Whorl

by James Tarr

  “Yeah, why?”

  Ringo pointed up East Cobb. “According to the report, Anderson was parked in his Cherokee on East Cobb, facing west, approximately one hundred feet from the intersection with Northfield. Walk down that way, to where he was parked. I’m going to go to where the shooter’s van was parked when the cops rolled up on him.”

  The Troy detective frowned. He didn’t like anybody telling him what to do, and he didn’t see the point in this exercise, but he grabbed his cell phone out of his pants pocket and began walking up the street, counting his paces. Paces were thirty inches or something, which meant about forty paces for a hundred feet. Math. Now they had him doing math.

  Ringo went back to his unmarked unit and pulled the case file out of the back seat. Followed by Rochester and Cashman, he walked past the parked cars as he flipped through the crime scene photos. He stopped when he got to one which showed the dead officers’ bodies in relation to the two ragged houses and an upthrust square of sidewalk concrete just visible in one corner of the photo.

  Studying the photo very carefully, trying not to look at the bodies or the pools of blood, he took two steps to the right, then one forward. He was almost in front of one crumbling house, maybe fifty feet from the intersection with East Cobb. It shared a driveway with the house to the left, a tall narrow Addams Family-looking thing made of dark brown brick. The driveway looked like it had once been made of concrete, but now more closely resembled a gravel two track with two-foot tall weeds sprouting from….everywhere. If it had once led to a garage, now it seemed to lead to nowhere, vanishing into the overgrown backyard which sloped gently upward. Past the tall grass between the houses he could see nothing but blue sky. He had a tall rectangular window of blue over green fifteen feet wide to look through. He dialed Reed’s cell phone.

  “Reed.”

  “You a hundred feet from the corner?”

  Reed looked around. Facing back the way he had come, there was nothing but waist-high grass to his right, a small house with dirty white siding behind him to his left. “Just about.”

  “Walk away from the corner slowly.”

  “Okay. And should I be looking for something?” Reed looked around, but there was nothing to see but grass, weeds, and random litter blown against the curb. He walked, and walked. “Okay, I’ve gone about forty feet.”

  Ringo frowned. Bill Rochester was to his left, and Cashman was behind his right elbow, wondering exactly what was happening and staring in the direction he was looking. “Okay, that didn’t work. Try walking the other direction, toward the corner. Let me know when you get to your starting point last time.”

  Reed huffed into his phone and pulled it away from his head as he strode quickly back to the approximate spot he’d stopped at before. What the hell was he doing? Were the Detroit cops fucking with the white boy from the suburbs? Playing a practical joke on him? “Okay, back at my original spot, walking toward the corner now,” he said into the phone. He’d only taken four steps when the Detroit cop yelled in his ear.

  “Stop!”

  Reed stopped. “Okay, why did I stop?”

  “How far are you from the corner?” Ringo asked him.

  Reed eyed the distance, then looked back at the spot where he’d paced to. “Maybe eighty-five, ninety feet.”

  “And how far from the right curb?”

  Reed looked down. “Maybe five feet.”

  “About where you’d be in a parked car. Look to your left.”

  The house with peeling white siding was behind him, and directly to his left was a dense clump of bushes and young trees, growing wild. Between the tangle of foliage and the brown-bricked house at the corner of East Cobb and Northfield was a vacant lot covered in long grass and mysterious lumps that, perhaps a decade ago, might have been piles of trash but had long since been overgrown. This is where aspiring archeologists should go on digs, he thought absently. Detroit. The airfare would be a hell of a lot cheaper, too.

  As he stared at the tall green grass waving in the gentle breeze, he realized the empty lot fell away from him, and past it were the dark back sides of two houses on Northfield. Reed saw movement, and squinted. Between the two houses he saw the Detroit detective waving at him. Behind him were the other two cops. What was that on a diagonal, a hundred yards away? Less?

  “Where are you standing?” Reed asked.

  “Right about where the back of the shooter’s mini van was,” Ringo told him. He squatted a little, trying to guess how tall someone sitting in the back of a minivan would be. He could still see the Troy detective, standing on East Cobb, from the waist up.

