She led me down a narrow hallway into a brightly lit kitchen with cheerful yellow cabinets and white linoleum floors. In the middle of the room, there was a small folding table with three matching plastic chairs. A thirty-something man sat on the far side. He had short-cropped hair that was just beginning to go gray. He wore jeans and a tight-fitting sweater that made it clear he was proud of the time he spent in the gym. A half-finished cup of coffee sat in front of him. Next to him was another half-finished cup and a chair that had been pushed out. He and the widow Kipps had obviously been sharing a beverage.
“This is Mike, Darius’s partner,” Mimi said, walking around behind him and draping a hand on his shoulder for a second. “Mike, this is the reporter I was telling you about.”
We nodded at each other.
“I’m going to take a shower before the baby wakes up,” she said, then looked at Mike. “Tell him what you told me.”
She backed out of the room, leaving me alone with a man who, I got the distinct feeling, didn’t like guys who carried notepads for a living.
* * *
Although we serve vital functions in our respective ways, cops and reporters are oftentimes the oil and water of a democratic society. We just don’t mix all that well.
The antagonism arises from a variety of fundamental conflicts—the short version: they like to keep things secret and we don’t. While our differences could be overcome, it always took some effort. And I could tell in this guy’s case, it would take more effort than most.
My instant read was that he fancied himself a tough guy and he would only respect other tough guys. This was a bit of a problem for me seeing as, under most circumstances, I’m about as tough as sun-warmed gummy bears.
But I could pretend otherwise. So, without saying a word—because tough guys are taciturn—I pulled out a plastic folding chair and sat across from him. I narrowed my eyes and reclined slightly because tough guys squint a lot and don’t care about impressing anyone with good posture. And then I sat there. Just sat there. Because I was tough. Very tough.
It took all my energy to do this, of course. My natural tendency toward glibness made me want to fill long silences like this one. But I focused and kept my lips pressed together.
Finally, after an eternity of pretending to be tough—and I’m talking a good forty-five seconds here—he said, “You want some coffee?”
I didn’t. Not even a little. I hate coffee. I don’t like the flavor of it when it hits my tongue, and then—as if to reassure me of my first impression—it floods my mouth with this bitter, acidic aftertaste. I’d rather drink a stranger’s toothpaste scum. So I said, “Coffee. Sure.”
Because I’m
that
tough.
“How you want it?”
“Black,” I said, because I knew that’s how tough guys were supposed to take their coffee.
Mike got up from his seat and poured from a clear pot of dark brown liquid into a Halloween mug, complete with black cats and witches. It was not exactly a tough guy mug. But I accepted it and tried not to wince as I took a tough guy–sized swallow. Then I set the mug down and continued our modified staring contest, which seemed to involve not actually looking at each other.
“Mike Fusco,” he said eventually.
Feeling like I won some important victory, I replied, “Carter Ross.”
He looked aside, as if he had nothing more to say. So I figured I’d let him win a round, adding, “Sorry about your partner.”
“Yeah, it’s rough,” he allowed.
I paused, so as not to make our conversation feel rushed, then asked, “How did you find out?”
He shifted in his seat. From somewhere upstairs, I heard the shower turn on.
“I’m only talking to you because of Mimi,” he said. “My name doesn’t go anywhere near your story. We clear?”
“Sure. We can be off-the-record. To be honest, I’m not sure I’m going to be writing anything. We don’t write about suicides.”
I stopped there, curious if he would object to the word. But he didn’t bite.
“So how’d you find out?” I said again.
“Well, I heard the gunshot like everyone else. I was at the precinct when it happened.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
Fusco shrugged. Nothing more, nothing less. Just a shrug. But it was a shrug that told me he knew more than he was letting on. For whatever reason, cops don’t like to be the first one to tell reporters anything. But once we already know something, they don’t mind expanding on our understanding—if only because it galls them so much when we get things wrong.
So I tried to make it clear that I already knew some stuff, in hopes he would help me learn more.
“We’re hearing he went into a shower stall and turned on the water before he pulled the trigger,” I said.
