Everyone Dies

by Michael McGarrity

  “Affirmative.” After requesting another unit, the lieutenant dropped the microphone on the seat. “This won’t take all that long, ma’am,” he said.

  “Good,” Sara replied, trying not to wiggle, “because I have to pee.”

  Kerney sat in Sara’s new car with Larry Otero and watched as a group of detectives huddled in the middle of the street while Sal Molina gave them the word that the scope of the investigation now included a serious threat to the chief and his pregnant wife.

  The emergency lights from the police units, an ambulance, and the crime scene van blinked lollipop colors into the night, bouncing off the trees and the front of Manning’s house. A cluster of neighbors, including the Sauls, stood behind the police line watching techs lug equipment into Dora Manning’s house.

  The killer’s note and the explicit symbolism of a second dead rat on his doorstep ate like a worm in Kerney’s gut, and assigning officers to protect Sara didn’t ease his anxiety. Until he knew who the perp was and why this was happening, none of them was safe.

  An unmarked unit passed through the checkpoint and pulled to the side of the street. Ramona Pino came over with a shut-down look on her face and handed Kerney the note retrieved from his front door. It was protected in a clear plastic bag.

  He read it, turned it over to the back side, which was blank, and passed it along to Larry, who did the same before handing it back.

  “I think the neighborhood knows that we’ve arrived in force,” Kerney said, as he returned the note to Pino. “Except for the patrol officer at the checkpoint, ask the officers and detectives to kill their emergency lights.”

  Kerney knew his orders sounded picky. But it was a lot better than cursing the nameless son of a bitch who wanted to kill his family.

  Ramona nodded stiffly and walked away.

  “She’s not a happy camper right now,” Larry said.

  “She’ll get over it,” Kerney said, not in the least interested in Pino’s emotional state. “What’s happening with the IA investigation?”

  “Lieutenant Casados has personally interviewed Pino, Tafoya, Molina, all on-duty commanders in the operations division, and the SWAT supervisor. I’m next on the list. I’m meeting with him in the morning. He’ll want to see you after that.”

  One by one, the emergency lights went dark. Kerney nodded. Unless directed otherwise, Casados reported to the chief and no one else.

  “We’ll see what shakes out,” he said. “Have Molina put Tafoya and Pino on desk duty starting tomorrow. I want a comprehensive search made to locate every case file and court record that involved Jack Potter, Dora Manning, and me. I don’t care how many archives they have to dig through to get the information. It’s time to start connecting the dots.”

  “You’ve got it.”

  “Also have the ME give us his best estimate of the time of Manning’s death. To me, it looks like she’s been dead for at least twenty-four hours, perhaps longer. That would mean the perp cut her throat before he shot Jack Potter.”

  “Why the different MOs?” Larry asked.

  “We don’t know yet if they’re different,” Kerney replied.

  “He used a knife on Manning and a pistol on Potter.”

  “Because each circumstance and setting was unique. Potter was killed early in the morning on an empty street. I doubt our perp wanted to risk attacking him with a knife. It was far better to shoot him and then get the hell out of there in a hurry. On the other hand, Manning died in her bed, so I’m assuming she was killed at night. A gunshot could have alerted the neighbors. In that instance, it was better to use a blade.”

  “But there’s no indication the perp played any mind games with Potter before he killed him,” Larry said.

  “We don’t know that for sure,” Kerney said as he started the engine.

  “Going home?” Larry asked, as he opened the passenger door.

  “Not yet. There are a few things I want to do first. Is the ADA on his way?”

  “Yeah, Foyt should be here soon. I’ll bring him up to speed.”

  On late rounds, Dr. Rand Collier read the admission report, the medication chart, and the nursing notes in Mary Beth Patterson’s chart. After an hour of observation in the ER, Patterson’s catatonic stupor had lifted, replaced by a moderate psychotic reaction stemming from the death of her boyfriend. The ER physician who’d examined Patterson cited nihilistic delusions, verbal requests to be punished, and a flat affect. An antidepressant had been prescribed and Patterson had been sent up to the psych unit for further observation and evaluation.

