Bobby says, “Do you want me to go with you?”
He means to Malone. Bobby and I have no misunderstandings even when we speak in shorthand. It’s one of the reasons we love each other. He knows I want to make sure that Clyde will not spend the rest of his life in the safety of a jail, one with comforts for former prison guards. I don’t have much time before police question or arrest him. Bobby walks me to my car. We don’t talk. I am imagining the movie of me in a courthouse; I am my own moving camera. It begins with an establishing shot of the exterior of the courthouse, then a tracking shot of me climbing the stairs to the entrance. Cut: I enter the lobby. Another angle. I am waving to the security guards, who by now are my buds, especially Danielle, with whom I have had a beer or two at the River Tavern. She wants to move to Brooklyn. When she does, I promise to help her get a job in my police force. This one time, because the line is long and Danielle knows I am in a hurry (I’m a witness), she waves me around the metal detector. That is how I will bring a gun into the courtroom. Cut to me sitting in the witness chair, cross-examined by the defense attorney. When he is finished challenging my memory of the evening Clyde allegedly shot Dr. Karim, this attorney will turn to the judge. “No more questions, Your Honor.”
The judge will respond, “The witness is excused.” I rise from my hard-backed wooden chair, walk to the defense table, take out my .38 Ruger LCR, pause for a second before I pull the trigger so Clyde knows what to expect, dash any hopes he has for an acquittal, a hung jury, a long or short sentence with the possibility of parole. I put a .38 slug into Clyde’s brain, then another to his heart. He falls over dead, just dead. Like Haneen’s brother, I drop the gun to the floor, put my hands on my head, wait for my close-up. I will say, “It was necessary.”
There will be no wailing from me.
Bobby reads my mind. “Once they have him, you’ll never get within ten feet of him. They are not stupid.”
He is right. I delete the courtroom shooting scene from my movie.
“I have to go home.”
“Are you sure you don’t want me to go with you?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me, how you plan to get away with this?”
“I don’t plan to.”
“That’s a dumb-ass mistake.”
“I know.”
Have I just become a lost cause to the man I love who loves me? If I kill Clyde and admit it, I will be arrested, fired from the Long Island City Police. Returning to college becomes problematic unless I can do an online course from the prison where I will be spending a large part of the rest of my life. A talented defense lawyer might be able to convince a jury that I acted out of diminished capacity, the insanity defense, but I would never agree to that. I am not insane. I am perfectly sane. I was seeking justice. Bobby calculates. Does he want to wait for me to finish my sentence, then come out of prison, be his wife, mother to his children? Bobby is a realist; he plays the odds. I imagine him crunching the numbers of our future. Bobby’s expression says maybe, maybe not. We realize we’ve both been living in a fantasy world. Mine is my obsessive revenge. Bobby’s been humoring me, going along with it by helping me find Clyde, trying to keep me sane while we do, also not facing what the consequences of finding him will be.
I think neither of us really believed it would happen. Now it has. The cowardly bastard, the murderer, is within range. If I make good on my promise to kill Clyde, then this present delusional life might be over. I can see Bobby pull out the receipt from the life calculator. Does it say his investment in me is a bad one, write it off? In the movie of Bobby and me, there are quick close-ups of two people who realize life has just caught up with them. Am I selfish? What is the point of this act of revenge? My own logic says since Clyde killed my father, I will kill him. My act will be illegal, a violation of due process, my role as a police officer. I will take responsibility for it. Once again, the circles created by the stone of my father’s murder spread outward, and Bobby B is brought in. Who else?
“Do you want me to come with you?” Bobby asks again.
“No.”
“Then you will need an alibi when you get back.”
It’s what I love about him.
Chapter 29
I leave the shelter early the next morning and drive to my apartment, where a thick FedEx envelope leans against my door. I make coffee and read the file Ernie Saldana sent to me.