Fusco didn’t respond. I was going to have to draw him out a bit.
“I spoke to a cop I know earlier this afternoon,” I said. “He told me the talk around the Fourth is that Kipps was dirty.”
Before I could react, Fusco leaped up, slamming his chair to the floor, then lunged across the table at me. He grabbed me by the shirt and tie, to make sure he had my attention, then unleashed a series of expletives—most of which involved fornication, defecation, or my mother. The diatribe finished with, “… so don’t you ever say crap like that again!”
Because I was a tough guy, I had willed myself not to flinch. I just let him slowly release his grip on my shirt. He sat back down on his own side of the table.
“It was only a question,” I said quietly.
“Yeah, well, it’s crap, okay? Kipps was clean. Totally clean. Anyone who says otherwise doesn’t know jack. You put that in the newspaper and you’ll be printing a lie.”
“Noted,” I said. “Were you with him at any point last night?”
He glared at me a little more, his nostrils flaring, his overdeveloped chest rising and falling before he finally answered. “Mimi called us partners, but that’s not exactly true. The precinct doesn’t really have assigned partners. It’s more, there are certain guys who often get the same shift—Kipps and I were mostly four to midnight—and sometimes you end up working with them on bigger cases.”
“Were you guys currently working on anything together?”
Fusco shook his head. “I saw him when our shift started. I had a backlog of reports to write, so I stayed at the precinct. He went out. I didn’t know where he was going. I never saw him again. The next thing it was maybe eleven or so, I hear that gunshot and…”
“Did you go down there to take a look?”
Fusco’s head shook again.
“You know what he had been working on?” I asked.
“Run-of-the-mill stuff. Nothing big.”
He accompanied this revelation with another shrug.
“So what’s this thing Mimi said you should tell me?” I asked.
My answer, at first, was only a stare. There was some kind of battle going on between his ears. I could tell he wished Mimi had kept her mouth shut. Finally, he coughed into his hand, turned his head, and said, “Kipps was drunk.”
“What do you mean?”
“Some of the patrol guys said they found him passed out by the station with an empty bourbon bottle and puke all over his clothes. They dragged him back inside and tossed him in the shower to help him sober up. I guess they put him in with his clothes on because he was such a mess. So he must have still had his gun on him. The next thing they knew,
blam
.”
Fusco pantomimed a gun to the head, in case I didn’t know what “blam” meant.
“You told Mimi that?”
“I did. The higher-ups weren’t going to tell her and I felt she had a right to know.”
“And she’s taking
that
as evidence her husband didn’t kill himself?” I asked, wondering if Fusco was going to jump across the table at me again.
But he just gave me another unreadable shrug. “Kipps didn’t drink,” he said.
“Yeah, but if you had decided to kill yourself, why not go out and get good and plastered one last time?”
“That’s what I said. But Mimi…”
“What?”
“She said he hated bourbon. She said back in the day he drank vodka, or tequila, or maybe rum. But never bourbon. I guess he had a bad experience with it when he was young. She said he couldn’t even stand the smell.”
“That make sense to you?”
“I knew Kipps for ten years and I never saw him touch anything. So I wouldn’t know.”
It was hardly what I would call conclusive evidence. And Mimi Kipps would not be the first widow to use anything to convince herself—and others—that her husband’s death wasn’t a suicide.
But it was one more thing that didn’t quite fit.
“Okay, so you’re a detective,” I said. “Was this a suicide?”
He didn’t answer.
“You’re investigating this, aren’t you?” I said.
Again, no answer. But he also didn’t contradict it.
“When Mimi gets out of the shower, tell her I had to run,” he said, standing up.
I took out a business card, held it out for him, and said, “Maybe I’m investigating this, too. Let’s keep in touch.”
He didn’t respond directly to my suggestion. But on his way out, he took my card.
In the state of Virginia, buying a gun is only slightly more complicated than buying a lawn mower. Buying a whole lot of guns is only marginally more difficult than that.
