Stolen Lives: A Detective Mystery Series SuperBoxset

by James Hunt

  Cooper slapped the file in Diaz’s chest. “Then it looks like this isn’t Homicide’s case.” She took one step toward the door, and Diaz grabbed her wrist, stopping her.

  “Can you give me anything else? Anything you heard or saw?” Hall asked, his voice flooding through the speaker.

  The woman sniffled, pulling at the sleeves of her shirt, shaking her head in dismay. “I don’t… I don’t know. It was dark most of the time. He always wore a mask, and he didn’t speak much. He just…” As she trailed off she buried her hands in her face, sobbing hysterically. Hall reached his hand across the table and gently squeezed the woman’s balled-up fist.

  “Diaz,” Cooper said, looking at the girl. “What am I doing here? She was a missing person. Now, she’s a found person.” But the longer she watched the woman cry, the less Cooper cared about whose case it was and more about catching the bastard who hurt her.

  “Just listen.” Diaz motioned toward Hall and the woman.

  Hall flipped a page in the notebook on the table. “Ms. Wurstshed, you mentioned earlier in the report you gave to the officer who picked you up that you heard screams from where you were being held captive. Were there other people with you?”

  Cooper inched closer to the one-way glass until she felt the cool of the mirror on the tip of her nose. The woman nodded, gaining her composure. “Yeah. More than once. It was faint, but when it was real quiet I could hear them.” She twisted her face in grief but regained control of the tears quickly. “It sounded like… he was… killing someone.” Her lower lip trembled, and she once again hid her face in her palms.

  “Did they give her the kit?” Cooper asked, her eyes still locked on the woman.

  “Yeah,” Diaz answered. “We should have the results from the lab either tomorrow or Thursday. We’ll run any DNA we find against the database. See if we get any matches.”

  Cooper flattened her palm against the glass and leaned forward, offering a long exhale. She turned back to Diaz, who wore the mask every detective needed in their line of work. With the shit they saw on a daily basis, it was the only way to stay sane. You couldn’t let yourself feel it. You couldn’t get too close. “What are you not telling me?”

  Diaz stepped forward but kept his eyes on his partner and the woman beyond the glass. “I heard you’re getting a new partner.”

  “Looks like you knew before I did.”

  “I know the kid’s dad. He and I went to the academy together. Make sure he doesn’t get lost in the shuffle, all right?”

  “Is that what this was about? The kid?”

  Diaz inched closer to the glass, keeping his eyes on Hall and the woman, who was still struggling to string together coherent sentences. He snapped his head right, then left, two loud pops sounding with the motion, and then exhaled a slow, steady breath. “You’ve never had the best reputation. But you always did the job well. You’ve helped put a lot of shitheads behind bars, so that’s kept you afloat. But you don’t have that luxury anymore. Not after what happened with Danny.”

  “Don’t put that shit on me, Diaz.” Cooper thrust her finger in his face, her face red from the mixture of anger and fear coursing through her veins. “Everyone knew what Danny was doing. He broke the law, and IA investigated him. If people have a problem with that, if you have a problem with that, then you can go fuck yourself.”

  Diaz shifted his gaze toward Cooper, and with one squeeze of his fist another series of cracking joints filled the awkward air between them. But as quickly as his knuckles flashed white, he relaxed his hand and shook his head. “Christ, Cooper. You’ve made too many enemies and not enough friends. You need someone watching your back. Just give the kid a chance, will you?”

  “Is that it?” Cooper cocked her head to the side.

  “Nope.” Diaz pointed to the woman. “She was kept in an abandoned storage unit off of Highway 86. It foreclosed three years ago. It’s for sale, but it’s still listed under the original owner’s name.”

  “I’m not tracking down some warehouse flunky, Diaz.”

  “And I’m not asking you to. Just go and check out the crime scene, will you? Forensics is already on their way, and we’d appreciate your eyes.” Diaz turned back to the battered woman. “I think she would too.”

