by Tina Whittle
He turned back to the window. “Tomorrow. I’ll explain what I can tomorrow. Once I’ve had some sleep.”
“Trey—”
“Please.”
I took the exit for Kennesaw. “All right. Sleep it is. But then you and I are having a long discussion.”
The nightmare started as it always did—with me bound and gagged in the trunk. I writhed and twisted, desperate to get free, but my body moved too slowly, like I was swimming in molasses. And then the darkness collapsed, and I strangled on my own tongue, and—
The hand on my shoulder was strong. I pulled away from it. “No!”
“Tai—”
“No!” I bolted upright. A light flared to my left, and I kicked myself away, feet tangling in the sheets.
The voice was steady and familiar. “Tai. Look at me.”
I looked. Trey sat beside me. I was panting and delirious, but I knew that Trey wasn’t in the trunk of the car, which meant that I wasn’t in the trunk of the car. Reality crept back like a slow-drip IV. I was numb, stuck with one foot in dreamscape, one in flesh and blood. I breathed heavily. The air was clean, not the hot rubbery stink of the trunk. Trey sat on my side of the bed, but did not touch me again.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” I raked my hand through my hair. “I’m good now.”
His touch had brought me back, but he’d known better than to get too close. I’d have kicked and flailed, maybe hurting him, or myself, or both of us. Distance was the protocol. I knew this from all the times I’d roused him from some nocturnal horror. During the waking up, I couldn’t get too close. He sometimes swung out in panicked self-defense, and his punches were deadly. Mine were just punchy, but dangerous enough in close quarters.
Suddenly the bed felt too small, the room too close. I shoved the sheets aside and sat up. “Do you have any of those little herbal pills, the calming ones?”
“I do. Let me—”
“I know where they are.”
I pushed myself up and went to his overnight bag, rummaged around until I found the bottle. Chamomile and Avena sativa and other exotic pharmaceuticals. Then I went to the kitchen and came back with the Jack Daniels.
Trey shook his head. “That’s not—”
“—a good idea. I know.” I tipped two fingers into a glass. “But it’s an idea whose time has come.”
He frowned. “I was going to say that while alcohol isn’t contraindicated with that particular herbal combination, it won’t help the problem.”
“It’s helping well enough.”
What I really wanted was a cigarette. I suspected that I always would, that during any time of stress, the craving would kick up. There was no cigarette like a relapse cigarette, sweet as candy, soothing as cool fingers stroking my forehead. But I didn’t have any. So whiskey it was.
I plopped down next to him. “It’s always the trunk. The dock was where I thought I was going to die, but when I dream, it’s the trunk.”
“The trunk is where you were confined. You had choices on the dock. Not in the trunk.”
I sipped the liquor, feeling the warmth spread as I washed down the pills. He was right. Confinement pushed my panic button. I didn’t need my brother’s psychology degree to figure out the symbolic connections. I didn’t like being deprived of my own volition. And I didn’t like being kept in the dark.
Trey slid closer and put his hand between my shoulder blades, tender and tentative. I let it rest there. He’d come for me that night. I’d been practically catatonic on the deck, Jasper’s body only a few feet away, a steel-tipped arrow through his heart. Trey had been unable to pry the bloody rifle out of my hands, so he’d sat behind me and held me against his chest until the ambulance arrived. My official statement was that I didn’t know who’d killed Jasper. Trey knew better. And yet he’d said not one word about it. He’d let my lie stand.
Now I centered on his hand, solid and reassuring. I relaxed a little, leaned my head on his shoulder. I noticed then that he wore a tee shirt, and that he didn’t have the slightly fuzzy expression and sleep-mussed hair of a man snatched from slumber. I slid my hand to his side of the bed. It was cold.
“You were awake,” I said.
He nodded. This was unusual. Trey usually hit the sack at nine sharp. He needed sleep, lots of it, and when he slept, he slept deeply and completely, so thick in slumber that an earthquake could tumble him out of bed and he wouldn’t wake up until he’d hit the floor.
