How It Happened

by Michael Koryta

  He was held without bond.

  George Kelly, who had also declined to speak to police, was charged with obstruction, collusion, failure to report evidence of a crime, and conspiracy to commit murder. After a lengthy bond hearing in which three attorneys presented the reasons that George was not a flight risk or a threat to the community, he was granted bond set at two million dollars.

  He paid it that day and left Maine for Virginia, equipped with an ankle tracking bracelet. He instructed his wife, son, and daughter to stay away so they could avoid the media, and he assured them the truth would come out.

  On his first day in Virginia, he summoned his assistant to his home office and asked her to notarize three documents for him. He was wearing a suit and tie, and they didn’t speak of the charges against him or the crush of media outside. He was cordial and calm and he thanked her for her time and professionalism and gave her a check for her next month’s salary and a bonus for what he called all this unpleasantness. When she left the house, he took the shotgun with the silver inlay off the wall of his office, removed the skeet-shooting ribbons, and fitted a double-aught shell into the breech. Then he moved away from the desk, put the muzzle in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

  When they found him, there was blood on the walls and ceiling, and most of his brainpan had been emptied onto the floor, but the notarized documents on his desk were clean. There was an updated will, a letter to his family, and an eleven-page confession.

  The confession included a revised theory. In the moments before his suicide, apparently for the first time, George Kelly had finally been able to contemplate the possibility that his unknown adversary was in fact his trusted summer caretaker.

  Even then, his notes were tinged with disbelief.

  There had to be something bigger in play, he insisted. Someone more powerful. Someone more important.

  These were the last thoughts he had before he put the muzzle of the shotgun in his mouth.

  Police and prosecutors went to see Mathias Burke once more. Once more, he refused to answer all questions.

  He held this stance for three weeks. Then, in the first week of July, he contacted the state police and said he was ready to talk, on one condition.

  He would speak only to Rob Barrett.

  Nobody liked it. The police and prosecutor wanted someone else in the room. Mathias refused. It was Barrett, and Barrett alone.

  It was personal, Mathias said.

  They met in a visitation room, separated by a wall of glass. Mathias sat down and studied Barrett for a long time without speaking, and Barrett began to wonder if this was the point, if Mathias had grown bored and wanted to taunt and torment in whatever limited fashion he could. Then he finally picked up the phone.

  “Do you know,” Mathias said, “just how pleased I was when you searched that pond?”

  “No,” Barrett said. “Why don’t you explain it to me?”

  “I will. You just listen, okay? Just sit there and listen. You know why I picked you to talk to?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Because you think you understand. You always did.” He paused, smiled at Barrett through the glass, and added, “And I’d like to watch your face when you hear this.”

  “Okay,” Barrett said. “Enjoy it, then. Tell me how it happened.”

  58

  Kimmy told it right, mostly. Looking back, it’s kind of impressive. I hadn’t expected her to have that vivid of a memory, really, especially since she thought it was all unfolding right then. That it hadn’t been in motion before.

  In reality, I wasn’t going for Ian. Didn’t even think he’d be at the house that summer. I was going for George.

  You should know that there are fifteen previous versions of George. I’d been doing the same thing for six years. It was something my dad taught me originally, though he never understood how to capitalize on it. He told me that if you just paid attention to who came and went from the summerhouses, you’d find that lots of people who bought a second place had a reason for it that didn’t have shit to do with sitting on a deck by the ocean and eating lobster. You know the kind. An old guy shows up with some bitch who looks like she’s just out of college. Next weekend, he comes back up with his wife. Women do the exact same thing, trust me.

  All you have to do is pay attention. Those people look right over a man like me, like my dad. They looked over me, past me, through me. But I was always watching.

  Unlike him, I did something with it.

  I made forty grand the first year, and that was just with threats. Some people didn’t pay, but I’m not sure if they were more scared of me or of Bitcoin and Ether. Some of these guys, they’d rather watch their marriage implode than try to move currency that they don’t understand. But digital currency is the best way. Trust me.

  I got better cameras the next year, and then I made ninety thousand. That was just off two people. One guy, one woman. Funniest thing about that? It was the same house. The same couple, cheating on each other on different weekends. Then they both paid to save the marriage. I always wonder if they’ll end up figuring that out. I’d love to see that moment.

  By then I was charging people to set up cameras. Reduced the risk of having them noticed, for one thing, but I also figured if I didn’t get anything useful, at least I wasn’t wasting money on the cameras. Defray your costs whenever possible, you know? I put seven systems in that summer, and guess how many people changed their original password? One. I didn’t even have to hack anything. Not because they trusted me, but because they overlooked me. I was just there to serve at their pleasure, right? Once I’d done my thing, I was out of sight, out of mind, until they needed something else fixed.

  I was making more in one summer, Barrett, than you’ll make in the next five years. I checked what your salary would be once. Pretty easy to estimate with federal pay. You don’t make shit unless you’ve got graft on the side.

