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

by R. S. Guthrie

  “You’re awake,” he said, startling her so close to her ear. “It’s time, my lovely.”

  “W-who are you?”

  “A friend.”

  She’d never seen her captor. He spoke to her often through the slat he could have easily used to give her a tray and flatware. Almost kind. She felt a strange attraction to him. Stockholm Syndrome, probably, but also because she’d not known her own father and there was something deeply fatherly in the tone of her captor’s voice and certain words and phrases he used. He never spoke unkindly or unfairly to her, even when she cried or snapped and called him every hateful name in the book.

  “I’ve never seen you,” Hailey said, trembling, even though she was well-secured. “You could let me go and I wouldn’t know what to tell them.”

  “I could never do that to you,” the voice said.

  “What?”

  “I’m here to give you a gift. Something I know you will cherish forever.”

  “A gift?”

  “Death.”

  Hailey’s trembling grew to a quake. Then she began sobbing. “Please don’t hurt me. I want to go home.”

  “You weren’t home,” the man said. “How long has it been since you were actually home? Did you ever really even know one?”

  “My mother,” she began.

  “Will never even know you’re gone, will she?”

  Hailey cried harder. She wouldn’t. Her mother hated her; spat in her face and called her a “drug whore” the last time they spoke, over seven months past. Her, saving for college, at worst smoking a little ganja.

  The man put his gloved hands on either side of her face and he kissed the top of her head. “If you only understood how lucky you are.”

  “Please don’t hurt me,” Hailey whispered again. She was so terrified she wet herself.

  “Oh, baby. You aren’t going to feel a thing.”

  The man removed his hands from her face and placed a noose around her neck. The same kind of noose she’d stared at for hours on end. The same type noose she’d always known would one day be tied for her neck. She’d long since become convinced that indeed this was Judas. The rope fibers pricked at the soft skin of Hailey’s slender neck. The man tightened the knot at the base of her skull and she felt another bee sting.

  Hailey stopped wailing. A strange calmness descended on her. Euphoric.

  “Who will I be?” she said.

  “What?” Judas said, thrown off, unsure where he demanded sureness from himself at all times.

  “How will I be famous?”

  The drug—Dilaudid, an extremely strong opiate unknown to Hailey—had her feeling almost excited at the prospect of posthumous fame.

  Judas was silent for a few beats. Then she felt the cool wetness of a kiss on her right cheek and just before a lever was pulled and the world fell out from beneath her feet and she went weightless for a moment in time, the killer spoke:

  “Nicole Brown Simpson.”

  “How gauche,” Hailey thought dreamily.

  Then, mercifully—nothing.

  4

  MY SON, Cole, sat across from me at the restaurant table, that look of discomfort screwing up his face as I’d seen it so many times in his teens. It was hard for a parent to stop parenting. A teen would say he doesn’t need parenting and he’d be dead wrong. A twenty-seven-year-old man would say he doesn’t need parenting and he’d be one hundred percent correct. The problem between us went deeper than a dad still trying to tell a son what he should do.

  I was robbed of my parenting when Cole was in his late teens. He completely shut down, lived with his grandparents for a while after his mother died of cancer. He couldn’t understand why I wanted him in my life. To that point I thought I’d done the best possible; that all I’d done was the best I could. Sometimes parents are wrong, and we forget that fact too often with our children. Simply because they lack years does not always mean they are wrong, and even when they are wrong about a fact of life it doesn’t alter the reality that their belief system still affects them profoundly. I’d taken that truth into account far too infrequently.

  On the other side of the same coin, all I’d ever asked of him was the best he could do. As a parent I could accept a C-student, for example, if that child had worked his ass off to arrive at a C grade. But Cole would turn in half his assignments and end up with a D or an F. I refused to accept that as the “best he could do”, but what never occurred to me was the idea that under the circumstances it was the best he could do.

