The Slowest Death

by Rick Reed

  Jack’s phone rang. It was Little Casket.

  “We haven’t started the post mortem but it shows up on the X-ray,” she said, and hung up without waiting for a reply.

  “The body is Sully, Bigfoot. Our killer wouldn’t waste one of the monkeys to throw us off track.”

  “We should call the captain,” Liddell said. “Not just because it’s the right thing, pod’na, but because this could go sideways on us and someone could get killed.”

  Jack said, “Let’s hope the right guy gets killed. I’m not dying tonight. Neither are you.”

  “I’m serious, pod’na.”

  “I am too. I want you to stay downstairs and cover the front. I have a better chance if I go in al—”

  “No way! If we go in together there’s less chance he’ll get squirrely. Safety in numbers, remember?”

  “Okay. You’ve convinced me. You go in first,” Jack said.

  “I’ll flip you for it.”

  “I’ll go in first, Bigfoot. You’re too big of a target and besides, you’ve always had my back. Trust me on this.”

  “If you’re going to face him alone, I’ve got to tell you something first,” Liddell said.

  “Sure.”

  “A priest, an escaped convict and a mule go into a bar—” Liddell began.

  “Just shut up,” Jack said.

  * * * *

  The room number was on the card. Jack and Liddell rode the elevator to the fourth floor. The hotel was attached to the Blue Star Casino. The hallway wasn’t entirely empty as they walked toward the room.

  An older gent was weaving his way down the hall, swaying from wall to wall like a pinball, heading toward the casino. When he saw Jack and Liddell draw their .45s and check the magazines, the man stood ramrod straight, eyes to the front. As he passed he said, “Good evening, officers.”

  “Every day’s a party,” Liddell said.

  “Not for everyone it ain’t,” the man said, and hurried to the elevator.

  At the door to the room Jack took a breath and let it out. He wasn’t nervous. He was scared shitless. Liddell was right. Chances were this wouldn’t end well, but he didn’t want another policeman to have to do this. He motioned for Liddell to stand to the side of the door. He reached up to knock and saw the glass peephole darken. The door opened a crack.

  In a low voice Jack said to Liddell, “Cover me.” Jack holstered his .45 but kept his hand on it. He pushed the door open and saw a partially packed suitcase on the side of the bed. A leather carry-on bag was next to it. Tunney smiled at them and said, “Come in, gentlemen. I wanted to get packed before I went to sleep. Old habits die hard.”

  Jack removed his hand from his .45 and entered the room. Liddell remained in the hall just outside the door, .45 in hand.

  Tunney folded a shirt, and as he set it inside the suitcase Liddell shifted into an alert posture.

  “What’s going on?” Tunney asked, looking toward Liddell.

  Jack could feel the tension in the air. He said, “Like Ricky Ricardo would say, ‘Lucy, you got some splainin’ to do.’” Jack smiled, and Tunney smiled in return.

  Tunney put another folded shirt in his bag. “That’s about it except for what I’m wearing when I leave.” He was no longer smiling. “Just what kind of ‘splainin’ do you mean, Jack?”

  “You know how I hate loose ends, Frank. Make me understand.”

  “It was her birthday,” Tunney said. “She had just graduated with a degree in Criminal Justice. She wanted to celebrate both of these milestones with her father. I was supposed to pick her up at her apartment in Boston, but I was on a case in Manhattan and couldn’t get away until late. She said she would come to me instead. She said it was her birthday, and she had always wanted to eat at Ecco, the Italian restaurant in Manhattan. She would take the train and meet me there. It would take a few more hours to get together, but what was a few hours compared to the twenty-two years that I had never known I had a daughter?”

  “You have a daughter, Frank?” Liddell couldn’t help asking.

  With a bittersweet smile, Tunney said, “Yes, I had a daughter. We didn’t know about each other until a week before her birthday. I met her mother when I was just starting out with the Bureau.”

