The Kill Clause tr-1 Read online

  “Are you hitting on me?”

  “I think so.”

  Tim stood and leaned over her, sliding his hands under her knees and shoulders. She let out an anomalous giggle and looped her arms around his neck. He exaggerated his trouble picking her up, groaned, and dropped her back on the couch. “You’re gonna have to lay off the weights.”

  He’d intended it as a joke, but it came out sharply. Her smile dimmed, and he felt his insult bank and come back a vicious self-loathing. He crouched and cupped her face with both his hands, letting her read the remorse in his eyes.

  “Come with me,” he said.

  She stood, and they regarded each other. They hadn’t made love since Ginny was killed. Though it had been only six days, the fact hung disproportionately heavy between them. Maybe they were punishing themselves, denying themselves intimacy, or maybe they feared the closeness itself.

  Tim felt first-date nervous, and he thought how odd to be so fragile at his age, in his house, with his wife. She was breathing hard, her neck sparkling with remembered sweat, and she reached out and took his hand, a touch awkwardly.

  They walked back to the bedroom, pulled off their shirts, and began to kiss, tentatively, tenderly. She lay back on the bed, and he moved gently above her, but then her noises shifted direction and gained edge. He stopped, realizing she was weeping. Her fingers splayed, her palms finding the balls of his shoulders, and she pushed him back and off. He sat on the bed, naked and confused as she grappled with the sheets to pull them over herself. Ginny’s empty room across the hall silently made itself known, like a deep vibration.

  Dray tucked one arm across her stomach and pressed her other hand to her trembling lips until they stopped. “I’m sorry. I thought I might be ready.”

  “Don’t be sorry.” He reached out and stroked her hair, but shedidn’t respond. He put on his clothes quietly, unsure whether she perceived his dressing as an insult or as his move to gather his pride; he’d intended neither.

  “I guess I just need some space.”

  “Maybe I should go back to…?” He pointed down the hall, then retreated slowly across the room. He paused for a moment at the door, but she didn’t stop him.

  •Tim slept lurchingly through a tangle of nightmares and awoke in a sweaty haze a mere hour later, his intake of dream images somehow affirming his suspicion that Ginny had died at the hands of two killers-one still an enigma.

  He couldn’t trust the detectives’ competence. He didn’t agree with the DA’s take on the case. He couldn’t use the service. He couldn’t investigate the case himself.

  He was desperate.

  Desperate enough to look for help in the one place he swore he never would.

  He glanced at the clock-11:37 P.M.

  He jotted Dray a note in case she woke up, left the house quietly, and drove swiftly to Pasadena. He headed through the clean suburban neighborhood, his heartbeat and anxiety increasing with his proximity. He parked at the end of an aggregate concrete walk, the stones perfectly smoothed as they were on Tim’s porch. The windows sparkled-not a single smudge. The lawn was dead level and precisely trimmed, the sides lined to perfection by an edger or maybe even shears.

  Tim headed up the walk and stood for a moment, taking note of the coat of paint on the front door, untainted by even one brush mark. He rang the bell and waited.

  The footsteps approached evenly, as if timed.

  His father opened the door.

  “Timmy.”

  “Dad.”

  His father stood, as always, wedged between the door and the jamb, as if protecting the house from a Bible salesman’s assault. His gray suit was cheap but well pressed, the knot of his tie seated high and hard against his throat despite the hour. “How are you holding up? Haven’t talked to you since the news.”

  The news. An engagement. A business deal. A daughter’s death.

  “May I come in?”

  His father inhaled deeply and held his breath for a moment, indicating the inconvenience. Finally, he stepped back and let the door swing open. “Would you mind taking off your shoes?”

  Tim sat on the couch in the living room, facing the La-Z-Boy upon which he knew his father would eventually settle. His father stood over him for a moment, arms crossed. “Drink?”

  “Water would be good.”

  His father leaned over, plucked a coaster off the coffee table, and handed it to him before disappearing into the kitchen.

