by Reed Arvin
“You think he’s dangerous?”
Tate shrugs. “I’m not a trained psychologist,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to say.”
“Off the record. Just give me your best shot.”
“Bridges hates jail, man. Unless that changes, I don’t see him doing anything that sends him back.” He pauses. “On the other hand, life after jail hasn’t been a picnic, either.”
“What’s happened?”
“Your basic post-incarceration spiral. Can’t find work because nobody will hire him. Also, he’s an asshole. He imagines himself something of a doctor, so he won’t do anything menial.” He smiles. “One of my predecessors tried to get him a job as an orderly in a hospital. Bridges didn’t appreciate that.”
“When was this?”
“Pretty soon after Bridges got out of the joint. It was the guy before me.”
“You remember the guy’s name?”
He shakes his head. “It’s been a couple of years.”
“So you aren’t aware of Bridges’s long-term history.”
“No, but I’ve got the files. It’s all pretty straightforward, at least on paper. Like I say, he’s reliable, never breaks the rules. With the overcrowding, you have to screw up pretty bad. But Bridges is a very good boy. He doesn’t risk anything.”
“Does he ever leave you notes?”
“Notes?”
“On cars. Or at your house.”
He shakes his head. “I wish I had more for ya, but I got thirty-nine guys on my plate right now. If somebody doesn’t make noise, he’s fine by me.”
“You know he’s going by Robert now?”
He nods. “That was my idea. I thought it might help him find work, but it didn’t.”
“You mind looking through the file for the officer who worked with him before you?”
Tate walks to a filing cabinet and pulls out the center drawer. He fingers his way through several files and pulls out Bridges’s. “Yeah, it’s Kavner. Abe Kavner.”
“What happened to him?”
“Off the radar. Retired, I think.”
“You got an address?”
“Nope.” He reaches under his desk, pulls out a phone book, and hands it to me. “Be my guest.”
I hand him my card. “Don’t tell Bridges we talked.”
“You got it.”
Back in the Ford, I call information and ask for Abraham Kavner. There’s no such number, but there’s a Mrs. A. Kavner out in Rayon City, a lower-middle-class neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. I drive out north on I-65 to Old Hickory, head west, and soon see the huge DuPont chemical factory looming on my left. The houses are working-class, inexpensive squares put up for workers at the plant. I take Mrs. Kavner’s street and park in front of her house. It’s modest but well kept, with a green yard and impatiens and begonias planted around the mailbox. I walk up the entry to the porch; a trowel sticks out of a bucket half filled with topsoil that sits by the door. The entrance is barred by a substantial, black, cast-iron storm door. I ring the doorbell, and a dark-haired woman in her sixties opens the inner door, leaving the storm door locked. The living room behind is well lit, and more flowers are visible in pots and hanging from the ceiling. “Can I help you?”
“Mrs. Kavner?”
“That’s right.”
I show her my Justice Department ID. “Thomas Dennehy. I’m with the DA’s office. I was wondering if your husband was around.”
She looks at me blankly a moment. “Abe’s not here.”
“Can you tell me where I could locate him? It’s important.”
She shakes her head. “You don’t know?”
“No.”
“My husband is dead.”
Dread begins crawling up my spine. “I’m terribly sorry.” She nods and begins to shut the door. “Mrs. Kavner? Could you tell me how he died?”
She stops the door half-shut. “He was murdered. He was out walking. It was after dark.”
“Around here?”
“The park, over by Dupont. They took his wallet.”
“They?”
“Whoever it was. The police never found out. They think maybe it was a junkie.”
“I’m really very sorry.”
She looks at me. “He’d been with the county for thirty-six years. Abe had just bought an RV. We were going to go out West.”
I nod. “I’m sorry to have bothered you.” The door closes, and I’m standing alone on her porch. Tate’s words come back to me: One of my predecessors tried to get him a job as an orderly in a hospital. Bridges didn’t appreciate that.
