Cop Town: A Novel

by Karin Slaughter

  “Such a phrase,” her grandmother had said.

  “An oxymoron,” her father had noted.

  Her mother had smoked a stranger’s cigarette from a nearby ashtray.

  Kate had no idea where the brochure was now. She didn’t really care. She didn’t need death benefits. She needed her husband.

  Lacking both, what she really needed was to get ready for work.

  Kate took off her robe as she walked into the bathroom. She checked to make sure her hair was securely pinned up before turning on the shower and stepping in.

  She gasped at the cold spray. The plumbing was menopausal, which was a funny joke considering she lived in a hotel exclusively for women. One minute the water was too cold, the next it was too hot. The stream fluctuated depending on how many women were using identical bathrooms on identical floors. If too many toilets were flushed too closely together, they were all screwed.

  Kate stared blankly through the translucent shower curtain as she washed. The view wasn’t much: her bed, and the wall on the other side of her bed. She closed one eye, then the other. Her vision was mottled by the green-tinted plastic curtain. She tried to remember what she had liked so much about this place when she’d first seen it. The anonymity? The sterileness? The beigeness of it all?

  That hadn’t lasted long. Her mother had swooped in with her credit

  card and her good taste, and now abstract art hung on the walls, a white shag rug covered the awful tan carpet in the bedroom, and Kate’s bed linens were more suited for a display window at Davison’s than a downtown hotel for single women.

  Honestly, Kate preferred the place the way she’d found it.

  She turned off the taps and quickly dried herself. The bedside clock had been playing games, flipping ahead almost half an hour while she stood under the water. She would have to stop letting her mind wander. The same thing had happened this morning on the way back from breakfast at the diner. One moment she was asking a man in the street for the time, and the next she was sitting on a bench, staring up at the blue sky, as if she had all the time in the world.

  Daydreaming was the old Kate’s luxury. She lived on her own now. She had rent to pay. She had to buy her own food and clothes. She could no longer while away the hours reading trashy paperbacks and drinking her father’s gin.

  Death benefits.

  Kate tore away the plastic dry cleaner’s bag and laid out her clothes on the bed. From the hallway came the hustle and bustle of girls on their way to work. She thought of them as the first shift—the office girls with their neatly bobbed hair and daringly short skirts. They were young and pretty and still worried about what their parents thought of them, as evidenced by the fact that, as audacious as it was to live alone in the big city, they did so in an establishment that strictly forbade any male guests above the lobby floor.

  The second shift would follow in approximately fifteen minutes, older women like Kate who were in their mid- to late twenties. They were all personal secretaries or head tellers. Career gals. Independent. Full of spunk. Kate loved watching them in the elevator. They were constantly checking themselves. Eyeliner unsmudged. Lipstick perfect. Blouse tightly tucked. Hem sharply pressed. Before the car reached the bottom floor, they’d reflexively checked at least three times to make sure that their stockings were straight.

  And then they walked across the lobby, heads held high, as if they

  hadn’t a care in the world. Between their shockingly good posture and pointy brassieres, they reminded Kate of ships sailing off to war.

  The clock was sneaking up on her again. Kate muttered a curse as she pulled on her underwear. She sat down on the bed and rolled on her pantyhose. She stood up to adjust the waistband. She sat back down to put on a pair of black socks. She slid into the stiff, navy-blue pants. And slid, and slid.

  “Oh, no …,” she groaned.

  The pants were enormous. She stood up to assess the damage. Even with the belt tightly buckled, the material hung like a deflated balloon around her waist. This must have been done to her on purpose. Kate had given the supply sergeant all of her measurements. She was five feet nine, hardly diminutive, but the legs of the pants were so long that they reached past her toes. A string of curses followed as she searched her underwear drawer for a pack of straight pins that she eventually found in the medicine cabinet.

  Kate pinned up the pant legs until the edge just grazed the top of her foot. And then she remembered the shoes. They were obviously designed for men, bulky and ugly, the sort of thing a prison warden or high school math teacher would wear. The heel was too wide. Even with the laces tight, her feet could slip out.

