Dead Drop: A Girl's Guide to Homicide

by D. A. Brown

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Dead Drop

  The Girl’s Guide to Homicide - Book One

  D.A. Brown

  Cover design by Alex Tibio

  Author Photo by Melissa Fenno Photography

  Copyright © 2017 Debra A. Brown

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Published by MercerWeave Press, LLC

  Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-9985995-0-2

  Ebook ASIN

  For Deborah Brooks: Your loyalty, love and encouragement makes life a joy.

  This book took so long, I’m undoubtedly going to forget to thank someone. If I leave you out, you have my sincerest apologies.

  I’m old enough to know that I’m incredibly lucky to still have both my parents in my life. Thank you, Ray and Yvonne Brown, for allowing me to nurture an imagination from a very young age and encourage me to indulge in the arts. And a special thanks to my Mom for enduring an amazingly horrible first draft that shouldn’t have been foisted on my worst enemy. You’re a trooper.

  To my brother Steve who did it before me when he published a biography of his mother-in-law many years ago. My sister-in-law, Alison doggedly scouted locations for me in the Bay area, reporting back with photos and geo-tags. Thank you for making the locations believable.

  Kate Cronon also read a crappy first draft and gave me wonderful insights and suggestions. Thank you.

  To my beta readers, James Forkner and Marissa Brooks, thank you for your great suggestions and kind words.

  John Hough, Jr., you are an editor extraordinaire and tireless cheerleader.

  Melissa Fenno, your photos were amazeballs. And it was fun pretending to be a supermodel for a few hours.

  Alex Tibeo, thank you for a cover that won over even the harshest critics.

  For encouraging me from the beginning and selflessly providing tips, thank you Mary Buckham.

  Deb, thanks for putting up with the craziness that accompanies the writer’s life.

  And last but not least, I’d like to thank the women and men of the Seattle Police Department. I know what you do everyday, what you give up and what you endure. Be safe always.

  For more information and to join my mailing list at www.writerdabrown.com

  About the Author

  D. A. Brown is a detective with the Seattle Police Department Criminal Intelligence Section specializing in threat assessment and cyber crimes. She’s also a task force officer with the FBI’s Cyber Crimes Task Force. She lives in West Seattle.

  CHAPTER ONE

  August 2000

  She will never forget her first dead body. To be precise, there were two - a mother and her teenage daughter. In her third field rotation, student officer Sophia Benedetti arrived with her field training officer shortly before the homicide detectives, but after the district car had already been dispatched on a welfare check, when the mother hadn’t reported for work that afternoon. Just as they rolled up to the meticulously landscaped Tudor, an officer bolted out the front door and vomited on the lawn.

  Her FTO was a twenty-year veteran with a less than stellar attitude about the job but an impeccable record as a trainer. Dead bodies were considered good teaching moments for new officers, especially rookies still on probation and fumbling through field training straight out of the academy. He’d volunteered Sophia for the call.

  "Maybe we should let one of the other guys handle this one.”

  "I'm good,” she said and marched through the front door.

  Soft rock hummed on the stereo. Magazines and catalogues, sorted and dog-eared, were littered across a coffee table. Wadded up on the corner of a couch was a cashmere throw, a paperback nearby. Everything looked as ordinary as you would expect in a family home.

  Sophia stepped around the corner and into the kitchen. A wine glass and a tumbler sat on a built-in breakfast nook next to an empty bottle of Zinfandel. Family pictures covered the front of the refrigerator. A couple of dishes in the sink; a few more on the kitchen counter.

  Sophia followed the staccato sound of cops moving around upstairs while her radio chirped with requests for supervisors, a public information officer, CSI, all coming from the rooms above her. Patrol was always the first to arrive, and their job was to secure the scene and get the right people there to take over the investigation. But human nature being the curious beast that it was, brought with it every rubbernecker not already on the call. The house was filling quickly with officers and commanders.

  She climbed the stairs slowly.

  “What kind of fucking animal does this? And to a kid? Jesus Christ.”

  “My wife wants one of these beds. Wait until I tell her about what happened on this one…”

  Four medics passed her in the hall. They all nodded as they squeezed by with their gear.

  Another couple of medics came out of a bedroom at the top of the stairs.

  “I didn’t sign up for this shit,” a female medic said to her partner as she met Sophia’s eyes.

  Sophia looked past the woman and saw the first body, lying on a pastel bedspread. The girl couldn't have been much older than fifteen. Her face was slack and her eyes still open. Blood covered the front of her night gown and pooled onto the floor.

  Sophia’s FTO tried to pull her away.

  "Don't go in there. You’ll piss off homicide.”

