The Kill Clause tr-1 Page 29

  Rayner’s eyebrows were raised, frozen in an expression of distaste or respect.

  “So I shot Motherfucker in the face. What are you saying?” Robert was flushed, the muscles of his neck pulled taut.

  “You’re not starting to enjoy this, are you?”

  Robert stood up again, but Mitchell yanked him back down. He stayed in his chair, eyeing Tim, but Tim turned to face Mitchell. “And what’s this about a rare explosive wire linking the explosives?”

  “It’s media horseshit. I use standard wires. There’s no way they could link them.”

  “Well, someone in forensics knows the two executions are linked and leaked that fact, with a slight skew, to the media. How do they know? And so quickly? It had to be the explosive.”

  Mitchell grew finicky under Tim’s glare.

  “That wasn’t a commercial blasting cap, was it, Mitchell?”

  “I don’t use anything commercial, not for a key component. Don’t trust it. I make all my own stuff.”

  “Great. So could forensic analysis determine that the initiation portion of your homemade blasting cap was similar to the earpiece device? This is LAPD bomb squad we’re talking about, not some Detroit Scooby-Doo with a magnifying glass.”

  “Maybe.” Mitchell looked away. “Probably.”

  “Who gives a shit anyway?” Robert said. “It doesn’t affect anything.”

  “I give a shit, because if it happens and we didn’t plan it, that’s bad news. There’s a reason we voted against a communique”-an angry eye toward Rayner-“not that we’d want to claim this mess anyway. The bomb squad matching the two explosives is going to bring the heat, and we don’t have room for missteps.”

  Tim leaned back in his chair, weathering the Mastersons’ aggressive stares. “Let me make something else clear, since you two seem so eager to run and gun: You don’t have what it takes to lead this kind of operation.”

  Robert and Mitchell coughed out identical snickers. “Mitch blasted the door,” Robert said. “I was the number-one man through.”

  “And I was the one who jumped in and saved your ass when you missed three shots, tripped down the stairs, and got tossed like a Nerf ball by Debuffier.”

  The muscles of Robert’s face had tightened, compressing his cheeks into sinewy ovals.

  “I run the show operationally,” Tim said. “My rules. Those were the conditions. And since it’s clear none of you have given any thought to defining our operational rules, how’s this: You have none. I’m the sole operator on a kill mission. You will not be on-site when a hit goes down. That’s just how it is.”

  “Let’s talk about this,” Rayner said. “You’re not solely in charge here.”

  “I’m not negotiating these terms. They stand, or I walk.”

  Rayner’s lips tightened, his nostrils flaring with indignation-the spoiled prince used to getting his way. “If you walk, you’ll never get to review Kindell’s case. You’ll never know what happened to Virginia.”

  Ananberg looked over at him, shocked. “For Christ’s sake, William.”

  Tim felt his face grow hot. “If you think for a minute that I’d stay here and participate in a venture of this severity to get my hands on a file-even a file that could help solve my daughter’s death-then you’ve underestimated me. I will not be blackmailed.”

  But Rayner was already backpedaling into his polished-gentleman persona. He hadn’t dropped his guard before, but the picture beneath it was as nasty as Tim had imagined. “I didn’t mean to imply anything of the sort, Mr. Rackley, and I apologize for my phrasing. What I mean is, we all have aims we’re seeking to forward here, and let’s keep our eyes on the ball.” He cast a wary glance at the Mastersons. “Now, how would you like to handle matters operationally so you’re comfortable?”

  Tim took a moment, letting the pins and needles leave his face. He met Mitchell’s eyes. “I still may need you. And you.” He nodded at the Stork, as if the Stork gave a damn. “For surveillance, logistics, backup. But I handle target neutralization alone.”

  Mitchell’s hands flared wide and settled in his lap. “Fine.”

  Ananberg’s eyes tracked over one chair. “Robert?”

  Robert ran a knuckle across his nose, studying the table. Finally he nodded, glaring at Tim. “Affirmative, sir.”

  “Excellent.” Rayner clapped his hands and held them together, like a delighted Dickensian orphan at Christmas. “Now, let’s get back to the media recap.”

  “Fuck the media recap,” Robert growled.