  Cooper tucked Kate Wurstshed’s file under her arm and backed to the door. “I’ll hang on to this for a while. But you owe me. Fucking big time, Diaz. I’ve got a case load larger than your prostate right now.”

  “My urologist thanks you for your concern.”

  When Cooper reentered the hallway, she saw Hart chopping it up with a few of the traffic cops near the first interrogation room. But the laughter ended when one of the officers noticed her gaze. The air grew cold in the space between their stares, though to Hart’s credit he didn’t offer her the same disdain as the others. But the way gossip traveled through this place she wasn’t sure how long it would take before his opinion was swayed.

  Hart dismissed himself from the conversation. She watched him carefully. He couldn’t have been older than twenty-four, the shine on the wedding ring suggested he was recently married, and the sudden urge for promotion suggested she was pregnant. “Sorry about that.” Hart looked back to the end of the hall, where his friends had disappeared. “I went through the academy with them. It’d been a while.” He extended his hand and smiled. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”

  Cooper examined the hand, letting him sweat a little longer. Finally, just before he broke off, she reciprocated the greeting then brushed past him and headed toward her office. “Where’d you walk your beat?”

  Hart took a few quick strides to catch up. “Um, Northeastern, but before there I was stationed at Southwestern.” Hart kept pace, flattening out his tie and clutching the detective’s badge that swung wildly from his neck.

  “Southwestern?” Cooper cocked her head to the side and raised her eyebrows. “And I thought I worked the bad parts of town.” She turned to look at him as they rounded the hallway’s corner and passed through the bull pen. “Ever discharged your weapon before?”

  “Once.”

  “How’d you handle the leave?”

  “It was harder on my wife. Well, she was my girlfriend at the time.”

  “How far along is she?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  Cooper looked at him. “Your wife. She’s pregnant, right?”

  “Um—well, yes. Only a few months. Who told you that?”

  “No one.” Cooper shoulder checked her office door open but stopped upon the view of a box stacked on top of her files. She flung her hands in the air. “What the fuck is this?” She shoved Hart aside and stepped back out into the hallway, cupping her hands around her mouth. “Whoever left their shit in my office, come and pick it up, now!”

  Hart quickly stepped in front of Cooper and raised his hands. “Actually, Detective, those are my things.” His cheeks flushed red as he looked back and forth down the hallway as half the station gawked in their direction. “Captain Farnes told me I could drop off my things here.”

  Cooper cracked her neck to the left then sharply to the right, the motion triggering a whip-like pop with each snap. She closed her eyes and took in a slow breath. “They assign you a squad car yet?”

  Hart’s features softened. “No.”

  “We’ll take mine, then.” She started walking, but Hart remained frozen in the hallway.

  “Don’t I need to fill out some paperwork?”

  Cooper turned around and thrust her arms out. “Paperwork comes after we catch the bad guy, Detective.”

  Chapter 3

  Cooper flipped on the lights and blared the siren once they hit traffic, which happened less than a mile from the station. Early-morning rush hour and the storm from the night before had created a cluster of angry motorists amidst downed traffic signals, busted power lines, and flooded streets. Cooper mounted the curb close to the sidewalk and veered around the standstill traffic. “You’d think a hurricane had just blown throu
gh here.”

  Hart shifted his weight to the right to avoid falling into Cooper as the car rolled forward on the slant, then quickly buckled his seat belt. “It got really bad. Power went out at my place. My neighbors had a tree crash into their roof.”

  Traffic opened up once they made it to the highway, and Cooper reached into the glove box, pulling out a packet of latex gloves, and tossed them in Hart’s lap. “Have you ever worked a murder before?” She kept her eyes on the road and flicked on her blinker as she switched lanes.

  “No, well, not directly. I was first on scene last year to a double homicide over in Middle Branch Park. Two teens. It was gang related.”

  “Marcus Freemont, age fifteen, and Julius Smith, age fourteen. The deaths were at first believed to be initiation for new members, but it was actually retaliation. Freemont and Smith had just joined one of the smaller gangs, killing two boys of thirteen and twelve.” Cooper shook her head. “Members of the rival gang discovered what happened and sent their foot soldiers to track Smith and Freemont down.”

