by Steven James
No, if he stayed here, they’d find him. He either needed to get behind the nearest apartment, which was about twenty-five feet away-but that meant traversing the lawn in plain sight-or make it to the other side of the road and hope the parked cars would block the view as he crossed the street. Then he could disappear into the neighborhood on the next block over.
Which was better?
Hard to say.
Hard to say.
Maybe crossing the road. If he stayed low enough, the cars would at least partially block the view. Less chance of being seen.
Yes, that would work, he could make it. He had to.
The vague sound of distant traffic floated through the chilly night. Nearby, more dogs were joining in barking, but Vincent tried to block all that out.
He took a breath and went for it, dashing across the road as swiftly as he could, but just as he reached the far curb, he heard one of the cops yell, “Stop! Police!”
Go!
As fast as he could, Vincent sprinted into the dark channel between the two houses in front of him.
A quick glance back told him that the cop was in pursuit. Looking forward again, Vincent managed to duck just in time to avoid a clothesline strung up in someone’s backyard. He came to a waist-high wooden fence, scrambled over it, and bolted past a driveway and through the night, weaving between the houses to try to lose the cop.
“Stop right there!” the officer yelled. Amazingly, he sounded like he was gaining on him. He wasn’t out of breath and it was the voice of a guy who knew he was going to take you down.
But Vincent didn’t stop running, there was too much at stake. He rounded another house. If he could just stay out of sight, just-he dodged an abandoned tricycle and barely missed slamming into a jon boat stationed on its rusted trailer beside the home-just get to the next street-
Though he was already almost two blocks from the alley where he’d left Lionel, he could see the flicker dance of the blue-red-blue lights of more squads driving toward the scene.
Vincent angled left and flew past a tumbledown duplex. He didn’t see the cop anymore and figured he must have lost him somewhere between the last two houses. He kept running.
By now, some of the porch lights in the neighborhood were snapping on as more people woke up from the shouting, the yelping dogs, the police sirens.
Vincent whipped around the corner of a house.
And almost ran into the cop, a tall scruffy guy, who stood in front of him with his gun raised. “Do not move.”
How did he get-?
“Hands up!”
Vincent raised his hands. He needed to get away, there was no other option. “Officer, I’m not-”
“On your knees. Do it.”
The guy looked like an athlete. Vincent calculated whether or not he could take him. It might not be easy.
Go for the gun.
That would be tight too. But he couldn’t risk being taken in. “Please, Officer, I need to-”
“Now.” The cop leveled the gun at his chest.
Desperation swallowed everything. This was it. He had to go for it, had to risk it, had to act now, before more officers got here. He started to bend down as if he were obeying the officer, but then used his bent knee to propel himself forward and lunge for the gun.
Years of college football and weight lifting had made Vincent quick and tough and not afraid to mix things up. He went hard at the cop, snagging his hand and knocking the gun away. Then he balled up a fist and aimed a blow at the officer’s kidney, but the guy blocked it just in time.
He deftly grabbed Vincent’s wrist, twisting it to control him.
Countering, Vincent threw a hard hook with his other fist, connected solidly with the guy’s jaw, but that didn’t stop him-he drove his shoulder into Vincent’s chest and slammed him to the ground.
Vincent tried to wrestle free but the cop was wiry and strong, and as he rolled to get away, he felt his arm being wrenched behind him to subdue him. Vincent strained fiercely to get away, but the cop twisted his arm more, toward the breaking point.
“No!” Vincent couldn’t help but yell. If he didn’t get away-
But then he was cuffed and the officer was pinning him down with his knee, calling for backup. “Do not move,” he told Vincent.
“You don’t understand-”
“Quiet,” the officer said. “This is Detective Bowers.” He was talking into his radio. “I’m on the southeast corner of Twenty-sixth and Wells. I have the suspect.”
“Please,” Vincent gasped. “He has her. If you don’t let me go, he’s going to kill her. You can’t let that maniac kill my wife!”
