Resolve

by Hensley, J. J.

  “Then we have the question about who shot Walker. We thought we caught a lucky break when the bullet that passed through his head was intact enough for us to get a read on it. My partner is a smart guy. He suggested that we run every name we’ve come across in the TRU and Oakland investigations and see who might own a .357, and bingo! The computer spits out your name and the dots start to connect. We can’t fill in all the blanks, but you’re starting to look dirty as hell.”

  Looking through the dirty windshield, I reminded myself to breathe.

  “I’m usually not sloppy, but when we were at your house and I bagged your gun and ammo, I didn’t notice it.” He smiled, but not really. “Let me tell you, I was pretty embarrassed when I took those things to the lab and saw that the bullets were .40 calibers.

  “Now, I’m not a gun nut like some cops, so I was at a loss before the lab guys filled me in. Did you know that your gun can either be a .357 or a .40? Yes, sir. We carry Glocks, so I didn’t know that. With your gun, it turns out that all you have to do is swap out the barrel, get yourself some new ammo, and then you have a weapon with a completely different signature. And the best part is, you can buy a barrel without having to fill out any paperwork. If someone were to pay cash for that baby, it would be damn near impossible to track that kind of purchase.”

  A stick of gum materialized in front of Hartz and disappeared into his mouth.

  “Like I said, I’m not sloppy, so I had the boys check your gun anyway. Of course, it didn’t match, but you probably guessed that. I even thought to ask them if they could tell if the gun had ever been fired. They told me that a lot of the parts looked well-used, but the barrel had minimal signs of usage. Strange, but nothing damning.”

  I really needed a sabbatical.

  “Needless to say, I was pretty upset. I was about to follow my partner’s example and take some R&R, when I remembered something you said at your house. Shand asked you what you thought should happen to the person who killed Walker and Nokes. It was a bush league question and he never should have asked it. You had to know that all you needed to say was, Whoever did this deserves to get gang raped in prison until the end of time, but you didn’t. You just couldn’t resist, could you? You said that whoever killed Walker deserved something other than prison. Then you said that we shouldn’t even question what you think about cop killers. So here is what I think happened. For whatever reason, I think Walker shot Officer Nokes. Out of either anger or pure instinct, you shot Walker with that gun right there.”

  He pointed at the box on the seat, while I internally cursed my ego for playing word games with the investigators.

  “Then,” he preached on, “you bought a new barrel for your gun and made the switch.”

  He paused and scanned the street again.

  “You could have simply replaced it with a new .357 barrel, but why not change it completely? I suppose I could spend the next six months going to every gun store in a 100 mile radius and hope I find some sales clerk who remembers a guy paying cash for that barrel, but even if I did, what would that prove. I’m sure the original barrel is down some storm drain by now.”

  A river outside Youngstown, actually.

  “And judging by the immaculate carpets in that hunk of junk you’re driving, I don’t think searching for any trace evidence would get me anywhere.”

  For the first time in several minutes, I looked directly at him. Even with the sunglasses shielding his eyes, I could tell that there was no real malice there.

  “What now?” I asked. I didn’t know what else to say. No need to fake being offended and insult his obviously formidable intelligence.

  “What now? I guess that’s the question, isn’t it? The way I see it, Steven Thacker killed the Behram girl. You killed Thacker . . . legally. Randy Walker killed a police officer and somebody took care of Walker. Maybe Walker killed Virginia Richmond and he doubly deserved a bullet in the head. So, what now? Now, I wait for the call that tells me to pin the Richmond homicide on Walker, whether he deserves it or not. Then I wait for some crackhead to smoke somebody over ownership of a street corner and I start working that case. That’s what’s now.”

  A woman in her late fifties passed by on a thirty-year-old bicycle. She smiled at the detective who was making an ordinary traffic stop. He smiled back.

  He started returning to his car, but then stopped and said, “By the way, my condolences on the death of that other professor. What was his name? Kanto?”

  “Kasko. Jacob Kasko.”

  “Yeah. Too bad. When I saw his picture in the obituaries, I thought I recognized him. He was running with you the first day we met, wasn’t he?”

  Seriously, I was going to throw up if this didn’t stop soon.

  “Just to make sure everything was kosher—because I’m not sloppy—I checked on that race he was running. I found out that you were registered to run in it too.”

  “I did run in it.”

  “I know. I’m learning all sorts of things these days. I’ve never done much long distance running. The most I ever had to run was ten-yard bursts so I could try to separate some running back’s teeth from his gums. So I was very interested to learn about those clocking things they put down on the streets. What do you call them?”

  “Timing mats,” I answered a little too quickly.

  “You can go back and check any runner’s time when they cross those things. Out of curiosity, because I love getting an education, I checked your times against Kasko’s. Do you know what I found?”

  I let the rhetorical question hang in the air.

  “According to those fancy computers, you were a long way from Kasko the whole time. Almost a full mile the second time you crossed a mat.”

