3 a.m. (Henry Bins 1) (11 page)

“
It was an email. I have
the same private email I had back then. It was a picture of her and
my son.”

“
That must have gotten
your attention.”

“
Sure did.”

“
And this time she asked
for two hundred grand?”

“
Yep.”

“
To stop dating your
son?”

He nods.

“
And then you went over
there that night to give her the money.”

“
But she didn't want
it.”

“
What?”

“
She didn't want the
money. She said she really liked my son, that she'd
fallen in love with him.”

“
And that's when you
killed her?”

“
NO.”

I didn't think he had, but I wanted to see
his reaction.

“
Why did she
scream?”

“
I pushed her up against
the wall and slapped her. Told her what she was doing was sick,
that if she didn't stop seeing my son I was going to make her
disappear. I dropped the bag of money and left.”

The car slowed. I looked out the window. We
were in front of a small row house.

It was 3:34 a.m.

Twenty-six minutes.

Twenty-six minutes to get a
confession.

“
Does this place look
familiar?” I ask the President.

He shakes his head.

I'd doubted Kim Bells lived in the same
house she lived in over twenty years ago, but you never know.

We get out. I tell Red to park a couple
blocks down the road and he peels away. The four of us walk up the
small stone steps. I am in front, then Detective Ray, then the
towering Sullivan in the rear.

“
You really think she had
something to do with Jessie's murder?” asks Sullivan. “That she
would kill her own daughter?”

I shrug. “Only one way to find out.”

I ring the doorbell.

Nothing happens for a long minute.

I ring the doorbell again.

Lights come on. The padding of
feet. The door opens.

“
Uh, yeah?” The twenty or
so years have not been kind to Kim Bells. The thirty pounds she's
put on since the photo drip from beneath a pink tank top and the
skin under her eyes is a heavy black. She is wearing gray
sweatpants. She is twice the size of her daughter. It would have
been easy for her. Easy to strangle her daughter to
death. 

I pull Ray to the side.

Kim's eyes widen. “Connor?”

“
Kim,” he says with a
nod.

“
Can we come in?” I ask,
checking the street for activity. 

“
I, um, guess so.” She
takes a step backward and the four of us walk past.

I find the living room and the others
follow.

I introduce myself and she shakes my hand
limply. Ray shows her badge and I can see every muscle in Kim's
body tense.

“
What's this about?” she
asks with a hitch in her throat.

“
It's about Jessie,”
answers Sullivan.

The air in the room drops a thousand
degrees.

“
Jessie?”

I try to read her emotions. Her labored
breathing. The double blink of her eyes. The smack of her
lips. Could be guilt. Could be indigestion.

“
I haven't seen her in
eight years,” she spats.

The three of us look at one another.

Sullivan doesn't buy it. Maybe it's a
wrinkle around her mouth, a flicker of the eyes. It's
something. A crack in the veneer. She's lying. 

“
Bullshit,” he
scoffs.

She doesn't respond.

Sullivan sees blood. This is the woman who
framed him for murder. He has every right to be furious. He has
every right to want to physically harm her, which he looks as
though he might do any second. I step between them.

“
How could you do it?” he
screams. “How could you kill your own daughter?”

“
Kill? Who?
Jessie?”

“
You murdered Jessie and
framed me for it!”

Kim's head whips left, then right. “She's .
. . Jessie's dead?”

Sullivan looks at me. Back to
Kim. Stares at her. Through her.

“
Are you saying that you
didn't kill her?”

“
NO! I didn't even . . .
No . . . I would never . . . I mean she was a terrible person . . .
psychotic . . . but I would never hurt her. Never . . . Oh, my God,
she's dead . . . how? WHEN?”

I knew that she didn't kill her, but I find
it hard to believe she didn’t know her daughter was dead.

“
You really didn't know
she was dead?” I ask.

“
No.”

“
Really?” asks Ray, her
first words in over twenty minutes. “Did you know about the
President's arrest?”

“
Uh, yeah, I guess I heard
about that.” She looks at Sullivan. “But I didn't want to believe
it. I started reading an article about it in the paper a few days
ago, but I had to stop.”

I could see it in her eyes, still to this
day. I'm not sure how Sullivan had felt about her, but she had
loved him.

“
But you'd seen her since
she was sixteen.” I say. It isn't a question.

“
Yeah, once,” she admits
reluctantly. “She came by about two years ago asking for
money. No 'Hi', no 'Sorry I ran away without telling you three
years ago', just 'Got any money?'”

“
Did you give her
any?”

She shakes her head. “That girl ruined my
life. Started doing meth when she was twelve, having sex by
thirteen. Cost me my marriage and hundreds of thousands of dollars
in rehab. They foreclosed on my house. I lost everything. I didn't
give that lying slut a dime. Best thing that ever happened to me
was her leaving that day.”

“
Why didn't you call and
get her removed from the Missing Persons database?”

She shrugs. “Never thought to, I guess.”

“
You could have told me,”
interjects Sullivan.

“
Told you
what?”

“
That Jessie was
mine.”

“
Yours?”

“
My daughter.”

“
Jessie's not your
daughter.”

“
According to the DNA test
she showed me, I am.”

Kim scoffs. “Jessie was a pathological
liar. Pathological. She started making her own fake
report cards on the computer when she was seven. They were perfect.
Her teacher couldn't even tell the difference. She forged a sixty
thousand dollar check when she was eleven. She made fake IDs for
everybody at the high school when she was fourteen.”

That would account for all her fake
identities. I'm sure she'd had help along the way, but if she had
one foot in the world, it would have been far more accessible.

