Killing With Kings Read online

  “Apology accepted.” For the remainder of the night, I avoided Earl, and later that evening, I snuck out without anyone noticing.

  Tomorrow morning, I would get some answers from Maggie. Answers I hoped would lead me to Ray’s killer.

  I knew I had a sleepless night ahead of me, but I’d rather face that than give Earl an answer to his proposition.

  Chapter 26

  After parking my SUV in front of Maggie’s house, I took in the area. Three cars were parked across the street. None were in front of her house. It was five minutes to eight. Nowak confirmed that she was on her way to meet me here. I poked my head around the corner of the house. No cars were parked around the other side. And her moped wasn’t there, either.

  Maybe I had arrived too early.

  As I walked up the steps, I saw the front door was cracked open. I knocked and announced through the small opening, “Sergeant Rodriguez from the Savannah Police Department, here to interview Maggie Linzey.”

  I waited a couple of minutes. No answer.

  Proceeding with caution, I slowly opened the door a few inches wider and announced myself again. I stepped one foot on the doormat. Immediately, the door caught on something. Stopping, I craned my head to see that the door leaned on a trip wire and there were also wires coming out from under the doormat. The same wires led to a gallon of gas and a battery.

  Shit. A bomb. I was set up. Damn it. I wasn’t careful enough.

  Which meant that Maggie knew I was onto her. And she wanted me dead before I could catch her. I’d been right. Maggie had killed Ray. Where was she now?

  I assessed my current situation.

  There had to be a pressure-sensitive trigger under the doormat, as well as a trigger that ignited as the door pushed open and tightened the wire. There were several wires, but my eyes followed a white one that I believed, if cut, might disarm the IED.

  My chest constricted and my heart rate increased. I stayed exactly where I was and took in some long, calming breaths. I knew that moving the door either forward or backward could cause the trigger to activate. I was stuck. Even reaching into my jacket to grab my cell phone could set off the bomb sequence.

  “Good morning, Sergeant,” Nowak said.

  “Not so good of a morning here. There’s an IED, and if I move an inch, I could trip it.” I kept my voice steady and calm, although my heart pounded in my ears.

  “Are you kidding me?” Nowak came up behind me, enough for me to see her face as I looked out of the corner of my eye. Her face looked pale, and her eyes were wide.

  “Let me walk you through this. Just like we’ve practiced countless times, okay?”

  “Fine. Yes. Okay.” Her voice was shaky. “What the heck? I mean, this means that Maggie is—”

  “First, call for backup. Second, secure the area. Make sure no one is around. Then, go way across the street out of harm’s way until backup arrives.”

  She made the call, and then I heard footsteps leaving the porch. Good. For once, she was listening to me. If this went sideways, I wanted to be the only casualty. No innocent bystanders. Especially not Nowak.

  Thinking that my life could end right here, right now, made me terribly sad. I hadn’t lived my life in truth as I should have. I didn’t care anymore if everyone knew I was gay. If I got out of this alive, I would be real and let the chips fall where they would. In this moment of crisis, the thought of continuing to live a lie was worse than the thought of any repercussions my truth might cause.

  Shoving those thoughts from my mind, I refocused on the task at hand.

  I kept my foot on the mat and the door exactly where it was. If I could get to the detonator and cut the wire, I thought it would disarm. Once the bomb squad got here, they would be able to take care of this in no time.

  My arm began to tingle with the loss of feeling as I held the door exactly where it was. I didn’t even want a breeze to push it open because that could set off the bomb. I felt a bead of sweat drip into my eye, but I couldn’t wipe it away. A car door slammed behind me. As much as I wanted to look, I didn’t dare. Remaining perfectly still was the only way to keep the pressure exactly the same and the bomb intact.

  I heard Nowak’s voice coming from inside the house.

  “I’ve got this. I’m going to take care of this.” Nowak reached the living room, adjacent to where I was stuck at the door with one foot on the doormat. She must have entered through the back door.