  The nursing notes from the afternoon shift reported that upon arrival, Mary Beth had been placed on a close watch. She had remained passive and verbally unresponsive until early evening, when she had requested some juice at the nursing station. Since then, she’d been observed in her room watching television, and had partially eaten her dinner meal—all good signs.

  He reviewed summaries of Patterson’s prior admissions which detailed her self-destructive behavior, depressive episodes, and her sex-change operation, and read through the intake note prepared by the hospital social worker who’d interviewed Joyce Barbero, Patterson’s counselor at the independent living center.

  Collier, who was covering for the mental health clinic’s psychiatrist, walked into Mary Beth’s room and introduced himself.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked, as he approached the bed.

  Mary Beth pushed herself to a sitting position. “I need to go home. My Kurt will be worried about me. He doesn’t know where I am.”

  “Would you like to talk about what happened to Kurt today?”

  “Nothing happened to him,” Mary Beth replied.

  “Do you remember why you were brought to the hospital?” Collier asked.

  “Why was I?” Mary Beth replied. “I wasn’t sick or anything.”

  “You were upset,” Collier said.

  “No, I don’t let things upset me anymore.” She tugged at the collar of her hospital gown. “I want my own clothes. I can’t let Kurt see me like this.”

  Collier asked Mary Beth to tell him the day, month, and year. Her answers were way off.

  “Do you know Joyce Barbero?” Collier asked.

  “Is she one of the nurses?” Mary Beth replied, looking confused.

  “I’m going to have the nurse bring you something to help you sleep,” Collier said, as he scribbled a prescription note on the chart and a remark that Mary Beth was disoriented, possibly due to emotional trauma. “Rest tonight and we can talk again in the morning.”

  “I don’t want to stay here.”

  “We’ll see how you feel in the morning,” Collier replied as he smiled and left the room.

  Mary Beth sank back against the pillow and started scratching her arm with her long fingernails, drawing blood as she went.

  At police headquarters, Kerney asked dispatch to pull all the logs for animal control calls that had occurred on nights and weekends over the past sixty days. During normal weekday hours calls went directly to animal control, which was housed on the grounds of the humane society shelter but under the control and supervision of the police department.

  Kerney knew Jack Potter’s house was inside the city limits. But he didn’t know if Potter and his partner, Norman Kaplan, owned a pet. Still, it was worth checking out. Dispatch called and reported no contact by Potter to animal control. He contacted the animal control supervisor at home and asked him to go to the office right away and search the phone logs for Kaplan’s or Potter’s name. The supervisor said he’d call back in thirty minutes.

  Kerney used his time making a list of what else needed to be done to start identifying candidates who might reasonably be suspected to hold a grudge against Potter, Manning, and himself. Checking court records and case files only started the paper search. Data from the sex offender registration files, intelligence reports, jail and prison release reports, and confidential files needed to be pulled to see if any red flags popped up. He ended his list wi
th the names of a dozen or so of the most violent offenders he’d busted during his career who were mostly likely to seek revenge.

  He looked at the names on the list. The men were all hardcore felons with extensive criminal records. It would be foolish to assume the killer’s motivation could be tied to a single case that involved all three primary targets. A separate search would need to be done for threats against each one.

  He scratched out a note amending the order he’d told Larry Otero to pass on to Sal Molina, and called Helen Muiz, his office manager. He asked to have her staff get all in-house documents gathered and on Sal Molina’s desk by mid-morning with instructions to conduct both a combined and separate assessment of perps who might have reason to seek revenge against any one of the targets.

  Molina wouldn’t like getting Kerney’s orders through Helen Muiz, but right now he didn’t give a dead rat’s ass about Sal’s feelings. The SWAT screw-up still stuck in his craw and the jeopardy to Sara and the baby was too great to waste time worrying about protocol.

