by KJ Kalis
“Did he say anything?” the voice on the other end of the line asked.
“Not yet, but it sounded like he was close.”
“You think he’s a threat?”
“Maybe.”
“Take care of it.”
“What about the eighty grand he owes us?”
“Will get it off some other schmuck. No shortage of people that like to lose money gambling.”
The line went dead. The man turned off the Buick, leaving it parked where it was. He had carefully planned routes over the last couple of days just in case. He pulled a nine-millimeter pistol out of the glove compartment, making sure it was loaded. He pulled gently on the slide, the dull copper color of the bullet casing peeking through when he inched it back. He flipped the safety off. As he got out of the car, the man shoved the gun into the back of his pants. He had put his holster on just in case, so he didn’t have to worry about the pistol clattering to the ground and making a scene. That was the best way to get caught.
The man left the Buick and walked half a block to the front door of Oskar’s condo and keyed in the code to get the door to buzz open. The team had been watching the condo for long enough that they knew pretty much everything there was to know about the building and the surrounding area. The man used the steps to go up to Oskar’s floor, avoiding surveillance cameras that were in the elevators, not that anyone ever looked at the feed. He climbed the three flights of steps, feeling a little winded by the time he got to the door, reminding himself that spending a little bit more time working out might not be a bad thing. “Why did you have to buy a unit on the third floor?” he mumbled to himself.
The man walked down the hallway and went directly to Oskar’s door, pulling the key out of his pocket. While Oskar had been in the hospital, another guy had come in, set up a couple of bugs and got the keys to the door. He was a good locksmith, the kind that didn’t ask questions and preferred to be paid in cash.
The man slid the key into the lock, turning it quietly, hoping that the click of the bolt coming away from the frame wouldn’t alert Oskar. It probably wouldn’t matter even if it did, but the less noise the better. As the man cracked the door open, he could see Oskar had fallen asleep on the couch. He was probably in the same position as when the police left him.
There was a half-consumed bottle of water and an orange vial of pills on the coffee table next to where Oskar was laying. It looked like Oskar had taken a bunch of pain pills and then laid back down on the couch just after the police left. The man moved quickly but efficiently, knowing that the more time he spent in Oskar’s apartment the worse it would be. He found the two bugs that had been placed in the apartment, pulled them off of the underside of the coffee table and from the top shelf of the bookcase and stuck them in his pocket. No need for the police to find those. Luckily, Oskar hadn’t woken up. The man made his way back to where Oskar was sleeping, the wooden floor making a slight creak as he approached. He drew the gun out from his waistband, and without thinking, put it to the side of Oskar’s head and pulled the trigger. There was no need to check if he was dead. A shot like that to the head would end him. Adrenaline started to surge through the man, realizing he was now on the clock. He had forgotten to pack his silencer, so it was likely someone else in the condo had heard the gunshot. That gave him about a three-minute window before the police arrived. Unfortunately, the Savannah Police Department didn’t have much to do, so their response time was way too quick for his liking.
The man looked around the condo, wondering if there was anything he should take. He frowned for a second, and then realized he had left no fingerprints except for a set on the door going in. On his way out, he stopped and wiped the doorknob clean. He turned down the hall and went back down the three flights of steps, going out the back door of the building, rather than the front door.
Outside, he walked down a side street and cut back through the parking lot of the building next door, getting himself lost amid trash dumpsters and the rise of buildings crushed together. The police would start looking on the main roads, not in the back. By the time they figured out what happened, he would be long gone.
The man walked down the sidewalk, his hands shoved in his pockets, his oversized shirt covering the gun he had just used. On the way back to the office, he’d drive by the waterfront and toss the gun in the water. The bosses preferred it when there was less evidence to be found later. He’d probably chuck the bugs in the water as well. He snorted, realizing that whoever was listening to the apartment was about to get a lot of feedback in their ears when he dumped them. That was their problem.
