The Good Killer Read online

  Something strange in the way she said it—not like a warning from an FBI agent. Something softer and so subtle that Garza assumed he must be imagining it. He had another half hour in the car with her to think about it. He had planned to drop her at her office, but it was after five o’clock, and she asked him to take her home, directing him up Woodward Avenue to an apartment building in midtown.

  He wasn’t sure of her intentions, even when she told him he should come up for dinner. He went up in the spirit of an experiment. She put on music but nothing romantic. She poured him soda instead of wine. She moved around her apartment in her bare feet, toenails painted red, tidying here and there. In the kitchen, she put some rice on to boil, then covered it and turned down the heat to let it simmer. She got out a cutting board and an onion. A yellow pepper and a red one. She started chopping the red one.

  Garza stood behind her and took her hair in his hands. Gathered it together and drew it away from her neck.

  “Well, all right then, Ray,” she said. “That’s good.”

  He touched the skin at the back of her neck, with his fingertips first, then with the palm of his hand. She went on chopping. He slipped his fingers under her collar, then his whole hand, rubbing her back between her shoulder blades. After a while, he withdrew his hand and combed his fingers through her hair again.

  She was still chopping when he tugged her blouse free of her skirt and laid his palm against the small of her back.

  “Jesus, Ray.”

  She laid the knife down and he kissed her neck. His hand slid around to her stomach and she turned to him. She lifted her face up and he kissed her mouth. Both hands on her waist now, feeling the heat of her. Her breath smelled sweet. She was surprisingly aggressive with her tongue.

  He started to pull up her skirt.

  “Not here,” she said.

  They made it to her bedroom, leaving her blouse and her underwear behind. The skirt went last. He unzipped it and it fell to the floor. He laid her down on her stomach and traced his fingers over her, starting at her neck, working all the way to her ankles and back again. She turned over and parted her legs and put his hand on her. She guided him, then let him go on his own. She buried her face against his shoulder as he gave her an orgasm.

  She got on top of him after, her long hair falling down to brush his chest as she leaned over him. Her hips moved in a rhythm that built over time, turning fierce, insistent, until the only thing he could do was let go.

  *

  He’s still inside her and it’s a sweet, hazy feeling, the weight of her against him, the touch of her cheek on his chest. He doesn’t know if she’s asleep or awake.

  Until she says, “I want a bath. Do you want a bath, Ray?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve got a tub big enough for two. We can have a soak. But I should turn off the rice first. It might be overcooked.”

  She doesn’t move, though. Not until there’s a chirp from a phone.

  “Is that yours or mine?” she says.

  “It’s mine,” says Garza. “But it can’t be as important as what we’re doing now.”

  She laughs. “There’s a nice thought. But you can get it. Go ahead.”

  It’s only a text. His pants are on the floor by the bed. He digs the phone from a pocket and reads the message with Rachel sitting cross-legged beside him.

  Turn on CNN.

  It’s from his lieutenant.

  There’s a TV on Rachel’s dresser. She grabs the remote from her bedside table and clicks it on.

  Video of Sean and Molly, getting into their car and driving away. The chyron at the bottom of the screen says: KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE.

  Garza calls Lieutenant Hayden and gets the whole story, thin on detail as it is. A discussion follows. Hayden thinks Garza should go to Tennessee. Garza wants to stay in Michigan. He remembers something Rachel said.

  “I need to get ahead of them,” he tells Hayden. “Figure out where they’re going to be. I won’t do that by going to Knoxville. I still have leads to follow here.”

  Hayden seems skeptical, but he agrees. Garza can take another day or two.

  When he finishes the call, Rachel is running a bath. She’s wearing an open robe. Garza slips a hand inside, rests it on her hip.

  “You’ve got leads,” she says. Teasing him. “Tell me about these leads.”

  But he does have a lead: Dalton Webber, Sean’s captain from Iraq. And the image of Sean and Molly in their car has jogged his memory.

