How It Happened

by Michael Koryta

  “What the hell is that?” Johansson said.

  “Air hammer, maybe?” Barrett said. “They’re also spraying paint.”

  The biting chemical smell was strong back here. There was something about the hissing sound and the clatter of the air hammer amid all the empty, broken cars that made the place feel ominous even under the bright midday sun.

  He looked the cars over, trying to assess why they had not been hauled into the field with the others. Maybe they needed to be scavenged for parts, and the others already had been? They were missing hoods or doors or wheels, wounded soldiers on a forgotten battlefield.

  “Chop shop, maybe,” Johansson said again, walking toward the back building. He’d gone about ten paces before he realized Barrett was no longer beside him and turned. “What are you doing?”

  Barrett was staring at a truck that rested in the weeds behind the garage. It was missing its wheels and its body seemed to be suffering from a skin disease, gray flesh pocked with rusty sores. The chrome grille was bent and one headlight was cracked, but the square face of the truck was intact, and you could read the word DODGE stamped into the top of the grille.

  They made a million of them, Barrett thought, but he left Johansson and walked to the truck. The color was right except for the hood. No black-on-white, no Halloween cat. Nothing that matched Kimberly’s story. Of course, that could have been painted over. If anyone had painted over this truck, though, he’d done one hell of a job—it was tough to match thirty-year-old paint and rust spots.

  He came around to the back of the truck and then pulled up short, his blood seeming to thicken in his veins.

  The weathered license plate was Maine 727CRC.

  “Barrett, what in the hell are you doing?” Johansson called in a low voice.

  Without speaking, he motioned for Johansson to join him, then pointed wordlessly at the plate.

  “Son of a bitch,” Johansson whispered. “He’s here.”

  “Or he’s long gone and driving another vehicle. But the plate is right.” Barrett stepped forward and looked in the bed. It was filled with junk, old cinder blocks and some scrap lumber and a chain. On the inside of the tailgate, a splash of rust-colored stains was visible.

  His pulse began to speed up again. Slow warmth spread into his fingertips as he rounded the truck and looked at the hood. It had not been replaced, and it had not been repainted.

  “Right truck,” he said. “But what in the hell was she talking about with the paint?”

  “I think we can forget about Kimmy for the moment,” Johansson whispered. “Let’s call this in.”

  The soft clattering resumed from inside the garage, thunk-thunk-thunk, as the air hammer pounded metal. The smell of paint rode heavy on the wind. Barrett walked to the passenger door, pulled his shirttail free, wrapped his fingers in the fabric, and tried the handle. Unlocked. The door creaked open and he looked in at the long bench seat.

  There was no extended cab, only a bench seat in front. I usually get stuck in the middle because I’m small, right? But Cass took the middle that night. She wanted to be close to Mathias.

  “It is the right truck,” he said again under his breath.

  There was no sound except for the hiss of the paint gun.

  “We need to call this in,” Johansson repeated.

  “Yeah.” But Barrett didn’t move. He was scanning the cab now, looking at the collection of fast-food receipts and candy wrappers and Uncle Henry’s trader magazines that littered the floor and seat.

  “Hey!”

  The shout was so loud that Barrett rocketed up and smacked his skull on the door frame, a brain-rattling shot that left him dizzy as he stepped back.

  A short, muscular guy with unkempt hair and uneven stubble was walking toward them with swift, officious strides, like an umpire hustling across the diamond.

  “What the hell are you doing inside my—”

  The man stopped short when he saw Johansson’s uniform. Barrett fumbled his own badge loose from his belt, still wincing from the blow to the head.

  “We’re police,” Johansson said. “I need you to calm—”

  “I know why you’re here,” the man said, his voice going high and unsteady. Barrett could see him clearly now. It was Jeffrey Girard.

  “Calm down,” Johansson said.

  But Girard was retreating, backing toward the garage, where a pedestrian door stood ajar.

  “Stop moving,” Johansson barked. “Stop moving!”

  “I know why you’re here,” Girard repeated, and then he turned and moved to the door with that odd, urgent walk.

