When he walked in the front door of the house he had owned for nine years, the only family left looked at him simultaneously and then at their watches in dismay. The early hour, long before deadline, caught them off guard.
"Querido? Mr. Mullins. You are early!"
"Hi, Dad. How come you're home?"
He put a smile on his face, the one that, if he really thought about it, he knew never fooled anyone.
"I'm here to see my girls," he said, using a familiar phrase, and then quickly added, "Carly the Creative, and Elsa the Magician!"
The two looked at each other with a mix of humor and apprehension and waited until Nick crossed the floor and bent to kiss his daughter and said quietly, "I wanted to see you, pumpkin." She accepted that and took his hand and led him to the sewing machine, where she was putting together her latest fashion project.
"See how cool?"
While she explained the intricacies of double stitching, Elsa hung near Nick's shoulder, pretending to watch, but not too secretly smelling his breath. When she was satisfied that he was not drunk, she said, "I am going to do the dinner."
Nick asked his daughter several questions about her technique and reasons for color choices and aspirations for the skirt she was making. It was like an interview for a lively little lifestyle feature. Carly kept giving him sidelong glances but eventually got caught up in her enthusiasm for the creation and went into great detail until Elsa called them to dinner.
While they ate, Nick turned out one of his favorite and long-memorized stories of building a fort with his best friend in the field behind his house when he was a boy. He described how it was three stories high in the shape of ever smaller plywood boxes and how they'd put hinged trapdoors in the floor of each to get from top to bottom. Rocket ship, battleship, Foreign Legion outpost-it was whatever they cared it to be with only a twist of imagination. Carly had heard the story many times, but her father's enthusiasm in the retelling on this night made her laugh at the funny parts and groan at the hokey parts.
After dinner both Nick and Carly demanded to help Elsa with the dishes and then after they were done they convinced her to play a game of Pictionary with them. They sat around the kitchen table and with only three to play they were forced to rotate teams-Nick and Carly first, then Elsa and Carly. It had been a family favorite. But with Elsa's partial knowledge of English and limited background in Americana, the game quickly became hilarious.
"No es donkey. Es un burro, si?"
She took the merriment in stride even when Carly doubled over in the kind of childlike laughter that is as pure as a jiggling bell. All of their sides were aching by the time someone finally won.
At bedtime Nick kissed his daughter on the forehead and tucked her in and as Elsa passed him in the hallway she whispered, "You are a good man, Mr. Nick." He only nodded and found his way to the garage, where he searched out a hidden bottle of Maker's Mark and in the dark silence formed his own whisper: "No, I am not."
For the next two hours he sat out by the pool in turquoise light and drank the whiskey alone, thinking of the times his wife and he swam naked after the girls had gone to bed, of the arguments when their own bedroom door was closed, of the fragrance of her hair that he swore still hung in her pillow even after he tossed the sheets and cases in the trash bin months ago.
He poured another drink and when he put the bottle down, his cell phone chirruped as if the movement had set it off. He fumbled with it, punched the answer button and took a deep breath, about to curse who he figured to be someone from the paper again trying to rouse him. But before the words got out, Hargrave's voice snapped out of the earpiece:
"Easy, Nick, easy, Nick, easy… Mr. Mullins," he said, modulating his volume with each repetition.
Nick swallowed his words and held the phone closer. "Hargrave?"
"Yeah."
"Sorry."
"It's alright. I've been bitched out enough on the phone to know what's coming after that deep breath, Mullins. You OK?"
"Yeah," Nick said softly. "OK."
"Look, I ran the rest of those names and we need to talk," Hargrave said, his voice kicking back to business mode.
Nick looked at his watch. It was almost two in the morning.
"Now?"
"Now."
"Uh, alright," Nick said. "Let me give you the address and-"
"I already have it," Hargrave interrupted.
"Yeah? OK, then," Nick said. He wiped at his mouth and tried to sound sober. "Come on over, I've got some of your favorite here."
"Yeah, I can hear it," Hargrave said. "I'll be there in ten." Nick waited out at the end of his driveway, watching a constellation up in the Western Hemisphere that he had either just discovered for the scientific community, or he was drunk. He had to steady himself with a hand on his mailbox when the headlights of Hargrave's car swept around the corner. When the detective got out, Nick explained that he did not want to wake his daughter and then led the way around the back, where they entered his pool area through a screen door. He had fetched another tumbler from the kitchen, and had also drunk two deep glasses of water to try to take the edge off the whiskey's effects.
