by Tina Whittle
She kept one fist wrapped around the strap of the messenger bag on her shoulder. “You got sunburned.”
Trey touched his cheekbone, freshly scrubbed. “A little.”
I watched from the kitchen as she held the bag close and came inside. She made straight for the armchair, sat with her legs tucked under her. Then she pulled a deck of cards from her pocket, bright green and worn at the edges, and smacked them in the middle of the coffee table.
“You want those files, Seaver, you gotta earn them.”
Trey sat down on the sofa opposite her. “The game?”
“Slapjack.”
He picked up the cards and started shuffling. Whatever was going down, it was old and familiar and strictly between the two of them. Trey dealt. Keesha looked at him, not the cards. The expression on her face reminded me of someone watching old home movies, seeing long-dead relatives talking and walking around.
She draped one arm along the back of the sofa. “You remember the last time we played? We didn’t get to finish because we got that call to the Botanical Garden about the shooter on top of the greenhouse, and it turned out to be some naked drunk girl with a dildo?”
The corner of his mouth twitched, but he remained focused on the cards, one to him, one to her. “I remember. You called that one before we’d even set up.”
“I know how to tell a sex toy from a firearm.” She narrowed her eyes in a mock glare. “You made me go up there and get her all by myself. Said you wanted no part of trying to wrestle a rubber penis from a crazy woman twenty feet off the ground.”
He dealt out the last card, the deck now split evenly between them. “You handled the situation.”
“Of course I did.”
“Of course.” He looked up. “Are you ready?”
She nodded, placed one hand on top of her stack. On some signal I couldn’t see, she flipped the top card face-up in the middle. Trey did the same on his turn. Back and forth they went until a jack appeared, and they both slapped a hand on top of it, Trey first. She cursed as he collected the cards.
“Damn, you got faster in your old age.”
He shuffled the cards into his deck. “Perhaps you’ve gotten slower.”
“Like hell.”
Then back to flipping cards. She claimed the second jack, Trey the third. He didn’t take his eyes off the table, didn’t even look at the messenger bag.
She slid closer until she was on the edge of the chair. “You still think Nick Talbot did it?”
“I do.” Trey turned over another card. “Do you still think Macklin did it?”
“Yep.”
Trey snagged the fourth jack, and Keesha cursed. He gathered the last of the deck to himself.
“Macklin had no motive,” he said.
“Greed not good enough for you? The man was up to his eyeballs in debt. Gambling debt, hooker debt, God knows what other kind of debt.”
“He also had an alibi. His dash cam.”
“His first visit is at 8:45, lasts approximately five minutes. Then he’s there again an hour later, talking about some gut feeling. Gut feeling, my ass. He killed that woman somewhere in that hour between and then pretended to find her body, pretended to catch her killer in the act, hit his own self upside his own head and pretended to find that weapon on the edge of the property. And then everybody eats this story up like it was a damn doughnut.”
She slapped her hand on the jack and dragged the stack of cards toward her. Trey took his stack and sat back. They regarded each other over the coffee table like gunslingers at the OK Corral.
Trey put his cards down. “Talbot bought that gun the month before.”
“Because of the burglaries. Hundreds of Buckhead residents bought new guns.”
“Still, Macklin knew better than to go back to the house. He knew Jessica was there. He’d spoken with her at 8:45.”
“In gym clothes. He thought she was about to leave the house and go for a run.” Keesha put her cards down, flipped the top one over. “So he parks the cruiser and sneaks back, thinks she’s gone, she’s not, she walks in on him stealing her jewelry and makes a break for it, he grabs the gun from the side table…pow pow. Twice in the back as she’s running down the stairs, once in the chest when she falls. He makes the scene look like a burglary gone bad, goes back to his car, starts driving around again. Goes back to the house to pretend to find her body. At which point you show up.”
They flipped cards the entire time she talked. I could picture them in some neighborhood bar with a beer-sticky floor, slapping down cards after a shift, surrounded by laughter. I was watching history, this moment added to a daisy chain of other moments going back years.
Keesha claimed the next jack. “But since you’re all about alibis, you know your boy Nick Talbot has a solid one.”
“The woman he was having an affair with. We could have broken her testimony in court.”
“That sweet thing with the batty-bat eyelashes and heart full of love?” She scoffed. “Please. Nobody was breaking that child.”
“Regardless, no connection was ever found between Macklin and the Talbots.”
“That’s because people stopped looking for it when he blew his brains out. But there’s a big hole in that case, and it’s shaped like Joe Macklin.”
Garrity was right—she and Trey had matching grudges. As much as Trey wanted to take down Nicholas Talbot, Keesha wanted to take down Joe Macklin.
Trey flipped a card. “If Macklin had staged the scene, he would have done a better job. He knew the details that would make it look authentic. But Talbot didn’t. Talbot only knew what he’d read about in the newspapers.”
“Macklin was working fast. He made mistakes.”
“Those mistakes weren’t cop mistakes, they were civilian mistakes, and you know it.”
