No answer. Hailey wondered if there were really other officers in the building, or if the shots they’d heard had taken them out. A moment later, two officers appeared on the stairs behind them—a heavyset black man about her age whose name badge read C. Carlton and a Latina woman who looked to be in her late twenties, A. Mendoza.
“We heard the shots.”
Hailey nodded. “No idea who’s up here, so be ready for hostile fire.”
“Just make sure it’s hostile,” Hal added.
“He almost got shot by the rookie we sent down,” Hailey explained.
“That’s Wainwright,” Carlton said. “He’s a little green.”
“Just a little,” Hal agreed in a flat voice.
They split the hallway. Hal and Hailey headed toward the end, where the shots had come from, and sent Carlton and Mendoza to clear the other direction.
As they turned the corner, the full length of an empty hallway came into view. Down the right side, wind blew through a series of windows, some opened from the bottom, some closed, and a handful broken, their cracked glass reminding her of Jim.
Faded brown beer bottles, cardboard boxes, and newspapers lay strewn across a splintered avocado-green linoleum floor. On their left were three doors, the first closed completely and the second two partially open.
They paused at the first one.
Hal rapped his gun on the jamb. “Police!”
When no one responded, he kicked the door open. The wood cracked as the door slammed against the wall.
No one behind it.
Hailey watched the familiar bob of Hal’s head as he counted silently to three. Then he stooped into the doorway. After a beat, she followed.
The room was empty except for two folding chairs that had been overturned and an old, partially burned brown couch, which stood in the center of the room. Around it, the linoleum was scorched, and a black circle of ash marred the ceiling.
The stench of smoldered synthetic hung in the air, but when Hailey leaned down to touch the floor, it was cool. The fire wasn’t recent.
Nothing else in the room: no closets, no hiding places, and no people.
They backed into the hallway and turned to the next room, but it, too, was empty, except for a handful of newspaper sheets that fluttered in slow circles across muddy brown carpet, like moths circling light.
Something rattled in the next room. Hal nodded toward the wall.
“I guess I’ll take door number three, Bob.” His voice lacked humor, and Hailey knew he was feeling the same way she was. Unsettled, scared.
Homicide detectives usually showed up when the victims were already dead. It had been a long time since either she or Hal had dealt with a live scene. Only twice before had she experienced two separate shootings in a single day, back when she was a patrol officer.
Never as inspector.
That, on top of the circumstances of Jim’s shooting, made her feel shaky, off balance. Hailey radioed for backup—careful to mention that there were multiple officers in the building.
The next room was empty like the others, except for a closet in the far corner. The door was closed.
Hal nodded and Hailey moved toward it.
Guns aimed, they crept toward the door.
She crouched low—ready to fire. Hal swung the door open.
Propped up against the far wall was a cop in uniform. The policeman’s eyes were open, his lips parted as though struggling for breath. Beside him was a black kid wearing a hooded sweatshirt. Seated shoulder to shoulder, they might have been friends. Someone had put them there.
Hailey dropped to her knees by the cop while Hal dealt with the kid.
“Dead,” Hal said, touching the kid’s neck.
Bleeding from the neck, the cop was alive, his pulse thready but discernible, his uniform saturated down the left side. “He’s got a pulse.”
Hal radioed for an ambulance.
Hailey worked quickly to peel off her windbreaker and then twisted it into a long, thin strip to tie around the cop’s neck. The slick material didn’t stop the bleeding. There was nothing in the room to help, and Hal’s wool sweater was too bulky to do much good. They needed a tight fabric, something to stop the bleeding rather than just absorb the blood.
Moving quickly, Hailey stripped off the white cotton blouse she had over her bulletproof vest and used it as a tourniquet.
The cop’s eyes rolled open, his gaze settling on her momentarily.
“Can you hear me?” she asked as his eyes shifted slightly, glassy and yellow, then shut again.
Hal handed her his sweater the way an older brother would, motioning for her to put it on. Without looking at the bare skin around her vest, he turned to stare out the window.
She pulled the sweater over her head and folded the sleeves up until they were giant bulges at her forearms.
Outside the window, something rattled in the wind, and Hal leaned forward to stare out.
She listened for the whir of ambulances to break the silence.
With every passing minute, the pulse in the officer’s neck felt slower and weaker. His blood leached through the white cotton, but the slow pace suggested her efforts to staunch the bleeding were working. How quickly John’s blood had poured out of him. She couldn’t believe how much there had been. It had never slowed.
