The Kill Clause (30 page)

“Dumone is like a father to me,” Robert said. His lips were trembling. Tim waited for him to break, but he remained stubbornly on the edge between composure and grief.

“You need some time off from this,” Rayner said. “To get your perspective back.”

“No, no. Back to work. I need work.” When Robert looked up, his eyes were scared. “Don’t you do that to me.”

“You’re a liability to our aims,” Tim said. “You’re sitting it out for a while.”

Robert remained bent over the table, shoulders drawn forward and around so his trapezius muscles pulled high and hard around his neck. His head was raised, tilted up from his hunch like a pointing dog’s, his
eyes bright. “You’ve been trying to cut me and Mitch out from day one. You of
all
people should understand our needing to be involved. To do more. Don’t tell us to sit back and let others handle it. You’re giving us the same bullshit answers your dad threw back at you when you went to him for help.”

Rayner jumped in angrily. “That’s
enough,
Robert.”

Off Tim’s expression, Robert looked away uncomfortably, maybe even a touch ashamed. “Yeah, that’s right, you forget. We know about when you went to him for help, and he turned you out. We were listening.”

Tim felt his pulse beating at his temples. He sifted through the anger, searching out a sharper vexation. “I was told you’d been listening to me since the day of Ginny’s funeral.”

Mitchell strummed his short-cut nails on the table. “Dumone already apol—”

“I went to see my father three days before that.” Tim faced the Stork, who was only now perking up to pay attention. “So how were you listening to me at my father’s?”

“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.

And he was struck also with the alarming needlessness of it all.

He rubbed his hands, studied his three pages of notes, and formulated a strategy. Bowrick had skillfully arranged his own relocation to duck threats and possible attempts on his life; he was going to be hidden smart and well. Normally Tim’s tracking resources were virtually unlimited. Each government agency, from the Treasury Department, to Immigration, to Customs, controlled an acronymous computer database or eight—EPIC, TECS, NADDIS, MIRAC, OASIS, NCIC—but they were all inaccessible now. To obtain information about Bowrick, Tim couldn’t call his rabbis at other agencies, his CIs, or his contacts inside companies. He couldn’t talk to anyone in person, nose around any locations, or leverage any snitches. He’d have to street-smart his way through, like a criminal, which he supposed he was.

He started with Bowrick’s last-known, reached the apartment manager, and pretended to be a bill collector. A long shot, but Tim knew to start with the ground-ballers. No forwarding information. But he did get the date Bowrick moved out: January 15.

Posing as a postal inspector investigating mail fraud, he called the gas, power, water, and cable companies and presented a gruff voice and a false badge number. He was amazed—as always—at how easy it was to elicit confidential information. Unfortunately, all Bowrick’s listings were for addresses prior to January 15; he had been smart and registered everything under his new name, whatever that was. Telephone was usually the most current listing, but the address Pac Bell had was for his last-known, and the number had long been disconnected.

Giving Ted Maybeck’s name and badge number—he figured Ted owed him one for throwing the infamous high five—Tim tried to talk his way through the DMV bureaucracy but got nowhere. DMV staff was either incompetent or tough; those displaying the latter trait were also well schooled on privacy policies. According to the case binder, Bowrick had no car of his own—his mother used to drop him off at school, which, Tim recalled, had made him the object of derision among other seniors. In fact, the majority of the student character testimonies had been scathing—all except for that of one girl, an Erika Heinrich, who’d pointed out the vicious bullying that Bowrick and the now-deceased gunmen had received at the hands of the basketball team.

Dead ends all around. Tim had fallen into the pursuit as if he were working up a warrant, and the sudden halt brought him quickly to frustration. He slid open the window and leaned into the slight breeze. He hadn’t realized how stifling the room had grown with the rising sun and his own body heat. He closed his eyes and thought about the police report, waiting for a piece of information to rise out of place and trip his thoughts. None did.

Tim thought of the slump of Bowrick’s shoulders, his caged-rat unappeal. He tried to imagine having a child capable of such destruction. Could even a parent love someone so cruel and odious? Could anyone?

Tim sensed a shift in instinct, a puzzle piece sliding and dropping into place. The jagged half-coin pendant that he’d seen in Bowrick’s booking photo—a lover’s necklace. Each party wore one piece of the same coin. Erika Heinrich’s character testimony suddenly stood out all the more. The one sympathetic account. The girlfriend.

Tim logged on and entered
Erika Heinrich
into Yahoo People Search and got two hits—a seventeen-year-old in Los Angeles and a seventy-two-year-old in Fredericksburg, Texas. The grandmother? One
of Tim’s former saw gunners in the Rangers was from Fredericksburg, so Tim knew it was a predominantly German community—maybe that explained the
k
in the first name.

He located the more eligible Erika’s phone number on the screen and dialed. When a woman answered, he tried his best salesman voice, and it came out surprisingly well. “Is this Erika Heinrich?”

