His phone vibrated with a text. Benjamin Dobeck asked if they could meet ASAP.
Kenny texted back: Sitting area outside Princeton library. He added: And you have to buy me Sakura’s because I’m starving.
* * *
■ ■ ■
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Kenny was dipping an oshinko roll into a plastic cup of soy sauce and savoring his first meal of the day. Who says there’s no such thing as a free lunch? Benjamin had not bought anything for himself. Ken assumed that his friend had developed an ulcerous condition over the events of the past week, since he’d never known him not to eat when eating was an option.
“You’re broke, aren’t you?” asked Benjamin. He was wearing his uniform, which naturally included his gun. After what had just happened at the rifle range, Ken was feeling especially sensitive about the thought of having a gun pointed at his face. And he had felt pretty sensitive about such things before what had just happened at the Patriots Rifle Range.
“Haven’t eaten since yesterday,” Kenny admitted.
“That explains it,” his friend muttered.
“What?” Kenny asked through a mouthful of sushi.
“Why you’re so desperate to hurt so many people,” Benjamin replied.
“I’m not,” Kenny stammered. “I don’t—”
“You’re attacking my family, my coworkers, my department, our entire town.”
“I’m attacking—? Benjy, I don’t know how much you know. I hope it’s not a lot, because otherwise, you’re either sitting here lying to my face or you’re delusional. But either way—”
“There’s stuff you couldn’t understand,” said Benjamin.
“Like what?”
“You don’t have family, Ken, not really,” he replied. “Blood carried on to blood. Responsibility handed down from one generation to the next. You don’t have that. Your dad died, and I’m sorry, but your mom was cold before that and became an iceberg afterwards. You never liked your brother, you were always jealous of him and angry at the world because you thought pretty boys like him and me had things easy.”
Kenny decided not to respond with a defensive, caustic comment, mostly because Benjamin wasn’t wrong. He ate a couple more pieces of sushi, then said, “Nothing you say about me isn’t true, but it has nothing to do with the real truth here. Your grandfather was involved in a murder in the summer of nineteen sixty-five. He may not have committed the murder, or he might have, I don’t know, but I do know he sure as hell was complicit in covering it up. That family responsibility you talked about? That was handed down from your great-grandfather to your grandfather and then to your dad. So, did your dad pass it on to you, Benjy? Or haven’t you earned that yet in their eyes?”
Benjamin Dobeck said nothing.
“I’m sorry I’m going to be responsible for making you lose your job and sending you to jail,” Kenny continued. “But I gave you a choice and you’ve picked the wrong side every single time.”
Getting no response, Kenny said, “Thanks for lunch.” He walked away, hoping he wouldn’t get shot in the back.
At his desk, he wrote a rough first draft of his article, infused with existing facts but also loaded with speculation about how things would soon break. It was six p.m. when he finished, and he was the last one left in the office. He heard a rumble of thunder and the rain started coming down. He hoped it would break the humidity. With the rain pounding, he finished proofreading the draft.
It was good. Netflix good. It probably would have read better if he’d wrestled the gun out of Appelhans’s hands. Or if it had gone off once or twice, maybe even wounded him in the leg.
He called Andrea.
She answered, “I’m getting dinner on the table.”
“I’ve seen your cooking. The kids won’t mind if you take your time,” he said. “I wrote a first draft of the story.”
“Really? But we’re not done yet.”
“I know, I do that just to see how it plays out, how it feels. It’s not for publication. Anyway, I was reading it and something stood out to me. Worried me.”
“What?”
“Bradley Dobeck,” he said.
“I made him out for the Sasmal murder, Ken.”
“And it doesn’t worry you that he knows we’re onto him?”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s why I wanted to pressure the others to talk. The sooner the better.”
“Okay, well, I just wanted to say to be careful,” Kenny said. “I don’t trust that he won’t try to hurt you or your husband, maybe even the kids.”
“I hear you. I don’t think any of them are going to do anything because they know there are too many people talking already. But you’re absolutely right; I’ll keep an eye out. The alarm is set at night and the one thing the old bastard doesn’t know, that not even Jeff knows, is that I have a gun and I know how to use it.”
“Seriously?” he asked.
“I have two. One of them is a ghost,” she said. “I won’t waste that one on Dobeck. I’m saving it for Jeff.”
“Not funny,” he said.
“We have Ramon at eleven tomorrow,” she said.
“Get a good night’s sleep, Andie.”
“You, too,” she replied.
She put her cell phone down and looked over the kitchen countertop and out the window. She could see the geese rustling in the pond. She drew the curtains, thinking about the Patriots Rifle Range on the other side of the pond, and knowing that during the entire time of her musings, she could easily have been in someone’s target sights.
41
KENNY was awakened at 7:35 by a call from Laura Privan at Windrows. She had seen something she thought he should know about. Bradley Dobeck had left the facility at six the night before, driving off in Steve Appelhans’s car. When he returned at eight fifteen, he was soaking wet, his knees and shoes caked with mud, his arms covered in scratches.