Hargrave scraped a patio chair across the flagstone and sat, angled with a sight line of the pool and darkness beyond. He picked up the bottle of Maker's and poured himself a glass.
"You're welcome," Nick said as he retook his own seat.
Hargrave got the crinkles at the corners of his eyes. "Nice spot," he said.
"Yeah, it serves its purposes."
Hargrave took a sip of the whiskey and said, "Cameron tells me that some other reporter from your paper contacted him this evening for update information on the Michaels shooting."
Nick took a silent few seconds to pour two fingers of whiskey into his own glass, but remained quiet.
"In our business we'd call that being bounced off the case," Hargrave said, this time turning to look at Nick. "Are you off the case, Mr. Mullins?"
"I haven't been told that officially, but since I quit this afternoon, it's probably a good guess."
This time Hargrave simply held his glass near his face, letting the blue-green light blend with the deep red of the whiskey to form a color that seemed oddly cartoonish.
"Just because I'm not doing the story for the Daily News doesn't mean I'm not doing it as a freelancer," Nick quickly added.
"They're going to call you a material witness," Hargrave said, again with the official tone.
"My ass," Nick said, though it would only take a minute of sober thought to know it was true.
"Oh, what fun it would be to see a journalist up there on the stand like the rest of us when the real mud wrestling begins," Hargrave said, now actually grinning, no attempt to cover.
Nick let him enjoy his shot, for thirty seconds, then scraped his own chair forward. "The names, Detective. What did you come up with?"
Hargrave put his glass down. The grin was gone.
"Of the names we decided on from your stories, four are dead, seven are still in prison and two are out on probation, but I still haven't been able to contact their parole officers to find out where they are. Last record had one guy over on the Tampa side and the other up near Pensacola."
Nick didn't have to say the obvious: that this information didn't bring them any closer than they'd been.
"How about Canfield? Any luck talking with the SWAT guys?"
"No one's seen Redman but you," Hargrave said, emphasizing the you. "Far as they know, he's off the face of the earth. Canfield even checked with the managers of the firing range where Redman practically lived when he was with the unit. His parents are dead, of natural causes, mind you, up north somewhere, and he doesn't have any siblings. The lieutenant said he wasn't surprised no one had seen him. He said Redman had become isolated even before he left for Iraq."
"The goddamn editorials," Nick said.
"Yeah, I read up on those," Hargrave said.
Nick eyed him over the rim of his glass, reminding himself to never underestimate this guy.
"So what's his reasoning? What's Redman's motive for putting ex-cons in his target zone?" Nick said, thinking out loud even if the thinking was a bit clouded.
"Could be a combination," Hargrave said. "Public humiliation, death of his partner, post-traumatic stress from Iraq."
"Might even be enough to put the Secretary of State there," Hargrave said. "She's the one who sets policy, the one with the President's ear when shit hits the fan over in the Middle East. He already killed the man who killed his partner, maybe he just considers this a job undone."
"Jesus, Detective, you're siding with Fitzgerald now?" Nick said.
Hargrave shook his head and blew out a long breath.
"Now, there's a fed with some major responsibility pushing on his sphincter," Hargrave continued. "But the secretary is coming to town and it would be a hell of a venue to make a statement."
Nick took another drink, like he thought the booze was going to make things clearer. "OK, so you're following the theory that you can never say never, but I can't see it. I don't see a man like Redman targeting his own country's leaders. That's not who he's after."
Hargrave matched Nick's feat of emptying his glass and sat back like he had given up and was just staring into the pool. Then he said in a clear, matter-of-fact voice, "How about Mr. Walker, Nick?"
He let the question and the name hang in the night air, not looking to see the reaction in Nick's face like he would if it were a question posed to some arrestee in the interview room.
"What were Redman's words again, Nick? Do you a favor?" he said just as clearly. "This one's just for you? How about killing the man who put your family in the ground?"
Nick wondered if the detective could hear the sound of his heart, impossible to ignore with the way it had started thumping in his ears. The detective had not trusted his explanation for the last name on the list. Hell, he might have recognized it right off. Why wouldn't he have been briefed on Nick's background before they gave the reporter such access? Why wouldn't he see immediately that a name that starts with W fits perfectly with the alphabetizing of Redman's own victims list?
"Yeah," Nick finally said out over the glow of the pool. "How about him?"