  Kate ignored the issue, settling on one problem at a time. Blisters would be the least of her worries if her pants weren’t properly shortened. A few more adjustments with the pins and the hem fell just shy of the shoelace.

  “Good job.” She allowed herself a smile of relief. Then she caught her reflection in the mirror and was too stunned to speak.

  She looked like a new form of centaur: a woman who was a man from the waist down. The sight would’ve been comical had it not been so jarring.

  Kate turned away from her reflection, pulling on the stiff navy-blue shirt. Also too big. The collar scraped her earlobes. The breast pockets were at her waist. The emblems on the sleeves were at her elbows. She

  flapped up her arms, trying to get her fingers past the long sleeves. Finally, she managed to poke one hand through, then the other. She rolled the shirt cuffs until it appeared she had two large doughnuts on her wrists.

  Kate closed her eyes. No crying this morning. That was her promise. No crying until her shift was over.

  “Laugh about this,” she coached herself. “Laugh because it’s funny.”

  She buttoned the shirt. Her hands were steady. Maybe this was funny. Maybe a week or a month or a year from now, she would be telling the story of the first day she put on this ridiculous outfit and tears would come to her eyes—not from the horror, but from the hilarity.

  She found the S-shaped metal clips that were designed to hold the utility belt. The equipment was too heavy for just one belt. She had to have one belt looped through her pants in order to support the second belt. Kate hooked one metal clip on each hip. She tried not to think a few hours ahead, when the constant wear would seem like Chinese water torture.

  “Silly,” she mumbled. “The blisters on your feet will take your mind off of it.”

  She picked up the thick leather utility belt. This, at least, looked like it would fit. She pulled the tongue through the buckle, piercing the last hole in the belt, making sure that the metal S-hooks had taken hold underneath the edges.

  And then she tried not to think about Virginia Woolf walking into the river with rocks in her pockets to ensure her suicide.

  Flashlight on the hook. Handcuffs in the pouch. Radio transmitter clipped to the back. Shoulder mic threaded up to the epaulet. Keychain attached to the ring. Nightstick through the metal loop. Holster secured around the belt. Gun.

  Gun.

  Kate weighed the heavy metal revolver in her hand. She ejected the cylinder and let the brass blur as the bullets spun around. Gently, she clicked the cylinder back into place, then tucked the gun into the holster. Her fingers were oily from handling the revolver. Her thumb slipped as she snapped the leather safety strap into place.

  Oddly, the gun felt heavier than anything else on her hips. She’d only fired the revolver a couple of times at the police academy, and both times all she’d been thinking about was how quickly she could get away from the grabby instructor. Kate wasn’t sure she’d cleaned the gun properly. The grip seemed greasier than it was supposed to be. The instructor wasn’t very helpful. He’d said that he was against the arming of females.

  Honestly, having spent two weeks with the rest of the women in her class, Kate shared the man’s reticence. There were a few serious recruits, but many were there on a lark. More than half of them signed up for the typing pool, where they’
d receive the same pay as officers on patrol. Only four women in Kate’s group had asked for street assignments.

  In retrospect, maybe Kate should’ve paid more attention in typing class. Or secretarial school. Or paralegal training. Or any number of the jobs she’d tried and failed at before seeing a story in The Atlanta Journal about women police officers being trained for motorcycle patrol.

  Motorcycle patrol!

  Kate laughed at her naïveté. If the firearms instructors were loath to train women, the motorcycle division was downright hostile to the idea of women on bikes. The riding instructor wouldn’t even allow them inside the garage.

  The bedside clock clicked as the numbers turned over. Time had jumped forward again. Noises filled the hallway—the career gals heading out to work. Soft voices. Occasional laughter. The swish-swish-swish of nylons rubbing against slim skirts.

  The hat was last. Kate had worn hats before. They were all the rage in high school—pillbox mostly, like Mrs. Kennedy. Kate had found a leopard skin to match the Dylan song. She’d pinned it at a rakish angle that made Kate’s mother send her straight back to her room.

