Wrath (The Lieutenant Harrington Series Book 1)

by E. H. Reinhard

  I made a right onto the next street, NW Ninety-Second, and drove to the entrance to the back lot. After a quick right, I pulled through the gates. Steve followed me over to where we normally parked. I pulled the Bronco in, one slot away from a grass parking lot divider, and killed the motor. Steve made a Y-turn and backed into the empty slot between my truck and the grass.

  I jumped out of the truck, leaving the windows down, and slammed the door, which made its familiar rattle. I took a few steps to the building and stopped to wait on Steve, who was putting a sunshade in the windshield of his car. He hopped out and closed the door.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “For?” I asked.

  “Protecting the other side of my car from door dings with your heap.”

  “Heap?” I asked.

  “Yeah. You know, heap of garbage. Or crap?”

  “I get the reference, I just don’t know why you’d speak about Lucille like that.”

  “Lucille is a rust bucket that needs to be retired.”

  “That’s called patina,” I said. We headed to the building’s back door. “And with you being a car guy, I’d think you’d appreciate someone else driving a classic as a daily driver.”

  “There’s a difference between driving a classic and driving something that should come with a tetanus shot. The GN, on the other hand, now that’s a classic.”

  “I’m pretty sure you’re breaking some kind of rule by driving that thing without a mullet.”

  “I had one when I first got her, so I’m in the clear,” he said. “Grandfathered in.”

  I laughed and swiped my card in the reader of the building’s back door. “That’s great,” I said with a smile.

  We hit the stairwell halfway down the hall. Up a flight, we made a right out of the stairway and walked the hall until it came to a T.

  “I’m going to grab a coffee,” Steve said. He pointed to the right. The hall led to our building’s lunchroom. “Need one?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Black. No sugar.”

  “I’m familiar with the order,” Steve said.

  “All right. I’m just going to check in with the captain, and we’ll be ready to roll.”

  “Okay,” Steve said.

  I made a quick left then passed through the doorway to the homicide bureau office. Our unit was a big rectangle. The wall immediately to my left held the offices of Lieutenants Lopez, Dave Ramirez, who was our night shift lieutenant, and myself. The wall directly across held the offices of the captain and the major. Along the far left wall was one large meeting room. The far right wall held the restrooms and two smaller conference rooms that we often used to conduct interviews with friends and family of suspects and victims. For the interviews that required a bit more of the you’re in trouble approach, we used the interview rooms over at the Midwest District police patrol building that was just outside our front doors. Their observation rooms were more standard fare with recording equipment and observation mirrors. Smack in the center of our office was our bull pen. Five rows of four desks sat sunken ten inches down into the center of the big office room. Half of the desks had detectives plugging away at computers. The area was for our sergeants, detectives, and cold case unit. The desks for my guys were empty. It looked like a couple of the cold case guys were out, and one or two of the desks belonging to Lieutenant Lopez’s team were empty. I looked across the bull pen at the captain’s office. He was sitting at his desk inside, so I crossed the bull pen, saying a few hellos to the guys, and stepped up on the other side. I gave Halloway’s office door a tap with my knuckles and walked in.

  Halloway—late fifties, round faced, and clean shaved—sat at his desk. He focused on his computer monitor. A gray suit jacket hung behind him on his office chair. He wore a blue dress shirt and darker blue tie. “Harrington,” he said. He waved me toward his desk and the guest chair across from him.

  I took a seat. “Cap.”

  “The scene. How was it?” Halloway rocked back in his chair.

  “The guy got stabbed at his front door. Colt seemed to think it happened around midnight. And by stabbed, I mean a half dozen times in the gut and another pair in the side of the throat. So pretty brutal. No witnesses, no nothing. What we do have is a woman, who we’re thinking is the girlfriend, who left right around the time that this went down. We have an address but no phone number. Her name is Grace Mercer, no priors. Steve and I were just popping back in here to grab a car, check in with you, and head out to her house and see what we come up with.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “Miramar.”

  “What else do we know about her right now?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Other than she has a prescription for birth control at the deceased’s house. We have a name, a photo from her DL, a description from her DL, and a DMV record. With any luck, she’ll be home when we come knocking. Or someone will be there who can tell us something.”

  “Okay.” The captain tapped his fingertips on the top of his desk. “Anything else from the scene that we can work with?”

  “A cell phone that Colt sent Gomez back here with. I’m guessing it’s going to be a bit before it gets in the hands of the tech center and they start getting us any information from it. I mean, either way, that will be today but probably not for a few hours. Skip has the body and is going to put next of kin in contact with me. But again, we have some hours before any of that happens as well.”

  “Hey, Cap,” I heard. I looked over my shoulder, and Steve was leaning into the doorway and holding out a coffee—mine, I figured.

  “Sergeant,” the captain said.

  Steve walked in and passed me my cup.

  “Thanks,” I said and took a sip. The station’s brew was somewhere around acceptable—more gas station than coffee shop, but drinkable.

  Steve slid out the chair next to me and plopped down.