  “I didn’t know you worked the case,” Hart replied.

  “I didn’t.” Cooper pulled onto Highway 86, the speedometer tipping eighty as she blew past traffic, which yielded in her path. “But if someone kills somebody in this city, then I know about it.”

  The rest of the trip was in silence, and when they arrived on scene at the storage unit, the area had already been taped off. And the fact that the news crews had yet to appear lifted Cooper’s spirits. She ducked under the yellow tape, pulled on her gloves, and stepped onto the storage facility’s property.

  The ground was thick with mud, and more than once she sank ankle deep in the muck. She pulled her foot out, shaking the mud from her shoe. “The storage unit will be our best bet. The roads aren’t the only thing the storm washed away last night. Smart.”

  Hart followed close behind, cursing as he watched his new shoes dirty with mud. “What’s smart?”

  “If someone was killed anywhere outside, the storm would have gotten rid of most of the evidence, giving the killer a clean slate.” Cooper watched Hart shake the mud from his feet. “Leave the dress shoes for church, Detective. You don’t have to impress the dead.”

  The facility’s entrance door was propped open, and Cooper saw officers and forensics teams combing the hallway, setting up battery-powered lights. Cooper lingered at the door, examining the digital security pad. She leaned in to get a closer look. The display was off, as the power in the facility was still down, and the molding around the lock was fresh. She looked along the wall at the bright paint, which contrasted against the aging discolored roof. “Odd for a place that hasn’t been used in three years to have a new security system.” She tapped one of the forensics members on the shoulder and pointed to the digital lock. “Make sure you tag that for evidence.”

  Cooper reached for her flashlight and allowed it to guide her through the dark halls. Storage units lined both sides of the narrow hallway, with some of them already opened. Broken and discarded locks littered the floor next to the doors. Most of the units were empty, but a few had abandoned belongings still tucked away after the business closed. Forgotten memories crammed into the small spaces, once-treasured items no longer of any use. Cooper shined her light inside one of the units, and the graveyard of lost property. None of the items looked important: old toys, decrepit furniture, lamps, shoes, shirts, coats. But suddenly Cooper stopped, and the spotlight of her flashlight lingered at the sight of a baby’s crib tucked in a corner, half hidden by an old tarp.

  The pause caused Hart to add his light inside. “You find something?”

  Cooper quickly cast her light away. “No.”

  The storage unit hallways were connected in the shape of a large U pattern. Once into the second hallway Cooper found the majority of the forensics team clustered around a particular unit halfway down the hall. Lights had been strung up around the unit’s entrance, and the quick flashes of cameras burst into the dark hallway like lightning. Cooper stopped at the unit’s door and examined the lock, which matched the digital keypad at the front entrance. She ran a gloved hand over the edges, the molding fresh like its partner outside. “Someone went to a lot of trouble to make sure this unit could be accessed quickly.” She leaned against the wall, taking her shoes off before entering, then looked to Hart. “Try not to touch anything.”

  Inside the unit there were only three items: a bed, a bucket, and a lamp. The mattress rested on the far side, no bigger than a twin, stripped bare of any sheets. Against the wall on the opposite side rested a bucket, empty, and the small battery-powered camping lamp sat against the third wall. Each of the items had already been tagged, and Cooper sniffed the air where she caught the heavy scent of bleach. “It’s been scrubbed clean.” The walls were grey and barren, and the floor the same, except for the tagged evidence.

  “Whoever bleached it was thorough.” One of the techs pointed to the wall. “We found cleaning residue on the walls and the ceiling.” The tech scribbled a few notes down on his pad and joined Cooper in the center of the room. “We took a few samples from the bed and the bucket, but I don’t know if we’ll find anything. We couldn’t even pull any prints off the lantern.”

  Cooper leaned over the mattress, her nostrils catching the same bleached scent that covered the rest of the room. “So is this Kate Wurstshed’s room, or the person she heard screaming?” She wiped her nose with the back of her sleeve. “How many units does this place have?”