“You’re worried. And not normal worried, either. Can’t-sleep worried.” I lifted my head and looked him in the eye. “You said you wanted to talk about this in the morning. But I think we need to talk now. I think—”
“You’re right. I need to tell you. What I can.”
I held out the medicine bottle. He opened his hand, and I shook two tablets in his palm. I offered the bourbon, but he swallowed them dry.
“Talk,” I said.
He kept his eyes down. “Someone gave me the files. I wasn’t supposed to have them. Neither of us were.”
I was beginning to understand. It was odd to think of this past Trey breaking rules and sneaking home forbidden files. Current Trey would be positively apoplectic at the thought.
I shrugged. “So you have files you shouldn’t have? Big deal. You’re not a cop anymore, they can’t—”
“It’s a crime, Tai. A violation of Georgia code 50-18-72. Section 4. This isn’t simply a violation of procedure. It’s illegal. For me, and for the person who gave them to me. But that’s not the problem. Not exactly.”
“What is the problem?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“I swear to God, if you say that one more time, the top of my head is gonna come off.”
Trey kept his eyes on his folded hands. “I have to find the files before I can tell you anything. I have to talk to her.”
“Who?
“The person who gave them to me. The person I suspect took them back.”
“And who is this person?”
He hesitated. Then he told me. I pondered the information for a second, threw back the rest of the whiskey. Trey watched me like maybe he’d changed his mind, like maybe getting hammered on Jack was a fine idea after all.
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and handed him the bottle. “Here. You need this more than I do.”
Chapter Nine
The noonday sun beat at Garrity’s car like a deranged hitchhiker. Even in the mottled shade, we had to keep the air conditioner running. He’d already started on his sandwich—the rest remained in the box in the backseat along with a cooler full of soft drinks and water bottles. The car smelled strongly of pulled pork and grande sauce, this ominous concoction involving ghost pepper and Vidalia onion jam.
He pulled out another wad of napkins. “I never thought I’d hear the name Nick Talbot on Trey’s lips again, and now you tell me he’s going face-to-face with the guy?”
“Once he gets the files back.”
“And he thinks Price has them?”
“Yep.”
“That’s gonna be hard country there. She’s still active SWAT.” Garrity licked sauce from his fingers “Why’d she give him those files in the first place? And what possessed him to keep them?”
“He hasn’t explained. I was hoping you could.”
The parking lot at Constitution Lakes was packed. As usual, Trey had parked his Ferrari far away from the rest of the vehicles, some Dekalb County sheriff, others civilian. The park was closed to the public for the day. The water oaks beyond the rutty dirt lot were tall and slender and close, textbook bottomland. This was a young forest, reclaimed from the degradation of a former brickworks factory. It filled me with homesickness, this spot of boggy wildness in a sea of concrete and asphalt.
Garrity shook his head. “I’d moved on to Major Crimes when
all this happened, so we weren’t partners anymore. I got the off-duty vent and fume from him, of course, but Price was by his side during the investigation and the OPS interviews. If anybody knows what’s going on, it’s her.” Garrity shoved three tortilla chips in his mouth and talked around them. “Still, it’s been what, almost four years ago? Nobody’s going to retroactively prosecute him for having those files. Confidentiality only applies to current investigations or pending cases, and the Talbot case isn’t either of those things. That case is cold as old stone.”
“He seems to think otherwise.”
“So I’m learning.” Garrity reached in the backseat and pulled a Coke from the cooler, shook the ice water from his hand. “Every cop’s got that quicksand case, you know, and I think the murder of Jessica Talbot is Trey’s. One dirty cop fouled the works, and the bad guy got away with it.”
Got away with it. Every cop’s sticking point. Revenge is a dish best served cold, they say, and Trey could do ice-blooded with the best of them. But when he’d told me about the case, what I’d seen flashing in his eyes had been the opposite of cold.
