by Randall Dale
Dan touched his shoulder. Demetrius turned to follow his partner’s pointing. There in a clump of dry grass was a glint. The big detective took two steps, then with a pen pulled from his pocket, inserted the end into a nine-millimeter shell casing and lifted it for all to see.
He glanced at his partner. “Good eye.” He dropped the casing into a plastic bag Dan had produced.
Step by step the men moved closer, searching for additional clues or evidence. Five feet from the body, the footprints were easy to read. One man, certainly the killer, walked behind the other. As they approached the tree the victim must have kneeled because the toe prints were deeper in the sand. It didn’t take much for the police officers to imagine what had happened next.
Demetrius heard the tones from Dan’s phone then the request for forensics. There were several excellent shoe prints of the killer and as far as he could tell they looked exactly like the print from the wash behind Dr. Smallwood’s house.
He approached the body, unable to shake the feeling it was a homeless man because of the long, dirty hair, the old coat and ragged pants. As he got closer, the smell seemed to confirm that suspicion.
Using the same pen, he lifted the pillow to see the thumbs still intact. He clucked his tongue. Maybe this was not a related killing. They’d have to wait for the science guys to figure that out. He couldn’t wait to get the shell casing back to Dusty to see if it was the same gun.
The coroner’s van arrived followed only a few minutes later by the forensics unit. Demetrius and Dan stayed long enough to show the shoeprints and request a cast be made. Dan held the plastic bag with the shell casing. The technician took it by the corner and held it, turning it this way and that to see inside the bag.
“Nine,” he announced.
Both detectives nodded.
He started to place it into an evidence bag when Demetrius spoke. “Would you mind if I took that back to the office? I’d like to get a read on it right away.”
The man shrugged then passed it to the big detective.
◆◆◆
The detectives marched into the third-floor offices. Dusty looked up from his computer as they strode to the counter. He smiled in recognition.
Demetrius returned the smile, then glanced around the big room with stark, white walls and matching white counter and desktops. Even Dusty was in a bright white lab coat. Every time Demetrius came into the lab he felt like he was in a hospital. Dusty stood and met the men at the counter.
“Hi, guys. What’s up?”
Demetrius gingerly placed the plastic bag on the counter. “Another killing. We’d like to know if this casing matches the one from the Smallwood murder?”
Dusty made a face, then pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. “We can do that, but it will have to wait until tomorrow morning. I have some high priority stuff I’m working on right now. Will that work for you?”
Demetrius peered over the boy’s shoulder to the supervisor’s office in the back. He could see Robert and knew a request to jump ahead would be denied unless he had the Lieutenant’s blessing. Robert was a good man, but he followed rules to the letter. They were friends, but friendship didn’t matter when it came to police work as far as Robert was concerned. Demetrius drummed his fingers on the counter while wondering if a quick visit to the Lieutenant might be in order, then just as quickly decided he had no desire to talk to the administrator. Besides, it was already after four o’clock. The next morning would be soon enough.
“We’d appreciate that.”
◆◆◆
Dinner was scheduled at six o’clock. The meal was prepared and the little family sat in the living room waiting for the doorbell to announce the arrival of their visitors. They’d all met Marcus, and Demetrius had told them what he knew about the new boy, Edward.
The father sat with undisguised pride as he watched his wife, two daughters and one son. He felt good about being able to help the boys and hoped his family didn’t get resentful in any way. He knew any time spent with the boys might be time robbed from his family, but he’d decided he would make the time to be there for all.
His musings were interrupted by the ringing of the bell. The family looked toward him in anticipation. He nodded reassuringly as he strolled to the door.
“Hello, Marcus, so glad you could come over tonight.” He moved to allow the boy to enter. Before closing the door he heard a car door slam. He peered across his yard to see the second young man walking toward the house. He also noticed the bright red Mustang convertible.
As the boy approached, Demetrius stepped down to the porch and leaned on the rail. “Hello, Edward. Glad you could make it.”
The grin and firm handshake from the skinny boy reemphasized to the big detective how honored he was that Marcus and Edward were letting him into their lives. He silently vowed again to be there for them.
The banter at the dinner table was lively because Marcus was a born comedian, comfortable and at ease with the family. At his antics and stories, everyone laughed through the meal.
Demetrius took time to study Edward. The boy seemed to be enjoying their company. He wasn’t particularly talkative, but his occasional comments were insightful and intelligent. He was obviously a young man who knew a lot about a lot.
Marcus was intent on his dessert, which brought about a lull in the conversation. Wanda patted her mouth with a paper napkin and focused on the new boy. “Where are you from, Edward?”
The timing of the question was inopportune as he had just taken a bite of the chocolate cake. He chewed with an embarrassed grin. At last he swallowed. “My dad’s an accountant for the City of Phoenix.”
“I see. Are you wanting to be an accountant too?”
He looked at her with a shake of his head. “Not a chance. That’s way too boring for me. I’m in pre-law taking classes in criminal justice. They’re really interesting and I’ve toyed with the idea of being a detective.” He turned to Demetrius with an expression of awe.
