The Ninth Life

by E. H. Reinhard

  “We just have to wait for the other team to be in position,” he said. He called for a confirmation over the radio when the other team was set.

  A moment later, the call came through our radios that the other team was waiting to make the turn onto Tenth Avenue.

  “Here we go,” Collison said. He called back over the radio that we were en route to the target and hit the gas. We sped down the block to the storage business. I saw the building approach on our left and the home across from it on our right—directly ahead of us, I saw the other two cruisers coming down the street from the opposite direction. Collison locked up the brakes, and we slid to a stop. The lead car coming from the other direction did the same.

  “Out,” Collison said.

  I left the passenger side of the car and got the rear door for Troyer. We stood in the street and removed our service weapons. I quickly took in the surroundings. The storage business sat directly before us. The small front office with a blue roof overhang was just a few feet from the road’s edge. A sign in the front glass read Closed. Behind the front office, the roofline rose another fifteen feet. To the right and left of the main building were long storage garages behind chest-high chain-link gates. I looked left and right up and down the street and then over my shoulder. The rest of the block was empty aside from the home where the Dana Haden woman lived, directly at our backs. I spotted the BOLO metallic-green Toyota pickup truck parked just outside of the carport before I got a chance to take the home in. The home was single story and small. I didn’t imagine it was much more than twelve hundred square feet. The driveway led up to a carport attached to the right side of the gray house. A front door sat to the carport’s left, and beside that, a pair of double windows.

  Collison snapped his fingers to send his assigned group that would serve the warrant on the house. The officers jogged across the street and up the driveway. Collison pointed at Troyer and Lapone and then the left and right sides of the gates of the business. The two officers started for their respective sides.

  “Kane, Rawlings, Jones, are you set?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Hank and Jones confirmed. We walked to the front office. Troyer and Lapone jumped the chain-link gates on our right and left.

  Collison got to the business’s front door. Through the glass, I saw that the office was empty. A couple of cardboard boxes looked out of place, lying on the floor near the front counter. The lights inside were off, but I could see a hallway stretching off from behind the counter, courtesy of the light coming through the front windows.

  Collison reached out and tried twisting the knob. “Locked,” he said. Collison hit his mic. “Are you guys in position at the house across the street?”

  His voice came through my ear radio a split second later.

  “In position,” someone called back.

  “We’re making forcible entry here now,” Collison said. “You guys get inside over there.”

  We received multiple confirmations. Collison took a single step backward, counted to three on his fingers, and delivered a front kick to the doorjamb. The door crashed open, and we funneled inside.

  “Tampa Police, search warrant!” Collison yelled.

  There was no response—no running, no shouting, no anything. We walked toward where the hallway started behind the front counter. Collison led. He stepped past the front counter and stopped. I took a step behind him and stopped cold when I heard a squish under my foot. The dark-colored carpet that we walked upon turned a deeper shade all around the front counter. I moved the boxes that lay in front of the counter to see the bottom sides of them were red—covered in blood. I took in the rest of the carpet and saw reddish-orange stripes in multiple areas—I couldn’t tell what the substance was. I continued looking, spotting more of the substance on the wall and racks that held packing supplies.

  I looked past Collison and down the hall. The hallway, just ten feet long, opened up into a lit-up service shop. I could see the rear end of box trucks. The trucks weren’t what was keeping my gaze. On the gray floor, from where the hallway ended and clear across the shop, were bloody drag marks. I pointed at them and got confirmation that Collison, Hank, and Jones saw them. We passed the front counter and took the short hall.

  We entered the large service shop, staying clear of the blood. The roof and walls were metal. The trucks parked inside were all from a well-known rental truck company. One of the box trucks sat hoisted on a lift immediately to my right. Behind the box truck, the right wall held three large garage doors. I looked left at the other wall, which was lined with toolboxes, workbenches, and a couple of machines—a tire machine and a wheel balancer on quick glance. Next to the tire machines was a void against the wall where a couple of tools seemed strewn across the floor.

  “Search warrant, Tampa Police!” Collison shouted.