As he got to the Buick, he heard sirens. He shook his head, mumbling to himself, “They seem to get faster every day.” He slammed the door, turned the key in the ignition and heard the engine rumble to life. He pulled out into traffic, making a U-turn to head away from the direction the sirens were coming and toward the waterfront. At the first red light, he sent a quick text. “Done.”
“Good,” was the response he got. It was time for lunch.
21
Carson’s mind was racing. He stopped on the way back to the police station at a local Thai restaurant. He wanted curry. Thoughts of his conversation with Oskar and Miles wound around in the back of his head while he mumbled his order to the woman behind the counter. The pieces still didn’t add up.
The minute he got back in his car, the smell of chicken, vegetables and red curry filling it, his phone rang. “Martino,” he answered.
“Were you just interviewing Dr. Kellum?” the voice asked.
It was Ginny. “Yep. I’m headed back to the office now. Why?”
“Well, you might as well turn right around and go back the way you came. I think your lunch is going to get cold. Officers just called it in. Looks like Dr. Kellum was shot.”
“What? I was just there…” Carson glanced down at the MDT that had been mounted in his work unit. Most of the Savannah Police Department now had mobile computers right in their vehicles. His detective unit was no exception. As he spun the unit around, he glanced at the time on the MDT. Barely thirty minutes had passed since he and the other officers had been at Oskar’s apartment. Someone was cleaning up loose ends. The question was who?
“Yeah, I know you were just there,” Ginny’s voice broke through his thoughts. “We got a call from one of the neighbors, I guess a lady across the hall, said she heard a gunshot.”
“How did she know it was from Oskar’s apartment?”
“I guess she watched Oskar’s cat for the last couple of nights while he was in the hospital.” Ginny had an uncanny way of knowing what was going on in nearly every case in the department. “When she heard the shot, I guess she went to the door and peered out. Oskar’s door was cracked open. When she looked inside, she saw the blood and called it in.”
Carson shook his head. “All right. I’m on my way. Thanks for the call.” As soon as he hung up the phone with Ginny, he pounded his fist on the steering wheel. Rage burned inside of him. Who were the people responsible for this? How did they get ahead of him? Carson felt the muscles in his jaw clench and reminded himself that he needed to stay relaxed if he hoped to solve the case. The last thing he needed to do was start grinding his teeth again. He’d done enough damage to his mouth already.
The drive back over to Oskar’s condo didn’t take long, just about eight minutes. Several Savannah Police Department cruisers were parked in the front, lights flashing. Two officers were standing outside the front door, keeping it open. Carson parked on the opposite side of the street, slipping the cruiser between a pickup truck and a yellow sedan with a bumper sticker that read “GA On My Mind.” He nearly got clipped by oncoming traffic when he got out, eliciting a honk from the car horn. “Sorry!” he said, putting his hands up in the air. This case was getting under his skin, that was clear.
He walked across the street, nodding to the two officers that were standing by the door. One of them yelled, “A fresh one, huh?” Carson nodded, not wan
ting to take the time to stop and talk. Frustration tightened the muscles in his shoulders. He decided to run the three flights of steps instead of taking the elevator to work off the stress.
Carson got to the landing on Oskar’s floor and was barely out of breath. The discipline of his workouts took care of his stress, anger and, of course, the department requirements for fitness. He straightened his tie and pushed the door open onto the third floor. He looked to his left and saw a uniformed officer standing outside of Oskar's doorway. “Hey,” he said, walking past the officer into the condo.
Once inside, he saw the condo was a hive of activity. There was a woman with dark hair, thick, rimmed glasses, and a dark blue polo shirt taking pictures of Oskar’s bloodied body. Carson paused for a moment, trying to remember her name. “You got here fast, Nicole.”
She straightened up, resting the camera in her hands. “Yeah, not much going on today until this happened.”