  “Stop right there!” Johansson shouted, and then he drew his gun.

  Girard ducked through the open door and vanished.

  Johansson swore and rushed forward, his gun raised, but Barrett caught him by the arm.

  “Easy! We don’t need to escalate.”

  Johansson was buzzing, his eyes wide, muscles tensed, jaw locked.

  “He said he knows why we’re here.”

  “He ought to,” Barrett said. “Now call it in. We’ve got Girard and we’ve got the truck. Let’s not screw this up.”

  His eyes were still on the doorway where Girard had vanished. Against the sunlit day, it was just a square of blackness. Somewhere beyond, the hissing sound continued.

  Johansson lowered his gun. He kept it in his right hand and used his left to key the radio that was just below his collar. He’d only had time to say “Unit one-forty-three” before there was motion inside the door and Jeffrey Girard stepped out of the darkness and into the daylight with a shotgun in his hands.

  “Put that down!” Barrett shouted, sidestepping to get behind one of the gutted cars as he drew his Glock nine-millimeter duty pistol, the first draw he’d ever made in his career. Before he’d even cleared it from the holster there was the double-clap of two gunshots.

  Girard had been holding the shotgun across his chest, not pointing it at them—at least not yet—but now he fell back against the door and slid down, leaving a bright streak of blood against the white paint on the door.

  “Damn it, hold your fire!” Barrett shouted at Johansson, who was standing in place, gun leveled out in front of him in one hand like an amateur pistol shooter at the range. He’d fired so fast he hadn’t even gotten into a two-handed grip. He’d just lifted and shot.

  And hit.

  “I thought he was shooting!” Johansson said, still holding the odd pose, as if the scene were frozen until he broke it, as if this could be rewound. “I heard shots!”

  “That was the air hammer,” Barrett said, and he could see a little of the color drain from Johansson’s cheeks.

  “Oh, shit,” Johansson said, and then he finally lowered the gun.

  Barrett looked at the writhing, bleeding man in the grass just in front of the garage and said, “Give me cover, and do not shoot unless you have to.”

  He stepped out from behind the car and advanced on Girard with his own gun held in front of him. Shooter’s stance, two-handed grip, careful stride. Just like he’d been taught at the academy, which was not all that long ago.

  Girard was holding his stomach with both hands. The shotgun was just in front of him. He looked from Barrett to the shotgun and then back.

  “Do not move,” Barrett snapped. “Just stay down. We’re going to get you help. Do not move, though.”

  The paint fumes wafting out from the open door stung his eyes and made them water as he advanced. He didn’t want to blink, was afraid of what might happen in that brief instant. Jeffrey Girard watched him approach and tried to speak. Instead of words, though, he made a sound like a stifled yawn and then bright blood ran over his open lips and down his chin. He looked at Barrett plaintively, the sort of look you could give only when you understood that you were badly hurt and were helpless to fix it.

  Then he reached for the shotgun.

  Barrett tensed his finger on the trigger, but Girard didn’t try to pick up the shotgun or even close his
hand around the stock. Instead, he pushed it with an open palm, sliding it a few pitiful feet closer to Barrett, like an offering.

  “Thank you,” Barrett said, understanding that this meant surrender. He kept his Glock trained on Girard while he reached out with his left hand and pulled the shotgun away, out of reach. Then he waved Johansson forward. Johansson had been speaking into his radio, but now he hurried forward—moving too fast, too upright. Everything about him had been too fast today.

  “Sheriff and state en route. And an ambulance,” he said.

  Barrett wanted to help Girard because that level of bleeding would kill him fast if it wasn’t stopped, but there were others inside to worry about. A swirl of training and assault simulators spun through his mind as he tried to steady his breathing and bring his heart rate down.

  “We need to clear that building and then help him,” he said. “I can’t turn my back to that door to help him until we clear it, do you see?”

  Johansson nodded. He face was awash with sweat, and his breath was coming fast and ragged. It was not the face you wanted to see on someone who might need to provide cover fire for you.

  “Whoever is in there is probably just working on a car, okay?” Barrett said. “Be alert but not anxious. You got me?”

