I looked to Ed. “Time frame?”
“They will be ready within the hour.”
Hank walked to my side. “Son of a bitch.” He shook his head and let out a big breath. “What does that say? Claire?”
I nodded. “Looks like it. You remember any murder victim named Claire?”
Hank shook his head. “It doesn’t sound familiar, no.”
Tires squealing overtook the sound of policemen and reporters. We all looked to our left. A burgundy BMW appeared from around the corner. It sped up the block toward our police barricade. The car veered to the right of the street and locked up the brakes. It wasn’t going to stop. The car slid through the plastic police barricade, hopped the curb and crashed into the back of Hank’s car. The sound of the impact echoed off the buildings. Hank’s car jumped forward into the unmarked cruiser I’d been driving. When the crunching stopped the BMW was three feet from the back of my car. Hank’s car was sandwiched between, half the size that it was a few seconds prior. I’d never seen a car get that small that fast. It was destroyed.
“What the hell! Son of a bitch!” Hank yelled.
The driver’s door of the BMW flew open and a man ran toward us. He was met by uniformed officers. He clawed against the patrolmen. They fought to restrain him. It was Judge Casey.
“Let him go!” the captain yelled.
The officers obeyed. Casey ran toward us. The captain tried to intercept him before he got to his daughter. The judge shoved Captain Bostok’s two hundred sixty pound body out of the way like he weighed nothing. Casey fell to his knees before his daughter and let out an ear piercing wail. He pawed at her. Rick tried to hold him back. The judge jerked himself free.
“You’re contaminating evidence!” Rick shouted.
I pulled the judge away. Hank stood to my side. We formed a wall in between the judge and his daughter. He tried getting past us—he couldn’t. The judge collapsed to the grass. He buried his head in his hands, and sat that way until the captain went to him. Bostok crouched to his side. I couldn’t hear what he said to the judge. It was another five minutes before the captain helped Casey to his feet and walked him to his daughter. Judge Casey knelt next to her. He rested his arms and head on the park bench. His shoulders rolled back and forth as he sobbed into his forearms.
I snapped my fingers at the captain and pointed. Casey had a pistol protruding from the back of his waistline. The captain shook his head at me to leave it alone.
I spent minutes watching the judge kneeling at the park bench. Rick had left to go inside and get started on the trace. Pax had moved on to search the park for evidence. The coroner’s van pulled up and drove along the park’s sidewalk and stopped a few feet from the park bench. The judge stayed with his daughter’s body until Ed had to take her away.
I looked around the scene. Hank had walked to the street to inspect at the crushed pea green metal that used to be his car. The captain stood next to a tree with Casey. They talked. From what I could overhear, Captain Bostok seemed to be trying to comfort him. They walked over.
“I’m going to take the judge over to the medical examiner’s,” the captain said.
I nodded. “What the hell are we supposed to do about this mess?” I jerked my chin to the street where four patrolmen and Hank where standing next to the pile of crashed cars. Scattered plastic from bumpers and headlights covered the street. The front door of Hank’s car hung off the side.
“Just get it all off the street. Have some of the guys from Patrol push everything into the parking structure. Call a truck to tow Rawlings car in if you need to. We’ll deal with it later.”
“Alright, I guess.”
The captain shuffled the judge from the scene. They walked across the street into the parking structure. I followed behind and joined Hank and the other officers.
“Cap wants us to get this pile off the road. We’re supposed to push everything inside.”
Hank gave me a reluctant confirmation.
We started with the judge’s BMW. Four guys pushing and we couldn’t get it to budge from the back of Hank’s hybrid. We tried lifting, we tried rocking. It wouldn’t come free. Sweat soaked my clothes. I had enough.
“To hell with this. I’m going to head inside and grab someone with a truck.”
I walked up the ramp into the parking structure. The captain drove my way. He stopped and dropped the driver’s side window.
The judge spoke to me from the passenger seat. “I’ll call my insurance company and explain to them what happened. I’ll cover whatever damages that need to be covered. I’m sorry.”
It was all that he said before the captain rolled up the window. I gave him a nod, and the captain pulled out. I walked inside and grabbed Timmons. He had a turbo diesel Ford pickup and seemed to light up when I told him that we needed to drag a couple cars with it. We chained the cars up one at a time and Timmons pulled them inside. A couple uniforms swept the debris from the street.
I walked back into the station. My suit was covered in dirt from cars and sweat. Hank trailed behind on his cell phone. “I’m heading to my office to change,” I said.
He let out a puff of air in anger and covered the mouthpiece of his phone. “I’m on hold with my damn insurance company. Number seventeen in queue.”
There was a message from Rick on my desk. It said he went to retrieve Jessica Casey’s clothing, and he’d let me know as soon as he got anything from the tests. I dialed Terry Murphy in our Tech Department. After fifteen rings, there was no answer. I caught the time on my watch. It was a quarter to eight. He’d be in any minute. I left him a message to pull all the footage from outside the station last night and told him to clear his desk. We’d be bringing in more.
Chapter 19
Hank finished his phone call with his insurance company and had met the rest of us in the meeting room.
