Gregg Hurwitz - The Kill Clause

“Yes, well, I’m afraid I was mistaken when I told you that before. I ended up doing it a few days earlier. Broke in when you were at work and your wife went to the grocery store.”

Tim studied him closely, then Robert. He decided to believe them for the time being. “Listen,” he said, “we already have a guilty vote in on Bowrick. I’m handling it alone, as I pointed out earlier. Robert, you take some time off-and I mean off-and catch your breath. And be advised, when you come back, I’m not tolerating another word of your racist bullshit. Is that clear? Is it?” He waited for Robert to nod, a barely discernible tilt of his head.

“Then we’ll move to Kindell,” Rayner said. “And I’ve already embarked on the tedious process of selecting a second set of cases for our next phase.”

“One step at a time. Right now I need you all to leave.”

Rayner’s mustache twitched in a half smile. “It’s my house.”

“I need to sit alone with Bowrick’s file. Would you rather I ran copies and took them home?” Tim stared from face to face until the others rose and shuffled out of the room.

Ananberg lingered behind. She shut the door and faced Tim, sliding her arms so they were folded across her chest. “This is coming unglued.”

Tim nodded. “I’m going to slow things down, see what I can get on Bowrick, see how Dumone fares. I can handle this operation largely on my own. If I need to use Mitchell, I’ll stick him on surveillance and keep him well clear of any situation that might go hot.”

“Robert and Mitchell won’t settle for being your spy and errand boys for long. They’re obsessed. They’re all about black-and-white logic, no mitigating circumstances.”

“We need to keep phasing them out operationally so they’re permanently on the sidelines before we embark on the next phase of cases.”

“And if things don’t move the way we want them to?”

“We invoke the kill clause and dissolve the Commission.”

“Can you make this work without Dumone?”

Tim looked up at her. “I don’t know. That’s why I’m handling Bowrick myself. I can make sure it’s done right, then move on to Kindell.”

“You must be eager to get to Kindell.”

“Like you wouldn’t believe.”

Ananberg removed a thrice-folded document from her purse and slid it down the length of the table. It stopped when it hit Tim’s knuckles.

The public defender’s notes.

“Rayner had me run a copy of this at the office. I accidentally made two. Put it in your pocket, do not look at it until you get home, and don’t ask me for anything else.”

Tim resisted the overwhelming urge to flip through the pages. As much as it pained him, he wedged the public defender’s notes into his back pocket. When he looked up, Ananberg was gone.

The sudden silence rankled him, and he tried to soothe his unease. He couldn’t risk Rayner’s walking in here and finding him examining the purloined documents, and he couldn’t leave abruptly after saying he was going to stay to study Bowrick’s file. He had to play it cool-he owed Ananberg that much.

He dimmed the lights overhead, then propped Bowrick’s photo up against Ginny’s frame. He stared at Bowrick’s discontented face for a long time before flipping open the binder.

THE notes from Kindell’s case burning a hole in his jeans, Tim left without finding Rayner to announce his departure. As he pulled out of the driveway, the house loomed behind him, dark and falsely antiquated. It wasn’t until the wrought-iron gate swung closed behind his car that he realized he’d imbued the building itself with an ineffable quality of emotion, something like sadness and menace mixed together.

He drove a few blocks, then parked and flipped through the public defender’s notes on Kindell. His excitement quickly gave way to disappointment. A summation of the lawyer’s pretrial talks with Kindell, the typed notes were poorly organized and incomplete.

Some of them were chilling.

The victim was the client’s “type.”

Client claims to have taken an hour and a half with the body after death.

Tim’s stomach lurched, and he had to roll down the window and breathe in the crisp air before mustering the courage to continue.

A single sentence on the fifth page slapped him into shock. In an attempt to jar himself back to lucidity, he found himself reading it over and over, trying to attach meaning to the words so they’d make sense again.

Client claims he carried out all aspects of the crime alone.

And then the sentence beneath: Had spoken to no one regarding Virginia Rackley or the crime until the handling unit arrived at his residence.

Through an all-enveloping numbness, he finished scanning the report, turning up no new information.

Kindell would have had no reason to deceive his public defender, nor his public defender to lie in his confidential record-keeping. Unless the case binder revealed additional facts-perhaps buried in the public defender’s investigator reports-then Tim had been off the mark all along. Gutierez, Harrison, Delaney, his father-they’d been right.

Tim’s conviction about an accomplice had grown into an addiction that had shielded him from the full brunt of Ginny’s death. If Kindell had in fact been Ginny’s only murderer, then Tim’s options were concrete, as finite as the sagging walls of Kindell’s shack. There was little left for him to do but confront Kindell however he decided and face the reality of his child’s death.

Dray had gone to sleep-the answering machine picked up on a half ring-and he left her the news, coding it in case Mac happened to be around.

Held in the trance of a sudden exhaustion, he drove home and fell into a blissful, dreamless block of sleep. He lay on the mattress for a few minutes upon awakening, watching the motes swirl and drift in the slant of morning light from the window, his mind returning obsessively to the last black binder awaiting him in Rayner’s safe.

If it didn’t miraculously yield compelling evidence for an accomplice, he realized with some satisfaction, then he’d deal with Kindell soon enough.

He just had to get to Bowrick first.

He showered, dressed, and headed out for a cup of coffee. He sat in a corner booth at a dive of a breakfast joint one block down, flipping through the L.A. Times. The Debuffier execution had grabbed the headline again, but the story contained little about the actual investigation. Man on the Street reared his ugly head again, claiming, “You don’t need the law to tell you right from wrong. The law told that voodoo bastard he was in the right, but he wasn’t. Now he’s dead, and the law says that’s wrong. I say it’s justice.” Tim noted with some alarm how clearly Man on the Street was articulating his own supposed position.

Another article announced that a moral-watchdog group was protesting a vigilante game Taketa FunSystems had put into development called Death Knoll. The player had a choice of automatic weapons with which to outfit his video-screen counterpart before setting him out on the streets. It featured tomato-burst head shots and limb-severing explosions. A rapist got you five points, a murderer ten.

A back-page story about two immigrants shot in robberies took the edge off some of Tim’s hypocritical indignation.

He returned to his apartment and sat in his single chair, feet on the windowsill, phone in his lap. For reference he’d smuggled out three pages of notes he’d taken from Bowrick’s file. For inspiration he logged on to the Internet and found the L.A. Times photograph of the coach clutching his dead daughter outside Warren High School. For a long time he looked at the man’s face, twisted with anguish and a sort of shocked disbelief. Tim was struck, now, with the heightened empathy that fear fulfilled provides.