The big man had taken a bite of the cake so he just smiled and nodded. How about that? The boy wants to be a cop.
Chapter 16
The staccato clacking on the polished, tiled floor warned Demetrius of the Lieutenant’s approach. He glanced at the clock. It was four minutes after eight o’clock and he’d only been in the office a short time. He watched the open doorway, waiting with some apprehension for the small man to come bursting into his office.
The entrance was exactly as he had expected, no knock, no pause, only a rush into the room. Demetrius suspected the Lieutenant fancied these entrances as an explosion into the room, a show of tremendous force and energy, but to the big detective it seemed more like the pop of a child’s cap-gun. He sat, trying to relax as the man stretched to his full five-foot-eight-inch height and stood with hands on hips.
“Another murder and no progress from you?”
It was clearly a rhetorical question so Demetrius waited. If the Lieutenant would only leave them alone maybe they could get some work done. The big detective’s silence infuriated the suit-wearing man. Demetrius could tell because of the flush of the face and the crimson at the tips of his boss’ delicate ears.
“Lucky for you it was just some homeless guy.” The Lieutenant frowned deeply while pointing a skinny finger. “You had better show some progress soon or there’ll be consequences. You understand?”
Demetrius gritted his teeth. If the man had been a real cop and knew anything about actual police work he wouldn’t make such an asinine statement. With effort, he kept his voice calm.
“We’re working on it. Dusty’s upstairs now running tests on the shell casing.”
The Lieutenant smirked. “Are you expecting the name of the killer to be engraved there?”
The muscles in the big man’s jaws tensed and he pushed back the temptation to do physical harm to the arrogant jerk. Instead, he took a long breath in and out through his nose. The Lieutenant must have known how close he was to being run over by a freight trai
n because he quickly took two steps back.
The tone of his voice was much softer. “You guys just get this guy in jail, okay?” He then hurried out of the office without waiting for a reply.
Demetrius watched him go, continuing to stare down the hallway long after the man had disappeared from sight. He rolled his head from side to side and consciously forced his muscles to relax. Slowly, the tension dissipated.
In only a moment, Dan’s head appeared at the door.
“Dusty called from upstairs. There were prints on the casing. Would you like to guess whose?”
Demetrius slapped his desk as he thought of the tall man from the gas station. “Let’s get Stretch in here.”
Dan nodded with a smile. “I’ve already had dispatch send two cars to bring him in. My guess is he’ll be here in less than half an hour.”
◆◆◆
Both detectives sat motionless on one side of the table as John Fillmore was led into the interrogation room, ducking to make sure he didn’t bump his head on the door. His hands were cuffed at his back and with his longish hair frizzled in disarray and eyes puffy and squinted, he looked as though he’d just woken up. One of the uniformed officers pointed to a chair. John looked at him with one eye closed and the other open only a sliver. He grunted as he sat, then coughed and hawked. He looked around for somewhere to spit, but seeing nothing, he swallowed loudly in the confines of the bare-walled room.
“Whatever it is, it wasn’t me.” He cocked his head, squinting at the detectives.
Demetrius pushed the button on the recorder, then nodded at his partner.
The younger man sat straighter in his chair. “Where were you two nights ago?”
Fillmore studied the recorder on the table. As he looked at it, both detectives’ eyes were also drawn there. A tiny red light blinked every second.
The man glanced up with a squint, looking first to Demetrius, then to Dan. He blinked his eyes, squeezing them tight for a second before resuming the squinting. He yawned wide and shook his head before answering.
“Working. You can check the tapes again.”
Demetrius laid his big hands on the table. A phone call to the gas station while they were waiting had confirmed Fillmore had worked all that night. The coroner indicated the time of death from between nine and midnight, so as with the Smallwood murder, the disheveled man in front of them couldn’t have pulled the trigger. He nodded again at his partner.
“We’ll do that for sure. Did you work all night?”
“From eight till four.”
Dan nodded then looked at the senior detective. Both men had expected the answer. Demetrius took his turn. He stood and fished an empty nine-millimeter shell casing from his pocket. It had been fired from his own gun through the pillow at the gun range only a few days earlier. He placed it, spent primer down and hole up, on the table.
“Do you know what that is?”
Fillmore grunted and shrugged. “An empty casing.”
“A nine-millimeter. We found one just like it at a murder scene from two nights ago.”
“So?”
“So, the prints on the casing are yours.”
Stretch sat up quickly, all tiredness apparently gone from his body. He looked at the detectives with wide eyes.”
“I told you before, I didn’t kill nobody.”
“Then how do you reconcile the fact that two spent casings on two separate nights are found at the scenes of two separate murders, and both casings have your fingerprints?”
The man looked around the room while licking his lips nervously. His eyes darted from one detective to the other. He finally focused on Demetrius.
He paused and swallowed one more time. “You’ve read my file?”
“Yes.”
“And you know I did time?”
“Yes.”
“And I’m out on parole and can’t own a gun?”
“Yes.”
Stretch hesitated, his right eye began to twitch. “I did own a gun, a nine-millimeter Glock, but I sold it a month or so ago ’cause I was out of a job and needed the money. I only had it for protection. I never used it. Honest. I swear.”
