R.S. Guthrie - Detective Bobby Mac 03 - Reckoning

by R. S. Guthrie

  She awoke, groggy, in a cold steel cell with one closed door and no windows, lying on her side in the fetal position. She was a foot above the cold floor on a thin, hard, mildewy-mattress that had been placed askew atop a rickety cot on four legs made of cheap wood that seemed incapable of supporting even Hailey’s bird-like frame. What light there was emanated from a single incandescent bulb protruding from the far metal wall and encased by rusted, curved, grated metal. The room smelled of urine and feces, though there was none of either she could see—it was as if the particles had been mopped up without actually removing the lingering stench.

  Her mind felt swollen and untrustworthy—useless like her numbed, heavy limbs. Her vision was blurred. As far as Hailey could tell, squinting through the dimness, there was no other furniture in the room. Just her makeshift bed. In one far corner she could just make out two bowls on the floor—one looked empty, the other half-filled with what she assumed was water.

  She rolled on her back, eyes now closed, trying desperately to clear her foggy mind; trying to remember what exactly had happened. It reminded her of passing out drunk or stoned, waking up in a strange house, waiting for the memories to come creeping back in.

  There was the party, and she’d smoked a lot of cheap ditch weed—but not that much; enough for a morning headache but not to black out or be carried to wherever she was without her knowing it. No. There had to be more. And there were: memories that crept about in the fringes of her tattered mind, allowing but a fleeting snapshot or two before slipping back into the shadows, unseen, unrecognized.

  She opened her eyes and stared toward the ceiling. Something else. The light from the single bulb now seemed to illuminate more of the room, which was stupid. Her senses were returning. And now, near the top, in the center of the room, she could see something. Her eyes were playing tricks—whatever she saw appeared to be moving. Nearly imperceptible, but moving, slightly, almost—swaying.

  She looked over to the wall opposite the light bulb and then noticed a vent, blowing a small stream of fresh air. Reaching whatever hung in the middle of the room, disturbing its inertia—

  There was an abrupt power surge and the weak bulb hissed and hummed and new light exploded forth as if day had finally come to Hailey’s cramped, imprisoned little world. She squinted against the brilliance, her head suddenly aching; her brain rebelling at the infusion of clarity to her unknown reality. She shielded her eyes with a weakened arm so that she might become used to the new light.

  It was when she finally dared remove the arm that she saw it, in all its perfect splendor—and it was then she began screaming uncontrollably. Memories of the night of her abduction stampeding back into her timid brain, crushing everything good and happy and hopeful in their path.

  “The world was all before them,

  where to choose

  Their place of rest,

  and Providence their guide:

  They hand in hand

  with wand’ring steps and slow,

  Through Eden

  took their solitary way.”

  John Milton, Paradise Lost

  1

  I’D BEEN a cop for as long as I could remember, or at least it seemed that way most days. That was not a complaint. Detective Bobby Macaulay—Bobby Mac. I was born for this work; I’d no sooner have traded in my badge than I would my wife, my three little girls, or my son. And if it wasn’t part of who I was when I was born (many contended that very truth, half-kidding maybe)—either way it certainly defined me then. I’d always believed that all good cops felt that way—that being a cop was as fundamental to their core personality as anything else about them. As fundamental, actually, as their hair color or their height and weight.

  It was in the DNA.

  Whatever the truth happened to be, I counted myself fortunate to be one of the minorities in the world—those who woke up each morning excited to go to work. I loved my job. It was not about the money. I did not stare at my paycheck each month, willing the numbers to magically transform or for extra zeroes to appear. When I received the standard city wage increase, I didn’t smile or frown or say much one way or the other.

  I was, in two words, completely fulfilled.

  Churchill said, “Find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.”

  That was me.

  The worst part of the job? You’d think the murder and mayhem; you’d think the death, blood, and gore. Sadly, you got used to that. You saw guys eating cheeseburgers while studying the ligature marks around an old woman’s throat. I know, it sounds horribly insensitive, as if these guys could not care less. I supposed there were people like that on the job: detectives who literally didn’t care one way or the other. Or had stopped caring, more likely. Oh hell, of course there were, because I knew some of them. But most I knew—the ones with cop in their DNA—the way they learned to cope was by shutting that part of their brain down. It was tougher than learning how to levitate, but that was the irony. Good cops actually cared so much that they had to do it; they had to go numb and desensitize themselves to the worst horrors imaginable because only then could they do their jobs.

  What were our jobs?

  We spoke for the dead; we spoke for them by finding who made them that way.

  I couldn’t eat a cheeseburger at a crime scene. I’d never gotten used to that part of the horror, but I’d learned to cope in my own way. I had a place I put things in my head. Or my heart. At times it was hard to tell the two apart, especially as a Homicide detective. But that place, it had a very strong lock, and I made sure I was the only one with the combination.

  Anyway, back to the part of the job that made it most difficult for me: the crackpots. My own personal stitch in the side as I ran the gauntlet. It seemed (to me, anyway) that there were people on this earth whose sole purpose in life was muddying waters that were already quite unclear to begin with. Shit disturbers, I called them. They were not simply a bane to the police department; they appeared in every place and in all walks of life.

