The Kill Clause

by Gregg Hurwitz

  “We’re…uh, separating, Bear. For a while.”

  Bear blanched. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” He slapped the side of his leg, then crossed his arms, fixing them with a ponderous stare. He seemed to take note of Tim’s black eye, but he didn’t comment. “I leave you two alone for a few days and this is what you get yourselves into. Separating. That’s great. That’s just great.” He stood, agitated, then sat back down again. “Is there anything to drink in this house?”

  “No,” Dray said. “We’re…we’re out.”

  “Fine. Fine.” His big hands rose, then clapped to his knees. “So maybe you can explain this to me. What does ‘separated’ mean? I’ve never understood it. You’re either married, or you’re divorced. What is ‘separated’?”

  “Well,” Dray said. “I—”

  “How do you get out of ‘separated’? It’s not like ‘separated’ people suddenly find themselves together again. Do they? It seems like ‘separated’ is chicken-shit terminology for ‘divorced.’ Is that what this is?” Red blotches were starting to bloom beneath his stubble-dense face and throat.

  “Listen, Bear, when you lose a child—”

  “Don’t you throw statistics at me, Dray. I don’t give a shit about statistics. You’re Dray and you’re Tim and you’re my friends and you get along as good as any husband and wife I’ve ever seen.” He was breathing hard, pointing hard. “If you think you don’t need each other now more than ever, you’re crazy.”

  “Bear,” Tim said. “Calm down.”

  “I’m not going to—”

  “Calm. Down.”

  Bear took a few deep breaths, then tilted his head and flared his hands as if to evince a newfound tranquillity. “All right,” he said. “All right. Who am I to tell you what to do? I guess you guys would know if you need…whatever. I guess you would know.”

  Tim took a deep breath and held it before exhaling. “A thing like this, with Ginny, it comes in, and it changes the fabric of things. And you feel like there’s a tear or a crack and you try and smooth it over but you can’t. And the more you work on it, the more it unravels or fissures and you can’t keep working on it because it’s just ruining what you had before.” He moistened his lips, then snuck a quick look at Dray. “What you had before, it’s this beautiful thing that you don’t want to see defiled, and so maybe you’d rather walk away while there’s still some of it intact because you can’t stand to see it…”

  Dray had her fist pushed up against her mouth, holding something in. Bear, stuffed into the too-small love seat, looked utterly crestfallen.

  Tim rose and rested a hand on Dray’s soft blond hair, let it drift until he touched the edge of her cheek.

  As Tim headed back down the walk to his car, shoulders aching as if some great weight had been lowered or lifted, Tad Hartley paused from trimming his shrubs to offer another wave.

  •Sitting at his flimsy, window-facing desk with little to do beside wait for his eight o’clock meeting, Tim studied the foreign street scene below, losing himself further in grief’s endless folds and wrinkles.

  A C-section delivery with a complicated post-op course had left Dray horizontal for the first three weeks of Ginny’s life. Tim had been the one up in the night, rocking Ginny back to sleep or preparing her bottle when she cried. He’d explained away the tree monster outside her window when she was three. He’d negotiated with a kindergarten bully, crouched on one knee beside his trembling daughter.

  He’d made the world a safe place for Ginny. He’d taught her to trust it.

  And she shouldn’t have.

  Every time he thought he’d familiarized himself with its contours, grief surprised him; it was ever bountiful, ever yielding. He released himself to it, letting it spread through him, noxious and painful and—finally—deadening.

  After forty-five minutes he condemned himself as self-indulgent and useless, so he hauled himself out for a jog. Unaccustomed to the smog and exhaust, he wound up on a street corner, bent at the waist, hacking like a coal miner with a three-pack habit. It was with immense relief that he showered and headed over to Rayner’s. The Commission, he realized with equal parts happiness and disquiet, gave him something to look forward to.

  It gave him purpose.

  Rayner was back to his usual socially lubricated self when he met Tim at the door. No hint of resentment about Tim’s intrusion last night. After receiving Tim warmly, he led him into the conference room where the others waited. Ananberg spun in her chair to face him, legs crossed beneath a short but professional navy blue skirt.