  The Stork clasped his hands and raised them. “Here, here.”

  Rayner looked like the teacher’s yes boy who’d just had his test tubes stomped by the class bully. “But the sociological impact is certainly relevant to-”

  “Bill,” Ananberg said. “Get the next case binder.”

  Rayner huffily pulled his son’s crestfallen image off the wall and punched buttons on the safe, issuing a steady stream of words under his breath.

  “Wait,” Mitchell said. “Are we voting without Franklin?”

  “Of course,” Rayner said. “The binders don’t leave this room.”

  Robert said, “Then conference him in.”

  “He could be overheard talking in his room,” Ananberg said. “And we don’t know if those phone lines are secure.”

  “He gets exhausted pretty quickly,” Rayner said. “I’m not sure if he has the focus or stamina right now to pay these deliberations the meticulous attention they demand.”

  “I say we wait for him to recover,” Tim said.

  Rayner faced them, his hands trembling slightly. “I spoke to his doctor at length today. His prognosis… I’m not sure that waiting for hisrecovery is the wisest idea.”

  Robert blanched. “Oh.”

  Mitchell got busy scratching his forehead.

  Shock turned to sadness before Tim could get a handle on it. It took him a moment to regain his composure, then he nodded at Rayner to move ahead.

  Rayner grabbed a binder and tossed it on the table. “Terrill Bowrick of the Warren Shooters.”

  On October 30, 2002, three seniors at Earl Warren High had gotten into a sixth-period altercation with the starting lineup of the school basketball team. They’d retreated to their vehicles and returned with ordnance. While Terrill Bowrick stood guard at the door, his two coperpetrators had entered the school gymnasium, where they’d fired ninety-seven rounds in less than two minutes, killing eleven students and wounding eight.

  The coach’s five-year-old daughter, Lizzy Bowman, who’d been watching practice from the bleachers, had caught a stray bullet through her left eye. Greeting Angelenos on their doorsteps Halloween morning was a front-page photo of her father on both knees, clutching her limp body-a reverse Pieta for the new millennium. Tim remembered vividly how the coach’s jersey had borne a blood imprint of his daughter’s face, a crimson half mask. Tim had set down the paper, dropped Ginny off at school, then sat in his car in the parking lot for five minutes before walking to his daughter’s classroom so he could see her again through the window before leaving her.

  The two gunmen, lean stepbrothers bound by a perverse codependence, had claimed there had been no premeditation. Their father was a pawnbroker-they’d been transporting the weapons between two of his stores, just happened to have dueling SKSs and four mags in the trunk when they’d lost their cool. Second-degree murder at worst, their defense lawyer claimed, maybe even a push for temporary insanity. A foolish argument, but good enough to get past your average foolish jury.

  The prosecutor, unable to play the brothers off against each other and faced with wrathful media and a community hell-bent on vengeance, had realized he could roll Bowrick with a grant of immunity. Bowrick, a second-time senior who’d just stumbled across the threshold of his eighteenth birthday and thus was sweating heavy, could testify that they’d planned the shooting in the preceding weeks, thus establishing premed and giving the prosecution an express train to murder in the first. The stepbrothers, also
not Oppenheimers in the classroom, were legal adults as well.

  The prosecutor slid the immunity grant past the media by pointing out that Bowrick was the least culpable co-conspirator and that his participation had been the least egregious. He slid it past his division chief by making clear that Bowrick, a twig of a kid with a lame arm and a limp, could play to jury sympathy and that all the evidence to prove up the premed was circumstantial. By providing independent corroboration, Bowrick could shore up the case.

  After Bowrick testified, the brothers were convicted and fast-tracked for capital punishment. Bowrick walked with a plea to a lesser charge-accessory after the fact-and was granted a deal for probation and a thousand hours of community service, no time served.

  “So that’s what a school shooting buys you these days.”

  Mitchell joined in Tim’s disgust. “About the same sentence you’d get for spray-painting graffiti on your neighbor’s shiny new Volvo.”

  “Let’s bear in mind that he was only an aider and abetter,” Robert said. His eyes, glassy and loose-focused, betrayed the slightest identification with Bowrick, the outsider.