Her eyes flashed as she flipped her card, an ace. “You know what I know? I know that when you got there you were supposed to secure the scene. But you didn’t. Instead, you rendered aid to the victim. The dead victim. Before you cleared the house.”
Trey flipped his card. The Jack of Clubs. But he didn’t move to claim it. Neither did Keesha. It lay between them on the table, untouched.
“Now why would you do a fool-ass thing like that?” she said.
He stared at the jack. “I don’t know. I remember feeling as if I were watching from somewhere else in the room. Watching somebody else count off the compressions and clear the airway.”
My heart felt light in my chest. Disassociation. A psychological reaction to overwhelming stress.
He shrugged, eyes still on the table. “And then I was myself again. And I had her blood on my hands. On my knees. On my mouth. So I stood up. I secured the scene. And then I went back to my cruiser for the first aid kit for Macklin.”
“I know what happened,” Keesha said, her voice tightening. “I found out when I read the OPS report. Not because you told me. You never said a word to me.”
He looked puzzled. “How could I tell you that I’d made that kind of fundamental mistake?”
“Just like that. That’s how.”
He shook his head. “You did not tolerate failure, not in yourself, certainly not in your partner.”
“I don’t give a good goddamn about what you did wrong! I care that you could have been killed!”
“But I wasn’t. There was no suspect on premises.” His expression stayed calm, but it was a manufactured calm. “Is that why you took the files without telling me? Because I wasn’t honest with you?”
“I took them because I couldn’t trust you.”
Trey froze. Then he reached forward and claimed the jack, started shuffling it into his deck. “Okay.”
Keesha arched an eyebrow. “That’s all you got to say to that?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to s
ay that you’re sorry. Because I came to the hospital that night, after the accident. I came the next morning. I came over and over and over again. But all I got was the wall.” Her voice shook, old pain rising to the surface. “And now you show up at my training. But not for me. Because you want those damn files.”
He stopped shuffling. “You don’t think…that’s not why I signed up to help with the training. In the woods. With the mosquitoes and the poison oak and the…things in the trees.”
Her brow creased. “Squirrels?”
“Right. Squirrels. I don’t like squirrels. But I volunteered anyway because I wanted to see you. I wanted to…I was trying to…I can’t find the word. Three syllables, starts with R.”
I knew the word. But I wasn’t about to interfere.
“Reconnect,” Keesha said.
“Yes. That’s it. I was trying to reconnect. But I’m very bad at it.”
Keesha’s expression didn’t change. “You suck at it.”
“Yes. But I am sorry. For all of it.”
She didn’t say anything for an entire minute. Then she switched her dark luminous gaze on me. “Seaver says you’re his partner now. You know what that means?”
I was startled, but I’d been expecting the question. Trey and I had gone over this before she’d arrived. He had not used that word casually, he’d explained. It meant something to her, and to him. Did I understand? he’d asked.
“Yes,” I said.
Keesha shoved the deck his way and stood, leaving the messenger bag on the sofa. “The files are yours now. For as long as you need them, or until I need them back, or until I tell you to burn ’em to fucking ash. We clear on that?”
He stood up too. “Very clear.”
“And if you really want to reconnect, next time let me know that’s what you’re doing, all right?”
“All right.”
“We’ll find a squirrel-free zone.”
She let a smile flicker around her mouth. She started walking toward the door, Trey right behind. She paused in the threshold.
“I’m still a better shot,” she said.
Trey shrugged. “I still run faster.”
“Maybe. But I’m gaining on you, Seaver.”
She held out her fist, knuckles first. He tapped it lightly with his own. Then she left without looking back. Trey closed the door behind her. He didn’t even hesitate, went right to the sofa and started removing files from the bag.
I came out of the kitchen. “You digging into all this right now?”
“Yes.”
He stacked several folders on the coffee table. There were dozens more in the bag, hundreds of pages. I checked the time. Nine o’clock. I opened the cabinet and pulled down the coffee and a box of lapsang souchong tea, both highly caffeinated.
“Trey?”
“Yes?”
“Keesha’s tattoo. I recognized the labyrinth, but not the Latin.”
“Alea iacta est.” He spread another sheaf of folders on the table. “She told me it was a quote from Julius Caesar as he prepared to cross the Rubicon.”
“What does it mean?”
Trey placed the empty bag on the floor. “It means, the die is cast.”
Chapter Thirteen
Trey sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by yellow pads, mechanical pencils, and sticky notes. He understood information best if he could process it spatially—flowcharts and bubble maps, lists and graphs—and he liked it hard copy. Every now and then he’d take a sip of tea. The caffeine would buy him an extra hour or so before he finally crashed, but he’d pay at the end. His sleep would be jittery, restless, no matter how many valerian root capsules he took.
I propped my chin in my hand and watched him. Yes, tomorrow would suck for him, but he was crisp and utterly capable at the moment. First, he’d sorted Keesha’s files into stacks. Then he’d hauled in the boxes we’d collected from his basement, now dusted and organized. I’d added my own research, the scattered online articles and magazine spreads, the lurid and the tacky all mixed up with the objective and professional.