  Wearing another tropical shirt, this one a blend of greens and blues, the Stork rose to greet Tim. His hand was puffy and moist, his grip limp, and his pate and nose were peeling, despite the fact that it hadn’t been sunburn weather for months. “I’d like to welcome you to the Commission, Mr. Rackley.” Up close he looked even more odd, with his tiny chin, soft features, and twisted upper lip.

  Mitchell was leaning back in the big leather chair, his Nikes resting on the edge of the table’s marble surface. Robert mirrored him on the other side.

  Dumone walked over and regarded Tim with a surprising expression of pride. For a moment Tim thought he might embrace him and was relieved when he offered his hand. He gripped Tim’s right arm at the elbow when they shook. “I knew I could count on you, Tim.”

  Two garbage-can paper shredders stood at either side of the door like footmen. The confetti visible through their clear basins displayed that the machine cross-cut vertically and horizontally. No square of paper was bigger than a thumbnail.

  Two pitchers of water and a set of glasses waited on the sidebar.

  Tim’s eyes went to the table, where framed pictures had been set in front of seven of the chairs. An old black-and-white of a woman with a seventies-style haircut was propped in front of the seat in which Dumone had been sitting. The same photo sat before Mitchell and Robert, that of a stunning blonde in her late teens on horseback. Tim walked around until he arrived at what he assumed was his own chair. Ginny looked out from within the thin silver frame with a goofy, slightly uncomfortable grin. Her second-grade photo, the one the L.A. Times had run. Seeing it in this new and unrelated setting was jarring. Tim picked it up, regarding it as if he’d never seen it before.

  “We took the liberty,” Dumone said.

  Tim acquiesced to the manipulation, letting his sorrow re-form as anger; this provided him more traction. His mind went to Kindell, awakening each morning in the garage shack marked with Ginny’s blood, cooking dinner for himself, breathing the air with impunity. He thought about having ten minutes alone in a room with him, and the stains he’d like to leave on the walls.

  Robert nodded at Ginny’s picture. “I know it seems a little weird and…”

  “—ritualistic—” Mitchell said.

  “—but the pictures are good to have around. They help us keep our eye on the ball.” Robert’s eyes were drawn back to Ginny’s photo, and his face relaxed into an expression of bitter sadness, the first break in his rock-hard façade.

  “We are very sorry about your daughter,” Mitchell said. “It was an awful thing.”

  Grief shared, grief compounded. “Thank you,” Tim said quietly.

  Rayner signaled Dumone. “Why don’t you swear him in?”

  Dumone cleared his throat uncomfortably and began reading from a yellow legal pad. The oath was a brief encapsulation of the points they’d already covered in their conversation two days ago in Rayner’s library. Tim repeated each point after Dumone, ending with the kill clause, then sat and pulled his chair in to the table. “Let’s get to work.”

  With a shudder the paper shredder devoured Dumone’s sheet of paper. Dumone pulled his hands back from the feeder, a humorously chary motion. “Hungry little bastard.”

  Rayner removed the creepy portrait of his son from the wall, revealing a Gardall safe with an electronic keypad on a circular dial and an inset baffle near the top that allowed items to be deposited when the door wa
s locked.

  Blocking the others’ view with his body, Rayner punched in the code and tugged the steel handle. He stepped aside, revealing a weighty stack of black three-ring binders within.

  A charge moved through Tim, quickening his heart.

  One of the binders was Kindell’s. One potentially held the key to the accomplice. A name. The secret of Ginny’s fate.

  Rayner gestured to the open safe. “These are the relevant case binders I’ve compiled, the cases of the past five years that have generated the hottest debate in legal circles. I’m culling more for our next phase, but for now we’ll focus on these seven. Feel free to jot notes as we review the cases”—he nodded to the paper shredders by the door—“but no documents are to leave this room. Each binder is magnesium-lined, so in the event the authorities come, I can drop a lit match through the safe’s baffle and we’re evidence free. The safe has a three-hundred-fifty-degree, one-hour fire label, so it’ll contain the blaze until it’s burned itself out. If anyone tries to hacksaw his way in, the handle shears off.”

