Kelp moved up to suspect number one in my mind. He stunk of wrong. Too helpful. Knew too much. He went way past “willing to share” and into megalomaniac territory. Confident he could dance his cha-cha around the police in circles and the flatfoots would never be the wiser.
My lieutenant—Elias Shackleford—did not agree. I wouldn’t say he was being obtuse, but he was definitely stepping on my toes. And in my zeal to prove my commander wrong—in my own version of “making the case a game”—I tipped our hand.
During questioning in our station house, I simply allowed Kelp to see my suspicions. I dropped the façade for a moment. I wasn’t really his buddy; I had nothing in common with him, and he figured it in less than a second of my own arrogance. Witnessed my own suspicions firsthand. And hell, they weren’t suspicions—I was convinced the weird little bastard did it. And I let him see that. Bye-bye to any chance of a confession.
We couldn’t hold him. No matter how certain I was regarding his guilt; it was going to take time to build the DNA case proving it. We lacked motive, too—other than him being a creep, and the neighbor, we hardly even had circumstantial evidence. We could show opportunity since his alibi was weak—home alone—but that was all we had without his DNA. No judge was going to grant us a warrant to violate his person or residence without something more solid on which to base our allegation of his guilt. I, of course, felt they should add fucked up demeanor and a sinister smile to the list of potential motives but that wasn’t happening until we arrived at a slightly more dystopian future.
When completed, our case would likely be a strong one. We had plenty of physical evidence; we only needed a sample to match against Kelp. But we needed motive, too. Being the neighbor gave him plenty of opportunity but why did he want her dead? Detective work isn’t always as glamorous as portrayed on the boob tube. The lawyers had to dance their dance and the court had to maintain its reputation as objective, the pretense being that we’d all sleep a little better if we knew people were presumed innocent first (but knowing full goddamned well most people wouldn’t mind a little stepping on the rights of cretins if it meant making the city a safer place for truly innocent people to live). As the detective role in this drama, I’d see to it that we found what was required and it would take time.
I’d seen the understanding in the suspect’s eyes when he walked away. I wrongly assumed this meant the hunt was on. Catch me if you can, copper. I saw it every time we sent a suspect home that had a clue about how the system worked. He knew exactly why we couldn’t hold him and he thought it was prime time funny. Or at least that was what I thought. What it meant instead? Kelp recognized his fate. He might have even remembered his own mistakes.
He definitely had no plans to do prison time. It happened. Some criminals, they knew they couldn’t do time. Maybe they’d been in the joint and they knew it was not half as luxurious or even tolerable as the public might think. Or it happened often that, when cornered, some humans realized they were simply tired of life and wanted to end theirs splashed across the local news.
Either way, I misread our killer. I thought he was taunting us. He was, plain and simple, inept and scared. And he wasn’t going to be coming back to the station house, much less any courtroom or behind any bars.
“Let me talk to him,” I asked Len Brighton, the senior S.W.A.T. negotiator after I arrived.
“This one’s ours, Mac. You know that. You’ve been called in as a consultant only. You’ve met the guy. Period.”
“Everyone here knows I fucked up,” I said. “I showed him our hand. He’s playing the cards I handed to him. Now tell me he hasn’t asked for me. Go ahead, look me in the eyes and tell me this psycho fuck did not demand I be brought here. How long before he has you put me on the phone anyway, Len?”
Brighton didn’t answer me verbally but he dropped his stare to his boots.
“You made the call,” I told him. “You called me in.”
“Not me. My supervisor.” Brighton considered the situation. Clearly his boss had left the ultimate decision with him, but no cop needed innocent blood on his hands. Brighton gave me the cell.
“Gerry…this is Detective Robert Macaulay. We spoke at the station.”
“This ends badly, Detective. That’s really all you need to know.”
Kelp’s voice was mocking. Still some energy left, which was good. Life had not quite defeated him. No matter how much we want to die, it is never easy when the moment comes. A jail cell and a male lover can suddenly look more attractive than the pain of death and the uncertainty of the afterlife.
