A Good Kill Read online

  “Was it black?” I asked. “Looked like a hard plastic material? Like a carbon finish?”

  “That’s the one,” Therese said.

  “So you sat him where he wanted,” I said. “What happened next?”

  “He drank his coffee,” she said. “Black, two sugars. No cream.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  Therese motioned at the far side of the restaurant. A corner booth that looked out the window onto a side parking lot.

  I pulled my phone out and showed her the sketch of the old guy. “You’re a hundred percent sure it was this guy?”

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “The other cops already asked me twice.”

  Remy and I had seen the old guy in person, but it was in the dark inside Tandy’s. And dark again in the forest behind the bar. I wanted to know if anything had changed.

  “He still have a beard like in our picture?”

  “Uh-huh.” She nodded.

  “Seventy-ish?”

  “Yup.”

  “He look distinguished?” I asked. “Look like somebody’s uncle?”

  “He looked like somebody’s grandpa,” she said. “If Grandpa was in shape.”

  “Okay.” I nodded. He was fit.

  I hadn’t heard the old guy speak more than five words in the forest. “You hear an accent in his voice, Therese?”

  “Not anything specific,” she said. “Not like us. Not like up North. Somewhere neutral.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Nothing for a good half hour,” she continued. “I brung him two refills. Then some guy joined him. I didn’t even see the second fella come in. He was just there. I came toward the table, to see if he wanted a drink, you know? Or maybe they both were gonna order food now that the second fella was there. But the old guy waved me off.” She held her palm out at me, as if to demonstrate.

  “So you didn’t get to the table, but you saw something.”

  “Not much,” she said. “But the guy who joined him was white. Black hair. Younger than you.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “This new fella brought out a paper bag,” she continued. “Grandpa looked in it and then went to the restroom. When I looked up, Grandpa was heading back and the young guy was gone.”

  “Back from the bathroom?”

  “Uh-huh.” Therese nodded. “No paper bag anymore. Just that black case he came in with.”

  Somewhere in the distance, someone was laying on a car horn. Over and over again.

  “He took the black case to the bathroom with him?” I confirmed. “You sure?”

  “Yup.”

  “So he’s back at the table. What’s the next thing you remember?”

  “He seemed antsy now. Squirming in his chair like a kid. In comes these other two men, maybe twenty minutes later. One of them’s real big. Like a football player. Tank top showing off his muscles. White. Dark hair. The other guy . . . I dunno. Shorter. Not memorable.”

  “The unmemorable gentleman—white? Black?”

  “White,” she said. “Grandpa leaves them two the case, and he gets up himself. As he does, the football player grabs his arm. You could almost see there’s gonna be a fight. But then the unmemorable guy says something and the football player lets go. And out goes Grandpa. Two minutes later, the two men take off with the case.”

  Therese had gotten to the bottom of her coffee cup, and Remy leaned in and refilled it. As she did, my partner’s eyes moved to me and then toward the back of the store. I thanked Therese and got up. Told her we’d be back in a sec.

  As we walked toward the back, I leaned in to Remy. “I think someone might’ve brought our old assassin those missing parts.”

  “Yeah, I was listening,” Remy said. “The paper bag?”

  “The trip to the bathroom was probably to make sure they fit.”

  “So these two new guys have the gun now,” Remy said, heading with me into the back of the restaurant. “The football player and the nondescript guy.”

  “With the missing parts in the case,” I said. “The old guy just turned it over to the buyer, Rem.”

  In the back room, a man in a Cracker Barrel apron with the name York on it stood with Patrolman Ingram. The place was a tiny box, and I leaned against the doorway, the last open space available. A video was queued up, and Ingram hit Play.

  We saw the older man enter the restaurant and stand there. His back was to us, and his hunting jacket was zipped tight around his collar. A baseball cap sat low on his head, his wavy light hair coming out the back and sides. He pointed to an area in the restaurant and the waitress shook her head.

  The rest of the video went exactly as Therese had explained. I couldn’t see much of the man with the paper bag, except to say he looked white or Latino and was in and out fast. But when the other two men arrived, they came in a different door from the parking lot.

  The man Therese called the football player wore a tank top that was too small and showed off his hulking arms. Even in black and white, you could see he was ripped.

  “Bodyguard?” Abe asked.

  The football player was followed by a shorter man. Both men sat down opposite the older guy.

  The two men got up after Grandpa left. As they headed out, they grabbed the case from the opposite seat in the booth. Ingram paused the video. We had a solid image of them.

  The bodyguard was white. Six foot with arms like granite. His friend—or more likely his boss—was smaller. Five-six and late thirties, a wiry build. He wore a designer polo and slacks. He had piercing dark eyes.

  Remy took a shot of the paused image with her phone.

  I looked to Ingram and the restaurant manager. “Our assassin sat facing the parking lot,” I said. “We got cameras outside?”

  “We were just going through ’em before you walked in,” Ingram said. He used the controls on a desktop computer to pull up a different camera.

  “The guy who came with the paper bag,” the manager said. “He mustn’t have parked in the lot. But them final two . . .”