3
I paused. “Who has her?”
“Some guy-I don’t know his name! He broke into our house, told me I had to take a black man to that alley. Please-he said if I got caught, it’d be too late for last rites, that he’d slit her throat. Slit her like a pig.” The guy’s voice cracked. “That’s what he said.”
I patted him down. “Where are they?”
“I don’t know. You have to believe me!”
No weapons. A wallet. Car keys. A portable phone in his pocket. Not just a pager, an actual portable phone. Though they were starting to become more popular, it spoke of wealth. I removed the items. “What’s your name?”
“Vincent Hayes.”
A few seconds ago he’d knocked my gun, a.357 SIG P229, away, and now I quickly retrieved it and slipped it into my holster, then held Hayes down firmly.
Assess the threat. Clear the scene.
I scanned the shadows to make sure no accomplices were coming to assist the guy, but the view in all directions was restricted. After evaluating the sight lines, the distance to the nearest intersection, and the spacing between the streetlights, I realized I didn’t like our position here at all.
“You said he told you to do it. Did you meet with him?”
“On the phone!”
It was possible for someone to be making something like this up on the spot, but it seemed unlikely. The best way to ferret out a lie is with a follow-up question. “Who are you working with, Vincent?”
“No one.” A pause. “What do you mean?”
“Abducting the man in the alley. Who else was involved?”
“No one. It was just me.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“He made me do it! I swear. Stop wasting time. He’s going to kill her if-”
“Where do you live, Vincent?”
He rattled off an address and I radioed it in to get a car over there. I was still holding him down and he was a hefty man, so I was glad that, at least for the moment, he’d stopped trying to roll away.
“No, no no, they’re not there-” Then abruptly, he seemed to change his mind. “Wait. You can’t go in. If he sees you, he’ll kill her! He said no cops!”
There was no question that I needed to check out this guy’s story to see if his wife was safe. “Go in dark,” I told dispatch. “Possible hostage situation.”
Swift, light footsteps approached us. I whipped out my SIG, snapped around, ready, wired. But it was just Sergeant Brandon Walker, the guy we called Radar, entering the circle of light tossed down from one of the streetlights about thirty meters away.
At thirty-seven, Radar was twelve years older than me and was the one officer Lieutenant Thorne thought wouldn’t be threatened or insulted partnering with the youngest homicide detective on the force. He’d been right. Radar was a good cop. A good man. A great dad. Even though he wasn’t an imposing guy-slim, balding, stuck with a nose that was a little too big for his face-Radar was scrappy and smart, and I was glad he was my partner.
I holstered my weapon, hailed Radar, then asked Vincent, “Why would he kill her?”
“I don’t know! He made me do it. Like I told you, he said if I got caught, he’d slit her throat! You have to-”
“You alright, Pat?” It was Radar jogging toward us, weapon out to cover me.
“I’m fine. You
hearing this?”
“Yeah.”
He arrived at my side.
“Get two cars over here, Radar. I want this guy in a cruiser ASAP so we can talk to him in private.”
He was eyeing my face where Vincent had punched me.
“Go on,” I told him.
“You sure you’re okay?”
Only then did I become aware of the pain emanating from my jaw and pounding through my head. It was hard to imagine that I hadn’t noticed it a few seconds ago, but adrenaline does that to you. My index finger ached too; it’d gotten wrenched pretty badly when Vincent yanked at my SIG, and now the proximal interphalangeal joint felt thick, swollen, hard to move. “I’m good. Make the call.”
While Radar stepped away to radio the cruisers, I asked Hayes, “How would he know you did it? Were you supposed to meet him? Call him?”
“He said he’d be watching.”
“From where?”
“I don’t know.”
I scrutinized the area again. “Tell me what happened. Make it quick.”