  Tunney stared at something that wasn’t there and spoke in a quiet voice. “I met Sue while I was on the job in Boston. I was young and fell in love. We spent every moment together for a month before I was transferred to California. I wanted Sue to go with me. My parents were both deceased. I’m an only child. Sue had no family. We were both alone. I thought it the perfect idea. She thought the idea was crazy. Sue had her life planned out, and her plans didn’t include going to California for God knew how long.”

  He turned his attention to Jack and said, “She stayed in Boston. That was her decision. I moved to California. I couldn’t give up the job. Sound familiar, Jack?”

  It did.

  “Anyway, we talked on the telephone a few times while I was in California, but you know how long-distance relationships are strained, to say the least. After a couple of months, I was so homesick for Sue I offered to come back to Boston. I said I’d take a job at Lowe’s. I remember Sue crying. I thought it was tears of joy or relief and that she wanted me to come back. It wasn’t. She said she didn’t want me to quit. It wouldn’t be the same.”

  Tunney distractedly folded a pair of slacks and laid them on the bed, lost in thought. He said, “I pushed. She withdrew even further. She finally told me she was pregnant and she wasn’t keeping the baby. She said she was moving and I shouldn’t try to find her.

  “She was right. Nothing was the same after that. I was a father for the short length of that telephone conversation from across the states. She hung up, and I never heard from her again. I was heartbroken, but a few days later I put my considerable resources to work—and wasn’t able to find her. It was like she’d dropped off the earth. Of course, if a woman marries and changes her name and doesn’t go to work or drive a car it’s almost impossible to locate them again. You know that.”

  Jack knew that was true. Today it was a little more possible, but twenty years ago they were working at a disadvantage.

  “But then you found out you did have a daughter,” Jack prompted Tunney, to get him talking about the case, how he was involved, and most importantly—although he had an idea of this last—what Tunney’s motive was.

  Tunney was quiet, folding and refolding a shirt, gathering his thoughts. “She took the train. I met it at the station near the Ecco. She wasn’t on it.” His eyes moistened and his words became thick. “I thought she had changed her mind. She wasn’t ready to meet her old man. In our phone conversation, she had told me how she found me. Her mother, Sue, had pancreatic cancer. She left a letter for Missy when she died, and in it she explained what had happened and why she had never told her about me. She thought she was protecting Missy, but had a change of heart on her deathbed. Missy had seemed excited, happy about the idea of meeting me, but she was still a young girl and might have had cold feet. That’s what I thought then.

  “She had not given me her address. I only knew she lived in an apartment. I didn’t know much about her but I always thought there would be time. I looked forward to each new revelation about the daughter I thought had been lost all those years.”

  “Missy Schwindel,” Jack said, and a tear made its way down Tunney’s cheek.

  Neither Jack nor Liddell moved or spoke, allowing Tunney to come to the end of something that was of such import in his life it had driven a good man to kill mercilessly.

  He wiped the wetness away with his sleeve and continued.

  “I have a PsyD in Psychology.” Tunney said. He stopped and looked at Jack. “Did you know I went to law school before I joined the FBI?”

  “No. I never knew that, Frank.”

  “My daughter was following
my career path. Do you know what that feels like? To have a family. To finally not be alone. I was overwhelmed with pride and a desire to meet this amazing child. I had made my mind up that she was going to attend the best schools. Have the opportunity to write her own ticket. Missy was my child, my family.”

  “I tried calling her cell phone over the next few days and got her voice mail each time. I became worried and called everywhere I could think of in both Boston and Manhattan. I checked the FBI databases. Manhattan and Boston had plenty of Jane Doe admissions, arrests, found bodies. None were Missy, of course. It was six weeks later I came to find out about the murder in Boston. Detective Yankowski had run the DNA and matched it to Missy. Because of the nature of the death, it was entered into VICAP and flagged to my attention.”

  “If I had only been there for her. Jack, you can’t let the job ruin your life with Katie. You can learn from my mistake,” Tunney said.

  “You can’t blame yourself, Frank,” Jack said. “I know you think you should have picked her up at her apartment, but this is life. It’s not always fair. In fact, it sucks sometimes.”

