The Kill Clause

by Gregg Hurwitz

  “How long will it take to get the transcripts?”

  “Tomorrow. Court clerks don’t quite snap to when it’s not an official request.”

  “It looks like we’re both being unofficial.”

  “You can’t put this in a category with what you’re considering. Don’t even try.”

  “Everything’s imperfect, Dray. But maybe the Commission can be closer to justice than what we’ve gotten. Maybe it can be that voice.”

  “You really want to rededicate your life to this? To hate?”

  “I’m not doing it because of hate. The opposite, actually.”

  She drummed her fingers on the table, hard. Her hands were small and feminine; her delicate nails recalled the girl she had been before she put on a sheath of muscle and enrolled in the academy. Tim had met her only after she’d become a deputy. At his first Thanksgiving with her family, when her older brothers had proudly and with some silent element of warning shown him Dray’s high-school yearbook, he’d hardly recognized the pixie face in the photos. She was now bigger and more powerful, and she’d taken on a toughened sexuality. The first time they’d gone to the range together, Tim had watched her from the shade of the overhang, her hips cocked, holster high-riding her hip, a squint drawing her cheek high and tight beneath a water-blue eye, and he’d thought for not the first time that she’d been spun from the daydream of some sugar-buzzed, comic-book-gorged adolescent.

  Her lips were pursed, perfectly shaped, and chapped. Gazing at them, he realized that he wanted them not to be dry from crying, and in that he felt the depth of his continued love for her. He had told her about Rayner’s proposal because she was the second leg on which he moved forward through life, and that reality, that trust that had been forged and built upon through eight solid years of their marriage, held true regardless of circumstance or even estrangement.

  “Come here,” he said.

  She stood and trudged around the table as he scooted his chair back. She sat in his lap, and he leaned forward, pressing his face to the bare fan of skin revealed beneath the back collar of her stretched T-shirt. Warmth.

  “I know you feel like you’ve lost so much so quickly. I do, too.” Dray shifted in his lap so she was looking down at him across the bulge of her shoulder. “But there’s more we can lose.”

  Tim ached with an uncharacteristic fatigue. “I’m tired of sleeping on the couch, Dray. We’re not helping each other here.”

  She stood abruptly and walked a half turn around the kitchen. “I know. I’ve got all this…all this anger. When I pass the bathroom, I see her on her stool brushing her teeth, and in the backyard I see her trying to get that damn kite untangled, the yellow one we got her in Laguna, and every time I get that ache, I’ve got a need to blame someone. And I don’t want us to keep on tearing at each other in the middle of all this. Or worse, I don’t want us to go numb around each other.”

  Tim rose and rubbed his hands. A childish urge gripped him—to scream, to yell, to sob and plead. Instead he said, “I understand.” His throat was closing, distorting his voice. “We shouldn’t stay on top of each other if we’re winding up hurting each other in small, spiteful ways.”

  “But a part of me feels like we should. I mean, maybe that’s something we need to do. Hate each other. Slug it out. Fight and scream until the blame’s gone and there’s just…us.”

  He could see in her eyes that she knew otherwise, that she was just trying to convince herself. “I can’t fight that kind of fight,” he said. “Not against you.”

  “I can’t either.” She shook her head, roughly, like a child. The chair creaked when she sat again. She dipped her head and let out a sigh. “If you’re gonna do this thing, with those men, you’re gonna need a safe house. Because I’m not getting implicated in it.”

  “I know.”

  “That crew sounds pretty geared up on surveillance.”

  “They are. And I don’t want their eyes on you or this house. I’m gonna be in it pretty good with the criminal element, too, and I won’t put you one inch at risk if one of my targets catches wind of me coming.”

  She sighed, the heel of her hand sliding from cheek to forehead. “So where’s that leave us?”

  They faced each other across the kitchen, both of them knowing the answer. Tim finally mustered the courage to say it. “We need some time off anyway.”

  A tear arced down her cheek. “Uh-huh.”

  “I’ll get my things together.”