  This hat would’ve sent her mother into apoplexy. Dark blue and, as with everything else to do with her uniform, overly large. Wide brim. Gold, round badge sewn onto the center. City of Atlanta Police Department.

  Inside the circle was a phoenix ascending from the ashes. Resurgens. Latin: rising again.

  Kate put on the hat. She looked at her reflection in the mirror.

  She could do this.

  She had to do this.

  3

  Fox sat in his car smoking a cigarette. The windows were rolled up tight. Smoke filled the space. He thought of tear gas. Not for the first time. Not for the last. The needle wouldn’t skip on that record. Lachrymatory agents, they were called, which was a fancy way of saying your eyeballs were going to be impaled on spikes. Twenty seconds of exposure was all it took. The gas overstimulated the corneal nerves. Pain, tears, coughing, sneezing, and blindness followed.

  Boot camp.

  Fox had stood with the men in his unit as they watched the first team get gassed. The exposure was supposed to toughen them up, prepare them for jungle warfare, but what it did was break them down. Grown men screamed like little girls. They tried to scratch out their eyes. They begged for mercy.

  Fox had watched them writhe around like worms and thought they were idiots. They had all gotten the same briefing. Sure, it hurt, but you just had to wait it out. Thirty minutes later, you were fine. Thirty minutes was nothing. You could do anything for thirty minutes.

  Then it was Fox’s turn to be gassed.

  Hot tears blistered his eyes. He inhaled needles into his lungs. He panicked. He dropped to the floor. He begged for mercy just like all the worms who had come before him.

  That was where the shame came from. Not the crying or the choking, but the begging. Only once before in his life had Fox ever begged for anything. He was twelve years old, and he had quickly learned that there was no use begging, because nobody was going to help you but yourself. So, twelve-year-old Fox had vowed that his begging days were over, and then seven years later, he was at Camp Bumfuck rolling on the floor alongside twenty other grunts like a helpless, pitiful worm.

  Should Fox take even a little bit of pride in the fact that he wasn’t the one begging the loudest?

  A guy from his unit had died from exposure. Undiagnosed asthmatic, the brass had said, but who trusted the brass? Probably they were trying out a new formula on their own men before sending the caustic gas into the field. Wasn’t the first time. Wouldn’t be the last. War was nothing but a grand experiment. Behind every senseless tragedy, there was some guy with a clipboard.

  Fox had a clipboard of his own.

  He glanced down at his log.

  0546: Exited building. Talked to no one.

  0600: Breakfast at diner, usual table, usual waitress: one hardboiled egg, dry toast, black coffee. Read paper. Left twenty-five-cent tip

  0628: Walked opposite direction from building, down 14th and around block

  0639: Asked unknown businessman for time

  0651: Sat on bench outside bank building, stared up at sky

  0658: Rose from bench, went into apartment building

  Now what?

  Fox opened the glove box. He saw the pantyhose that had covered his face last night.

  Her pantyhose.

  The scope of the mission was changing. Fox could feel the shift almost like he was standing on a rug that was being slowly pulled from beneath his feet. This had happened before. Fox would be doing one thing, but somewhere in the back of his brain, his thoughts were mulling over other courses of action. All it took was some kind of lightning to strike. The bolt would hit his skull, and the thing in the back of his brain would jump to the front.

  And like that, he had options.

  Fox took out his binoculars and used them to find the familiar window. As he watched, the curtains were opened. He smiled at his luck. Sometimes, he missed the curtains. Sometimes, he would look up and his guts would turn to liquid because he had no idea how long ago the curtains had been opened, whether or not he had missed something important.

  But today, he saw her open the curtains.

  Fox noted a new time in his log: four minutes from now, because he knew that’s how long it took for the elevator to arrive on the correct floor, the short ride down to the lobby, the next elevator down to the parking garage, the quick walk to the right space, and bingo—exactly four minutes later, Fox watched Kate Murphy pull her car out of the underground garage.