He held his mug with both hands, his expression serious. “Tai—”
“I already know.”
“Know what?”
“Why the files are so secret.” I sat my coffee on the floor. “See, Garrity said the only reason you needed to be worried about breaching confidentiality was if those files revealed the identify of Keesha’s CI. But your worries felt bigger than that.” I tapped one folder, resting now on his knee. “I think Keesha is the CI. I think she’s working undercover for OPS.”
Trey didn’t say anything; he simply extended the file my way. I skimmed the interview transcripts. Every single time the CI’s name was mentioned, the name had been redacted. Not one mention of Keesha Price. Macklin, Talbot, lots of Trey Seaver in there too. But not a single CI.
And then I saw it. The same name, repeated, only not in the reports themselves. In the administrative section at the top of the page.
I pointed. “This is the OPS officer who investigated Macklin. And you.”
Trey nodded. But I was still puzzled. Why would Keesha make copies of these files? To protect Trey, certainly, in case the incident came up again. But the official record still existed. It was still accessible. Unless…
I gave the papers a satisfying thump. “She’s a double agent! An undercover OPS officer covertly investigating the OPS itself. She kept these copies because she worried the records might be altered, and then you’d have only your word to protect you.”
“She suspected that might be the case, yes.”
“But don’t they video OPS interviews?”
“Yes. But the division is moving its video evidence to cloud storage. They hired an outside company to do this. Occasionally a recording becomes corrupted. Or misfiled. Or lost.”
“Sometimes on purpose.”
“Price is certain of it. Gathering the evidence, however, is proving…challenging.”
I wasn’t surprised. At every intersection of the investigation process, there was a chance for someone to interfere. Involve an outside firm in such a crucial process, give its people discretionary oversight, and bam: major fox and henhouse situation.
I placed the file in its proper stack. “Did she catch the guilty party?”
“Parties. And no, not yet. The investigation is ongoing.”
“Four years ongoing?”
He nodded.
“So we have to treat these files like nuclear bombs?”
“Yes. But if I’m going to engage with Nicholas Talbot again, I needed to see the evidence again.”
“If you’re going to?”
“Correct.” He scrutinized the semi-circle of information fanned around him like a rainbow. “I haven’t decided yet.”
I drained the last of my coffee, rubbed my hands together. “In that case, we’d best get on with it.”
The next hours were a parade of blood and betrayal and bad ends. The crime scene photos were few and horrific, but it was Trey’s field sketches that hit me hardest. Drawn from an overhead perspective, they were bare and precise—blood spatter detailed as objectively as room measurements. He’d rendered the body of Jessica Talbot as a faceless figure, plain, a piece of evidence like the footprints or the shell casings…except for the waves of hair trailing across her face and the open palm of one hand. It was a painstaking detail, wrenching and human, and it revealed as much about Trey as it did about the body.
I closed the folder. “You told Keesha that Macklin would have done a better job of staging the scene. How?”
“The broken glass at the alleged entry site, for one.” He pointed to the map of the garage. “The Buckhead Burglar came in quietly, usually through a door after disarming the security system. He wouldn’t have shattered a side window. He never broke into an occupied home,
and yet Jessica’s car was in the garage, a clear indication that she was still on premises, as was the fact that the security system was not armed.”
Trey had assembled the official crime scene sketches like a map of the home, each room a separate piece of paper. These were computer rendered, two-dimensional and bloodless. He pointed to the bank of doors overlooking the backyard patio.
“This would have been the entry site he would have most likely used. Hidden from the street, close to the main security box for easy disarming. The suspect fled through these doors, through the backyard and into a wooded area adjacent to Powers Ferry Road, and then, presumably, into Chastain Park where Macklin lost him. There was no hesitation, no wrong turns or backtracking.”
“You’re saying the killer knew where he was going?”
“Yes.”
Trey put out the mug shot. Nick Talbot in a dark golf shirt, his eyes wide, like a startled nocturnal animal. I tried to imagine him shooting his wife in the back, but the image wouldn’t take.
“Talbot had been having an affair for months,” Trey said. “That morning, he told family and friends that he was going golfing. And he did park at the golf club, at the north end of the park. But he didn’t stay there.”
“His lover picked him up.”
“That’s what she testified to, yes. Addison Canright, a volunteer he’d met at his most recent rehab facility, now a writer on something called Moonshine. She said that she drove him to her apartment, where he stayed for two hours before she returned him to his car.”
He pulled out her photo, a newspaper shot snapped as she was leaving the courthouse. A small, neat woman, she wore her black hair in a shoulder-length blunt cut, her features hidden behind sunglasses too big for her face. I remembered Keesha’s words: that sweet thing with the batty-bat eyelashes and heart full of love. But in this photo, Addison Canfield’s slate gray dress and sensible shoes spoke of restraint, not come-hither high jinks.