Lieutenant Kane: Dedicated to Death 01-The First Shot

by EH Reinhard

  I pulled into the station’s parking structure a couple of minutes after eleven, entered the building, and walked the white hallway that led toward the bull pen and the offices of the department leads. A small room off to the left held the station’s fax machines, printers, copiers, and our in-boxes. I stopped in briefly to see if I’d received anything in the mail. A brown package sat in my tray—the return address was from my sister in Wisconsin. I had a good idea what the contents were. I tucked the box under my arm, left the room, and continued down the hallway until it opened up into the bull pen.

  Gray metal desks filled the area to my right. The detectives in the office mulled about—some sat typing away at their computers, some were on the phones, and some stood together talking. On the far side of the bull pen was the hallway that led down to our patrol unit. I glanced toward Hank’s desk in the bull pen, seeing it empty. I must have beat him back. The door for the captain’s office, ahead and to my left, stood open. The blinds of his office were closed. I poked my head through the doorway to see if he was inside. Bostok sat at his desk.

  “Morning, Cap,” I said.

  Captain Bostok waved me in and pointed at his guest chairs. “It’s damn near lunchtime,” he said.

  I walked in and had a seat.

  “Well?” Bostok said. He pushed his glasses up his nose and reached for a cardboard coffee cup on his desk. He tucked the cup of coffee under his thick snow-white mustache and took a sip.

  “Two females, bound, gagged, blindfolded, and dead in an alley. GSWs to the head and another center mass on those. Three males dead in the building to the side of the alley. Again with the head and center mass shots, aside from one that was shot under the chin.”

  Bostok set his coffee down and leaned back in his chair. He adjusted a star-shaped tie tack on his blue tie that hung over his large stomach. He said nothing.

  “We had a firearm and multiple casings on scene. Rick is going to get started on everything shortly.”

  “Any theories?” he asked.

  “Possible abduction that went south. I don’t know. None of the bodies had ID on them, but we have probable identities on the males. One of whom Detective King said was Charles Treadwell. We’re going to rattle some of his known associates and see if we can get anything there.”

  “The women?” Bostok asked. “Any idea who they are?”

  “Unknown as of right now,” I said.

  “Run the descriptions past Steinberg in missing persons,” Bostok said.

  “I planned to.”

  “Okay. Let me know what you get when you get it.”

  “Will do, Cap.”

  I left Bostok’s office and walked next door to mine. I unlocked the door, walked in, and flipped on the lights. An old couch took up the back right corner of my office. File cabinets, which were full, lined the sidewall. I walked to my desk located to the left, walked around it, and took a seat. To my back was a shared window between the captain and my office—just to the right of that was a shelving unit filled with photos of my nephew and miscellaneous service awards. I slid the drawer of my desk open, took out a scissors, and used it to cut open the package from my sister. Inside, as I figured, were a couple of photos of my nephew, Tommy. The pictures were framed. A note inside said February family photos. The third and final photo was of my sister, her husband, and Tommy together. Knowing my sister as I did, she’d know that the package was delivered that day. She’d call that evening with an attitude if I didn’t call and thank her or at minimum send a text message. I pulled out my phone and sent off a quick message saying thanks and that I had received the photos.

  I stood from my chair, made a bit of space between the other photos on my shelf, and added the three new pictures. I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket, slid it out, and clicked Talk.

  “Hi, Mel,” I said.

  “Get the photos?” she asked.

  “In hand. Tommy is getting big.”

  “You should come up and see him,” Melissa said. “I’m sure Dad and Sandy would be excited to see you.”

  “I talked to them last week. I actually want to try to get something scheduled over the summer. I’ll let you know as soon as I figure out when.”

  “Sure, yeah, just don’t do it the week of July Fourth.”

  “Okay. Are you guys going somewhere or something?” I asked.

  “No. Um.” Melissa paused, seemingly looking for words. “Okay, I’ll just tell you. Sam is coming up here that week.”