  “He was a good athlete.”

  “Apparently he was. Especially for a man much older than you. Well, this got me thinking that only two timing mats don’t tell me much and besides, you can’t always trust computers. So I talked to one of the race organizers and he mentioned that if I was interested in seeing a particular person, there were official race photographers at a couple of spots along the course. Each photo is digital, so you can see the time that it was taken too. Amazing. Anyway, I told him that I would just love to see some photos of you since we’re becoming so close, and he typed your name into a computer, matched you with a bib number and in a flash—there you were!”

  “There I was,” I said while trying not to look shaken.

  “They had a couple of real good photos of you. I had no trouble picking out the number on your chest and making out your face. It didn’t hurt that you had those sunglasses up on your head and not covering your face.” He tapped a baseball bat finger on the frame of his shades. “In one of the shots, it even seemed like you were looking right into the camera.”

  “Did it?”

  “Like I said, I don’t know much about marathons, so I asked the race people if the times on those photos were consistent with the times when you crossed the mats. You know . . . if you were running at a pretty constant pace. They said you were. I then went through the same process to check Kasko’s times. It looks like he was well ahead of you up until he collapsed.”

  Placing his giant mitts on the door beside me, he said, “There is one thing I wanted to ask you about. You must have passed right by your friend after he went down. Did you stop to check on him?”

  “A lot of people had to pull off the course. I must have missed him.”

  The investigator looked at the ground and shook his head back and forth.

  “Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm. That’s a shame. You have to be thinking that maybe if you’d seen him and stopped, you could have helped him in some way. Or not. Anaphylactic shock is a real bear. It can take only a matter of minutes for a person to die. The medics who worked on him told me that he must have had an allergy to something he came into contact with during the race. Maybe even something he ate. You guys do that, right? Eat things during the race?”

  I told him we did and why.

&
nbsp; “You would think he’d have known better. He had a bracelet that said he was allergic to penicillin, but there was no reason he would be taking that at the end of a race.”

  I shifted in my seat and put my hands on the wheel. He changed gears.

  “Being a detail-oriented guy, I pulled Kasko’s phone records to see if there was any unusual activity before he died. Things like him receiving threatening calls or anything like that. Boy, was I surprised when I saw the same number keep popping up on his system. It was the number of a prepaid cell phone. Dozens of calls were on that list to and from that number, and the records I requested went just two months back. The number was for a cell we found in Steven Thacker’s car after he died. Hell, nearly every call made from that phone was to Kasko or some office on the TRU campus. Did you know that Kasko and Thacker knew each other that well?”

  “No. Neither of them ever mentioned it.”

  “Sure would have liked to talk to Kasko about those calls. Too late now.”

  Hartz rolled his neck and took a thoughtful inhale. He continued, “You know, it just so happens that Kasko received a few calls from Lindsay Behram prior to her death. On top of that, Virginia Richmond also called Kasko just before she was murdered. It’s funny how people tied to Kasko kept ending up dead. Especially since Virginia Richmond only called him one time and the next thing you know, she’s on ice.”

  The lady on the bicycle passed by in the other direction, and seemed to wonder why this guy wouldn’t just give me the ticket and move on.

  As if he was coming out of a daydream, Hartz shook his head and explained something I already knew.

  “When a guy Kasko’s age dies during a marathon, they don’t normally do an autopsy. I was going to have him dug up and see what the M.E. could find, but at this point it might be impossible to detect anything in his system.”

  Several beats passed before the detective seemed to reach a final conclusion.

  While coaxing his tree trunk legs to walk away from my car, he said, “Well, Karma’s a funny thing. Maybe he had something coming to him. You can’t mock the gods of fate and then stand outside in a thunderstorm.”

  With that, the detective covered the ground between our cars in six thunderous steps and drove back into a city that would never appreciate him enough.

  Six weeks passed before I found myself back on campus. Of all the stupid reasons to revisit TRU, I ended up back there because of $125. That was the cost of the extra pair of running shoes I had left in my locker. Earlier that morning, I had come to realize the running shoes I had been wearing had seen their last miles. That’s when I remembered I had a relatively new pair sitting inside my locker at TRU. My locker—and the shared locker—still contained some of my personal items. The spare socks and Pop-Tart boxes didn’t concern me, but the expensive running shoes demanded that I not leave them there to rot. As I drove south on I-79, I cursed my thriftiness and vowed to get on and off campus as surreptitiously as possible.

  Less than two minutes after entering the recreation building, I was walking out of there with the pair of shoes tied together by the laces. Brent was standing beside my double-parked Jeep, admiring the fine machine. So much for my covert operation.

  He wore jeans and a plain green T-shirt. The gym bag on his shoulder told me he was on his way to a racquetball game.

  “I saw the oil burner sitting out here and figured you’d be right out. I haven’t seen you around. Off for the summer, huh?”

