodded. “Okay.”

  He lay on the living room couch as if in a coffin, fully dressed, hands laced across his chest. He stared at the ceiling, trying to grasp the new realities of his life. He couldn’t get his mind around the monumentality of his loss. He was falling into darkness, with no idea of its depth. Canned laughter emanated from Nick at Nite at hypnotic intervals. He tuned out everything but its sound. Laughter still exists, he thought. If I need to remember that, I can turn on the little box and there it is.

  Sometime around 3:00 A.M. Dray awakened him, trudging to the couch, trailing the comforter. She crawled on top of him and burrowed into his neck.

  “Timothy Rackley,” she said, her voice soft and sleep-heavy.

  He stroked her hair gently, then pulled it up and rubbed the soft nape of her neck. They slept entwined in a restless embrace.

  4

  TIM OPENED HIS eyes and felt dread descend on him before he could even put a name to it. He swung his legs off the couch and set his feet on the floor. Dray was in the kitchen, rustling.

  He didn’t just remember his grief, he relearned it. For several minutes he sat on the couch, slumped forward, arms angled out in anticipation of his rise. Paralyzed with sorrow. Unable to bear a single movement. He focused on his breathing. If he could draw three breaths, then he’d be able to draw three more, and life could go on as such, in three-breath increments.

  Finally he mustered the strength to stand. Walking back to the shower, he tried not to think about his daughter’s theatrical heaviness when he carried her along this same path from TV to bedroom at night. Her head tilted back, eyes squeezed shut, tongue stuck out the side of her mouth like a drunk cartoon character’s. Trying to steal a few extra minutes of tube time by feigning sleep.

  In daylight her death had taken on a reality. It lived in the house with them, in the dust on the floors, the blankness of the ceilings, the soft, unanswered noises of his movement past her room.

  After a scorching shower, he dressed and walked back to the kitchen.

  Dray sat at the table, sipping coffee, her eyes swollen, her hair flat on one side. The cordless phone sat on the table beside her. “Well,” she said, “I just got off the phone with the DA. It looks like you guys didn’t screw up the case against Kindell.”

  “Good. That’s good.”

  They studied each other for a moment. She held her arms out like a child wanting to be h
ugged, and Tim walked into her embrace. She buried her head in his stomach, and he scrunched her hair in the back. She groaned.

  He slid down into the chair next to her.

  Black half-moons stood out beneath her eyes. “Motherfucking asshole prick cocksucking goddamned fucked-up pile of miserable shit,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Tim said.

  “They have Kindell at county. He’s got three priors—a weenie wagger and two lewd acts with a minor. All girls under the age of ten. Three slaps on the wrist. Last time out he pled. Judge found him not guilty by reason of insanity. NGI bought him a year and a half at Patton, padded walls and warm food.” She spoke quickly, getting it out.

  “And the case?”

  “He completely clammed up at the station—wouldn’t talk no matter how hard they pressed—but there’s evidence all over his little shack. They got a blood match this A.M. from the…from the hacksaw….” She leaned over and gagged, her spine arching through twodry heaves.

  Tim held her hair back gently, but she brought nothing up. She shoved herself upright in her chair, wiped her mouth, gave a great, halting exhale, then it was back to business. “The DA’s hammering him, filing special circumstances. The arraignment’s tomorrow.” She spun her coffee mug, then spun it again.

  “We still have an accomplice out there who they need to track down.”

  “Someone in on the kill who knew how to cover his tracks in ways Kindell didn’t.”

  “Or a partnership gone bad, or a double-cross.”

  “Or, as the DA seems to think, it was just Kindell in his truck, Ginny walking to Tess’s, and bad goddamned timing.”

  “He’s not looking into this?”

  “She assured me personally her office would continue to explore the possibility, but she doesn’t seem hot on it.”

  “Why not?”

  “A high-visibility case, a neat little package as it stands. And I’m sure Gutierez and Harrison are none too eager to spend sweat probing your leads.”

  Tim considered the dried weeds outside Kindell’s, the soft dirt that could have borne footprints or the marks of a second set of tire tracks. He thought of all the traffic through there—him and Bear included—before CSU was called, obscuring evidence, polluting the scene. Guilt felt weightier heaped on top of intense sorrow.

  “I keep thinking I’ll have to make arrangements. Like they always say.” Her face contorted as if she were going to sob, though she didn’t.

  Tim poured himself a cup of coffee, focusing on the task, trying for a numb moment.

  “Remember at the department picnic, when she was four?”

  “Don’t,” Tim said.

  “She was wearing that yellow-checked dress your aunt sent. A plane went overhead. She asked what it was. And you told her it was an airplane, and that people were up there flying in it.”

  “Don’t.”

  “And she looked up at it, gauged its size with a chubby little thumb, and do you remember what she said? ‘No way,’ she said. ‘They’d never fit.’” A tear tracked down Dray’s cheek. “Her hair was curly back then. I remember it like I could touch it.”

  The doorbell rang, and Tim rose to answer it, grateful for the disruption. On the doorstep stood Mac, Fowler, Gutierez, Harrison, and a few other deputies from the bar last night. They all had their hats off, like salesmen feigning deference.

  “Uh, Rack, we…” Fowler cleared his throat hard. He smelled of coffee and stale booze. He seemed to catch himself. “Is Dray here, too?”

  Tim felt a tug at the back belt loop of his jeans. Dray went up on tiptoe and rested her chin on his shoulder.