“Get something set with your insurance company?”
“If you can call it that.” Hank continued. “They’d like a police report and the driver’s insurance information. After they receive those two things they can send out an adjuster sometime next week between the hours of 8:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. The customer service agent I spoke with said that they could narrow the window down to a single day if I could be on call to meet the adjuster.” Sarcasm and anger hung on his words.
“Sorry Hank. It will get sorted out. I’m sure the captain will sign off on you using one of the cruisers.”
He shook his head. “Damn, Karen is going to be so pissed off.”
“Karen?” I asked.
“It was the only one with all the options she wanted in that color in the state.”
“Wait, I thought you picked it out? Wasn’t it your car?”
“Yeah, well, you know.”
It was a gift wrapped opportunity to bust his chops about his wife—a slow, under hand pitch, just waiting to be knocked out of the park. I just nodded and left it alone. I wasn’t going to kick him while he was down.
We began hashing out our plan. Aside from whatever footage our station cameras picked up, the park was surrounded on all sides by high rise buildings. I was betting that, from their security footage, we’d catch multiple views of the body dump. The plan was to talk to the heads of security in each building and have a look at their outdoor surveillance. We’d need to find the person on camera and follow him on video to and from the park. It would be a process, but I liked our chances of getting something solid.
Timmons from patrol offered me up two of his guys to lend a hand—officers Henry and Telwan. Officer Henry I knew but had yet to work with Officer Telwan. I needed two more men, so I called in the detectives from the graveyard shift. There was a loud burst of thuds at the door and it swung open. Blocking all the light behind him, Detective Jones walked through the doorway with Detective Tony Donner following.
“Jones, Donner,” I said.
They made a quick round of handshakes with the uniforms that Timmons had lent us and turned their attention back to Ha
nk and I.
“You guys sleep yet?” I asked.
I received head shakes from both.
“Sorry guys, but we need the manpower. You give me a couple good hours here and you can have the night off with pay.”
Detective Jones’s voice boomed. “That works for me. I got a couple hours in me yet.”
“Thanks Jones.”
“How’s the late shift treating you?” Hank asked.
Hank’s question drew an annoyed stare from Detective Jones. After the Cross case, Detective Jones had been moved to nights. I wasn’t happy that they pulled him from me and he wasn’t all that pleased with being shuffled into the graveyard shift.
“About what you’d expect.”
“Are you ready to work in the daylight?” I asked.
“Daylight? What’s daylight?”
“What about you Donner? Are you alright for a few hours here?”
Detective Donner was a victim of Bob Cross. He’d been attacked while doing surveillance on my behalf. I tried to throw him a bone with some daytime hours as much as I could.
“If you’re giving us the night off, I’m good to go.”
I nodded.
I filled the detectives in on the plan and we headed out. We dedicated a channel on our radios and split up. Hank and I started with the McCormick hotel, a thirty-some story high rise that sat to the south of the park. Jones and Donner took the Market Bank of Tampa to the west. Officers Henry and Telwan took the group of restaurants and businesses to the north. Our police station was to the east.
Hank and I walked through the building’s front doors. Small trees in planters lined the perimeter of the interior drawing light from the all glass front. Orange modern chairs sat staggered through the sitting area of the lobby. Our heels clicked against the red marble floor on the way to the cherry wood front desk. The two receptionists that manned the counter watched as we walked up. With the two women’s unobstructed view of the park from their front desk, I guessed that they’d been taking in the scene out front all morning.
“Good morning. I’m Lieutenant Kane. This is Sergeant Rawlings from the TPD. Is there someone in charge of the building’s security we could speak with?”
The woman on the right spoke up. She looked to be in her mid-forties with short brown hair. She wore a blue blazer over a light blue blouse. A charm necklace dangled around her neck. Her gold colored name badge pinned to her chest told me her name was Patty. “That would be Ken Lyons. Let me page him for you.” She picked up the front desk phone and made the call.
The younger woman stationed on the left side of the desk spoke up. She looked to be in her late twenties. Her black-rimmed, trendy glasses suggested that she was trying to look sophisticated. Her name badge read Tiffany. “What happened?”
“A body was found in the park,” Hank said.
She gasped. “That’s horrible. We saw some kind of car accident this morning as well. What was that?”
Her question was an instant reminder of Hank’s crushed hybrid, the joys of dealing with his insurance company and of course, dealing with Karen’s wrath.
I could see his anger returning. I piped in. “Just that, a car accident.”
Hank’s face turned a dark shade of red, but he remained quiet.
A man approached from the hallway to the right of the front desk near the elevators.
“Here’s Ken, head of our security here,” Patty said.
He approached. The man had jet black hair with a black, short trimmed goatee. He wore a white button up shirt filled with badges and stars. A thin black tie hung from his neck. His black slacks were creased to perfection. A hundred dollar flashlight, a radio and a can of pepper spray clung to his belt. There was no mistaking him as a security guard. “What can I help you gentlemen with?” he asked.
“I’m Lieutenant Kane.” I pointed to Hank. “This is Sergeant Rawlings. You have video surveillance here, correct?”