Demetrius sat up. If the man was telling the truth it did make sense. He could have loaded the clip so his fingerprints would logically be on the shells.
“When and where did you buy it?”
“When I first got out of the pen. I was working on a construction job and a buddy there sold it to me.”
“I see. And who did you sell it to?”
“Don’t know the dude’s name. Just some kid who answered an ad in the Dandy Dime want-ad paper.”
“What did he look like?”
“Young guy. Maybe eighteen. Kinda skinny. But he had on big sunglasses and a cap pulled low.”
“Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”
Fillmore frowned. “I doubt it. Like I say, he was all covered up.”
Demetrius had his pocket notebook out, scribbling the details. “How tall?”
“Quite a bit smaller than me.”
The big detective frowned again. He realized that even he, at six-foot-two, would fit that category.
“So, under six feet?”
“I suppose.”
“Weight?”
“I wouldn’t know where to start. He wasn’t big and stocky, not like he was a weight lifter or anything.”
“So, which side of one-seventy-five do you think?”
“Maybe about that. I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to tell.”
“Hmmm. What kind of car?”
“Never saw no car.”
“How did he answer the ad? Did he call you on the phone?”
Fillmore perked up. “Yeah. Then we met at a little market on the east side of town and did our business in the parking lot.”
“Is yours a cell phone? We can check the history to get his number.”
Stretch nodded, anxious to please. “It’s at my house.”
Demetrius felt the old familiar tingling at his shoulders. Finally, what looked to be a break. He believed the story, every bit of it. The phone might be the answer.
“With your permission, we’ll send a cruiser to get the phone. Where is it?”
Fillmore nodded enthusiastically. “On a nightstand by my bed. I don’t get many calls so the number should be easy to find.”
Both detectives nodded. Demetrius turned to Dan. “Anything else?”
The smaller detective twisted his mouth in thought before asking, “Hair color?”
“Blondish, I guess. Couldn’t really tell under the cap.”
The three men were silent for half a minute. Demetrius focused on Stretch, noticing the return of the worried expression. “What?”
“They won’t send me back to prison, will they?”
The big detective immediately felt sorry for the man. He at least had a job and wasn’t trying to work the system. Still, he had broken the terms of his probation by owning a firearm. He shrugged. “Not our call. We have to report it. In the meantime, you’ll be placed into a holding cell while we check your phone and some other things. You’re not under arrest, only here for questioning. If we don’t find anything more in the next couple of hours, you’ll be turned loose. What the parole board does is up to them.”
Fillmore nodded dejectedly. “Okay.”
Demetrius reached to turn off the recorder, then he and Dan stood as the man shuffled out of the room escorted by a jailer. With one final glance over his shoulder, Stretch disappeared down the hall.
Demetrius absently scratched the plastic on the handheld digital recorder with a blunt fingernail. “What do you think?”
Dan rubbed his chin while looking down the now-empty hall. “I believe him.”
“I do too. Let’s get that phone.”
◆◆◆
It was surprising how many received calls showed up. Demetrius frowned at his incorrect assumption that finding the number would be easy. After all, Fillmore had told them h
e didn’t get many calls. He’d indicated the approximate date of the sale of the gun so the detectives started a week after and worked their way back. Demetrius wore his half-rimmed reading glasses perched on the end of his nose and growled at the annoyance of the tiny print on the old-style flip phone. After an hour, they had compiled a list of fourteen numbers.
Dan tore the sheet from the yellow legal pad and held it up. “I’ll take this to Suzie down the hall. She’ll have the owners worked up for us by tomorrow, then we can start checking them out.”
Demetrius glanced at the clock on the wall. He clucked his tongue then nodded with a half-smile. This was what he enjoyed the most about being a detective, slowly unraveling the case one clue at a time. His shoulders had tingled all afternoon. They were one step closer, he could feel it.
As he turned the corner toward his house, he noticed a bright red Mustang convertible parked on the street with its hood up. As he got closer and turned into the driveway, he saw his son, Adam, and the new boy, Edward, standing in front of the car peering in at the motor. He stopped his Explorer on the concrete of the driveway rather than in the garage and quickly joined the boys.
“Hi, Dad.” Adam’s eyes were bright with the excitement of the opportunity to check out the expensive car. “Edward came to see you but he agreed to show me his car. Isn’t it cool?”
Demetrius smiled at the exuberance. His son had never been big-time into cars like a lot of boys, but still, a sleek, sports car like this held his attention. The big man nodded then greeted the smallest of the group.
“Hi, Edward. Glad you could come over. What can we do for you?”
The boy smiled widely, his perfect white teeth gleaming. “I wanted to ask a favor.”
The boy’s smile was contagious and Demetrius found himself returning it with pleasure. “Sure thing. Whatcha got?”
Edward leaned against the car and looked one time at Adam before speaking. “Nothing much and I promise I won’t take too much of your time. I have a research paper due in one of my classes. I’m supposed to write about a solved crime and how the police were able to break the case. I figured you’d be the guy to talk to about that.”