by CJ Lyons
“No signs of anything missing, but we’ll go through the house with Raziq and his wife to be sure. There’s a floor safe in the master bedroom closet, but it doesn’t appear to have been disturbed. If it was more than one killer, then I doubt it was the boyfriend in a crime of passion.”
“Anyone talk with the boyfriend yet?”
“He’s at a hockey tournament. I’ve got a uniform picking him up.”
“Pretty cold, killing your girl and her baby sister then going to play hockey.”
He shrugged. They’d both seen worse.
“Point is, Burroughs, I’m not seeing anything that makes this my jurisdiction.” She was juggling close to two hundred open cases, and with court dates approaching for several of her team members, her ability to put bodies in the field was dwindling. As the Bureau moved its focus and resources to counterterrorism and financial crimes, Lucy’s Sexual Assault Felony Enforcement team was perpetually overworked and undermanned with an ever expanding list of crimes—internet pornography, human trafficking, high-risk missing persons, and crimes against children, to name a few—falling under their purview.
Burroughs led her back across the slate foyer to the dining room, which appeared untouched. “Could be a hate crime. Anti-Islamic. That would be yours.”
“Could also be the boyfriend or a home invasion or the father. All of which would be yours.”
“If it’s the father, it’d be an honor killing. Wouldn’t that be like a hate crime?” He tried a coaxing smile. “Two out of three, I win.”
“You suck at math, Burroughs.”
“Look, Lucy.”
Oh, no, he was using her first name. Next would come the dimples and the boyish charm.
He surprised her. He got serious—something Burroughs rarely did. “If Raziq’s gonna bring in the DEA and the State Department and Lord knows who else from alphabet city, I need some back up. Otherwise those two girls are going to end up in the fridge.”
The fridge was the Pittsburgh nickname for their cold case files. Lucy frowned, glancing beyond Burroughs to the foyer, her gaze fixed on the tiny handprint.
Bloody handprint coming out of the living room. Instead of answering Burroughs, she moved past him and crouched at the edge of living room carpet where the floor transitioned into slate. Below the handprint a bloody child’s footprint fell half on the carpet, half on the slate.
Burroughs hovered behind her, watching. He knew better than interrupt. She grabbed her high intensity LED flashlight and craned her face down parallel to the slate as she shone it across the foyer and down the hall beside the stairs to the kitchen.
“There isn’t any more blood.”
“No. He must have grabbed her, carried her to the kitchen through the living room. That’s where all the blood is.”
“But there weren’t any bloody footprints in the kitchen.” She didn’t wait for his answer. Spinning on her heels, she directed her attention back to the living room, focused on the carpet and the rug. Immediately inside the entrance to the room, across from the fireplace, a chair had been moved about four inches from where the indentations of its legs had sunk into the carpet. Not tossed or turned in the midst of a struggle. Deliberately moved to have a better view of the killing.
It was an upholstered chair, boxy and Middle Eastern in style with beautifully carved legs. And on the floor near the left hand side, was a long ash. Cigar.
“Does Raziq smoke cigars?”
“I don’t know. We’ll check.” He motioned for a crime scene tech to photograph and process the chair and area around it. “Would have gotten there sooner or later. Why is it so important?”
She stood, knees popping, reminding her that she’d skipped her last few workouts. Thirty-seven and already creaking, that couldn’t be good.
In an effort to answer his own question Burroughs retraced Lucy’s steps, examining the handprint and footprint just beyond the edge of the living room and then the chair.
“The little one saw her sister, turned and ran. One of the actors chased her, caught up with her, took her to the kitchen—” His face cleared and he nodded, slowly, enlightenment dawning. “You were wrong.”
“I was wrong,” she admitted. “There were three of them, not two. Two to do the dirty work and one to watch.”
“Except they weren’t counting on the little girl.”
“Right. So the watcher, Mr. Fancy Cigar, grabbed her and took her to the kitchen himself. He didn’t have blood on his shoes, that’s why no prints in the foyer or kitchen.”