The first document is a photocopied history of the Army of God compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The center tracks domestic hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Brotherhood, neo-Nazi groups, racist biker gangs, the Jewish Defense League, and the Army of God. The next item is a two-page FBI biography of Clyde Fairbrother. He was born to Anne and Dennis Fairbrother in Nantahala, North Carolina. When Clyde was ten, Anne divorced Dennis and took Clyde to Missouri, where she joined her sister in a compound known as the Church of Israel. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists it as a Christian Identity hate group. Clyde spent four years at the compound, homeschooled; worked part-time as a carpenter’s helper; and got his high school diploma at the same time he was certified as a junior minister in the Church of Israel.
Clyde married Shirley Ruiz, a member of the church. They had a daughter, Glory. When she was three years old, Glory died of meningitis despite the efforts of Dr. Robert Matthews, the founder of the church, to cure her through prayer. There was an unsuccessful attempt by the Missouri Department of Health to prosecute Clyde, Shirley, and Dr. Matthews on charges of child endangerment for refusing to take the child to a hospital or physician. A year later, Clyde and Shirley divorced.
Clyde joined the marines, took basic training at Quantico in Virginia. Following a tour in the first Gulf War, he was assigned to embassy duty in Moscow, Helsinki, and last, Cologne. In 2009, the year before his discharge, Clyde was sent to Afghanistan to serve in an outpost in Kandahar province. Its mission was to expand protection to the nearby villages and provide basic training to local army units, some of which were infiltrated by the same people they were supposed to fight.
The unit spent a year doing cursory patrols, making sure the army cadets they were training did not have live ammunition that could be turned against them, and constantly strengthening the defensive position of their base from attack by Al-Qaeda. Detective Higgins, who also did a tour in Afghanistan, told me a similar story. He put it succinctly. “The training and protection mission was bullshit; we changed it to ensuring our own survival.”
In a night attack, Clyde was wounded by shrapnel from a mortar round and flown out, recuperated at Walter Reed and enrolled in a dodgy for-profit college that took his GI Bill money and promised him a career in respiratory technology. Halfway through the course, it went out of business. Clyde returned to the compound, married Bea Turner. The next year, the Church of Israel became a familiar presence on the anti-abortion road show, with Clyde Fairbrother as its star. It is more than I need to know, but there is something vaguely familiar about this. It will come to me, as all things do; perhaps on my drive to Malone to kill Clyde. I leave a voice mail with Phyllis that I have a job emergency and will be away from the shelter for one or two nights.
According to Google Maps, the town of Malone is a five-hour-and-twenty-seven-minute drive northward on the Governor Thomas E. Dewey Thruway, also known as I-87. Governor Dewey is less remembered for his governing accomplishments than for the picture of a grinning Harry Truman holding the Chicago Tribune with its blazing headline “Dewey Defeats Truman!” that wrongly proclaimed Dewey winner of the 1948 presidential election. It is a lesson about getting it right. I have been preparing for this moment for a long time. I will get it right. There are CCTV cameras at bridges crossing the Hudson and at every thruway tollbooth, so I will take a route that is longer, complicated, and not recorded.
I take a bus to Penn Station, then another to Newark Airport, and get on a shuttle to the Avis rental office. At the counter, a woman takes my fake New Jersey driver’s license with a photo of someon
e who looks like me but isn’t. I give her a prepaid debit card I bought in a Walgreens, emerge from the parking lot in a rented gray Ford Escape that smells of tobacco and lemon oil. My driving outfit will be a black parka with a high collar, a knitted cap, sunglasses, and a thick scarf; there isn’t much of my face that is visible to any CCTV cameras, anywhere. I am on the west bank of the Hudson River; there are no bridges to cross all the way north. When I get to Malone, the Ford will be unremarkable, harder to remember than my red Prius.
I zig and zag through New Jersey suburbs until I hit Route 9W in New York. It runs north, parallel to the thruway. It will cost me an hour going through towns, but I will leave no tracks. I obey speed limits, don’t tempt yellow lights, make one bathroom coffee break at Kingston, refill the gas tank and pay cash. North of Kingston, the traffic thins out. The scenery is monotonous; orderly green pine trees line the road. Except for the occasional deer crossing warnings, there are no road signs, billboards, or other distractions. The only obligation is not to fall asleep at the wheel. There is no chance of that. I will not listen to music, news, or talk radio. I will spend the time figuring out the best way to kill Clyde Fairbrother. In the trunk of my car is the backpack I prepared for this mission. It contains dark clothes, Bausch + Lomb night-vision binoculars, a loaded Walther P22 pistol, its serial number filed off, with a Finnish SAK noise suppressor. I discovered the Walther behind a toilet in a drug dealer’s abandoned apartment and kept it. The noise suppressor went missing from the Long Island City Police evidence locker a long time ago. No one noticed.
