The Good Killer Read online

  I’d rather not, Garza said.

  No kidding. Anyway, that’s what I’ve got to look forward to. You’ll have to find a way to get along without me. I’m retiring.

  But Don Lefors never did retire. He went in for the surgery and died on the table. The surgeon told Don’s wife it never happened before, not to any of his patients. But it happened to Don.

  There was a funeral with full honors, and when they lowered the box into the ground Garza came very close to laughing out loud, because he kept hearing Don’s voice: Cancer of the shitter. Can you believe it?

  He held himself together. In fact, he overcompensated. His lieutenant thought he looked depressed. The man pulled him aside and told him to take a week or two. Maybe go on a trip. Process what had happened.

  Garza went to Vegas. Played blackjack. Won a little money and lost it all again. He asked a dealer to have a drink with him and wound up telling her his troubles. She went up to his room with him to help him forget. Don would have approved.

  Garza was with the woman again, a second night, when his lieutenant called and told him to come back. He packed fast and headed for the airport. The last he saw of her she was naked in the shower.

  Now, on Saturday morning, Rafael Garza is once again a cog in the machine that is the Houston Police Department.

  He attended a briefing at 8:00 a.m., so he’s more or less up to speed. He knows that Sean Tennant rents this two-bedroom house on Woodvale Drive from a woman named Carla Whyte, who lives next door. Tennant shares the place with Margaret Winter, also known as Molly. Tennant and Winter have drivers’ licenses issued by the state of Texas. Tennant is thirty-one years old; Winter is twenty-nine.

  DMV records show a Toyota Camry registered to Sean Tennant. No vehicle registered to Molly Winter. There’s no car in the garage behind the house.

  The house is peculiar. As Garza walks through it, his first thought is that something’s missing. The house isn’t empty, but it’s not full the way people’s houses tend to be full. There’s no mess, no clutter. There doesn’t seem to be enough stuff. But then Garza realizes there is enough. All the things that two people would need to live are here and not much more.

  As he moves through the rooms, he finds himself counting things. The numbers are mostly even: twos and fours and sixes.

  Two bath towels hanging on the shower rod, four more folded in the linen closet. Two sets of sheets and pillowcases: one on the bed and one in a drawer. Two laundry baskets on the floor of the closet: one for whites and one for colors.

  In the kitchen: Four chairs around the table. Two placemats. In a cupboard: four dinner plates, four dessert plates; four soup bowls, four salad bowls; four mugs, four drinking glasses, two wineglasses. In a drawer: six knives, six forks, six spoons.

  The spare bedroom has two desks and two chairs. There are no computers, but the assumption is that there were laptops and Sean Tennant took them with him.

  Tennant was definitely in the house after the incident at the Galleria. The landlady, Carla Whyte, saw him.

  There are papers, pens, and notepads on the desks. Other detectives have already searched here, and one of them, Glen Kirby, discovered a clue. He looked closely at one of the pads and saw that someone had written on it and then torn the page away—leaving behind the impressions of numbers on the page underneath: 1090 and 320.

  Kirby did some checking and discovered that United Airlines flight 1090 flew nonstop from Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport to Mexico City. It was scheduled to depart this afternoon at 3:20 p.m.

  When he heard about it at the morning briefing, Garza was skeptical.

  “Has Tennant made a reservation on flight 1090?” he asked.

  “No,” Kirby said. “But he must realize we can access airline reservations. He may be waiting to buy a ticket at the last minute.”

  “That’s clever,” said Garza. “It’s a shame he gave himself away. Maybe he didn’t realize we’d search his house.”

  He said it drily, sarcastically, and when Kirby heard it his cheeks flushed red. He started to respond, but Garza’s lieutenant—Arthur Hayden—raised a hand to interrupt him.

  “The flight number could be misdirection. That’s understood. We’ll still send people to watch the airport. We might get lucky.”