  The news annoyed me immediately. “Why?” I asked.

  “Because she wants to visit, and it’s been a bit since we’ve seen each other.”

  I dug my fingers into my eyes and rubbed them, hard.

  “Carl?” Melissa asked.

  “Yeah, I’m here. It’s just wrong. My adulteress ex-wife, going and visiting my family. Is she taking her shiny new husband up there?”

  “No, she’s not bringing Marty.”

  His name sent my annoyance toward anger. I said nothing.

  “Carl, she and I are friends, okay. We were close for how many years? That’s not something that just goes away.”

  “She cheated on me with the guy she’s now married to. I would probably think that it would be logical for you to, I don’t know, not like her. You know, because she cheated on your brother with her little weaselly-ass boss.”

  “People make mistakes, Carl. You guys have moved on. Let the anger go.”

  “You know she tried getting half of my inheritance money from Mom, right? Real good person there. It wasn’t enough that I gave her half of the money from a house that I bought and paid for in full. She wanted our deceased mother’s money as well.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “Yeah, good you guys are still friends, though, Mel.”

  “Okay, let’s not talk about her,” Melissa said.

  “You brought her up.”

  “Anyway. Did you do the Internet dating thing like I suggested? If you want, I could probably get you a profile made up.”

  “No, I didn’t do it. I’m not going to do it. And I don’t need a profile made up.”

  “You have to get out there, Carl. You can’t just put on blinders and work a hundred hours a week. You need to have some kind of life other than work.”

  “I did have a life. I picked up everything and moved to Florida for that life. Big plans. Family and a white picket fence with two point three children.”

  “I thought we just agreed to not talk about Samantha?”

  “Whatever, I don’t really need this pissing me off right now. Is Tommy there?” I asked.

  “Jeff took him to the park,” Melissa said.

  “All right. Tell him his uncle says hi. I have to get back to work. Thanks for the photos.”

  “Now you’re mad at me because of Samantha, aren’t you?”

  “Yep. And I’m at work,” I said.

  “Well, wait, how’s Butch?”

  Butch was the name of the soon to be bobcat-sized Savannah cat that my sister had talked me into buying. She claimed that a pet was exactly what I’d needed. “Get something different,” she’d said. “Savannah cats are amazing pets,” she’d said. “He’s just being playful,” she’d said. The truth was that my living quarters became the stomping grounds of a wild cat. I imagined him roaming my condo at that very moment, plotting how he’d spill blood from my legs the moment that I arrived home.

  “He’s fine.”

  “Did he stop terrorizing your feet when you walked in?”

  “He’s getting better.” That was a lie. “I have to run, Mel.”

  “Call me tonight,” Melissa said.

  “Yeah, if I’m not working late, I will,” I said. I planned on working late. “Bye, Mel.”

  I clicked off and rocked back in my chair. I stared at the ceiling. I could have done without the mentioning of my ex-wife, her husband, or the knowledge that Samantha was going to visit my sister.

  My desk phone rang, breaking my annoyance. I leaned forward
and scooped it up. “Lieutenant Kane,” I said.

  “Hey, it’s John. You got a minute?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Did you get something?”

  “Maybe. Not sure what if anything we can do with the information. Um, I’ll just walk over to your office.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  He clicked off. I looked out through the open blinds on the front glass of my office and saw him walking across the bull pen. He entered a moment later.

  “Grab a seat,” I said.

  John slid out one of my guest chairs and sat across from me at my desk. “I got a little bit from one of my CIs. Nothing really actionable, but I guess it was the latest word on the streets. Kind of interesting as well.”

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  “I guess Charles was in some methamphetamine deals with another crew. The same crew that was led up by Angel Guerro.”

  “That is interesting,” I said. “Think maybe Charles was behind Guerro’s murder and this was Guerro’s crew getting their retribution?”

  “I don’t know yet. Any word back on what Rick got on the scene?”