Carson nodded. “Notice anything while you were taking pictures?” He put his right hand in his jacket pocket and pulled out a set of blue gloves.
“I’m not a medical examiner, but this looks pretty straightforward to me. Gunshot wound to the head. Apparently, the killer didn’t bother to use a silencer or muffle the noise. The woman across the hall said she could hear it pretty clearly.”
Carson glanced that way, “Is she in her condo now?”
As Nicole bent over to take more pictures, she said, “Yeah, I think so. I think an officer is sitting with her. They were waiting for you.”
“I’ll go over there in a sec. Just want to take a look at this body first.” Carson leaned over to look at Oskar. Nicole was right. Even if they had had a trauma surgeon on standby in the hallway, there was no way Oskar could’ve survived a direct shot to the head. Though the medical examiner would give him a full report on what happened, he always liked to have a little information gathered from looking at the body while it was still at the scene. Oskar wasn’t telling him much. From the way it was positioned, it looked like he had been asleep. There was water and a pill bottle on a table nearby.
Carson took a deep breath and scanned Oskar’s body. He was laying on his right side, facing the back of the couch. His glasses were on the table by the pill bottle. There was no blanket on him, though one was folded up on the back of the couch. What was left of Oskar’s head was resting on two thin pillows. A red stain had seeped into the fabric fibers of the pillow that was closest to his head. There was a small round hole in his left temple just above his left eye. “Gunshot residue,” he pointed out the charcoal gray area around the entry wound to Nicole. “Can you get a close-up of that?” Nicole nodded. Carson knew she probably already got the shot, but he would feel better if he saw her do it himself.
Carson turned away from Oskar’s cooling body, glancing around the condo. When he had been there earlier, he had only taken in Oskar’s belongings in a general sense. Now that Oskar had been murdered, and it was fair to say it was a murder given the circumstances, Carson looked in more detail around the condo.
Oskar seemed to be as much of a neat freak as Carson was. The books on the shelves were lined up, pressed together with bookends, with no dust gathering around their bindings. Decorative items were placed carefully on each surface, but there weren’t too many of them, nothing like Eli’s antique store, that was for sure. For a moment, Carson’s mind drifted to Kat and Eli. He needed to check in with them. He glanced at the time on his cell phone.
Carson walked through Oskar’s bedroom and his bathroom, pulling on a pair of blue latex gloves from his pocket. He wandered into a second bedroom that looked like Oskar used it for work. Carson stood behind an old antique desk that was positioned toward the back of the office space. He muttered, “Eli would love this.” He carefully opened the drawers trying to figure out what had made Oskar a target. In the top drawer, there was nothing more than a small divider with pencils, pens and a few notepads. The next drawer down held a couple checkbooks and some old photos that Carson thumbed through.
The third drawer had been retrofitted to handle hanging files. Carson sat down on Oskar’s desk chair, and pulled the drawer open wide, thumbing through them. In the front of the drawer were notes from the last condo association meeting, a thin folder that look like genealogy information, and a few miscellaneous files for paid bills and documents. Carson was ready to close the drawer when he saw something at the bottom. It wasn’t hung up the way the other files were. Carson pushed the files to the side and reached down into the bottom of the drawer and called into the other room, “Hey, Nicole, can you come document this?”
As Nicole snapped a few photos of the bottom of the drawer, Carson held up his hand, “Hold on for a second, would you? I want to pull this file out of here and have you document it.” Carson reached down into the bottom and pulled the green file up through the tangle of the rest of the file folders that were hanging. He held it out for Nicole to take a couple of pictures and then opened it up while she took a few more. Establishing where the information came from would be important if they ever hoped to catch Oskar’s killer. Carson lifted his head, “Thanks.”
Nicole nodded, “No problem. Call if you need more pictures taken.”