  The two cops stared at each other across the open land for a long while. Reed looked around him, but there was nothing to be seen in the street. Finally, Ringo pulled the phone slightly away from his mouth and said, “Did Bill or I remember to mention that the shooter had a scoped rifle in the back of his van? And fake ID so good we didn’t know it was fake until we ran his prints.”

  The Troy detective stood there and stared across the lot and between the houses at the other cops. “Son of a bitch.”

  Back together in front of Ringo’s unmarked cruiser, the four detectives clustered in a tight group. “What do we know about the shooter. Marsh?” Cashman asked.

  Bill Rochester shook his head. “Not a whole hell of a lot. Army veteran, that’s how we matched his prints, but he left active service six years ago. Since then, nothing. No criminal record.”

  “Combat vet? Who was he with?”

  “I’m still—still—waiting on official copies of his records, but what I was told over the phone was that he was 10th Mountain Division, Airborne qualified, Ranger tab, eight years in, and that he did two combat tours in Afghanistan. Bronze star, two purple hearts. So yeah, combat vet.”

  “And he had a sniper rifle in his van, and was parked right where he could see Anderson?” Reed said, trying to wrap his head around it. The Troy detective was used to cases that were a little simpler; husband kills wife, teenager steals car, that kind of thing. This thing had him using muscles he hadn’t exercised in a while. “What about the rifle, what do we know about it?”

  “Winchester Model 70 in thirty-ought-six, bought new in 1979 by Raymond Meadows of Evansville, Indiana. Near as I can tell after making a few calls, talking to the widow Meadows in a nursing home, Raymond owned that rifle until he died, and it was bought in an estate sale about two years ago. By who, nobody knows.”

  “And the pistol?”

  “A Springfield……” Rochester had to check the file. “Springfield Armory XDM, whatever the hell that is. Nine millimeter. Stolen from a gun store in Oklahoma about two years ago, along with a shitload of other guns. ATF said this was the first one that’s even turned up. Nobody ever arrested for the burglary.”

  “Well hell.” Reed rubbed his neck. “You say you looked into Phault. I’ve been looking into Anderson after that fiasco last week. We both have.” He gestured at Cashman. They’d had a dozen phone conversations, and met on-scene in both Troy and Shelby Township several times. “If he’s dirty, I haven’t been able to find it. Two jobs, no criminal record, and he’s got a CPL. The only thing I found was an eight-year-old speeding ticket. So if this asshole Marsh was here to kill somebody, why Anderson?”

  Cashman stood there, thinking, and slowly started shaking his head. The conversation with the West Bloomfield detective kept replaying in his head. “Shit,” he said. “Shit shit shit.” He looked at the assembled detectives. “I think I know who might want to kill the kid,” he admitted. “The name Pietro Bufonte ring a bell?” And he recounted the details of the phone call he’d had with Billy Dixon.

  “Fuck, I’m getting a headache,” Ringo said, pressing his palms against his temples. “So you’re saying that Bufonte hired this guy to kill Anderson because he suspects him of killing his kid?”

  Cashman shrugged. “Anybody else got anything resembling a motive?”

  “The FBI learned that Anderson gave firearms training to
the employees of one of the strip clubs Wilson’s crew hit,” Reed volunteered.

  “That’s not a motive, that’s just a connection. And a damn thin one at that,” Rochester observed.

  Cashman informed them, “None of the Detroit officers had any sort of a connection to Absolute Armored that we could find, and while he won’t let us look at his files, Phault insists that he’s not aware of any cases he’s worked either on those officers or anybody with the same last name, like family members.”

  “But do you think Bufonte’d risk a murder rap, taking out someone he wasn’t even sure did it? You said the detective didn’t have anything other than his gut, right?” Reed had started to write in a small notebook.

  “Right. He liked Anderson for the hit-and-run, but had absolutely nothing in the way of proof. And I got the impression he’d been looking hard.”

  “Have any of you guys ever worked any cases on connected guys?” Ringo asked the group. “I haven’t, so I don’t know. Is Bufonte old enough or sick enough that he’d be willing to say ‘Fuck it’ and take the kid out anyway? On a ‘maybe’?”

  “Big Paulie was his only son,” Rochester told him. “And he’s not getting any younger.”

