Yes, okay, that was very weaselly of him. But working the system every now and again wasn’t a bad thing, especially if you could use it against a dickwad like this guy.
Roan was settling into a long stakeout, seeing what reading material he had in the car (he always stashed a couple of paperbacks in each car, on the off chance he’d have a lot of time to kill somewhere), when he heard a woman scream, “No!”
There was an astonishing amount of emotion packed into that one-syllable word: fear, hatred, rage, desperation, sorrow. Every internal alarm Roan had was going off, and he was already lunging out of the car as he heard the gunshot.
Just one, a small pop muffled by both distance and being inside a house, but that was followed by children screaming and a man yelling at them to “Shut up!” Roan had his Sig Sauer out, safety thumbed off, and in his other hand he had his cell phone. He’d already punched up 9-1-1, and as soon as the operator picked up, he said tersely, “Shots fired, 154 Sycamore Drive, Officer Carey Switzer’s house.” He then dropped the phone on the front lawn as he took the gun in a two-handed grip and ran toward the front door like a charging bull, intending to break it down whether it was locked or not. It would make him an instant target, but he didn’t care—in fact, that’s exactly what he wanted. Drawing Switzer’s fire would mean the kids were clear.
And he knew this scenario, didn’t he? Before he caught the scent of blood, before he burst through the wood-framed door, he knew Switzer had just killed his wife, and now he was either going to kill the kids or kill himself, or all in sequence. He had either picked a bad day to follow Switzer—or a good one.
Roan exploded through the door shoulder first, wood splintering from the frame as he allowed his sense of smell to immediately orient him toward the rank stench of blood and flop sweat, the keening wail of frightened children, and he brought his gun up at the same time Switzer leveled his police issue Beretta at him. “Drop the gun now!” Roan shouted, focusing on him and shoving everything else to the side. In his peripheral vision, he was aware there was a woman lying on the living room floor, only her legs visible to him from where he stood, and the kids were cowering in a corner behind Switzer, the little girl behind the little boy. The shopping bag Switzer had brought had been tossed casually on the sofa.
Switzer was a solid but chunky man, probably hard fat, but there was some doubt as to whether he could pass a department physical now. His round face was ruddy and plump, his hair a thinning bird’s nest of strawberry blond, his eyes just pissholes in snow, curiously hot and hollow. There was some wetness on his cheeks, but they were angry tears. “They’re mine,” he shouted angrily, skin flushing. A tear was suspended in his close-cropped mustache like a bead of silicone. Somewhere a clock ticked loudly, the only noise beyond the whimpering kids.
Roan nodded, as if declaring children property was the most natural thing in the world. “Drop the gun, Carey, and we can work this out.” How crazy was he, how far gone? If he could be reached through talk, Roan wouldn’t have to execute him in front of his own kids.
Switzer was aware enough to realize he was talking to a strange man with a gun, but not sane enough to think it through. “Get out of my fucking house.”
“Put down the gun and I will,” he lied.
Switzer’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. He stank of sour fear, of alcohol, chemicals indicating something more prescription, and emotions too hard to categorize correctly. It was chemical imbalance, exacerbated by the introduction of other chemicals. “You’re him, aren’t you? The one she was fucking.”
“No, Carey, I’m a private investigator—” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the little boy looking toward the gaping hole of the front door and tensing, like he was going to make a run for it.
Sadly, Switzer noticed it too. “Get out of my house!” he roared, swinging the gun back toward the kids.
Roan squeezed the trigger, and a hole exploded in Switzer’s chest, blood spraying out the back and splattering the sofa. The little girl screamed again, and Carey fell like a toppled redwood, hitting the floor on his side, the gun bouncing out of his hand on impact. Roan edged inside, gun aimed down at the floor, and went to check on April.
As soon as he saw her splayed faceup on the floor, clots of brain tissue splattered out on the butterscotch carpet behind her, he didn’t bother checking for a pulse. Switzer had got her with an almost point-blank shot to the forehead; her head resembled a partially deflated basketball, lopsided in a way it never should have been, the neat little round hole like a third eye socket in her forehead, misleadingly dainty for all the damage the exit wound had done. She may have been pretty once, but you couldn’t tell anymore. There was the stench of death, but it was almost smothered by blood and gunpowder and fear.
He didn’t check Switzer for a pulse, just kicked the gun farther out of his reach. Even though his ears were still ringing from the shot, he could hear faint sirens outside. He looked at the kids and holstered his own
gun. “Zachary, Ashley, why don’t we go outside and wait for the ambulance,
okay?” He needed to get them out of the house. They didn’t need to keep staring at their dead mother or watch their father bleed out on the carpet.
The kids had the glassy hundred-yard stare of shock victims, which was understandable. From the sharp ammonia scent, one or both of them had pissed themselves, but that, too, was understandable. Finally, Zachary asked, “Who are you?”
“I’m Roan McKichan, a private detective. I was investigating your dad. I’m sorry I didn’t begin sooner.”
“Not a cop.” Almost a question.
“Used to be. I’m not anymore. I didn’t play well with others.” It was an attempt at a joke, but there was no laughing now. “Come on, we need to get Ashley outside.”