CHAPTER
19
I HEAD TO PAUL LANDMEYER’S office, hoping to get a few minutes of his time to go over Abe Kavner’s autopsy report. Paul comes out of his office and meets me in the lobby with a worried expression. Something’s happened. “Talk to me,” I say quietly.
“I just got off the phone with Rayburn,” Paul answers. “Buchanan’s people won’t be stalled any longer. We’re going to have to do the ballistics test on the shotgun today.” He glances back into the restricted area. “It’s just as well. His guys have been sitting on their hands so long they’re becoming a problem.”
I nod. “When will we have results?”
“I’ll get a preliminary tonight. If it goes against us, they won’t ask for a second test to confirm, obviously. But our people are good. The results won’t change.” He looks at me. “What are you doing here?”
“I need fifteen minutes.”
Paul grimaces. “It’s not a good time.”
“I know that. I need it anyway.”
Paul regards me a second, then nods. “Okay. Fifteen minutes. What are we looking at?”
“An autopsy report. The name is Abe Kavner. He was murdered two years ago in Old Hickory.”
Paul starts toward the door leading to the inner offices, then stops and turns back to me. “Kavner?”
“Yeah.”
“I remember that one. I didn’t work it, but it got talked about. Everybody said the guy was really unlucky.”
“Unlucky? He got murdered.”
“Yeah. It was how that got people’s attention.” He starts back toward the doorway. “Follow me.”
Paul drops me off at his office and returns shortly thereafter with a large file. He spreads the papers onto his desk and runs his thumb down the documents, scanning for salient information. He pulls out some photographs and maneuvers his movable desk light to shine light directly on them. “Yeah,” he says. “This is it.” He pulls out a gruesome autopsy photograph that shows Kavner’s body lying on its stomach. The skin is purple-pale, and layers of flesh have been pulled back for examination, revealing the organs beneath. “The victim died of cardiac arrest stemming from a knife wound from behind that punctured the heart. But since the ribs are only about a half-inch apart, the blade had to come in horizontally, sliding exactly between them. That was where he was unlucky. If the knife had been positioned vertically—blade up, instead of sideways—it would have hit bone and he would have had a superficial wound.” He flips to another photograph. “The blade punctured the dermis and the subcutaneous tissues, here. It then went through the parietal and visceral pleuras and entered the lung, here.”
“I thought you said he died of a puncture of the heart.”
“The knife had to go through the lung first. The blade penetrates the alveoli, severs these blood vessels, then enters the left ventricle of the heart, here.” He looks up. “That was another interesting thing.”
“How so?”
“The left ventricle is the high-pressure side of the heart. You die quicker if you get it on that side.” He shakes his head. “Help got there pretty quick, but it was too late. If the wound had been on the right, he might have made it.”
“Unlucky.”
He nods. “First thing that happened, he got a collapsed lung, and he started coughing up blood.” He pulls another picture under the light. “See? Blood on the chin, on the clothing in front. M
eanwhile, his heart’s bleeding into the pericardial sac, creating pressure, so it can’t function properly. He feels more and more pressure, like somebody’s sitting on him. He’s freaking out now, becoming aware that he’s going to die. His heart rate starts rising to compensate for the pressure, up to maybe two hundred before the end. A guy that age, he can’t last long at that speed. He fibrillates, and a couple of minutes later, the brain dies. His heart follows soon after.” He closes the file. “It would take a hell of a knife, I will say that.”
“How long?”
He shrugs. “At least nine inches, maybe more. But slender, more like a filleting knife than the typical weapon.” He looks down at the picture. “We all talked about it. The wound was so perfectly placed, it’s almost like whoever did this had some kind of medical training.”
“He did.”
Paul looks up. “You got something on this?”
I’m already moving for the door. “Thanks, Paul.”
DAVID RAYBURN LOOKS like something foul just climbed out of a half-eaten sandwich. “What did you say?”
“Charles Bridges, the EMT from the Sunshine Grocery murders. The guy we went after for negligent homicide, remember?”
“Of course I remember.”
“He’s the source on Kwame Jamal Hale.”
“How the hell did you find that out?”