  Ananberg said, “Now, before we start, I want to explain the process—”

  Robert inhaled deeply, a half-joking show of exasperation. “The procedure hound howls again.”

  Ananberg turned to address Tim. “Before you joined, Franklin and I moved that we come up with a procedure—nothing rigid, but a floor plan for our meetings. By acclamation we agreed I’d work out a rough idea of how we’re going to comprehensively review each case. In place of arraignment, we’ll first discuss what crime the defendant is alleged to have committed. Rayner and Dumone will lead the discussion. Since we already have to give up any pretense of being unbiased from the media, we’ll talk through the case in broad strokes and lay out major arguments. If it looks like a guilty vote is a reasonable possibility, we’ll return and move systematically through the files. Since William has managed to obtain files from both the DA and the PD, we have access to everything from discovery, whether it was eventually ruled admissible or not.”

  Tim tore his eyes from the bottom binder in the safe, focusing on Ananberg’s words.

  “We’ll move through the police investigation, then to the interview reports with investigators from both the DA’s and PD’s offices so we’ll be familiar with all angles both sides were considering in forming their respective arguments. From there we hit the forensic reports, then we assess evidence that came out in trial, including eyewitness testimonies. Everyone reviews every document before we vote—doesn’t matter how long it takes. Since I’m the procedure hound, as Robert so ingeniously dubbed me, I’ll be in charge of researching case precedent, which we’ll use as a touchstone.”

  “Thank you, Jenna.” Rayner nodded once, slowly, with the proud air of a father at his daughter’s piano recital. He removed the top binder from the safe and sat, resting a spread hand on the cover. “We’ll start with Thomas Black Bear.”

  “The gardener who slaughtered the family up in the Hollywood Hills last year?” Tim asked.

  “Allegedly, Mr. Rackley.” Ananberg tapped a pencil against the arm of her glasses.

  “Get off his dick, Jenna,” Robert said. Sitting beside Tim, he smelled faintly of bourbon and cigarettes. His face was more textured than his brother’s, a trellis of wrinkles supporting his eyes. The nails of his left-hand thumb and forefinger were yellowed from nicotine, the knuckles stained.

  “What’s the evidence?” Tim asked.

  The crime-scene diagram and evidence reports went around the table. An eyewitness had placed Black Bear, an immense Sioux, at the house earlier that morning, overseeing the removal of a dead sycamore from the front yard. Black Bear had no alibi for the two-hour span during which the crimes had been committed. He said he’d been home watching TV, a dubious claim given the detectives’ discovery that his set was broken. Motive was hazy; nothing had been stolen from the house, and the victims hadn’t been assaulted in a fashion suggesting a sexual predator or thrill killer. The parents and the two children—eleven and thirteen years old—had been murdered with gunshot wounds to the head, execution style.

  After intensive questioning, Black Bear had signed a confession.

  “Reads to me like some kind of drug hit,” Robert said, flipping through the file. “The father’s Colombian.”

  “Because all Colombians are drug lords,” Ananberg said.

  “Black Bear’s got a colorful rap sheet, but no drug or assault charges,” Dumone said. “Mostly small-time. Stolen cars, B and E, public drunkenness.”

  “Public drunkenness?” Robert kept an eye on Ananberg. “Damn Injuns.”

  The forensic report at his elbow, the Stork jotted a few notes, then stopped and worked a cramp out of his hand. A pill appeared magically in his palm, and he popped it without water and kept writing.

  “How’d he get off?” Tim asked.

  “The prosecution’s whole case rode on the confession,” Rayner said. “It was thrown out after it was determined that Black Bear was illiterate and spoke little English.”

  Dumone added, “They sweated him in the interrogation room for nearly three hours, and he finally signed. The defense argued he didn’t understand what he was doing, that he was worn down and just wanted to get out.”

  “Wonder if they turned the heat up,” Robert said. “In the room. We used to do that. Get ’em cooking at around eighty-five degrees.”

  “Or the coffee,” Mitchell said. “Gallons of coffee and no bathroom breaks.”

  The Stork placed his plump hands flat on the table. “Nothing conclusive in the forensics.”

