The Good Killer Read online

  It’s twenty minutes after eleven, but Rusty’s is already starting to draw a lunchtime crowd. Sean and Molly must be good for business.

  Jimmy scans the room and settles on a booth in a corner. He asks if he can sit there, and the waitress leads him over. With his back to the wall, he can see everyone else in the restaurant, and he can watch the street.

  He knows instinctively that this is where Sean sat.

  The decor is old-fashioned: wrought iron light fixtures and rough-hewn wood. There are flags framed behind glass on the walls: the Stars and Stripes and the state flag of Tennessee.

  The waitress gives him some time with the menu, then comes and asks him what he’d like.

  Jimmy grins at her. “What did they have?” he asks.

  “I don’t know who you mean,” she says. But she’s playing. She knows. She has a pretty smile, and he’s surprised not to see a ring on her hand. She looks like nothing so much as someone’s young wife.

  “You can tell me,” he says. “I bet they had the fish fry.”

  “No,” she says.

  “Turkey with gravy and mashed potatoes.”

  “No.”

  “Meat loaf? Steak?”

  She looks around as if someone might overhear. Then says, “He had a steak.”

  “I knew it,” Jimmy says. “What’s your name?”

  “Denise,” she tells him.

  “Denise, I’ll have a steak too. Rare.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And a beer. Is it too early for a beer?”

  “I don’t see why.”

  “Exactly. I like you.”

  The steak is fine, and it comes with a baked potato and green beans. Jimmy digs into it; he hasn’t eaten anything since the night before.

  Denise comes by and asks him if he’d like another beer. He says he would, but she should sit down with him first.

  “Oh I can’t,” she says.

  “Sure you can. For a minute.”

  She perches on the edge of the seat across from him.

  “There you go,” he says. “Now tell me about them.”

  “About who?” she says. Playful again.

  “You know who. You talked to them.”

  It’s a guess, but it’s true. She turns shy. Blushes.

  “Everybody keeps asking me,” she says.

  “What did you think of them?”

  “They’re sweet. Just … nice.”

  “Did they talk to anyone else while they were here?”

  She shakes her head, as if she’s already revealed too much. But Jimmy catches something, a glint in her eye. This might not be a waste.

  “Come on,” he says. “You can tell me.”

  She’s teetering on the edge, but when she falls she doesn’t fall his way. She gets up and winks at him and says, “Back to work.”

  A little later she delivers the beer he wanted. Jimmy finishes his steak and orders fish-and-chips to go, for Nick. He leans back, nurses the beer, feels the warmth of the sunlight through the window. More people come in. It’s a lively place. Jimmy looks them over, wonders if any of them were here yesterday.

  A busboy clears his plate away and fumbles with the silverware, dropping a knife on the floor. He’s slightly skeevy looking, with a tattoo on his neck that the collar of his shirt can’t hide. Denise arrives with the fish-and-chips in a Styrofoam box. She lays the bill facedown on the table.

  “What if I need to see you?” Jimmy asks her.

  There’s the blush again. “I guess you’ll have to come back,” she says.

  He taps the bill. “Write your number on there, in case I need to call.”

  She gives him a look that says, Oh you, you’re trouble, and she writes her number down.

  Tom Clinton and Lincoln Reed

  Jimmy Harper stays in Rusty’s for an hour, and when he comes out he’s carrying a takeout box. Clinton watches him walking west, until he reaches the end of the block and turns a corner onto Twenty-First Street.

  Reed got hungry, waiting. He bought a sack of tacos and he’s eating the last one.

  “Now what?” he says.

  Clinton starts the engine and pulls out onto Cumberland. He drives past Twenty-First and turns onto Twenty-Second, which brings him around to the street that runs behind Rusty’s. Clinton stops well short of the lot behind the restaurant and sees Harper walk to a blue sedan and set his takeout box on the hood.

  Then nothing. Harper doesn’t get into the car. He stands there, staring at the back of the restaurant.