  Sophia stood in the doorway surveying the bedroom. Stuffed animals with black, button eyes stared down from a dresser. The walls were covered with posters and photos of smiling boy bands and track and field ribbons. On a built-in desk was an open laptop displaying a screensaver of several young girls, their faces frozen in unguarded and unabashed glee.

  The master bedroom was at the end of the hall. Four officers stood around something on the floor. Sophia peered into the room. What she thought had been a bedspread was the body of an adult female, presumably the girl’s mother. Her blond hair was matted with blood as it swirled against the carpet. Embedded in her throat was a large screwdriver. When she told the story later, Sophia would marvel at how she could still see the black and orange handle
with the bold ‘Craftsman’ lettering glowing in the dim room.

  “Sweet Jesus.”

  “This is a bad one." An officer she didn't recognize held her gaze and then looked away.

  The scene was surreal. That's how she’d choose to remember it.

  Sophia walked to a large window at the end of the hall and looked out at Lake Washington. Her reflection signaled back that she’d forgotten she had cut off most of her dark brown hair and the hairstyle was still foreign to her. Her kevlar vest and uniform gave her lean frame some bulk, etching an oddly androgynous image. At a distance, she’d easily be mistaken for a man.

  “Hey rookie, don’t go walking through a bunch of blood and shit and tracking it all over the place.”

  The cop looked older than her grandfather. He stood in the corner, an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth. Sophia strained to read his name tag.

  “It’s Miller.” He didn’t move forward, didn’t make any pretense of a proper introduction.

  “Benedetti.” Sophia held her ground. “How’d you know?”

  “Cuz, boot rookies still polish their shoes and their gun belt. And they don’t have these.” He pointed to a poorly sewn patch over his uniform shirt where his holster had rubbed a hole. “Also, your FTO is my old partner. Stig Hansen is good people. You got lucky.”

  “I did.”

  “Like I said, just watch and learn. Stig’s a little soft but he’s a good cop.”

  Sophia scanned the hallway for Hansen before returning to the window and the scene below.

  The full moon bathed the back yard in an eerie shade of pale gray, reflecting in a lap pool below her. Adirondack chairs surrounded a small fire pit on a terraced ledge framed by lavender. Sophia imagined a late summer afternoon of laughter and cold drinks, quick dips in the lake after a strenuous round of touch football.

  Her eyes drifted over the long, narrow dock behind the terrace where a twenty-seven foot Sea Ray Sundancer bobbed softly in the water below. Something glinted near the boat’s bow. Sophia ran past Miller and down the stairs. She sprinted through the kitchen and out the back door.

  "Where the hell is she going?"

  "Probably gonna lose her dinner,”

  Her FTO followed, breathing heavily despite the downhill slope.

  “Benedetti, hold up.”

  “There's someone out there.”

  She ran down the grassy slope to the water, the beam from her flashlight jumping with each stride. She drew her gun, married it to her flashlight and scanned the dock.

  "What the fuck, Benedetti?" A tall squad mate named Jack came up behind her with Hansen.

  "I saw something down here.”

  "What?” Hansen’s breathing was labored. He leaned over with his hands on his knees to catch his breath.

  “I don't know. Something moved. I saw it from upstairs.” She walked slowly down the dock, keeping the beam of her flashlight as steady as the adrenaline would allow, shifting her attention from the SeaRay below to a fiberglass shed at the end of the pier.

  “I can’t see shit,” Jack whispered.

  Sophia paused and listened to the voices filter down from the house. Water lapped against the shore. The boat rocked in rhythm with the current.

  He lunged from behind the shed, crashing violently into Sophia and lifting her off of her feet, forcing all of the air out of her lungs. She twisted out of his grasp as the two fell to the dock, his right arm cocking back with a large butcher knife pointed at her chest. The vest wasn’t going to stop it nor was she going to win against his strength and gravity.

  Officers would later testify that she told him to drop the knife, but she had no recollection of saying a thing. He was on her so fast that the muzzle of her gun buried itself in his chest as the round from her Glock exploded through his heart. But the bullet didn't stop the momentum of the knife’s path into her shoulder.

  When the lab came back with the results from the weapon, her DNA profile was mixed with the mother and daughter. She later learned that the suspect was someone the mother had picked up at a local bar and brought home for a night cap.

  As the medics rolled her on a stretcher to the Medic One rig, Hansen grabbed her hand.

  “Thanks for the paperwork, Benedetti.”