“We use the Intellect Nine Thousand system with over sixty P-40 cameras.”
He tried to dazzle us with his intelligence. It was fine.
“Great. Do any of your cameras catch the park there?” I pointed out of the front of the building.
“A couple do.”
“Mind if we have a peek at the footage from last night?”
“Not at all. Come on back.”
He turned and headed back past the elevators to a door leading sitting center in the wall with a large employees only sign. Hank and I followed. The glitz and glamor from the front lobby was lost on the hallway we entered. A stark white covered the walls. Gray doors lined the sides. We trailed behind the security officer four doors down until he entered a room to his right marked security office.
“Right this way guys.”
We walked in and he took us into a room at the back. Inside was a wall of flat screen televisions. Stacked five high and four across, they each displayed a colored image from their dedicated cameras.
“You said we were looking for footage of the park?”
“That’s correct,” I said.
“Alright.” He focused his attention on the wall of monitors. “Looks like cam number two gets the east corner and cam ten catches a little more of the west of the park. Hold on one second.” He plugged away at a few keys of the command center’s keyboard and all the screens switched to different views. “These are the other twenty cameras. Looks like camera number nine is the one we are looking for here. It gives us a pretty clear view right out of the front doors.”
“Alright, can we see the footage from those three cameras from starting at 6:00 a.m. and work our way back?”
“Sure. What are we looking for?”
“Someone dumping a body in the park,” I said.
He was quiet for a second. “Is that what happened over there?”
“Yes.”
He brought the three camera views up on the screen. “These will start going backward at eight times speed. As soon as you see something, just say stop and we’ll check it out. You watch that one.” He pointed to Hank and then a monitor on the wall. “I’ll get this one.” He pointed. “You take that one.”
With our assigned screens, he started the video. After numerous stops that weren’t what we sought, Hank yelled out stop at 3:58 a.m. Ken rewound the footage another two minutes and hit play. We stared at the screen watching what we assumed was the body dump unfold. At 3:57 and nineteen seconds, a person in a large jacket with the hood pulled over their head appeared from the side of the frame pushing a shopping cart. From the video it appeared to be filled with something. They disappeared from the streetlights of the sidewalk into the park. Two minutes later, the same person that was pushing the shopping cart reappeared heading the way they came. The person wasn’t moving fast or slow, just a normal pace minus the cart. It was that simple. The person pushed Jessica’s body up in the cart, sat her on the bench, left the cart, and walked away.
“Is that the right time?” I asked.
“Our system is set to GMT minus four hours.”
A simple yes would have been sufficient. I let the other groups know what time to look for over the radio. I got a call back from Jones and Donner confirming they were looking at video and would head to the stated time. Officer Henry and Telwan confirmed the time but had yet to find any footage.
I pointed to the figure on the screen. “Is there any way to get a better view of that person?”
He shook his head. “This is going to be the extent of it. They’re a good sixty yards from the camera.”
“Can we see set these other two cameras for that time and see if we can get anything else?” Hank asked.
“Sure.” Ken rolled the footage on side by side screens. The camera facing our police station didn’t catch anything. The camera facing the other side caught a bit more of the person leaving the scene.
“You have a way to burn this footage to disc or something?” I asked.
“Yeah, let me just go find something to put it on.”
He had us set with a matter of minutes and Hank and I thanked him for his help. I put a call over the radio for the rest of the guys to meet us back at the park. We had the direction he came and went from. I was hoping there would be more video from the businesses heading down North Tampa street.
Chapter 20
The van sat parked in the back of the shop. Tom double checked the glove compartment, door pockets and under the seat. The front was clean. He needed to address the back. Even though he had hosed her down, blood still leaked from her head when he laid her inside. He grabbed a couple shop towels from his workbench and scrubbed at it. A few sprays with a little bathroom cleaner, and the back was clean enough. Tom removed the magnets and tossed them in the corner. The phone in the shop rang. He walked to his office and scooped it up.
“Speedy’s Plumbing and Supply. This is Tom.”
“Hey, this is Daniel, we spoke a little bit ago. I’m out front. I tried the door, but it was locked.”
“Sure. Why don’t you come around back, the door is open.”
“Oh, OK. Be back there in a second.”
Tom hung up and went to meet his potential buyer.
Chapter 21
We gathered back in the park. Pax worked nearer to the station. He was waist deep leaned over into a garbage can. Rob from Forensics was dusting the shopping cart.
I looked to Officer Henry and Telwan. “Did you guys get anything?”
Telwan spoke up. “We got a manager from the cantina that’s going to call us back as soon as the owner gets in. I guess he’s the only one who knows how to operate their video security.”
“We didn’t have too much luck at the other places either. The one doesn’t have any video security, and the little hot dog place on the corner just has a single camera focused on the cash register,” Officer Henry said.
“Well, hang tight guys. We’ll need you some more here.”
“Sure,” Henry said.
Telwan scratched at his chin. “Yeah, no problem.”
I noticed Jones had a CD case in his hand. I flipped a finger at it. “That the footage?”
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