I stay on 9W for another three hours, passing the lakes: Lake George, Lake Placid, and Lake Saranac. At Plattsburgh, I switch over to I-90, drive due west for fifty miles until I enter Malone. Signs inform me the Lions Club meets on Thursday, the Knights of Columbus Tuesday, the Moose on Monday. Malone’s population is 12,500; elevation is 790 feet above sea level. At a stoplight, I read a historical marker. I am glad to learn the husband of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the author of Little House on the Prairie, was a native of Malone.
When I have done what I set out to do, I write a letter.
Dear Mom and Sammy,
Greetings from Malone in way upstate New York—just below the Canadian border. I drove up from Long Island City. It took almost six hours but, in the end, it was worth the trip. Or, as they say in the Michelin Guide, “worth a detour.” I’m sure you guys are wondering, why Malone? Here’s why: him. The one who shot Daddy. I found him. I had lots of help from Ernie Saldana. He heard about a man who sold a sniper rifle to the killer. He got the FBI to trace the DNA on a beer can the killer left in the man’s car, and he was traced to Malone, where he was working as a prison guard. I drove up as quickly as I could to get to him before the police did. His name is (was) Clyde Fairbrother. About the past tense, you can have no doubt.
In the end, killing Clyde was simple. Easy simple. I stopped at a diner in Malone, ordered some food at the counter, went to the bathroom. There was a pay phone on the wall with a local phone book on a chain. Can you believe it? When was the last time you saw a phone book? You guessed it—Clyde Fairbrother was listed, with his address. The house was ten minutes out of town. It was a typical upstate two-story wood frame, probably built in the ’40s like ours. It had a porch, a fireplace, a detatched garage, where there must be tools, a workbench, a boat on a trailer, and a chest freezer. It abutted a woodsy area. Best of all, the porch faced the trees.
I parked at the end of the street and waited until he came home from work. When it got dark, I drove farther down the road. Then, using night-vision binoculars, I found a spot in the woods under a pine tree where I could see the house. I watched him eat his dinner with a woman who must be his wife. When they finished, he put the dishes in the washer. Then he went outside on the side porch and lit a cigarette. I walked right up to him. I was wearing a black jacket, black jeans, and a black knit cap. Oh, I had a pair of hospital booties over my shoes—no footprints. I had a sign hanging from my neck with the words i am the daughter of dr. martin karim.
He said, “Please don’t.”
They were his last words. I put a bullet in his head, then one in his heart. I used the Walther P22 with the SAK noise suppressor. Sammy, the sound isn’t like in your video games, that pumf-pumf; it’s more like a sharp door knock. He went down on his knees (the P22 doesn’t have a lot of punch), then I repeated the process; four rounds in all. As I walked back into the woods, I heard a woman’s voice call out from the kitchen, “Clyde, you okay?”
I went back to the car and drove home. I stopped at a gas station. In the bathroom I burned the paper booties and the sign I had hung around my neck, and flushed the ashes down the toilet. I broke down the Walther. I threw its parts, one at a time, separately, into the woods along the forest road at ten-mile intervals. In a few years, it will be just random rusted junk. There will be no murder weapon. I tossed the shell casings and the noise suppressor into the Hudson River south of Poughkeepsie. I’d left my phone with Bobby in my apartment. He checked my Facebook page a few times, sent some emails, looked at my bank balance. The phone will be additional supporting evidence that I never left Long Island.
For sure I’ll stop at the cemetery next week to say hello, do some weeding around the stones. I’ll bring some tulips—I know you like them, Mom. I’ll leave some of Dad’s favorite halvah. Sammy, two comic books for you: a Garth Ennis you will like called Preacher and a new Wolverine.