  Again, we heard nothing. We proceeded through, following the bloody foot-wide drag mark on the cement floor. I saw no people. We stopped where another short hallway stemmed off of the back of the large, open service area. The hall held two doors, one left and one right. The drag marks continued to the door on the right with a restroom sign. Jones and I stayed put. Collison and Hank went down the hall. Hank covered Collison as he went to the left door and pulled it open. Collison entered and quickly returned—he pointed at the restroom door. Hank went to the door and pulled it open. Collison entered but not by much—I could still see him. He took a step back into the hall and walked toward me. Hank swung his weapon into the open bathroom.

  “Shit,” I heard Hank say.

  Collison passed Jones and me standing at the entrance to the hall. “Body,” he said as he brushed past my left shoulder.

  I went to Hank at the door to have a look for myself. I could hear Collison’s voice through my ear radio saying we had a DB inside and calling for a report from the rest of the team as I got to the bathroom door.

  Standing at Hank’s shoulder, I stared into the restroom. In my ear, I heard the other officers calling back clears on the home across the street. Their voices seemed to get tuned out as I stared at the woman lying faceup on the tiled floor. Her short brown hair was just an inch or two from the bowl of the toilet. Her eyes were open, staring at the small room’s drop ceiling. The front of her flannel shirt was soaked in blood. Blood covered her mouth and chin. She had nines drawn on her face. It was a sight that I was becoming all too familiar with. Her physical appearance and short brown hair matched what we had on the owner of the cell phone, the home next door, and the name on the business.

  “What was the room across the hall?” I asked.

  “Office,” Hank said.

  “We need to check the vehicles,” Collison called down the hallway toward us.

  Hank and I left the bathroom doorway and returned to clear the rental trucks. Jones had already started toward them.

  Chapter 38

  We cleared each truck. There wasn’t a person there. The team outside had found Kleeman’s father’s vehicle parked behind one of the side storage buildings. The car was unlocked and searched, but we didn’t find a cell phone. I dialed the tech unit at the station.

  “Terry Murphy.”

  “Terry, it’s Kane. Is that signal still coming from here?”

  “It has to be, or you guys would have had a call. Let me check with Westbrook quick. What did you get out there?”

  “Another body and the car she’s been driving. No phone yet, though.”

  “Hold on.”

  I could hear muffled talking from Terry’s end of the phone. I assumed it was with Westbrook, asking about the signal.

  Terry came back on. “The phone is still there, Kane.”

  “Okay,” I said. I clicked off.

  We turned the lights in the rental office on and opened all the doors. Hank made the call to Rick to come out to the scene.

  “Let’s get into the trunk of one of these cruisers and get some gloves,” I said. “We need to find that phone, get an ID on our DB, and
see whatever the hell else is here. A master key to get into all of the units would be nice.”

  Collison, Hank, Jones, and I walked to the trunk of the cruiser that I’d come in. Collison popped the trunk for us and went to gather his men. Hank, Jones, and I gloved up. We walked back toward the front door of the rental office.

  “I’m going to split a couple of my guys up to search the surrounding area,” Collison said. “Maybe a square block or so.”

  “Got it,” I said.

  “The rest of us are going to start pulling up garage doors that aren’t locked,” Collison said. “If you find a master key, radio me, otherwise we’re going to get after the locks with a bolt cutter.”

  I gave Collison a nod and entered the front rental office. “Hank, Jones, you guys start looking around—check that back office, and the woman. Her appearance matches up with our sheet on the phone, but let’s find some ID and confirm that. And look for some keys on her.”

  “Sure,” Hank said. He and Jones walked the hallway to the back.

  The reddish-orange stripes on the carpet and packing supplies caught my eye again—they seemed to be a fairly uniform line stemming from a stack of boxes and shooting across the room. Another set of the lines crisscrossed the first. I walked to the rack of shelving and leaned in for a better look at some of it that had made contact with a roll of bubble wrap. I had a good idea what it was. I quickly touched the substance with my finger, which I then brought within a few inches of my nose, and it was confirmed. My nostrils immediately burned, and my eyes welled with water. Pepper spray.

