Shakedown

Chapter Nine

I felt Troy’s hand on my back, heard him ask if I was okay, saw him wave off the chopper as I turned my head skyward. Time got lost, seconds confused for minutes, moments for lifetimes. The involuntary muscle contractions that had folded me in half let go, allowing me to stand, clutching my sides, still shaking. I tried to talk, but words strangled in my throat and finally escaped in a stutter.

“I’m fine, just peachy,” I managed.

Troy cupped my elbow in his palm, guiding me past a gauntlet including my team and at least a dozen KCK cops, fresh contractions contorting my steps like I was a drunken puppet. Jim Day nodded, his chin tapping against his barrel chest, his massive arms hanging against his sides. Lani Hay-wood bit her lower lip. Ammara Iverson fought back tears. Marty Grisnik, my police department coconspirator on the fugitive warrant, was at the end of the receiving line, shaking his head like he should have known better.

“There’s an ambulance on the street,” Troy said as we cleared the crowd. “We’ll have the paramedics take a look at you.”

“Forget it. This will pass. Just let me catch my breath.”

I stopped in the darkened strip of ground between Marcellus’s house and the house to the north, easing Troy’s grip with my free hand. I tried the deep breathing again. The tremors were fading. I didn’t know whether the breathing was helping or whether the shaking had ended on its own.

“What’s going on, Jack?”

I looked at Troy, the worry obvious in his wrinkled brow and narrowed eyes. Some things were easy even for me to read in a man’s face.

I took another breath. “I’ve been having some shaking on and off for the last couple of months. It comes and goes but tonight it’s mostly been coming.”

“That was more than shaking. You were like an old man who fell and couldn’t get up.”

The shakes and the stuttering were nothing new, but this was the first time I’d lost complete control of my body. Something inside me had snapped like a mousetrap and I couldn’t stand up until the spring was reset. I didn’t want to speculate about it until I knew what I was talking about.

“I must have gotten excited when I found all that cash lying around.”

“Bullshit, Jack! What’s the doctor tell you?”

“Haven’t been. Too busy with this case.”

“Busy, hell! You’re going to get your butt in a doctor’s office when the sun comes up if I have to handcuff you and take you there myself. I ought to take you to the nearest ER right now.”

I smiled, put my hand on his arm. “I can handle this, Troy. I was waiting to get it checked out until we took Marcellus down. The timetable has changed after tonight. Let’s catch whoever did this and then I’ll get checked out. Probably nothing a couple of weeks on a beach won’t cure.”

“Jack, you need to find out what’s wrong with you. We can run this case until you’re ready to come back.”

I didn’t know what was causing me to shake, but I had figured out that the longer I worked and the less I slept, the more I shook. I also knew that if I walked away now, my chances of getting back to this case or any case weren’t good. FBI agents don’t do anything involuntarily-especially shake uncontrollably. I didn’t have a hobby, a wife, or a mistress, no matter what Joy thought about Kate and me. Ex-agents do a lot of things. They become private investigators, security consultants, or suicide statistics. I wasn’t interested in any of those options. I looked at my watch.

“It’s almost three o’clock in the morning. I’ll go back to the office, get some sleep on my couch, and I’ll be fine. You wrap things up here. Bag the cash I found and start thinking about why someone would leave a few grand lying under a tree that money doesn’t grow on. We’ll have a team meeting at six. I want reports on the neighborhood canvass and preliminary forensics by then. Have someone pull all the surveillance video from the camera on the utility pole and the one inside the house. I want names put to faces.”

Troy looked at me, his face blank, unimpressed. “Jack, you’ve got to see a doctor. Now. Today.”

“I will. As soon as we find whoever killed the people inside that house. Am I clear, Agent Clark?”

Troy backed up a step. “Clear.”

The regional FBI office was located at Fourteenth and Summit on the west side of downtown Kansas City, Missouri. It was the first new regional office built after 9/11, and the lockdown security measures were re?ected in its remote location on the far side of the downtown interstate loop, the high wrought-iron fence encircling the rectangular two-story building, and the armed guard at the entrance to the parking lot.

The offices were laid out like an ordinary civilian corporation except for the crime lab, the body shop, the armory, and the room where agents practiced with a simulator how not to kill innocent bystanders during gunfights with the bad guys. The interrogation rooms were another upgrade over the civilian model. The emphasis was on efficiency and duty-gray carpet, off-white walls, any color of furniture as long as it was blond or black, pictures of presidents and FBI directors on the walls, and one wall reserved to honor the memory of fallen agents with their photographs.

Field agents and law-enforcement personnel on loan from other agencies worked in bull pens filled with modular cubicles. A life-sized cardboard cutout of John Wayne in full cowboy regalia complete with six-guns and chaps kept a lookout at the end of one corridor. The corner offices were reserved for upper brass, the one with the best view overlooking the con?uence of the Missouri and Kansas rivers belonging to Ben Yates, Special Agent in Charge of the Kansas City office.

