Back on Murder

by Mark J. Bertrand

  We rush the entrance with a frenzy of shouting, advancing into the apartment, making sure no corner goes unswept by the barrel of a gun. My feet thunder through the hardwood entry, breaking right into a wide-open living space with floor to ceiling windows at the far end, and a balcony that overlooks Memorial. Cavallo fans out beside me, circling a white leather sectional. The bedroom is at the far side. I’m the first one there, my gun sights resting just below my plane of vision, ready to snap off a round if necessary.

  Over my shoulder I hear the others calling out.

  “Clear!”

  “It’s clear.”

  “Everything clear.”

  A low platform bed with bookcases rising on either side. Another window, its light baffled by shades. No sign of him. The bathroom door is open, the light on, casting a golden glow into the room. I step toward it, hugging the wall for cover, canting my barrel into space. Getting closer, I use the mirror to scan the room. The glassed-in shower is empty. No sound of running taps or movement of any kind. Taking a deep breath, I push through.

  “Clear,” I say.

  The team regroups in the living room, where the surveillance guys exchange a shrug.

  “Maybe he went down to do some laundry?” one of them says.

  “Or walked across the street to the Starbucks?”

  I go to the balcony, pulling the sliding door open. Glancing down to the parking lot, I see the reserved spot is now empty.

  “His car’s gone.”

  There’s nothing more ridiculous than a roomful of drawn weapons and no one to point them at. A spate of dejected re-holstering ensues, then we have a look around the place. The desk in the living room corner has a faint dust line where a laptop computer used to sit – the power cable is still plugged into the wall. A chunk of clothes seems to be missing from the closet, exposing a recessed safe, its door ajar.

  “We didn’t just miss him,” Wilcox says. “He skedaddled.”

  He gets on the phone, putting the word out to patrol to keep an eye out for Keller’s car. It isn’t much, certainly not enough to soften the collective adrenaline crash.

  “What now?” I ask.

  He pauses to consider. “Okay, we need to keep some people here, and we’d better send some to Salazar’s place, too.”

  “Got it,” one of the IAD detectives says.

  “And that warehouse they’re renting – ”

  “We’ll take that,” I say, heading for the door, motioning Cavallo to follow.

  “I’ll send some backup to join you,” he calls after us. “Meanwhile, we need to tear this place apart.”

  I wait until we’re in the elevator to say anything, and then I slam my fist against the wall instead. The ringing in my knuckles feels better somehow.

  “I knew that was too easy.”

  Cavallo nods, leaning back against the railing. “Why’d you choose the warehouse?”

  “Instinct. I figure they rent that place for a reason, and if he’s split in a hurry, maybe he’ll need to drop by there first. It’s better than chasing our tails back there. I want to keep moving.”

  When we reach the car, I remember Cavallo’s lead foot and toss her the keys. She doesn’t miss a beat, sliding behind the wheel and starting the engine. Out on Memorial, as we race past Starbucks, I glance over just to make sure Keller’s not in there, slurping on a Frappuccino.

  No such luck.

  A feeling builds inside, a fear really, that I’ll never catch up to him. He’s flown for good, escaped the net, cheating me one last time.

  We pull up outside the padlocked gate, the block of gray warehouses almost indistinguishable from one another. I knock on the security booth’s shuttered window, but there’s no response from inside. The sun beats down. Behind the glare on the windshield I see Cavallo thumping her fingers on the steering wheel.

  With a pair of bolt cutters we’d be inside in two shakes, but as far as I know we don’t have a search warrant on this place, and even if we did, we don’t have the cutters. I dial Wilcox for further instructions. Before he picks up, Cavallo starts pointing to the fence. When I turn, Wendell Cropper is standing halfway between the nearest warehouse and the gate, frozen in place.

  “Come on over here,” I call out.

  He advances, stopping about twenty feet off, blading his body sideways, his pistol on the far hip.

  “Can I help you with something?” he asks.

  “Open the gate.”

  Cropper lifts one foot, then hesitates, like he’s not sure whether to move forward or back. If I tell him it’s the warehouse we want to see, he might make a stink about seeing a warrant, so I try a different tack.