  “Two-eighty.”

  Cooper whistled a long, low pitch. She stalked the walls closely, ignoring the lantern and bucket. Hart appeared in her peripheral and knelt down to the bucket. “Careful with that,” Cooper said, placing her palm on the wall next to the lantern. “It used to have shit in it.”

  Hart flared his nostrils and set the bucket down. Cooper stepped back from the wall, her hands at her hips, and she cocked her head to the side. “Why would he bleach the walls?” She glided her eyes down to the crack where the wall and floor collided, shining her flashlight in the crevice. She ran the light along the space slowly and stopped just before she reached the corner.

  Tiny round balls were clumped together in the crack of the wall, but they were too small for her to gauge what they could have been. “Hart, I need a bag.” She stuck her hand out, keeping her eye on the granules, and then scraped the particles inside and sealed the evidence shut. She handed the filled bag to the forensic tech, who examined it under the light. “I want that tested at the lab as soon as possible.” She stepped out of the storage unit and glanced down the hall, where the second half of the hallway still had locked doors the team had yet to inspect. Cooper flashed her light down the corridor, the glow catching the shine of the steel locks. Leaving her shoes, Cooper padded the floor in her socks, flashing her light on each unit.

  “You looking for something in particular?” Hart asked, adding his light to the cause.

  “The keypad on the storage unit. It was recently installed. And I’m guessing that if the kidnapper was keeping more than one person here, then they probably—” Cooper slid to a stop, her socks slick against the smooth concrete floor. Her light caught sight of a digital keypad, identical to the one outside and the unit they had just inspected. “Had more locks like this.” She reached out a gloved hand and gently curled her fingers around the door handle.

  Hart pulled his weapon and aimed at the door, giving a nod when Cooper looked back at him. She yanked the door open and flashed the light inside. The beam penetrated the darkness but found nothing in its first sweep. And then the smell hit her a half second later. It was unmistakable, a stench she’d never been able to rid herself of since she started the job. She shifted the flashlight’s beam to the far corner, where a bloody, faceless head stared back at her. “Looks like we found our screamer.”

  ***

  The forensics team snapped their pictures, and Cooper crossed her arms over her chest while Hart dry heaved down the hall. She turned around an
d tossed a piece of gum in her mouth. “If you’re gonna pop, do it outside. We don’t need any more DNA in this crime scene than what’s already here.”

  Hart held up his hand, waving her off. Cooper smiled and stepped back into the storage unit. The victim’s head was completely unrecognizable. The face had been replaced with nothing but the bloody pulp of bone and brain. From the abrasive nature of the death it was clear she was bludgeoned, but until they sent her to the coroner they wouldn’t know if that was the cause of death. “I want the deluxe package for her,” she said, grabbing the forensic tech’s attention. “Rape kit, everything. And then I want it compared to Kate Wurstshed’s results.”

  Hart appeared behind her. “You don’t think the same guy who raped Kate Wurstshed killed this woman?”

  “We’ll know soon enough.” Cooper peeled her gloves off and tossed them in the trash. She shook her head, examining the carnage the young woman endured. “He was angry when he did this. Something didn’t go according to his plan.” She looked to the key lock on the door, still disabled from the power outage. “She definitely wasn’t killed here, no traces of blood around the body. She must have tried to make a run for it when the power went out.” She cracked her knuckles and then smacked Hart on the stomach, causing his face to shimmer green again. “Let’s go track down the owner of this place. See what they have to say about their new renter.”

  Hart radioed dispatch, and they had the owner’s address before they returned to the car. “William Barnesby, 335 South Baker Street. You want me to give him a call, make sure he’s home?”

  “No.” Cooper took one last look at the crime scene from behind the wheel, her hand hovering over the ignition. “Secluded, secure, sophisticated—whoever killed that woman and kidnapped Kate Wurstshed put a lot of effort into this.”

  Hart clicked his seat belt into place, his cheeks still pallid. “You think whoever did this has done it before?”