by Nolon King
She and Mike followed Angus through the gate and onto the field, passing fallen hats left behind by fleeing children.
“Seems he was recording the whole thing on his phone.”
“Did we find his phone?” Mal asked.
“Not sure. We’re still processing everything. But he went up to the pitcher’s mound and asked the pitcher for the ball.”
“What were his exact words?”
“Uh …” Angus took out his notebook and looked down at his notes. “Nothing at first. He just held out his hand.”
“What next?”
“He took out the gun and told the kid, ‘If I were you, I’d run.’ Then he began shooting.
“He gave the kid a chance to get away? Did he aim at the kid?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who was the first vic?”
“Belinda Thompson, 51, grandmother of one of the players, Zachary Thompson,” Angus said as they walked back to the home team bleachers.
Angus lifted the tarp. The woman was lying face up, a bullet wound to her chest, dead eyes wide open, a crushed cup on the ground beside her, soda and blood staining the pavement.
“Who’s next?”
Angus looked down at his notes, then pointed at another body between the bleachers and the concession stand.
“Claire Lambert, 29, a friend of one of the other kid’s mothers. She got clipped making a run for the parking lot.”
“What about the friend?”
“Becky Thompson, mother of the pitcher, Sam Thompson. Said she and Claire got split up when she went running toward the field to get her son.” He turned to the dugout. “Then we’ve got Chip Halverson, 39, back in the dugout. His daughter, Carrie, nine, was shot in the leg. She’s in stable condition and on her way to the hospital.”
“Did we get a statement?” Mal asked.
“Not much. She was hysterical. Watched the man shoot her father.”
“What happened?”
“We have a few different accounts from people who saw it. The killer apparently said something to Chip, though nobody heard what. He shot the girl; then there were more words exchanged between the two men before he killed Chip.”
“Hmm,” Mal said, exchanging a glance with Mike.
Mike asked, “Is Chip the only one that the killer spoke to?”
“Other than the pitcher, yes.”
“I want to talk to the daughter the minute she’s able.”
“Okay,” Angus said, scribbling in his notebook.
Mike’s phone rang. He looked at the screen, then answered the call. “Cortez.” His brow furrowed. “Okay, send it over.” Again, he looked at the screen, waiting.
“What is it?” Mal asked.
“Batra is sending us a link to a LiveLyfe video. The killer wasn’t recording. He was broadcasting live.”
The video played.
Mal watched the scene unfold, her stomach knotting as kids screamed and scrambled on camera.
Then the first POP!
She watched all the way through.
The phone muted before the killer’s words with Chip, making their exchange all the more mysterious, and suspicious.
Mike brought the phone back to his ear, talking to their tech guru, Aanya Batra. “Peter Kincaid? What do you have?”
A moment of silence as Mike listened, then, “You are awesome!” He hung up, his eyes bright. “We’ve got a name and an address. Peter Kincaid, a girls’ soccer coach. He’s got a wife and two kids, lives over on 1215 Randolph. We’re staging at the middle school.”
Mal turned to Angus. “Looks like our suspect has a name. Going to bring him in. Can you get statements from the witnesses?”
Angus nodded.
Mal turned to Jamie. “How long until you can work these?”
“There a rush? Bodies aren’t going anywhere over the weekend.”
Mal rolled her eyes. “So, Monday morning?”
“Monday afternoon, like six-ish.”
“Six is afternoon now? Shit, I need your hours.”
Jamie laughed.
Mal and Mike headed back to the parking lot, got in the unmarked car, and headed to the staging area. Mike drove. Mal kept looking at the video, listening as loud as the phone would let her, hoping that she’d pick up on something useful. After the video played a few times, she scrolled through the comments.
“Jesus, you see this? These people were egging him on. Telling the guy who to kill. What the hell is wrong with people?”
“How long you got?”
“Hey, usually I’m the pessimist.”
“What can I say, you’re rubbing off on me,” Mike joked.
The more Mal looked at the video, then at the profile page of the coach turned suspected killer, the more confused she became. But she couldn’t quite put her finger on what wasn’t adding up.
And then it hit her. “How many LiveLyfe friends do you have?”
“Hell, I dunno,” Mike shrugged.” I only use it to keep up with a few family members. Nobody can just call anyone anymore. It’s gotta be LiveLyfe chat or video calls. What about you?”
“I don’t have an account. Deleted it after Ashley died. Too many trolls.”
“Why do you ask?”
“Well, the coach has five hundred friends, which seems normal, I guess, for someone involved in the community. But there are a ton of commenters on this video, and they don’t appear to be his friends.”
“None of them?”
“Well, none that I’ve seen so far. Most of the people commenting aren’t using their real names. They’re using either handles or obvious fake names like Ronald Reagan or Sir Charles BigCock.”
“Ah, Chuck BigCock, he won the Nobel prize in ’09, right?”
Mal laughed.
Then she called Batra and told her the same thing she’d just told Mike. “Any idea why he’d have so many live viewers and commenters? And why none of them were his actual friends?”
“It might have made the front page of Reddit or some site like that.”
“Can you look into it?”
