Gregg Hurwitz - The Kill Clause

“Anything in the house?”

“Altars and tureens and animal hides. There were bloodstains on the basement floor, later determined to be from animals.”

“Crazy motherfucker,” Robert said.

“Not so crazy he can’t resort to premeditated criminality to maintain his blood lust,” Rayner said.

“Can I see the witnesses’ rap sheets?” Tim said.

Rayner slid them down the table, and Tim reviewed them as the others spoke. Neither witness had any felonies or misdemeanors-nothing a DA could drive a wedge under to get leverage for embellished testimony.

“…urged no bail, but knowing that Debuffier was broke, the judge just had him surrender his passport and set bail at one mil,” Dumone was saying. “The American Religious Protection Association came parading into town, claiming he was being harassed, and posted his bail. Within a day both witnesses were found murdered, stabbed in the jugular-another Santeria sacrificial rite. Cops looked into it, got zip. Good clean hits this time around-evidently he’d learned his lesson. Since the witnesses are dead, their statements to police become hearsay, case dismissed. The ARPA reps left town a little more quietly than they came in.”

A palpable sense of disgust circled the table.

Rayner put on his best musing face. “It’s a sad, sad day when the system itself provides motivation to commit murder.”

Tim thought Rayner’s assessment evinced a misplacement of accountability, but he elected to dig back into the file rather than comment. An exhaustive review of the remaining documentation didn’t turn up any compelling evidence suggesting Debuffier’s innocence.

The Commission’s vote went seven to zero.

TIM PARKED MORE than a mile away from the graveled drive leading to Kindell’s converted garage. The air out here was sharp and fresh, tinged with the scent of burned sap and ash from the long-ago fire that had claimed the accompanying house. Tim stayed off the gravel, his boots quiet on the dirt. He held his. 357 low to his side, forefinger resting along the barrel outside the trigger guard. A slanted but still-standing mailbox loomed up out of a crumbled bank of earth. The night felt flat and oddly static, as if it were receding, airless; every sound and movement seemed dulled by its residency within the vastness.

Tim was surprised to see no light up ahead. Maybe Kindell had moved away, scurried off after the trial to inhabit a new dark corner of a new town. If so, he’d taken with him his remembrance of that night-the snatch, the kill, the sawing, the man who had been with him before, planning, eager to partake of Tim’s daughter.

The moon shone almost full, an imperfect orb visible through the skeletal branches of the eucalyptus. Tim approached the house silently, freezing when he heard a clattering inside. Someone had tripped, knocking a pan, a lamp to the floor. Tim’s first thought was of an intruder, another intruder, but then he heard Kindell cursing to himself. Tim stayed wolf-still, gun lowered, standing equidistant between two eucalyptus trunks.

The garage door swung open with a bang. Kindell stumbled outside, tugging at an unzipped sleeping bag that he’d wrapped around his body like a toga, bobbling a dying flashlight that gave off the faintest yellow-eye glimmer.

Tim stood in plain view less than twenty yards from Kindell, hidden only by the darkness and his own immobility, which matched that of the tree trunks rising around him and the dead weight of the night.

Shivering violently, Kindell shoved open a rusting fuse box and tinkered inside. His other hand, clutching the ends of the sleeping bag at his waist, looked thin and impossibly pale, matching nothing in the night save the bone-whiteness of the moon.

“Damnit, damnit, damnit.” Kindell slammed the fuse-box lid, slapped at it, then stood shaking and miserable and unmoving, as if paralyzed by hopelessness. Finally he trudged inside, one end of the sleeping bag trailing him like the train of a gown. Kindell’s suffering, however petty, evoked in Tim an immense gratification.

Tim waited until the garage door creaked down, whoomping closed against the concrete, then eased up to the pair of windows. Inside, Kindell was curled into the fetal position on the couch, huddled inside the unfurled sleeping bag. His eyes were closed, and he breathed deeply and evenly, his head rocking slightly on the bunched pillow. His shivering had calmed.

Kindell would never help in identifying his accomplice-this had been made perfectly clear to Dray. If the answers were to be found anywhere, they were in the papers stuffed in Rayner’s safe.

Kindell had torn apart Ginny’s precious body and now was sleeping contentedly, the truths about her last wretched hours hidden safely inside his skull like personal, horrid keepsakes. Her pleas, the panic smell of her sweat, her last scream. The other face she’d seen beside Kindell’s, grinning through wet lips, lascivious in the eyes, not yet anticipating that the turn of events would move from depraved to deadly.

Acid washed through Tim’s stomach, seething and curdling.

Numbly, mechanically, Tim set his stance, placed both hands on the pistol, and sighted just above Kindell’s ear. His finger slid on the metal and hooked inside the guard, coming to rest against the trigger. He felt the pre-shoot calm descend over him, a precise unmotion. He stood for a moment, watching the delicate rise and fall of Kindell’s head through the alignment of the sights.

He floated away, seeing himself from above in his mind’s eye. A figure hidden in darkness, gun aimed through a greasy window. Through a confused and solitary childhood, Tim had clung to a desperate belief that there was something that shone in the human spirit that elevated it above meat and bone. With frantic hope and blind knowing, he’d fought his father’s code year after strenuous year, and yet here he stood, seized in the grasp of his own want and rage, bent on satiating his own needs at any cost. His father’s son.

He lowered the gun and walked away.

Replacing the pistol in the back of his waistband, he sat on the weedy concrete of the charred foundation, facing the freestanding garage. The tremendous responsibility the Commission, a by-all-accounts-illegitimate body of justices, had elected to shoulder struck Tim anew. To deem who was society’s scourge, to condemn justly, to be the voice of the people-these were responsibilities that could not be taken too seriously. And they demanded an impeccability of character, for the law was not to be meted out but acted; it was not a promise but a code.

He vowed to uphold that code even when the last binder moved from Rayner’s safe to the table, even as he picked through paperwork detailing the dismemberment of his daughter. If he didn’t honor it, he was no better than Robert or Mitchell or his father, selling fraudulent burial plots to lonely widows.

Something rustled to his right in the weeds, and his pistol was drawn and aimed as quickly as he turned his head. Dray’s form resolved from the dark, clad in black jeans, a black sweatshirt, and a denim jacket. She approached, unbothered by the gun, and sat beside him. Another ghost, another watcher in the night. Sliding her hands into the pouch pocket of her sweatshirt, she flicked her head toward his gun, then the garage. “Second thoughts?”

“Every minute.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah.” She propped her elbows on her knees, pressed her hands together, and rested her chin on the ledge of her thumbs. She seemed to remember something and quickly put her left hand back in her pocket. The collar of her jean jacket was up; she looked like Debbie Gibson with an attitude problem. “Saw your handiwork on the news. You’re creating quite a buzz.”