The Kill Clause (23 page)

Blank looks all around, except Dumone, who grimaced. “Debuffier’s a big, mean, Santero. Goes about six-six on a bad day.”

Tim slid into his chair. “Santero?”

“Voodoo priest. They’re Cuban mostly, but Debuffier’s a Haitian mix.”

The Stork’s humming reached an annoying pitch.

“Would you shut the hell up?” Robert said.

The Stork stopped, his puffy little hands midfold. He rode his glasses back up the bridge of his nose with a knuckle, blinking apologetically. “Was I doing that out loud?”

Tim reached for Debuffier’s booking photo. A displeased man with a shaved head stared back at him, the whites of his eyes pronounced against pitch-dark skin. He wore a flannel, ripped to expose his bare shoulders. His deltoids stood out, ridged and firm, as though he were straining against the cuffs. From the look of his build, he was probably making some pretty good headway. “What’s the case?”

Dumone flipped open the binder and paged through the crime-scene report. “Ritual sacrifice of Aimee Kayes, a seventeen-year-old girl. Her body was found headless in an alley, draped in a multicolored cloth, raw salt, honey, and butter smeared on the bleeding neck stump. The top vertebra had been removed. LAPD’s ritual-crimes expert found these details to be consistent with Santería sacrificial rites.”

“They sacrifice people? Regularly?” the Stork asked.

“Only in James Bond movies,” Ananberg said, reaching for the medical examiner’s report. “The Santeros mostly kill birds and lambs. Even in Cuba. I did an anthropology study on them in college.”

“So what gives?” Robert asked.

“We’ve got a Froot Loop, that’s what gives.”

Dumone’s chuckle turned into a racking cough. He lowered his fist from his face, then drained the last of his bourbon. “The ritual-crimes expert testified that, based on the specifics of the sacrifice, Debuffier probably believed that the victim was a threatening evil spirit.”

“Stomach contents included sunflower leaves and coconut.” Ananberg looked up from the pages. “The meal before the slaughter. If she eats, it shows the gods approve of her for sacrifice.”

“I’m sure she found that slender consolation,” Rayner said.

The Stork waved a hand before his yawning mouth. “I’m sorry. Past my bedtime.”

Robert slid a glossy crime-scene photo across the table. “This should wake you up.”

“What links Debuffier to the body?” Tim asked. “Aside from the fact that he’s a voodoo priest?”

Dumone tossed the eyewitness testimonies at Tim. “Two eyewitnesses.
The first, Julie Pacetti, was Kayes’s best friend. The two girls were at the movies a few nights before Kayes’s abduction. After the show Pacetti went to the bathroom and Kayes waited for her in the lobby. When Pacetti came out, Kayes claimed Debuffier had just approached her and asked her to go for a ride with him. He’d frightened her, and she’d refused. When the girls went out in the parking lot, Debuffier was waiting in a black El Camino. He saw that Kayes was not alone and took off, but not before Pacetti got a good eyeful.”

“A six-foot-six bald Haitian,” Mitchell said. “Not exactly inconspicuous.”

“The second witness?” Tim asked.

“A USC girl returning from a party saw a man fitting Debuffier’s description pull Kayes’s body from the bed of a black El Camino and drag it into the alley.”

Ananberg whistled. “I’d say that’s pretty damning.”

“She ran a few blocks, then phoned 911 at”—Dumone checked the report—“three-seventeen
A
.
M
. With a physical description of the suspect and the car, the cops got to Debuffier before daybreak. They found him outside his house, scouring the bed of his El Camino with bleach.”

“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 Santería 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.”

“We aim to please.”

“Funny, I never would have thought street justice was your style.”

“It isn’t. But my old style was found wanting. At least to some people.”

“How’s the new one fit?”

“A little tight in the shoulders, but I’m hoping I’ll adjust.”

“You tailor the suit to the man, not vice versa.”

He reached over and patted her down casually with one hand. She wasn’t hiding a weapon beneath her bulky sweatshirt. “What are you doing here?”

“Just keeping an eye on things. I like to have the creep under my thumb.”

The dim flashlight bobbed inside the garage, then a fierce rattling broke the silence.

“What the hell’s going on in there?” Tim said.

“I rerouted his mail to a drop box. I got his credit-card numbers, his telephone, gas, and power account numbers, then I canceled everything. It’s petty and small, but it makes me feel better.”

Tim extended a fist to her, which Dray matched. They knocked knuckles, a modified high five they used only on the range or the softball diamond. Dray leaned into him slightly, touching at the hip, the elbow. He pressed his lips to the top of her head, inhaling the scent of her hair. They sat for a bit in silence.

“You get anything new on the case?”

She shook her head. “I’ve pretty much run out the leads. I wanted to see if you’d gotten your hands on that case binder.”

“No, it’ll be a while, unfortunately.”

“We’ll have to wait, I guess.” Her face crinkled. “It’s wrecking me. The waiting. Bracing to find out something even more awful, or maybe to not find out anything at all.”

They stared at Kindell’s shack for a few moments. Tim bit his lip. “I hear Mac’s been hanging out at the house.”

The gap opened up again between their hips. Her mouth tensed. “The house was empty and haunted.”

“You trying to hurt me, Dray?”

“Is it working?”

“Yes. You didn’t answer my question.”

“Believe it or not, everything I’m going through isn’t about you. Mac is staying on the couch because I’m scared of the dark right now, like a little girl. I know, pathetic, but you’re certainly not around to help me with the problem.”