  The sad part of dealing with these individuals was that many had good hearts; a great number truly believed that the information they had would be immeasurably useful to the detectives in solving whatever crime they happened to be investigating.

  Others really were crackpots. Or addicts of true-crime television.

  A study within our own Homicide Division in late 2010 showed that only 2% of all leads garnered from the public bore any fruit whatsoever. That’s right. For every one hundred tips our division received, on average only two provided any reasonably true information about the case (and the impact of said information was normally nominal). Yet here was the conundrum:

  We had to follow every lead we got.

  The bottom line? The investigating cops couldn’t take the chance that one call was the case breaker they’d been waiting for and they dismissed it. In Homicide, particularly, we were talking about an investigation where we were trying to find the person responsible for taking away the most personal, coveted, irreplaceable possession any of us would ever have:

  A life.

  You didn’t take chances with that. You couldn’t. The responsibility was just too high.

  I’d been part of the Denver Metropolitan Task Force “3J” for the past seven months. Our team was formed after the third murder perpetrated by the killer known as “Judas”—a collection of twenty-five elite law enforcement personnel from a dozen surrounding Metro police departments, two County Sheriff offices, and several Special Agents of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. I had friends in each of those departments but Garvey—Special Agent Bum Garvey of the CBI—was about the closest thing I had to a best friend. Beyond my wife, Amanda, that was, who had not retired as expected from the FBI upon moving from New York to Denver to marry me, become my second (and last, I swore) wife, and give birth to our three perfect daughters. Amanda, because of her heroism in the massacre in Idaho, had been given a cushy job in Financial Affairs which was mostly desk-bound, not in
herently dangerous, and offered her flexibility in hours, including working from home over an encrypted network connection.

  The flexibility to work from home was almost a necessity with triplets and I appreciated the sacrifice my loving wife had accepted happily for me and for us. For our family. She was as good a field agent—as fine a cop—as I’d ever known. It was in her DNA, too.

  So she was more or less homebound, and in a little over half a year since the task force’s formation, I would have felt more useful at home than on the job. We had documented over two thousand one hundred and twenty-two dead-end leads regarding the identity of Judas. None useable (which bucks even the terrible odds I mentioned earlier). A few of the leads were circumstantially relevant; in other words, they were substantially legitimate as applied to the events in question but did not provide enough detail to flesh out a viable direction (an example might be a citizen who witnessed a delivery truck in the vicinity of a murder scene around the time of the homicide but the van and its presence there checked out completely). The majority of the leads, however, went nowhere because there was nowhere for them to go; they were phoned in, walked in, emailed in, faxed in, and in one case even mailed in via registered mail.

  By THEM.

  The terminal helpers.

  The well-meaning crackpots.

  I really shouldn’t be so jaded; I was allowed to play a part in making the lives of real people better. We’d never be able to stop the killing that went on in the world, but in being a part of the justice machinery that brought those guilty of such terrible crimes in to face punishment for what they’d done, I felt my existence was somehow worthwhile. The news media—and even the police department spokespeople—referred to the deceased as “the victim”. However, when a murder was committed there was a lineage of victims that went on and on.

  Parents, siblings, spouses, significant others, children.

  And almost no one remembers the victims who would never be.

  Babies that would never be born. Love that would never blossom. Marriages that would never happen. Graduations put on indefinite hold. Children that would not cope with their parentless environments and would turn to crime themselves or to doing drugs or both.

  When we were unable to solve a crime—when the murderer went undetected and worse, killed again—well, therein lay the frustrating part of the job. How to face the families and friends of the deceased and tell them we’d done all we could. It happened. We had many unsolved homicides each year, regardless of how much they weighed on my heart and how furious they made my lieutenant.

  And in the case of the Judas killings, we were now eight deep in just over a year and at times it felt as if we were no closer to the killer than we were on that first frosty morning.

  The morning we found sixteen year-old Deena Ballou’s upper and lower torsos, nude, in the open field across the street from the Capitol Building, separated in two pieces as cleanly as if she’d been born that way. I recognized the pose right away; the decedent’s arms were placed above her head and her legs spread open in a clearly sexually-suggestive way, her mouth cut in a Joker smile.

  The Black Dahlia.

  I was driving home after a rare short shift. Only fourteen hours. Things had gone more than a little stale with Judas, which normally meant he was preparing another victim. He’d kill her—or another he’d been preparing—unless we got to him within a month or so. The profiler’s best theory was that he mentally broke their will by showing them, every hour, every day, how they were going to die. But not when. Each victim had died by having her neck broken by a hangman’s noose; our theory being that the victim was dropped through the hole of a make-shift gallows. Bruising and lacerations were consistent with the body swinging and hitting the sides of the contraption. Splinters were also found, indicating a wooden execution device.