If I couldn’t mature that idea, he’d eventually check out. He’d asked for me. It could be because he wanted to leave his mark in my head. I’d betrayed him. Guy probably had no friends, which was exactly why I went for “good cop” when we had him in for questioning. It could be as simple as it being his time to hurt me as I hurt him. Or he might have truly bonded with me. That happened, too. I could be the friend to talk him down. There was no way to be completely sure.
As tactical officers we listened to the tone, inflection, and examined (when we could see the person) body language. We relied on our training (old as it might have been), our experiences, our psychology, and our orders. Then we turned to our gut. And maybe we prayed.
“Why make this about your daughter, Gerry? That’s chicken-shit.”
Brighton’s eyes dilated and he instinctively reached for the phone.
“What did you say to me?”
“I said it’s a coward’s way to hurt an innocent little girl.”
Heighten the adrenaline level. It was a delicate measure. A fine, fine line. Keep him pumped up and alive without pissing him off so much he simply went too far in the other direction and exploded instead of continuing to converse to defend himself.
So many endings to consider.
“She’s not so innocent,” Kelp said. There was a vein of anger in his tone. Good. It wasn’t rage and the adrenaline was flowing.
“How’s that?” I said.
“Too much like her mother. A bitch.”
“I get that,” I said. “My ex is a complete stone wall.”
“Bet she lets you see your kids.”
“Nope,” I lied. “Two little boys. Lying bitch has them thinking their old man is a loser and a bad father. Drives me to the brink. It would drive anyone to the brink.”
“Shit,” he barked. “I can’t trust you.”
“I’ll tell you this,” I said. “And this is the god’s truth, I shit you not. I am the only friend you’ve got out here. Funny and fucked up as that may be, I do have the power to broker some kind of better deal here.”
It was partial truth. I might be able to keep the trigger-happy cops from wasting the suspect on inexperience alone. But I couldn’t tell a man who at his core wanted to die that Detective Bobby Mac could keep him alive. The sweat really began to run, into my eyes, stinging them. I made sure I was out of eyesight and wiped my face and head with an extra t-shirt another officer produced from her car.
“Do you really get what I am saying?” Kelp said.
“No, man. I don’t. I mean, every man has been screwed over by a woman, especially in a custody battle. Yeah, that I get totally. But this isn’t your wife, Gerry. She’s your daughter. Your innocent daughter. It isn’t her fault.”
“She’s a BITCH.”
“She’s a teen; she’s looking for any excuse at all to hate you. All of ‘em do. My sons are eighteen and nineteen. I call them the ‘E Generation’”.
“What’s that?” Kelp said.
“Entitled.”
“That ain’t any lying right there, Macaulay. Fuckin’-A right, that is.”
“But here’s the thing, Gerry: we’re the adults. We were kids once. We thought we knew how every fucking thing worked. And your ex is using that fact, by the way—using it against you; just offering you up with an apple in your mouth. And I gotta be honest with you, this holding your daughter at gunpoint isn’t helping.”
“I guess.”
“Shit, if your ex was here I’d probably get fired for serving her up to you. Trade her for the little girl.”
Brighton actually smiled at that one.
“You’re smart, Gerry…you know? And in a way you’re right. But this is NOT the way we handle shit in an orderly society. As bad as it gets, we don’t resort to hurting children. This is still the same little girl you diapered, fed, took to soccer games—isn’t Shelly a hell of a player?”
Give her back her name. Kelp hadn’t mentioned it once. He needed to start thinking about her from his memories, not from the perspective of his illness. Shelly. His daughter. His little baby girl.
“Yeah. She’s awesome.”
“And I suppose she got that from your ex?”
“No fucking way. I worked with her every damn day.”
“Exactly, Gerry. And Shelly will remember that one day. Don’t steal her chance at having good thoughts about her old man. And don’t leave your ex talking to every newspaper, radio show, blog site, and tabloid that will listen that she’s always been right about you. Show now how much you love that little girl of yours.”