“Bridges was at Brushy at the same time as Hale. He says Hale told him what really happened at the Sunshine Grocery.”
“He says?”
“I spoke to him. I’ve been speaking to him, actually, only I didn’t know it. The point is, he goes to Towns, who is the highest-profile anti-death-penalty activist in the city. He spills his story, Towns contacts Buchanan, and the rest is history.”
“Shit, Thomas. Are you saying this is all an attempt to even the score against you?”
“Yeah, well, evening the score is a big deal to Bridges. The word is, his first parole officer insulted him right before he retired. He was found murdered shortly afterward.”
Rayburn stares. “Do we have enough to pick him up?”
“Not even close. But at least we can call Homicide, reopen the murder, and start building a case.”
Rayburn’s expression darkens. “Listen, if you’re right about this guy Bridges killing his parole officer, you need to watch your ass. I mean, he killed a guy just for pissing him off. He’s had seven years to think about how he feels about you.”
“Yeah. I know.”
Rayburn nods. “I’m having him picked up, Thomas. We need this guy off the streets.”
“We haven’t got enough to make it stick, David.”
“I don’t care. If we have to let him go later, we’ll do it. But I want him out of commission until this thing is finished.”
I CATCH JOSH RITCHIE walking down the hall on the way back to my office. I pull him into a small conference room. “Anything new?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “It’s quiet,” he says. “Bol’s confession took the air out of a lot of sails.”
“Good, then you’re free. I want you to find out everything you can about Charles Robert Bridges.”
“Who’s that?”
“About thirty-four years old, looks older. Dark hair, heavy beard and moustache. He goes by Robert.”
“And?”
“He’s a guy the cops are looking for but won’t be able to find.”
“Then how am I going to do it?”
“You don’t have to find him. I just want you to dig up information. He’s currently on the streets and spends a lot of time at the Downtown Presbyterian Church. When he’s not there, he’s buying meth down on the tracks underneath Union Station.”
Josh frowns. “Dude, I don’t go down there.”
“Just ask around the usuals. Find out who his dealer is. Find out where he sleeps. Anything.”
Josh nods. “What’s he done?”
Brought down the entire DA’s office? Eliminated the death penalty in the state of Tennessee, and possibly in the whole country? Killed a parole officer in cold blood? In that moment, I realize how seriously I have underestimated Charles Robert Bridges. “Just do it, Josh. And be careful.”
MY OFFICE TABLE IS COVERED with the paperwork of death. It’s 4:30 now, and I’ve spent the last few hours poring over the negligent homicide case of Charles Bridges. What I want to know, above all else, is this: what is the depth of his anger, and what are his skills to execute revenge?
I start over once more through Bridge’s history, provided from the ETNAC military database for the original trial: Bridges took the ASVAB armed services aptitude test to enter the army and scored off the charts for the medical corps. So high, in fact, that he was given a separate IQ test—probably by the National Security Agency, although the file doesn’t say—and scored 151. He was probably due to head into intelligence work, but something went off the rails, because his psych profile got flagged. Bridges grudgingly accepted an offer for the medic program and entered the service via the processing station at Nashville. Then came the standard nine weeks of basic training, during which he incurred two negative notations: a late to report, and an incidence of wearing the wrong uniform for an occasion. He survived—barely—and went through the sixteen-week crash medic training. Academically he was brilliant, scoring in the 99 percent range.
Bridges’s monthly counseling reports after graduation started poor and went downhill, including a drunken fistfight on leave that resulted in another man’s broken jaw. The comments in his fourth month were typical: “Specialist Bridges interacts poorly with other personnel. He is not particularly well liked and has distinguished himself primarily by his intelligence, arrogance, and condescension.” Predictably, there were two failure to salutes, and a few months later, he got an Article 15 for being thirty minutes late for staff duty. He was docked half a month’s pay and reduced in rank from E4 specialist to E3. But the end came when he was caught with his hand in the controlled-substances cookie jar. The last line of his file is a masterpiece of classic army understatement: “Specialist Bridges is involuntarily separated from the service, due to failure to adapt to a military lifestyle.”