  “I’ll call my staff and have them get to work early,” Helen said. “You’ve got me worried about you and your family, Kevin. Is Sara all right?”

  Kerney smiled at her rare use of his given name. “She’s doing okay.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to have Larry Otero pass on your orders to Lieutenant Molina?”

  “Larry’s got enough to do, and there isn’t time for niceties,” Kerney replied. “I’ll leave my note on your desk. Wave it at Molina if he gets uppity.”

  “What a terrible day you’ve had,” Helen said.

  “It hasn’t been a good one. I’ll see you sometime tomorrow.”

  Soon after he hung up, the animal control supervisor called.

  “We haven’t had any calls to that address, Chief,” he said. “But I just checked the animal shelter’s lost dog reports. Three days ago Jack Potter called asking if a five-year-old, mixed-breed, female Border collie named Mandy had been picked up or brought into the shelter. He said she’d gotten out of his backyard. She’s still active on the lost animal list.”

  “You’ve been very helpful,” Kerney said, pushing back his chair.

  “If you don’t mind me asking, Chief, first I get a call from your wife about a dead rat, and now you want to know about a lost dog. Does all this have something to do with Potter’s murder?”

  “You’ll read about it in the papers soon enough,” Kerney said. “Thanks.”

  Jack Potter’s house sat on a hill above the Casa Solana neighborhood, once the site of a World War II Japanese-American internment camp. A newer adobe structure with large glass windows, the house commanded a view of the mountains and downtown Santa Fe.

  He could see headlights of cars traveling on Paseo de Peralta, a street that looped around the historical core of the city, and a few of the traffic lights along Saint Francis Drive, the state road that led north to Taos. Behind the city the mountains were soft, obscure shapes in a star-filled night sky, and the semicircular sliver of the moon looked like the cutting edge of an old-fashioned sickle suspended in the air.

  Kerney didn’t bother ringing the doorbell; Norman Kaplan was still on a plane flying home from England. He walked around the darkened house and encountered a high six-foot fence and a locked wooden gate that enclosed the backyard. Kerney wondered how Potter’s mixed-breed collie, which wasn’t a big dog, could have jumped the fence. It didn’t seem likely.

  The closest house was about a hundred yards away. Kerney spoke to Potter’s neighbors, a younger couple who were surprised to find him at their doorstep. He showed his shield and explained the reason for his visit.

  “What does Mandy have to do with Jack’s murder?” the man asked. A chocolate-colored Labrador padded to the open door and sniffed at Kerney’s knee.

  “Behave, Herschel,” the man said.

  The dog sat and smiled up at Kerney.

  “I’m just wondering how Mandy managed to go missing from the backyard,” Kerney said. “I didn’t see any evidence that she’d dug her way out under the fence. Was the gate left unlocked?”

  “Mandy isn’t a digger, and Jack always kept the gate locked when he wasn’t home and Mandy was outside,” the woman replied.

  “We don’t know how she got out,” the man said. “It’s never happened before, and we’ve been Jack and Norm’s neighbors for three years.”

  “I think Mandy was stolen,” the woman said.

  “What makes you say that?” Kerney asked.

  “How else can you explain it? Mandy is an absolutely beautiful dog, very well behaved, and has a large, secure backyard to romp in when Jack and Norman are at work.”

  “Did he search the neighborhood for the dog?”

  “Yes, along with Norman and the two of us,” the woman said. “We went house to house, passed out posters, and even walked through the arroyos.”

  “I think a coyote got her,” the man said.

  “Perhaps,” Kerney said, doubting it. Coyotes rarely took down large prey, unless it was sick or wounded.

  “Do you think whoever took Mandy killed Jack?” the woman asked.

  “Anything’s possible.”

  Kerney thanked the couple and went home, where he found Sara asleep in the bedroom and two uniformed officers on duty. After being assured that the house was secure and all windows were closed and locked, he released them to return to patrol.

