Cop Town (25 page)

Kate thought about that. To be forced onto your knees. To look at a gun pointing at your head. To see the finger pull the trigger. To watch the explosion of the bullet coming out of the chamber. She could not imagine the terror.

Both men were married, though Keen was separated. Their wedding rings had been catalogued in the autopsy report. Both of their wives had called them good husbands, honorable men. Who had gone to their houses and knocked on their doors?

Kate knew what that part felt like, at least. You knew why they were
there the minute you saw them. The rest was theater. You said the line “Yes, may I help you?” as if your brain did not know. As if your heart was not already in your throat.

“What is it?” Maggie asked.

Kate shook her head. She made a show of studying the photographs. Only the first few were hard to look at. The close-ups of the backs of the men’s heads. Each bullet had made a perfect hole in their foreheads. The exit wounds were another story. The skulls were fractured out. Chips of white bone were stark as teeth in the bloody mass that showed brain and tissue. Those pictures were almost unreal. Kate was looking into a man’s skull, but for some reason her mind convinced her that it was fake.

Maybe that was why she was able to see the scratch on the back of Mark Porter’s neck. Kate held up the photo so she could better see. Was it a fingernail scratch?

One time, Kate had scratched the back of Patrick’s neck in the heat of the moment. He’d thought it was funny the next day, but she had been mortified.

Had Mark Porter’s neck been scratched by his wife, or was he doing the same thing that Don Wesley had been doing to Jimmy when the murder took place?

Kate felt herself shaking her head. That was too much of a coincidence. The Shooter had obviously made the emergency call about the burglar behind Friedman’s. Porter and Keen were lured there. As far as Kate knew, there was no directive in the manual that required you to fellate your partner after giving an all clear.

There was a scaled drawing of the crime scene in the back of the folder. Kate studied the diagram. The artist could teach the coroner a thing or two. The lines were steady and the objects were clearly defined. Everything that was within a radius of fifty feet from the bodies was marked with a number on the drawing. There was a legend in the corner. Kate scanned the recovered objects: cigarette butts, pieces of broken glass, hypodermic needles, squares of tinfoil, a bent silver spoon, the keys to the cruiser parked on the street, a piece of broken fingernail.

A thought occurred to Kate. Her face got so warm that she felt the
need to lean her head in her hands so that Maggie would not see. If Keen and Porter had oral sex, and the result of the completion was not at the scene, then where else would it be?

She flipped back to the autopsy reports. Kate folded up the pages so that Maggie wouldn’t see her focusing on the separate lines that read
GENITALS
. The word “unremarkable” was listed for both men.

She flipped back to the sections that listed stomach contents. Both victims had partially digested hamburgers and French fries that the coroner estimated were consumed an hour before death. Nothing else was listed. Kate wasn’t even sure it
would
be listed. Was that the sort of thing you could see inside a person’s stomach?

“Wait a minute,” Kate said.

“What?”

“Did your guys have anything in their stomachs?”

Maggie nodded. “Burgers and fries.”

“My guys requested a meal break right around the time we assume they were murdered, but the coroner estimates that they ate dinner at least an hour before they died.” She showed Maggie the two reports. “Hamburgers and fries.”

“The only place they could get hamburgers that time of night is at the Golden Lady. It’s a strip club off Peachtree. All the night-shift guys eat there.”

“Connection.” Kate wrote
the Golden Lady
on her list. “So, why did they request a meal break when they’d already eaten?”

“Why would they call a meal break at all?” Maggie explained, “Night shift pays double. You don’t clock out for meals. Nobody checks up on you, because the brass is asleep.” She nodded toward Kate’s paperwork. “What else?”

“Were your guys lured to the scene?”

“Yes. There was an anonymous call reporting a break-in. No alarm.”

“Same with mine. Did yours request a twenty-nine?”

“Their last contact with dispatch was to call the scene clear and request a meal break.”

Kate felt the hair go up on the back of her neck. “They were forced on their knees?”

“Yes.”

“They were shot in the foreheads?”

“The weapon was six to eight inches away, superior angle, so the guy was standing over them, holding the gun down.”

“That’s what I have, too.”

“Twenty-five caliber?”

“Twenty-five caliber,” Kate confirmed. “Anything unusual on the diagram of the scene?”