  Onto the screen came a shot of the bodyguard getting into a Cadillac Escalade. Black or dark blue. The wiry guy got in the back seat, but he opened his own door.

  “The first four digits of the plate look like 5DUT,” Ingram said, jotting the number and letters on his hand with a Sharpie from off the manager’s desk. “Let me go outside and run it.”

  He left. And Remy, Abe, and I asked the manager if we could have the place to talk. The manager nodded and took off.

  “The ideal situation would be to surveil these folks,” Abe said once he left. “Track that car. And wait.”

  “Especially if they can replace the gun parts that fast,” Remy added. “’Cause what we really want here are the 3D plans. More than the gun.”

  I nodded, but my mind was somewhere else. On the message that Carilla sent to the throwaway cell.

  “Carilla’s text,” I said. “It referred to something happening Thursday morning, right? He was trying to press the buyer into paying up.”

  “He said, ‘I know you’re still gonna need what I got,’” Remy said.

  “Well, it’s Wednesday afternoon now,” I said. “If those were replacement parts for that gun, then someone rushed them up here for a reason.”

  “You think something’s going down tomorrow?” Abe asked.

  “It’s a sniper rifle, guys. Someone’s going down. And when you shoot from that distance, it’s hard to know who even took the shot. We need to call ATF and fast.”

  32

  By the time we reviewed what else was found in the canvass and got back to MFPD, our friend Mandelle Clearson from Atlanta PD was there, acting in his capacity for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

  He and a Fed named Quarles had set up in our conference room, and Clearson smiled when h
e saw me. “You hillbillies can’t seem to stay out of gun trouble, can you?”

  I didn’t return the smile.

  “I’m kidding, buddy,” he said.

  “What do we know?” I asked.

  “The bodyguard’s name is Anton Sedonovich,” Clearson said, opening up a file on the guy that the waitress called the football player. “He grew up in Louisiana, got a scholarship to wrestle at LSU, and dropped out his sophomore year. After that, he picked up a charge for domestic abuse that was reduced to a misdemeanor.”

  “The shorter man’s name is Nolan Brauer,” said Quarles, the other agent.

  Quarles was late forties like Clearson. Black, with gray in his sideburns. “Brauer was Army,” he continued. “Iraq War vet, and a helluva sniper from the records we’re allowed to read.”

  Quarles had soft features and his shoulders were rounded. He looked more like an insurance actuary than a guy packing heat for the FBI.

  “He’s been on a federal watch list for three months,” Quarles continued.

  “Based on what?” Remy asked.

  “Some comment he made online. Agents interviewed him, but didn’t find any reason to do more.”

  The Fed had an accent like Abe’s, but different. More twangy. Like someone from the cuff of the boot of Louisiana. Or from Mississippi.

  “He’s not just a great shot,” Clearson said. “He’s got resources.”

  “How much?” Remy asked.

  “Brauer’s granddad apparently patented most of the car bumpers originally designed in this country,” Quarles explained. “Sold those rights to the Big Five automakers in the 1960s. Took the money and invested. The family owns three golf courses, about a dozen high-rises in Atlanta, and a franchise of paintball ranges.”

  “And Nolan Brauer is the grandson?”

  “And sole living heir,” Clearson said. “He also runs a blog called Patriots of Fort Pulaski.”

  Fort Pulaski was a Civil War post in what’s now Savannah. Cockspur Island to be exact. The South had lost that battle. Maybe Brauer was still sore about it.

  “Do we know where Brauer lives?” I asked.

  “He owns five houses,” Clearson said. He walked over to a map of Georgia that was tacked to the conference wall. The hotel and Cracker Barrel were marked in red Sharpie, and a perimeter was drawn. A circle about a hundred miles around. Too big to search. Too big for anything. There were five black X’s, one on each of Brauer’s houses.

  “Officers are on their way to all these addresses,” Clearson said. “We can assume he had two hours’ jump on us, and we’ve put every jurisdiction in this range on alert.”

  “That’s gotta be twenty jurisdictions,” Abe said, walking into the room.

  “Twenty-four,” Clearson answered. “But if your dead guy Carilla was right about the timing of something Thursday morning, then hopefully it’s just a matter of time before someone picks him up.”

  Remy and I exchanged a glance. It was five p.m. and there was a possibility that a sniper rifle would be used tomorrow morning. A matter of time?

  “How can we help?” Remy asked.

  “The FBI has fifty men on this, as of ten minutes ago. Three different federal agencies are scouring every pro-NRA email, gun blog, and right-wing database. We’re in touch with the governor. The GBI.”

  “Great,” I said, repeating what Remy had said. “How can we help?”

  Clearson looked at Quarles and then at Abe. “We’re guessing he’s long gone from Mason Falls, P.T. So I think we’re good without local help.”

  Clearson said “local help” like it was a slur.

  “So nothing?” I asked.

  “We already talked to your chief,” Clearson said. “I’d say go home and get some shut-eye. Maybe Abe stays here. P.T., you or Remy come in the morning for relief.”

  Remy and I glanced at each other. Clearson was usually a good guy, but when he put on his asshole Fed hat, voilà, he sounded a lot like an asshole Fed.