  “Not permanently. It’s not permanent.”

  “Just enough for us to catch our breath. Get some perspective back on each other.”

  “And for you to kill some people.” She looked away when he tried to meet her eyes.

  He packed in twenty minutes, amazed at how little he had amassed over the years that he held to be essential. His laptop, some clothes, a few toiletries. Dray followed him silently from room to room like a heartsick dog, but neither of them spoke. With a stack of shirts draped over his arm, he stood in the threshold of Ginny’s room. Moving out of the house where his murdered daughter grew up seemed to constitute some formal trespass, and he feared the unknown emotional consequences it might bring.

  As he loaded up his car, Dray watched him from the porch in her bare feet, shivering. The after-scent of a neighbor’s barbecue lingered in the air, smoky and domestic. He finished and walked over and kissed her. Her mouth felt both moist and dry.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure.” He cleared his throat once, hard. “We have a little over twenty grand in our savings account. I’m gonna take out five probably, soon. But don’t worry, I’ll leave the rest until we figure out what to do.”

  “Of course. Whatever.”

  He got in his car and shut the door. The clock on the dash read 12:01. Dray knocked on the window. She was shivering hard now, her whole body shaking.

  He rolled down the window.

  “Damn it, Timothy.” She was crying now, openly. “Damn it.”

  She leaned over, and they kissed again, a quick one on the mouth.

  He rolled up the window and backed out into the street. It wasn’t until he turned the corner that he remembered it was Valentine’s Day.

  14

  TIM WAS WAITING in his car across the street with a brick of hundreds in his lap when the manager shuffled inside the four-story building on the corner of Second and Traction, holding a cluster of keys on a jail-style ring and a steaming double-cupped coffee bearing the ubiquitous Starbucks logo. As part of the rejuvenation push for downtown, the civic promoters had given a face-lift to economy housing. This area of Little Tokyo housed artists, recovering druggies, and other people at the fringe of economic sanity. In a building like this, Tim could pay cash up front without raising any eyebrows. Plus, since it was a subsidized property, all utilities would be included with the rent; that would leave him fewer paper trails with which to contend.

  The plates on his car—good through September—he’d pulled from a smashed-to-hell Infiniti at Doug Kay’s salvage yard. During his years in the service, Tim had been particularly good about routing seized and totaled vehicles to Kay, precisely so he could cash in on a favor like this if the shit hit. His tires had been replaced by the previous owner—they were a widely used Firestone brand, nothing factory-specific and traceable.

  A new Nokia cell phone bulged in his shirt pocket. He’d rented it just up the street, in a shop where little English was spoken. He’d plopped down a healthy security deposit and paid out two hundred in cash for a month of unlimited domestic minutes, and because of this, the wizened, diminutive store owner had been less meticulous about eyeing the false name with which Tim had signed the contract. International calling was restricted. Tim selected the option to block Caller ID on outgoing calls.

  The J-town crowd was mixed, Caucasian and East Asian, with a few blacks thrown in for good measure. Tim could dissolve right into the melting pot here and benefit from the kind of who-gives-a-shit an
onymity to be found only on downscale city blocks.

  Tim crossed the street in a jog, lugging his first load of clothing, and slipped through the building’s front door. The manager—gay, going by his right-ear pierce and JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS T-shirt—an ex–aspiring actor from his upright carriage and stagy comportment, fussed with the locks to the manager’s office while juggling his coffee and pinching a stack of mail between his elbow and love handle. He finally found the correct key, shoved open the door with a knee, dumped the mail on the desk, and collapsed into a stuffing-exposed office chair as if he’d just braved Everest’s north face without oxygen.

  He mustered a smile when Tim entered, turning down the volume on a small-screen TV that took up half his desk. A KCOM Menendez brothers retrospective flickered on silently. “Can’t resist true-crime stories,” he stage-whispered.

  “Neither can I.”