  “Gone for a while longer. I’m calling it a research sabbatical, but truth be told Kaitlyn and I will be traveling and researching the finest cafes of Krakow and Prague. ”

  “Uh huh,” he replied after some hesitation.

  Dragging a finger across the dust on the hood of the car, he said, “I guess you probably heard—the official word came down that Silo is hanging them up. Some health thing.”

  I shrugged and managed, “Well, I can’t say I’ll miss him.”

  Brent smiled without smiling.

  He said, “Is it true that your buddy Aaron quit?”

  Aaron had sent me a rambling letter from his treatment center in which he told me that his wife had filed for divorce, and that he’d made the decision to retire. He wished me well and made no mention of ever seeing me again.

  “I heard something about that,” I said.

  Brent manufactured a lighthearted tone and said, “I need to stretch my legs before I go in there and clean Rixey’s clock. You would think a Kinesiology professor would be able to win a few games. Walk with me?”

  Without waiting for an answer, he started walking toward the center of campus. Not wanting to offend the last TRU employee who could stand me, I caught up to him. He let several minutes pass wordlessly before he broke the silence.

  “Did I ever tell you what I did for most of my time with the Secret Service?”

  I had always assumed that he had done things like protect the President, work some fraud cases, and arrest counterfeiters, and I told him so.

  “Sure. I did all that, but most of my years were on the intel side of things. I kind of became an expert on what we called protective intelligence. Basically, I identified and evaluated people who were deemed to be a possible threat to anybody who we were responsible for protecting.”

  I really wanted to get out of there. Normally, I wouldn’t have minded a nice round of war stories, but this wasn’t normally.

  “Brent,” I interrupted, “Kaitlyn and I have to meet with the travel agent. Do you think I could call you—”

  “I started off in Atlanta, did my time in D.C. and then back to where I started. I worked all kinds of threats: the nut jobs, lone gunman types, serial bombers . . .”

  The way we were strolling leisurely through the open patches of the campus, you would have thought we were out bird-watching. My running shoes bumped against my knee as I dangled them by the laces. I silently scolded myself for not throwing them in my car when I had the chance.

  “But my real specialty was working the groups. Militias, biker gangs, drug organizations . . . the groups like those were the interesting ones. Usually, they kept to themselves, but every once in a while they would get it in their heads to knock off one of our people—the politicians, I mean—and that’s where I came in. I teamed up with some DEA and ATF guys and we kind of started our own little task force. Between drugs, guns, and threats, we pretty much had everything covered. Mostly we just watched the groups and prepared to jump in if a threat started to look credible.”

  We were almost to the yard in the center of the campus by this point. The skyline of the city peered over the tops of the university bell tower.

  “So every once in a while some gang leader or wannabe-military commando would start firing an AK-47 in the air and start talking about taking out the old government and building a new one, or some similar craziness. And do you know what happened after that?”

  “You arrested them.”

  “Wrong. Nothing happened. That’s the thing, Cyprus, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, nothing happened. Studying the group dynamics of these whack jobs was fascinating. As soon as some loudmouthed leader started spouting off reckless threats, four or five strong personalities in the group would start to push back. They didn’t want all the heat that some grandiose plan would bring down on them. They went into self-preservation mode. They positioned themselves to wrest control from the leader who was becoming the threat; the infighting would start and before you knew it—Boom! All-out war would rip through the organization.”

  Brent came to a halt and turned to me when we reached the statue of Gadson, overlooking the fruits of his labor.

  “The most interesting aspect of all was that whenever the smoke would clear from their civil war, and all the main players had duked it out, there was always just one of them left standing.”

  He paused for effect and squared up to face me.

  “It wasn’t always the loudest. It wasn’t always the smartest. It wasn’t always the meanest, the
most popular, or the most daring. The last man standing was always the one who had the most belief. Right or wrong didn’t matter. It was always the one who believed he was doing the right thing, no matter how twisted that thing might be.”

  We listened to a train whistle in the distance.

  “You seemed to have gained a lot of insight,” I said.

  “When you stand back and watch, it’s amazing what you can learn. The guys I’m talking about, the survivors, they didn’t all last very long. For some of them, victory went to their heads and they didn’t get out when they should have. Some of them had truly evil intent to begin with and it ate away at them. Their beliefs, no matter how strong, couldn’t save them in the end. But the ones who thought they were righteous. Those guys . . . well, they may have had some screwed-up values, but they could live with themselves. So, I guess we all have to ask ourselves, what are we prepared to live with? And if we can live with the evil we have done, what does that make us?”

  Brent let out a long sigh, and took one more look at the city glowing from a setting sun.

  “I better get back to the courts. Rixey’s going to say I forfeited if I’m too late. And guys like us . . . never forfeit.”

  With that, Brent Lancaster retreated from the field and left me standing with a pair of running shoes dangling from my hand. My only company was a deranged steel icon and the most terrifying thing I have ever encountered—a clear conscience.