Gregg Hurwitz - The Kill Clause

Fowler met them at the truck, his mouth pursed over a lipful of tobacco. He was breathing hard, his eyes sharp and gleaming, his face flushed with excitement. He unsnapped his holster, then snapped it again. The detectives were not in sight. No yellow tape, no perimeter, no crime-lab guys working up forensics.

Before Tim could get out of the truck, Fowler was talking. “Gutierez and Harrison-they rolled from Homicide Bureau-they got a read off the tire tracks at the riverbank. I guess they’re factory-issue radials for Toyotas ’87 to ’89 or some shit. Crime lab found a fingernail at the scene-”

Tim buckled, and Bear laid a supporting hand across the small of his back, out of Fowler’s view.

“-chip of white paint under it. Automobile paint. Gutierez what-the-fucked it, ran it through for a ten-mile radius, only got twenty-seven hits, if you can believe it. We split up the addresses. This was our third stop. There’s hard-core evidence. The guy spilled in seconds. Cases just don’t work out like this.” He coughed out a single note of a laugh, then went pale. His hand dipped to his holster again, and he unsnapped and snapped the thumb break. “Jesus Christ, Rack, I’m sorry. I’ve just been…I should have come over myself, but I wanted to get my head down and help bust the piece of shit.”

“Why isn’t there a perimeter up?” Tim said.

“We, uh…we still have him. He’s inside.”

Tim’s mouth went dry. His fury narrowed, gathering like a parachute pulled through a napkin ring; with focus it seemed less likely to bleed into sorrow. Bear slid up next to him like a revving car at a stoplight.

“What about CSU? Did you even call them?”

Fowler grew suddenly interested in the ground. “We called you.” He toed a desiccated weed, which gave off a good crackle. “I know if my little girl-” He shook off the thought. “The boys and I just weren’t gonna let this one fly.” He unsnapped the thumb break again, slid his Beretta from the holster, and held the pistol out to Tim, butt first. “For you and Dray.”

The three men stared at the pistol. Bear made a noise deep in his throat that didn’t quite shape itself into a judgment one way or the other. Fowler’s face was still flushed and intense, a lightning bolt of a vein forking his forehead. Somewhere in his jumble of thoughts, Tim grasped why Fowler had contacted Bear on his cell phone, not the radio.

Bear shifted so he was close to Tim, beside him but facing opposite, his back to Fowler, his eyes staring out at the dark of the canyon. “What do you want here, Rack?” His fingers spread, then clenched into fists. “As a father? As a representative of the law?”

Tim took the pistol. He walked toward the garage, and neither Bear nor Fowler followed. He heard sounds issuing through the warped door. Murmuring voices.

He knocked twice, the ragged wood biting his knuckles.

“Hang on.” The voice belonged to Mac, Fowler’s partner and another of Dray’s deputy colleagues. Some shuffling. “Stand back!”

The garage door swung up on screeching springs. With inadvertent theatricality, Mac moved his large frame out of Tim’s way, revealing Gutierez and Harrison standing on either side of a scrawny man on a torn couch. Tim recognized the detectives now-local boys. Dray had worked with them when they were still patrolmen out of Moorpark Station; Homicide had assigned them the area, no doubt, because of their familiarity with it.

Tim’s eyes swept the interior, taking in a heap of blood-moist rags, a pair of little girl’s fingerprint-muddied cotton panties plugging a draft in the far wall, a bent hacksaw with the teeth worn down to nubs. He fought to get his mind around these objects, these inconceivabilities.

He stepped forward, his shoes slippery on the oil-stained concrete. The man was clean-shaven, his face razor-nicked at the jaw. He hunched over his legs, elbows tucked into his crotch, hands cuffed before him. His boots, like Bear’s, were caked with mud. The two detectives stepped away as Tim approached, straightening their poly wool suits.

Mac’s deep voice issued over Tim’s shoulder. “Meet Roger Kindell.”

“You see him, you puke?” Gutierez said. “This is that little girl’s father.”

The man’s eyes, focused on Tim, showed neither comprehension nor remorse.

“That this could happen in our fucking town,” Harrison said, as if continuing some previous conversation. “The animals are drifting north. Invading.”

Tim stepped forward again, until his shadow fell across Kindell’s face, blocking the dim light from the bare lamp bulb. Kindell sucked his teeth, then bent his face into the bowl of his hands, his fingers massaging the line of his scalp. His voice was loose, vowel-heavy at the ends of his words, and a touch guttural.

“I already tole you I did it. Lee me alone.”

Tim felt his heartbeat hammering in his temples, his throat. Controlled rage.

Kindell kept his face turned down into his hands. Black crescents stood out beneath his fingernails-dried blood.

Harrison uncrossed his arms, sweat shining on his ebony face. “Look at him. You look at him, son.” Still no response. In a flash the detective was on top of Kindell, hands digging into his throat and cheeks, knee riding his gut, bending his head back and up so he faced Tim. Kindell’s breathing flared his nostrils; his eyes were sharply defiant.

Gutierez turned to Tim. “I got a throw-down.” Tim glanced at the proffered bulge at the detective’s ankle beneath his pant leg, a crappy gun to be left on the scene clutched in Kindell’s dead hand. Gutierez nodded. “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, my friend.”

Harrison pulled himself off Kindell, shoved his head to the side, and nodded at Tim. “You do what you need to do.”

Mac was playing lookout at the wide opening of the garage door, his head swiveling back and forth, checking the darkness despite the fact that Bear and Fowler were less than twenty yards away with a clear line of sight to the main road.

Tim turned back to Kindell. “Leave me.”

“You got it, brother,” Gutierez said. He paused beside Tim and slipped him the handcuff key. “We already frisked the piece of shit. Just don’t leave any of the wrong kind of marks on him.”

Mac squeezed Tim’s shoulder, then followed the two detectives out. Tim reached up, grabbed the dangling rope handle on the garage door, and tugged. The door creaked again, gained momentum fast, and slammed shut. Kindell didn’t so much as blink. Cool as a blade.

He took note of the Beretta in Tim’s hand, pointed down at the floor, and turned his head to the wall, as if expressing vague uninterest. His hair was cropped short, a grown-out buzz cut that resembled fur.

The question came out before Tim considered it. “Did you kill my daughter?”

The lightbulb in the lamp emitted an odd humming noise. The air wrapped around Tim, dank and tinted with the odor of paint thinner.

Kindell turned back to face him. His even features were set off by an unusually flat and elongated forehead. His hands rested together in his lap. He didn’t look as though he planned to answer the question.

“Did you kill my daughter?” Tim asked again.

After a thoughtful pause, Kindell nodded slowly, once.

Tim waited for his breathing to even out. He felt his lips trembling, fought them still. “Why?”

Same sluggish cadence to the words, as though they’d been slowed down. “Cuz she was so beautiful.”

Tim racked the Beretta’s slide, chambering a round. Kindell emitted a muffled sob, his eyes starting to stream. The first sign of any emotion. He glared at Tim defiantly, even as snot ran from his nose and forded his upper lip.

Tim raised the pistol. His hands were shaking with rage, so it took a moment for him to line the sights on the tall target of Kindell’s forehead.