Hailey stood to adjust her hold on the wound when something clanked against the exterior of the building. She glanced out the window.
One floor down, a figure in black jumped across the fire escape onto the next roof.
“Who the hell is that?” Hal snapped the radio off his belt. “This is five-Henry-one-seven.”
“Five-Henry-one-seven, go ahead,” came Linda’s voice.
“Suspect is on the roof of the building to the—” He glanced around. He had always been hopeless with direction.
“East,” Hailey said.
He repeated it then, without hesitation, slid the window open, and climbed over the sill and onto the fire escape, descending each rung of the ladder with a thunderous clatter, something the suspect had accomplished in near silence.
Hal shouted, but the suspect fled across the length of the next roof without turning back.
Hailey stared after him, hoping to get a glimpse of his face. How did this all fit in with their cold case? And Jim’s shooting? Hal was almost shot by another cop. She hoped to hell that they weren’t chasing this down for nothing.
About the time Hal was halfway down the ladder, the suspect reached a short dividing wall between the two buildings and deftly scrambled over.
“Five-Henry-zero-eight here,” Hailey called into her radio. “Suspect is moving east across the roofs. Head him off at Polk.”
Hal reached the bottom of the ladder and climbed across the small gap to the next building, way behind the suspect.
Heavy footfall in the hallway accompanied the shouts of paramedics. When they entered, Carlton was with them, as were Mendoza and the rookie, Wainwright.
“Rest of the building is clear,” Carlton said. Then he spotted the wounded cop in the closet. “Damn it. Shakley, man.”
Carlton took a short step toward the officer. Hailey put her hand out and shook her head. “Let them work.”
Wainwright turned to the wall and threw up.
“You can head on down, Wainwright,” Hailey told him.
He nodded, gaze darting, his mouth and nose covered by his arm as he turned to leave.
Outside the window, the suspect had already reached the edge of the third building and stopped to peer down. From his hesitation, Hailey guessed there was some sort of gap between the buildings, and for a moment, she thought they had him.
He glanced back and she saw him in the glow of the streetlight. He was a white man with a reddish-brown beard. She waited, hoping for another look, but he turned away again, clambered over the wall and disappeared. Gangs in this part of San Francisco never mixed race. Where did the white guy come from?
She spun to face t
he others. “Was there a white man down there? On the street?”
Carlton turned to face her. “What do you mean?”
“The kids, the gun sales. Any of them white?”
“No.” He came to stand beside her at the window. “Why?”
“That guy, the runner. He was white.” Confused, Hailey stared at the dead kid’s face. Had that man killed these two? Why? What would he have wanted from this scene? Was he here for the police officer or for the gunrunners?
It had to mean something.
The paramedics wheeled the officer out of the room.
Hailey found a single latex glove tucked in the Velcro pocket of her bulletproof vest and snapped it over her right hand. She peeled back the suspect’s hooded sweatshirt to find a spatter of blood against his dark T-shirt.
Someone had closed his jacket after shooting him.
But why?
Hailey pulled the sweatshirt open farther and found the answer—a white circle pinned just above his heart.
She saw the button at Jim’s house. Now here. Two buttons in one night after more than a year. Why the long delay? Why now? Why Jim and this black kid?
Damn it, she hoped Hal had caught that guy.
She raised dispatch on the radio, told them to have the hospital search for a button on the cop who’d been shot.
Just then, Hal’s breathless voice called on her radio. “Lost him.”
Shit. “You better come up here, Hal. He left us a present.”
“I hope it’s something good.”
Hailey glanced at the dead kid’s face and reached out to touch his throat again, as though he might come back to life. “It’s not.” Her finger slipped off the radio, her focus on the dead black kid.
The connection was the guns. It had to be. There was nothing else that linked them. Which meant she was going to have to start pressing Jim for some answers.
With gloved fingers, Hailey closed the kid’s eyelids, wishing they’d caught him with a pulse.
Carlton pointed to the button. “What the hell is that?”
She shook her head, too overwhelmed to answer but unable to pull her gaze from the one-inch white pin with blue lettering.
Around the outside it read, “Wage peace, not war.”
Inside a circle were the letters “NRA” with a thick blue line through them.
“‘Wage peace, not war?’ That’s no street kid mantra, I’ll tell you that. Never seen anything like it.”
Hailey wished she hadn’t either.
But she’d seen two in that many hours.
Chapter 4
The next morning, Hal watched through the observation window as Dwayne Carson scraped under his fingernails with the broken shirt clip from a ballpoint pen.