  “Fuck.” Ringo shook his head again. “We’re going to have to call the FBI again.”

  Ringo and Bill Rochester had ridden over together from the nearest precinct house in Ringo’s unmarked, and he dropped Rochester back in the lot just before noon. “Call me after you talk to the feds,” Ringo said to him through his open window. They were both very surprised the feds hadn’t taken over everything already. Maybe this not-so-thin connection to the grandfather of Detroit’s organized crime community, who they had been chasing for thirty years, would be the final straw the FBI needed to claim eminent domain over every competing investigation.

  Rochester stopped and looked at him, eyes shining and teeth visible in a big grin. “Do you not just love this job some days?” he said.

  “I like putting bad guys away,” Ringo said. “I don’t know exactly what this is.”

  “This, Ringo, is a sho ‘nuff mys-ter-ee,” Rochester said. “And I’ll take this every day of the week over dead kids, you know?”

  Ringo nodded and gave a wave as he pulled away. He’d just exited the parking lot when his cell phone rang. He didn’t recognize the number, but it was local. “John George.”

  “Detective George, this is Diana Wilson. Paul’s wife.”

  Ringo didn’t have anything to say for a couple of seconds, his brain vapor locked. “Um, uh, Diana, I—“

  “We need to meet,” she told him. “Paul left me something to give you.”

  Ringo met her in the parking lot of a Murray’s Discount Auto Parts, against his better judgment. When she pulled up and got out of the car he said, “Diana, I….” He was about to say that he didn’t know what to say, but how stupid was that? “I’m sorry,” he ended up telling her lamely.

  She nodded. She was thinner than he remembered, and her eyes looked hollow, but she had some strength in her. She’d always had steel in her backbone. “This is for you,” she told him, and held her hand out. What she laid in his palm was a small audio recorder.

  “What’s this? I mean,” he corrected himself, because he knew what it was, “what’s on it?”

  She looked haunted. “Let’s sit in your car.”

  Diana Wilson held it together for about five minutes, listening to her husband’s voice on the recording, then started weeping silently, tears running down her cheeks. Ringo didn’t say anything to her, he was too engrossed in what he was hearing.

  “Oh my fucking God,” Ringo said when he heard the FBI agent proposition Paul Wilson, offering to make evidence disappear if he murdered David Anderson. “Oh my God.” Hartman—he knew who that was, he’d met him. Several times. Shit, Hartman was the Bureau liaison on the Anderson shooting!

  He sat there when the recording was over, unable to even think clearly. Finally he asked, “And he told you to give this to me? What, in case he died?”

  Diana Wilson smiled ruefully and wiped at her cheeks. “No. I found it in his desk, in a box marked R.I.P. After I listened to it, I knew I should bring it to you.”

  “Why? I mean…..shit….did Paul tell you? I was the one who figured out that it was him and his crew hitting the clubs. I was….I was the one called the FBI.” R.I.P.? He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at Wilson’s morbid sense of humor.

  She nodded. “He told me. And I told him to pay you off with some of the cash he took. To forget what you learned, or make evidence disappear, or something. He laughed, said you wouldn’t even take a half-price meal. He told me some stories of when you were in uniform together. Called you a ‘motherfuckin’ Boy Scout.’” She paused. “I know you called the FBI. I want to hate you, and maybe I do, but you called them because you thought it was the right thing to do, not because you knew this was going to happen. Which means you’re the only cop I know that I can trust to do the right thing with this. I know I don’t want it. Don’t want it anywhere near my daughters.” She climbed out of the car. “It doesn’t matter where you got it, you can say you got it in the mail.” She bent down and peered through the open door at him. “You do the right thing, Ringo. See if my baby girls can get some justice out of this. Because they sure as shit cain’t get their daddy back.” And she slammed the door.

  Ringo sat in his car and stared at the biggest piece of evidence he’d ever had. Biggest piece of evidence he was likely to have in any case, ever. It felt hot in his hand, heavy. When cops were dirty, you called in the FBI. Who did you call when the FBI was dirty? For the first time in a long time he had absolutely no idea what to do.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  In Michigan, Dave usually ran four times week. During the winter he ran on a treadmill, but in the summer he did his usual path around the neighborhood. Four miles, and he’d been running four miles four times a week long enough that he didn’t even start sweating until he’d gone a mile and a half. Four flat miles was easy, unless he had a chest cold or was running on only a handful of hours of sleep.