  All I was capable of focusing on was the fact that the assignments he did turn in, he averaged a ninety-five percent score.

  D’s and F’s were absolutely not the best my son could do. Not even in the same neighborhood. So I rode him. And rode him. I preached the sermon of the bewildered parent a hundred times. Rinse and repeat.

  They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result.

  The lies he began to tell—in part to appease me, in part to simply avoid the “same old conversations”—totally destroyed me. A child does not understand the significance of a lie, no more than the toddler understands the significance of a hot surface until they touch it. You cannot touch a lie; it is a completely intangible thing and, in the end, something I was both incapable of accepting and incapable of explaining to my son.

  I remember the first lie he ever told me—I don’t mean the four-year-old saying he didn’t eat the cookie; I’m talking “look me in the eye and tell me the truth, no matter what the truth is, and we can work this out” and him looking me straight in the eye and lying completely, without a second thought or so much as a pause in his breathing.

  I’ve had many a perp who could not lie as soundly as that.

  It is also impossible to make a child understand that the one thousandth lie cuts as deeply as the first. I no longer remembered all of them, of course. The lies, too, became one thick, storm-filled cloud where the lightning could strike you from anywhere at any time.

  We eventually made amends. The prodigal son returned, the father with (mostly) open arms. The younger we are, the more forgiveness seems to come with little or no cost. As we age we become petrified in our viewpoints, so much less capable of letting go of the past. But as I said, we made amends and by that time in our lives took on roles more peer-like than father and son—those years were gone and I could never have them back. It didn’t stop me, however, from being a parent.

  The current impasse had to do with Cole’s acceptance at the Law College at the University of Wyoming, just across the Colorado northern border, about a hundred and thirty or forty miles north. Out of the blue, my son didn’t think UW was prestigious enough. Admittedly he had applied himself at Denver Metro, worked his way into the University of Colorado system, and yes, finally graduated with honors. But it wasn’t as if he’d aced Harvard or Stanford or NYU.

  “Wyoming is a decent school,” I said. “They broke the top one hundred a couple years back. Firms would respect a J.D. from that school.”

  “That’s exactly what I am talking about,” Cole said, poking at his chicken. “You don’t pay attention. I want to go east.”

  “Because the schools are better?”

  “That’s part of the reason.”

  “Cole, what’s going on? You need to talk to me. Be honest.”

  “I can’t,” he admitted. “I don’t know how to talk to you.”

  “Whose fault is that?” I said.

  “See—it’s always about fault and blame with you.”

  He was right. But I didn’t understand his thought processes any better now than when he was fifteen or sixteen. Here’s something I learned long before my son was in diapers:

  There is right and wrong. Always. I didn’t believe in black and white—extremes—but the truth was different. Something either happened or it didn’t. A conversation took place, certain things were said, or they weren’t.

  In every argument, in every courtroom, and in ever
y decision. Yes, there were always two sides to a story. And there were degrees of correctness. The challenge should be finding the right answer. Or the most correct. The most logical, or the better financial decision. But teens—and it seemed to me, Cole, still—landed on a square patch of ground and no matter what or who or how circumstances put them there, defended it to the death.

  I, on the other hand, just wanted to know the facts. The truth. And the truth had long ago become vaporous between us when it mattered most. I told him the Golden Rule when he was younger. I said, “You can lie, and lie again, but the day you lose another person’s trust, it is over. Even if that person wants to believe you, they can’t. They’ll never know if the words coming out of your mouth are the real thing or another untruth, molded to your own designs. Once that happens, the choice is taken from the one who’s been lied to so much. They might even try, but it is then out of their control.”

  It didn’t help that Cole was the best liar I’d ever known (and that was saying a truckload, me being a cop—all we did day in and out, it seemed, was deal with seasoned liars). Cole could look me in the eye, tell an elaborate story, and hook me like a big, fat trout skimming the surface of a placid lake, watching for bugs. I bit every time. For a while.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just want to know why the school you applied to is suddenly not right for you. I think it’s a fair question.”