A state resident who is not banned by the federal government from gun ownership can purchase one weapon every thirty days. A state resident with a concealed carry permit—available from the county courthouse to anyone who has completed a gun safety class—can buy as many guns as he wants, no questions asked.
So, as a heretofore law-abiding citizen, John Bristow didn’t need to make any extraordinary preparations or seek any special permission. On the day of the exchange—which came less than a week after he first made Craigslist contact—he just followed the instructions that had been given to him by his new employer. He drove to a Hilton just off Interstate 64 and left his dented Dodge Stratus in the parking lot, unlocked. Then he walked away, as per his directive. He killed the next hour at a Chick-fil-A.
When he returned, an associate of Red Dot Enterprises had placed $8,000 in cash in his glove box. The deal was that he got to keep the difference between the cash and whatever he spent for twenty guns, new in box.
He had wondered, briefly, what would stop him from just disappearing with the money. These guys didn’t know him, after all. And what they wanted him to do was clearly illegal, so they wouldn’t be able to report the crime to the police. But he had barely formed the thought when he was told he would be watched. It was strongly suggested he not deviate from the plan. He didn’t ask for an explanation. He got the point.
Armed with the cash, he drove around the corner to Bass Pro Shop, a cavernous monument to outdoor play. He parked in the sprawling lot, wedging his Stratus in between a pair of large pickup trucks. He walked past a trio of glistening new boats, through a front entrance adorned with antlers, fishing nets, other rustic paraphernalia, and a sign that announced,
WELCOME, FISHERMEN, HUNTERS, AND OTHER LIARS
.
He was a liar, all right. Just a different kind than the store had in mind. He went to the gun section, bellied up to a glass-encased counter and said, “I need twenty guns.”
The clerk behind the counter—who was balding, bespectacled, and sweating—did not hesitate.
“You got your carry permit?” he asked.
“Yep.”
“Okay. What you want?”
Bristow hadn’t given it any thought and didn’t actually care. He started making selections based exclusively on price and availability, and within minutes he had cleaned out the Bass Pro Shop’s stock of several smaller models, mostly .22s by Beretta, Browning, and Ruger, with a few .38s thrown in. Whatever was cheapest.
“You need bullets, too?” the clerk asked at one point, and Bristow nearly said yes.
If they were his guns, he’d need bullets. But no one had said a thing about bullets. Just guns. So he said, “Nah.”
Then they began the approval process. Bristow presented his Virginia state driver’s license, with its sky blue background and official state seal; his concealed carry permit; and a recent utility bill, which confirmed his state residency.
Luckily, the state of Virginia didn’t particularly care the bill was past due.
Sliding over to a computer behind the counter, the clerk entered Bristow’s information—name, address, date of birth—onto a form that was sent electronically to state police headquarters, where trained personnel performed the necessary background check. Bristow had no felonies. He was clean.
And since there is no waiting period in Virginia, Bristow was soon at the register, paying for this small arsenal of weapons no differently than if it was a pile of personal flotation devices from the boating section. His total, which included sales tax, came to $6,228.95, which he paid in cash, under the watchful eye of the manager.
The entire transaction was perfectly legal, done in exacting accordance with all local, state, and federal laws. It took just twenty-eight minutes from start to finish.
Then he drove back to the Hilton, parked his car, and walked away. This time, flush with new money, he went across the street to a Wok’n Roll. When he returned, the guns were gone—heisted by Red Dot Enterprises.
That afternoon, Bristow walked into the Hampton City Sheriff’s Office and reported the guns stolen. The paperwork took a while—they had to fill out a separate form for each gun. But Bristow didn’t care. He didn’t have anything else to do, and besides, he could now get reimbursed by his insurance company, adding significantly to his score.
He didn’t know where the guns went. He didn’t particularly care. He had bills to pay.
CHAPTER 2
It felt a little intrusive, sitting in Mimi Kipps’s kitchen while she was upstairs showering, and I was contemplating whether I should take my leave when I heard the water shut off. Then, from the living room, baby Jaquille began making a noise that may or may not have been crying. It mostly sounded like a wind-up toy on the fritz.