Maggie flipped a few pages in her notepad. “Cigarette butts, drug paraphernalia, a pair of ripped women’s underwear.” She looked up and shrugged. “You could find that on any street in Atlanta right now.”

“What about the car keys?”

Maggie flipped to a different page. “Ballard had them in his front left pants pocket.”

“My diagram has the keys fifteen feet away from Mark Porter’s body.” Kate suggested, “Maybe he had them in his hand because he was walking back to the car?”

“You’re supposed to loop the ring around your middle finger.” Maggie pulled out her own keys and showed Kate. “That way they can’t be knocked out of your hand.”

“Their cruiser was around the corner, a good fifty feet away.” Kate shrugged. “I always take out my keys when I’m closer, but that’s anecdotal.”

“Tell me what you see.” Maggie spread two photos in front of Kate. Ballard and Johnson facedown in an alley. As with Kate’s victims, the backs of their heads were blown open. Their legs were at awkward angles. Their arms were wide. The equipment on their belts was spread around. The transmitters clipped to the backs of their belts were spattered in blood.

Kate asked, “What am I missing?”

“Look closer.”

Kate leaned over the pictures. She studied the bodies the same way she used to study those puzzles that ask the viewer to spot the things that are different. She went back and forth between the two. Left shoe. Left shoe. Right shoe. Right shoe. She did this all the way up to the radio transmitters. “Oh.”

“What about your guys?”

Kate found the corresponding photos for Keen and Porter. Different angles, but roughly the same images: two men facedown on the ground with the backs of their heads missing. She spotted the same discrepancy Maggie had flagged. “My guys have their shoulder mics unplugged from their transmitters, too.”

“That doesn’t happen by accident.”

“No,” Kate said. The jack was almost too narrow for the plug. She assumed it was designed that way so that the cord didn’t easily pop out.

Kate stared at the photographs so long that her eyes burned. Something else was bothering her. She just couldn’t put her finger on it.

“Look at the way their arms are spread.” Maggie pointed to each picture. Every victim had his arms at the same angle. “When you arrest somebody, you make them lace together their fingers and put their hands on the top of their heads.”

“Right.” Kate knew exactly what she was talking about. Their hands must have blown apart when the bullet passed through their skulls. “Do you think the Shooter forced them to request a meal break, then unplugged their mics?”

“They didn’t unplug on their own.”

“But the request for a meal break is a twenty-nine. These guys had a gun pointed at their heads. Instead of asking for a twenty-nine, why didn’t they request a sixty-three, officer needs assistance? The Shooter would never know the difference.” Kate answered her own question. “Unless the Shooter knew the police codes.”

They both thought about that. The Shooter knew police codes. He knew procedure. He knew the routines.

Maggie raised her voice, calling, “Jimmy?” She waited in vain for a
response. “Jimmy?” She pushed herself up from the table. “Where the hell is he?”

Kate followed Maggie through the humid kitchen, then out to the carport. Jimmy and Rick were in metal lawn chairs under the shade. Terry Lawson and Bud Deacon sat on the hood of a brown Impala. Jett Elliott was behind the wheel, but he was obviously passed out. Chip Bixby leaned against a cord of wood. Cal Vick was beside him. They all had beer cans, even Jett. Empties littered the ground. Kate was not surprised they were all friends. They were the same type of jerks, evidence of which was likely soon forthcoming.

Terry glanced up, but he was obviously in the middle of a story. “So, then what happens? Kennedy gets shot and the only thing standing between us and that fucking commie brother of his is an Arab with a twenty-two.”

“Good thing he knew how to use it.” Chip tipped his beer can. Kate could see the skin on the back of his knuckles was broken open. She suppressed a wave of nausea, but not because of the violence. At the gun range, Chip had pressed against Kate’s back as he showed her how to hold a gun. There weren’t enough hot showers in the world to rid her body of the memory.

“No offense, sweetheart.” Terry was talking to Kate. He held a cold can to the back of his hand. His knuckles were bleeding. “I know you people put those Kennedy bastards right up there with the Pope.”

Kate bristled. “I’m not Irish. I’m Dutch.”

“I bet you are.” Cal Vick gave a suggestive laugh that turned into a hacking cough.

“Steady.” Chip slapped the man on the back.

