Resolve (32 page)

T
he cardboard boxes were splitting at the corners. One of them tore apart as I forced it into the back of the Jeep. It had been just two days since my conversation with Silo, but I wanted to get off campus as soon as possible. The loading zone near my office impatiently waited for me to let it start its vacation. Standing back from the rear of the vehicle, I wiped my forehead with my sleeve, surveyed my packing job, and noticed one of the signals wasn’t flashing with the rest of the hazard lights. Just one more thing.

Aaron waved meekly at me from across the street and approached.

“Taking off for the summer?” he droned as he scanned the boxes. He was on the depressive side of bipolar today.

I told him I was. An uncomfortable silence put a wedge between us.

“I am too. I’ve been thinking that I may go away for a while. Go somewhere peaceful and get away from all this craziness.”

“That’s probably a good idea, Aaron. It’s been a stressful couple of months. Everybody needs a break sometimes so they can step back and regain their perspective, right?”

He didn’t immediately respond. He watched two squirrels dance around a tree.

“I’ve got some problems, Cyprus. I may not come back for a while. I’ve got some things to sort through. There’s a place I go sometimes, it helps me . . . like you said, regain my perspective.”

Aaron needlessly smoothed out his thin mustache.

“I just wanted to tell you in case I don’t see you next fall. I’m on my way to see if Silo will let me take a semester off.”

“That sounds like a nice plan,” I said. “I’m not coming back until the spring either.” I added, “I think we all need some time to recover if we expect ourselves to carry on.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Kaitlyn and I want to spend some time traveling. Then I think she wants to get another dog—something called a Eurasier. So I guess we’ll be busy training a new puppy.”

Aaron smiled. A real smile.

“Man’s best friend, huh?”

I shook my head.

“Kaitlyn’s my best friend. But dogs are good company.”

Aaron nodded his assent and scratched his neck. A full minute of nothingness passed before he started making small talk about the race. He told me he was sorry we didn’t get to talk while we were there, and I said the same. He asked me how I did, and I told him it went about how I expected. We shook hands and made promises about staying in touch over the summer which we both knew we wouldn’t keep.

He was nearly across the street when he turned back in my direction and said, “Do you think Silo will let me take the time off?”

Seating myself behind the wheel of my dust-caked machine, I responded, “Just tell him you want the same deal as me. I think you’ll find him pretty agreeable.”

The Wrangler had barely reached its second record-scratch gear change before the grill lights appeared in the rearview mirror. The unmarked car pulled close behind me, and behind the wheel sat a grim mountain wearing black Oakleys. My side mirror was swallowed by an eclipse as he approached the driver’s side door.

“Detective Hartz.”

“Dr. Keller.”

He was wearing black dress pants and a forest green sport coat over a chalky white polo shirt. He was holding a small cardboard box similar in color to the ones behind me. His partner was nowhere to be found.

“I was on my way to your office when I saw you pass by.”

His head pivoted as he took an inventory of the car.

“No summer classes?”

“No. Research sabbatical.”

My reflection in his glasses moved up and down as he acknowledged his understanding.

“I was coming by to return this to you.” He handed me the box that I knew contained my gun.

“Normally, we would have had you come down to get it, but I thought I would return this personally.”

The way he said
personally
made my vertebrae tingle.

“You can sign this.”

He handed me a pen and a receipt. Putting the box on the passenger seat, I used my dashboard as a table and signed the receipt without bothering to confirm what was in the package.

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“I know.”

We listened to the Jeep’s idling engine beg for euthanasia.

Becoming very disconcerted about this one-on-one meeting, I asked, “Where’s Detective Shand?”

“He decided to take a few days off.”

Hartz took the receipt and pen from me, tore off the thin yellow sheet on the back, and handed me back the illegible fifth copy.

“You see, he’s a little newer at this than me, so he takes it personally when he fails to close a case.”

I started to say something, but stopped myself.