  “No. Damn it! I said wait for backup, and that’s an order.” She was just as stubborn and bull-headed as Juanita.

  She knelt next to the IED and opened her toolkit. “If you go, I go. We’re in this together. There’s no changing my mind.”

  Anger seared through me. “You directly disobeyed an order. I’m going to write you up. Kick you off the squad. Unless you leave now,” I threatened.

  “Go ahead. I don’t care.” She flashed a light at the wires. Her forehead creased in concentration.

  “Well, I do.” Rage and fear roared through me. The last thing I wanted was for anything to happen to her. I heard car doors slamming and voices behind me. The bomb squad had arrived. “You’re insubordinate.”

  “There’s a timer. We don’t have a second to lose. If you’re done scolding me, I’d like to tell you my strategy. Right now, this”—she pointed to a cluster of wires, the white one in particular—“is the wire that needs to be cut to disarm the bomb. I’m sure of it. I need to prove to you that I know what I’m doing. Now is as good a time as any.”

  Footsteps on the wooden porch sounded behind me. “Stop. Backup is here.”

  She pulled out clippers and snapped the wire. “Too late.”

  Her impatience was her downfall. Thankfully, her bomb disarmament skill was her salvation.

  Our salvation.

  Chapter 27

  “I heard your rookie Nowak did a great job disarming the bomb; she must have had a great teacher,” McFalls said as we stood in Maggie’s house.

  “Thanks. She’s still a little rough around the edges, but in time that will smooth out, too.” I smiled. I was proud of her, although I was aggravated she hadn’t followed my direct order. She’d have to work on that. I’d told her as much before she’d left to go back to the precinct and research Elias and Maggie. “Have you found Maggie Linzey yet?”

  “No. She seems to have disappeared into thin air,” McFalls observed.

  “Did you call her brother, Elias?”

  “Yes. And we couldn’t reach him, either. I have an officer at the Magnolia Club now, hoping Elias shows up to work.”

  “I doubt he’s going into work. There has to be another way to find him. He and his sister must have planned all this.” I scanned Maggie’s living room again, trying to see if we’d missed anything. There had to be something here that could lead us to them. I had already checked out all the evidence that had been bagged, but couldn’t find from it any indication of where they might be now.

  “Getting them in custody is our number one job,” McFalls agreed. “I hate that any jackass can find out how to build a simple bomb using household items and a few things from the local hardware store. These things are all over the Internet.” McFalls rubbed his forehead. “I hate the Internet.”

  “I hear you. We have to deal with homemade IEDs all the time.”

  “I’m glad this worked out okay. I hate that this whole thing could have turned out way differently.”

  “That’s why we’re here. To protect people from things like this.”

  He exhaled. “We’ll find Maggie and Elias, trust me on this. I’ve got a whole team after them.”

  “Good. In the meantime, I’m going to look around the house one more time. See if we missed anything.”

  “Suit yourself. I’m heading out.” He began to walk away but then stopped. “You know, this whole time you’ve been trying to tell me there was more to the case. Although you pissed me off with your interfering, I think I owe you an apology.”

  “No need. W
e’re good.” I grabbed plastic gloves and evidence bags. I entered the bedroom and searched the dresser, nightstand, and closet but found them empty. I checked under the bed, dresser, and rug. Lifting the mattress, I didn’t find anything stashed under it.

  In the bathroom, I looked behind and inside the toilet tank as well as the medicine cabinet.

  Afterwards, I made my way into the kitchen. I rummaged through the refrigerator and then through the kitchen drawers. Under the kitchen sink, I pulled out a trash can that had already been emptied by McFalls’ crew.

  Sticking my head under the sink, I pushed aside an assortment of cleaning supplies and saw a small empty prescription bottle tucked way in the back corner behind a bottle of Comet. I grabbed it.