  Johansson nodded again, crab-walking closer, and when he brought his gun up, Barrett almost wanted to tell him to put it down. Barrett took a breath, gathered himself, and then went through the door and spun toward the light, keeping low, gun drawn. Almost immediately he saw a bulky figure in the center of the room.

  “FBI! Hands in the air, hands in the air!”

  When the big man in the bulky suit and mask turned toward him and pointed the gun, Barrett nearly shot him. The visual was simply Gun, he is pointing a gun, shoot him now, kill him now, but the gun was blowing blue paint into the air.

  The man was dressed in a heavy protective suit, wearing a mask and ear protection, clueless to the chaos outside. In front of him was a half-painted car, its windows covered in clear plastic and tape. He stared at Barrett for a second, blowing the paint into the air between them, and even through the mask, Barrett could see his wide eyes, the absolute confusion in them.

  That was when Johansson whirled in and screamed, “Drop it, drop it!”

  “Not a weapon, it is not a weapon!” Barrett shouted back, and he was reaching for Johansson’s arm when the man in the suit dropped the paint gun and stumbled back, hands in the air.

  “Stay there! Do not move!” Johansson’s hands were shaking, and Barrett sagged against the wall, thinking of what could have happened in here. He’d been through dozens of close-quarters simulations at Quantico, each of them designed to be challenging scenarios, but nobody had ever dreamed up a paint gun and the staccato clap of an air hammer. Even the simulator programmers weren’t that sadistic.

  “Go get him, and be easy,” Barrett said. The man in the suit was down on his knees now, hands held so high he had to be close to dislocating his shoulders. He was terrified. “Get him secured. I’ll be with Girard.”

  He went back outside and into the daylight. The hot copper smell of blood was mingling with the chemical odor of paint now, a sickening pairing, and he had to swallow against the rise of bile in his throat. Jeffrey Girard was curled up like a child, hugging his abdomen. There was blood all over. It shone ruby-colored in the sun.

  Barrett holstered his gun, unbuttoned his shirt, and peeled it off, no other material to hold pressure with in sight. He had a first aid kit in his car, but it was for cut fingers, not gunshot wounds. He balled the shirt up and knelt beside Girard. There were sirens in the distance now.

  “Let me help you.”

  Girard didn’t want to take his hands off his wound. He made a low moan and pressed them harder against himself, and blood bubbled between his fingers. He looked at Barrett’s shirt with doubtful eyes. He knew he was bleeding out and he was afraid to let up on the pressure even for an instant. So primal—I can’t afford to lose any more of this. Barrett put the shirt over the wounded man’s hands. It was not going to matter much either way. Unless those sirens closed the gap awfully fast, it was not going to matter.

  He leaned over Girard and said, “Did you kill them? Jackie and Ian? Did you kill them?”

  Girard stared at him. His eyes were glassy and distant. Barrett wanted to smack him, get his attention. It was past that point now, though. So far past that point.

  “Did you do it? Or did you help Mathias Burke?”

  Nothing. Barrett could feel the warmth of the man’s blood even through the shirt.

  “Please talk,” he whispered. “Please tell me how it happened.”

  Girard’s head drooped forward, his neck muscles loosening. His mouth fell open and a thin stream of blood ran out of it.

  “Fuck,” Barrett said, speaking in a calm, reasonable voice into this day gone mad.

  He stood and went over to the shotgun. It was a heavy black Remington twelve-gauge. He broke the barrel and looked for the load.

  Empty.

  He closed his eyes for a moment. Took a breath. Then he snapped the barrel shut so that it would look better when they found it in the grass. He wanted to do that much for Johansson. It was a mean-looking gun when you thought it was loaded. It was a mean-looking gun and it had been in a suspected murderer’s hands and the air hammer had been clattering like a semiautomatic weapon.

  It had been tougher out here than people would understand.

  Barrett was kneeling by the body again when Johansson came out to join him. The sirens were louder now and they could see the first cars up on the hill. Two cruisers, running like hell.