  “Maybe he didn’t fire the weapon because he couldn’t hold it properly with an atrophied arm,” Tim said.

  “And regardless, Robert,” Rayner said, “an aider and abetter is subject to the same sentence as those who actually perpetrate the crime.”

  “Less the gun enhancements,” Robert said.

  “No one needs the gun enhancements. It was a capital-punishment case.”

  Robert tilted his head, a gesture of concession. “Right,” he said. “That’s right.”

  “The case precedent is pretty clear on this one,” Ananberg said, “particularly for accomplices of this type. Aiders and abetters have gotten dinged on special circumstances for everything from lying-in-wait allegations to multiple-murder allegations.”

  Bowrick’s booking photo sat faceup to Tim’s right, the border nudging his knuckles. Despite Bowrick’s attempt to approximate good posture, the flare of his dishwater-blond bangs barely notched the five-foot-eight line painted on the wall behind him. A jagged half-coin pendant dangled from a thin gold necklace. Sullenness pervaded his features. He didn’t have the confidence to give off surly; his was the pasty-white face of hope beaten down to unhappy submission. He was sullen like a kicked dog, like the kid picked last, like a deflowered girl after her lover’s too-hasty departure.

  Ananberg backed them up, and Rayner led them through the case from the beginning. They started by scouring the evidence reports-admissible and inadmissible. Their evaluative capabilities had drastically improved as they’d grown more familiar with Ananberg’s procedure, leading to sharper focus, more incisive arguments, and a wider exploration of potentialities. The deliberations were all the more impressive given the divisiveness at the meeting’s outset.

  When the final document had made its way around the table, Tim slid it into the binder and glanced up at the others. “Let’s vote.”

  Guilty. Unanimous. Ananberg, who’d cast her vote last, crossed her hands on the table, her expression oddly content.

  “There is one major complication,” Rayner said. “After he went state’s evidence, Bowrick went into hiding.” He spread his hands, Jesus calming the seas. “The good news is, he didn’t go into witness protection. Not formally. But he was getting death threats, his property vandalized. After someone tried to burn down his apartment, he switched his name and moved away. Only his probation officer knows where he is.”

  “I’ll find him,” Tim said quietly.

  “If he’s still under the thumb of his PO, he’s still laying his head somewhere in L.A.,” Robert said.

  Mitchell’s fingers strummed on the table. Stopped. He looked at Rayner. “Can you pry where he’s staying from the PO?”

  “Too messy,” Tim said before Rayner could respond. “Too many trails leading back to us.”

  “We know he’s logging community-service hours,” Robert said. “Why don’t we run a check on what programs are up where, give a glance?”

  “I said I’ll find him,” Tim said. “Without stoking any fires. I’ll take care of it quietly. You all sit tight and keep silent.”

  Rayner was standing at the safe, his back to the others. Before Tim could move to rise, Rayner turned and let another black binder drop on the table. Tim’s eyes went past him to the last black binder in the safe. Kindell’s.

  He wondered if Ananberg had even attempted to get him the public defender’s notes from Kindell’s binder.

  Rayner followed Tim’s gaze behind him to the open safe. He smiled curtly, reached back, and closed it. Tim continued to find Rayner’s petty power plays galling, despite their transparency.

  “What do you say we tackle one more case now while our brains are warmed up?”

  Tim checked his watch. 11:57.

  “I got nowhere to go,” Robert said.

  Ananberg’s laugh, sharp and short, rang off the wood-paneled walls. “I don’t think any of us has anywhere to go. Tim, do you have to get home?”

  “I don’t have a home, remember?”

  Robert’s mustache shifted and rose. “That’s right. None of us do, do we, Mitch?”

  “No home, no family, no records. We’re ghosts.”

  The Stork emitted a wheezy little laugh. “No taxes either.”

  “Ghosts.” Mitchell grinned. “We are ghosts, aren’t we? We just come out of our graves now and then to take care of business.”

  Tim nodded at the binder. “What’s the case?”

  Rayner folded his hands atop the binder and gave a magician’s pause. “Rhythm Jones.”

  “Ah,” Mitchell said. “Rhythm.”

