Michael McGarrity - Everyone Dies

She opened the venetian blind next to the bed and looked out the window into the dark night, running her finger along the sharp edge of a plastic slat. With both hands, she bent the brittle slat until it snapped, and then broke it once more to free it from the cord that held it in place.

In the bathroom with the door closed, she pressed down hard, drawing the sharpest point of the slat up the length of her arm, cutting deeper than her fingernails ever could. The pain felt so good it made her shiver.

She did the other arm, and then her thighs. Lovely red blood stained her gown. She took the gown off and cut into the soft flesh under her breasts and watched red droplets course down to her belly button.

She put her hands together and looked at her wrists. The veins were right at the surface. She dug the slat into the fattest one, gritting her teeth until she broke through and blood squirted out in pulses. She clenched her fist, gouged between two tendons, popped open the other vein, and watched the blood flow freely into the sink.

She switched hands to repeat the process, her fingers shaking as she tried to stab into the vein. She punched repeatedly until the slat pierced it. Then she sawed the last one open, her blood lubricating every cutting stroke.

She dropped her hands to her sides, smiled at herself in the metal mirror, and saw Kurt smiling back at her. She could feel the blood draining from her body, her head becoming light and empty of bad thoughts. It felt so very, very dreamy.

Now she could sleep. She sank to the floor and closed her eyes.

The telephone rang and instinctively Kerney reached for it on the bedside table, his hand grabbing empty air. Groggily, he got up from the couch, hurried to the kitchen, and picked up on the third ring. The stove clock read 4:00 A.M.

“What is it?” he asked.

The third-shift dispatcher told him Mary Beth Patterson had been found dead in her psych-unit hospital room.

“How did it happen?”

“An apparent suicide, Chief. She cut her veins open with a piece of a venetian blind.”

“Who’s on it?”

“Lieutenant Molina and Detective Pino.”

“Have them call me back when they know something,” Kerney said.

“Ten-four.”

Kerney dropped the phone in the cradle. Day two of his vacation had just begun and it had already gone from bad to worse.

I n the early morning light, Detective Ramona Pino walked slowly down the street where Jack Potter had been killed. Yesterday’s search by the crime scene techs for the spent bullet had been unsuccessful, and Ramona wanted to look for it on her own before starting her normal shift.

But more than that, Ramona wanted a break from the biting anguish she felt about the deaths of Larsen and Patterson. If she’d handled the investigation differently both of them would be alive. For the first time in her career as a cop, she had to seriously question her abilities and judgment. She knew Lieutenant Casados was doing the same, and she fully expected that he would drop Patterson’s suicide on her as part of his IA investigation.

Yesterday’s session with Casados had been grueling enough with only one innocent person’s death to account for. Maybe she should just turn in her shield and walk away from it all.

She rejected the idea with an unconscious shake of her head. There was important work to do. Chief Kerney and his family were at risk, apparently targeted by a revenge killer, who could easily be someone unknown to the chief with a motive that was equally unclear, which meant finding the link between the perp, the chief, and the two victims might not be an easy task.

Beyond that, there were aspects of the perp’s MO that didn’t fit the typical pattern of revenge killers. Usually, such homicides were planned blitz attacks against unsuspecting victims that occurred with no forewarning, or were impulsive murders of opportunity that happened in public view, often without any thought given to escape.

But this perp wasn’t playing by the rules. In the Manning homicide, he’d alerted his victim of his intentions with a dead rat in her driveway and, according to information received overnight from the Taos Police Department, was most likely the unknown subject who had broken into an art gallery a month ago and stolen twelve of Manning’s paintings by cutting them out of their frames.

He’d followed the same MO with Kerney by first destroying the chief’s horse and then leaving two dead rats at his house. Additionally, his messages, left at the Manning crime scene and tacked to the chief’s front door, made it clear that there were more killings to come, which wasn’t something a revenge killer would ordinarily do.

In an attempt to confirm part of the killer’s MO, Chief Otero had officers searching Potter’s neighborhood in the hopes of finding the carcass of the missing Border collie. If they came up empty, Ramona still thought it highly probable that the killer had an agenda for the dog.

Pino ran down two other possible types of multiple killers worth considering. Spree killers didn’t fit because the perp had planned and carried out his attacks methodically. A serial killer didn’t work because there appeared to be no sexual component to the crimes. That left vengeance as the motive, which brought her back to the still unanswered questions, who and why.

She continued down the street, inspecting anything that might have stopped the bullet. Somehow, without willing it, her mind had erased the image of Patterson’s naked, mutilated body. All that floated through her head was the face of the hysterical psych-unit nurse who’d found Mary Beth lying in a pool of blood on the bathroom floor.

She stopped to inspect a tree trunk. There was no traffic, no people were out and about, and the only sound came from a singing towhee who ended a long series of clinking sounds with a trill. It cut short a repeat of its refrain, flew out of the high branches above Ramona’s head, and perched on the roof of the elementary school a half-block away.

The last of the old downtown schools, the building had been saved because of community protests to keep it open. Two rows of high, old-style windows, designed to let as much sunlight as possible into the classrooms, ran across the front of the building. A small street-side playground enclosed by a low wall served kindergarten students. It contained new, brightly colored slides and play equipment. Just beyond, steps led up to a formal portico entrance. Jutting out from the rear of the building was what Ramona guessed to be either an assembly hall or the school gym. Behind the gym was a dirt-packed playground for the older children enclosed by a chain-link fence.

Ramona climbed the low wall and inspected the street-side playground equipment before moving on to the portico, where she stood on the top step trying to remember the good times of her early school days in Albuquerque. But her mind kept going back to the face of the hysterical psych-unit nurse.

She examined the large square-beam columns and the gray plastered walls for any sign of recent damage. The initial autopsy report indicated the round had clipped Potter’s sternum before passing through his chest cavity and out his back. That could have changed the trajectory of the bullet.

Ramona also knew from the pathologist’s findings that the muzzle-to-target distance was less than three inches, which meant that the killer had made sure Jack Potter knew he was about to die. Additionally, the diameter of the entry wound suggested that the killer had used a large-caliber handgun.

She looked both high and low. Finding nothing, she reached the intersection where Griffin Street and Paseo de Peralta met just as the traffic light changed and the DON’T WALK sign started flashing. Part of the glass looked broken. She crossed the empty street, looked up, and saw a small hole at the bottom of the sign with spider-like cracks radiating out in random directions.