  “I’m betting that he’s just getting started with all of his processing now. That’s if he’s even back from the scene yet. Maybe by this evening we’ll know more.”

  “Sure,” John said.

  “Do you have any kind of sheet of Charles’s associates that we can get on?”

  “I’ll get something put together for you. Planning on shaking some trees?”

  “It’s about all that I can do until we get anything concrete from forensics. If you can get me some names, I can get Timmons from patrol on putting the word out across the wire. If we can get a couple people in here, who knows, maybe we’ll stumble upon a talker.”

  “Sure. I’m going to make a few more calls too and see if I can get anywhere. I’ll bring by a list in a little bit.”

  “Appreciate that. Hey, do you know if our blond-haired guy was part of Treadwell’s crew?”

  “Did we get an ID on him? I didn’t recognize the guy.”

  I pulled out my notepad and found the name that Officer Johnson had given Jones on scene. “We have a patrolman that believes this to be a Michael Woodward.”

  “The name doesn’t ring a bell, but I’ll look into it.” John scooted his chair back and stood. “Let me know what trickles in from forensics.”

  “Will do,” I said.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Chris

  The sound of Brad’s laughter jarred Chris awake. He cracked his eyelids. The pounding in his head started as soon as his vision came into focus. He stared at the numbers on the cable box, 10:38 a.m. Chris sat in the recliner, his feet perched up on the leg rest. He looked down at the bottle of beer he still held in his hand. Chris reached down and set the beer on the floor beside his chair. He reached his right hand up, ran it through his couple-of-inches-long brown hair, and gripped his head, hoping the pain would subside.

  “Rise and shine,” Brad said.

  “Ugh,” Chris mumbled.

  He glanced over at the beat-up leather sofa to see Tim and Brad seated on each end—Tim nearer to him. Both guys wore old T-shirts and shorts. Tim held a Styrofoam cup of soda from Barrilleaux’s Pit Stop, the mom-and-pop gas station and restaurant down the long dirt driveway and across the street from the house. He tucked the straw into his goatee-wrapped mouth and gnawed on the end before taking a drink.

  Both Tim and Brad’s feet were up on the coffee table in front of them. Empty beer and booze bottles from the previous night’s celebration filled the surface of the table that their feet didn’t occupy.

  “There’s some aspirin on the table,” Brad said.

  Chris leaned forward, grabbed the aspirin mixed in with the empty bottles from the table, and tossed a couple of pills back, dry.

  Brad and Tim mindlessly stared at the small television playing some sports bloopers program. Brad’s thin face winced, probably with pain, and then he chuckled as he looked at the screen and watched a kid on a skateboard catching a stair handrail with his nether regions. Tim’s face remained stoic.

  “When did you get back?” Chris asked.

  “A little while ago,” Tim said. “The girlfriend comes home on break from the hospital around six or seven in the morning, so I wanted to be there.”

  “Where’s David?” Chris asked.

  “He went to fence the watches and jewelry. He should be back in an hour or so,” Brad said.

  “Did he say that he had an idea on what he’d get?” Chris asked.

  “He said probably around three grand,” Brad said.

  “So another seven fifty each. Okay,” Chris said. He did a little mental math. “We need to get this Solomon job done and be on our way. Start again someplace new before anyone has a clue as to what we’re doing.”

  “That’s kind of what I was thinking too,” Brad said. He took his baseball hat from his head, pulled his thin blond hair back, and put his hat back on.

  Chris saw Tim shake his head.

  “What?” Chris asked.

  “Nothing,” Tim said. He stretched and cracked his neck from side to side. Tim spread out his faded tattoo–covered arms across the back of the tattered couch.

  Chris stared over at him. Tim had barely drunk the prior night. While Chris, Brad, and David celebrated the score, Tim had seemed disinterested, or bothered by something. He’d spent most of the late-night hours sitting at the dining room table, text messaging his girlfriend. The rest of the group talked about beaches, booze, women, and giving up the life—Tim didn’t join in on the conversation. While the rest plowed through two bottles of whiskey, into the morning hours, Tim went home.