  I wiped off the small amount that was on my fingertip and avoided the blood-soaked carpet as I made my way behind the front counter. The back wall held a number of locks and keys. I assumed they were for the garages that hadn’t been rented. I didn’t see anything hanging by itself that made me think it was a master. I turned around and dug through the shelves underneath the front counter. I went through the miscellaneous forms for rentals of the trucks, as well as the storage units themselves. Nothing I found was filled out. I looked through the items on the rest of the shelves—boxes of pens, staples, and reams of paper. There was nothing of interest. I walked to a small cart that held an old printer—nothing there caught my eye.

  “I got a phone!” I heard Jones call.

  I left the front office area and walked the hallway that led to the service shop—staying to the side so as not to walk through any more blood. I saw Jones standing in front of one of the tool benches. He pointed at the bench’s surface as I walked up.

  “Touch it?” I asked.

  “No. Do you think it’s the one that led us here?” Jones asked.

  I stared down at the phone and saw a blue light flash on the top corner. “It’s on,” I said. “One way to find out if it’s the one we’re looking for.” I pulled out my notepad and cell phone. I found the page where I’d written down the number that Koskinen gave us to track and dialed. The phone rang once in my ear before the screen on the phone on the bench lit up and showed my number dialing.

  “So that’s our phone. Now what?” Jones asked.

  I hung up from the call and put my phone and notepad back in my pockets. “Keep looking. Did you take a look at that?” I jerked my chin at a clipboard filled with papers a bench over.

  “I already looked through it. It’s nothing. Just looks like service logs for the rental trucks,” Jones said.

  “All right. Leave the phone where it is. I’ll make sure Rick knows of it when he gets here so he can get it bagged up.”

  “Sure,” Jones said. “Anything up front?”

  “Nothing, other than someone shot off some pepper spray.”

  “Does it look like someone got the business end of it?” Jones asked.

  “Possibility. Was Hank in the back office?” I asked.

  “I saw him in the bathroom with the woman. I don’t know if he got to the office yet.”

  “Okay. Keep at it,” I said.

  I walked through the shop and into the hallway that held the office and restroom. I saw Hank inside the bathroom, crouched beside the body of the woman.

  He looked over his shoulder at me when he saw me standing in the doorway. “No ID on her,” Hank said. “Maybe she has a purse or something in the office. She’s got a thing of pepper spray tethered to her belt, though.” Hank grabbed the bottom corner of her flannel shirt and raised it a bit, exposing a three-inch black pepper spray cylinder with a red thumb trigger. The canister hung from what looked like a retractable cord secured to her belt. I spotted blood on the canister and trigger.

  “She used it in the front office,” I said. “There’s some on the carpet and shelving.”

  “Didn’t stop this from happening, unfortunately,” Hank said. “With the blood on the thing, I’d have to think that she was already stabbed before she went for it.” Hank let go of the corner of the woman’s shirt and let it drop back down. He stood. “I’m done in here. We don’t have anything.”

  “Let’s get into that office,” I said.

  I crossed the hall and entered.

  The room was square and had wood-paneled walls that had been painted white. A metal desk with a chair behind it sat at an angle in the back corner. A love seat sat against the wall to my right. A closet with a pair of folding doors was to my left, next to a small TV on a stand. To the right side of the desk were a file cabinet and mini fridge. I spotted a purse on the desk right away. “Purse. Check it out,” I said.

  I walked to the four-drawer gray metal file cabinet and reached for the handle to pull the top drawer open. The drawer didn’t budge. I tried the next one down and then the next. The cabinet was locked. I’d have to find a key or maybe a tool in the service bay to get it open.

  I went behind the desk, watching Hank rummage through the purse as I did.

  Hank pulled out a wallet and flipped through it. “We have an ID here,” he said. “Cash is all still here too.”

  “What’s the ID say?” I asked.

  “Dana Haden. It’s our woman in the bathroom,” Hank said.

  He held the open wallet toward me and showed me the ID, which looked like our DB.

  “Looks like her,” I said. “So if the vehicle Kleeman was driving is here, and this woman’s pickup truck is across the street, where the hell is Kleeman?”