“I’m on it. I’m also going through his whole page, copying and saving it all in case it gets taken down. I have calls into LiveLyfe to get everything we can — IP addresses, private messages, anything we might need. I’ll also look into the commenters, see if there’s anything worthwhile.”
“Thanks, Aanya.”
They pulled into the school parking lot. The undercover SWAT truck was idling. A current of dread rippled through Mal, forcing her thoughts to the raid gone wrong on Paul Dodd. How the bastard had rigged explosives and murdered three sheriff’s deputies, and seriously injured two others.
This would be Mal’s first raid since returning to duty four months ago. The SWAT team was most frequently used for narcotics, not homicides. Then again, the county didn’t usually have many of the latter, and not mass murderers.
She hoped they weren’t walking into another trap.
Chapter 2 - Mallory Black
The house was a single-story home in Pine Ridge, an older community built out in the eighties and nineties in an unincorporated part of the county surrounded by Pine Harbour on three sides. A burg caught in a perpetual tug-of-war between the county and the city seeking to annex it for the valuable property running along State Road 110 — widely regarded as the municipality’s next big commercial expansion.
In many ways, Pine Ridge was frozen in time, a neighborhood holding out against the modern homes, shops, and strip malls that had exploded around it during the last building boom. Residents clung to their sovereign rights, wanting to park cars on their lawns, paint their homes in garish colors, and buck against every other code or policy that Pine Harbour enforced upon its residents.
Under such chaos, it was common to find a million dollar palace sharing the street with a hovel that ought to be condemned.
The coach’s home was one of the nicer, more modern builds on a street with several eyesores, a single-story house with a well-m
anicured lawn full of flowering bushes, a neat brick walkway, a wrought iron fence, and a wooden bench in the front yard.
Of all the houses, it was the one she’d least expect a monster to live in.
Most of the Sheriff’s office vehicles parked at the end of the street.
The SWAT truck rolled up to the house, the unit splitting. Some deputies took the rear while others stormed the front.
A deputy knocked twice, loud.
No answer.
No waiting.
They battered the front door with a battering ram and surged into the home, guns drawn.
Mal watched from two houses over, on edge in an unmarked car, waiting with Mike for their turn.
She flashed back, watching her fellow officers storm Paul Dodd’s house only to be murdered by his fiery trap.
A part of her waited for another explosion, even though bombs and traps weren’t something they usually had to worry about. But once it happened to your siblings in blue, it was hard to approach another raid the same way.
But there were no explosions. She listened to the deputies’ voices crackling over the radio, saying “clear” after checking each room. One said, “The house is clear. We’ve got a white male, possible suspect, dead, gunshot wound to the head.”
Mal and Mike headed into the house, slipping on gloves and booties. She immediately saw why the officer had said “possible” suspect.
Slumped, dead in the living room recliner, was a white man in a tee and boxers, his jaw blown away at the bottom. An exit painted the wall behind his skull in chunks of bone, blood, and brain.
In his right hand, slumped over his lap, he held a Smith & Wesson Shield 45ACP.
She pulled out a recorder and spoke into it, “No obvious signs of rigor or lividity, blood is slightly congealed …”
Mal took some preliminary photos of the corpse and crime scene, using her phone before the crime tech arrived with an actual camera.
On the coffee table, next to two open bottles of beer, was a note.
She snapped a photo, then read:
I may be a sick man, but NOBODY has the right to judge me.
Nobody but my maker.
Sorry to anyone I may have hurt.
Peter Kincaid
Mike stared at the letter. “Well, that looks like a confession if ever I saw one.” He looked back up at Mal.
“Yeah, but what’s he confessing to? Does that sound like it came from a guy who just shot up a baseball game?”
There was also a phone, face down on the table. She wanted to pick it up, pour through every megabyte, searching for evidence to close the case. But it would be best if she left that for Aanya.
Evidence collection rules were specific when it came to computers, phones, and other devices where data could be erased with a keystroke. Fail to enter the right password, and you might find the phone’s data wiped. And while there were methods of retrieval, they were never surefire and could cause issues when entering the device as evidence in a trial.
Sometimes Mal wished she were born fifty years earlier when tech didn’t offer lazy criminals easy tools to commit crimes in relative anonymity. Once upon a time, a perp had to leave his house to rob, extort, or abuse someone.
Mike went outside to update Gloria Bell — the sheriff — while Mal walked the house, snapping additional pictures and searching for evidence without disturbing the scene. As tempting as it might be to call this a suicide and then wrap the case (and the shooting at the baseball field), every death had to be investigated as a possible homicide.
The coach’s home was spotless. A nice three-bedroom, built within the last six years or so, with too many sconces and a master bedroom with a studio apartment’s worth of wasted space. The bed was unmade, clothes on the floor. The room’s only personality lived on the two shelves holding trophies for a girls’ soccer team. There were also a couple of team photos from the coach’s two previous seasons. The other two bedrooms were spare, and reeked of recent divorce, providing a cold room with little comfort for refugees of a domestic civil war.