Carson stared down at the file folder that was in his hands. Why Oskar had chosen an almost fluorescent green for something he was trying to hide, Carson wasn’t sure. If it had been him, he would have chosen a color that was as close to the bottom of the drawer as possible, but not everything in a crime made sense. Carson flipped open the file and looked at the sheaf of papers that were stuck inside, laying them on top of Oskar’s desk. There wasn’t much else there, save for an expensive desktop computer and a few psychiatric trade journals stacked in the corner.
In the file, there appeared to be sheets of paper that logged transactions. It looked like Oskar had torn pages out of an old-fashioned accounting journal, and then carefully trimmed the edge to make them straight. In the left-hand column there were dates, and the rest of the columns followed with numbers. There were no discernible headings, other than he could tell what the dates were. “What were you up to, Oskar?” Carson muttered.
Carson shuffled through the rest of the papers that were in the file. The other pages weren't accounting information. They appeared to be case notes about a particular patient. Each page was dated with information about a session that had happened, but there was no information as to what patient it was about. Carson scanned the pages and saw times, medications, and longhand sentences about what had occurred during the session. Carson frowned and shook his head, wondering what patient the notes referred to. Why were there patient notes at Oskar’s house? Shouldn’t they be at his office, he wondered? It was interesting to him that there was accounting information in the same file as patient notes. He looked back at the accounting page. Was it possible that Oskar was treating a high-profile client in cash? Carson looked at the page of accounting figures and realized the balance at the end was negative, not positive. That didn’t make sense. He was just about to read through the case notes in more detail when Nicole came back into the room. “If you’ve got a minute, the officer across the hall said the resident is getting antsy and would like to talk to you.”
Carson nodded. “Do you have an evidence bag big enough to put this in?”
Nicole reached behind her and pulled out a bag that had been stuck in her back pocket. “Here ya go.”
Carson slid the folder in the bag, sealed it, signed and dated it. He would take it back to the office with him after he was done talking to the neighbor. “Can I leave this with you while I go do this interview?”
Nicole nodded and picked up a pen from Oskar’s desk, signing her name to keep the chain of custody intact. “Yep. Just come and get me when you’re done.”
“Thanks.” As Carson walked away, he could hear the shutter from Nicole’s camera fire. She was taking pictures of the inside of Oskar’s office. He shook his head. The amount of detail that the forensics teams had to do
cument was just staggering. Attorneys like Alberto Soza made their life nearly impossible.
Carson pulled off the blue gloves he had been wearing and shoved them back in his jacket pocket. He walked out the door and took a couple of steps across the hallway, tapping on the door. “Savannah Police. Can I come in?”
“Yes,” came a weak voice from inside.
Carson turned the knob on the door and gave it a push. Inside, he spotted a small woman sitting next to an officer, the sunlight from a large window covering their backs and shoulders. The officer stood up, “Detective, this is Susan. She knew Oskar and was the one that reported the gunshot.”
At the mention of the gunshot, the small woman crumpled into a tiny ball, whimpering. The officer looked at Carson, raised his eyebrows and said, “I’ll be just outside the door if you need me.”
Carson swallowed, knowing this wasn’t going to be an easy interview, “Thanks.” He walked over to the couch where the woman was sitting. “Okay if I sit here with you?”
The woman looked up, her eyes wet with tears. She nodded.
Carson wanted to get the interview over as quickly as possible. Hysterical people made him nervous. “Susan, my name is Carson. I’m sorry to meet you under the circumstances.”
“I’m sorry, too.”
It seemed a strange thing to say, but Carson knew that people who were in shock said all sorts of crazy things. He let it slide. “Can you tell me what happened?”
The woman sniffled and wiped her nose with the sleeve of the oversized light pink sweater she was wearing. Carson glanced around and saw a box of tissues behind him. He stood up and brought it to her, offering her one. “Thanks,” she said, pulling one out of the box. She paused, wiping her nose. “I’m not sure why I’m so upset,” she said. “It’s not like I saw anything. I didn’t even know Oskar that well, to be honest.”
