The Good Killer Read online

  Molly finishes her salad. Sean fusses with his steak. Outside, one of the city cops finally persuades the shirtless guy to come along peacefully. The cop guides him by the arm and deposits him in the back seat of the cruiser.

  The cruiser backs out of the lot and drives away. The ambulance follows suit a minute later, and so does the campus cop. The crowd disperses until there are only a few people left. One of them is the woman in the skirt.

  The waitress comes to the booth and Molly tells her they’re ready for the bill.

  She doesn’t have the bill.

  She’s got a whole speech ready. She delivers it in a soft voice but with an edge of excitement, like she’s telling them a thrilling secret.

  “When you first came in, I didn’t recognize you. But now, I mean, obviously. I’ve been seeing you on the news, we all have, me and Bonnie and everybody, and we’re just so grateful for what you did out there in Houston.” She reaches out and her fingertips graze Sean’s shoulder. “God bless you, both of you. It’s a real treat to have you here. And your lunch, well that’s covered, don’t you give it another thought. In fact, we took up a little collection, the staff and some of our regulars.” She draws a sheaf of cash from the pocket of her apron and lays it on the table. “It’s not a lot, some gas money, but maybe it’ll get you on the way to where you’re going.”

  She pats the money, nervously. Molly looks across at Sean and knows his pride will make him want to refuse it. She slides out of the booth, smiling, and pulls the waitress into a hug. “Thank you,” she says. “That’s the most generous, sweetest thing. We need to go, but you’ll thank everyone for us, won’t you?”

  “I sure will,” the waitress says.

  Sean hugs her, too, but Molly, watching him, knows he’s not comfortable. They wave at the other waitresses as they make their exit. Outside, a robin hops along the sidewalk. The sun feels warm. Sean says, “We didn’t need to take that girl’s money.”

  Molly slips the cash into her pocket as they cross the street. “It was the right thing to do, and the smart thing. If we had said no, she would have soured on us. This way she loves us. She wouldn’t turn us in now in a million years.”

  Jennifer Linsey

  Standing in the Taco Bell parking lot, Jennifer Linsey is reminded that her job is not as glamorous as she once hoped it would be. She’s a crime reporter for the Knoxville News Sentinel.

  On the upside, if you want to look at it that way, Knoxville has a crime rate much higher than the national average and the average for Tennessee. But it’s still not a big city. With a population of less than two hundred thousand, it’s not Chicago or Baltimore or Detroit.

  There are twenty murders in Knoxville every year, give or take, so most days Jennifer isn’t looking at dead bodies. Most days are like today: the police get called out to deal with some joker acting up at Taco Bell. There’s a real story here, because the joker in question is someone Jennifer has heard about before. He’s a kid who got diagnosed with schizophrenia at nineteen, who had to drop out of UT as a sophomore, who’s been in and out of psych wards for years, on and off his medication. He has tried going back to the university, but he can’t hold himself together for longer than a semester.

  That’s a story Jennifer would like to write, but whether the paper would print it is another question entirely. So she does what she can. She tries to talk to the cops, but they’re not in the mood. All they want is to get the kid off the street. They give her nothing. She lingers afterward and interviews some members of the crowd. One of them knows the kid. She gets some quotes she might use someday. Not today. Today, on this, her editor won’t want more than a paragraph or two.

  She’s ready to head back to her car when she sees something that alters the course of her afternoon.

  It’s two people crossing the street. Normally she wouldn’t give them a second glance, but this time she does. She’s been following the Houston shooting story, and the man in the street looks like a scruffy version of Sean Tennant, the guy who shot Henry Alan Keen.

  The woman with him looks like Tennant’s girlfriend, who went missing from the yoga retreat in Montana.

  There’s no earthly reason for the two of them to be in Tennessee, but the closer they get, the more Jennifer is convinced: it’s them.

  Jennifer has the presence of mind to raise her phone. Her camera app is already open. She starts shooting video.

  “Sean!” she says. “Molly!”

  They see her, and Sean puts out a hand to block her view, like a celebrity annoyed by the paparazzi. Molly gives a faint smile and shakes her head, as if Jennifer has made a mistake.