  “What?” Chris asked again.

  “All right. I just have to say it. David isn’t right in the head,” Tim said.

  “The women?” Chris asked.

  “Just everything. He’s a damn psychopath. The two women, he just executed them in the street. Not a second thought. We agreed to use them as leverage and then let them go. That was the plan, was it not?”

  Chris shrugged. “Look, I can’t say that I was thrilled with it, either, but it was what it was. We’ve all seen the inside before. Best way to not see it again is to not leave any witnesses.”

  “They were women, and we’ll be gone in a week,” Tim said. “They would have never fingered us.”

  “You don’t know that,” Chris said.

  “How many jobs have you done with this guy, Brad?” Tim asked.

  “I’m going to stop you right there,” Chris said. He crossed his big arms over his even bigger chest. “Don’t start questioning his methods. He won’t like it. If you don’t like his actions, well, I guess you can seek employment elsewhere. If you start giving David a problem, he won’t hesitate to take care of it, if you catch my drift.”

  “Yeah, we have a good deal going on here, Tim,” Brad said. “Just let it be. You’re out, you’re making money. Just leave it alone.”

  “I’m just making an observation. He kind of went all off the rails on Guerro too. Did the guy need to be shot seventeen times? Did he need his damn thumb chopped off?” Tim asked. “Probably not.”

  “Look,” Chris said. He leaned forward in his chair. “If you don’t want a problem, the kind of the permanent variety, you’ll drop the topic.”

  “Yeah, well, he says some shit to me like he did last night again and we’re definitely going to have a real problem.”

  “What are you talking about?” Brad asked.

  “He threatened to kill me. Just stared at me with his dead eyes. He was as serious as it gets.”

  Brad said nothing.

  “You were brought on to enforce. Do that, and count your money,” Chris said. “David isn’t the kind of person to get on the bad side of. You think what he did to those women was bad? You have no clue.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I finished writing the names that Rick gave me—Michael Woodward, LaMarcus Taylor, and Charles Treadwell. The id
entities of the men had been confirmed, and they were who we thought they were on scene.

  “You said you had an ID for one of the women?” I asked.

  “Positive ID on the Caucasian woman,” Rick said. “Gretchen Ramey.”

  I asked for a spelling and wrote it down.

  “She has a prior for assault. It’s about seven or eight years old.”

  “A woman with an assault charge, huh?” I asked.

  “Yeah, who knows. But there’s more here. When I pulled her up, there was an alert to call the Plant City PD. The missing persons report was filed yesterday morning. Her whereabouts were last confirmed Sunday.”

  “So she’d been kept for a day or two before meeting her end in the alley.”

  “Appears so,” Rick said. “Did you want me to make the call?”

  “No. I’ll do it. You keep plugging away at whatever you have to do yet. Still nothing on the other female?” I asked.

  “Nothing on her prints. She’ll be logged as a Jane Doe, and we’ll have to put her approximate age, height, weight, and description out and see what comes back.”

  “That reminds me,” I said. “I tried calling Steinberg with the descriptions of the women earlier, but he wasn’t in. Now that we know the one was reported missing, maybe the other was as well. I need to call him back.”

  “Sure,” Rick said.

  I glanced up from my writing, seeing motion in my peripheral vision. Hank was standing in my doorway. I waved him in and pointed at the guest chairs. He sat.

  “What about the firearm? Anything on the numbers?” I asked.

  “I just put Rob on it a couple minutes ago,” Rick said. “I’ll give you a ring as soon as we know anything as far as registration. I’m sure I’ll hear from Ed at the ME’s office regarding getting the bullets that have been removed from the bodies. A little bit more information on that front, though. We had a total of nine shots fired on the scene. Two in each body, aside from the one who took the shot from under the chin. That was his only GSW. The firearm has eight bullets remaining in a seventeen-round magazine.”