  Ananberg asked, “No prints, no DNA?”

  “No blood was found on his person or property. A few prints were picked up around the exterior of the house, but that doesn’t mean much, since he was their gardener.” The Stork’s hand darted to the bridge of his nose, pushing his glasses back into place. “No fibers, no footprints in the house.”

  “He did disappear after the trial,” Mitchell said. “That hardly bespeaks innocence.”

  “Hardly establishes guilt either,” Ananberg said.

  Tim flipped through the pictures of the family members. The shot of the mother—a candid—had caught her standing in a garden, bent at the waist, laughing. Attractive, well-defined features, layered hair thrown back in a ponytail, bare feet in the grass. Her husband had probably taken the shot—the woman’s expression and the camera’s attitude toward her made it clear that the photographer had adored her.

  Tim slid the picture down the table to Robert and waited for his reaction, anticipating he’d comment about her looks. But when Robert raised the photo from the table, his face eased into an expression of sorrow and tenderness so genuine that Tim felt a stab of guilt for estimating him so cheaply. The photo trembled slightly in Robert’s grasp, blocking his face, and when it lowered, his eyes were edged with a cold resentment.

  They reviewed the rest of the binder, and then, at Ananberg’s behest, they returned and moved systematically through the entire case, examining the documents and arguing the merits. Finally they voted: Five to two not guilty.

  Robert and Mitchell cast the dissenting votes.

  Rayner rubbed his hands together. “It seems the shadow of reasonable doubt falls protectively over the defendant.”

  The razor edge working Tim’s nerves eased, leaving him with either a keen disappointment or a clammy relief—he was unsure how to interpret the moisture left on his back and neck from the anticipation.

  Rayner replaced the binder in the safe. Robert expressed his frustration at the verdict with a not-so-subtle sigh and strenuous reshuffling of paperwork.

  Tim checked his watch—it was nearing midnight.

  “Next case.” Rayner flipped open an immense binder overflowing with scraps of paper and newspaper articles and announced, “This is a case with which we’re all familiar, I’m sure. Jedediah Lane.”

  “The militia terrorist,” Ananberg said.

  Robert smoothed his mustache with a cupped hand.
“The alleged militia terrorist.”

  Ananberg scowled at him, and he threw a wink in Tim’s direction.

  The Stork ran a hand over his bald head. “I’m something of a media hermit, so I—I’m afraid I’m not familiar with the case.”

  “The guy who walked a briefcase of sarin nerve gas into the Census Bureau downtown,” Robert said.

  “Oh. Oh, yes.”

  “Know where he left it?” Robert’s eyes were past angry, almost gleeful. “Near the main AC duct on the first floor. Eighty-six deaths. Including a bunch of second-graders on a civics field trip. He just walked in, walked out without a trace.” His flattened hand drifted in a gesture of evanescence, of stealthy malice.

  “One of our own goddamned citizens,” Mitchell said. “After 9/11.”

  Dumone flipped through the arrest report. “FBI obtained a search warrant for his house after a neighbor came forward and reported seeing Lane exit his residence that morning with a similar metal briefcase.”

  “That was enough for a search warrant?” Ananberg asked.

  “That and Lane’s history of membership in fringe organizations. The judge went for it, issued FBI a warrant, but wouldn’t grant night-service authorization. The problem was, the investigators were shaking a list of other leads. Everyone and their aunt was calling in with sightings, suspects, theories. They got hung up with a militia guy in Anaheim who was stockpiling M16 ammo. When they finally got back to serve Lane’s warrant, they received no response to their knock and notice. The door was double-barred from the inside. When they went through the door with a battering ram, they knocked over a table in the entry, breaking, among other things, a clock. Do you know what time the broken clock showed?” Dumone set down the binder, flipped it closed. “Seven-oh-three.”

  Mitchell grimaced. “Three minutes late.”

  “That’s right. Night-service authorization kicks in on the hour. Sharp.”

  “Foolish,” the Stork muttered. “Why didn’t they wait till morning?”

  “They never checked the warrant. Probably assumed it was standard. Keep in mind, they had a handful of them.”