“Was he in an accident?” asked Kenny.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “It was just odd. And then he went to the elevator and back to his room. I—um . . . I’ve been hearing some things. About Bradley and his friends. I mean, people talk—I mean, your mother, honestly, your mother talks . . . a lot, so I knew you’d been investigating Bradley and I was worried.”
Kenny thanked her and hung up. He called Andrea. When she didn’t answer, he started to panic. Maybe she was driving? Maybe she was busy doing some kind of pregnant-woman thing he wasn’t aware they had to do?
He texted her. No response. He was thinking of going to Windrows and confronting Dobeck when his phone rang. He breathed a sigh of relief.
“What’s up?” Andrea asked. “You’re going to be ready in time?”
“Yes,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“I’m fine, why?”
He relayed what Laura Privan had told him. She processed it and shrugged it off. “Nothing happened.”
“I want to find out if he has a gun in the car he took out last night,” Kenny said.
“We can talk to Ramon about it in a couple hours, see what he thinks,” she said.
* * *
■ ■ ■
ANDREA PICKED KENNY up in the Odyssey at ten. He was surprised to see she had brought her two youngest with her. He was not surprised to realize he couldn’t remember their names.
“Hi, Mr. Kenny,” squealed one of the girls in the back. “Your face looks funny!”
“Hi, Mr. Kenny,” mirrored the younger one. “Why does your face look so fat?”
“Too much gluten,” he responded to their giggles. “How are you doing . . . ?”
“Sarah and Sadie,” whispered Andrea.
“I knew that,” he said.
“Mommy said we’re going to get to sit in a real office!” exclaimed Sadie.
“Yeah, that’s great, Sa
rah,” he said.
“She’s Sadie!” said Sarah.
“And she’s Sarah!” said Sadie.
“And I’m suicidal,” said Kenny.
The girls giggled again.
He stared daggers at Andrea.
“Jeff went golfing and our deal was he took two kids and I took two kids. Don’t worry, this’ll all play really well in your Netflix documentary,” she said.
He couldn’t argue with that.
Though it took them only forty-five minutes to reach the FBI offices, to Kenny it felt like forty-five years. Ramon came out to greet them and Andrea introduced him to Kenny. When they shook hands, Kenny couldn’t even fake a strong grip. He stood in front of the man he suspected Andrea had really loved. Mercado was tall, muscular, and good-looking in a swarthy way that made Kenny feel a little like a glass of almond milk.
The FBI agent greeted the girls with casual, confident respect, but not in that adult-without-children way that talked down to them or tried too hard to act like them. And he’d also remembered both their names. And even which name went with which body, which Kenny thought was just showing off.
He led them inside. An assistant met them at the elevator, taking Sadie and Sarah to an office where they could stream cartoons on a computer. There were also several toys for them to play with. Off Kenny’s confusion, Ramon said, “We have to keep children occupied often enough that we just finally set up a day care room.”
Ramon walked them to a large conference room, where a few other agents waited for them. One entire wall was a whiteboard with two marker trays. A second wall was a large screen linked to a computer. Andrea and Kenny had both brought their laptops. Andrea also had a flash drive she handed to Ramon.
Ramon opened up the JPEG of Andrea’s map rug and cast it on the large screen. “Ptolemy had nothing on you,” he muttered. She giggled and playfully elbowed him in the ribs. Kenny watched it, wondering if his chin was dragging at his ankles. The words Andie Abelman, giggled, and playfully had never, to the best of his knowledge, been used in the same sentence.
Andrea asked Kenny if he could work the whiteboard since she couldn’t reach the top and her knees were killing her.
Like a servile monkey, he stood up and grabbed a marker. “You want me to break it down for him?”
“The people,” she said. “The map will show him location.”
Kenny followed the parameters of the original wall chart he’d drawn up at the start of his investigation. By the time he had finished, it had taken up the entire wall. For the first time, he was able to give their work a thorough review, devoid of any personal bias. He took it all in for a second. He thought it stood up. He turned to face Andrea and Ramon.
“It doesn’t stand up,” said Ramon.
Kenny flipped the marker in the air, and much to his embarrassment, he failed to catch it. And it wasn’t a simple, clean drop, of course. The marker bounced off his hand and in trying to snag it, he hit it two more times before it skittered under the conference room table.
Ramon asked his agents to point out the holes and they did. It all sounded frustratingly right to Kenny. His boner of twenty seconds ago had dropped. Proving a murder seemed like a lot more work than writing a newspaper story accusing someone of murder. He had more than enough information now to go to press and let things go from there. He had to deal with the court of public opinion, not prove his case in an actual court.
Just when Kenny thought no more air could be leaked from his deflated balloon, Ramon said, “We don’t have enough to arrest anyone.”
Andrea answered immediately. “You will after you hear Jennifer Guilfoyle’s confession.”
Ramon said, “Play it.”
Andrea clicked and dragged the file from her flash drive to the desktop and opened it. Jennifer Guilfoyle’s nervous face appeared on-screen, her eyes avoiding Sathwika’s camera phone. She looked down, rubbing her thin, weathered hands.