  In Arizona, he wasn’t running on the road because he didn’t want the people he was trying to avoid driving up on him when he was only armed with a small pistol. So he ran cross country, up and down the hills on trails that had been there for years. He didn’t know if they had originally been game trails or something else, but he was able to stay off the roads and still get a three mile run in. Three miles up and down hills, however, on dirt that often wasn’t packed hard, at five thousand feet of elevation, was kicking his ass. Hard.

  Wheezing and gasping, he stumbled into a walk as he reached his driveway halfway between the house and the road. Four times he’d run the route, every morning, and four times it felt like someone had ripped his lungs out of his chest with burning tongs. He supposed—eventually—he’d get used to the elevation, but how long would that take? Probably more time than he had.

  The sun was barely up, and it was only about sixty degrees, but he wasn’t cold. He wasn’t cold, but he wasn’t sweating—or at least that’s what he would have thought, if he’d never exercised in the desert before. Jogging in an arid environment was nothing like jogging in Michigan. In Michigan, and pretty much everywhere else that it wasn’t near desert, you knew when you were sweating. In the desert, it often evaporated so quickly you weren’t aware just how hard you were working.

  Every day they’d been there he’d been waking up long before dawn. The combination of surveillance hours plus two days travel west meant he would have been out jogging at three a.m. local time if he wasn’t afraid of twisting his ankle on the uneven ground. Plus, of course, he wasn’t sleeping well. He was surprised he was sleeping at all, actually.

  If the elevation wasn’t kicking his ass so hard he probably would have been able to appreciate how pretty the surroundings were. The ground itself was shades of brown, and it was far too dry for more than occasional clumps of nearly dry grass, but the slopes
were dotted with all sorts of green bushes and scrub trees. He’d learned the names of most of them when he was younger, but remembering which was which now was tough—acacia, hackberry, mesquite and ironwood were trees and bushes. Buckwheat and primrose were low to the ground. As for cacti, he’d always been fascinated with them and remembered which was which. Around the property they mostly had prickly pear and cholla cacti, with a few saguaros.

  Dave walked back and forth on the driveway for a while until he was cooled down, then headed into the house. A check of his watch showed him that it was just eight o’clock. “It’s me,” he called out when he opened the door, just in case.

  Mickey was in the small open kitchen, making coffee and still looking half asleep. While Dave was running with the Kahr, he left his Glock sitting on the kitchen counter, but Mickey didn’t seem to be a big fan of guns. “I’m going to jump in the shower,” Dave told him.

  Dave took off the Kahr and took a quick shower, then got dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved button-down shirt. That was another thing he’d learned in the desert; clothes that were a little warmer, but covered your skin from the intense sun, were a good thing. Exiting the tiny bathroom, Dave grabbed a cup of coffee, unloaded his Glock, and proceeded to practice his draw. He’d been doing it every morning and night since they’d arrived at the house.

  Mickey stood with one hip against the kitchen counter, sipping his coffee and watching Dave as he practiced his draw and reloads and shooting on the move, over and over and over and over…..gun clicking and snicking, timer beeping…..it was maddening. How could he do that? He must have drawn his gun a thousand times since they’d arrived, not to mention putting a new magazine in it, shooting while moving left or right.

  Shit, Mickey thought, I guess that’s how you get good at something, you do it ten thousand times. Dave was amazingly fast, Mickey had never seen anything like it. His go-to “dryfire drill”, as Mickey had learned they were called, involved two 8x10 pictures hung on one wall across the room, “Because I don’t have any proper targets,” as Dave told him. At the beep of his timer Dave would draw his Glock, “fire” twice at one picture, twice at the other, reload with a spare (empty) magazine off his belt, then shoot each picture twice again. He was consistently able to do it in 4 seconds or less. Impressive as hell, but Mickey was bored numb just watching and listening to the routine. He didn’t know how Dave could do it, it was like imitating a sewing machine. Dave had calluses on his right hand in weird places (the inside of his middle finger, the web of his hand) just from practicing his draw.