  “Cars,” he says to Rachel. “When they disappeared six years ago, they each had a car. But they couldn’t keep them. Someone could trace them.”

  “They abandoned them,” Rachel says.

  “Where?”

  “One of them was left in a hotel parking lot in Ohio. The other one in—”

  “Indiana.”

  “That’s right.”

  “There’s someone Sean knew from the army who lives in Indiana,” Garza says. “A man named Webber.”

  “Could be a coincidence.”

  “Maybe it’s not. Webber lives on a farm outside a town called Elkhart. It’s only a three-hour drive from here. We could go tomorrow.”

  “That’s your lead?” Rachel says.

  “That’s my lead.”

  She hangs her robe on a hook and gets into the tub. “All right, Ray. That’s what we’ll do.”

  24

  Rafael Garza

  The Saint Joseph River winds through the middle of Elkhart, Indiana, and the streets bend to accommodate its course. But when you drive a few miles south of the city you reach farm country and the roads are all long and straight and at perfect right angles. The major ones have no names, only numbers.

  Dalton Webber’s farm is off County Road 7. It has a driveway long and straight like the road—covered in gravel and wet with morning rain. When the driveway reaches the farmhouse, it takes a ninety-degree turn, widens, and runs past a garage to a barn.

  Rafael Garza makes the turn and parks just short of the garage. He and Rachel step out into the early afternoon. Before they reach the farmhouse porch, Webber’s wife comes out to greet them. She’s wearing denim and flannel, and her honey-blond hair is gathered in a thick braid that runs halfway down her back.

  She brings them around to a deck at the rear of the house. Sits them at a table. Goes inside and returns with glasses and a pitcher of lemonade. The sun is obscured by a cover of clouds, but it’s mild. Sixty degrees.

  She leaves them there with an apology for being a bad hostess. She needs to look in on her twelve-year-old son, who’s home from school with a cold.

  She goes in through a sliding glass door and Dalton Webber comes out.

  Garza does his best not to stare at him, though he senses that Webber is used to people staring. Webber is tall, wide shouldered, and from a distance he would put you in mind of a high school quarterback all grown up. You’d have to get closer to see the damage.

  It’s most obvious on the right side of his face. It’s nothing grotesque, but the skin is stiff and waxy. The eyebrow over his right eye is only half there, and the hair on that side of his head is a patchwork. His earlobe looks shrunken.

  He walks with a cane, but confidently. He crosses the deck to Rachel and Garza, shakes their hands, and joins them at the table.

  There’s small talk over lemonade. The farm has been in Webber’s family for five generations. They grow corn and soybeans and keep a few chickens and cows for the eggs and milk. Webber and his wife have four children. The oldest will turn sixteen in a month.

  Garza asks him about his time in the military, intending to work his way around to Sean Garrety, and soon Webber is talking about Iraq.

  “I was in charge of a company of two hundred soldiers, part of a battalion of eight hundred on a base called Rustamiyah. Our area of operations amounted to about sixteen square miles of Shia neighborhoods in Baghdad. This was in 2007, when the Shia insurgency was at its worst. Every time we left the base we were taking our cha
nces. We traveled in Humvees and our biggest problem in that war had always been IEDs, roadside bombs. The armor on our Humvees was good—not like at the beginning of the war. But all it meant was that the bad guys had to come up with better ways to blow us up. Have you ever heard of an EFP?”

  “No,” Garza says.

  “It stands for ‘explosively formed penetrator.’ They’d take a big metal pipe and put a concave copper disk at one end. They’d pack explosives behind the disk. They’d detonate it remotely as a convoy passed by, and the explosion would turn that copper disk into a molten slug that would burn through the armor on a Humvee.”

  Webber pauses and scratches the side of his face. “We were coming back from a mission in the middle of the night when we got hit. Five vehicles in a line, and the EFP hit the third one. The one I was in. That copper slug tore through an Iraqi civilian who was sitting next to me. Tore through my legs, too, though I didn’t realize it at first. And it set the vehicle on fire. A private named Ortiz never got out.