  Tell you something I really enjoyed—living the way I’d always been living, and watching the way people looked at me and treated me, and knowing the whole time that I had more money than they did. I had an idea that eventually I would buy one of those big homes where I worked. George’s house, maybe. I like to imagine someone like George coming up at the end of June, once the days are warm and all the dumb little lobster shacks are open, and finding out he has a new neighbor. Who owns the big house on the hill? he’d say. Your caretaker does, do you remember his name? Didn’t think so.

  I really like that image.

  Okay, so the year before his son died, George started bringing someone around who wasn’t Amy, and I got interested. I didn’t have any cameras in back then, so I just shot a little video, made sure to get some close-ups, and then George and I enjoyed a clean, professional transaction. He paid twenty-five thousand.

  While that was going on, I sent him an invoice for the end-of-season cleaning and closing up, and I suggested he might consider upgrading his security. He was worried about his stalker by then, you know, so he thought that was a good idea. He could catch the son of a bitch.

  I’m telling you, they never saw me. Never. They always imagined someone else in their lives, someone who mattered to them.

  I changed to cameras with microphones that year. Cost came down on those, quality went up, and audio is a huge game changer—people don’t like to see themselves, but when they can see and hear themselves? Man, they feel awfully vulnerable then.

  So the cameras were waiting, but George didn’t come back the next year. He went overseas and sent his kid up alone. I was disappointed about that, but then Ian started having those parties, inviting locals to the bonfires on his private beach. I heard from Mark Millinock that he was offering drugs to them. Ecstasy, mostly, but I also heard heroin. Now, I was surprised by that. He didn’t look like the heroin type, right?

  He didn’t use the drugs, and he didn’t sell them. What was the point? I think it was about feeling like a different kind of guy, trying on a different identity. He didn
’t like his dad much. Didn’t like his place in the world, really. He was so damned desperate to get people to look at him in a different way. I think the drugs were one way of pushing back on his life, and that always pissed me off. You don’t like your life? You kidding me, man? You don’t like your rich-bitch life?

  It was feeling like a lost summer to me. I’d been counting on George. I thought about trying to capture some video of Ian with the drugs, but it didn’t seem valuable enough. Not initially. Then one morning I went there to give them an estimate on a stone fire pit down by that beach, his party spot, and found Molly Quickery’s body in the sand.

  It was nearly high tide, but the water still only came up to her ankles. She was dead, but she hadn’t drowned. I looked around a little—there were beer cans and Solo cups, somebody had left a one-hitter, and there was an empty pony keg in the sand. Seemed like it had been a hell of a party, and I guess when Molly wandered away, nobody missed her, or they just thought she’d passed out.

  I sat there and thought about things for a while, and then I walked up to the house. Ian was still asleep. I got him up and told him I had something to show him. He was cooperative. He was one of those types who wants to be really nice to the help. Man of the people.

  We went down there, and he saw Molly, and he threw up in the sand. He was shaking. I sat down and put my arm around his shoulders and said, Tell me how this happened.

  He told me about the drugs then. He didn’t use them, but he’d brought them up from Virginia, curious, I guess, and then Ronnie Lord offered to buy the whole supply from him, and Ian told him to just take it. Just take them. That was Young Master Kelly, nothing if not generous.

  But now there was a dead girl in the sand, and that was very bad for Young Master Kelly. He’d crossed state lines with those drugs. He’d distributed them, even if he hadn’t sold them. She was on his property. It was all very bad.

  I’d been recording everything he said. Then I stopped recording and said, What if she wasn’t on the property?

  I pointed out at the ocean, and he looked at it like he’d never seen it before.

  Maybe she drowned, I said. Maybe it didn’t have anything to do with you.

  Give him credit—he thought about it longer than I’d have expected. Moral compass, right? But they all spin around. With the right pressure, Barrett, you can always make them spin.

  The deal we made was that I’d make Molly disappear, and Ian would pay for the help. I knew nobody was going to be looking too hard for Molly Quickery. It was a one-off, right? He’d made a mess; I cleaned it up. What better caretaker than a guy who hides the bodies for you?

  At the time, we were both thinking she had just overdosed. We weren’t thinking that all of his supply was lethal.

  But then…then people kept dying.

  I was hearing different stories about the drugs, and I thought about Molly and realized how bad it could get if she was part of something bigger. If anyone traced those drugs back to Ian, I knew he’d break, and then he’d also tell them the story about Molly, and they’d come for me.

  I went to see Ronnie Lord. He was scared shitless, because he’d been selling the dope that was killing people, and he knew he could be charged for a lot more than dealing. I told him to hang tight and let me work on this. Then I went back to Ian.

  Ian started talking about going to the police right away. I talked him out of that. I got with Ronnie and we tracked down what was left, and what he couldn’t buy back, I stole back. There were six, maybe seven, others dead by then. Names you still don’t even know. Look around Augusta sometime, if you’re interested. And Bangor. Bangor in July was a bad place to shoot up. You’d think people would have noticed by then, right? Not anymore. Not with opioids. The dead people were all addicts. There were no surprises in that bunch, so nobody was paying attention to what they took and where it came from. It was happening all over the country. But it wasn’t happening around people like Ian Kelly.

  I gathered up all the shit that was still out there and brought it to him to prove that I’d cleaned up his mess. He was scared to touch it. I’m not kidding. He made me pick it up, like it was a snake.