  The drab room, in all likelihood a converted janitor’s office, had been livened up with a few framed headshots on the walls. Beside a toothy Linda Evans, John Ritter gazed out with woeful earnestness. Next to them hung a few more posed eight-by-tens of actors Tim did not recognize, but who he guessed were former stars by their exuberant use of exclamation points and trite exhortations about following dreams and staying real. The photos were all signed with Sharpie pens, the inscriptions made out to Joshua.

  Joshua followed Tim’s eyes to the photos and shrugged, feigning diss-missiveness. “A few colleagues of mine. From my days on the stage.” He flared his arms, theatrically but with an element of self-deprecation that Tim appreciated. “I bowled them over at the Ahmanson with my Sancho Panza.” He seemed disappointed by Tim’s blank look. “It’s a supporting role in a musical. Never mind. What can I help you with?”

  Tim adjusted his armload of shirts and the bag slung over his shoulder. His coiled laptop cable was sticking out of his back pocket. “I saw from your sign outside you have apartment availability.”

  “Apartment availability. Yes, well. So formal.” When Joshua smiled, Tim realized he was wearing lip gloss. “I can rent you a single on the fourth floor for four twenty-five a month. To be honest, it could use some freshening up, maybe a throw rug or two—let’s make it four even.” He shook a jeweled finger in Tim’s direction jokingly. “But I’m not going any lower.”

  “That’ll be fine.” Tim set down his things and counted twelve hundreds on the desk between them. “I assume this will cover the first and last months and the security deposit. Fair?”

  “Fairer than springtime. I’ll get the paperwork together—we can deal with it later.” Joshua slid out from behind the desk as Tim gathered up his possessions. “I’ll show you the apartment.”

  “The key’s fine. I can’t imagine the place has got too many bells and whistles that need explaining.”

  “No, no, it doesn’t.” Joshua cocked his head. “What happened to your eye?”

  “I walked into a door.”

  Joshua returned Tim’s gentle smile, then grabbed a key from a pegboard hook behind him and offered it across his desk. “You’re in 407.”

  Tim shifted his shirts so he could take the key. “Thank you.”

  Joshua leaned back in his chair, knocking the John Ritter frame askew. He adjusted it quickly, then stopped, embarrassed. A can of shaving cream fell from Tim’s unzipped bag and rolled across the floor. Weighed down with his things, Tim made no move to pick it up.

  Joshua smiled sadly at him. “It wasn’t supposed to work out like this, was it?”

  “No,” Tim said. “I suppose not.”

  •The key fit a Schlage single-cylinder knob lock. There was no dead bolt, but Tim didn’t mind, since the door was solid-core with a steel frame.

  The square of the room had a single large window that overlooked a fire-escape platform, bright red and yellow Japanese signs, and a busy street. Aside from a few worn patches, the carpet was in surprisingly good shape, and the alcove kitchen came equipped with a narrow refrigerator and chipped green tile. All in all, the place was bare and a touch depressing, but clean. Tim hung his four shirts in the closet and dropped his bag on the floor. He removed his Sig from the back of his pants and placed it on the kitchen counter, then pulled a small tool kit from his bag.

  With a few twists of a Phillips-head screwdriver, he removed the entire doorknob. He drew out the Schlage cylinder from its housing and replaced it with a Medeco—another item he’d scrounged up at Kay’s salvage yard. Because of their six tumblers and the uneven spacing, angled cuts, and altered depth of the keys, Medecos were Tim’s locks of choice. Virtually impossible to pick. The new cylinder came with only a single key, which Tim slipped into his pocket.

  Next he connected his PowerBook to the Nokia and accessed the Internet through his home account. He’d leave the apartment’s phone jack dormant, thereby avoiding any records linked to a landline and an address. He was not surprised to see that his password no longer worked at the Department of Justice Web site, but he wouldn’t have used the site extensively anyway, as he knew that all traffic was closely monitored and recorded. Instead he ran Rayner’s name through a Google search and came up with a smattering of articles and promotional Web sites for Rayner’s books and research.