  It was from the local pharmacy and had been prescribed to William Taylor. The medicine was Sumatriptan, which I recognized as migraine medication. It had been filled one month ago—thirty tablets, with one refill left. The bottle being empty meant that William needed a refill soon. Or that he might have already gotten one. I snapped a picture of the label and then bagged the bottle.

  My first thought was that Elias and William Taylor were the same person. They had to be. There was a strong chance not only that Elias was really William but also that William had once been named Aaron Welsh. After his mother had been admitted to the psychiatric hospital, he’d been put in foster care. Sometime after that, he could have been adopted and changed his name. Or he could have changed it when he’d come of legal age and left the foster care system.

  Either way, my hunch was that Elias and William were the same person. I texted Nowak about my theory and asked her to do research on it.

  The house had been deeded from Jennie Welsh to her heir, and Aaron was her only heir, as her other son had been on death row when she’d died.

  Following this line of thought, if Elias was Aaron, he had every motive to kill Ray.

  But how was Maggie involved in all of this? That was the missing piece. Had Elias set Maggie up to work at the poker tournament in order to kill Ray? How had Elias known Ray was allergic?

  Looking back, I remembered seeing Ray at the Magnolia Club when I’d been there for Sweetie Pie’s performance. Elias had placed a bowl of snacks in front of Ray, which had ended up spilling on him. Ray had pulled out his EpiPen and made a scene about being allergic. Elias had witnessed all of it. He could easily have told Maggie this. Somewhere along the line, he found out Norman needed a dealer and he’d volunteered his sister.

  However, Aaron/Elias didn’t have a sister. He had a brother, David. Or maybe he had someone he considered a sister from foster care or an adoptive family?

  Another possibility was that Elias was Maggie. Norman transformed himself into Sweetie Pie, a pretty believable drag queen. Elias could’ve easily done the same transformation with makeup and clothing. Maggie and Elias had a similar build, tall and slender.

  I’d seen Maggie wince a few times during the night of the tournament and put her fingertips to her temples. It could’ve been that her head was hurting. Elias suffered from migraines, as well, which made my theory even more plausible.

  Elias, as an employee of the Magnolia Club, had access to the dressing room. He could’ve entered Norman’s dressing room without anyone taking too much notice. He could have put the EpiPen filled with peanut oil into Norman’s makeup bag. As Maggie the dealer, it would have been easy for him to replace Ray’s real shot with the tampered shot during the poker tournament. And in turn, he could have made sure the cards dealt to Ray received the most oil in order to cause an allergic reaction.

  The gun. Elias might very well have known where his brother had stashed the gun used to shoot Officer Palmer. It was all lining up.

  He killed my coworker, framed my friend for murder, shot at Nowak and me on River Street, and had tried to blow me up today.

  I needed to find Elias, or whoever he really was, myself.

  It was personal.

  Chapter 28

  As I left Maggie’s house, I made a call to McFalls with an update on my train of thought regarding Elias and his connection to Ray.

  “Vengeance is a powerful motivator, no doubt. I agree with you: Elias lost his brother and mother, and he must’ve blamed it all on Ray,” McFalls concurred.

  “Which is twisted thinking, because his brother committed murder, and Ray was just doing his job,” I added.

  “I know. But no matter how Elias tries to hide, I’ve got officers all over town looking for him. We’ll find him,” McFalls claimed. “I issued a BOLO. He might have skipped town.”

  A ‘be on the lookout,’ also known as an all-points bulletin, would be sent through dispatchers to police officers across our jurisdiction, neighboring jurisdictions and even across country. In it would be details about Elias, his aliases, age, height, and weight. However, I felt that he was still in Savannah.

  I knew that Elias would not show up at the Magnolia Club. He would know that was the first place the police would look for him. And he would not dare go back to 2222 Harmon Street. He had already cleared it of his personal belongings, expecting it to be destroyed.

  The only place that seemed reasonable for him to make an appearance was the pharmacy where he could get his meds. Unless he had a way to get them elsewhere, or would do without.

  On the other hand, he could have taken off right after he’d set the bomb and be long gone by now.