  A smile played at the corners of his lips, but his eyes remained alert, professional. “Spoken like a psychologist, Jack. Thanks. But it was my fault. I didn’t have her address. She didn’t give it to me. She was being careful and I don’t blame her. She was her father’s daughter, after all.”

  “Even you couldn’t have predicted what would happen, Frank. You can’t save everyone. Tell me how you got on to Sonny and the others. Did you find out who killed Missy?”

  “It started to come together with Detective Yankowski. He’s good. Almost as good as you two. He got the DNA match that identified Missy. But before he could get very far, a guy confessed. Sam Knight gave the guy a five-year deal. Five years in exchange for Missy’s future—our future. Good doesn’t always win out over evil, Jack. Sometimes it has to be helped along.”

  “Yankowski told me he couldn’t disprove the guy killed Missy, Frank,” Jack said. “The confession stood. The guy was killed. Case closed.”

  “For them. Not for me. Yankowski had taken DNA samples from Missy’s apartment and matched them to the body, but the crime scene and coroner’s reports said there was nothing else, no foreign DNA, the fire had destroyed everything. At the trial, the coroner reported there were signs, but no physical evidence to prove rape. The guy was never charged with rape. I thought the case was too pat. I mean, this guy shows up out of the blue and confesses to a murder. Knight gives him what amounted to a slap on the wrist. Then the guy conveniently is killed just before he is released from prison.

  “It made me curious. I knew Yankowski was working a new homicide that he wasn’t getting anywhere with. I offered to help. We convened at a cop bar, and while he drank Scotch I asked questions. Soon we were comparing cases and he started talking about Missy’s murder and how he never thought the killer was caught. He told me about the suspicion that was hanging over Sonny’s and Sully’s heads before they both resigned. He said he thought the coroner’s office knew more than they testified to in the trial.

  “I visited the coroner and we had a heart-to-heart talk. I had to threaten a federal probe of misconduct before he would admit he hadn’t reported everything from Missy’s autopsy. He said there was a foreign sample from her remains that would have been evidence of the rape, but it was a small sample and so on. After more pressuring, he admitted that one of Big Bobby’s guys threatened his family if he put it in the report. Knight had told the coroner this DNA would only confuse a good confession. The rape sample would point to the real rapist and killer, but Knight was running interference for Big Bobby. The coroner wasn’t a bad man. He hadn’t taken any money. He was just trying to protect his family.”

  “It was Little Bobby’s DNA, wasn’t it?”

  Tunney said, “I collected the sample from the coroner and used a source of mine at the Bureau to run it discreetly. Robert Touhey Jr.—Little Bobby. I got him alone, and at first he didn’t want to confess to raping and murdering my little girl. His testicles convinced him otherwise.”

  Jack waited for Tunney to continue.

  “I’m not a killer, Jack. I track killers down. But these guys…”

  Jack said, “I can understand doing Little Bobby. And Sully. Hey, I wanted to do Sully myself.”

  “I knew you’d understand,” Tunney said. He refolded another shirt and held it.

  “Did you know Sonny Caparelli and Sam Knight were in Evansville?” Jack asked.

  “When I was here a few years ago, working with you on that case, I was introduced to Judge Knight by your captain. It was just a passing thing. I remembered the name from Boston in connection with the light sentence the killer was given. Yankowski had told me about Sonny.”

  “Sully was just icing on the cake,” Jack said.

  Tunney smiled. “I always said you would make a good profiler.”

  “No thanks,” Jack said. “I already have a thankless job.”

  This made Tunney chuckle. He still had a hint of a smile on his face when he asked, “Am I under arrest, Detective?”

  “Do you want to be?”

  “Not really. No.”

  “Finish your story,” Jack said. “I love a good story.”

  “This one doesn’t have a happy ending, I’m afraid.”

  “Let me be the judge of that,” Jack said.

  Tunney placed the shirt in the suitcase and continued his story.