  It’s no mistake. Jennifer is sure. The two of them get into a silver-gray Toyota Camry. The same color and model that Sean is said to own.

  They back out of the space and roll toward the street. Jennifer runs along beside the car, still capturing video. “Wait!” she says. “What are you doing in Knoxville?”

  Brilliant question, she thinks. You’ll get a Pulitzer with that.

  Then they’re gone, west on Cumberland Ave.

  Jennifer runs to her car, but by the time she pulls into the street they’re out of sight. She drives west and then north, thinking they might head for I-40, but she doesn’t spot the Camry again. They might have turned off at any of a dozen intersections.

  She pulls off the road at an Exxon station and reviews the video on her phone. She should share it with the police, but that can wait. The police have done her no favors today, and she has larger responsibilities. As a journalist.

  The first call she makes is to her editor at the paper. The second is to CNN.

  21

  Adam Khadduri

  His housekeeper tells him about the story on CNN.

  She’s a quiet woman, which is why he likes her. She’s in her sixties, a second cousin on his mother’s side of the family, the Lebanese side. Never married, she keeps to herself. Khadduri doesn’t know what she does with her off time, and he doesn’t care. She keeps the house immaculate, and if he wants a home-cooked meal she can provide it. Shish kebab, spiced perfectly. Rice pilaf. Tabbouleh and fattoush.

  She makes no comment about the story, just lets him know it’s on and leaves him alone to watch it. At first it’s sketchy: a piece of video shot by a newspaper reporter in Knoxville, Tennessee. The CNN anchor is slightly noncommittal: We’re showing this to you now, exclusively, he says, because we believe it to be footage of Sean Tennant and Molly Winter. We’re confident of the identification, though as yet it has not been confirmed by any official sources.

  Khadduri doesn’t need confirmation. He recognizes them. He hasn’t seen Molly in six years, but she hardly seems to have aged.

  The story develops over the next hour. Or rather, it stretches out. There’s nothing new, only talking heads speculating on what Sean and Molly might be doing in Knoxville. Commentators filling time.

  The closest thing to a new development comes when a TV reporter from a local station in Knoxville does a piece from outside a restaurant called Rusty’s All-American, the same restaurant that can be seen in the background of the video. It’s believed that Sean and Molly spent some time inside. In fact, they might have hidden out there to avoid the police, who were called to investigate an unrelated incident nearby.

  What are the people in the restaurant saying? the anchor asks the reporter. Have you spoken to the customers or the staff?

  That’s the strangest part, the reporter says. They’re not saying a thing. I only heard one comment, from a waitress who wouldn’t give her name or be interviewed on camera.

  What did she say? the anchor asks.

  She said Sean and Molly are good people, and they have friends here in Tennessee.

  Khadduri mutes the television, shaking his head.

  He takes his phone out and calls Tom Clinton. Tells him the news and asks him to come over.

  He makes a second call to Jimmy Harper but gets no answer.

  The situation bothers him. He’
s spoken to Harper only once in the past few days and only for a few minutes—long enough to hear an account of the fiasco at Long Meadow Ranch in Montana. Khadduri regrets not sending his own men to hunt for Sean. They might have had better luck.

  Jimmy Harper has proved overconfident and unreliable. Now Khadduri can’t even raise the man on the phone.

  By the time Tom Clinton arrives half an hour later, Khadduri has made up his mind.

  “I’d like you to go to Knoxville,” he says.

  Clinton nods.

  “See what you can find,” Khadduri says. “Take Lincoln with you.”

  “Sure.”

  “It might be too late, I suppose.” Khadduri looks at the muted television. CNN is playing the video again. “Those two can’t stay on the run forever,” he says. “If the police bring them in, I may never recover what’s mine.”

  “You think they’ll get caught?” Clinton says.

  “Don’t you?”

  Clinton stares at the screen. “I don’t know. I’m hearing things, from friends in Detroit. From cops who are in touch with folks in the FBI. It’s a strange case.” He nods at the image of Sean and Molly getting into their car. “There are lots of people who don’t want them caught.”