  Unwilling to risk waking Sara, he sat quietly on the living room couch and mulled over the pattern that seemed to be developing in the cases: dead kangaroo rats delivered to doorsteps, a prized horse killed, a cherished dog stolen. All seemed acts intended to intimidate, to create a climate of fear, and demonstrate the killer’s superiority and intelligence.

  The threatening note left on his door announcing two more deaths before his own meant that he was supposed to be the final target. Did it also mean the killer wanted Kerney to lose Sara and the baby before he died himself? Or was it a ploy to throw him off?

  He used the cell phone and called Larry Otero, who was still at the Manning crime scene.

  “Jack Potter had his dog stolen three days ago,” he said. “Have the detectives find out if Manning had a pet, was a recent crime victim, or had suffered any kind of personal or family loss.”

  “Will do,” Otero said. “She didn’t have any pets, so that’s one thing we can forget about. How far back do you want them to go?”

  “Six months, for now,” Kerney said. “Do we have flight information on Norman Kaplan?”

  “Nothing specific, just that he’s on his way.”

  “Put someone on it,” Kerney said. “I want him met at the Albuquerque airport, accompanied home, and given protection.”

  “I’ll see that it’s taken care of,” Otero replied.

  “Where are you with the crime scene?”

  “Molina and his people are still gathering evidence and talking to neighbors. You were right about the time of death; Manning was killed before Potter was shot.”

  “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  He checked the lock on the front door one more time, pulled off his boots, and stretched out on the couch. With all that had happened, with all there was still to face, he wondered if he could sleep. It didn’t seem possible.

  When the nurse brought the sleeping medication, Mary Beth kept her mutilated arm under the covers, tucked the pill under her tongue and pretended to swallow it. She spit it out as soon as the nurse left the room, her mind racing with images of Kurt dead, all cut up and bleeding. He was dead, dead, dead.

  Had she killed Kurt? She decided no one else could have done it. But how and when?

  For hours, she moaned quietly into the pillow, stuffing it in her mouth, covering her face. But she still kept breathing, kept thinking, kept seeing Kurt standing naked like a statue with his arms at his sides, bleeding from every pore of his body with a sickly smile on his face until he disappeared behind a creamy red shroud.

  Her visions never lied. She n
eeded to stop her mind from remembering how she’d killed her Kurt.

  She waited until the nurse made a late-night round, then got out of bed and went to the bathroom. The mirror was metal and fixed to the wall. The toilet had no tank, just a flush valve. The light fixture had a plastic cover screwed in place over the flourescent tube. There was nothing around she could use to stop the bad vision of Kurt and the terrible thoughts about herself.

  She opened the venetian blind next to the bed and looked out the window into the dark night, running her finger along the sharp edge of a plastic slat. With both hands, she bent the brittle slat until it snapped, and then broke it once more to free it from the cord that held it in place.

  In the bathroom with the door closed, she pressed down hard, drawing the sharpest point of the slat up the length of her arm, cutting deeper than her fingernails ever could. The pain felt so good it made her shiver.

  She did the other arm, and then her thighs. Lovely red blood stained her gown. She took the gown off and cut into the soft flesh under her breasts and watched red droplets course down to her belly button.

  She put her hands together and looked at her wrists. The veins were right at the surface. She dug the slat into the fattest one, gritting her teeth until she broke through and blood squirted out in pulses. She clenched her fist, gouged between two tendons, popped open the other vein, and watched the blood flow freely into the sink.

  She switched hands to repeat the process, her fingers shaking as she tried to stab into the vein. She punched repeatedly until the slat pierced it. Then she sawed the last one open, her blood lubricating every cutting stroke.

  She dropped her hands to her sides, smiled at herself in the metal mirror, and saw Kurt smiling back at her. She could feel the blood draining from her body, her head becoming light and empty of bad thoughts. It felt so very, very dreamy.

  Now she could sleep. She sank to the floor and closed her eyes.