  “It’s his cousin inside,” Johansson said. “Bobby. I cuffed him. Just to…I didn’t know what the hell to do with him.”

  Barrett nodded. He didn’t tell Johansson that the shotgun hadn’t been loaded. It was better that he not know that detail when the incident-review team asked him how it had happened.

  “I didn’t know what the hell to do,” Johansson repeated, his voice urgent, almost pleading. “I’ve never been in a firefight before.”

  “We still haven’t,” Barrett said, and then he walked to the gate to meet the oncoming police, shirtless and bloodstained, his badge held high.

  17

  Mathias Burke addressed the media on the jailhouse steps after his release.

  He faced the cameras with poise and reminded the reporters that everyone’s heart should be with the families of Jackie Pelletier and Ian Kelly today and that the injustice Mathias had endured was nothing compared to what they were going through.

  But what if the bodies hadn’t been found? a reporter asked. What if there had been no tip, and they’d pressed on with the prosecution based on Kimberly Crepeaux’s confession?

  “That’s God’s hand,” Mathias said.

  They asked Mathias if he was angry.

  “I’m angry with the FBI agent,” he said. “Rob Barrett. Barrett didn’t want the truth. He just wanted to hang me. He accused me of terrible things, and probably a lot of people believed him. Now people know the truth. I’m grateful for that. For myself, sure, but mostly for the families of those two who were killed. As far as what was said about me, the accusations that were made…if you ask me, that’s criminal.”

  When questioned as to whether he would pursue civil charges for libel or slander, Mathias demurred.

  “I’d win if I did, but I just want to get back to my own life, keep my head down, and put this behind me. It was a nightmare while it lasted, but I’m awake now.”

  Kimberly Crepeaux didn’t give a press conference, and she wasn’t released, still serving time for her unrelated charges. Instead, she issued a written statement through her public defender explaining that she’d made up her horrific tale to appease the relentless pressure of Special Agent Rob Barrett.

  I was coersed, she wrote. I talked to him over and over and told the truth but he didn’t want to hear the truth. Barrett wanted to hear a spacific story
and finally I just told him what he wanted to hear, because I didn’t want to spend my life in prison. He told me if I gave him that story, the one he wanted to hear, then I’d be able to stay out of prison and see my little girl grow up. Who wouldn’t be willing to make that trade?

  The dead man’s defense consisted of a single hollow excuse from his cousin.

  Bobby Girard claimed that a man in Rockland had borrowed Jeffrey’s battered Dodge Dakota sometime in the summer or fall a year earlier because his own vehicle was in the shop. There was no evidence of this, but even if there had been, it wasn’t a threat to Mathias Burke, who personally owned a truck, a car, and a motorcycle and through his company owned an additional eight trucks and two cargo vans. He was hardly hurting for a vehicle.

  The idea that the truck matched most of Kimberly’s description led to theories that she’d been with Girard at the time of the killings. She denied this, and the dead man couldn’t say otherwise.

  Barrett’s requests to talk to Kimberly Crepeaux again were denied by Kimberly, Emily Broward, and Colleen Davis. As soon as the police in Maine were through reviewing the shooting at the body shop, he’d been recalled to Boston.

  “Do not go back to Port Hope,” Roxanne Donovan said. When he said he still had to clear out his hotel room, she promised to have an agent from the Augusta field office ship his things south.

  Boston felt loud and distracted and detached to him. He wanted everyone he passed on the streets to know of the case, the way they had in Maine. He wanted strangers to approach him and tell him a story about the time Howard Pelletier had made Jackie a rocking chair out of busted lobster traps or the time they’d seen Ian and Jackie walking hand in hand down the pier to the Marshall Point Lighthouse.

  He wanted people to care.

  Considering the kind of publicity he was getting for his role in the case, though, he should have been grateful that they didn’t.

  Roxanne Donovan, who’d brought him to Boston because of his expertise in interviewing, interrogation, and confessions, now told him she needed him on document review for a case involving a pharmaceutical company that had endured a wave of citations from the FDA and drawn interest from the Department of Justice. His assignment: read seventy-three thousand pages of e-mails.