  “Sean Garrety was in the next Humvee in line. He ran up and dragged Cole Harper clear. Cole had been driving. He’d lost a foot. Sean hauled him into an alley between two buildings and fastened a tourniquet around his leg.

  “Private Glen Park pulled me out. A skinny kid but tough. He did it under fire too. We had driven into an ambush. There were insurgents with rifles on the rooftops. All around us, other soldiers were returning fire. I was in shock. I’d lost both legs: one above the knee and one below. Park put tourniquets on them, but he had never done it before. I mean he had practiced, but it’s different when you’re being shot at. He couldn’t stop the bleeding from my right leg, couldn’t get the tourniquet tight enough.

  “We were exposed. He wanted to move me. He lifted his head to call for help, and a bullet tore through his throat.”

  Webber closes his eyes for a moment. “Park slumped on top of me, bleeding out,” he says. “I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. I was barely awake. Which was good, because it meant I didn’t realize I was slipping away. I would have died there. But Sean came out of the alley where he’d been tending to Cole. He pulled Park off me and dragged me away. Into the alley. Where he tightened my tourniquets and kept me alive until the firefight ended and they could get me back to the base.”

  Webber runs a hand over his patchy, close-trimmed hair. “I was twenty-nine then, and I had a wife, a daughter, and a son back home. Now I’m thirty-nine and I have two more daughters. Because of Sean.” He looks at Garza candidly across the table. “That should tell you something. But ask me whatever you want to ask.”

  Garza says, “Six years ago, when Sean was in trouble, did he come to you for help?”

  Webber nods. “They both came here. Molly too.”

  “And you helped them?”

  “Of course.”

  “What did you do for them?” Rachel asks.

  “I did as much as I could, as much as they would let me.”

  “What about this time?” Garza says. “Have they contacted you?”

  “No.”

  “But you would help them if they did.”

  “What do you think?”

  Garza leans forward. “I think you would probably do anything for Sean Garrety. Even if it meant lying for him.”

  Webber sits with his eyes fixed on Garza’s and makes no reply.

  “I admire your dedication to your friend,” Garza says. “We are not at odds, you and I. You have nothing to fear from me. I have no wish to disturb you or your family. I won’t ask to search your home, even though Molly and Sean might be hiding in there at this very moment. I only ask that if they are or if you see them or speak to them, you deliver a message for me.”

  “What message?” Webber asks.

  “That Sean should turn himself in. I’ll take him into custody personally, and no harm will come to him or to Molly. What he did in Houston, I believe he did in defense of himself and of others. There’s no reason he should be charged, but he needs to talk to me, to give me his account. The burglary in Michigan six years ago is another matter, of course. It’s a problem for him, but it can be overcome.”

  “Is that right?” Webber says.

  “Absolutely,” Rachel says. “We’re optimistic that a deal can be made.”

  “What kind of deal?”

  “It’s hard to say without knowing exactly what Sean took. Did he ever tell you?”

  “No.”

  Rachel has a photograph of the cylinder seal found in Cole Harper’s pocket. She brings it out and places it on the table.

  “We found this stone on the body of Sean’s friend,” she says. “Have you ever seen one like it?”

  Webber pulls the photo toward him, shakes his head.

  “I’ll tell you something about these stones,” Rachel says. “They tend to come in sets. They’re like stamps or coins. If you collect them, you don’t have just one. So Sean might have taken a number of them, and if he still has them, or even if he knows where they are, that’s worth something.”

  “How much would it be worth?” Webber asks.

  “It’s hard to say, until we know what Sean has. But if he cooperates, if we can recover what he took, then it could be worth a lot. He might do no jail time. He might not even be charged with the burglary.”

  “That sounds … optimistic,” Webber says.

  Garza takes a card from his wallet, writes his cell phone number on the back, and sets it on the table. “We’re looking for a good outcome here,” he says. “The way I see it, we’re all on the same side.”