  Garza doubted it, and he doubts it still. Since the briefing, he’s studied the videos of Sean Tennant at the Galleria. The department collected mall security footage as well as several cell phone videos recorded by witnesses at the scene.

  Footage from the mall’s parking garage showed Tennant walking to his car and driving away. It captured his license plate, which was how Garza’s colleagues were able to determine Tennant’s name and address.

  But there’s another video that Garza has watched over and over. He finds it revealing. It was recorded from the second level of the mall by a salesclerk who works at Zales jewelers. It shows Tennant approaching Henry Alan Keen, drawing a pistol from under his coat, firing two shots that drop the man to the floor. Tennant moves with an unhurried grace. There’s no sign of panic in him. He looks calm and in control.

  He doesn’t look careless. He doesn’t look like a man who makes trivial mistakes.

  He wouldn’t leave a flight number behind. Not accidentally.

  *

  Garza leaves Tennant’s rented house and walks a dozen yards through rain-wet grass to the landlady’s place next door.

  Carla Whyte is a slender woman in her forties. She answers her door in yoga clothes, brown hair tied in a ponytail. She leads Garza to her kitchen, where there’s a juicer on the counter and a glass of something green that she’s been drinking. She offers to pour him some.

  “It tastes better than it looks,” she says.

  He accepts a glass, takes a sip, does his best not to make a face.

  She laughs. “It’s good for you.”

  “I bet,” he says.

  “Seriously, there’s kale in it. Kale will make you live forever.”

  Garza asks her about seeing Sean Tennant the night before. She tells him she’s gone over the story already with another detective. Which is true: there were detectives here last night, talking to all the neighbors along the street. But Garza’s impression is that the interviews were thin and rushed, and in any case he needs to get a better sense of Sean Tennant and Molly Winter.

  “Let’s pretend I’m brand-new,” he says. “Let’s pretend I don’t know a thing.”

  Carla is willing to pretend.

  She likes to sit on her back porch when it rains, she tells him. It rained yesterday after sunset, and she was out there watching it come down. Sean drove in, and she heard him before she saw him: she heard his garage door rising and his car rolling along the driveway.

  She waved at him, but he didn’t see. He seemed preoccupied. He left the garage door up and went into his house. He was in there for maybe half an hour. The rain let up and she was getting ready to go back inside when she saw him come out with a suitcase and a small travel bag. He put them in the trunk of his car, returned to the house, and came out again with a duffel bag and a backpack.

  He started the car, backed it out, lowered the garage door, and drove away. He never spoke to her. She assumed he was going away for the weekend.

  “Molly Winter wasn’t with him?” Garza says.

  “No,” Carla tells him.

  “When did you see her last?”

  She looks off at nothing, trying to recall. “Thursday afternoon. She came over here. We did yoga.”

  “You didn’t see her yesterday then?” Garza asks.

  “No.”

  “Another neighbor, a retiree across the road, Mr. Henderson—”

  “Hendricks.”

  “Mr. Hendricks. He remembers seeing them leave together yesterday morning, Molly and Sean. Do you have any idea where they might’ve been going?”

  “I don’t.”

  It’s a question that needs to be answered: where Molly was yesterday, where she is
now. She wasn’t at the Galleria with Sean. She doesn’t appear in any of the surveillance footage.

  “Could Sean have dropped her off somewhere?” Garza asks. “An appointment—”

  “I wouldn’t know about her appointments,” Carla says.

  “Maybe a friend’s house.”

  “I don’t know her friends.”

  “You’re her friend. You do yoga together.”

  “That’s true. But I don’t know her other friends.”

  “It would help if I knew what her life was like,” Garza says. “What does she do with her time?”

  “She’s a writer.”

  “What does she write?”

  Carla smiles and looks away. “This is where I tell you she writes novels and you say, ‘What kind of novels?’ And I say, ‘Dirty ones.’”

  “Dirty ones?”

  “Kind of like those Fifty Shades books. Do you know about those?”