He snatched a breath and quickly recounted the story. “I came home, found blood in the kitchen. He’d taken her. There was a note with a phone number and I called it. He told me I needed to leave a black man in his twenties, naked, cuffed in that alley, that if I got caught or went to the cops, he’d kill Colleen.”
“Did he tell you that alley on Twenty-fifth, that specific one?”
“Yes.”
That was the alley where, back in 1991, Konerak Sinthasomphone had been found. The teenage Laotian had been drugged and was disoriented, but had escaped apartment 213 when his abductor, a serial killer named Jeffrey Dahmer, briefly left him alone.
When the police arrived, Dahmer convinced the two MPD officers that Konerak was his drunk lover. When the officers returned Konerak, who was still disoriented from the drugs, to Dahmer’s apartment, they caught the scent of a terrible smell that Dahmer told them was his aquarium he’d been putting off cleaning-but it was really the decomposing body of a victim Dahmer had killed earlier that week, Tony Hughes. The officers left Konerak with Dahmer, who, within minutes, overpowered him, killed him, and began to eat his heart.
The same alley.
When Konerak was found there, he’d been handcuffed-naked and cuffed, just like the guy tonight. Two months later, when a young African-American man named Tracy Edwards escaped from Dahmer and led the police to Dahmer’s apartment, one of his wrists was cuffed as well. He’d fought back when Dahmer attacked him and barely managed to get away in time. Everyone on the MPD knew the story.
I processed everything, made a decision, told Radar, “Send out a call that the suspect got away.”
He glanced at Hayes, then looked at me again quizzically. “That he got away?”
“If this guy’s telling the truth, as long as he’s free from the police, his wife stays alive.”
“Got it.” Radar went for his radio again.
“Okay.” I turned to Vincent. “What’s the phone number you found at your house?”
“On my portable phone. The last number I called. I don’t remember it.” Obviously he was scared, worried, desperate, but he must have been able to tell that I was trying to help, that I wasn’t discounting his story, and his straight answers were just what I needed.
I took out his phone and yanked the antenna up. I wished there were a simple way to redial portable numbers, but a quick call to the station, then to the telephone company, got me what I needed.
I punched in the number and let it ring.
While I waited for someone to pick up, the two cruisers I’d requested pulled up to the curb and four officers jumped out. Radar helped them hustle Vincent Hayes into one of the cars.
The phone kept ringing. Still no answer.
Radar returned and I told him urgently, “Have everyone keep their red-and-blues on. I want it to look like we’re still searching for the suspect.” It wasn’t much, and if Vincent was telling the truth and his wife’s abductor was watching, or maybe if he was monitoring emergency frequencies, it would already be too late. But it was worth a try and-
The ringing stopped. I waited, but whoever was on the other end said nothing, so I did: “It’s done.” I kept my voice low and tried to sound out of breath so that whoever was on the other end wouldn’t recognize that I wasn’t Vincent. “The cops came, but I got away.”
No answer.
“They found the black guy,” I said.
“Yes.”
“You said you’d let Colleen go.”
“Who is this?”
“Vincent,” I lied. “I did it. I swear. Let me talk to-”
I heard a gasp and then a scream on the other end of the line, and then nothing at all.
“Colleen!” I yelled.
A blank silence, and then a rapid beeping sound. The man had hung up.
I redialed, nothing. Called the station: “Get me a trace on 888-359-5392. Now!”
4
We were unable to trace the call, found no one at the Hayes residence, didn’t learn anything helpful from the bartender at New Territories, and when I met up with Vincent at police headquarters in interrogation room 2A thirty minutes later, I had no good news to share with him.
It was possible that the woman I’d heard scream on the phone wasn’t Colleen Hayes, and it was also possible that the scream was staged, that no one had even gotten hurt. I found that unlikely, but all too often premature assumptions end up needlessly derailing investigations and I wasn’t about to let that happen in this case. Facts need to establish hypotheses, not the other way around.
Right now Vincent didn’t need to know anything about someone screaming on the phone.
