by David Levien
Behr knew he wasn’t getting inside. He had no pull with the cops out here, and no standing as one of Teague’s coworkers anymore. It didn’t matter. There’d be nothing in there for him by way of evidence. The doer was a professional, and while the neighbors may have wanted to speculate over vengeful master criminals with vendettas, the killing of Pat Teague represented another loose end snipped off by the cold player he was chasing. He imagined the wife was an accident, collateral. Perhaps she’d walked in at the wrong time or the guy couldn’t wait until she’d left. Or he’d used her to get Teague to talk. Regardless, this guy was stone coldblooded in everything he did.
It wouldn’t be long before Potempa and the rest of Caro received word and traveled out in a caravan to gather up around the surviving family. Behr, as he returned home, imagined he was driving east past them as they went west to Teague’s.
63
Dwyer was sitting in the shite hole drinking a Newcastle and looking out the window when Rickie arrived, and he couldn’t help laughing at the sight of oversized Ruthless in his silly little Japanese motor. He could practically stick his arms out the windows and his feet out the floor and carry it around his waist as if going to a costume party dressed as a car. When he got out, he looked a little weary but otherwise unfettered.
He carried a plastic rubbish bag in his left hand and walked into the room.
“I’ll have one of those, please,” Rickie said of Dwyer’s Newcastle. Dwyer pointed to the remainder of the sixer in a plastic ice bucket.
“Did you get him?” he asked.
“Nah,” Rickie said, popping open the ale. “I waited as long as I thought it was wise.”
“So, nothing then?” Dwyer asked.
“Well …” Rickie said, and went into the bathroom. Dwyer heard him empty the contents of the bin bag into the sink and turn on the faucet. He got to the door in time to see the water run pink over the tools in the basin.
“What happened?” Dwyer demanded.
Rickie met his eyes in the mirror. “I had to do the big guy’s wife.”
64
The first thing Behr saw when he walked into his house was blood—what looked like gallons of it—on the diamond-tiled floor near the door, slowly spreading in every direction, and lapping over plastic shopping bags from Target. His world flipped upside down in that instant and he fought a roaring surge of panic. A dead woman lay on the floor in his entryway. She was pregnant and blond, her throat slit and bled out, her hands folded over her abdomen. His mind fought to process what he was seeing … she was six inches shorter and five years younger than Susan, and there were some dark roots showing along her scalp, which was mostly soaked red. A cold wave of relief and crushing dismay collided within him. The dead woman was Gina Decker.
He crouched to touch her neck for a pulse, but saw it was more than just cut—it was opened up in horrific fashion, chopped away in a deep, wide arc from ear to ear beneath her chin. She hadn’t lost all her heat yet, but it was going quickly. He put a hand on her belly, which was still and without life.
Behr muttered a stream of epithets and what passed for prayers as he dialed Susan. His call passed straight to voice mail and he went white with fresh fear before he remembered that she was at a doctor’s appointment. He speed-dialed the gynecologist and got a receptionist who told him, “She’s in with him now. Any message?”
“Tell her not to leave alone.”
He hung up on her and dialed 911, calling the police and an ambulance to his house and police to the doctor’s office for Susan.
His next call was to Eddie Decker, and he felt his voice go flat.
“It’s Frank Behr. My place. Get here now,” was all he said.
He looked around for evidence or clues of any kind, but nothing looked out of place. The thing appeared to have been coolly and expertly handled. His head was swimming, though, so short of whoever did it crouching in the corner, he had to allow he was probably going to miss anything subtle.
Two patrol cars arrived first, the whoop of sirens breaking him out of his head-down, trancelike stare at the body. Four officers—three men and a woman—appeared at his entryway, and he moved aside to let them in. They were silenced by what they saw, save the youngest male in the group who looked like he was fifteen but must have been past twenty-one, who doubled over and gulped and dry-heaved but managed not to vomit.
“What happened?” asked Sergeant Ryan, the female officer, who seemed to be senior in the group.