There was silence on the line for several beats.
“The front door,” Kelp said.
“Hold,” I said to the cops surrounding the home, raising my opened palm. “DO NOT FIRE. Hostage is exiting the building.”
Shelly Kelp came through the open apartment door, trembling, and was scooped up by a female S.W.A.T. officer.
“Gerry?” I said back into the phone. “That was a good thing, Ger. I want you to know that makes me proud of you.”
The line was still open, I could hear the sound of the world echoing in it, so I knew he hadn’t hung up, but Kelp said nothing for the longest time. Then, in a whisper that could have been anyone’s voice if I didn’t know what I knew and hadn’t heard it too many times before said, “Just a reminder you’re still in this with us, MacAulay. And we’re far from done.”
The true monster, Rule.
Then the connection went dead.
The single gunshot from within the house didn’t surprise anyone there who wasn’t green as grass.
But I was the only cop left wondering who the real Gerry Kelp had been and if he’d originally been capable of murder at all.
2
Ten Months Earlier, The Black Dahlia
“GOOD TO see you, Mac,” Cindy Wu, our crime scene sketch artist, said as I crunched across the frozen ground of the small amphitheater with the Capitol Building rising above us like a mountain spire.
“You, too. What’re we looking at, Cindy?”
“Female victim. Uh, halved. Looks like she’s in her mid-teens: sixteen, seventeen. Always hard to tell with these young ones today. Heavy ligature marks on the throat, wrists, ankles. I’m putting my money on hanging as cause of death. The rest of the team is held up in a meeting. They’ll be here within the hour. Figure with the low temperatures the M.E. will need to get her back to the morgue anyway and thaw her to place T.O.D. Both sections are hard as stone.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. Worst I’ve seen on the job,” she said, going back to her measuring.
“Me, too.”
“The mouth is sliced from ear-to-ear.”
The victim was cut in half so cleanly it was nearly surgical, meaning the murderer knew what he or she was doing. I wasn’t making any assumptions on this one. No fuck ups. No mistakes. That place inside me that wells up for the victim really went into overdrive. Shit, I actually felt like crying. I stared at the open, striking green eyes. That was it. She reminded me of Amber. The girlfriend I’d once been forced to kill in self-defense.
I ached, and it wasn’t just the frigid air.
I walked the small amphitheater setting. The Capitol Building was actually across the street but it was so large it felt like the naked victim’s halves were lying on the very steps of our state’s towering symbol.
My bones continued to ache. Now it was the cold. Weather forecasters had the high temperature hovering in the low teens. The sun was out, which helped, but I had never been a fan of the cold months. Denver was a well-kept secret; we saw a lot of sixty-degree days in the middle of winter. Unfortunately we saw our share of days like this one. A dry cold. People joked about “dry heat”, which was silly to argue—the problem in Denver on a hot day was that we were a mile closer to the sun than most cities and we had over three-hundred and fifty sunny days a year. You wouldn’t think a mile in terms of a ball of heat ninety-two million miles away would be significant.
It was. Denver sun on the skin made air temperature nearly completely moot. The feeling was easily twenty degrees hotter than the official “temperature”. The sun slipping behind a summer storm cloud instantaneously erased the extra twenty, just that fast.
The sun in winter, however, was much lower in its elliptical, so it didn’t bring you that extra twenty when you could really use it.
“Who called it in?” I said to Cindy.
“Taxi driver. She saw the upper half first. Thought it was a homeless drunk in need of an assist. She phoned in an ambulance before she walked over. Good thing—they took her to Swedish for a psych eval.”
“First respondents?”
“Pair of uniforms from the First. Over there.” She motioned to a gaggle of police huddling to keep warm next to the barricade.
I walked over and recognized one in the group right away.
“Quaid,” I said, smiling.
“Shit, Mac, never seen you out in the cold like this. Not since patrol anyway.”
