Deadlocked

Chapter 10

Mason picked Harry Ryman up in front of Union Station an hour later. He wanted to run through the facts of the case with Harry. Mason was troubled by the missing murder weapon. The prosecutor didn't need it to prove that the Byrneses had been murdered or that both boys had committed the crime. Mason needed it to prove that Ryan was innocent. Even after fifteen years, there could be fingerprints or DNA evidence that would prove who had swung the tire iron.

Mason had another problem that was also dependent on the murder weapon. He hoped that Harry would help him with this one even though he knew Harry had an arresting cop's bias.

There was no evidence of a struggle between the victims and the killers. If Ryan was innocent, Whitney King had managed to kill both victims before either could resist or flee. Whitney may have been a spoiled rich kid, but that didn't make him a ninja.

With his deteriorated eyesight, Harry didn't trust himself to drive outside Red Bridge, his neighborhood in south Kansas City. When he couldn't stand being cooped up any longer, he walked two blocks from his house and caught a bus that took him all the way downtown and into the River Market area along the Missouri River. He'd wander around the shops, grab lunch, sometimes taking a walk through River Front Park, catching a southbound bus back home, getting off if something else struck his fancy along the way. When Mason called his cell phone, Harry was sitting next to the fountain in front of Union Station.

Once the second largest passenger rail terminal in the country, Union Station had been abandoned, boarded up- an eyesore that was too big to be forgotten. Saved by the vote of people living on both sides of the Missouri-Kansas state line in favor of a tax to raise money for its restoration, the station had been returned to its glory days, once again delivering passengers to the center of the city. The station was on Twenty-fifth Street between Main and Broadway.

Just to the south high on a hill above Union Station, stood the Liberty Memorial, a towering obelisk honoring those who had died in World War I. It too had recently been restored.

Mason parked next to a granite pillar with a bronze plaque that commemorated the spot in the Union Station parking lot where Pretty Boy Floyd and his gang had gunned down four lawmen in an effort to free their friend Frank Nash, who was killed in the effort. It was Kansas City's answer to Chicago's St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

Mason stopped to read the summary of the bloody business that had taken place on June 17, 1933. Nash had escaped from the Kansas State Penitentiary nearly three years earlier where he was serving a twenty-five-year term for assaulting a mail custodian. Finally captured in Arkansas, two FBI agents and a local chief of police escorted Nash by train to Kansas City where he would be transferred back to the prison in Leavenworth, Kansas.

When the FBI agents and Nash got into their car, Floyd and his men opened fire on them and their police escort. Floyd escaped the botched rescue only to be killed in a shootout in Ohio in October 1934. Bloody as the massacre had been, the books had been balanced with the same red ink. At least, Mason thought, no one had second-guessed Floyd's fate. Looking up the hill at the Liberty Memorial, Mason was struck by the City's impulse to honor its dead when the cause was noble or the death dramatic. There would be no monument for Ryan Kowalczyk.

"Hot enough for you?" Mason asked Harry when he joined him at the fountain.

"I don't mind the heat," Harry answered. "Besides, the fountain helps. I'll bet it's ten degrees cooler next to that water."

The fountain was an array of high-powered jets, the sprays choreographed in a kaleidoscope of patterns that never seemed to repeat, sometimes set to music. Kansas City bragged about its fountains. They may be baking in a heat wave, but the city wouldn't let the fountains run dry.

"It's great that you can see it well enough to enjoy it," Mason said.

"Hell, I can't see the patterns worth a damn," Harry said. "About all I can see is when one spray starts and another stops. But, I can feel it, like the water vibrates around me. That's something."

"How about I give you a ride home?"

"Cheaper than the bus," Harry answered. "What are you up to besides running a taxi service?" he asked when they'd settled into Mason's car.

"Mary Kowalczyk and Nick Byrnes hired me. Mary wants me to get her son a pardon and Nick wants Whitney King's head on a pike outside the village gates."

"I know. Blues told me."

"You okay with that?" Mason asked. "I mean the part about proving Kowalczyk was innocent."

"None of my business," Harry said, looking out the passenger window, his left hand balled into a fist, drumming against his knee. "We all gotta eat, but you ought to find another way to pay for your groceries. Kowalczyk is dead. You can't un-ring that bell and I'm not losing any sleep over it. He was guilty. Plain and simple. You want to have your head handed to you, be my guest."

Mason drove, neither of them talking. Harry never said anything trite to Mason, like telling Mason he thought of him as a son, though he had treated him that way since Mason was a small boy, Harry's relationship with Claire dated back that many years. Harry took him to ball games, slipped him a few bucks for a date, and gave him a stern eye if his grades slipped. In recent years, he cut corners and pulled strings for Mason when he needed help from the police department.

Growing up, Mason had idolized Harry, making it tough for him to take Harry on, though he'd done it once before when Blues's life was on the line. Blues and Harry had been partners until Blues was forced from the police department. Harry had carried a grudge against Blues that was almost fatal when Mason was caught in the middle years later. Blues was the brother Mason never had. This time, Mason was taking both of them on. Long odds.

"Why do you think the jury acquitted Whitney King?" he finally asked Harry.

Harry shook his head. "The jury was deadlocked for two days. Then they split the baby. I've never been in a jury room, but that's one I'd have paid for admission. We had those boys dead to rights. Their alibis were bullshit. They both should've gotten the needle."

Mason sighed. "I've got a feeling Kowalczyk was innocent."

"A murder case isn't a prom date, Lou. Feelings got nothing to do with it. It's all about the evidence and the evidence in this case was overwhelming."

"There's something that bothers me about the facts," Mason said.

"What's that?" Harry asked.

"Graham and Elizabeth Byrnes were young and healthy. His parents testified that they ran marathons, worked out all the time."

"What's your point?"

"The murder weapon was never found. Everyone assumed that it was the tire iron from the Byrnes's car since it was missing. If that's true, the killers had to hit them one at a time."

"So what?" Harry asked.

"So, if the husband got it first, why didn't the wife run away? If the wife got it first, why didn't the husband put up a fight? If both boys were there when the murders took place, the one not swinging the tire iron would have had to hold the other victim down. There were would have been a struggle. One of the boys would have ended up with bruises or cuts. One of the victims would have had the killer's skin under their fingernails. Something would have happened, but nothing did. It's like the victims stood still while they were killed."

Harry said, "The wife wouldn't have run and left her baby in the car. Who's to say there wasn't a fight? Besides, that doesn't prove one of those kids was telling the truth and it doesn't prove there was only one murder weapon. Could have been two and we didn't find either one of them."

"Maybe not," Mason said. "But it doesn't add up. If Ryan Kowalczyk was innocent, we need to know that."

"Why?" Harry asked. "So his mother can sue the state of Missouri and wooly some boo-hoo money out of the taxpayers? So you can prove that Blues and I caused an innocent kid to die? How's that gonna help anybody? Especially us?" Mason had no answers to Harry's questions. "Pull over," Harry said. "I'll take the bus the rest of the way home."