  Christ, she was beautiful. The way the sun hit her face, he could almost let himself forget about her dirty little secret.

  Fox rolled down his window to let out the smoke. He put the clipboard on the passenger’s seat.

  Then he followed her.

  4

  Terry’s anger pushed a low pressure into the car that reminded Maggie of the way she felt when a tornado was about to touch down. Her head throbbed. Her blood felt thick. The hairs on the back of her neck stood at a permanent attention.

  They should have been able to have a conversation about what had happened to Don and Jimmy. Two cops stuck in a car; it was normal for them to discuss the shooting, talk out what they were going to do next to make sure the killer was brought to justice. But Terry didn’t think of Maggie as a cop and Maggie sure as hell didn’t think of her uncle as a confidant, so they both stared grimly out the window and kept their thoughts to themselves.

  Besides, justice was probably the last thing on Terry’s mind. He wouldn’t be thinking about what had happened this morning. He would be thinking about the cop killer who had gotten away with murder.

  Last January, Detective Duke Abbott had been shot in the chest while sitting in his parked car behind the City Motel off Moreland Avenue. His partner was inside the motel doing what you’d expect a cop to be doing inside a motel at two o’clock in the morning when he was supposed to be working a shift. Duke was a white cop. Witnesses had seen a black man leaving the scene. By the time the morning paper hit the stands, the city was wound up like an alarm clock strapped to a thousand sticks of dynamite.

  Within three days of the murder, they had a suspect’s name. Edward Spivey was a mid-level drug dealer and pimp who operated in the vicinity of the motel. A couple of witnesses had identified Spivey as the man leaving the scene of the crime. One claimed he saw Spivey ditch a gun in a sewer grate. The other said Spivey had blood on his shirt.

  Terry led the team that had found both the gun and the bloody shirt. For nearly a week, they turned the city upside down looking for Spivey. The suspect proved to be more cunning than any of them anticipated. Instead of running, Spivey turned himself in. He invited a local news crew to meet him on the steps of the station house. He shouted out his innocence. He said the evidence was planted, the witnesses bribed. He hired a fancy lawyer from up north. He talked to any reporter who showed up at the jailhouse. He practica
lly dared the city to send him to the electric chair.

  Normally, the city would have gladly obliged, but between Duke Abbott’s murder and Edward Spivey’s trial, Atlanta had gone through a radical change. The newly elected black mayor had delivered on his promise to bring diversity to local government. Which was good or bad, depending on how you looked at it. Before the transition, a black man accused of shooting a white cop would’ve gone straight to death row. But then the ballots were counted, and an all-black jury let Edward Spivey walk out of the courthouse a free man. The resulting rift between the police and the district attorney’s office made the Grand Canyon look like a crack in the sidewalk.

  If Maggie had to guess, she would’ve said that the only thing on Terry’s mind right now was making sure that Don Wesley’s killer never saw the inside of a courtroom.

  The car jerked as Terry took a left into the parking lot down from police headquarters. The Buick sailed into its regular space. Maggie moved in tandem with her uncle: He put the gear into park. She pulled the door handle and got out of the car. There was a brief moment of relief, then Maggie found herself facing a wall of duplicate Terrys.

  Same cropped haircuts. Same bushy mustaches. Same kind of anger flashing in their beady little eyes. Terry’s friends all had names like Bud and Mack and Red and talked about the good old days like preachers talked about heaven. They all had multiple ex-wives, angry mistresses, and grown children who wouldn’t talk to them. Worse, they were all the same kind of cop as Terry. They always knew better than everybody else. They never listened to anyone from the outside. They carried throwaway guns in their ankle holsters. They kept their Klan robes hanging in the back of their closets.

  Maggie couldn’t remember a time in her life when Terry’s friends were not around—not because of Terry, but because of Jimmy. They attended all of his football games. They dropped by practice to offer the coach unsolicited pointers. They slipped Jimmy cash to go on dates. They bought him beer before he was old enough to drink. When Jimmy’s knee blew out, they had given him a police escort to the hospital.