A Good Kill

by John McMahon

  “Were they on foot?” I asked. “Or maybe you remember what kinda car they drove?”

  “I think they walked.” Nina pointed. “Like across 914.”

  “From the liquor store?” Remy motioned.

  “That or Tandy’s,” she said. “I couldn’t tell ya.”

  “Which guy bought the shirts?” Remy asked.

  This was a test, since we knew the sizes in the car were XXLs. Too big for Vinorama.

  The woman took my phone. “That one.” She pointed at Dilmendes, verifying our hunch and handing my cell back. “But his friend was interested too. Everything was just too big for him.”

  I cocked my head, confused. We’d seen Juan Vinorama’s body in the car this morning. The medium tee I was holding would fit him just fine. If not that, a men’s large.

  “What do you mean, ‘too big’?” I asked, flicking the photo back to Vinorama and looking at it myself.

  “No, not him,” she said. “The other guy.”

  I flicked to Dilmendes, and she shook her head.

  “No, the third guy. The little one,” she said. “You don’t got a picture of him?”

  Remy and I moved a bit closer to the woman. A third man with these two very well might be our killer.

  “What did the third guy look like?” Remy asked.

  “Like them.” The woman shrugged.

  I flicked my eyebrows at her, and she put a palm out, wanting to correct herself. “Mexican, I mean. But little.”

  “Ya got more than just the word ‘little’?” Remy asked.

  “Well,” she said. “We don’t have kids’ sizes, and he kept asking for shirts. I told him he should go lookin’ at Walmart. The teens section. He looked pissed off and left. Had a smoke.”

  “You said it was before closing?” Remy asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Remy was typing notes in her iPad. “Do you remember how close to closing? Like what time?”

  “Well, we shut down on Tuesdays at ten p.m.,” the girl said. “Let’s call it nine forty-five.”

  I looked around the store. Out the crowded front windows and across at Tandy’s. If these guys were drug mules, what the hell were they doing hanging in this area for days? I thought of what else was out here, far from the city. At ten o’clock, the bar would be open. The package store. Not much else.

  “You got security cams in here?” my partner inquired.

  The woman smiled for the first time. “Not even fake ones, sugar,” she said to Remy. “We rely on the kindness of folks—and the security of the good old Mason Falls PD.”

  We both grinned at that.

  “And well you should,” Remy said. The official response.

  “We got people who can draw a picture for you, Nina,” I said. “You describe the eyes or nose and they can—”

  “I wouldn’t know where to start,” she said. “All I remember was he was Mexican and his size. Like four foot ten or so. Four-eleven tops.”

  “Hair color?” Remy said. “Eye color?”

  “I’d guess dark and dark.”

  “How did the big guy pay for the shirts?” I asked.

  “Cash.”

  Remy and I peppered her with more questions. Did she see any car the men might’ve hung around in the parking lot? No. Did she overhear any of their conversation? No.

  “Were they speaking in English?” I asked.

  “I dunno. I think so, yeah.”

  We’d gotten everything we could from Nina and left.

  Walking across 914, we found the liquor store manager unhelpful, and the front door to Tandy’s locked.

  Standing in the parking lot, I stared down the highway, imagining the men crossing this road. The land out this way was flatter than a gander’s arch, and largely white and rural. These three would’ve stood out. Been remembered.

  We suddenly heard a garbage truck pull out from the back of the bar, and began crossing the street.

  Other than the noise of the truck, the area was quiet and desolate, at noon on a Friday.

  From behind Tandy’s came the noise of a dumpster rolling. We turned. Was someone working at this hour and had ignored our knocking on the front of the bar?

  We walked around to the back of the place.

  A rolling steel garage door was pulled open behind Tandy’s, and a man was pushing industrial trash cans full of empty booze bottles and crushed beer cans over to a dumpster. Filling it back up.

  “How ya doing?” I said.

  The guy glanced up for a moment, but kept to his work. He was sixtyish and Black—heavyset with a wrinkled face and graying hair, cut short. He wore a black sweater with a red O on it, outlined in white. Ohio State.

  “Buckeyes gonna be any good this year?” I asked.

  The man sized me up as harmless. “Favored to win the Big Ten,” he said. “Hung forty-two on Cincinnati last Saturday.”

  Remy badged him as we walked closer. “Detective Morgan,” she said. “This is my partner, Detective Marsh. You work in the bar here?”

  “I’m the manager,” he said.

  Remy took out her phone, which had the same pictures of the DOAs as mine.

  “We’re looking for a couple guys,” she said. “We heard they were in here in the last couple days.”

  The man glanced at Remy’s phone for a quick second and nodded, moving back to his chore.

  “Yeah, they were here.”

  “You remember when?” she asked.

  My partner always began with fidelity: test out one fact that we already know. Then go to other questions. I had come up under a different training: always begin with connective tissue. Find rapport.

  “I dunno.” The man shrugged. “Two days ago?”

  He grabbed another trash can. Started wheeling it away from us and toward the dumpster. Cans rattled around inside, and Remy gave me a “what the fuck” look. The guy was ignoring us.