  Cole nodded. “It is a fair question. You’re right.”

  Telling me what I wanted to hear. Like a fighter softening the other with body blows and hidden kidney shots.

  “Talk to me, Cole. I swear, I’ll shut up and listen.”

  “I want to go to Fordham. In New York.”

  “Fordham Law?” I said, trying not to sound incredulous.

  “Yes.”

  “Pal, Fordham is top twenty or thirty in the country.”

  “I know.”

  “Colorado is ranked around fifty and they turned down your app. Your in state application.”

  “I know.”

  I stopped for a moment. I’d heard these short, non-informative answers before. There was most definitely something else happening; something was being withheld. Time to quit dancing.

  “Fordham has a helluva Master’s program in Social Services, don’t they?” I said. I was a detective; did he really expect I would come into the conversation with no hole cards at all?

  “I love her, dad. I really do. Like you and mom.”

  “Her” was Brianne Finnegan. They’d been dating for three years; met at a class he took at the University of Denver, where Amber used to teach and where Brianne was finishing her undergrad degree in Social Science. Cole did look like I did when I first met Isabel.

  Stunned, almost. Reverent. In love.

  I remembered Isabel for the first time in a while—allowed myself the memories of my first honest love—and yes, the feelings I had for Isabel were far more than overwhelming. They were a living part of me. When she died it was as if they severed all my limbs.

  “If you can get accepted,” I told Cole, taking a large bite of my hoagie, “we’ll figure out a way.”

  Cole’s eyes brightened and he waited a breath, wanting to make sure, no doubt, he’d heard what he thought he’d heard.

  “Thank you,” he managed.

  “If you aren’t going to eat that here,” I said, pointing at his plate of Alfredo, “take it home and promise me you’ll warm it up later for you and Bri.”

  The next morning Hailey Carpenter’s corpse was found on the sidewalk in front of a home in Cherry Hills Estates, the closest thing Denver had to a luxurious Southern California neighborhood like Brentwood. A corporate VP walking outside to head off to work found the two bodies lying inside his gate.

  One male and one female victim. After dropping his coffee cup and throwing up the previous few swallows, the man called 9-1-1.

  Hailey Carpenter exhibited the same ligature and rope burns on the neck as the previous victims. She was stabbed twenty-two times in the head, postmortem, and her throat had a full gash from one side to the other. The fucking sick bastard had even incised her C3 vertebrae, all reported in the Nicole Brown Simpson autopsy in 1994.

  The young man—Stan Perry, 27—was a pizza delivery employee called to the address twenty minutes before Judas positioned Hailey Carpenter’s body; our team believed he was murdered after her body was placed due to blood spatter on the woman’s corpse matching Perry’s and the differences in post-mortem signs of T.O.D.

  “When did the call come in at the pizza place,” I asked Manny. He flipped through the last few pages of notes.

  “According to the manager, who checked the tickets himself, around eight-forty P.M. M.E. puts time of death of the delivery guy at between nine and nine-thirty. The homeowner confirms that he did not make any calls to the pizza joint.”

  “Incoming phone number?” I said.

  “Traces to a burner. But we caught a break. Serial number tracks back to a lot received at a 7-11 store near the crime scene. Judas may have picked up the cell on the way to the Cherry Hills home.”

  “Video surveillance?”

  “Just getting ready to make the drive. Owner says they keep only twenty-four hours on tape—can you believe they still use tape? I got to him in time. We can watch all the video from four differently-angled cameras.”

  “It’s a long shot,” I said.

  “In the dark.”

  “I’d prefer something more solid.”

  “Like the movie Se7en? Perp walks into the station house and delivers himself up to you personally?” Manny said, smiling.

  “You a movie buff?”

  “Aw, you never asked me such a personal question before, boss.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Love ‘em,” Manny said. “Can’t get enough.”