  “We need to have a talk with you, Mr. Cropper. Open up.”

  He squints at me, feigning recognition. “Oh, it’s you. I didn’t recognize you at first, Detective.” But he still doesn’t move toward the gate.

  I grab the padlock and give it a shake. “If you don’t mind, we’ve got other stops to make, so I’d like to get through this pretty quick.”

  “Well,” he says, digging through his pocket. “All right, then.”

  His hands shake so bad that he has trouble sliding the key into the lock.

  “You nervous about something, Mr. Cropper?”

  Once he pulls the padlock free, I walk through, pushing the gate wide as I advance, motioning Cavallo to drive through. As she does, Cropper moves to block her path. I take him gently by the arm.

  “Don’t get yourself run over,” I say.

  She parks just inside the gate, then gets out. The security guard backpedals, positioning himself between the car and the warehouses. I follow. When Cavallo joins us, she stands on his opposite side, forcing him to backpedal some more just to keep an eye on us both.

  “Is something wrong?” I ask him. He’s got that wide-eyed fight-or-flight look, and he’s still blading his strong side away from us. I flick my jacket back, revealing my holstered gun, just to test his reaction. His hand twitches slightly, then relaxes. Cavallo catches the movement, too.

  “Put your hands on your head,” she says, resting hers on the butt of her pistol.

  Cropper looks at her, aghast. He doesn’t move.

  Over his shoulder, the metal warehouse door trundles upward. As it rises I glimpse the back end of a black Ford pickup, an enclosure covering the bed. On the opposite side of the entrance a pair of legs advances toward the vehicle. The door lifts and I see a box held in two hands, a lidded file box like we use in the office. Then a muscled torso and the tanned face of Tony Salazar. He glances over, casually surveying the scene, then sees us and stops in his tracks. The box hits the ground.

  “It’s him,” I say.

  As soon as the words are out, Cropper makes his move. His hand flashes to his side arm, the gun clearing leather, the muzzle coming up. Cavallo’s nearest, so he points her way.

  Training takes over, years of muscle memory. I draw in a smooth, single motion, not waiting for the sights to come online. Instead, I let the first round go at his belt line and the second, aided by recoil, hits just below the sternum. The third is in the upper chest, and then the empty brass lands at my feet and Cropper’s staggering backward, his Glock in midair.

  Next to me, Cavallo stands flatfooted with her hand still on her holstered gun, shoulders hunched by the loud reports.

  “Get back to the car!” I yell.

  She draws and turns toward the fallen security guard, kicking his gun clear. But Cropper’s not a threat anymore. I grab her sleeve with my free hand, yanking her back, just as the first muzzle flash erupts from the warehouse. The shot whistles through the air at head level, a near miss. After a pause, Salazar keeps shooting, and I fire back while beating the retreat, hoping to throw off his aim.

  A gouge opens up in the hood of the car as I’m pushing Cavallo down behind the tire. I hit the pavement in a slide, skinning my elbows and knees. My pistol’s slide is locked back, meaning I’ve burned through thirteen rounds already. Three in Cropper and
ten downrange at Salazar. As I reload, Cavallo returns fire. I’d rather she stayed behind cover. I grab her arm again and pull her back.

  “Don’t give him a target.”

  She shrugs free. “If somebody shoots at me, I’m shooting back.”

  “You won’t hit anything at this range,” I say, but she’s not listening. As she fires I try to pinpoint Salazar’s position. He’s tucked alongside the truck bed, using the vehicle for cover. All I can see is the muzzle flash from around the enclosure.

  It’s hard to think clearly when you’re taking fire. Either you go to ground or you keep pulling the trigger. It says something about Cavallo that she chooses the latter, but that kind of bravery won’t turn her side arm into a rifle. I open the passenger door and crawl over the seats, fumbling for the button that pops the trunk. When I hear the dull thunk, I slide out, grabbing the keys from Cavallo and moving around back. Inside a locked box in the truck, there’s a shotgun and an ar-15. With the latter, I can reach out and touch him, something I’ve been itching to do.

  “March!” she yells, her voice shrill. “He’s starting the truck.”