“Fuck you.”
Olson Quaid smiled wide and grabbed my hand with his own. He was the supervising officer on scene. “Just bustin’ your balls. What’re left anyway, old man.”
I was old. Fifty next month. Mornings like that I felt a hundred.
Quaid owned a nice Beechcraft inboard. He had a cabin up at Grand Lake and spent every weekend trolling for Mackinaw. He’d held the state record for three years, pulling one just under fifty pounds in 2004. Then in 2007 another guy beat his catch trolling at the Blue Mesa Reservoir—it outweighed Quaid’s fish by only six ounces. I knew those half-dozen ounces were a sore, sore subject.
“You still up on the lake summers?” I said. “Looking for those extra six?”
“Speaking of ‘go fuck yourself’.” Quaid smiled. “Hell yes, I am. Been a few since you came up.”
“I’ll take you up on it if that’s an official invite,” I said. “Pining away for the warmth of summer as we speak.”
“It is. Bring the brood.”
“You got it, pal.”
“Guess you’re looking for the boys who got here first? This is Rico and Gibbs,” he said, pointing to two officers standing to his right.
“Detective Bobby Macaulay, gents,” Quaid said. “He’s good shit.”
“Detective,” the cop named Gibbs said. I nodded.
“I know you,” said Rico. Not in that friendly way; more like, and screw you.
“Officer Rico?” I said, a look of confusion shrouding my face. He did look vaguely familiar. Not from the job, though.
“That’s right. Ned Burke was my T.O. and I used to bowl on the same team. He was my friend.”
“Ned was a good man,” I said.
Burke was my partner for a lot of years. A father to me. He died of a heart attack, away from the job.
“IS a good man. Always will be,” Rico said.
“You want to keep breaking bad, Rico? I say it’s too fucking cold out here for this shit. I’d be happy to see you down at the gym, though, you feel like you want to go a few rounds.”
“I used to try and get him to slim down,” Rico said. “Get healthier.”
“So?”
“So you were his partner.”
“Get to the point.”
“Just seems like someone should have had his back is all.”
“I had his back every day, hoss. There’s a line here and you�
��ve just about stepped on it.”
“Yeah? You pulling rank?”
“I never pull rank. I walk the walk. You box? I find it a great way to settle bad blood without getting asses suspended. Like the lake next summer, that invite is for real.”
“Easy guys,” Quaid said. “Gibbs. Take the detective over there and give him your report. Rico, shag your ass over to my car. We need to have words.”
Gibbs and I walked over toward the victim.
“You two arrived at the scene first?” I said.
“Yep. Female taxi driver called it in. She was really shaken up when we got here.”
“Anyone else around? Witnesses?”
“No. Too early, I guess.”
“You set up the barricade, taped off the crime scene?” I said.
“Yeah, we called in backup to handle pedestrians and the crowd.”
It was good work. I’d seen too many crime scenes compromised by lazy uniforms.
“Good job,” I said. “This place is already hopping.”
“Is there anything else, Detective?”
He was curt, to the point. Professional but not wanting to concede anything else because of his partner. The blue line. I got it. And I liked him right away.
“No, nothing else. Like I said, Gibbs, thanks for preserving the scene.”
“Have a nice day,” he said, spun, and walked away.
Rico’s words had stung me. He was an asshole but he was saying things my own conscience had whispered to me a hundred thousand times. Burke had been everything to me, especially on the job. I loved him. We try to help our loved ones but too often we’re the last ones capable of effecting change. In the end I’d chosen to be the best partner and friend I could while letting him make his own adult decisions on the rest. He liked his donuts, he liked his Philly cheesesteak, and he enjoyed an occasional pastry at Wholly Cannoli Café.
I once heard on talk radio the guy say “I don’t care if giving up donuts adds two years to my life or not; sounds like two more years with no donuts.”
R.S. Guthrie - Detective Bobby Mac 03 - Reckoning Page 3