  Tim looked around the familiar room, unchanged since his childhood. A scattering of picture frames covered the mantel, displaying the sun-faded stock photographs that had come with them. A woman at the beach. Three babies in a kiddie pool. A generic couple having a picnic. Tim was unsure if the frames had ever housed personal photos. He tried to remember if a picture of his mother, who’d wisely left them when he was three, had ever been on display in the house. He could not.

  Ginny was the last of the Rackleys, the end of the lineage.

  His father returned, gave Tim the glass, and offered his hand. They shook.

  Easing into the La-Z-Boy, his father shoved the wood lever on the side and leaned back, the footrest kicking up beneath his legs. Tim realized he hadn’t seen his father since Ginny’s fourth birthday. His father had aged, not drastically but significantly-a faint net of wrinkles beneath each eye, a slight pucker cupping the points of his mouth, coarse white hairs threaded in his eyebrows. It distressed Tim. Another stark glance at death’s encroachment-slow this time, but equally unrelenting.

  It struck him that when he was little, he hadn’t understood death. Or he’d understood it better. It had seduced him. He’d played war, he’d played cops and robbers, he’d played cowboys and Indians, but he’d played no game in which death had not been a participant. When his first Ranger buddies had died, he’d worn his uniform and sunglasses to the funerals and observed stoically, dark and tough. And he hadn’t been mourning for his friends, not really, because they’d just beaten him to it. First one to get a license, first one to get laid, first one to get killed. But with falling in love, losing a daughter, that had all changed. Death wasn’t seductive anymore. When Ginny died, he’d felt a part of himself break off and spiral down a void. The damage had lessened him. And left him more exposed to dread.

  He found he had less and less stomach for death.

  To steel himself he reached for the reliable joist of aggression. “You been shooting straight?” he asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  “No fraudulent checks, no running fake credit-card numbers?”

  “Not a one. It has been four years now. My parole officer is quite proud, even if my son is not.” His father tilted his head for emphasis, then let his smile drop.

  He leaned forward, the footrest sucking into the cheap fabric and disappearing. Crossing his legs, he laced his hands across his knee. He’d always exhibited an elegance that far outpaced the people and objects with which he surrounded himself. It was hard to square his well-filed nails with a life patched together from second-rate cons.

  What he said next surprised Tim more than anything he’d ever said.

  “I miss Virginia.”

  Tim took a sip of water, more to stall for time than anything else. “You never saw her much.”

  His father nodded, again with his head slightly tilted, as if he were listening to distant music. “I know. But I miss the idea of her.”

  Tim found himself gazing at the photographs on the mantel. “She wasn’t just an idea.”

  “I didn’t say she was.”

  It took some effort for Tim to get the words out. “I need help.”

  “Don’t we all.” His father uncrossed his legs and leaned back, his hands gripping the armrest, like Lincoln at the monument. “Money?”

  “No. Information.”

  His father gave a grave nod, that of a judge who’d seen it all before.

  “I was wondering if you could put the word out about Ginny’s death. To your guys. You know people in all walk
s-maybe someone’s heard something.”

  His father stood, removing a handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket. He wiped the condensation from Tim’s glass, wiped the coaster, replaced them on the coffee table, and sat back down. Tim wondered if his own impeccable neatness was an attempt to satisfy some deep-buried urge to please his father or simply a learned need to hold in order those matters in which order could be held. The house conveyed not a loving custodianship but the rigidity of the not deeply secure. His father had built it plank by plank, or so he’d always claimed.

  “It was my understanding from the newspapers that there’s a clear suspect. This Kindell.”

  “He is. But I have a feeling there’s more to the story.”

  “It sounds like you’re being a bit emotional.” He regarded Tim, waiting for a response. When it became clear he wasn’t going to get one, he said, “Why don’t you dig around? You have confidential informants, colleagues. You deal with people on the wrong side of the tracks, I’d imagine. Aside from your father, I mean.”