  “The police don’t want to catch them?”

  “Not the police. People. There’s a flood of calls coming in, from Seattle to Miami, New York to LA, Sean and Molly sightings in hundreds of different cities. Some of them are sincere: people who really believe they’ve seen them. Others want to gum up the works. It’s intentional. It’s coordinated.”

  “What do you mean, coordinated?”

  “It started on Twitter,” Clinton says. “Do you pay attention to Twitter?”

  Khadduri shakes his head. He bought stock in the company when it went public, and he sold it at a profit and never thought about it again. He knows how Twitter works but doesn’t understand why anyone would waste their time with it.

  “Probably some high school kid got it going,” Clinton says. “There were hashtags, very early on. #HoustonHero was one. #ImWithSean was another. That turned into #ImwithSeanandMolly. People expressing their support and encouraging each other to phone in false tips.” Clinton shrugs. “A lot of people admire Sean for what he did in Houston, and now they’re trying to provide cover for him. There’s no telling how long he and Molly might be on the loose. That’s good for us. It gives us a chance to find them.”

  It’s a comforting thought, and Khadduri holds on to it after Clinton leaves him. That night, before he goes to bed, Khadduri opens a browser on his phone and searches Twitter for #ImwithSeanandMolly. Fascinating, what people will do to fill up the emptiness in their lives. They’ll latch on to strangers, talk about them as if they know them. Call them by their first names. Sean and Molly. Butch and Sundance. Bonnie and Clyde.

  They’re folk heroes now, Khadduri thinks. Outlaws on the road.

  If they stay out there long enough, if they stay free, then his people will find them. He’ll get what he wants: the treasure they took from him.

  After that, he doesn’t care what happens to them.

  22

  Tom Clinton and Lincoln Reed

  Eighteen hours after his meeting with Adam Khadduri, Tom Clinton is in Knoxville, Tennessee. Searching for two people who, in all likelihood, are far away by now.

  There are worse ways he could be spending his life, he thinks. He used to be a police officer in Detroit. Joined up when he was young and idealistic. He figured he could make a difference, getting lowlifes off the streets.

  After a few years, he figured out that the lowlifes were winning. They had the numbers, and they weren’t confined to the streets; they were everywhere. Most of the calls he responded to were domestic: men doing violence to the women they lived with. You could arrest them, even send them away for a while, but they’d come back. You’d see the same ones over and over.

  Clinton played the game for almost a decade, until he started having bad dreams. In his dreams, he never arrested anyone. All the violent men he saw, he let them off with gentle warnings. Then he watched them, followed them, came at them at night when they were alone. He brought a metal pipe with him, as long as his arm, and he beat them until they were bloody and begging for mercy.

  One day, in waking life, he came across a metal pipe in a vacant lot. He picked it up and threw it into the trunk of his car, thinking he might find a use for it.

  A week later he quit the force and went to work for a friend who had a private security company. The bad dreams went away. His friend introduced him to Adam Khadduri, and he’s been working for Khadduri ever since.

  Clinton has no official title. He tells his wife he’s a security consultant, but bodyguard might be more accurate. Or right-hand man. Or jack-of-all-trades.

  Whatever he is, he has a partner: Lincoln Reed, another former cop from Detroit. Reed put in almost twenty years, advancing from patrol to detective before he decided to leave the job. Clinton has never gotten a clear answer on why he left. One rumor had it that Reed got caught planting a gun on a suspect he had shot. Another said he got caught sleeping with his lieutenant’s wife.

  Clinton wouldn’t care either way. He gave up on idealism a long time ago. The only thing that matters is that Reed is reliable.

  This morning they’re driving together through the streets of Knoxville. It’s a college town with some nice architecture, and Clinton is taking in the view. Beside him, Reed is complaining about their boss.

  “Khadduri’s strange,” Reed says. “You’ve got to give me that.”

  Clinton yawns and offers no comment. He realizes, too late, that he should have let Reed drive. Reed is quiet and focused when he’s behind the wheel, but if you put him in the passenger seat he gets restless.