A voice edged with irritation. “This is her mother, Kirsten. Why, what’d she do now?”

“I’m sorry, we must have the names crossed in our database. I’m calling from Contact Telecommunications to let you know you’re eligible for—”

“Not interested.”

“Well, if you have family out of state, our rates are
extremely
competitive. Two cents a minute state-to-state, and just ten cents a minute to Europe.”

A weighted pause, broken only by mouth breathing. “Two cents a minute long-distance? What’s the catch?”

“No catch. Can I ask who you’re with now?”

“MCI.”

“And for local?”

“Verizon.”

“Well, we beat both MCI and Verizon by nearly
four hundred percent.
There’s simply a once-a-month twenty-dollar charge for—”

“Twenty-dollar charge? See, I knew you guys were all full of shit.” She hung up.

Tim had no phone book in his apartment, Joshua was out, and the corner telephone booth’s had been ripped from its cord. Two blocks down he located another booth, this one with the book intact. He flipped through and found the nearest Kinko’s, then picked another a bit farther away from his apartment. He called and got their number for incoming faxes, a service they provided for people without fax machines willing to abide the buck-a-page fee.

Back upstairs he called MCI and got a male customer-service rep. He hung up and called back twice before he got a woman. He softened his voice, trying his best approximation of pitiful. “Yes, hello. I’m hoping you can help me with a…with a somewhat embarrassing personal problem. I’ve just…um, been separated from my wife, our divorce papers went through last week, and, uh…”

“I’m sorry, sir. How exactly can
I
help you?”

“Well, I’m still responsible for paying my wife’s…” He let out a sad little laugh. “My
ex
-wife’s bills. Her lawyer just sent along her
telephone bill, and it seemed…well, it seemed unreasonably high. I don’t mean to imply my wife is dishonest—she’s not—but I’m worried her lawyer is monkeying around a bit with the numbers. You know how lawyers can be.”

“I was divorced once myself. You don’t have to tell me.”

“It is…it is hard, isn’t it?”

“Well, sir, it’ll get easier.”

“That’s what people keep telling me. Anyway, I was wondering if you could fax me the telephone bill for review, just so I can make sure these numbers are accurate. If they are, of course, I’ll happily reimburse my wife, it’s just that—”

“If some lawyer’s giving you the markup, you want to know.”

“Precisely. My wife’s name is Kirsten Heinrich, and she’s at 310-656-8464.”

The sound of fingers flying across a computer keyboard. “Well, as much as I’d like to help you, I’m not permitted to turn over her records to unauthorized…” More typing. “Sir, this account is listed under
Stefan
Heinrich.”

“Yes, of course. That’s me.”

“Well, technically it’s still your account, so until she changes the name, I
am
authorized to grant you access to billing information. Which fax number would you like me to send your last statement to?”

“It’s actually my local Kinko’s—I lost my fax machine along with my new Saturn—and the number is 310-629-1477. If you could send the last several bills, that would be most helpful.”

With Verizon, Tim claimed to be Stefan Heinrich from the outset and asked for the last three months of bills to be faxed over so he could review what he believed were some false charges.

He ate lunch alone at Fatburger, giving the faxes an hour to trickle through the various bureaucratic chains of command, then drove over to Kinko’s and picked up the stack. Back at his apartment, he hunched over the pages with a yellow highlighter, looking for triggers, his tongue poking his cheek out in a point.

Bowrick’s move had occurred less than two months ago, and Tim prayed he and Erika had, in fact, been a couple and that they were still in touch. He’d seen men forsake their cars with their telltale Vehicle Identification Numbers, their pets with registered pedigrees, even their own children to go into hiding, but they could always be counted on to contact their girlfriends. Drawn back to the bang, like a dog to his vomit. With a loner like Bowrick, the chances were even better.

The first two bills gave Tim nothing, and he felt a dread settle over
him in anticipation of having to call every number in the entire stack, but then he noticed a recurring regional number matched with a recurring time. Roughly 11:30
P
.
M
. every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. He looked closer and saw that there were also calls made to the same number, less regularly, around 7:30
A
.
M
.

Clever, clever Bowrick.

Bowrick knew that if someone was determined to find him—a reasonable possibility, given that he was partially responsible for one of the most publicized mass killings in Los Angeles history—that his pursuer could trace calls originating from people closest to him. So instead of having calls ring through to his apartment, he’d set contact times where he could be reached out-of-pocket.

Tim called the number and let it ring and ring, since he guessed it was a pay phone. After the seventeenth ring, a man picked up. He spoke with a strong Indian accent. “Stop calling, please. This is a pay phone. You’re driving my customers away.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but my girlfriend was supposed to pick up. I’m sort of worried she’s not there, so I want to cruise over and look for her. Would you mind telling me where you’re located?”

“You will buy something and not just poke around?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Corner of Lincoln and Palms.”

Tim knew already, but had to ask to clear the Politically Correct censor he was surprised to find lurking in his head. “And your store isa…?”