Terry picked up where he left off. “All I’m saying is people don’t take power. You give it to them. Look at what’s happening here. Mayor Hartsfield traded his soul for the airport and the stadium. Then Massel, that fucking kike, takes over and forces MARTA up our asses.”

Chip muttered, “Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta.”

Terry lifted his beer in agreement. “Now we get this spearchucker in
a three-piece suit sitting behind the desk and suddenly we’re taking shots in the street.” He told Kate, “You weren’t here six months ago, sweetheart. You don’t know what it was like.”

“Fucking Spivey,” Chip muttered.

Edward Spivey. Kate heard the name echo in her head.

Bud held up his beer can in a toast. “To Duke Abbott. Best damn detective this squad ever had. He deserved better than he got.”

“Duke Abbott,” they all intoned.

Terry leaned back and knocked on the windshield. “Jett? Wake up, you sad shit.”

Jett stirred, but he was too far gone to do anything but roll his head to the other side.

“Let him sleep it off.” Vick slurped beer from the rim of his can. “Lookit, boys, I gotta call back from California. Spivey’s still living there. Coupla D’s ran him down for me. He was on a church retreat last night. Twenty people saw him.”

“You believe ’em?” Bud asked.

Vick shrugged. “Plane schedules won’t work putting him in Atlanta around dawn and back in California by the time the detectives knocked on his door.”

“Them D’s black or white?” Chip asked.

Vick shrugged again. “Sounded white, but who can tell with them Hollywood types.”

“Queers and freaks,” Bud muttered.

“Lookit, Spivey don’t matter.” Terry slapped Bud on the shoulder. “We’re gonna get this one. We’ll fry him up like a chicken.”

“Damn straight,” Vick agreed, though he didn’t seem troubled that half his detective squad was drinking in a carport rather than searching for a cop killer.

“So we catch ’em,” Bud said. “So what? Some lawyer gets him off? And then the next day, another cop gets shot. Then another.”

“Them’s the times, boys,” Vick said. “Ain’t none of that bullshit ever woulda happened if the good guys was still in charge.”

“Damn straight,” Chip agreed. “We kept ’em in line.”

“Kept this city working,” Terry added.

Kate worked to keep her expression neutral. She wondered if this was the sort of talk Leo Frank heard before the lynch mob dragged him toward the tree.

“Shit.” Bud tucked his hand into the waist of his pants. “When I was coming up, there wasn’t a nigger in Atlanta didn’t look down when you passed by. Now they’re struttin’ around like they own the place.”

“They
do
fucking own the place.” Terry threw his empty can into the yard next door. “What crawled up your ass, Olive Oyl?”

Maggie had her arms crossed. “I need to talk to Jimmy.”

“About what?”

“About—”

“Nothing.” Terry talked over her. “I didn’t let you bunk off roll call so you could sit around the house with your girlfriend all morning.”

“I’d sit around with her,” Bud offered.

Chip belched. There was genial laughter from all the men but Rick Anderson. He gave Kate an apologetic look. Then he finished his beer.

Jimmy threw his empty into the side yard. “Dutch.” He was looking at Kate. “That’s Holland, right?”

“The Netherlands.” Terry answered before Kate could. “I was stationed in Amsterdam back in ’45. Them gals all looked like her. Tall, blonde, fucking stacked. They see the uniform, you don’t even have to snap your fingers. They’re already asking, ‘How high?’ ” He shrugged a shoulder at Kate. “No offense, doll.”

“None taken,” she said, as if he hadn’t just accused her mother and grandmother of being whores.

Terry asked, “It took, what, five days for you guys to surrender after the Nazis started dropping bombs?”

Kate chewed the inside of her cheek.

“There were some Dutch sailors in the Pacific.” Chip crumpled his empty can and lobbed it into the yard. “Crazy bastards. Sank more ships in a week than the entire Allied forces. Brits said it was uncouth, but fuck ’em.”

Terry said, “A Dutch ship fished my brother out of the Pacific. Too
bad they didn’t bring him home.” He sat back on the car, seeming to reflect. “My tour in Amsterdam was at the bitter end. All over but the shoutin’. Krauts bombed the shit outta that city. The ordnance they used—I don’t know. So fuckin’ precise. You’d walk by a building and look through the window and there was nothing inside. No floors. No studs. No joists, even. Just brick outside and an empty shell inside.”