“My name is Frank Behr,” he said, showing his old three-quarter tin and his driver’s and P.I. licenses. “This is my residence. I returned home to this. Her name is Gina Decker. She’s my wife’s friend and married to an IPD officer.”
They reacted to this news, but before anything else could be said, another car raced up and ground to a halt outside. Behr saw it was Decker, in uniform, getting out of his cruiser, and hurried down to meet him.
“Behr …” Decker said.
“This thing I’m in the middle of …” Behr began, “someone came for me. Susan was going to be collateral. But Susan, she wasn’t here …” Behr felt Decker’s black, knowing eyes search his own.
“Gina,” Decker said. He must have known his wife’s schedule. He practically ran through Behr up the steps and knocked the young officer, who was exiting the front door, flat on his ass.
A blood-in-the-esophagus wail echoed from inside when Decker saw her, and the officers inside were not equipped for what happened next. By the time Behr got there Decker was tearing the place apart. A chair exploded against a wall. A left-right combination blew holes clean through the drywall next to it. A kick turned more drywall to powder, but also found a stud that cracked in half under the boot heel. None of them could get close to him. Decker turned, his eyes wild with pain and rage, and he moved for the door. The older male officer tried to put a comforting, restraining hand on Decker’s shoulder, but he ended up slumped against the doorframe for his trouble. Behr followed Decker down and out into the street. He was headed for his car.
“Uh-uh, Eddie,” Behr shouted. He knew if Decker got behind the wheel, somebody was going to die.
Behr reached him just as he was opening the driver’s side door. He didn’t pull Decker, but instead pushed him forward, using his own momentum, into the side of the cruiser, and tried to wrap him up from behind. Decker caught Behr’s elbow and spun him, slamming him into the rear door. Behr fought to hang on to him, and finally got his arm over and around Decker’s in a whizzer, then clapped his other hand around the back of Decker’s head, who in turn got an under hook on Behr, and then they clinched.
Decker drove Behr back into the police car again, standing him up. Decker was strong, that much was clear. The man was a beast. He wasn’t just stronger than Behr, he was exponentially so, like a lion or a gorilla would be. Behr tried to use his height for leverage, leaning down upon and sinking his weight onto Decker’s shoulders, but Decker fired his legs and whipped Behr around like a rag doll. Behr stumbled but kept his feet. Barely. He recranked the whizzer and then jerked hard and fast to the other side, unbalancing Decker. Decker went with it, though, yanking them both to the ground, as if he were pulling guard, but instead of wrapping his legs around Behr’s body, he jammed them inside Behr’s legs—butterfly guard—then rocked back, extending his legs. Behr felt himself travel up, flying through the air in an elevator sweep, and landed hard on his back. It was no massage, but nothing broke or tore either, and he managed to grab Decker’s wrist as it was being yanked away, and keep it. He used it to pull himself forward, and Decker toward him, until he caught the sleeve of Decker’s other arm. Behr gator-rolled, keeping them on the ground, spinning them in a cloud of dust. After three revolutions, the rough dirt and gravel scraping their elbows, hips, and knees, Behr stopped them and went for a front headlock that he hoped to convert to an anaconda choke. If it’s not applied perfectly and sunk deep, the anaconda becomes something of a strength move which doesn’t work on a powerful, educated
opponent; and Decker was on his way to ripping loose from it when the other cops on the scene got with the program.
Behr felt Decker torn free of his grasp as the four officers tackled the wild man to the ground and restrained him. Decker was in the process of wearing out—Behr certainly was—and his fury gave way to grief, and the howling sound that issued from beneath the pile of officers was more animal than human.
The scene got thick with official vehicles within moments: more police cars—marked and unmarked—an ambulance, and a coroner’s van. A hoard of officers descended to keep neighbors and a few arriving news crews back. Another group gathered around Decker. Sergeant Ryan and her partner had sat him in their cruiser and were attempting to comfort him, before they finally got him into an ambulance and Behr was oddly left alone for the moment when the dark Crown Vic that Breslau drove rolled up.