  In clicking around he discovered that Rayner had grown up in Los Angeles, gone to college at Princeton, and received his Ph.D. in psychology from UCLA. He’d been involved in a number of progressive experiments, for which he’d been widely praised and criticized. In one of them, a group dynamics study he’d run with students at UCLA over spring break in 1978, he’d separated his subjects into hostages and captors. The pseudo captors had grown so identified with their roles that they’d begun abusing the hostages, both emotionally and physically, and the study had been called off amid a storm of controversy.

  Rayner’s son, Spenser, was murdered in 1986, his body dumped off Highway 5. The FBI, monitoring a truck-stop pay phone as part of a mob sting, inadvertently recorded a panicked trucker, Willie McCabe, describing the murder to his brother in the course of seeking advice on whether he should turn himself in. The wiretap warrant, of course, did not extend to McCabe, so his incriminating comments were deemed inadmissible in court.

  It occurred to Tim that Rayner had strong secondary motivations for not now focusing his vigilante energies on McCabe—having his son’s killer on the loose elevated his cause and gave it a sales hook. Plus, Rayner, and his connection with McCabe, was too public. He’d be a leading suspect in the event of foul play.

  After McCabe’s case was dismissed, Rayner had begun to focus on the legal aspects of social psychology. One journalist went so far as to refer to him as a constitutional expert. Rayner and his wife, like an alarming majority of couples who lose a child, split within the first year after their son’s death. Tim couldn’t deny the sense of distress provoked by the possibility of his and Dray’s bolstering the divorce statistic further.

  Rayner had really come into his own after his son’s death, publishing his first bestseller—a social-psychology study packaged as a self-help book. Tim found a review in Psychology Today bemoaning the fact that Rayner’s books had grown thinner and more anecdotal each time out. It certainly hadn’t hurt his sales. Another article stated that Rayner had become less involved with his teaching, though it did not make clear whether that had been his decision or the university’s. He was now an adjunct professor who taught two occasional yet wildly popular undergraduate courses.

  Tim logged on to the Boston Globe Web site next and ran a check on Franklin Dumone. He was not surprised to find that in his thirty-one years on the job, Dumone had been an extremely capable detective, then sergeant. Because of the arrest record of the Major Crimes Unit under his tenure, Dumone had grown to become something of a local legend. He’d retired after he’d arrived home one evening to find his wife beaten and strangled. Her alleged killer had been someone who’d just gotten out of a fifteen-year stint in the pen; Dumone had been his original arresting officer, catching up to him with a sti
ll-alive five-year-old girl in the trunk of his car. The killer’s prison sentence, like so many others, had merely provided time for notions of revenge to evolve.

  The Detroit Free Press’s Web archives housed only a few articles involving the Masterson twins, most of them fluff pieces on twins or siblings in law enforcement. They’d been top-notch dicks and solid operators within their specialty units but had maintained a fairly low media profile until their sister’s rigor mortis–ed body had been found pressed into the sand beneath the Santa Monica Pier. She’d moved to L.A. just a few weeks previous. In interviews Robert and Mitchell were quite outspoken about their belief that the Santa Monica police had handled the investigation incompetently. When her accused killer’s case was dismissed after evidence was tainted by sloppy chain of custody, their responses grew even more vitriolic. The fuel behind their antagonism toward L.A., which they’d expressed so vehemently at Rayner’s, was glaringly evident.

  Another burst of newspaper articles followed several months later, when they won a $2 million settlement against a tabloid for going to press with illegally obtained—and gruesome—crime-scene photos.

  Tim called trusted contacts at six different government agencies and had them each run a member of the Commission. The background checks came back clean—no wants, no warrants, no past felony charges, no one currently under investigation. He was amused to find that Ananberg had been arrested during high school on a marijuana-possession charge. Because of his technological prowess, the Stork had been accepted into the FBI despite his failure to meet physical qualifications. Deteriorating health had forced him into an early retirement eight years ago, at the age of thirty-six. A buddy at the IRS told Tim that Rayner had paid seven figures in federal taxes each year for the past decade.