Back in Nashville, Bridges concealed his army history and enrolled in the Nashville Technical College EMT program. He sailed through—having already completed the army medic program—and quickly landed a job with a local company doing contract emergency response work for the county. Six weeks into the job, he and a partner answered a call to the Sunshine Grocery in east Nashville. The partner tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate the first victim, while Bridges made a mess of an esophageal intubation on Lucinda Williams. The cops on the scene, recognizing Bridges was impaired, arrested him on the spot. When he tested positive for a truckload of methamphetamine, his fate was sealed.
So Bridges sits in Brushy Mountain for a few years, figuring out how to pay me back. Time enough for his hate to burn bright. I glance up at the clock; it’s getting close to five, which means the ballistics team has probably already fired the Browning shotgun. We’ll know something soon. I watch the second hand on the clock tick off seconds for as long as I can stand it. I snap shut the file and head for the door.
I walk back to Rayburn’s office, thinking that it’s important to be together when we hear the news. Family. We sink or swim together. Dolores nods me through, and I head inside. Halfway through the doorway, I pull up. Carl is standing by the window, his hands stuffed into his pockets. “What are you doing here?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I’m damned if I let you guys face this music alone,” he says. “Paul called me earlier today, right after you left his office. He thought I’d want to know things were going down today.”
“It was a hell of a gesture, you coming,” Rayburn says, coming around from behind his desk. “Pure class.” He walks to me and shakes my hand. “We should hear anytime, Thomas. They’ve already fired the gun.”
“Paul called?”
Rayburn nods. “He’s our eyes and ears. He said stay b
y the phone.” Rayburn hands me a fax. “Buchanan is pretty confident. He’s already called a press conference for two p.m. tomorrow afternoon, over at the Regal Maxwell House.”
We look at each other in silence. This is not good news. Buchanan, if nothing else, would never do anything to embarrass himself. I can see it in Rayburn’s eyes: he goes into damage control as the last bit of hope drains away.
“So we hold our own press conference,” Carl says sternly. “Except we do it earlier, in the morning. If we’re going to crash and burn, at least we can drive the car.”
Rayburn nods. “Good. Either way, we announce it, not him. We turn his conference into an anti-climax.” He walks over to his desk. “Look, we’ve got some time to kill. I say we draft two statements, one for each way it goes.” He picks up the phone. “Dolores? Hold all my calls, unless it’s Paul. And bring in some coffee, will you? We’re gonna be busy a while.”
Over the next hour, Rayburn, Carl, and I pound out the statements. The one where we win takes little time; we settle on a magnanimous, mostly humble tone, and keep it simple. The one where we lose—where the ballistics match—quickly reveals itself to be a grind the equal of any closing argument I’ve ever prepared. It’s obvious we could spend hours parsing words and sliding through excuses. After half an hour, Rayburn’s had enough. “We tell them this is the system,” he says, walking to his window. “If people don’t like it, there are ways to change it. We regret Owens’s death. Just like we regret the two victims at the Sunshine Grocery, and the other three hundred and fifty people who got murdered in this city in the last year.”
Carl nods. “Well done, David.”
Rayburn looks at his watch. “Any minute, now.”
NOBODY SPEAKS WHEN THE PHONE finally rings. David walks calmly to his desk, picks up the phone, and listens. He asks no questions, but when he looks up at us, we know the worst has happened. Rayburn hangs up the phone and says, “It’s a match. Paul says nothing’s going to change. We’re done.”
SO. THIS IS HOW IT ENDS . I’m in the old truck, and the blocks pass under its tires as I drive out of downtown. My career, it seems obvious, is over. The rest of my life—the things other than work that make me who I am—suddenly seem frighteningly inconsequential. I realize that if I add everything together other than work in my life, there’s precious little other than Jazz. And she’s old enough now to understand some things. She’s old enough to figure out her father’s done something terrible. She’ll watch the TV and see the news clips.