Garrity took another bite of his sandwich, a torta cubana with hot pickle relish falling out the sides. “That was the angriest I’ve ever see him. I’m talking spitting, cursing, foaming-at-the-mouth furious.”
“I’d be mad too, if my testimony got thrown out.”
“It was more than that. I mean, testimony gets thrown out all the time. You get used to cases going south.”
“This one seemed to go south very quickly.”
“This case had no brakes from the get-go. No matter how meticulously Trey documented that scene, it was already tainted when he got there. The prosecutor knew any half-decent defense attorney would have destroyed it in court.” He dropped mustard on his jeans, cursed and dabbed at it with the napkin. “You know the story of how Price got tangled up in all this?”
“I know nothing, Garrity. That’s why I’m sitting here with you.”
He eyed me over the sandwich. He had this way of looking at me like I was on the witness stand, but he was my go-to source if any blanks needed filling in about Trey. He wasn’t training today, so he was in jeans and a tee shirt. My brain kept superimposing images of him from the day before, tactical gear over denim, ballistic helmet over Atlanta Braves ball cap.
He finished chewing and wiped his mouth. “Price had ridden with Macklin herself, back when she was a rookie. He already had a shady rep, one of those cops you get saddled with if you’re being punished for something. In her case, it was for refusing to play good old boy games. Stupid detrimental shit, but it happens. She sicced OPS on Macklin, and it almost ruined her career.”
“For doing the right thing?”
“For not handling it in-house. For calling in OPS.”
As if the Office of Professional Standards wasn’t made of cops. But the attitude was common, I’d discovered. Good cops hated dirty cops, but a lot of good cops wanted to deal with the situation “in the family.” Bad cops had many ways to get back at a pushy rabble-rouser, and sticking them with a partner they couldn’t trust was top of the list. Few things chilled a cop’s nerve faster.
“Anyway, they moved her to a new zone, did zippo to Macklin. She and Trey started working together on SWAT. When she learned about the Talbot murder, and how Trey was getting implicated in Macklin’s dirt, she made it her personal mission to take Macklin down. So she got one of her confidential informants to cough up some pertinent leads, including the guy who was his fence, and bam. Macklin’s done.”
“But when Macklin went down, the case against Talbot went with him.”
“Yep. Sank like the Titanic.” Garrity squinched up his eyes. “That could be why the files are so problematic, if they revealed the identity of Price’s CI. Documents that do that are not protected by sunshine laws, pending investigation or otherwise. All kinda illegal there.”
I popped the top on my Coke. I had my own theory, and it had nothing to do with Keesha Price’s confidential informant and everything to do with Keesha Price herself. And if I was right, Trey wasn’t overreacting. But I didn’t dare spill any of this to Garrity, not yet.
He grabbed more chips. “Here’s the thing—CI identities are redacted and coded in any case files. There shouldn’t be a single speck of compromising data in there. So this still doesn’t make sense.”
“Trey said he’d explain.”
“Well, he’d better. He likes to play close to the vest, especially with information that could potentially hurt people. But if those files have CI information, they’re a hot potato, and he needs to relieve himself of them, and fast.”
At the edge of the woods, a trio of crows descended on a piece of trash, squabbling, wings beating. It was the only activity in the lot. The hubbub of highway traffic lay just a few hundred feet away, but in this separate place, the city seemed a distant memory.
“Trey mentioned they suspected a robbery gone bad?”
“Burglary. Yeah.” Garrity chewed thoughtfully. “There was a thief active in the fancier neighborhoods then. They called him the Buckhead Burglar. Always struck during the morning when people were at work or yoga or whatever—get in, go straight for the good stuff, get out, empty house, no violence. The theory was the thief finally screwed up and broke into the house with Jessica still there. She ran, he panicked, and in the heat of the moment, he picked up the handgun lying on the nightstand and shot her dead.”
“This is where Macklin came in?”