“Mac has a thing for you, Dray. Always has.”

“Well, I don’t have a thing for Mac. He’s staying as a friend. No more.” She reached over and took Tim’s hand, keeping her left hand wedged in her pocket.

A sudden dread gut-checked him. “Take your hand out of your pocket, Dray.”

Unwillingly, she withdrew her hand. Her ring finger was bare. A deep-lit pain took hold in Tim’s chest and spread out and out, brushfire-fast. He turned away, looking at the house of the man who had consumed his daughter, but Kindell had quieted within and could provide no distraction.

Dray’s lips quivered ever so slightly, the pre-quake warnings of anger, of self-loathing, of sorrow—a triple cocktail with which Tim had recently grown familiar. Her face, gloomy and frozen in a halfcringe, matched nothing he’d ever known of her. She knuckle-scratched
the top of her nose, a gesture she made when distressed or deeply sad. “I feel like you don’t want me anymore, Timothy.”

“That’s
not
true.” His voice rose a bit with the inflection, but it was just him and Dray and a deaf man at thirty yards.

“It’s too hard for me to wear it right now. I’ve looked at that ring every day of our marriage, first thing when I wake up, and it always made me grateful.” Dray seemed small and vulnerable sitting in the darkness, her arms hooked across her knees the way Ginny used to hold hers when she watched TV. “Right now it just reminds me of your absence.”

He plucked up a weed by its roots and tossed it. Its mud-caked cluster of roots hit the foundation a few feet away with a satisfying splat. “I have to see this through. The Commission. Get my hands on that case binder. I can’t do that if I’m living at home, in plain sight. It puts me at too much risk. It puts
you
at too much risk. I need to protect Ginny at least in her death, so the men who did this…” When he raised his hand to wipe his nose, he saw it was trembling, so he lowered it into his lap and squeezed it, squeezed it hard.

“Timothy.” Her tone approached pleading, though for what, he did not know. She started to reach for him but withdrew her hand.

It took another minute or so before he could trust his voice again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I haven’t said her name in a while.”

“It’s okay to cry, you know.”

Tim bobbed his head a few times, an intimation of a nod. “Right.”

Dray stood up, dusted off her hands. “I don’t want to not see you right now,” she said. “I don’t want to not have you in my life. But I understand why you have to do this for you, for us. I guess we just wait and hold on and hope what we are is strong enough.”

He couldn’t take his eyes off her hand, her bare finger. The hole that had opened up in his chest continued to dilate, claiming his lungs, his voice.

Something fluttered nearby, settled, and began to chirp.

Dray turned and started the long walk back to the road.

•Halfway home, Tim pulled over and sat, hands on the wheel, breathing hard. Though it was February-cold, he had the AC on high. He thought of his waiting apartment, its barrenness and bleak functionality, and realized how ill equipped eight years of marriage had left him for being alone. He pulled Ananberg’s address out of his pocket and studied the edge-ripped slip of paper.

Her apartment building in Westwood was security-intensive—
controlled access, double-locked glass front door, security cam in the brief stretch of tile that passed for a lobby. Turning from the camera, Tim ran a finger down the directory beside the call box outside and was not surprised to see the numbers listed by last name, not apartment number. He punched the button and waited as the metal speaker harshly projected a buzz.

Ananberg clicked on, sounding wide awake though it was nearly four in the morning. “Yeah?”

“It’s Tim. Tim Rackley.”

“First and last name. How wonderfully unassuming. I’m in 303.”

A loud buzzing issued from the heavy glass door, which Tim yanked open. He took the elevator up. The third-floor carpet was clean but slightly worn. When he knocked lightly on Ananberg’s door, he heard soft footsteps, then the sounds of two locks and a chain being undone. The door swung open. Ananberg wore a thigh-length Georgetown T-shirt. One hand held a thick-necked Rhodesian Ridgeback at bay by the collar, the other gripped a little Ruger, the muzzle of which she was using to scratch her leg.

“You should check the peephole. Even if you just buzzed someone up.”

“I did.”

He knew she was lying, as he hadn’t seen the darkness of her eye through the lens. The dog moved forward and nuzzled his nose moistly into Tim’s cupped hand.

“Impressive. Boston usually hates people.”

“Boston?”

“I inherited him from an ex-boyfriend. Harvard asshole.”

She turned and headed back into the oversize studio. Past the kitchenette, diminutive dining table, and TV-facing couch, two bureaus cordoned off the sleeping area, which was no more than a full-size bed wedged beneath the room’s single large window. She snapped her fingers, and Boston trotted to a fluffy disk of a dog bed and lay down. The pistol she slid into the right bureau’s top drawer.

She stepped closer to the bed, leaving them a few steps’ space. They eyed each other across a frayed throw rug. Crossing her arms, she lifted her T-shirt off over her head. Her body, thin and wonderfully shaped, was unexploited by weights or vigorous training. Modest, firm breasts rose above the in-curve of her stomach. Her gaze held the sapient matter-of-factness of examining nurses and prostitutes. It was frank and distressingly genuine, a sad, doleful ritual in a sad, doleful apartment.

Tim’s eyes strayed uncomfortably to the single place mat on the dining
table, the T-shirt puddled by the box of Kleenex on the floor. He understood more concretely that she’d been touched by death and loss, as had they all.

“I’m afraid you misunderstood me. I can’t…” His hand described an arc of some sort but failed to extract better words. “I’m married.”

“Then why are you here, Rackley?” She pulled a cigarette out of a pack on her nightstand and lit it.