When she began to speak, her voice was a dry whisper. “I loved Cleon. I knew I shouldn’t—and he tried so hard to ignore me every time I flirted with him. He was funny.” Her eyes looked away, lost in bitter memories. “He had such a beautiful smile. I try to remember that smile . . . his laugh . . . I try to remember that and not the farmers . . . my father . . . yelling at him in the barn. All of them yelling at him. They were so angry.”
Eight minutes later, the confession ended. She had named who was there. The sudden silence that followed their anger. The sounds of Cleon’s body being cut apart. The men leaving with parts of him. The room was quiet. After a minute, Ramon said, “We arrest the three older men and the township administrators who appeared in Kenny’s video at the gun range.”
“Bradley Dobeck, Appelhans, Halloway, Robertson, Eversham, and Mueller,” said Kenny.
“On conspiracy to conceal a murder,” said Andrea. “But not on murder.”
“Right.”
“And the police department? Police Chief Dobeck?” asked Kenny.
“We don’t have anything concrete,” said Ramon. “Yet.”
“What’s the timeline?” Andrea asked.
“We execute the warrants on Monday morning,” he said.
“We haven’t discussed the most important part yet,” said Kenny.
Ramon was confused. Andrea said, “He wants to write his story.”
“Do you have a story?” asked Ramon.
Kenny laughed. “I have more than enough and I shouldn’t have to wait any longer. I can post a blog tonight. I can go to press by next Wednesday.”
“But I’m asking that you not do that,” said Ramon, with a tone of voice that clearly indicated to Kenny that he wasn’t asking.
By 4:40, Andrea had dropped the kids off at home with Jeff and was meeting with Kenny and Detectives Rossi and Garmin at the office of the Princeton Post. Ramon was on FaceTime on Kenny’s laptop. Everyone’s discomfort was palpable.
“What is it you want out of us?” asked Rossi.
“The warrant will be served Monday by eleven a.m.,” said Ramon. “Two things will help make this go more smoothly. You have one day to plan for the schism it’s going to create in your department between the people you think might be part of this conspiracy and those you don’t. And second, you’ll have to talk to the mayor”—Ramon looked at a note on his desk to remind himself of her name—“Wu. We’ll be notifying her of the execution of the warrant at ten thirty a.m. I know that sounds tight but we can’t risk anyone in her office getting the word out. We will recommend she immediately place Chief Dobeck on paid administrative leave until the investigation is concluded. She will then appoint a temporary chief of police and that will likely be one of you.”
“Chain of command is Lt. Wilson,” said Rossi.
“Her family has lived in West Windsor for eighty years, Detective,” said Andrea. “We can’t be certain she’s not a part of the conspiracy.”
“Shit,” replied Garmin.
“Don’t blame us,” said Kenny.
“We don’t, Lee,” said Rossi. “We just got a giant plate of crap and we have to divvy it up into edible portions.”
“I’m spending tomorrow getting a task force in place and up to speed. Everyone knows what’s expected of them,” said Ramon. “So, let’s get ready for Monday.”
Kenny raised his hand. “Excuse me, I don’t know what’s expected of me.”
Ramon smiled. “You’re expected to be a good citizen before you’re a good journalist and sit on this until we’ve had a chance to interrogate the conspirators.”
“So, to get this straight, you’re expecting me to not do my job while you do your jobs?” Kenny said.
“Exactly,” Ramon said. “And as compensation, you’ve been getting the inside scoop on the investigation every step of the way.” He cut the video feed.
Kenny’s laptop screen blinked back to its deskto
p setting.
The fact that it showed a picture of Taylor Swift did not help the moment, so he closed his laptop before anyone could mention it. He quickly said, “Why am I the one getting the short end here?”
“Reporters just don’t get it,” said Rossi. “It’s not about getting the story out first, it’s about getting it out right. That’s what we do, we try to get the story right.”
Kenny spun on Rossi, finger wagging in his face. “You’re representing a department whose chiefs have covered up a racially biased murder for fifty years, so maybe a little less holier-than-thou would be a better look for you right now.”
The room was quiet for several seconds.
Rossi turned to Andrea and said, “We’ll be in the mayor’s office when she gets the call. I want you there with us.”
“Me?” asked Andrea.
“Her?” asked Kenny.
“The mayor doesn’t like you, Lee,” said Rossi. “But she’s going to love her.”
Kenny looked to Andrea for some kind of support. Getting none, his jaw slack, with nothing to say, he gathered his laptop off the table and said, “Fine, Andie. No problem. I’ll call your publicity agent after your meeting with the mayor, and maybe they’ll let me know if it’s okay for me to interview you.”
He stormed out of the conference room, almost bowling over Janelle as he blew past the door. She followed him to his cubicle. “Maybe they’re right,” his editor said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, maybe it’s better if we wait to see if any arrests are made.”
“Janelle, this is the story you didn’t want me to do,” he snapped. “And now it’s the story you don’t want me to write. Ben Bradlee would be rolling over in his grave if he were watching you do your job right now.”
As the detectives left, Andrea walked over to Kenny’s cubicle. He pretended to be shuffling papers on his desk, which was problematic since he only had two pieces of paper on his desk.
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