  The reason we knew of the mental breakdown was because he had them sign a typewritten note, each of them, before they died. Each note made a similar confession and was typed on old parchment with what appeared to be an equally old typewriter. The signatures were confirmed against those of each individual homicide victim. Deena Ballou—our Black Dahlia—left the first note:

  Our profiler was still working on his theory for the posing of the corpses to recreate the crime scenes of infamous killings. And the Judas fixation—where they intersected.

  I had my own theories.

  The radio squawked out of the darkness, startling me.

  “Car seven-seven, this is Dispatch, over.”

  I picked up the transmitter. “Seven-seven, over.”

  “Hostage suicide situation at Clawson and Spear. Request you respond, over.”

  “Mary, I’m a homicide detective. I work with them after they’re dead.”

  “Guy’s got his little girl in the house and is asking for you specifically, Mac. Suspect’s name is Gerry Kelp.”

  “Ten-four. Show seven-seven responding. Over.”

  It became clearer to me what was happening on the drive over and the new theories in my head did not make me feel better. The Homicide Unit—i.e. me, in that particular case—had been called in by the Special Tactics division of the DPD, not only because the hostage-taker had been our suspect, but mostly because they knew it was me who’d gotten through to him; me who had buddied up enough to get him close to talking.

  They also knew it was me who blew it.

  During the suspect’s interview, Manny dug into his increasingly thinning skin. Bad cop. I came in a bit later and befriended the guy. It was standard technique. I’d studied his file, found some similarities between him and me—I put myself in his shoes. If I was sweating a homicide in an interview room, who would I want as my friend? So I became that guy. I’m not saying I am better than most, but when it comes to working over the lowlifes of my city, I admit I do take a particular pleasure in rooting out their weaknesses and exploiting them.

  Again, it was procedure. I sometimes relished it more than the others and I’ll leave it at that.

  Gerry Kelp was one of those rare breed of killers. Not flashy, and not stupid exactly, but so completely inept that he made our work much easier than it could have been.

  As I mentioned, I caught the case with my partner, Manny Rodriguez. Manny was the new guy when my previous partner and father figure, Ned Burke, died of a heart attack over a decade back. I liked Manny a lot, and the idea that I had, over the years, become a father figure to him had not escaped me.

  Not that I needed the extra responsibility but there were not enough good men in the department or the world. Anything I could do, well, it was part of the duty as far as I was concerned. As a detective and as a human being. And Manny was easy; the boy had gotten the genetics. He came from a tough background but had been raised never to let it consume him. Regardless of the pressures he’d faced. Shaming, beatings, and promises of death were just a few of the hardships he overcame to become a cop. And the surviving made him the man he was—a protector of the city where he was raised; a hero in the eyes of those who took pride in the inherent good still left in their neighborhoods.

  When we arrived at the scene, the crime looked to be one of method rather than compassion. A young woman in her mid-thirties was found facedown on her own sofa. The cause of death was clearly strangulation, confirmed by our Forensics Chief Investigator, Margaret Duchamp, and also Dr. Benjamin Hollis, the Denver County Medical Examiner.

  There was little evidence of a struggle, and the bruising around the victim’s throat suggested the killer had come at her from behind. (An approach consistent with criminal intent and forethought.) The scene also appeared to have been vacuumed—literally picked clean of hairs, fibers, and any other trace evidence. Which would have made proving guilt incredibly difficult had the perp not experienced a total mental meltdown and disposed of the vacuum bag in the trash bin behind the house in the alley. That and the used condom in the master bathroom trash basket, slathered in his near-dry semen.

  Problem was, Kelp lived
next door to the victim. Neighbor, not boyfriend. So he had not originally been at the top of our list. He was questioned in the initial canvas and told one of the uniforms that he heard some noises but assumed it was amorous in nature. He described a fiancé—gave us a detailed description: how often he came by, where he worked. He practically drew a sketch for Cindy Wu, our resident artist. Mentioned that he had heard a couple of fights and that the police had been involved more than once.

  I looked the victim’s fiancé up in the system and he had a pretty long list of prior arrests for domestic disturbance and assault, three with the current victim, several others with women who may have been previous lovers.

  We talked to the fiancé that same day. He had a strong alibi; a suspect-buster right there, and I don’t say that like an overzealous prosecutor, wanting the suspect to be guilty. I believed there was a fundamental problem within the borders of the justice system; prosecutors looking at cases from a “win and loss record” perspective. I understood why we didn’t open a case until we had enough evidence to prove it. However, the ultimate goal should always be to prosecute and convict the guilty party; not just the person with the best odds at putting a check in the win column.

  I’d seen prosecutors withhold evidence, or at least attempt to covertly suppress it, when it basically exonerated the accused. I’d seen it more resemble a game of chess than a criminal proceeding. My belief was you wanted the person—or persons—who committed the crime behind bars. Too many DAs were professionally and politically-motivated and needed to manipulate the balance sheets in constructing a favorable résumé.

  So what I meant by “suspect-buster” was that it usually cleared the suspect, which was actually a good thing if the suspect was innocent—the solid alibi in most cases meant the suspect wasn’t guilty. Most criminals weren’t masterminds, setting up elaborate fake alibis. If the guy was at work, and the supervisor witnessed such, it was more than likely true.