  “Stuffy,” Reed says. “That’s what he is. Talks sometimes like he’s got a stick clenched between his teeth. Don’t know what his accent is supposed to be. I’ve been to Plymouth. They don’t talk like that there.”

  Clinton makes a turn onto Cumberland Avenue. “Pontiac,” he says.

  “What?” says Reed.

  “Adam is from Pontiac, not Plymouth.”

  “Shit. They don’t talk like that in Pontiac either. Another thing, they don’t move the way he does. You ever notice the way the man walks around? Back stiff, trying to stand up taller than he is. Like somebody took that stick from between his teeth and shoved it up his ass. You walk around like that in Pontiac, it’ll earn you a beating.”

  Clinton stops for some college kids crossing the street. Says nothing.

  “Adam,” Reed says. “Listen to you, callin’ the man Adam. Like he’s your pal. He’s not. You don’t mean a thing to him, except what he can pay you to do. Sends you chasing after fugitives. For what? So he can get back some rocks that he likes. He cares more about those rocks than he does about you.”

  Definitely should have let him drive, Clinton thinks. Reed drove for most of the trip down here: eight hours on the road, five hundred miles from Michigan to Tennessee. They listened to oldies stations and NPR and arrived in Knoxville around 3:00 a.m. Checked into the Holiday Inn downtown. Clinton got up at nine this morning for a jog and a swim in the pool. Knocked on the door of Reed’s room around 11:00, and now they’re cruising along Cumberland, trying not to run over college kids.

  Clinton spots the restaurant—Rusty’s All-American—and parks the SUV in the lot of the Taco Bell on the other side of the street. The SUV is a black Ford Explorer, and it doesn’t belong to Clinton or Reed. It’s registered in the name of someone long dead. Better this way, in case it gets noticed at a crime scene.

  Not that they intend to get noticed. If all goes well, any crimes they commit will go under the radar.

  As Clinton cuts the engine of the Explorer, Reed says, “This is stupid.”

  Clinton doesn’t need to be told. He’s been thinking the same thing.

  “Seriously,” Reed says. “Unless Sean and Molly waved goodbye to the people in t
his restaurant and said, ‘We’re off to Albuquerque’—I don’t know what we’re doing here.”

  “We’re here to find out what we can,” Clinton says. “Because that’s what Adam wants.”

  “Seems to me Adam wants miracles.”

  Clinton is about to tell Reed he can stay in the car, but the words drift out of his head. He’s looking at the entrance to Rusty’s, and what he sees is Jimmy Harper strolling along the sidewalk, opening the door, and walking in.

  Reed sees him too. “Is that—?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “No shit. Now what do we do?”

  Clinton isn’t sure. He imagines Jimmy’s here for the same reason they are. So they could go in now, like they’re all playing on the same team. Or they could hold back. Maybe find an advantage that way, if Jimmy doesn’t know they’re here.

  Reed is silent. Waiting.

  “Let’s sit tight,” Clinton says. “We’ll see what he does.”

  Jimmy Harper

  It’s probably a waste, coming here.

  Jimmy feels like he’s wasted the last few days. He and Nick have been driving around in the same rental car they picked up in Bozeman. They spent a night in Idaho, then drove back through Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas. With no leads to follow, they stopped at random motels along the highway: dingy, off-brand places where you could pay cash and they wouldn’t care much about seeing an ID.

  The same routine in each place: Hold up a cell phone, flash pictures of Sean and Molly. Watch tired clerks shaking their heads. Jimmy knew it was futile. But he needed to keep moving, to keep trying.

  They were in St. Louis last night, checked into a Red Roof Inn, when Jimmy caught the news about Knoxville. Nick crashing on one of the hotel beds, Jimmy on the other, flipping through channels. He came to CNN and saw Sean holding his hand up, palm out toward the camera. As if he knew Jimmy was watching.

  Jimmy woke Nick and they drove through the night to Knoxville and checked in to another hotel. They slept late; Nick was still snoring when Jimmy left to come here—to Rusty’s on Cumberland Ave. He figured he could give the kid a break. Nick’s face is healing, but the stitches are conspicuous. It’s not the kind of face you want to take out in public.