  I raise myself into a crouching position in time to see the reverse lights illuminate. It took him a while, but he’s done the arithmetic. All we have to do is keep him pinned. Backup is on the way. But he has to fight his way out, which means the sooner he moves the better.

  “Keep shooting!” I say, grabbing for the rifle. I fumble with the charging handle, chambering a round of 5.56 nato. I’ve manipulated the controls a thousand times on the range, but now it’s like my fingers are disarticulated, one clumsy mass of flesh.

  I hear the squeal of tires, smell the rubber burning, and when I look up again the Ford is out in the sunlight. Salazar accelerates backward, cuts the wheel, then rocks to a stop. I lift the rifle, hunting for his silhouette with the iron sights. The truck accelerates, picking up speed, heading straight for us. He would have been better off going the other way.

  The front post lines up over his head. I take a deep breath and squeeze off a round. The windshield shatters into a spider web of glass, but the truck bears down on us.

  “Move, move, move!”

  I jump clear just as the Ford hits, smashing the front of the car, dragging its crumpled shell into the street before slinging it aside. My sights come up again, but before I can fire, the truck hauls across the road, rumbling over the curb, heading straight into the curtain of trees separating us from the houses on the other side. It crunches into a thick oak, sending up a cloud of smoke and steam.

  Cavallo limps up beside me, clutching her elbow.

  “Are you okay?”

  She nods quietly, advancing across the street. I follow, ready to fire. We reach the far curb just as the backup units roll up.

  “Stop.” I put a hand on her arm. “Let them take it from here.”

  I toss the AR-15 to the ground and pull my badge out, just so we’re clear on who’s who. Cavallo holsters her Beretta and sits down on the curb, burying her head in her hands. The uniforms rush up to us, then creep steadily across the grass toward Salazar’s mushroomed truck, weapons drawn. They haul him out of the cab. I hear him screaming as they push him to the ground, twisting his wrists back for cuffing. I slump down beside Cavallo and try to catch my breath.

  I tell the story a dozen times, first to strangers and then to friends. Amazingly, when they haul Salazar to the road on a backboard, he’s still breathing in spite of the hole in his upper chest. Wendell Cropper isn’t so fortunate. His body, covered by a tarp, lies where he fell. Numbered markers sit next to my shell casings and his unfired Glock. Inside the box Salazar dropped, Lieutenant Bascombe, one of the first detectives on the scene, discovers the cocaine and the printed photos described by Balinski. The bed of Salazar’s Ford is full of more boxes, some stacked to the brim with coke, some with dog-eared bundles of cash.

  Mitch Geiger, the narcotics intel guru, arrives in time to catalog everything, speculating that the truck’s contents represent the haul from at least five stash-house heists.

  “They couldn’t move this much,” he says, “so they just sat on it for the time being. If you hadn’t shown up, he’d have disappeared with it all.”

  When he finishes with me, Bascombe turns to Cavallo for her account of the action. As she’s speaking, he stops her with an exclamation of surprise, then bends over, scratching at her chest. She swats his hand away.

  “Just look,” he says, laughing incredulously.

  She glances down. There’s a pancaked bullet lodged in her vest. She panics as soon as she sees it, flailing with the Velcro straps. I help her take the Kevlar off, then inspect the damage.

  “You didn’t feel that?” I ask.

  She presses a hand to her sternum. “I didn’t realize – ”

  Bascombe puts an arm over her shoulder, bares his gleaming teeth. “The boss told me March got his luck back. Looks like it rubbed off on you.”

  Instead of basking in the sense of relief, Cavallo sits down again, the reality of the situation crashing down on her. “I could’ve been killed.”

  “But you weren’t.”

  She doesn’t look reassured.

  Before we’re released from the scene, I get a call from Wilcox, who’s been camped out at the hospital since the ambulance transported Salazar.

  “He’s still in surgery,” he says, “but they’re telling me he’s going to pull through.”

  “Good for him.”

  “Good for us, March. I was right about what I said before. On the ride over, he kept taking the oxygen mask off and saying one word. Want to take a guess? Immunity. I’ve got a lawyer coming now. I’m pretty sure he’s going to talk.”