  “I’m reluctant to put myself too close to the case, given my clear bias. And I can’t use the service for a personal cause.”

  “Ah. The superego speaks.” His father pursed his lips; he had a pronounced Cupid’s bow, a more handsome face than Tim’s. “So you’ll put me on the line, call in my contacts but not your own.”

  “I’m compromised here, for obvious reasons. I thought if you came across something hard, a strong lead, we could turn it over to the authorities.”

  “I don’t like the authorities much, Timmy.”

  Tim forged through thirty-three years of hard-built instinct, opening himself up to the intense vulnerability that came in expecting something, anything from his father. “I’ve never come to you before. Ever. For a job, for money, for a personal favor. Please.”

  His father sighed, affecting regretfulness. “Well, Timmy, things have been tight lately, and I only have so many favors to call in. I gotta spend them wisely.”

  Tim’s mouth had gone dry. “I wouldn’t be asking if it wasn’t important.”

  “But your important, you see, isn’t necessarily my important right now. It’s not that I don’t want to help you out, Timmy, it’s just that I have some problems of my own and some priorities of my own. I’m afraid I don’t have any extra favors to call in right now.”

  “Any or any extra?”

  “Any extra, I suppose.”

  Tim bit the inside of his lip, took it to the verge of pain for a few moments. “I understand.”

  His father traced the edges of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger, as if smoothing a goatee. “The lawman come to the con man for help. I believe that’s what they call irony.”

  “I believe you’re correct.”

  His father stood up, smoothing his pant legs. Tim followed suit.

  “Give my regards to Andrea.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  At the door his father straightened his arms, showing off his jacket. “Like my new church suit, Timmy?”

  “I didn’t know you went to church.”

  He winked. “Hedging my bets.”

  7

  ALL the medical examiner’s rooting through Ginny’s body produced no essential physical evidence. There was extensive vaginal tearing, but no signs of semen. A condom had been used-identified as a Durex Gold Coin from the lab workup of the lubricant residue-but no matching or discarded condoms had been logged at Kindell’s house or at the crime scene. On the seventh day the medical examiner finally released the body. Because of the severity of Ginny’s assault and the ME’s thoroughness, Tim and Dray had no choice but to arrange a closed-casket service, which suited them anyway.

  They paid for the funeral from Ginny’s incipient college fund.

  The service was mercifully brief. Dray’s four brothers showed early, tall and refrigerator-wide, packing flasks of bourbon. They circled up like a football huddle in the parlor, shot Tim criminating looks, and wept. Bear sat alone in the last pew, his head lowered. Mac came with Fowler and didn’t miss a single opportunity to be at Dray’s side. They kept their distance from Bear.

  Dray wore a gray coat over a black dress, and carried herself gracefully despite her visible exhaustion.

  Tim’s father appeared late, slender, well groomed, and smelling conspicuously of aftershave. He kissed Dray on the cheek-she received him warmly for once, clutching his hand-then nodded somberly at Tim. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you,” Tim said.

  After awkwardly reaching and rereaching for each other, they managed a dour embrace. Tim did his best to avoid his father for the rest of the service, and his father seemed to find the unspoken arrangement equally acceptable.

  The burial itself took place at the Bardsdale Cemetery in a wet breeze that left the mourners’ clothes damp and uncomfortable. The mud collecting around the base of Tim’s dress shoes reminded him of that on Kindell’s boots-the stain of guilt. Tim contemplated whether he wore it now for withholding retribution against his daughter’s murderer.

  His father left midway through the ceremony. Tim watched his solitary form make its way down the grassy hill, shoulders not squared with the resoluteness that ordinarily so defined his father’s posture, and his father.

  On the drive home Tim jerked the car to the side of the road and hunched over the wheel, his breath hammering through him. He used to wake up this way a few times a month upon his return from Croatia, flooded with images of mass graves, but he’d not before experienced such claustrophia in the daylight. Dray reached over, rubbed his neck lovingly, patiently. The sensation of constriction departed as suddenly as it had started. He sat staring numbly at the road, the rise and fall of his shoulders still pronounced.

