R.S. Guthrie - Detective Bobby Mac 03 - Reckoning Read Online Free PDF Page A

battle. Yeah, that I get totally. But this isn’t your wife, Gerry. She’s your daughter. Your innocent daughter. It isn’t her fault.”
    “She’s a BITCH.”
    “She’s a teen; she’s looking for any excuse at all to hate you. All of ‘em do. My sons are eighteen and nineteen. I call them the  ‘E Generation’”.
    “What’s that?” Kelp said.
    “Entitled.”
    “That ain’t any lying right there, Macaulay. Fuckin’-A right, that is.”
    “But here’s the thing, Gerry: we’re the adults. We were kids once. We thought we knew how every fucking thing worked. And your ex is using that fact, by the way—using it against you; just offering you up with an apple in your mouth. And I gotta be honest with you, this holding your daughter at gunpoint isn’t helping.”
    “I guess.”
    “Shit, if your ex was here I’d probably get fired for serving her up to you. Trade her for the little girl.”
    Brighton actually smiled at that one.
    “You’re smart, Gerry…you know? And in a way you’re right. But this is NOT the way we handle shit in an orderly society. As bad as it gets, we don’t resort to hurting children . This is still the same little girl you diapered, fed, took to soccer games—isn’t Shelly a hell of a player?”
    Give her back her name. Kelp hadn’t mentioned it once. He needed to start thinking about her from his memories, not from the perspective of his illness. Shelly. His daughter. His little baby girl.
    “Yeah. She’s awesome.”
    “And I suppose she got that from your ex?”
    “No fucking way. I worked with her every damn day.”
    “Exactly, Gerry. And Shelly will remember that one day. Don’t steal her chance at having good thoughts about her old man. And don’t leave your ex talking to every newspaper, radio show, blog site, and tabloid that will listen that she’s always been right about you. Show now how much you love that little girl of yours.”
    There was silence on the line for several beats.
    “The front door,” Kelp said.
    “Hold,” I said to the cops surrounding the home, raising my opened palm. “DO NOT FIRE. Hostage is exiting the building.”
    Shelly Kelp came through the open apartment door, trembling, and was scooped up by a female S.W.A.T. officer.
    “Gerry?” I said back into the phone. “That was a good thing, Ger. I want you to know that makes me proud of you.”
    The line was still open, I could hear the sound of the world echoing in it, so I knew he hadn’t hung up, but Kelp said nothing for the longest time. Then, in a whisper that could have been anyone’s voice if I didn’t know what I knew and hadn’t heard it too many times before said, “Just a reminder you’re still in this with us, MacAulay . And we’re far from done.”
    The true monster, Rule .
    Then the connection went dead.
    The single gunshot from within the house didn’t surprise anyone there who wasn’t green as grass.
    But I was the only cop left wondering who the real Gerry Kelp had been and if he’d originally been capable of murder at all.

2
     
    Ten Months Earlier, The Black Dahlia
    “GOOD TO see you, Mac,” Cindy Wu, our crime scene sketch artist, said as I crunched across the frozen ground of the small amphitheater with the Capitol Building rising above us like a mountain spire.
    “You, too. What’re we looking at, Cindy?”
    “Female victim. Uh, halved. Looks like she’s in her mid-teens: sixteen, seventeen. Always hard to tell with these young ones today. Heavy ligature marks on the throat, wrists, ankles. I’m putting my money on hanging as cause of death. The rest of the team is held up in a meeting. They’ll be here within the hour. Figure with the low temperatures the M.E. will need to get her back to the morgue anyway and thaw her to place T.O.D. Both sections are hard as stone.”
    “Jesus.”
    “Yeah. Worst I’ve seen on the job,” she said, going back to her measuring.
    “Me, too.”
    “The mouth is sliced from ear-to-ear.”
    The victim was