  “They’re about bondage, aren’t they? You’re saying she writes bondage novels?”

  “There’s some light bondage in them, but mostly they’re just … erotic.”

  “And she sells them? They get published?”

  “Self-published. She puts them out as e-books. You can read them on your Kindle. She sells them cheap—like four bucks apiece. But she’s done a bunch of them.”

  Garza tips his head to the side, skeptical. “You think she makes much money that way?”

  “I don’t know,” Carla says. “But you’ve been over there.” She gestures in the direction of the Tennant house. “The two of them live pretty simply. They’re not throwing money around.”

  “What kind of work does Sean do?”

  “He makes furniture for people. Tables, chairs, dressers.”

  “Do you know the names of any of these people?”

  She shrugs. Picks up her glass of green juice. There’s one good slug of it left, and she downs it in one go.

  Then she says, “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “What do you mean?” Garza asks.

  “I’ve been watching the news. That guy, Henry Keen, he was crazy. They’re always crazy. I heard one reporter say he was carrying a bunch of spare clips for his gun. He had almost two hundred bullets with him, and he only got to fire fifteen. Because Sean stopped him. And now you’re going after Sean.”

  “I’m not going after Sean,” Garza says. “I just want to talk to him.”

  “Somebody ought to give him a medal. But I don’t think he wants a medal.”

  “What do you think he wants?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? He wants to be left alone. And that’s the one thing he’s not going to get.”

  Garza gives Carla a kindly look. “I’ll be happy to leave him alone. But I need to talk to him first.”

  “Sure,” she says. “You want to talk to him. All the newspeople want to talk to him. If he had stuck around, they wouldn’t have left him alone. Not for a minute. Sean never hurt anybody, except for Henry Keen. And it looks to me like he deserved what he got. I hope Sean disappears, if that’s what he wants. I hope he and Molly are together right now, off somewhere by themselves. I hope you don’t find them. I hope nobody finds them.”

  *

  As Garza leaves Carla Whyte’s house, he’s thinking he’s inclined to agree that Sean Tennant deserves a medal for his actions at the Galleria. In fact, he would gladly buy the man a beer if given the opportunity. But he still needs to understand who Tennant is. It’s in his nature; it’s the reason he became a detective. He needs to figure the man out.

  Not that he has a choice. The investigation of the incident at the Galleria has a momentum of its own. Garza couldn’t control it if he tried. A mass shooting gets people’s attention. They feel a need to make sense of it. Henry Keen is dead, but there are teams of detectives questioning everyone who knew him, trying to work out what led him to Brooks Brothers with his gun and his pockets full of bullets. They’re working with profilers from the FBI to try to understand his motives. They’re tracing his contacts and his movements to determine if he has any connections to terrorist organizations, foreign or domestic.

  Sean Tennant is a part of it too. He’ll need to be picked apart and analyzed, tracked down and questioned. There can be no loose ends.

  Garza spends the rest of the morning at his desk in the homicide division, typing up his notes and making phone calls and searching databases. He knows from this morning’s briefing that Sean Tennant has no criminal record in Texas or anywhere else. It was an obvious thing to check, and Glen Kirby checked it while Garza was on the plane from Las Vegas to Houston. But now Garza knows more: Sean Tennant has lived at his current address for somewhat less than six years. Garza can find no record of a previous address. Tennant’s credit history is thin, which is consistent with someone who rents and lives cheaply and doesn’t like to borrow money. The strange thing is that none of his accounts have been open for more than six years.

  Tennant’s driver’s license fits the same pattern: he’s held it for less than six years. If he held one before in another state, Garza can’t find a record of it.

  From the moment Sean Tennant left the scene of the shootings at the Galleria, it was plain that he was running from something. Carla Whyte believes he’s running from attention, from notoriety, from being hounded by the media. But to Garza it looks more and more as if he’s running from something else. It looks as if Sean Tennant may have a secret, and the secret may be that he’s not really Sean Tennant at all.