  “Good question. And why the hell is she at a storage unit in the first place?” Hank asked.

  I pulled open the top drawer on the desk and rummaged through it. I didn’t find any keys or anything that looked as though it shouldn’t be there. I pulled open the lower two drawers to find a bottle of whiskey and a couple of random boxes of office supplies—rolls of tape and business cards. I rolled the drawers closed.

  Hank was still rummaging through the contents of the woman’s purse. “There’s nothing else in here,” Hank said.

  “I’m going to get something to pop open this file cabinet,” I said. “Go check on the progress of getting the individual storage units open. After we finish up with that, we’ll head next door to the house and do a walk-through.”

  “Sure,” Hank said.

  I left the office with Hank following. Hank made a left as soon as we left the hall into the service bay and walked out through the open garage doors.

  I walked to the tool benches, noticing that Jones was searching the individual rental trucks.

  He looked over. “Anything back there?” he asked.

  “Seems our DB is the Dana Haden woman.”

  Jones nodded and returned to his search.

  I passed by the tire machines and scanned the tools on the nearest bench—a drill, a couple of hammers, some air tools, wrenches, screwdrivers, pliers, sockets. I looked to my right at the tire machines that I passed and saw a three-foot-long pry bar used for beading tires. I walked to it, snatched it up, and returned to the office.

  I wedged the pry bar above the lock and bent the metal down. The top drawer freed, and I got a look inside. Folders filled the entire drawer.
Each folder had a tab at the top with a month and year. I spread the folder for the current month and pulled the stack of papers from inside. There wouldn’t be a need to weed through them. The top sheet had Kleeman’s name on it. I ran my finger down the page.

  “Storage unit nine. I should have figured,” I mumbled to myself.

  I left the office and walked through the service bay. Jones was just sliding out of one of the rental trucks. “Jones,” I called.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “Come on. We have Kleeman’s storage unit. Number nine,” I said. Jones jogged to me, and we got outside. I looked straight across at the unit number on the nearest door—number three, with only two garages to the right. The numbers increased as they went left.

  Jones and I started down the line of garages—number nine was the last in the building. We saw Collison, Lapone, Troyer, Hank, and more of Collison’s men to our left, behind the main, center building, searching garages. I let out a quick whistle and waved them over.

  They met Jones and me outside of the storage unit. I pulled my service weapon. The rest of the group already had their weapons drawn. I looked at the corner of the door for a lock—there was none. From inside of the unit, I heard a sound. It sounded like something being tossed to the floor.

  “Someone is inside. Be ready,” I said quietly.

  I crouched and grabbed the metal flap at the base of the rolling metal garage door and got a grip. Hank came to my side, also crouched with his weapon out before him. I gave the bottom a lift, and the door began to roll up. The rest of the men got into positions with weapons aimed inside, waiting for a view.

  The door rose. Hank had the first view inside.

  “On the ground!” Hank shouted.

  His order came before the door even got above my line of sight. I threw the door up the rest of the way and got both hands around my weapon. Collison and the SWAT officers barked orders. Jones’s voiced boomed as he shouted for the woman to get on her knees.

  I didn’t say a word. I stared inside at the scene laid out before me. A huge red pentagram was spray-painted on the floor of the storage unit. Directly in the center, a naked woman, large in stature, sat on a backward chair. Her arms rested before her on the top of the chair’s backrest. Her back was tattooed from her neck to her buttocks—I couldn’t exactly tell what the image was from the distance but could see her skin glisten as if covered in something. Her blond hair, which looked wet, was pulled over her right shoulder. Beyond her on a wooden bench sat two bodies—an older man and an older woman. From the way the shoulders of the couples’ shirts stretched and their bodies hung forward, I figured them to be secured, somehow, to the wall. The smell coming from the unit hit me a second later—death, mixed with gasoline. My eyes darted left and right. In the corner was a turned-over fuel can. A couple of feet farther left were a pair of large black crumpled-up plastic bags—body bags. I brought my eyes back to the base of the woman’s chair. Fuel dripped from her body to the pooled gas beneath her.