It’s done. I’m sorry you both didn’t live to see it happen. I hope you can all rest easier. I know I will. Strangely, I will have to figure out the rest of my life now that this is done. I still have one more big case I want to solve, then I will decide if I want to be a cop or go back to school. I’m probably in a state of shock. Right now, it feels okay. I’ll give it time. Maybe it’ll be different later. I doubt it. I don’t regret what I did. He deserved it. You know what I always said: “Forgiveness is overrated.” If I feel badly for what I’ve done, I’ll convert to Catholicism and go to confession.
Your loving daughter and sister,
Nina
Chapter 30
I return the Avis car at Newark Airport, leave the keys in their lockbox, and take a bus back to Penn Station and then another to Long Island City. On the way to my apartment, I stop at a newsstand and buy a New York Post. There’s an article: “Prison Guard Murdered”, and a photograph of Clyde. A State Police spokesperson theorizes Sergeant Clyde Fairbrother was killed by an ex-convict seeking revenge. This is good news for me. I walk into my apartment to the bing of a text from Ernie in Maui. I call him.
Ernie gives me another piece of news: while I was driving to Malone, the FBI questioned Clyde Fairbrother about where he was on the night my father was murdered. Clyde told them he was racing his Dodge Charger at the Airborne Speedway in Plattsburgh, two hundred miles away from our house in Grahamsville. He showed them a dated article from the Albany Times. There was a photograph of Clyde standing next to his Dodge in the winner’s circle. It was proof, incontrovertible, unshakable—it was the truth. Clyde didn’t shoot my father.
I killed the wrong person.
Chapter 31
Bobby is waiting at the apartment with white boxes of takeout from Mandarin Chef. A ninja killer’s meal?
“Can I jump in the shower first?”
“The food will wait. Go ahead.”
I sink to the floor, my favorite place in the shower, curl up, and let the hot water fall over my body in a Macbeth-like fantasy that I can wash the deed away. It doesn’t help. I have done something irreparable. There is nothing I can do to change, adjust, or alter my action, no computer program that can retrieve the event, find it, or delete it. It’s done. My life is changed forever. I killed an innocent man. Or did I? I remember a story about an IRA terrorist who set off a bomb in a London mailbox that killed an innocent bystander. Later, it was revealed the man had murdered his wife earlier that day.
I can justify what I did by saying I didn’t kill an innocent
man. I killed the wrong man. I know who Clyde Fairbrother was, what he stood for, who he served. I know he was a zealot in an organization that pickets abortion clinics, intimidates pregnant women, threatens physicians and their families. There are real victims: David Gunn, John Britton, George Tiller, and Barnett Stepian were doctors who provided legal medical procedures to women and were murdered for doing so. I killed the right man. I just didn’t kill the one who shot my father. I’ll sleep.
In my bathrobe, clean and righteous, I sit down next to Bobby at the kitchen table. “You saw the news?”
“I spoke to Ernie. How do you feel?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “No, I do. I feel exhausted. Do I have to start over?”
“Ernie insists Clyde got the rifle from George. But he may have bought it for someone else, another shooter in the Army of God. He’s going to look into that. Try to get a list of their members, see who would know how to use it. Maybe someone Clyde knew in the military.”
I don’t have the energy. I stare at the row of white boxes, the packets of soy sauce and mustard. I crush open a fortune cookie: Today you screwed up big-time.
“Nina?”
“Sorry. Yes, that makes sense. Right now, I’m kind of numb.”
Bobby starts unpacking the food.
“Eat something.”
“Sure. I still have my appetite, don’t I?”
I remember Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood; there is a description of the meal Dick and Perry consumed in a Kansas diner after murdering the Clutter family. It went on for a page. Murder as an appetite stimulant. “Bobby, I think a drink makes more sense.”
“No. We’re not finished.”
We eat quickly. We burn my killing clothes in the fireplace, scrape the ashes into a plastic bag he will later flush down a toilet in a public restroom. Bobby is now an accomplice to my murder.
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