  My eyes glinted at my partner. It’s an odd thing—when you’re young and time stretches out endlessly across the horizon, your only desire is to will it to move faster.

  “I was trying to remember that quarterback’s name from 2018,” I said to the man. “Was it Haskins? Must’ve completed seventy percent of his passes last year. You guys lost him, right?”

  “Drafted by Washington,” the man said. “But I didn’t watch the Buckeyes before this year.”

  This was my own test, and I understood the man better now. I’d seen a number of Ohio State shirts recently on folks in the area. Justin Fields, our backup quarterback at Georgia, had transferred there, under those new rules that let kids leave one school with no penalty and go to another.

  “You a Fields fan?” I asked.

  “Pride of Kennesaw,” he said. “Four thousand yards of passing in high school.”

  Fields was a local kid from northwest of Marietta, and some fans thought he should’ve started at Georgia instead of the current QB, Jake Fromm. Now heading into week three of the 2019 season, it was too early to tell.

  I walked closer to the man. “Help us out, will ya? These guys are in the morgue.”

  The man motioned for Remy’s phone again, and she handed it to him. A pile of wooden pallets was stacked twenty high against the building that housed the bar.

  “From what we heard, there were three guys,” Remy said, breaking the silence of the barkeep’s inspection of the photos. “The two you see here—plus another buddy. A shorter fella.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “They were in here together a few nights ago. Tuesday night. Maybe again Wednesday. Then last night it was just the one guy.”

  “The shorter guy?” Remy confirmed.

  “Yeah, he came in last night,” the man said. “’Round ten p.m. One shot of tequila. Two Dos Equis. Tipped me a twenty and said he’d see me tonight.”

 
“What’s he look like?” Remy asked.

  “Think he’s Puerto Rican. Curly dark hair. Probably twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Real short. He had a thing on his hand. Not a cast. It’s more like gauze. Messy, like he taped it up himself.”

  “Right or left hand?” my partner asked.

  The man cocked his head, picturing the customer from his vantage point. “My right, at the bar, so his left.”

  “And he said he’d be back tonight?” I asked.

  The man nodded, but slower now.

  “What’s your name, sir?” I asked.

  “Isaac McGulden.”

  “You’re gonna have a police presence in your bar tonight, Mr. McGulden,” I said.

  “And what if I don’t want one?” He stepped close to me, his body a similar frame to mine, even if thirty years older. “Friday’s my best night.”

  “Well, we won’t be in the way,” I said. “But if the register runs short, I can always talk to my chief. See if we can help out. A night out here with patrol.” I shrugged. “Drinking parties with cops tend to run up the tape pretty well.”

  He hesitated, not sure what to make of the offer.

  “I think it’s a fair guess that this man is armed and dangerous, Mr. McGulden,” Remy said. “We’ll be in plainclothes, so no one’ll notice. But we’ll park some black and whites nearby.”

  “All right,” the old guy said, even though we weren’t asking his permission.

  We followed him inside the bar then, and arranged where the best place was for us to wait and what time we’d be back. Made sure he didn’t alert any customers.

  As we drove back to the station, I was thinking about Lauten Hartley again and whether he’d still be hanging around.

  The woman who’d led the police oversight board before Hartley was in that office only ten days a year. It would be the same for Hartley. Today was just a show of force. He’d set up that meeting to intimidate me. To get a reaction.

  But why now?

  As I entered the precinct lobby, a woman stopped me. She touched my elbow as Remy and I headed toward the stairs.

  “Detective Marsh,” she said, and I glanced over.

  She was in her thirties, pretty, with hair the color of a reddish-orange pepper, tied up in a bun. She looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her.

  “I’ll catch up with you,” I said to Remy, and turned to face the woman.

  “Can I help you?”

  “My name is Kelly Borland,” she said.

  On instinct, I took out the small reporter’s notebook that I keep in my jacket breast pocket. But as I did, I realized that I knew the woman. She was the teacher from the school shooting. The only other time I’d seen her was through my binoculars. That, and on the news.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Your hair. I didn’t . . .”

  She smiled gently, and when she did, small dimples formed on each cheek. She was five foot three and white. Attractive, with brown eyes. A curvy but athletic figure.

  “I’m trying to lay low.” She pointed at the red bun. “Coloring the hair sounded like a good idea when my friend suggested it. I didn’t realize how red it would get.”

  I smiled at the shade. “It worked on me,” I said. “Incognito. How are you doing?”

  “I’m okay,” she said. “I mean, you know, given everything.”

  I wasn’t sure what she was here for, but I could imagine the week that Kelly Borland had had. First, some psycho holds a gun to her head. Then a bullet rips through the glass inches away and lands in the man. Blood in her hair and on her body. And if that wasn’t enough, the media started accusing her of having an affair with the dead teacher.

  “Listen,” I said. “I’m not part of the investigation. So if there’s something you’ve remembered, Detectives Kaplan and Berry are your—”

  “It’s not that,” she said. “I know you and I haven’t talked. And Detective Berry has been great,” she said of Merle. “I just . . . I went to a therapist today.”

  “Oh, that’s great,” I said. “It’s good to talk it out.”

  “I wanted to come by and thank you. For saving my life.”