  *

  Driving away from Webber’s farm, Rachel says, “That wasn’t bad, Ray.”

  “You think so?” he says.

  “You played it cool. I could tell you really wanted to search the house. Do you think Sean and Molly are in there right now?”

  “They could be. Their car could be in the garage or in the barn.”

  “I wonder if we could get a warrant. Webber admitted to helping them before.”

  “It’s probably not enough,” Garza says. “And if we tried to execute a warrant, someone might get hurt. And if they’re not there, we would lose whatever goodwill we’ve managed to build up.”

  “What do you want to do?” Rachel asks.

  “I want to park on the side of the road and watch the house, but there’s no cover anywhere, and Webber would catch on in a second. So instead we’ll drive into Elkhart and find a place to have lunch. We’ll wait and see if Sean and Molly call.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  “How much time can you spare? Maybe we’ll hang around for dinner.”

  25

  Molly Winter

  It’s well after dark when they drive into Elkhart, Indiana.

  Molly is at the wheel. Sean is sleeping beside her. He’s clean-shaven now, after Knoxville, and his face looks as soft as a boy’s. Molly’s hair is gathered under a ball cap.

  These minor alterations are all they’ve had time for. They’ve been moving.

  They headed west after Knoxville, because they’d been driving south and east before and they wanted to break the pattern. They stole a Tennessee license plate for the car at a rest stop on I-40 and Missouri plates just before they stopped for the night at a campground outside Cape Girardeau. The plates they have now are ones they picked up this afternoon in a supermarket parking lot in Kankakee, Illinois.

  Little crimes they’re leaving in their wake.

  It’s peaceful, driving in the dark, no radio. They glide over a bridge, the Saint Joseph River down below, and Molly sees the lights of Main Street stretching out ahead of her. She stops at a red light, and there’s a woman crossing with a chocolate Lab on a leash. There’s an antique shop that’s closed for the night and a bookstore that’s still open. Farther south on Main she passes restaurants. There’s a couple standing in front of one called Artisan. Both well dressed, the man much taller than the woman. They look happy. The woman takes hold of the man’s coat to pull him close and turns
her face up for a kiss.

  Then they’re gone. Molly has passed them by. After a few more blocks she comes to County Road 9 and lets it lead her out of town. There’s less and less light as the miles tick by, eight of them, and she starts looking for the turn. It’s on the left: a narrow lane that runs between two fields.

  It takes her to Dalton Webber’s farm. The back way, less conspicuous than driving up to the front door. She cuts her headlights and rolls to a stop, a hundred yards away from the rear of the house. Sean is awake now.

  “We’re here,” Molly says.

  Outside, it’s dead quiet. She’s aware of every sound: the engine ticking, the car doors shutting, Sean’s footsteps and her own. She looks up, and there’s a clear sky full of stars. She picks out the Big Dipper. The shape of the barn looms ahead of them. There are lights on upstairs in the house.

  They leave the lane and cut across the grass. There’s movement on the patio deck as they approach. A shadow separates itself from other shadows. It moves stiffly, descending three steps to the yard.

  “About time you showed up,” Dalton Webber says. “I’ve been expecting you for a week.”

  Sean Tennant

  It’s the first shower he’s had in what seems like forever, and he stays in it a long time. His muscles ache from days in the car and nights spent sleeping on the ground.

  He towels off in a cloud of steam, cracks open the bathroom window to help it clear. He wraps the towel around his waist and crosses the hall to the bedroom where Molly is waiting. It’s one of the kids’ rooms, the oldest girl’s.

  The detective’s card is on the dresser. Webber handed it over as soon as they came into the house. Sean picks it up now and wonders about Rafael Garza of the Houston police.

  Molly is sitting on the bed, running a brush through her hair. She’s already showered and dressed in a T-shirt and shorts. She sees him fiddling with the card and says, “You’re obsessing. Stop.”