  “If you don’t mind, I’m going to the pharmacy to see if Elias picked up his prescription,” I said to McFalls.

  “No need. I’m sending an officer over there,” he assured me.

  “Why don’t you let me go?”

  “José, I would. You know that I appreciate your help on the case, but—”

  “Let me do this,” I persisted.

  “Something tells me that you’re planning to do it anyway, with or without my approval.”

  “I wonder if you could help me out.” I showed the pharmacist my badge. “Has William Taylor refilled this prescription yet?” I showed him a picture of the label.

  “Let me see.” The pharmacist searched his computer. “No. He hasn’t. But it’s filled and ready for him to pick up.”

  “How late are you open today?”

  “We close at five.”

  “Thanks.” It looked like I was in for a two-and-a-half-hour observation.

  There were two employees at the front of the store, working the registers, and one pharmacist with two assistants in the back. Five workers. A college-aged kid with a candy bar and chips was getting rung up at the register. An elderly couple was in the back near the pharmacy, occupying two of the six chairs in the waiting area. They sat next to a table stacked with magazines.

  A mother, holding a toddler on her hip and carrying a shopping basket with diapers, walked past me. I hoped they would all be leaving soon. It would be better not to have any civilians around when Elias showed up. But there was no way I could control who went in without drawing attention to myself and potentially scaring away Elias.

  As I left the pharmacy to do a perimeter check, I called Nowak to get her up to speed on everything.

  “Not that it matters now, but I did as you had asked and talked to JJ. He had no motive.” She paused. “I want to do the stakeout with you,” she announced.

  “No. I’m doing it solo.” The back door of the building was locked, with a key access code needed to enter. An area with a wooden fence housed a small dumpster. Four employees’ cars were parked in the back. A gas station was on the left, a bed and breakfast to the right. Behind the pharmacy was an alley, and beyond that a row of townhouses.

  “If you don’t mind me saying, you’re stubborn, Sergeant, sir,” Nowak told me.

  “I do mind.” I hung up and jogged to my vehicle. I’d parked it in a lot across the street from the pharmacy with a clear view of the front door. I got in my car and pulled out binoculars from my glove box to do a spot check. Two cars were parked next to the automatic door of the building, one in the han
dicapped spot. A lime-green bicycle was chained to the bike rack on the left side of the building near three empty shopping carts.

  A few minutes later, the college-aged kid unlocked his bike and rode away. The elderly couple got in their Buick, which was parked in the handicapped spot, and also drove away.

  A half hour after that, a car pulled up next to me. Nowak got out and knocked on my window. I shot her the evil eye as I lowered the glass. “What part of solo didn’t you understand?”

  “Are you going to let me in?”

  “No.” My neck tensed. She had a knack for pushing my buttons. “Leave now. That’s a direct order.”

  “I’ll just sit here in my car next to your car.”

  “You’ll do no such thing. Go.”

  “I want to get my uncle’s killer. I need to be here.” Her eyes pleaded. “C’mon, Sergeant.”

  I understood why she wanted to be here. It was personal to me, too. But I couldn’t put her in danger again, as had happened at Maggie’s house. “No. Final answer.”

  “Then I’ll just go in the pharmacy and wait.” She crossed her arms over her chest.

  She was impossible. I pushed the unlock button. “Get in and keep quiet.”

  “But I have to talk so I can tell you what I found on the research you wanted me to do.”

  “Fine.”

  “So, I called in a few favors at the courthouse to get some quick answers. Bottom line, your theory was correct.” She paused. “When Aaron Welsh turned eighteen, he legally changed his name to William Taylor. So that means that the cop killer my uncle put on death row was his brother, David Welsh. It all adds up now. Elias must be William’s alias.”

  I then explained why I thought Elias was Maggie.

  “Yes, that makes sense, too.” She slumped in the seat. A tear streaked down her cheek. “Knowing this doesn’t bring back my uncle.”

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  She sniffed. “But at least we can put away his killer.”