  It’s an easy theory to test. Garza drives back to the house in Stafford, and Carla Whyte lets him into the garage. Tennant’s workshop. There’s a carpenter’s square on the workbench—a tool for laying out right angles. It’s made of steel and has smooth surfaces that would hold fingerprints. Garza picks it up with a latex glove and bags it. He gathers other small items that Tennant would have handled: a tape measure, a wood file, a utility knife. He bags those too.

  From there Garza has more driving to do: First to the lab, where he delivers his finds to the fingerprint analysis section. Next to the airport, where he meets up with Glen Kirby. Kirby is still convinced that Sean Tennant might try to take flight 1090 to Mexico City, so the two of them spend their afternoon coordinating with airport security, making sure Tennant doesn’t board that flight or any other.

  Tennant never shows. Garza doesn’t believe he’s heading for Mexico City. Tennant has a car, and he could be far away by now. He could be in Dallas or Baton Rouge or Memphis or Little Rock. The department has received tips from each of those cities: people who called in to report seeing someone who matched Tennant’s description. There will be more as the day goes on, and Garza will hear about all of them.

  But he’s not counting on tipsters to help him find Sean Tennant. As Saturday wears on, there’s a part of his mind that’s working the problem. He’s thinking about Molly Winter and the old man across the street who saw her drive away with Sean Friday morning. He’s thinking about the Tennant house and all those things he counted: twos and fours and sixes.

  He’s thinking about Carla Whyte, who saw Sean loading his car Friday night with a suitcase, a small travel bag, a duffel, and a backpack.

  One suitcase.

  Two people living together should have two suitcases. So there should be a suitcase left in the house. But when Garza walked through it, he didn’t see one.

  There are more than two dozen airlines flying out of George Bush Intercontinental Airport. Garza starts with the bigger ones. He visits United, then American, then Delta. It’s early in the evening when the ticket agent at the Delta counter gives him the answer he’s looking for. Molly Winter flew out Friday at 11:40 a.m. Her destination: Bozeman, Montana.

  It’s a solid lead, but there are no guarantees. Maybe Sean will go to Bozeman to meet up with Molly, but maybe he won’t. Maybe the first thing he did was call her and tell her to meet him somewhere else. Even if Molly stays p
ut in Bozeman, it’s a city of forty-five thousand people. She won’t be easy to find.

  Still, it’s a lead. It’s what he has. His lieutenant takes some convincing, but by Sunday morning Rafael Garza is on a flight to Montana.

  10

  Jimmy Harper

  Sean hid himself well, Jimmy thinks.

  He might have done better if he had been willing to give up civilization. If he had built a little cabin in the wilderness. Maybe near a river. Then he could have fished for his supper. He could have grown food in a garden.

  You could live like that if you were disciplined, Jimmy thinks. If you didn’t mind all the things you missed. You wouldn’t even need a name, if you were living out there on the edge.

  But Sean took another path. He wanted a life in a city; he wanted to be connected. For that, you need a name, an identity.

  He did well though. He made an effort. Sean Tennant had no presence on social media: no Twitter account, no Facebook page, no Instagram, no LinkedIn.

  But no one can hide, not anymore, not if they want a civilized life. Once Jimmy had the name Sean was living under, he found his street address with a simple online search.

  The house is bland and a little run-down. White siding. Gray shingles on the roof. There are concrete steps in the front, but the steps leading up to the back door are wood, and they’re bowed in the middle.

  Jimmy can feel them bend beneath his weight.

  He walks up to the back door and goes to work on the locks with a pick and a tension wrench.

  Jimmy’s father was a locksmith, a mechanic, and a small-time thief. He taught Jimmy everything he knew.

  There’s a spring lock in the knob that takes about forty-five seconds. The dead bolt takes a bit longer. Jimmy works in the dark, but he doesn’t need to see anyway. It’s all about feel.