  “While I was in Boston helping Yankowski on the other case, I reminded him he still wasn’t satisfied with Missy’s case. I offered to look through the file. Unofficially, of course. He had some photos from Little Bobby’s funeral service. Good detective that he was. The pictures were damning. I was at the service, far, far in the background. It was foolish, but I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to see the bastard in the ground. And I wanted to see who showed up. Sonny, Sully and Knight were all there. They pretended not to know each other, but it was a poor act. I shouldn’t have lied to you. I told you I didn’t know anything about Boston. My mistake. You know the rest, Jack. I had to kill them all. It wasn’t a choice.”

  “The monkeys were a ruse?” Jack asked.

  “It almost worked. Another hour and I would have been gone.”

  “And Big Bobby?”

  “Big Bobby’s not my problem, Jack. He’s got syphilis. Like Al Capone. Elliot Ness didn’t get Capone. Syphilis did. He’ll be dead in a year, maybe less. He’ll go painfully. Unless he takes the coward’s way out.”

  “Were you really going to leave without saying goodbye?” Jack asked.

  “I’m not going to jail. Only one of us is going to walk out of here.”

  Jack sensed Liddell winding up like a spring.

  “I always admired you, Jack. I didn’t want it to end like this.” Tunney’s hand reached inside the suitcase.

  Jack drew his .45. Two deafening shots rang out. The room filled with the smell of burnt gunpowder.

  Chapter 45

  Japanese legend describes four wise monkeys. See No Evil. Hear No Evil. Speak No Evil. Do No Evil. Some say the wise monkeys are warnings. Others say the wise monkeys are an abstraction, a way of deciding if human behavior is acceptable when measured against the whole of society.

  An even more ancient Japanese legend describes a fifth monkey, a Monkey King, Ten-Tei, whose job it is to mete out punishment for those who violate the teachings of the four wise monkeys.

  Little Bobby Touhey, Sergeant Franco Caparelli, Judge Samuel Knight, Vincent Sullis. Each of these men had violated Ten-Tei’s laws. Frank Tunney, with over twenty-five years of service with the FBI, having seen every type of depravity mankind can visit on its own, had meted out punishment appropriate for these men’s crimes against a daughter he had never met.

  A maxim of law enforcement teaches, “Anyone is capable of anything, given the right set
of circumstances.” Murphy’s Law says, Even the Devil was an angel once. The fallout of Tunney’s crimes affected many lives and brought no one back to life. Justice is incapable of truly righting a wrong.

  Jack stood at the back of the “Celebration of Life” room at the funeral home and watched Katie and Marcie as they stood beside the casket, arms around each other, Marcie with one arm supporting her ready-to-burst stomach. Captain Franklin stood just behind the women, a hand on each of their shoulders. The room was large but full. It seemed the entire police department had turned out for the wake. Several men in suits, some FBI, ATF and DEA that Jack knew, several others he did not, stood in a group. It made Jack sad that even at a wake, there was still a separation in law enforcement.

  Jack made his way through the mourners and stood beside the casket. He felt guilty. It was his fault. He was the one who insisted he and Liddell go charging in without backup. If he’d waited, maybe Frank would still be alive. Nothing about this body reminded him of the man he’d known.

  Jack reflected back on that night at the Tropicana Hotel. He’d thought of little else since the shooting that night. It wasn’t the first time he’d killed in the line of duty, Bigfoot either, for that matter, but Tunney was a friend and a lawman they both liked and respected. When Frank Tunney had pulled the gun from his suitcase, Liddell had shot without hesitation. Jack fired a split second later. Tunney never fired a shot. Tunney’s weapon was not loaded.

  Liddell approached, put a hand on Jack’s shoulder, and leaned down to Jack’s ear. “There’s a guy in the back that wants to talk to you, pod’na.” Liddell hooked a thumb in the direction of the gaggle of federal agents. “The older gent in the thousand-dollar suit. He’s Donald Trump’s doppelganger.”

  “He’ll wait. Bigfoot, I want to ask you something. We did the right thing, didn’t we?”

  “Frank made the choice, pod’na. If it wasn’t us, it would have been SWAT.”