That was the tack to take—make the boy feel like he was taking care of his sister. He agreed with that and lead his sister toward the door. She was holding his hand so tightly that it looked like she’d cut off blood circulation. He followed them out at a respectful distance, sure not to get too close to them and spook them further, and retrieved his phone off the lawn, where he heard the tinny voice of the 9-1-1 operator repeatedly asking if he was there. “I’m here,” he told the man. “Switzer just killed his wife. I shot him before he could turn the gun on the kids. He’s still alive, but he has a GSW in the upper left quadrant of his torso. I’m Roan McKichan, a private detective. Tell the police I will be waiting out front with the children and will fully cooperate with being taken into custody.”
He would be taken in, that was unavoidable, but once the circumstances were checked out, he’d be released. Or hopefully he would, at any rate.
He’d never dealt with the Federal Way PD before. Boy, they were going to love him.
It turned
out not to be so bad.
The first cop on the scene was a big, corn-fed kid with a buzz cut who looked barely twenty, but he was clearly old enough to hold a rank, and he was hardly out of the patrol car when he exclaimed, “Holy shit, you’re him. The guy from the news. The Grant Kim thing. I thought your name sounded familiar.” Roan assumed a beating would soon commence, but as it turned out, the guy treated him like a fellow cop, respectful and with an almost obscene amount of trust.
Roan recounted what had happened, saying that he was looking at Switzer as a suspect in a case and was intending to follow him home and question him about his involvement (some of the questioning would be with his fists, but he wasn’t about to admit that until he absolutely had to), but then he heard April scream, followed closely by the gunshot. None of this was a lie—you could argue it was a sculpting of the facts, but he could live with that.
Neighbors started gathering before the ambulance arrived, and he wondered where they had been during the shooting. He gave the kid—whose name turned out to be Nate Dougherty; his partner was a surprisingly slight Chinese woman named Mira Chin—his Sig Sauer and knew he wouldn’t be seeing it until forensics was done with it. Oh, why couldn’t he have worn his Glock today? Okay, it was weird to like one gun over another for something other than technical reasons, but he did. So there.
He wasn’t handcuffed, although he rode to the station in their squad car, ahead of any press. On the way there, it was Chin who wondered why Roan hadn’t shot him first thing coming through the door. “He could have shot you or the kids first.”
“No, he couldn’t have. He couldn’t pull the trigger faster than me.”
Dougherty snickered faintly and eyed him in the rearview mirror. “Little cocky, huh?”
“No. Catlike reflexes.”
There was doubt in his pale blue eyes that quickly cycled to concern as soon as Dougherty grokked he wasn’t joking. The cops were quiet for the rest of the ride in, and Roan was glad.
He was asked to tell his version of events several times, but he was never close to being booked, and most of the cops seemed to extend him a curious deference. On the one hand, it made him feel old; on the other, it was kind of a relief. The adrenaline rush of the shooting had worn off, and all he wanted to do was curl up somewhere and take a nap. He was in no mood to scrap with macho bullshit cops.
A few things became clear, slowly but surely. Roan had dropped the phone close enough to the house and had such good reception (he thought it paid to get a good phone if you had to have one of the fucking things) that the 9-1-1 tape picked up a few things, including Roan shouting to Switzer to drop the gun, as well as his response, “They’re mine”. They felt the tape could be enhanced to pick up other things, none of which would probably be good for Switzer. April Switzer had talked to an officer at the station several days ago, saying she was frightened of her ex-husband, but didn’t get a court order against him for fear it would make him violent. (Sadly, sometimes these control freak assholes didn’t need a reason; the fact that you were opposing them was reason enough to go psycho.) Switzer had left a suicide note in his truck, described as “angry, rambling, and pretty bugfuck” according to a detective named Hollenbach, and it explained why his kids had to die, proving he had planned to go the murder-suicide route with his entire family. The main motivation seemed to be his anger over the collapse of his marriage and his certainty his career as a police officer was over. (Was it the raping or the wife beating? There was a plethora of career killers to choose from.)
Switzer died in the ER, but a weary public defender who happened to be at the station for another client—and looked like a younger, thinner Ned Beatty with darker hair—admitted that because Roan had technically trespassed, he could be charged with something. But it was unlikely, because it fell within the realm of justifiable homicide, and also “No way is anyone bringing this to trial, unless they really want to be humiliated in open court. You might want to push this to trial. Not only would no judge or jury convict you, but you’ll probably get a street named after you. And not in the bad part of town either.” Nice to know.
Press were gathering. None had been let in, but the cops were telling him if he actually wanted to avoid cameras, he’d have to leave soon and out the back. The public defender, whose name turned out to be Andrew Gillis, said he knew a good way out, having gone out with clients who attracted more than a fair share of attention. Roan decided he’d have to bite the bullet and call Dylan. He was hoping he wouldn’t have to, that he could catch a lift back to his car and just go home and be able to tell him what happened over dinner, but that wasn’t going to happen if the “action news team” motherfuckers were already circling the wagons.
Dylan was up when he called, which he was glad about, but he hadn’t been watching the news. That was good, and that was bad. With a sigh, Roan asked, “Guess where I am.”
Dylan’s pause seemed strangely portentous. “One day. You’re not even out of the hospital one day and you’re back in?”
“No, not the hospital.”