There was another small room that could have been an office. It looked like a small hotel room waiting for its guest. The bed was neatly made, and there was a night stand with only a vase and a single flower, a small desk topped with issues of Elle and Real Simple, a dresser without any knick-knacks.
Was this room for a relative? A girlfriend?
There was nothing in the room to indicate a regular guest. The magazines were current, with the labels addressed to Peter Kincaid.
Mal returned to the bedroom, saw four pillows on the bed. It was hard to tell if two people had been sleeping there or not. There were no indentations in either the pillows or the bed.
She stepped around toward the left side of the bed, looked in the trash can and saw a used condom.
She remembered the bottles of beer on the coffee table.
Mal stepped back out into the living room, past the body, and reached down to carefully touch the bottles without moving them.
They weren’t cold..
But someone had likely been with him last night. Could it be the killer? Or had he slept with someone, then the two went their separate ways in the morning, with the suspect going off to kill a bunch of people?
Who was his guest?
And what did they know about him?
She needed to find out.
She stepped outside the house, told Gloria and Mike what she’d found, then said, “We need to find out who he had over last night or this morning. See what they know.”
“So, do we like him as our shooter?” Gloria asked.
“I won’t know anything until tech gets a look at stuff.”
“But what does your gut say?” They rarely saw Gloria at a crime scene, especially on the weekend. She wanted this case off of everyone’s desk yesterday. The last thing she needed with the election in seven months was a community thinking it wasn’t safe to bring your kids to a baseball game. Her challengers would exploit fear to get themselves elected.
No single person could keep an entire community safe. A sheriff’s job amounted to policies. What kind of work did the sheriff believe was best? Before Gloria, the sheriff’s department wasn’t exactly known for its neighborhood involvement. Deputies only went to Butler for arrests. But after Gloria stepped in, deputies became more community-oriented, getting to know the residents, business, and civic leaders within each city.
It had helped to reduce the crime numbers, but there were always those who thought the old traditions and the disgraced sheriff’s ways were The Right Way to Do Things. They didn’t think that Gloria was tough enough on crime, and jumped at every opportunity to make her appear weak or ineffective.
Nobody wanted a feeble sheriff.
“My gut?” Mal said. “My gut says let’s wait to see what we’ve got here.”
Gloria sighed. “Okay, we’ve had two shootings in one day, and I need to get the hell out of here before the media shows up asking me what the hell is going on. Which means I need answers from you two, ASAP. I can’t stomach another, ‘It’s an ongoing investigation.’”
The bodies aren’t even cold, and you want the case closed?
Mal wanted to tell Gloria to give them some breathing room — fuck the media. But Mike’s look said, Don’t engage. Just let her vent and move along.
Mal bit her tongue, holding back any of the smart-ass comments she might make if an election weren’t already kissing the horizon.
“We’ll keep you in the loop,” Mike assured her.
“Thank you,” Gloria said, then got into her SUV and tore away from the scene before the news could arrive.
Most of the neighbors were already out, peeking over, trying to get a look. Mal turned to Mike. “We may as well interview them until Jamie gets here. Maybe someone will know something so we can give the boss lady some answers.”
Mike smiled.
Chapter 3 - Mallory Black
Mike and Mal split their interviews, M
al talking to the women on the street while Mike took the men. No reason to double their efforts. While there were times you might want to have somebody else interview a witness, it was usually best not to add additional work. Witness accounts were hit and miss enough already.
Mal was on the sidewalk across the street from the Kincaid’s, talking to Sue Peterson. Sue was a heavyset woman in a grease-stained red tank top, clutching a sloppy-faced one-year-old on her hip. When she spotted a man making a beeline toward them, she dropped her cigarette and squished the butt into the sidewalk with her ratty blue flip-flop.
He was in his late thirties or early forties, tall, stocky, skin like leather, with a dirty blond buzz cut, sideburns, bushy albino caterpillar eyebrows, and intense chestnut colored eyes. He was wearing blue coveralls with a circular patch: Sal’s Towing.
Sue shifted her baby to the other arm and looked at him. “Hey, Daryl. How’s it going?”
“Okay,” he said in the Southern drawl that was a lot more common before all the city folk from New York and South Florida ruined things for the locals. “What’s going on?”
“Coach Kincaid is dead.”
“What?” Daryl’s eyebrows furrowed above his crooked nose. “What happened?”
Mal already had everything she was likely to get from Sue. She thanked her, then turned her attention to Daryl. “How do you know Mr. Kincaid?”
“He coached my daughter’s soccer team. What happened? How’d he die?”
“A gunshot wound.”
“Shit. A break-in? I bet it was those fucking Mexicans on the next street! You look into them yet? There’s like fifty in one house.”
“No, Coach K done shot up a buncha people at the baseball field earlier,” Sue said, still hovering with her kid. She lit another cigarette, not realizing, or caring, that she was blowing smoke in her baby’s face.
Mal had to look away from the woman or else she was likely to give her a lecture about the dangers of secondhand smoke. On the list of casual abuses she saw from parents, smoking was low on the list. Mal would occasionally speak her mind as a patrol cop, but it never went well, and always made things more difficult. It also probably earned the kids a wallop out of spite.