The lieutenant jumped out and crossed inside the perimeter to Behr, but this time his attitude was different from the other times they’d spoken.
“We’re in this thing now,” was the first thing Breslau said. “I just want you to know that. You can’t murder an officer’s wife. There’s no fucking way, and we’re going to make that clear … Now, who came after you?”
“I wish I knew. Believe me,” Behr answered.
“Bullshit,” Breslau grunted.
“You think I’d bullshit you on that?”
“Then what do you have?” Breslau asked.
Behr gave him a thumbnail of what he’d learned, including what he’d just seen over in Thorntown. Breslau was silent, working his gum with his front teeth as he wrote it down in his notebook.
“I left here a few hours ago, and what happened to Teague was pretty fresh,” Behr said. “I must’ve just missed the guy.”
“Unless there’s more than one,” Breslau pointed out. It was a good point, one that a layer of objectivity provided. Behr should’ve thought that way on his own.
“What do you have on the guy who got burned?” Behr asked.
“A whole lot of nothing. He rented that apartment with cash. Security deposit was a money order. There are tracks to another apartment and another alias,” Breslau said. “Do you have anything else? Any ideas?”
“You’ve got to grab Shugie Saunders, Kolodnik’s political adviser. He’s probably in D.C.”
“I know who he is. Why would he want to cancel his own meal ticket?” Breslau said.
“Don’t do it, then, just let the city turn into a goddamned butcher shop,” Behr said. He’d never encountered human death in such a concentrated way, and it was preying on his remaining sense of balance.
“All right, don’t get fucking testy,” Breslau said. “I’m just saying how?”
“He found a better ride,” Behr said.
Breslau looked at him and nodded for him to continue.
“One of Kolodnik’s old partners. Lowell Gantcher.”
“You got reports, hard linkage, substantiation?” Breslau asked greedily.
“I’m working on it,” Behr said. “I got a woman who was the nexus between Saunders and Teague. Not Gantcher, specifically, but there must be some connection there, too.”
“What ‘woman’?”
“One who knows,” Behr said, seeing a cruiser pull up with Susan in it, “but not a very presentable witness.”
“Junkie?”
“Close. Escort.”
Breslau winced. “Not being a jerk off here,” he said, “but I can’t go bunge up some solid citizen with that.”
“What the hell are you doing, then?” Behr asked.
“Exploring all the known business associates, digging into other shit. We’ve got to be exhaustive now,” Breslau said. “You know how it is.” Behr did. If it wasn’t a lack of resources these days, it was fear of being sued. It had law enforcement pretty well shackled.
Susan was out of the cruiser now, taking in the scene with confusion.
“I’m telling you, give Saunders a look,” Behr said. “He’s not so solid that you can’t get away with it.”
Behr broke off and went to Susan.
“Frank …?” she said.
It was a disaster. He told her and stopped her from going inside. But she screamed and cried as he talked to her and tried to hold her. He gave her water, which she batted away, and tried to sit her in his car, which she refused. She hyperventilated and nearly collapsed, though he managed to catch her; and the paramedics on-site, who could do nothing for Gina, swooped in and gave her oxygen and checked the baby’s heart rate, which was elevated, but not dangerously so.
She finally calmed, but then said, “Gina made a run to Target for baby stuff for us, and was dropping off mine—” which set off another paroxysm of grief. Behr tried to ride the waves and noted when various arms of the police finished their work and departed. The homicide unit was done with the scene, having photographed it and tried for prints. He saw the coroners carry out the bagged body, the plastic higher in the middle from the baby bump, and he physically held Susan’s face, keeping her eyes on his so she wouldn’t see it. Not long after that they were done inside, and an officer gave him a wave.
“Babe, I need three minutes before I bring you in,” he said, because he knew that while the authorities do cart the bodies away, they don’t clean up.
Somewhere close to catatonia, she nodded, and he hurried away.
Passing by a departing deputy coroner, Behr paused to ask, “What did this?”