  Fowler nodded at her, then continued. “We all wanted to apologize. For in the bar. And earlier, too. It was a, uh, a real tough night for us all—not near as hard as for you, I know, but we’re also not used to…Anyways, we were way out of line at a time when you least needed it, and uh, well…”

  Gutierez picked up for him. “We’re ashamed.”

  “We’re on it now,” Harrison said. “The case. Full force.”

  “If there’s anything we can do…” Mac said.

  “Thank you,” Tim said. “I appreciate you coming by.”

  They shuffled around a bit, then moved forward one at a time to shake Tim’s hand. It was a foolish, formal little ceremony, but Tim found it a moving one nonetheless. Dray held him from behind, trembling slightly.

  The deputies headed back down the walk, and then the patrol cars pulled out one after the other. Tim and Dray watched the procession until the last car faded from sight.

  •The next forty-eight hours passed tediously and painfully, like a jagged kidney stone. Every action was weighty and frightful, full of hidden turns and dark corners. Calling family members and friends. Trying to get Ginny’s body released from the coroner. Receiving updates on the case the DA was preparing against Kindell. Even the smallest tasks left Tim and Dray drenched in exhaustion.

  Kindell, understandably reticent about staying in custody, refused to waive time, demanding a prompt prelim. Dray learned that the public defender had filed a 1538 motion to suppress evidence. She hit the roof and called the DA’s office but was assured that the motion was not meritorious, that PDs filed them prophylactically all the time to keep appellate lawyers off their asses down the line. It wasn’t the worst thing that the PD was touching all the bases; he had a reputation for being a loose cannon, and the last thing they wanted was Kindell filing an Ineffective Assistance of Counsel Writ after the trial.

  The phone rang constantly with calls from investigators, well-wishers, press, its jangle an unnerving marching-band tune for the parade of tin-foil-covered plates and eyes crinkled with sympathy. But despite the traumatizing details and petty tortures, the days were defined by a maddening eventlessness, all sound and fury and little advancement, like running on ice.

  The incessant hammering of grief and stress left Tim and Dray with tattered and few resources. Though they tried to comfort each other, to embrace, to mourn together, their pain seemed amplified by the other’s distress and their own uselessness in the face of it. They both found themselves increasingly wrapped in their own private pain, unable to muster the strength to pull themselves out of it.

  They began keeping a respectful distance from each other, like roommates. They napped frequently, though always separately, and they rarely ate, despite the array of filled Tupperware that packed their refrigerator, replenished almost hourly by neighbors and friends. When they did interact, it was in brief, overpolite exchanges, parodies of domesticity. The sight of Dray elicited in Tim a piercing shame that he was unable to be more for her right now. He knew that in his face Dray saw reflected back only the same devastation that weighed down hers.

  The DA’s office was respectful about keeping them in the loop about the case, though also cautious about releasing many specifics. In conversations with her colleagues, Dray managed to piece together fragments of information about Gutierez and Harrison’s investigation, enough to grasp that they’d jettisoned the accomplice theory to focus their full energies on shoring up the case against Kindell.

  Tim’s mind returned to Kindell’s shack with obsessive regularity, replaying each detail, from the slipperiness of the oil-stained floor to the sharp scent of paint thinner.

  I wasn’t supposed to kill her.

  He didn’t—

  Eight words had opened up a chasm of doubt. The pain of not knowing almost equaled the pain of loss, because it played carnival-mirror tricks with Tim’s grief, magnifying it one moment, reshaping it the next. He was mourning without knowing the exact parameters of what he was mourning—Ginny was dead, but what she had gone through and who was responsible for it were blank canvases awaiting the latest incarnation, the latest projection of rage or horror. Kindell had proved enough to sate the appetite of the detectives and the DA, but Tim knew there were additional gutters to be flushed. The progression of atrocious events that had filled his daughter’s last hours remained out there, frozen
in history, waiting to be reconstructed.

  Wednesday night he and Dray went for a drive, their first outing together since Ginny’s death. They sat awkwardly in silence, trying to let the movement and crisp night air lull them back to compatibility. On their way home they passed McLane’s. Dray craned her neck, checking out the vehicles in the dark lot. “Gutierez’s rig,” she murmured.

  Tim flipped a U-turn and pulled in the lot. Dray turned in her seat to watch him, more curious than surprised.

  They found Gutierez in the back, shooting stick with Harrison. Gutierez nodded in greeting, then spoke in the same softened voice everyone used with them now. “You guys holding up okay?”

  “Fine, thanks. Can we have a minute?”

  “Sure thing, Rack.”

  The detectives followed Tim and Dray out to the back parking lot.

  “Word is you’re dropping the accomplice angle,” Tim said.

  Harrison stiffened. Gutierez cocked his head slightly. “It didn’t yield.”

  “Have you checked Kindell’s priors? Did he work with an accomplice on those?”

  “We’re working very closely with the DA, and we’ve turned up no evidence of other people’s involvement. We’ve looked into everything. Now, you’re well aware that we can’t involve parents of victims in our cases—”

  “A little late for that,” Dray threw in.

  “You’ve got no distance from the case. No perspective. And to say you’re biased is something of an understatement. Now, I know what you thought you heard in there—”

  “How did you find Ginny’s body?” Tim said. “So quickly. I mean, that creek bed is pretty remote.”

  Harrison blew out a breath that clouded in the cool air. “Anonymous call.”

  “Man or woman?”

  “Look, we don’t have to—”

  “Was it a man’s or a woman’s voice?”