  “You should read more,” I told him, as I probably told my son too many times. The overbearing father.

  “Why buy a cow when you get the milk for free?”

  “What? That’s why you should read more. Not only is the proverb misquoted, it is a terrible metaphor.”

  “I could never tell the difference,” Manny said.

  “Between—”

  “Metaphors, similes, proverbs, etcetera.”

  “Ah, me either,” I laughed. “Pretty sure you were shooting for a metaphor, though. I got it. Movies are like Cliff Notes.”

  “Fucking nice metaphor, boss.”

  “I think that was a simile. Let’s go for a drive.”

  “Bingo,” Manny said.

  I grabbed my jacket and Manny, his too. “The answer is no, by the way.”

  “To what?”

  “I would not like my perp to deliver himself up as in Se7en, a movie I love, mi amigo. One, too fucking easy. I love the job.”

  “Two?”

  “Gruesome fucking ending, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Amen to that.”

  We thought we’d have to sit in a cramped, cigarette-smelling office watching low-grade video on a three-inch screen. Turns out the manager was just using a euphemism. “Tape.” Like calling CD’s “records” kind of deal. This man was a techie and had convinced the owner to buy state-of-the-art digital surveillance. And he meant he duped off each twenty-four hour day from the system hard drive to an online service that secured and backed up the data. Another cost he’d talked the boss into.

  As we walked into the store the manager popped up out of his office and greeted us with a nice USB drive with twenty-four hours of surveillance, in case we wanted all of it.

  “It’s all time-stamped, high def, and I clipped off a segment two hours before and two hours after. A little less for my men in blue to have to sift. Used a sweet little program I downloaded.”

  I accepted the small drive, still amazed at the constant collusion between Big Software and Big Storage. I’ll make my software bigger, you sell more space. Chicken and the egg but you could buy a shitload of storage for a buck and put it on a piece of
plastic no bigger than your thumb (although I had monster thumbs).

  “Thanks, uh, Chuck, right?” I said. He nodded, eyes dancing a tad, clearly enthusiastic to be part of an honest-to-Pete homicide investigation; biggest the city had ever known, though we hadn’t told him that much. “Your boss pay for the video clipping software, too,” I joked with him.

  “Ah, free download. Twenty-nine ninety-five if I want to ‘appreciate’ the private developer’s work. It’s great software and fuck if I don’t appreciate an honest person trying to make an honest living.”

  “So you’re saying the boss paid, he just doesn’t know it.”

  “Chicken scratch, my main man.”

  “I got it,” I told him. “Seriously, though, we really appreciate your cooperation, Chuck.”

  “Go get the bad guy, Detectives.”

  As we were leaving the store, my cell rang. Blocked number.

  “Hello?” I said. Never give out anything until you know who you’re talking to.

  “Bobeeeee.”

  I froze. Whatever was in my stomach dropped straight into my bowels. I felt the urge to vomit. I couldn’t speak. I mean I literally couldn’t speak.

  A voice from the past.

  The killer delivering himself up on a silver platter.

  “A little like the movie Se7en, wouldn’t ya say, old buddy? You remember the scene: the detectives stumble upon the killer’s apartment and he comes up the stairs carrying groceries at the far end of the hall while they’re knocking on his door. Great scene. Perfect cinematography. The distance down the hall, the silhouette, the killer’s hat and him holding a sack of groceries. Ah, gives me chills. Don’t worry, though, I don’t plan to open fire on you. Although I could.”

  I started spinning, looking around, eyeing every street person, every shopper, teen, hippie, homeless guy—anyone.

  Just like the fucking movies.

  “What’s up?” Manny said, still finishing a Coney dog he bought inside while I was chatting with the manager.

  “You don’t have to say anything, Mac. And stop spinning around like a cliché. We’re cool. You won’t find me. You think I’d stand behind you? It’s not going to work out that way.”