“He killed Badria. Guy must have some experience. It was a clean strike, no fuss, no muss. Was he trying to save the little girl pain? Some kind of warped mercy, taking her out so fast?”
She closed her eyes for a moment, blocking out the room with its grisly contents. Sighed and opened them again. “No. He wanted to get back to the main event.”
Her voice tightened with anger. It was hard work not letting her cases get personal—but how could she when so many came across her desk? Her job as a supervisor wasn’t like Burroughs’; she didn’t have the luxury of putting everything she had into one case. Across the room, the ME’s men were finally moving Mina’s body. The smiling girl from the photo on the mantle tugged at her heart.
Lucy continued, “He killed Badria fast, but not out of mercy. He did it because her sister was still alive and he didn’t want his entertainment interrupted.”
Although her voice was low and no one except Burroughs heard her, everyone in the room stopped what they were doing. All eyes followed the ME’s men as they removed Mina’s body, now triple wrapped in a sterile sheet, plastic, and a body bag.
Good, hardworking men and women, standing silent out of respect for what the girl had endured. Their eyes were hard, not out of apathy, but because they cared about their job, cared about the victims who were their job. They would do whatever it took to find the men, the monsters who’d preyed on these innocents.
Lucy’s hands curled into fists. Useless reflex, but she couldn’t help it. Mina’s smile in the photo above the fireplace caught at her again. All she could think of was her own daughter, Megan.
Like many law enforcement officers, Lucy was secretly superstitious. Magical thinking, her husband Nick called it. By doing her job, throwing everything into her fight for the victims, she blackmailed the universe into keeping her own family safe.
Silly, maybe, but it was the best she could do: hope that Someone, Somewhere, was Up There, keeping score.
She didn’t take her eyes from the photo on the mantle as she told Burroughs, “I’m in.”
Chapter 3
Standing in the front hall of his grandmother's Ruby Avenue row house, Andre Stone stared at the brass knob on the front door. Outside. Panic sang like electricity through his veins at the thought of turning it. Twenty-seven years old, eight of them spent serving his country, the last two from behind the doors of sterile hospital rooms the size of prison cells.
How many doors had he gone through with his men in Kandahar? Hundreds. And he'd never felt the fear inspired by this one. More than fear. Terror.
Difficult for a Marine to admit. But when he was in the burn unit and got his first glimpse in the mirror, Andre had decided the one thing he wouldn’t run from was the truth.
“You ready, Sergeant?” Dr. Nick Callahan’s voice sounded in Andre’s Bluetooth earpiece.
“I guess.” Andre hated the uncertainty that haunted his voice. So different from two years ago when he led a squad in Afghanistan. Or from eight years ago when he ran these lawless streets intent on mayhem and impressing his homeys.
The memory of his old bad-assed cretin self stopped him. Did they even use the word “homey” anymore? Showed how far he’d come from the streets of Pittsburgh’s most gang-ridden neighborhood. How far he’d fallen by returning here, the only home he had left after the Marines. A home where he didn’t dare show his face in broad daylight.
Andre took a deep breath and opened the door. The sun had
dwindled to a faint smudge in the sky, leaving the daylight murky. Not dark, yet not light. Perfect time for a monster to roam.
The cold air stung as he breathed through his nose. A good thing. It meant he could wear his mask without attracting attention. Lord only knew what he’d do once it got warm outside. The mask covered his entire head with special openings for where his ears and nose used to be and was a shade of brown not found anywhere in nature. It was going to be impossible to conceal.
“Maybe this isn’t such a good idea,” he hedged.
“I can drive over and we can do it together.”
“Don’t know how I feel about a shrink with a death wish,” Andre quipped. Watching out for his redheaded, paler-than-pale trauma counselor on a Friday night in this neighborhood was more than Andre could handle right now. Only thing worse than chickening out by himself would be failing the Doc up close and in person.
Callahan chuckled. “Let’s do this.”
Stretching for every ounce of courage in his body, Andre stepped over the threshold and onto the porch.
“Outside the wire,” he told the Doc. No one seemed to notice: no women screamed, no children cried, no gunshots rang out. First time out alone in daylight—okay, dusk, almost-night—and so far, so good.