  “What’s he doing?” Reed says.

  “I don’t know,” says Clinton.

  Jimmy Harper

  Twenty minutes. That’s how long Jimmy waits.

  He spends the time thinking about how to handle Denise and what he might have to do to her if she won’t tell him what he needs to know. He doesn’t like the images that come into his head. But maybe there’s another way.

  After twenty minutes, the busboy comes out for a smoke. He stands by the dumpster with his head bowed. He looks up as Jimmy approaches.

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to talk to you,” Jimmy says.

  “I don’t know you.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You work yesterday?”

  The busboy takes a drag on his cigarette. “I work every damn day.”

  “So you saw when that couple came in, the ones on the news?”

  “Those rock stars, Sean and Molly? Sure.”

  “You talk to them?”

  “Nah.”

  “You overhear anything they said to each other?”

  The kid shakes his head. “I just clear the tables, man.”

  “I bet you heard something,” Jimmy says. “Or saw something.”

  There’s a plastic milk crate on the ground near the dumpster. The busboy kicks it with the toe of his shoe.

  “How much would you bet?” he says.

  “How much?”

  “Yeah. You play high stakes or is it just nickels and dimes?”

  He’s trying to be clever.

  “How about fifty bucks and you tell me what you know?” Jimmy says. “Are those stakes high enough?”

  “I don’t think so,” the busboy says. “Sounds like penny ante to me.”

  Jimmy laughs. “Where’d you get that ink on your neck?”

  The kid looks away, evasive. “My cousin—”

  “No. It wasn’t your cousin. It looks like something they gave you in prison. Some skinhead with a needle and a ballpoint pen. Am I right?”

  No answer, but Jimmy knows he’s hit the mark. He says, “You ever take a beating in prison?”

  The busboy drops his cigarette and grinds it out. “From tougher guys than you.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” Jimmy says. “But let’s not find out. How about I give you a hundred bucks?”

  A hundred is the magic number, Jimmy thinks. But the kid plays coy, lighting up another smoke and pretending to mull it over.

  “That guy, Sean,” he says. “He’s a good shot.”

  “You think so?” Jimmy says.

  “He did all right in Houston. You’re not his friend, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Or hers either.”

  “Nope.”

  “Maybe he’ll shoot you.”

  “We’ll see.”

  The busboy turns his head to let out a stream of smoke. “They talked to two people yesterday, far as I know. That waitress, Denise, she was one of them.”

  “Who was the other?”

  “A lawyer. But he was only with them for a minute.”

  “Do you know this lawyer’s name?”

  “Yeah. He comes in a lot. Let me see the hundred.”

  Jimmy takes five twenties from his wallet and holds them up.

  The busboy reaches for them. “Howard Frazier,” he says.

  Tom Clinton and Lincoln Reed

  They watch Harper from the SUV, see him talking with the smoking kid. Clinton is intrigued when
Harper’s wallet comes out.

  When Harper returns to his car, they let him go. As soon as he’s out of sight, they swing into the parking lot. The kid is still working on his cigarette by the dumpster.

  Clinton and Reed approach him on foot. The kid looks them up and down and says, “Five hundred bucks. That’s what it’s gonna cost you.”

  “Is that right?” Clinton says.

  “Five hundred. No less. That’s what the last guy paid.”

  “What did he get for five hundred?” says Reed.

  “He got a name.”

  “That’s a lot, for a name.”

  “He seemed happy.”

  “We could give you two hundred,” Clinton says.

  “Or we could break your arm,” says Reed.

  “Tough guys,” the kid says. “He threatened me too. Didn’t work.”

  “Two fifty,” Clinton says. “That’s as high as I go.”

  The kid tips his head up and blows smoke. “All right. Let’s see the money.”

  23

  Rafael Garza

  When Rafael Garza learns that Sean and Molly have been spotted in Knoxville, he’s in bed with a pretty, thirty-three-year-old FBI agent named Rachel Massoud.