  I got it now. Understood why she brought up therapy related to what she was doing here. “Not necessary.” I put up my hands. “I was just doing my job.”

  She squinted at me. “Are you not on the case ’cause you took the shot?”

  “No,” I said. “There’s other cases . . . other cases that need help.”

  I suddenly remembered that I had my own therapy session to attend to. In about an hour. If I missed it, I could end up facing off with Hartley at a police board meeting.

  “In a lot of cultures, I would owe you a life,” Kelly Borland said. She smiled as if embarrassed. “I know that sounds hokey, but—”

  “Not in my culture,” I said. “In my culture, we’re even-Steven.”

  She had been fidgeting with her hair and undid something that made it fall to her shoulders.

  “Well, my counselor said it was good to come here, and I did. But I’d also like to buy you dinner. As a sign of my appreciation.”

  “Again,” I said, “not necessary. Really.”

  She nodded then, as if she’d done what she came here for.

  At the same time, it was odd. I could feel an energy between us.

  “Thanks for coming by,” I said, and she shook my hand. I started toward the stairwell.

  “Detective Marsh,” Kelly Borland said from the door before leaving. “It was just an offer for dinner. A salad. A plate of food. Not your hand in marriage.”

  Hope Duffy, the desk sergeant, started laughing at me then, and I smiled. Now I was the one who was embarrassed.

  I walked back toward Kelly Borland. Pulled out my card. “I’m on a case now, but try me in a few days. I’d be honored.”

  She took the card from me and wrote a phone number on the back of it.

  “I didn’t mean to be pushy,” she said. “You call me if you feel up for it.”

  16

  The office of Dr. Gary Cavendish was located in a building just south of the precinct, on the corner of 5th and Drake.

  The psychiatrist’s place of business was on the same floor that housed human resources and was the place where city employees went to get discount tickets to Amicalola Falls or add a child to their insurance policy.

  I waited for the shrink in a red upholstered chair set up in the hallway outside his office. On the walls were prints of coastal Georgia. Tybee Island. Skidaway State Park. The squares of Savannah, hung with moss and covered in tourists.

  A minute after I arrived, I heard a door scrape open. Cavendish emerged from the stairwell.

  He was slightly shorter than me and slender, with thin wispy strands of blond hair that barely covered his head.

  “Am I late?” he asked, checking his watch.

  “I’m early,” I said. “Take your time, Doc.”

  Cavendish unlocked his office door and flicked the lights on.

  Inside, the place had an artificially floral smell. Like a lavender candle or air freshener was used more often than needed.

  “Come on in, Detective. Grab a seat.”

  I had seen Cavendish two times before. The first was when I was a young detective and had shot a man who had pinned down me and my partner inside a check-cashing place. Then in January, I’d been ordered to see the doc a second time after I’d killed a man who was trying to drown me.

  Cavendish was carrying a paper bag, and on the side was a logo from North Street Bread. If you wanted a biscuit with a piece of chicken in the middle, topped with a fried egg and gooped in spicy honey, you couldn’t do much better.

  “Did I interrupt your lunch?”

  “Absolutely not,” he said, dumping the bag into a small wicker trash basket. “We’re old friends anyway, right? If I wa
s starving, I’d eat in front of you.”

  He got into his chair, which was a brown leather number with a worn mark, right where his butt sat down. I moved to the center of the room and dropped into a gray lounger. The blinds were lowered, and the place was cool.

  Cavendish pulled his chair close. His skin was pinkish-red in places, almost as if he’d been stung by a jellyfish, and his eyelashes were so blond they were nearly invisible against his flesh.

  “So how are you feeling?” he asked.

  “Never better,” I said. “What’ve we got here—two sessions?”

  “Two hours,” he said. “Then you’re home free.”

  Unless he says different, Purvis said in my head.

  Department policy was that Cavendish had the ability to keep a cop from returning to work. Then again, there was an oddism about this time. Unlike normal protocol, I’d already returned to work. Minutes after the shooting.

  When I woke up this morning, I was expecting Senza to put a full stop on my work schedule, but then the call arrived for the double murder along 914.

  Cavendish and I small-talked for twenty minutes, mostly about the required process of me coming here and the methods the doc used to get cops to feel comfortable and share. To start talking about their hobbies first. Their favorite college or pro teams.

  “Well, you know me,” I said. “I’m hobby-less and team-less.”

  “That’s not true,” he said. “We’ve talked about both the Hawks and the Dawgs before.”

  Cavendish made a comment about a patrolman who’d left the force a month ago, after a different officer-involved shooting.

  “Did you know Terry Willard?”

  “Sure,” I said. “He was in patrol, but we came up together. Same rookie class.”

  We talked about the incident, in which the senior patrolman had mistaken a screwdriver for a gun and shot a man in the numbered streets.

  “Willard was a good cop,” I said. “Firing a gun just does something different to each person. For some guys, they don’t want to touch the steel again.”

  The mood had suddenly gotten serious, and it wasn’t lost on me what the doc was saying.

  “Well, the cops that end up here,” Cavendish said, “two times. It’s a pretty small fraternity, P.T. Not all of them make it back into uniform like you.”