He took a step forward. Across the street a bright jumble of Christmas lights blazed to life. Andre jumped, rattling the bars on the screen door blocking his escape back inside where it was safe. Making enough noise to wake the dead—or Grams, napping in her room. She slept in the old dining room, fixed up with a special hospital bed his docs had ordered to help his skin grafts heal better. But she was an old lady blind with diabetes and had already lost a few toes to the disease as well. She needed it more than Andre. Besides, the egg crate mattress he’d gotten for his old twin bed was way more comfortable than the wooden pallet he’d slept on in Hajji Baba.
“Breathe, just breathe,” Callahan coached.
Thanks to modern technology and the heart rate monitor Andre wore, they both could see Andre’s vitals on their phones. The Doc wore one as well and, as soon as they began to run in earnest, Andre was determined to set a pace that would send the shrink’s pulse into overdrive. Only fair given what Callahan was making him go through. Facing reality, rejoining the world, all that bullshit.
“I’m fine.” Andre scowled at how difficult it was to talk when your jaws had locked shut with panic. His fist tightened around the Beretta M9 in the pocket of his hoodie. Callahan didn’t know he had it, but no way in hell was Andre going to be the only unarmed black man prowling Ruby Avenue.
“Your turn to pick the tunes," Callahan said.
Andre chose a driving hip-hop beat, mainly because he knew Callahan hated the dirty lyrics, and sprinted down the porch steps. They’d done this before, running together but not together, but always on their treadmills, never outside where people might see Andre.
“Just an easy run over to Holy Trinity, up the bell tower, ring the bells and back down, right Doc?” Andre joked.
“If you say so, Quasimodo.” The Doc never flinched at Andre’s warped humor.
Still, Andre kept trying. After all, his black—pun intended, given that he was a black man who’d had most of the upper half of his body scorched black, haha—humor had a 99% success rate, having driven away his friends (the ones still alive), most of his nurses and doctors, all of his family except his blind grams, and of course, his wife. No, couldn’t forget Darynda, could he? Bitch ditched him just when he needed her most, leaving him to come home from rehab to an empty apartment with three months rent due.
A wave of despair flooded over him, his pace faltering as he began to hyperventilate again. His footsteps faltered, fallen soldiers—empty drug vials—popping and cracking beneath the soles of his shoes.
“You’re not breathing,” Callahan chided, his Southern accent sounding out of place against the background sound of the Ying Yang Twins. “Got your bag handy?”
The bag was an airplane sickness bag—handy if you had to barf, which Andre felt like he might, or were hyperventilating and needed a bag to breathe into. It was nestled in Andre’s waist pack along with Andre’s inhaler, keys, med-alert info, knife, and water bottle. The burns had healed but the resulting scar tissue (pale and grey and pink heaped-up ugliness that honest to God Andre would have traded for the charred skin any day) didn’t sweat like it should, so Andre had to stay hydrated while exercising, even during a Pittsburgh December.
“Don’t need it,” he gritted out, pushing his pace fast enough to leave pain and memories behind. He was goddamn Dog Company, used to pounding the desert carrying fifty kilos on his back. No one could ever take that from him. Plenty of men lost their women, left bits and pieces of their bodies behind on the battlefield. Faces of his squad danced before him. Dead, all dead.
Stop your bitchin. Their voices filled his mind. Wanna trade places, Sarge?
Problem was, most days the answer to that question was: Yes.
A truth he’d never shared with the Doc, but Callahan was smart enough to figure out for himself.
Of course Andre wanted to die, rejoin his squad. He’d let them down in the worst way imaginable. By living, by surviving Hajji Baba, he’d failed them. Yeah, he’d tried his best to die, but his damn body just refused to give up the fight.
Andre focused on his pounding steps, his Beretta a comforting weight even as it pressed against the scars on his belly, pain crackling like lightning across his flesh.
The echo of his first drill sergeant’s bellow rang through his mind: Good thing you're not a Marine yet, dog meat. Because a real Marine only quits when he’s dead!