  He leaned in and whispered, “Welcome to the club.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Present Day

  Sophia’s drive into work from West Seattle was predictably slow. It was raining sideways again, the drops flying from light gray to dark gray, propelled by wind from the southwest. It was day five of unrelenting rain and grayness, turning Seattle into a caricature of itself. Even the weather forecasters were glum, having lost any interest in sugarcoating the news. It was going to be one of those winters.

  The inside of her five year-old Jeep looked like a cross between a locker room and a doggy daycare. Old running shoes she’d meant to stash in the dumpster at work, filled the footwell of the backseat behind her. And fur from Bodhi, her Labrador Retriever, swirled inside the cabin, buoyed by an ever present draft. Two gym bags occupied most of the cargo hold, their contents long forgotten. A white exterior had been a perfect choice for the truck, but a black interior had to be the single worst color for someone who did not excel at cleanliness.

  Sophia dialed her voicemail. She had two calls; one from her mother asking if she was going to make it to California for Christmas and the other, from her friend Robin.

  She called Robin first.

  “When am I going to see you?” Robin said.

  “I’m a shitty friend.”

  “You are and yet, I still want to see you.”

  “How about drinks next week? I’m slammed the next few days.” Sophia tapped her brakes and reflexively looked into her rear-view mirror.

  “I will hold you to it and I will make you pay for all the frickin’ martinis I’m going to drink. You cops make too much money as it is.”

  “Thanks, counselor. I’m sure you could find a way to write off your alcohol habit onto one of your dirtbag clients. By all means, let a public servant support TiniBigs martini bar. I’ll call you later and set up a time.”

  Robin was Sophia’s last best friend. She was the only one who hadn’t married a lawyer or an accountant and moved out to the suburbs. She had a successful law practice defending the same people Sophia arrested. The two of them had both survived horrible men and it bonded them like sisters.

  Sophia skipped the call to her mother, who was just angling to smooth things out between Sophia and her father. It was going to take more than a quick visit to Tiburon to mend the mess she and her father had left behind. Four years later, he still couldn’t forgive her for leaving California to become a cop, a profession he held in low regard. Every conversation between the two ended in a vicious argument. She’d inherited her relentless stubbornness from him.

  Seattle Police Headquarters was one half of the Justice Center, sharing the block-long building with the municipal court. A largely uninspired stone and glass exterior housed several detective units including homicide, robbery, sexual assault, domestic violence and gangs. The remaining floors were crammed with records management, information technology, fiscal and human resources. The eighth floor was largely reserved for the Chief and his inner circle of assistant chiefs and civilian managers.

  Sophia dodged an incoming Crown Vic as she traversed the parking garage, swiped her access card and entered Headquarters from the back side. She descended the stairs to the sixth floor and quickly rounded the corner to her cubicle. A couple of guys were already in, evidenced by the soft tapping of computer keyboards.

  Her partner, Tommy Stinson had already assumed his morning position; chair tipped back, feet up on the desk and a newspaper opened wide but at a strategic distance from his gleaming and pressed white dress shirt. They shared the space between standard issue cubicles made of pegboard wood and fabric borders.

  “You’re playing with fire allowing newsprint within fifty feet of your fancy Nordstro
m suit, aren’t you?”

  “I like to live on the edge.”

  At sixty, Tommy was seven years past retirement eligibility but he still loved the job. He was a dead ringer for a slightly younger Harrison Ford, minus the facial scar and movie star money. Blue eyes, the color of robin’s eggs, softened the edge of his graying hair.

  He rubbed his chin. “I’m thinking of growing a beard, what do you think?”

  “Don’t like ‘em.”

  “On anyone or just me?”

  “Anyone. It’s not fair that men can change their look so drastically.” Sophia said.

  “Someday, you’ll have a beard. Maybe you’ll change your mind.”

  “Jesus, Tommy.” Sophia laughed, picked up the file on her desk and swatted him with it. She looked at the memo affixed to the front of the folder. A large, red ‘Confidential’ was stamped on the white space below the narrative. The victim, Grace Halifax, was five years-old and in a special learning program at a local private school for children with autism. Sophia’s unit didn’t get many cases from private schools. Most of those students came from families with enough money and influence to keep child abuse off of their resumes.

  The memo was confusing. Her sergeant, Randy Pierson, had used terminology that was completely foreign to her. ‘Avatar, MMO, Furries.’ There was no way he came up with those terms on his own. Someone had dictated this to him.

  Sophia pulled her chair up and flipped up the top sheet and scanned the second page.

  “What the hell is a ‘furry’?”

  Stinson chuckled. “As I understand it, furries are perverts who get off on having sex with people dressed up like animals. Like mascots. You know, someone who gets wood over say, the Mariner Moose.”

  “Jesus. I thought I’d heard everything.”