  I worried that he’d break right away if anyone ever asked him about it. That he’d confess to the first cop who hit the door. Ian didn’t grasp consequences. He figured his dad would make a few calls, and they’d cut him a deal. Five dead people equals fifty hours of road crew or something. Then the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if he wasn’t right. And I was really deep into it then, from moving Molly’s body, to collecting the drugs, to concealing my knowledge of all these deaths. If Ian broke, then Daddy would make his calls and take his meetings and his son would be doing road crew while I did twenty-five years in Warren.

  Now, you know who wouldn’t break? George. If he knew Golden Boy was at risk, he would shut the show down before cops were called, not after. So, I e-mailed George from an anonymous account. Videos and some articles about the OD deaths. He paid so damn fast—it was literally the same day, no hesitation, no who are you, how dare you, none of the stuff I usually got. He just paid. And I knew he’d shut Ian down too. I knew there weren’t going to be any trips to the police once George saw his exposure.

  George wasn’t sure who he was paying, but he was working on that. He always thought it was somebody from outside, back in Virginia, maybe overseas. Anyone extorting him had to be a major player, he figured. This was beautiful—guess who he hired to take the cameras down? Yours truly. He told me that someone had hacked his cameras and they needed to come down. I said no problem, sir, and then I took most of them down and sent him a bill. I left a couple up, but those were just for me.

  It all seemed pretty well in hand.

  Then, at the end of August, I misunderstood something that I saw. You’ve seen the clip I’m talking about. Ian and Jackie out on the deck. They were talking about going to family and getting out of trouble and I just kind of…I jumped too fast on that. I thought I knew exactly what they were talking about. They walked out of the frame too early. Jackie got cold, and they went inside, and I lost the audio. Nobody ever said pregnant.

  I figured if anybody was going to push him to confess, it was Jackie Pelletier. She wasn’t anything like George. Neither was Howard. I didn’t know how to manage that family. It was going to get too big, too fast.

  I had two weeks to think about how to handle it. I realized that I knew where they were going to be and when they’d be there. Out there in the cemetery, all alone.

  I saw a different way to manage things then.

  I’d never killed anyone before, but I’d thought about it plenty. I always wanted to. I’d figured I would have to at some point. I’d had the idea about the pond for…I don’t even know how long. I can tell you this—I had the idea for the pond before I ever saw the pond. It was a matter of picking the right spot. Most areas like that, there are too many people around. But when I saw that place, I thought: This could be just right.

  When you kill someone, you have two choices. The first one is to try to hide how you did it, which is what almost everyone does, and almost everyone gets caught. The second one is to show exactly how you did it—and then prove it couldn’t have happened that way.

  I needed to be ready for you to come at me hard. I needed to let police hear a story they believed but could not prove. I needed witnesses for the night. People who would talk eventually, but not immediately. They needed to have certain…credibility issues too. Kimmy was perfect. I didn’t need both her and Cass. I needed one to talk, not two, and I needed the least reliable one. That was Kimmy, obviously. Cass was collateral damage.

  Now, you’ve got to have a fall guy, of course, and Girard, he was perfect. He was a stone-cold idiot. I actually wish you’d gotten to talk to Girard. You remember that show where the kid confesses to killing the girl, and he wasn’t even part of it? That was Girard. If the two of you had gotten together, you’d have had him doing life without parole and him agreeing the w
hole time.

  The paint…that was more personal. I wanted Ian to see what was coming for him, that he’d brought it on himself. I wanted him to see me coming and just…understand.

  In the end, I guess he did. The way he looked at me right before I clipped him? He saw the world differently then.

  All night long I put on an act for the girls. I drank a little, but I didn’t actually use any drugs, and I kept up the act of being angry, fired up, out of control. It was supposed to be like a hit-and-run—Oh, shit, we were high and this happened and now you bitches have to help me dump these bodies! That was going to be good because I’d never done any drugs, my blood was clean, and people wouldn’t believe the picture the girls painted of me. Because it was not me.

  I went back to the pond at night. They came out easy. I had them in Girard’s truck and gone in twenty minutes flat. Stripped them and shot them because I knew that wasn’t the story that would be told. It’s a magic trick, make them watch the right hand, then use your left. Whole thing was clockwork. Swiss-watch shit. I knew you’d show up at my door someday, but I also knew the evidence would never back up what you’d been told.

  Your guys bought the e-mail tip about the bodies right away. Never really questioned it. You know why you didn’t question it? Because of how you see me. Mathias knows leaf blowers, but computers? No chance! That e-mail trick is the simplest thing in the world. Dead man’s switch coding. Your tech guys would’ve given it a look if the suspect was some kid in Boston with a basement full of computers, but Ma-thias, now, he might be able to winch a body out of a pond, but write a simple piece of computer code? Never.

  I know you asked about the dead man’s switch, but you don’t deserve credit for that. You weren’t looking at me any different; you were just desperate. Your ass was showing, and you wanted any way to cover it up. That was all it was. You were trying to send me up for murder and didn’t even respect me enough to wonder how I did it.