“Supposedly. The physical evidence backed up that part of the story—the nine-millimeter Macklin claimed to have found at the edge of the property, the one belonging to Nicholas Talbot, was the murder weapon. Talbot admitted it was his, said he kept it in the nightstand because of the thefts. And after that, the Buckhead Burglar was never heard from again. We figured the guy realized he was suddenly looking at a felony murder rap, so he dropped Atlanta like it was on fire and vanished.”
“But Trey didn’t buy that theory.”
“About the burglar making himself scarce after the killing? Sure. But he always liked Nick Talbot for the murder. Said the scene was obviously faked to make it look like a burglary.”
“And Price?”
“Same theory, different suspect. She was convinced Macklin was the guilty party. He had a gambling habit, a prostitute habit too, plus a temper. He was lazy and sleazy and bad police.”
“If he was such a bad cop, why was he still on the force?”
Garrity shrugged. “Back then, it wasn’t as easy to get rid of a bad apple. OPS had problems. They’ve cleaned their act up. Mostly. But even if Macklin was a skeeze, Price’s theory that he killed Jessica Talbot had one big problem—Macklin was at a traffic stop on the other side of Chastain Park when she died. His dash cam was his alibi. Trey was convinced that video eliminated Macklin as a suspect. Price was convinced he faked the videos somehow, and I gotta admit, it does seem hella convenient that he just happened to have a tailor-made alibi ready to go. Like he knew he’d get suspected.”
“And there was Trey parked suspiciously down the road at Gabriella’s.”
Garrity paused, sandwich halfway to his mouth. “You heard about that?”
“Gabriella told me.”
“Oh. You two are talking?”
“Sort of.”
“Good.” He sank his teeth into the sandwich, chewed heartily. “I mean, Trey wasn’t doing anything but sitting at the curb. But the GPS in his cruiser had him in that same spot for an hour, not patrolling, like he was supposed to be.”
I could see it like a news reel. Gabriella gone. The house empty. Trey sitting there, watching. Stewing. Regretting. And then the call coming in right down the street.
“Did they ever suspect Trey of wrongdoing?”
“It was looking bad for a little while. But then Price went ballistic on his behalf.” Garrity chewe
d, stared over the dash at the trail head entrance. “Price blamed herself, I think, for the way everything fell apart at the end. Taking down Macklin protected Trey from any taint, for sure, and it nailed shut Macklin’s coffin—literally, as it turned out—but that destroyed the case against Talbot.”
“So case closed,” I said.
“Case inactive. There’s still a warrant out for the Buckhead Burglar, still a profile up for him in the LINX network, but there hasn’t been any movement on it for years.”
LINX. The Law Enforcement Information Exchange, a multi-jurisdictional database for security personnel of all stripes. If anyone matching the Burglar’s MO surfaced, the Atlanta PD would hear about it.
Garrity shook his head. “That case still has its claws in Price too. She’s primary contact on it.” He hesitated. “You know things didn’t end well for them, right? After the accident?”
“Trey told me he cut ties with almost everyone on the force.”
“Yeah. He did. And Price took that harder than most. So now, after all these years, she’s best approached as a hostile witness.” He looked toward the edge of the woods, where the rutty parking lot met the trail head, jabbed his chin in that direction. “Speaking of the devil.”
Chapter Ten
I spotted Trey first, emerging from the treeline. A woman walked beside him. She was tall, almost as tall as Trey, lean-hipped and lithe. Her skin was ashy underneath the layer of dust except where sweat sheened it obsidian, and she had bits of dead leaves in her hair, neat cornrow braids tight against her scalp. Despite the heat, she and Trey were dressed in long-sleeved black tees, with heavy boots and…
I did a double take. “Is Trey wearing camo pants?”
Garrity laughed. “That’s ATACS, my friend. Advanced Tactical Concealment System. Tonal microstructures. Mimetic patterns. Very useful for mixed-terrain ops.”