“Initial guess, based on the tissue damage, some kind of hand ax,” the deputy said, continuing on. Behr gathered himself and moved inside.
He had worked three months in a slaughterhouse one summer many years back, right before college, and beside the sights of shit-stained animal flanks and offal running in cement trenches, the sounds of electric saws and bolt guns, and the lifers who thought nothing was funnier than flicking blobs of fat and meat off the end of their boning knives into the necks of the newbies like stinging projectiles, the fecund smell of blood and fear was one he’d never forget. It was in his nose now, as he crawled about and went through three rolls of paper towels, soaking his knees while trying to blot up the coagulating fluid and make the entranceway passable. He splashed pine-scented cleaning solution onto the tiles, the grout in between them turning pink, in hopes of knocking down the odor. Sweat ran into his eyes and burned them until they teared.
When he had done what he could, he went and tried his best to clean his hands and then saw Susan in. Being inside where it had happened, seeing the broken walls and furniture, which had actually been damaged by Decker, and stepping over the still damp and not properly clean floor, set her off again. By now, though, her grief had lost some of its force to exhaustion and Behr got her into the bedroom, and sat her down on the bed where he stroked her hair for half an hour, hoping she would pass out.
The situation outside had calmed. The neighbors and other onlookers, including the news crews, had called it a day. There were only a few police cars left. One belonged to the last pair of officers at the location; the other was Decker’s. He had been carted away in an ambulance filled with his brother cops at some point. Behr had lost track of Breslau too and he, as well as his Crown Vic, was now gone. But there was another Crown Vic outside. This one was silver. It was his old boss’s car. Major Pomeroy. Behr walked outside and saw him behind the wheel on his cell phone. When Pomeroy saw Behr, he hung up and got out.
“Major,” Behr said, greeting the tall, silver-haired man. He hadn’t tended to the thin side, but now he was cadaverously so, as if the worries of higher command had counteracted all the big lunches and desk work of his captaincy and eaten away all nonessential flesh. His eyes were like dark agate marbles sunk in pale dough.
“I recognized the address when the call came through,” Pomeroy said. “How’s Officer Decker in this?”
It was no social drop-in. “The women were friends,” Behr said.
“I see …” Pomeroy said. “I’ve been made aware that he put himself in t
his thing, that he might’ve shared department information with you.”
“He didn’t put himself in it,” Behr said. “Some asshole showed up looking to kill me, or me and my girlfriend, and his wife happened to be here.”
“And the information?” Pomeroy pressed.
Behr said nothing.
“Right …” Pomeroy said. “Well, I’ve gotta have someone on this.” Behr could only admire the unbelievable, self-cleaning organ that was the police department. “Seems like Decker’s paid enough.”
Behr could only nod.
“Due to the … political nature … of it, it’s raining big juice on this one, and you can’t stand under our umbrella. Lay off it, Frank.”
“Unbelievable.” Behr nodded once more. He knew what it meant: he was done with the department. Whatever anemic courtesy he might have ever gotten was now history. He’d been on this side before, for a long time. He’d only recently been in good standing. It was a shame to have to go back so soon, but he’d survived it in the past and he would again.
“You have no idea how the upper ranks of the department work—it’s like the Vatican,” Pomeroy said by way of absolving himself.
“Decker will be untouched?”
“He’ll be untouched.”
“Just so you know, I didn’t go looking for any of it—someone shot at me,” Behr said, walking back toward his house.
“Hey, this is the business we’ve chosen,” Pomeroy said, his arms outstretched and palms turned up.
When Behr came back in, he took care to be quiet in order not to disturb Susan, but soon found that she hadn’t been resting. She’d been packing.
“What’s going on?” he asked when he saw her in the kitchen filling a water bottle, a shoulder duffel and her pillow in a garbage bag at her feet.
“I’ve gotta go, Frank. I’m sorry.”
“What?”
“I just can’t be here now.”
“That’s understandable, Suze,” he said. “How about if we go to a hotel? Where you can relax …”