I found him seated at a metal table bolted to the floor, his hands and feet shackled. If his story was true, he’d been coerced to commit tonight’s crimes and theoretically might not pose a risk or need to be cuffed. But he had drugged and kidnapped a young man, resisted arrest, assaulted an officer of the law-in fact I wasn’t even sure how many laws he’d broken in the last two hours. We still hadn’t confirmed his story. Cuffed was good.
And what about that phone call? Somebody answered. Someone screamed.
“Okay, Mr. Hayes.” I took out a notepad and a miniature cassette recorder. “We were rushed earlier when I asked you to tell me what happened tonight. I need you to fill me-”
“Is Lionel okay?”
“Yes. He’s still at the hospital. They’re keeping him overnight.”
On the ride here, the officers with Vincent had grilled him on what kind of drugs he’d given Lionel, how much he’d used, when and how they’d been administered, how many drinks he’d seen Lionel have. “He’s okay for now,” I said, “but you gave him some pretty potent stuff.”
“And you got nothing on Colleen? Nothing?”
“We’re still looking for her.”
It struck me that he’d asked about Lionel first, rather than his wife.
Vincent was quiet. “Can I have some coffee?”
His request seemed a bit out of the blue, and was possibly a sign of interrogation avoidance, but on the other hand, it’s not uncommon for people to act unpredictably during times of intense stress.
Folks have been known to start cleaning their homes while the place is on fire, desperately trying to straighten things up or get the dishes in the dishwasher before leaving. Mothers who’ve lost their babies will sometimes hold the child to their breast and rock the corpse gently, even kiss its forehead as they would if the baby were still alive, though they would never think to snuggle with or kiss a corpse under any other circumstances.
Before life squeezes us to the limit, we can never be sure how we’re going to respond, so even though I found it odd that Vincent didn’t immediately ask any more questions about his wife, I gave him a pass.
“Alright.” Protocol called for me to offer him something to eat, which I did, and which he declined.
Outside the interrogation room I found a youn
g female officer whom I didn’t recognize. Her name tag: GABRIELE HOLDREN. Slim build. Black hair. Bright eyes. I asked her if she could get some coffee for Mr. Hayes.
“Would you like some too, Detective?”
“No, I never touch the stuff.” Grind up burned beans and pour water over them? Drink that sludge? Not my idea of a good time.
While she went for the coffee, I returned to my chair across the table from Vincent Hayes, flipped open my notebook, and started the cassette recorder.
“Mr. Hayes, I need you to tell me exactly what happened tonight. Starting with the last time you spoke with Colleen.”
“I talked with her at about seven. I run a PR firm; we’re under the gun with a deadline and I told her I wasn’t going to be home until at least ten.” His voice was balanced. He didn’t sound like a guy who was worried about his wife’s life being on the line; he sounded more like a man who was discussing his market earnings with his accountant.
I noted that.
“She was at the house when you spoke with her?”
“Yes. Everything was fine; she understood about my getting home late. No big deal. We hung up. I went back to work, came home a little after ten, and, just like I told you earlier, she was gone.”
“Tell me about the blood.”
“In the kitchen, on the floor. Spots of it, not that much.”
The clinical, objective way Vincent was describing everything was starting to disturb me.
I had some ideas about where to take this conversation, but I needed to cover the proverbial bases first.
“Did you notice anything missing?”
“No.”
“What was your wife’s state of mind? Had you argued earlier? Anything like that?”
“No, she was fine. Like I said.”
“How is your marriage, Mr. Hayes?”
“Our marriage?”
“Were you having any problems? Any other romantic relationships either of you were engaged in outside of-”
“No!”
“Mr. Hayes, is there anyone who might wish to harm either you or Colleen?”
“No. No one.”
A knock at the door. I answered it and Holdren handed me the coffee for Hayes, then disappeared into the hallway again. I slid the burnt-bean-flavored water to him. His wrists were cuffed, so he lifted the foam cup with both hands as he drank.