Yates had been in Kansas City for six months, none of them happy. Like all other agents, he rotated through different offices. The lucky ones, including me, were able to choose our final posting, someplace we’d like to live after we retired. Yates was from New Jersey, had worked in Los Angeles, New York, and overseas. He made no secret of the fact that Kansas City was not on the glamour itinerary he’d mapped out, that he’d serve his time here, move on, and never look back.

Yates was married to the manual and fond of telling us to lean forward, a fitness freak who kept a log of his body fat. I didn’t know how much body fat I had, only that it was more than I had the day before. Yates was ten years younger than me, taller, and didn’t need glasses like I did to study crime scene photographs.

He rode us about our statistics-cases opened, cases closed, conviction rates. I didn’t care about the numbers. I cared about the victims. My only worry was getting it right for them. One case meant nothing to another unless a person, not a statistic, linked them.

When Yates rattled on about bringing closure to the families of murder victims, I wanted to puke. I knew better. Long prison terms, life without parole, even the death penalty, whether the courts or the criminals carried it out like Frank Tyler had, wouldn’t heal the holes in our hearts. Some wounds never closed. But killers could be caught. That was what I did. One case at a time.

I had called Yates on my way back to headquarters. His voice was sharp, his questions quick and pointed; he wasn’t groggy from sleeping, as I would have been. I left out the part about my shaking. Now that I’d had my debut before God and everybody, I’d have to tell Yates before he heard about it from someone else, but I wanted to do it in person, hopefully without special effects.

Troy woke me just before six. We set up shop in a large conference room. One wall was lined with dry-erase boards, another housed?at-screen monitors linked to network, cable, and satellite feeds when they weren’t being used for in-house presentations or video conferences. Modular tables were laid out around the perimeter in a rectangular donut.

We were working with limited information since the preliminary forensics reports weren’t back. Troy posted the names of the victims on one of the dry-erase boards, adding names of their known associates, competitors, and enemies to the rapidly expanding universe of people to be tracked down, interviewed, and ruled in or out as suspects. I thought again about Troy’s speculation that Jalise Williams may have been the real target. We’d have to dig into the lives of all the victims to be certain of anything.

Ammara Iverson sketched a rough schematic of the neighborhood on another board, noting the houses they’d been to in the search for witnesses and the ones that warranted a second visit. Lani Haywood and Jim Day were studying the surveillance videotape, isolating freeze frames of people for whom we would need names and alibis.

I took a moment from studying the crime scene photographs to watch them work. They did their jobs with unhurried efficiency, making certain they didn’t miss anything. I waited until I made eye contact with each of them, offering a half smile and tilt of my head to reassure them I was okay and in charge.

I played with my pen beneath the table, hands shaking, testing my condition by repeatedly putting the cap on and then taking it off. I thought that if I could master the pen, I could get through the day. So far, the pen was winning.

“Ammara, what did you get from the neighbors?” I asked.

She finished her drawing, gathered her notes, and gave me a straight-ahead look. She was lean and muscular, a tribute to her days playing college volleyball, tall enough to rise above the net, strong enough to spike the ball right through the opposition. She wore her hair tightly cut, almost buzzed, against her brown skin, her jeans and T-shirt hanging on her lean frame with a casual elegance.

“Big surprise. No one saw or heard anything. They might even be telling the truth. It was raining pretty hard. Lots of thunder and lightning. Plus it was the middle of the night. No reason to be looking out their windows.”

“Did you talk to the people who lived on either side and behind Marcellus?”

She turned to the drawing of Marcellus’s block and the one immediately behind his to the west.

“LaDonna Simpson lives by herself on the south side. She’ll be eighty-one tomorrow. Goes to bed at eight o’clock. Slept through everything, which makes sense since she’s mostly deaf. Only reason she answered the door was that she’d gotten up to go to the bathroom when we came knocking. Wayne Miller has the house on the north side. He wasn’t home.”

“Where was he?”

“In jail. Bad checks. His girlfriend is staying there. Her name is Tarla Hicks. She was out partying. Came home after the shooting was over. Girl was so high I don’t know how she found her way home.”

“What about the house that backs up to Marcellus? The lights were on when I was in the backyard.”

“Belongs to Latrell Kelly. Works at the railroad terminal in Argentine. Said everyone in the neighborhood knew what Marcellus was about. Said he stayed out of Marcellus’s business and never had any trouble with him. Said the storm woke him but he didn’t get out of bed until he heard the sirens. Guy’s no help.”

“Did you check him out?”

“Yeah. Port Authority confirms his employment. Supervisor says he’s quiet, does his job, shows up on time. No problems. No arrests, no convictions. A couple of traffic tickets. That’s it.”

“Dig deeper on him. I don’t want to wake up one day and see his neighbors on television saying how he always seemed so quiet before he started killing everybody in sight. And expand the canvass to cover a block in every direction from Marcellus’s house. Put together profiles of the residents. We may not find an eyewitness, but we might find someone who has heard something since the shootings that could help us. And see what you can find out about Jalise Williams. Was she cheating on Marcellus? Did someone wish she was?”

“I’m on it,” Ammara said.

“Okay, people,” I said. “What do we got?”

“Five dead and nothing else,” Troy answered.

“Nothing else is right. It’s daylight and we’re falling behind. Keep digging.”