“I try to look at things more objectively. The evidence is either there, or it’s not. You do your job to the best of your ability and if the dealer still hits on eighteen and gets twenty-one, then you walk away knowing it was just his day.”

The engine fell silent as I turned the key. He had something to say and he wanted me to hear it.

“Take the killings in Oakland, for instance. Walker’s fingerprints were all over the unregistered gun at the scene. He had GSR on him, so it looks like he shot the officer. Of course, the scene could have been staged, but I don’t think it was. As to why he was there in the first place . . . I have no idea.”

Hartz looked up the street and then back past his car. An internal timer had activated an ingrained habit of assessing his surroundings.

“Then we have the question about who shot Walker. We thought we caught a lucky break when the bullet that passed through his head was intact enough for us to get a read on it. My partner is a smart guy. He suggested that we run every name we’ve come across in the TRU and Oakland investigations and see who might own a .357, and bingo! The computer spits out your name and the dots start to connect. We can’t fill in all the blanks, but you’re starting to look dirty as hell.”

Looking through the dirty windshield, I reminded myself to breathe.

“I’m usually not sloppy, but when we were at your house and I bagged your gun and ammo, I didn’t notice it.” He smiled, but not really. “Let me tell you, I was pretty embarrassed when I took those things to the lab and saw that the bullets were .40 calibers.

“Now, I’m not a gun nut like some cops, so I was at a loss before the lab guys filled me in. Did you know that your gun can either be a .357 or a .40? Yes, sir. We carry Glocks, so I didn’t know that. With your gun, it turns out that all you have to do is swap out the barrel, get yourself some new ammo, and then you have a weapon with a completely different signature. And the best part is, you can buy a barrel without having to fill out any paperwork. If someone were to pay cash for that baby, it would be damn near impossible to track that kind of purchase.”

A stick of gum materialized in front of Hartz and disappeared into his mouth.

“Like I said, I’m not sloppy, so I had the boys check your gun anyway. Of course, it didn’t match, but you probably guessed that. I even thought to ask them if they could tell if the gun had ever been fired. They told me that a lot of the parts looked well-used, but the barrel had
minimal signs of usage.
Strange, but nothing damning.”

I really needed a sabbatical.

“Needless to say, I was pretty upset. I was about to follow my partner’s example and take some R&R, when I remembered something you said at your house. Shand asked you what you thought should happen to the person who killed Walker and Nokes. It was a bush league question and he never should have asked it. You
had
to know that all you needed to say was,
Whoever did this deserves to get gang raped in prison until the end of time,
but you didn’t. You just couldn’t resist, could you? You said that whoever killed Walker deserved something
other
than prison. Then you said that we shouldn’t even question what you think about cop killers. So here is what I think happened. For whatever reason, I think Walker shot Officer Nokes. Out of either anger or pure instinct, you shot Walker with that gun right there.”

He pointed at the box on the seat, while I internally cursed my ego for playing word games with the investigators.

“Then,” he preached on, “you bought a new barrel for your gun and made the switch.”

He paused and scanned the street again.

“You could have simply replaced it with a new .357 barrel, but why not change it completely? I suppose I could spend the next six months going to every gun store in a 100 mile radius and hope I find some sales clerk who remembers a guy paying cash for that barrel, but even if I did, what would that prove. I’m sure the original barrel is down some storm drain by now.”

A river outside Youngstown, actually.

“And judging by the immaculate carpets in that hunk of junk you’re driving, I don’t think searching for any trace evidence would get me anywhere.”

For the first time in several minutes, I looked directly at him. Even with the sunglasses shielding his eyes, I could tell that there was no real malice there.

“What now?” I asked. I didn’t know what else to say. No need to fake being offended and insult his obviously formidable intelligence.

“What now? I guess that’s the question, isn’t it? The way I see it, Steven Thacker killed the Behram girl. You killed Thacker . . . legally. Randy Walker killed a police officer and
somebody
took care of Walker. Maybe Walker killed Virginia Richmond and he doubly deserved a bullet in the head. So, what now? Now, I wait for the call that tells me to pin the Richmond homicide on Walker, whether he deserves it or not. Then I wait for some crackhead to smoke somebody over ownership of a street corner and I start working that case. That’s what’s now.”