  “Garcia and Ryan?” Halloway asked. He scooped up a pen from his desk and spun it in his fingers.

  “They’re still on the scene,” I said. “I asked them to do a little more looking around. My guess is they’ll be back within the hour.”

  “With a murder weapon that has prints on it would be nice,” Steve said. “Or an eyewitness who saw what the hell happened.”

  “The neighborhood that it happened in, any video anywhere heading in or out?” the captain asked. He used his pen to scratch at his receding hairline.

  “It’s pretty residential over there,” Steve said. “And the house we were at was deep into that subdivision as well. Not really anything commercial that would have cameras aimed at the street.”

  “Yeah, I had the place up on a map on my GPS. It’s smack in the middle of a few hundred houses,” I said. “I’d have to think that the closest intersections that would or could have cameras would be a good quarter mile away. But I wouldn’t think that any of those intersections are busy enough to justify cameras that are real time. So unless our guy ran a red while coming to or leaving from the area, that’s probably going to be a bust.”

  “Okay. Find the woman, then. Are you guys heading out now?” Halloway asked.

  “Yup,” I said. “I’m just going to check my messages at my desk, grab a car from the lot, and we’re off.”

  “Let me know,” the captain said.

  I pushed my chair back from Halloway’s desk and stood. “I’ll give you a ring if we come up with anything. Otherwise, we’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

  “All right,” Halloway said.

  CHAPTER 8

  Steve and I drove an unmarked dark gray Crown Victoria north to the Miramar address of Grace Mercer. Having been a greater Miami native for my entire life, I prided myself on being pretty damn familiar with the area. Miramar, on the other hand, I was surprisingly unfamiliar with. My only real connection to the city was that I’d been to the giant futuristic looking FBI complex there a time or two since it opened, and I once dated a girl from there, Catherine Brundell, in my early twenties. But unless Grac
e Mercer lived at the FBI building or in Cathy’s old apartment, I was going to need some directions.

  “Can you pull up the address for me?” I asked.

  “I already have it up,” Steve said. He sat in the passenger seat, punching away at the screen of his phone. “Make a left on SW 184th Avenue. It should be about a mile and a half up.”

  “Got it,” I said.

  “So when are you going to pop the question?” Steve asked.

  Steve’s question about the question caught me off guard. I looked at him. “Where in the hell did that come from?”

  “I don’t know. A couple years into your forties, never been married, nice girlfriend who could tolerate you enough to move in with you, a nice girlfriend who also has never been married. Maybe it’s time.”

  The question sounded like something that Steve’s wife, Sasha, had put him up to saying. And it wasn’t lost on me that his wife and Amy were friends.

  “Is this you or Sasha asking? And if it’s Sasha, is it because Amy said something?”

  Steve smiled. “I told her that would be the first thing you’d say.”

  “Told who? Sasha or Amy?”

  “Sasha. Amy may have said something to her about it, though.”

  “So Amy wanted Sasha to ask you to ask me something about marriage?” I asked.

  “I think Sasha would be pissed if I said yes, so I’ll just nod my head up and down and not answer.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Aw, come on. Marriage isn’t so bad. There’s the bachelor party and the wedding night, and then there’s the honeymoon and the…” His sentence faded off. He seemed to be in thought. “Well, then there’s the spending every day of your life dealing with the same person and all their little habits that drive you insane. It’s great.”

  “You’re not really selling me right there,” I said.

  “Oh, and all the things that they did to get you to like them in the first place disappear, and all the little quirks that you used to think were cute now make you want to jab your eyes out with a hot poker. Then there’s the in-laws. Don’t get me started on the in-laws,” Steve said.

  “You just make it sound so appealing.”

  “I’m just screwing with you,” Steve said. “Marrying Sasha was the best thing I ever did. Plus if it doesn’t work for some reason, you can just give her all of your stuff, your money, your retirement savings, everything. Seems like a good deal, eh?” He chuckled. “Nah, if she’s the right one for you, pull the trigger. Seriously.”

  If I didn’t know that Steve and Sasha had a model marriage, I probably would have thought he was serious with half of his comments. I assumed he was mostly referring to his first wife. “I don’t know. Things seem to be pretty good as it is. Why start screwing with it?”

  “She wants to know that she’s the only one for you,” Steve said. “And for most women, that means you need to put a ring on her finger.”

  I didn’t have a response. I stared out the windshield at Miramar Parkway as we drove. A grass median with a single row of palm trees went on as far as the eye could see, separating the lanes of traffic. I rubbed my eyes and let out a breath. The more I thought about it, Amy’s and my relationship was considerably different than every last one that I’d been in prior to her. I’d never been in a relationship where marriage was ever an option. Normally at about the one-year mark, whoever I was dating left due to my job’s hours, my always being on call, or my general dedication to being a good cop. Somehow my profession managed to throw a wrench into things time and time again. Thinking about it, I might have held a record for one-year relationships.