  It would be difficult to live in L.A. County and not have at least a passing awareness of the Rhythm Jones-Dollie Andrews case. An exrapper of modest acclaim, Jones was a small-time dealer with a propensity for turning out girls. His first name derived from the fact that he was always bouncing, as if to a private beat. According to street lore, his mother had named him in the crib. As an adult he threw off a sloppily endearing vibe, all fat smile and bopping head. Usually he wore a Dodgers jersey, hanging open to reveal the RHYTHM tattoo stenciled in Gothic across his chest.

  For a few chance weekends in his twenties, he’d spun vinyl with the East Side DJ set, but he’d quickly found himself back in his hometown, South Central. Three years and two hundred pounds later, he was the go-to man for shitty rock and petite white girls who’d hook for a twenty or a spoonful of liquid nirvana. He was a notoriously vicious sex addict; his charges had been known to hobble into emergency rooms, towels crammed down both sides of their pants to stanch the bleeding.

  He’d been indicted on two counts of possession for sale and one count of pimping and pandering, but due to a combination of dumb luck and cowed witnesses, he’d never been convicted.

  Until Dollie Andrews.

  Andrews was an off-the-bus Ohioan who’d taken the archetypal Hollywood header, from waitressing actress to back-alley blow-jobber. But she’d finally gotten her dream: After her body had been found smeared into Jones’s ratty couch, punctured with seventy-seven knife wounds, her modeling eight-by-tens had been released to a ravenous press, and her short-cropped towhead curls and the just-right width of her hips had etched her persona posthumously into the zeitgeist.

  Jones had been found sleeping off a PCP high one room over; he claimed complete amnesia regarding the past two days. None of Andrews’s blood had been found on his body, his clothes, or under his nails, though a crime-scene technician had discovered traces in the pipes beneath the shower drain. The weapon, bearing a clean set of ten-point prints, had been recovered from a trash can outside. Motive? The prosecutor had argued sexual rejection. One of Andrews’s colleagues had captured her on camcorder wholesomely proclaiming she’d never give it up for black meat. In certain boxcars composing the train wreck of public opinion, this was known to pass for virtue.

  To Jones’s immense disadvantage
was the egregious ineptitude of his lawyer, an acne-faced kid just out of school whom the overburdened public defender had thrown to the wolves on the nothing-to-gain case. Given the circumstances under which the body had been found, several witnesses who claimed Jones had been stalking Andrews for weeks, and the unanimous testimony of two medical examiners that the stabber had been a forceful, right-handed male around five feet ten, Jones had been convicted by a jury after less than twenty minutes of deliberation.

  The verdict had brought out the Leonard Jeffrieses and the Jesse Jacksons, who had proclaimed that, as a non-professional-athlete black male accused of killing a white woman, Jones wasn’t being given a fair shake. The resultant political pressures had accelerated Jones’s Writ for Ineffective Assistance of Counsel, which was granted.

  Verdict overturned.

  Meanwhile, some jackass in long-term record storage had misfiled the evidence and exhibits, which left the prosecutor with no forensic reports, no photos of the body to flash at the jury during the second trial, nothing more than the testimony of four white cops.

  Verdict, not guilty.

  The case files were discovered the following Monday, mistakenly filed under “Rhythm.”

  Jones slipped out of sight, lost somewhere in the faceless obscurity of L.A. slums, protected from the heat of further inquiry by the generous parasol of double jeopardy.

  As Rayner finished reviewing the specifics of the case, Tim’s eyes were drawn to the picture of Ginny, propped on the table before him. He glanced again at the other photos in sight-Ananberg’s mother, Dumone’s wife, and the Stork’s mother, an imperious-looking, heavy-set woman with an expression of disgruntled impatience common to pugs and Eastern European immigrants. This was their purgatory, Tim realized, to oversee deliberations about L.A.’s most vile crimes and criminals, to play silent chorus to a seedy drama. This was how Tim had chosen to honor his daughter.

  “…reasonable doubt,” Mitchell was saying. “It’s not no doubt. There’s never no doubt.”

  But Ananberg held strong. “If someone were planning to frame him, it would be the perfect way. He’s a known drug abuser with countless enemies. Get him when he’s high as a kite, hack up a body in his living room, and voila.”