A woman in her late fifties passed by on a thirty-year-old bicycle. She smiled at the detective who was making an ordinary traffic stop. He smiled back.

He started returning to his car, but then stopped and said, “By the way, my condolences on the death of that other professor. What was his name? Kanto?”

“Kasko. Jacob Kasko.”

“Yeah. Too bad. When I saw his picture in the obituaries, I thought I recognized him. He was running with you the first day we met, wasn’t he?”

Seriously, I was going to throw up if this didn’t stop soon.

“Just to make sure everything was kosher—because I’m not sloppy—I checked on that race he was running. I found out that you were registered to run in it too.”

“I did run in it.”

“I know. I’m learning all sorts of things these days. I’ve never done much long distance running. The most I ever had to run was ten-yard bursts so I could try to separate some running back’s teeth from his gums. So I was very interested to learn about those clocking things they put down on the streets. What do you call them?”

“Timing mats,” I answered a little too quickly.

“You can go back and check any runner’s time when they cross those things. Out of curiosity, because I love getting an education, I checked your times against Kasko’s. Do you know what I found?”

I let the rhetorical question hang in the air.

“According to those fancy computers, you were a long way from Kasko the whole time. Almost a full mile the second time you crossed a mat.”

“He was a good athlete.”

“Apparently he was. Especially for a man much older than you. Well, this got me thinking that only two timing mats don’t tell me much and besides, you can’t always trust computers. So I talked to one of the race organizers and he mentioned that if I was interested in seeing a particular person, there were official race photographers at a couple of spots along the course. Each photo is digital, so you can see the time that it was taken too. Amazing. Anyway, I told him that I would just love to see some photos of you since we’re becoming so close, and he typed your name into a computer, matched you with a bib number and in a flash—there you were!”

“There I was,” I said while trying not to look shaken.

“They had a couple of real good photos of you. I had no trouble picking out the number on your chest and making out your face. It didn’t hurt that you had those sunglasses up on your head and not covering your face.” He tapped a baseball bat finger on the frame of his shades. “In one of the shots, it even seemed like you were looking right into the camera.”

“Did it?”

“Like I said, I don’t know much about marathons, so I asked the race people if the times on those photos were consistent with the times when you crossed the mats. You know . . . if you were running at a pretty constant pace. They said you were. I then went through the same process to check Kasko’s times. It looks like he was well ahead of you up until he collapsed.”

Placing his giant mitts on the door beside me, he said, “There is one thing I wanted to ask you about. You must have passed right by your friend after he went down. Did you stop to check on him?”

“A lot of people had to pull off the course. I must have missed him.”

The investigator looked at the ground and shook his head back and forth.

“Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm. That’s a shame. You have to be thinking that maybe if you’d seen him and stopped, you could have helped him in some way. Or not. Anaphylactic shock is a real bear. It can take only a matter of minutes for a person to die. The medics who worked on him told me that he must have had an allergy to something he came into contact with during the race. Maybe even something he ate. You guys do that, right? Eat things during the race?”

I told him we did and why.

“You would think he’d have known better. He had a bracelet that said he was allergic to penicillin, but there was no reason he would be taking that at the end of a race.”

I shifted in my seat and put my hands on the wheel. He changed gears.

“Being a detail-oriented guy, I pulled Kasko’s phone records to see if there was any unusual activity before he died. Things like him receiving threatening calls or anything like that. Boy, was I surprised when I saw the same number keep popping up on his system. It was the number of a prepaid cell phone. Dozens of calls were on that list to and from that number, and the records I requested went just two months back. The number was for a cell we found in Steven Thacker’s car after he died. Hell, nearly
every
call made from that phone was to Kasko or some office on the TRU campus. Did you know that Kasko and Thacker knew each other that well?”