Slowly the pain and panic subsided. He could do this. He would do this. Because, goddamn it, there was one truth he couldn’t deny: He wasn’t dead yet.
<><><>
Text sent 16:47
Z: Status report.
Seis: Movement from house. Man leaving.
Z: Confirm identity.
Seis: Description match.
Z: Alert locals to intercept. Confine until my arrival.
Seis: Locals prepared. Force?
Z: Lethal, if necessary.
Chapter 4
Lucy wanted to go through the house, get a feel for its inhabitants, before interviewing Rashid Raziq. She didn’t want Burroughs or Walden to think she was naive, but she’d never had any personal exposure to Islamic culture beyond basic training sessions at Quantico. Hell, she’d never even traveled outside the country except for a long weekend with Nick to Toronto.
She climbed the stairs to the second floor where the bedrooms were located. How would Raziq react to the monstrous way his daughters were killed? If he was responsible, he might even be proud that he’d restored his family’s honor by butchering his wayward teen. The thought sickened her, but she couldn’t ignore the possibility.
Her heart lurched at the sight of Mina’s bedroom with its teenaged-girl-blossoming-into-womanhood mix of stuffed animals and photos of pop icons torn from magazines and pasted together into a collage of young male hunkiness. Lucy wondered how Mina's parents felt about that—or about the collection of religious and philosophical books lined up on her desk including a Christian Bible, the I Ching, and a Torah. She saw a typical teenager exploring their options and boundaries, not unlike her own thirteen-year-old, who pushed those boundaries every chance she got.
Would parents raised in a fundamentalist atmosphere see it that way? Or would they see Mina’s small rebellions as betrayal?
Walden caught up with Lucy as she rifled through Raziq’s desk in the downstairs study behind the dining room. Burroughs had a warrant to search the entire crime scene for physical evidence, so anything in quasi-plain sight was in bounds. Anything she happened across that wasn’t in plain sight, well, it might not be evidence but if it could give her any insight as to why Mina was targeted, and if Raziq’s past in Afghanistan had anything to do with it, then at least it was a starting point.
It was one of tho
se many gray areas when an investigator was expected to use their "best judgment" even though the ultimate decision would be made much later by the pundits in the press and lawyers arguing before a judge. That's when the breakthrough that "blew the case wide open" could just as easily turn into the fuckup that "sank it all." Hindsight was a bitch.
“Any word from Agent Haddad?” she asked Walden as she paged through Raziq’s passports. Turned out he and his family were Pakistani citizens but Raziq alone also had an Afghan passport. Paperwork in that corner of the world was less regimented than here. Made her wonder what documents might be inside his safe.
“The DEA duty agent says he hasn’t returned his messages.”
“How about the neighbors?”
“Quiet family, kept to themselves, only disturbances were when the daughter and father got into it. Once after her boyfriend dropped her off, and once when the daughter was attempting to leave and the father physically restrained her.”
“Mina was how old?”
“Fifteen. Enrolled at the Schenley Academy over in Highland Park.”
“Nice school. Expensive.” She glanced around the study again, searching for insight into its owner.
Like the living room, it was filled with tasteful handcrafted furniture, and a variety of expensive-appearing pieces including a mahogany display rack that held an assortment of antique guns and swords. Family heirlooms or trophies of war, she wasn’t sure. Maybe bought on eBay. She needed more on Raziq to see how deep his roots went. It said a lot that a man in his position had left his home country—countries—so easily. Big question was why?
“What about the mom?” she asked as she twirled a curved ceremonial dagger, balanced its intricately carved hilt across her fingers.
“The neighbors never see her except when she’s coming or going. Doesn’t drive, uses a car service when she goes out. They’re not sure if she speaks English or not.”
“Isolated.” She thought about that. Stared at the computer monitor hooked into the security system. Tons of bells and whistles yet no help since it hadn’t been on during the attack. The setup was pretty fancy and expensive for the neighborhood or a modest, unassuming house like this. More paradoxes. “Cultural? Or because Raziq is afraid of someone?”