  He met her on his second day in Michigan. On the first day, he met Len Palmer, a police detective in an upscale Detroit suburb called Huntington Woods. Palmer dug through a file cabinet and dropped a green folder in front of Garza. The contents were slim. They had to do with a burglary from nearly six years ago.

  Back when Sean Tennant was known as Sean Garrety.

  “He was a suspect?” Garza said.

  “He was,” said Palmer. “Along with a friend of his, Cole Harper. Garrety lived in Detroit back then, and he skipped town before we had a chance to interview him. I haven’t thought about him in years. I didn’t connect him to Sean Tennant until you called.”

  Palmer drove Garza out to the scene on Elgin Avenue and walked him through what happened.

  “Our only witness was a retiree named George Monahan,” Palmer said. “He saw Garrety and Harper carrying two backpacks and a briefcase, coming around the side of that house.” Palmer pointed across the street. “He spoke to them. He wanted to let them know their car had been damaged. Monahan was sort of a wannabe cop, active with the neighborhood watch. He had a concealed carry permit, and he was carrying that night. He got suspicious of Garrety and Harper when they didn’t seem concerned about their car. He thought they must be up to something. They were too eager to leave. They didn’t want to stay and file a police report. ‘They seemed off’ is what he told me. So he drew down on them.”

  Palmer shrugged, as if to acknowledge that people are unpredictable. “‘A citizen’s arrest’ is what he called it. But they had guns too. Monahan put two bullets in Cole Harper, and Harper put one in him. Sean Garrety loaded Harper into the car and sped off. They ended up at Beaumont Hospital, about ten minutes away. Harper died. One of his wounds was to the chest.”

  “And Garrety?” Garza asked.

  “Disappeared from the hospital.”

  “You’re sure it was him?”

  “Monahan picked him out of a photo array.”

  Garza gestured at the house across the street. “Let’s go back to the burglary. What did Garrety and Harper come away with?”

  “That’s where things get interesting,” Palmer said. “The loot disappeared with Sean Garrety. The owner of the house is an art dealer named Adam Khadduri. At first he said all they took was some wristwatches and a few hundred dollars he had lying around. When we told him about the backpacks and the briefcase, he looked again and said they had made off with a set of sterling silver flatware he had inherited from his parents.”

  “Two backpacks full?” Garza said. “That’s a lot of spoons.”

  “It gets better,” Palmer said. “When we went through Cole Harper’s possessions the night he died, he was carrying lock-picking tools, which is how they gained entrance to the house. But he had something else too. Something odd.”

  “What?”

  “A hunk of amethyst as big as your thumb, with carvings on it. Looked valuable, but we didn’t know what the hell it was. We had to ask the FBI.”

  “Did they know?”

  “Yes they did. You should talk to them.”

  *

  The next day Garza drove to the FBI field office in downtown Detroit. He waited an hour in the lobby and then got passed from office to office until he ended up with Rachel Massoud.

  She had long black hair and skin the color of cinnamon, and if she had been taller he would have thought of her as exotic. She wore a well-tailored suit in charcoal gray, the skirt ending just above her knees, and the heels on her shoes brought her up to maybe five foot three. If you were an awkward boy in high school, Garza thought, you would have a crush on Rachel Massoud. She would be the friendly girl who talked to you in your art class. You would see her sitting alone in the library, and you would imagine that you could have a special connection with her, because you were both serious, sensitive people. And if you worked up the courage to ask her out, you would discover that she was dating a football player. But she would be sweet about turning you down.

  “You came all the way from Texas?” she said when he introduced himself.

  “By way of Montana,” he said.

  “Sounds like the Houston PD has money to burn. Why don’t you buy me lunch?”

  They walked four blocks to a Thai place called Go Sy, and over plates of fried rice she told him about the stone found in Cole Harper’s pocket.