  “I’ll take the first shift,” Abe said. “Why don’t you come back around five a.m. I’ll be dead on my feet by then.”

  I stared at Abe. I’d been the senior guy on the totem pole for so long that I had to remind myself that it was his job now to make these choices.

  “All right,” I said.

  We moved outside then, to where I’d double-parked my Silverado.

  I dropped Remy at her place and rolled down the windows of the truck, letting the cool air in as I drove past downtown. In a few minutes, I passed 10th Street and was about to turn south to pick up 906. To go home and crash.

  But I didn’t turn south. I was restless and kept driving.

  Plowing ahead into the numbered streets, I passed 15th Street, 18th.

  At 20th, my truck almost unconsciously steered to the curb, and I stared across at something that made no sense.

  Remy and I had been inside the Golden Oaks liquor store less than twenty-four hours ago, but now a green fence surrounded the entire block and a wrecking ball hung from a rig.

  The vertical sign that read LIQUOR was gone. The giant one that I’d assumed was too expensive to tear down. And the building was half-demolished. Some partial walls stood, but most of the place was a pile of rubble, ten feet high. A rolling mountain of concrete debris.

  I took a picture and texted Remy.

  A moment later, a message came back:

  WTF? Is that the Golden Oaks?

  I told her it was, and my mind scrambled through a number of scenarios.

  Lauten Hartley knew we’d been inside his place.

  He must’ve been.

  The building had sat dormant for almost two years. Now a day after we found the basement, the place was destroyed, rendering any revisit useless?

  Had there been an alarm system? Cameras that Remy and I were caught on?

  I started up my truck, but my mind was spinning. I got on 906, but saw Remy’s number blinking across the screen in the truck.

  “I’m not searching the liquor store property,” I said as I picked up. “Don’t worry.”

  “I’m not calling about that,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about Brauer and that bodyguard. You okay just sitting this one out?”

  “We can’t search fifty square miles, Rem.”

  “Sure, but I don’t want to wake up tomorrow and find out about another school shooting. Or some dead elected official.”

  I thought about the liquor store and the school shooting. About action and regret.

  “Well, the Feds’ assumption was that the best way to chase this guy is to pick up digital scraps,” I said. “Some chat room or blog. The dark web. They’re probably right, Rem.”

  “Sure,” she said. “But if this is about 3D printing and guns, we might know people who have better ears on the ground than the Feds.”

  “Who? Wolf?” I asked.

  “’Xactly,” Remy answered, imitating the way Wolf talked. “He didn’t want himself or his maker buddies to get maligned. Well, they’re about to. Anyone with a 3D printer is gonna be on an FBI watch list by tomorrow if someone innocent is shot.”

  “Call him,” I said to Remy. “If he bites, let’s see if he can introduce us to this community he bragged about.”

  33

  One of the interesting things about living in modern times is how people of strange interests connect and find their own kind of people. You collect Victorian coins? So do a hundred other folks. And those people eventually want to meet “IRL,” as it’s called.

  In Real Life.

  So I guess if you make complex 3D models, same goes.

  Remy and I parked behind a place called Cells and Vipers on Green Street, just up toward the north end of town. My partner had called Wolf, and in fact he did bite. Then I swung by and grabbed her.

  I’d grown up in Mason Falls, and I
knew the northern side of town pretty well. But I’d driven by this particular mini mall a dozen times and never noticed. It had a nail salon in it, a pizza place called Mr. Sauce, and the game place.

  From what Wolf had told Remy, Cells and Vipers was a business that sold games and hosted games, both analog and digital. They also sold electronic parts for robotics and had two meet-up areas, one in a room behind the retail area and the other in the basement.

  Wolf texted us to meet him in the alley behind the place, and I pulled my truck close to a dumpster by a metal back door that was painted orange.

  A minute later the door scraped open, and Wolf came out. Walked over to us.

  “Y’all are comin’ on my turf now, so you’re gonna be cool, right?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “And you brought something?” he said. “Something to offer?”

  I pulled out five business cards. On the back of each I had written, This individual is a close friend of Detective P. T. Marsh. Please call P.T. immediately. My cell number was written below.

  Wolf looked them over.

  “These are not ‘get out of felony’ cards,” I said. “But they are ‘get out of misdemeanor’ cards.”

  “Meaning what ’xactly?” Wolf asked, flipping them back over to the fronts.

  “You get in a stupid fistfight with your buddy,” Remy said. “You’re going eighty and you’re about to spend a night in jail. You call P.T. He makes it better.”

  “A’ight,” Wolf said. He asked us to wait in the alley a few minutes more. He took the five cards and went inside. Ten minutes later the back door opened again, and he waved us in.

  We entered a room that had eight or nine worktables, atop them mostly plastic bins full of metal parts. Gears and motors. Young men in their twenties were huddled in groups of two or three around each table, building something. They wore hoodies and sported barely any facial hair.

  “Over here,” Wolf said, pointing to a set of stairs that led to the basement.

  We clanked down the metal steps and into a subterranean room.