  “I wanted to give her things I never had. A stable home. Support. I wanted to teach her ethics, respect for society-things I was never shown, things I had to find on my own. Now that’s gone. I lost the future.” He blew out a shaky breath. “What’s the point now? To make another mortgage payment? To get up for work another day, go to sleep another night?”

  Dray watched him, wiping her cheeks. “I don’t know.”

  They sat until Tim’s breathing returned to normal, then drove home in silence.

  Waiting for them on the doorstep was the morning paper, still unread. The cover photo featured Maybeck and Denley throwing high fives outside Room 9 of the Martia Domez Hotel as two cops carried off a body bag on a stretcher. Both deputies were smiling, and Denley’s glove was smudged with blood, probably from checking Heidel’s pulse inside. The headline read: U.S. MARSHALS CELEBRATE DOWNTOWN BLOODBATH. Without a word Dray walked the paper to the curb and dumped it in the recycling bin.

  In the middle of the night, Dray’s keening from the bedroom awakened Tim on the couch. He walked back to the bedroom and found the door locked. She answered his soft knock between sobs. “I just n-need…to do this alone for a while.”

  He returned to the couch and sat, her sobs reaching him muffled through the walls.

  To respect Dray’s need for space, Tim took to brushing his teeth and showering in the other bathroom, near the garage, entering the bedroom only to get clean clothes. On the coffee table beside the couch, he put an alarm clock and a reading lamp. Marshal Tannino had asked him to take a few days while things cooled down, so Tim tried to keep busy, working out, doing small repairs around the house, trying to limit the time each day he spent feeling sorry for himself or basking in his unrequited hatred of Kindell.

  He and Dray ate at different times so as not to overlap in the kitchen, and when they passed each other, their eye contact was short and uncomfortable. Ginny’s absence loomed large in the house, a growing shadow that fell between them.

  If Tim had bothered to turn on the TV or read the newspaper, he would have seen that the Heidel shooting had captured that hottest spotlight of all, the attention of the L.A. media. Highlights from the trial of Jedediah Lane-the right-wing extremist thought re
sponsible for releasing sarin nerve gas at the regional office of the Census Bureau-occasionally bumped the shootings from the front page, but Tim’s story proved to have surprising staying power. Phone calls from the press trickled in at first, then reached a fevered pitch. Soon Tim could glean whether it was a press call based on how firmly Dray put the phone down. Tim raised the issue of getting a new number, but Dray, unwilling to concede another change no matter how small, wouldn’t have it. Mercifully, no media made the trek to their house.

  Tim was to give a statement for the shooting review board the day before Kindell’s preliminary hearing. He awakened early and showered. When he entered the bedroom, Dray was sitting on the bed, her hands in her lap. They exchanged polite greetings.

  Tim walked to his closet and gazed inside. His three suit jackets were center-vented so his pistol would never be exposed at his hip. All his shoes were lace-up; he’d learned the hard way about loafers his first time walking the fenders on a Protective Services detail on a muddy afternoon.

  He dressed quickly, then sat on the bed opposite Dray to pull on his shoes.

  “Nervous?” she asked.

  He tied his shoelaces and crossed to the gun safe before remembering that he no longer had a service-issued weapon. “Yes. More about the prelim tomorrow.”

  “He’s gonna be sitting there. In the same room as us.” She shook her head, mouth firmed with anger. “He’s all we have on this. Kindell. No accomplice, nothing else.” She stood up, as if sitting left her in too vulnerable a position. “What if they let him plea-bargain? Or if the jury doesn’t believe he did it?”

  “It won’t happen. The DA will never let him plead out, and there’s enough evidence to convict him six times over. It’ll go smoothly, we’ll have ringside seats at the lethal injection, and then we can get on with things.”