  When I hang up, part of me wishes I’d aimed better, putting the round through his head instead of his chest. But then I remember Cropper lying dead on the pavement, and figure I’ve got enough blood on my hands for one day. There’s a burden that goes along with killing, even when you’re justified in taking a life. So being spared that is something, even if it means a deal for Salazar, the man who tried to get me killed.

  CHAPTER 27

  Donna Mayhew reaches her hands out, one toward Cavallo and the other toward me. Without thinking, I clasp the hand, cool and small. She seems smaller since the funeral, diminished, a wan light in her eyes.

  “We’re here to talk to Mr. Robb,” I say.

  She nods, as if she’d known this already. “He’s upstairs, doing the high school Bible study.”

  The double doors leading through to the stairwell are at the end of the hall, but we don’t move. The three of us stand in the office corridor, exchanging no words, no eye contact. After a moment, Hannah’s mother sighs.

  “Evey, too,” she says. “And in that terrible place.”

  So Robb told her. Of course he did.

  “I tried calling her mom, but I couldn’t bring myself to . . .” She blinks at me, smiles weakly, and folds her arms tight around her frame. “I don’t know this world. I don’t recognize it anymore.”

  Cavallo’s arm goes to her shoulder.

  “It’s all right. I just, there’s a connection, isn’t there? The two of them, what happened to them. Something was happening and I didn’t see it.”

  “You couldn’t have,” Cavallo says.

  But Mrs. Mayhew cocks her head toward me, like she’s just noticed something that should have been obvious all along. “You knew, isn’t that right? When you came here that first time, that thing with the Q-tip. You thought – what? That Evey was Hannah?”

  “More or less.” My mouth is so dry, the words come out in a whisper. “I got it wrong.”

  “Maybe we all did. For a long time now I’ve had this feeling I don’t know my daughter anymore.” Her tear ducts open, her eyes shine with damp. “And now, I can’t really explain it, but it’s like I got her back.”

  At the top of the stairs, my leg throbs and I lean against the wall for a breather, grateful to have the bullet wound as an excuse so Cav
allo can’t make any cracks about my being an old man. She waits patiently, chin tucked, preoccupied by our encounter with Donna Mayhew.

  “Ready?”

  I’m not ready, not after that. Mrs. Mayhew has something to work through, a mystery of her own, much deeper than ours. A solitary question that can never be adjudicated, any answers she might find in this life impossible to validate. I know something about that, and what it can do to a person.

  So I push on with a nod. This wing of the church is new to me, a long linoleum-lined hallway with classroom doors on either side. It could pass for a high school except for the Bible verses painted on the walls and the framed portraits of robed and bearded men, heroes of the faith presented in a sentimental neo-Victorian soft focus. I glance into a couple of empty classrooms, noting folding tables and stackable chairs, the space flooded by afternoon light.

  At the end of the hallway, Cavallo pushes through a set of double doors, holding one open for me. We pass into a larger classroom, where the office-building suspended ceiling has been torn out, the exposed trusses painted black. Past a sea of now-empty couches, a group of thirty or forty teenagers sits in a semicircle around a raised stage. Carter Robb is up there, a tiny book dangling from one hand, a trap set and amplifiers and a couple of guitars on stands behind him.

  “Let’s wait back here,” Cavallo whispers, motioning toward one of the couches. Glancing around, I spot a table in back stacked with empty pizza boxes and two-liter bottles of Coke and Sprite. We take our seats, and a couple of kids turn to see who’s come in. Robb gives no sign of noticing us, though we’re hard to miss.

  Judging from the tone of his voice, the lingering pauses between the words, the way he makes pointed eye contact with first one student then another, his talk has reached its climactic finale. Robb’s style is very different from, say, Rick Villanueva’s, making up for what it lacks in polish with an extra dose of intensity. But then he’s not coaxing ex-convicts with outstanding warrants into a state of mental paralysis; he’s telling a bunch of slouching, dough-faced teens that all God wants from them is justice, mercy, and humility. Justice must be the greatest of these, because it’s justice Robb lingers on – not only justice for ourselves, he insists, but for the strangers among us, for the outcasts.