  With Amy, it was different. She accepted everything. And aside from making it a year longer than most, she moved in as opposed to ending things. Perhaps I should give more thought to the question now floating around in my head, yet it needed to be at a different time—Steve and I were getting close to our scene. A minute or two and a red light later, I made a left onto our street and drove until we made a right at a roundabout. The road went down to a single lane in each direction—no sidewalks, no homes, no businesses.

  “This says restricted usage,” Steve said.

  I pointed out the windshield at an approaching building, which looked like a fancy guard shack. There was a sign directing Residents with an arrow to the right and Guests with an arrow straight ahead. I continued toward the guardhouse. No gate prevented me from driving through, but I pulled up, stopped, and dropped my window, anyway. The door of the building swung open.

  “Afternoon,” a man said. He looked to be somewhere in his seventies.

  “Sir,” I said. I unclipped my badge from my hip and held it out the window at him. “We’re here on work.”

  He gave me a quick dip of his head, and with a wave, he disappeared into the guardhouse.

  We drove through and followed the road into the subdivision. Big man-made ponds sat behind the homes on each side of the street. They were large enough that the developer probably referred to them as lakes. Each home, while large and probably worth a half million dollars each, was still just fifteen feet or so from touching the neighboring house. It seemed that the homes themselves took up about three quarters of the lots that they sat upon. Out of my driver’s side window, the road bent to the left at the end of the pond behind the homes.

  “There’s going to be a couple of roads that shoot off to our left up ahead where this pond ends,” Steve said. “We’ll want to make a left on the first one. It should be Fifty-Fourth Street.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  I followed Steve’s directions until we made the turn, found our house, and pulled to the curb on the opposite side of the street.

  We stepped from the car and crossed the street to the house. The home was two stories, beige, and had three garage doors facing the street. One large palm tree, surrounded by shrubs, stood near the sidewalk. Steve and I walked up the brick driveway and found our way to the front door. Steve hit the bell, and we waited.

  I didn’t hear footsteps or any sound coming from inside the house. No one came to the door.

  “At work maybe,” Steve said.

  “Yeah, probably. Let’s see if we have any neighbors at home who can tell us anything. Maybe they know where she works.”

  “I go left, you go right?” Steve asked.

  “Sure.”

  We left the front door and split up at the end of the driveway. I went to the neighboring house, which didn’t look all that different from Grace Mercer’s that I’d just walked from. I entered the covered front entryway and pressed the doorbell. The door lock clicked, and the door swung open a second later. A pair of twin girls stood side by side. I looked at one then the other. They were identical—maybe ten-year-olds with long dark hair and kind of sunken looking dark eyes. The two wore matching red-and-white dresses. Neither smiled or made any kind of facial expression at all. They didn’t say hello. They did nothing but stand there.

  “Um. Are your parents home?” I asked.

  Neither responded. They just stared. The one on the right bared its teeth at me. It didn’t look like a smile. The one on the left did the same a split second later. I figured I should probably turn around and walk away before they possessed my soul or worse.

  “Girls, who is at the door?” I heard a male voice call from somewhere in the house.

  A moment later, a thirties looking man appeared. “Girls, go watch television,” he said and shooed them from the door.

  The guy looked at me, probably trying to figure out who I was and why I was at his door. I was still trying to wrap my head around what the hell was up with the two kids.

  “Can I help you?” he asked.

  “Yeah. I’m Lieutenant Harrington from the Miami-Dade PD. I’m actually in the neighborhood to see your neighbor, Grace Mercer. Do you know her?”

  “I know her. Sure,” he said.

  “We stopped at her house, but she wasn’t home. Does she work during the day?”

  “Normally, yes.
She’s a Realtor. Is something going on?”

  “We’d just like to talk to her. You wouldn’t happen to know the realty office she works for or maybe what her phone number is, do you?”

  “Phone number, no. She works for Realforce Realty. The office is on Sixtieth Street across from the car dealership.”

  I wasn’t familiar with where he was talking about, but I’d look it up when I left. I pulled my small notepad from the pocket in my jacket and wrote down the name of the realty company.

  “This isn’t about Chris, is it?” the guy asked.

  I looked up from my writing. “Who is Chris?”

  “Her husband. He was acting kind of off this morning.”

  “Off like how?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. He was kind of rude was all. It was nothing.”

  I was intrigued by the fact that the woman was married and had a husband who’d seemed off only after the boyfriend had been murdered. “Did you want to tell me about the interaction with him this morning?”

  “It really wasn’t that big of a deal. I guess just a neighborly dispute.”

  “Humor me,” I said.

  The guy rocked his head back and forth. He looked as if he was wrestling with the thought of talking to a cop about his neighbor. “He was inappropriately dressed and standing in his backyard,” the guy said. “I asked if he could go inside and put some clothes on due to my daughters being outside. After I asked, he basically said no but not quite that nicely.”

  The term “inappropriately dressed” sounded odd to my ears. “How was he dressed?”

  “Boxer shorts and rubber gloves.”

  I nodded. I guessed that would fit the bill for the term inappropriately dressed. “Was he doing some cleaning or something?”