“
But I called the company
who did the test.  They wouldn't give me much information, but
I wiggled out of one of the receptionists that
Jessie Kallomatix was in their files.”

“
That was probably from
when I had her tested when she was young, to make sure Paul was her
father and not you.”

“
And he was?”

“
Yep.”

“
Shit.”

Sullivan had a right to be pissed. He'd paid
out over three hundred thousand dollars based on Jessie being his
daughter. But he didn't look pissed, in fact, he was
smiling.

I could tell he was thinking about Ricky.
Glad his son hadn't been sleeping with his half-sister. That must
have been giving the President nightmares.

“
That's why she sent you
the picture of your son the second time,” I say to the President.
“Because if she would have blackmailed you for being your daughter,
you would have checked more thoroughly this time. You would have
had Red or one of your other guys get to the bottom of it. So she
started hooking up with your son. She knew you would keep that to
yourself.”

Sullivan nods.

“
Hooking up with your
son?” asks Kim.

Sullivan spends the next ten minutes
explaining everything. From how he'd first met Jessie, to her
blackmail, to the picture she sent of her and his son, to him going
over to her house and dropping off the money, to her being found
strangled to death.

I look down at my cell phone.

It's 3:50.

Ten minutes.

Sullivan gazes at me. “So, then, another
dead end.”

Lights turn onto the street.

Get brighter. Brighter. Brighter. Then
disappear.

All six eyes are trained on me.

I put my finger up to my lips.

Ten seconds later, there is a knock.

“
Bins,” comes a voice.
“Bins, it's me, I'm here.”

I pull the door open.

Paul Kallomatix is wearing the
same suit he’d been wearing when I’d first met him. His forehead is
heavily creased over furrowed brows. His goatee is perfectly
groomed around his gaping mouth.

“
Hey Paul,” I
say.

“
What the fuck is going on
here Bins?” he says, ignoring my jest. He sweeps his eyes over his
ex-wife, his partner, and the President of the United States. “Kim?
Ray? What the fuck is this?”

“
You tell me
Cal. Why don't you tell me about Jessie?” spits
Ray.

When the President had been telling his
story about the marriage mix-up, he'd said the name
Paul Kallomatix and Ray had gone silent. I could almost
see her trying to put the pieces together in her head. Cal? A
murderer? 

Cal looks over his shoulder. Thinks
about running. Thinks better. His goatee smirks and he
takes two steps in and closes the door.

“
Are the guys you had
following me still at the hospital?” I ask.

“
I don't know what you're
talking about.”

“
Sure you do. The off-duty
cops that you had watching me the last week. Watching to see if I
was going to take a drive up to Maryland to see your ex-wife.”
Luckily, she lived in a different house. One, he obviously didn't
know about if he'd driven up here to meet me in this
one.

“
Again. No fuckin’
clue what you're talking about.”

“
You're late by the way.”
I'd texted him this address right before I'd knocked on Ray's
window. Told him to meet me here at 3:45. And to be
alone.

“
Why'd you do it Cal?”
asks Ray.

“
Do what?”

“
Why'd you kill
her?”

“
You? They got to you?” he
scoffs. “Come on Ray, I didn't even know it was Jessie until they
showed that picture of her with him,” he nods towards Sullivan.
“And what difference would it have made. He killed her.”

He glares at the President.

“
If you
aren't gonna tell them how it went down, I will,” I
say.

“
I didn't do anything to
that girl.”

Not his little
girl. That girl.

I look down at my phone.

3:54 a.m.

Six minutes.

“
What happened when Jessie
accused you of raping her?”

There had been an article about it on the
Internet. It was one of the things that came up when I searched
'Jessie Kallomatix.' When she was twelve she accused her
father, a Maryland cop, of raping her. The case was later thrown
out, but it made big news.

“
What other lies did she
make up about you?”

His face is turning red.

“
How much of your hard
earned money did you spend sending her to rehab and
therapy?”

I can hear his teeth grinding together.

“
I'm sorry.”

He looks at the President.

“
I'm sorry,” Sullivan
repeats.

Cal snorts. Snorts again.

“
It all started with you,”
he screams. “You sticking your little dick where it didn't
belong.”

He scans the room. Locks eyes with each of
us. I can feel it. Feel the dam breaking.

“
THAT LITTLE CUNT RUINED
MY LIFE!”

Spittle shoots from Cal’s lips.

“
If I could strangle her
again, I would.”

The four of us don't dare move. Don't dare
derail the train.

He shakes his head back and forth as he
walks in a tight circle.

“
Do you know that when she
was fourteen she told me that if I didn't buy her a Range Rover
when she turned sixteen that she was going to tell everyone that I
got her pregnant and forced her to have an abortion? That little
bitch got me kicked off the force. No one in Maryland or D.C. would
touch me, even after the Judge ruled that I never touched my
daughter. My wife,” he points at Kim, “thought I was a sick bastard
who raped our little girl and divorced me.  Then I had to file
for bankruptcy because I spent my life savings putting my psycho
fucking daughter through rehab three times.

“
Then two months ago, I
get called to a strip club, one of the strippers is going bat-shit
on a customer, and low and behold it's my own flesh and blood.
She's coked out of her mind and I take her home and she tells me a
funny story about who her real dad is. Turns out, this
crazy fucking girl who ruined my life isn't even mine. Says that
she has his hair in the freezer if I want proof. She passes out and
I start looking through her place. Her email is open on her
computer and I see a message to the President. She's blackmailing
him. He's supposed to drop off two hundred grand in two
days.