  “It’s a cylinder seal, an artifact from the Akkadian empire dating back to the twenty-third century BC. They were common back then. The Sumerians used them, too, for signing contracts. You’d roll the seal over a clay tablet, and the image on the stone would be pressed into the clay.”

  “If we’re assuming Harper took it from Adam Khadduri’s house,” Garza asked, “where would Khadduri have gotten it?”

  “That particular seal was one of several stolen from the British Museum in London. Khadduri would have picked it up on the black market.”

  “And then it got stolen from him,” Garza said. “Did Cole Harper and Sean Garrety break into his house at random, or did they know what he had?”

  “There’s a good question,” said Rachel Massoud.

  “How would they know? What’s the connection between Garrety and Harper and Khadduri?”

  Rachel rested her chin on her hand and looked at Garza across the table. Her eyes were a rich, deep brown.

  She said, “You really are in the dark, aren’t you?”

  “Help me out,” he said.

  “The connection is a woman, and her name is Molly.”

  Garza frowned. “Molly Winter?”

  “She was Molly Bowen at the time.”

  Garza felt a flush of heat on the back of his neck, something that happened when he was embarrassed, ever since he was a child. He’d been so focused on Sean, he had never wondered about Molly’s past.

  “Molly Bowen dated Adam Khadduri,” Rachel said. “And she disappeared at the same time as Sean Garrety.”

  “You’re certain about this?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “How long have you known?”

  The words held a trace of an accusation. Garza heard it himself, as soon as he uttered them. Rachel heard it too.

  “Let’s not go down this path,” she said.

  “What path?”

  “The one where the police complain about the FBI withholding information. I’ve been figuring this out myself. Sean Garrety and Molly Bowen were names and pictures in a file to me. It wasn’t even my case back then. I inherited it. I only made the connection after the news started talking about Molly and her sudden departure from that ranch in Montana. I shot off an email to your people last night. To Arthur Hayden.”

  “My lieutenant.”

  “And you showed up today. Seemed awfully fast. I thought I had conjured you. But now that you’r
e here, I’ll do what I can.”

  The offer seemed sincere. Garza said, “You mentioned a file. I’d like to see it.”

  Rachel nodded. “That could be arranged.”

  “How much do you know about Adam Khadduri?”

  “Quite a bit.”

  “Is he violent?”

  Rachel raised an eyebrow. “Why would you ask me that?”

  “What happened in Montana is sketchy, but someone may have been trying to abduct Molly Winter,” Garza said. “If you saw the news, you know that the woman who shared a cabin with her wound up tied to a bed frame with a pillowcase over her head. I spoke to her. She said Molly was afraid of an old boyfriend. A stalker.”

  “You think Adam Khadduri went to Montana and tied someone to a bed?” Rachel asked. “That’s not his style.”

  “Maybe he hired someone to do it,” said Garza. “I don’t know. The stalker story could have been a lie. Something Molly invented so people wouldn’t take pictures of her and post them online, because she and Sean were trying to minimize their exposure. They would have been afraid of the police, because they knew the police would be looking for Sean in connection with the burglary. But maybe they were afraid of Khadduri too. I might need to talk to him.”

  A pained expression passed over Rachel’s face. “I would have to discourage that course of action,” she said.

  Garza smiled. “You would?”

  “And if discouraging didn’t work, I would have to forbid it. Do I need to say why?”

  “I think you do.”

  She was silent for a moment, then pitched her voice low, so as not to be overheard. “Adam Khadduri is under investigation for trafficking in stolen works of art, in violation of federal and international law. Preserving the integrity of that investigation takes priority over some shootings at a mall in Houston.”

  “Does it?” Garza said.

  “It certainly does. No matter how sensational the shootings might be. We can’t have you blundering around, spooking Khadduri before we’re ready to move on him. That’s the message I’ve been instructed to convey to you. But I’m hoping that even if you resist the message, you’ll see that talking to Khadduri is not the smart move for you.”