His white sweatshirt hung off the back of his chair. His shirt was ripped across the neck and partway down one shoulder, but he didn’t seem to notice. He was the only kid who’d emerged from the sting without a bullet wound, and yet he was as cool as the bodies already on ice.
Carson had sworn he didn’t know where the guns had come from, that he was just along for the ride, and Hal didn’t have high expectations for much more.
Shakley, the officer who’d been shot in that room, was their best bet for answers, but he was at the hospital, listed as critical.
No button had been found on him.
Apathy was already etched into the swollen pupils of Carson’s narrowed eyes. Resignation tightened the straight line of his mouth and wiped clean any trace of laughter.
Seventeen, and he was already gone.
Hal hated this part, made worse by the fact that he couldn’t do anything to change it. The police couldn’t protect him from the dangers of the people who lived in his neighborhood. In reality, the police were more likely to tie on the bricks and drop his ass into the swamp, and Carson knew it. They needed answers from Carson. That put him in the power position.
Carson knew that too.
What Hal wanted to know was who was the guy fleeing the scene—the white guy Hailey saw out the window. There was no way to know if Carson knew anything about that guy.
Carson had come out of the BMW, not the building. Aside from those few minutes on the street, there was nothing to tie Carson to the buyers. Nothing to indicate he had any knowledge of who else was inside.
The ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education had done nothing to touch segregation on the streets. Black delinquents dealt with other black delinquents. That’s just how it was. The white guy was out of place—way out of place. Which was why Hal needed to find him.
Maybe the guy Hal chased down the fire escape was interracial—but not white. If he really was white—and Hal hadn’t known Hailey to be wrong yet—then he’d gone into that building not to participate in the purchase of guns but for the sole purpose of shooting two men and leaving a button on one.
The same button found on Jim.
The same one found in three other homicides before today.
No matter how he turned them, those pieces didn’t fit.
His phone rang. “Harris.”
“Any news?” Hailey asked.
“Waiting for Triggerlock,” he told her. “You?”
“I’m with Roger,” she said. “Still working on the button, but they finished printing the fire escape.”
Hal sat up, hopeful. “And?”
“Nothing. Clean.”
“Damn. You see gloves on that guy?”
“It was dark.”
“But you saw his face.”
“Yeah. Caught under a street light.” She paused. “And he was white,” she added, an edge to her voice.
“Easy,” Hal said, hearing her defensiveness. “I believed you the first time.”
“Well, apparently you’re the only one. Did you talk to the kid?”
Hal glanced down at the gun box in his hand. “No. I got his gun and I’m going in as soon as the Triggerlock guy shows, but it doesn’t look good.”
Hailey sighed. “Call me when it’s over.”
Hal ended the call as Mike Neill stopped in the doorway. Neill could probably have been a businessman as easily as a cop. He was thin, gray-haired, and clean-shaven, the kind of guy who used hair gel. But what did Hal know? Maybe he would have used hair gel too, if he had any hair. “You want to come?” Neill asked.
Hal nodded. “If it’s okay.”
“Be my guest.”
Together, they stepped into the room with Carson.
Neill went first.
Carson barely glanced up at them before returning his attention to what must have been some stubborn dirt beneath the nail of his right index finger.
Hal dropped the box from one of the guns stolen from the Dennigs onto the table as Neill walked behind Carson to the far side of the room, just out of Carson’s peripheral vision. Carson kept his eyes focused in his lap.
“Let’s hear about these guns, Dwayne,” Neill said.
Carson averted his gaze from the box on the table and shrugged his shoulders, spreading his hands out to his sides. “I told that other guy I don’t know nothin’ about them guns.”
Hal tapped on the box. “Yeah. I’m not buying that bullshit.”
“I swear. Got nothin’ to do with that scene. Didn’t know what was going down. Saw the cops and shit and got to the ground like you said. Don’t know nothin’ about guns. Shit, I was afraid they would explode or somethin’.”
They’d heard all the stories already. Kids turned on friends, called it police conspiracy, pointed to strangers. They blamed younger siblings, knowing that anyone under sixteen had a better chance of getting off.
Hal flipped open the gun box so the lid clattered to the plastic tabletop.
This particular gun had come off Carson’s ankle, but they’d dusted all three of the weapons he’d been carrying, and the only prints they’d found were his.
“What about this? It’s a nice piece.”
The gun’s metal had a bluish tint, and its grip was inlaid wood. SIGs in
general were common, standard issue for the department, but this particular gun was more obscure.
A recoil-operated, locked-breech handgun, with a modified Browning HI-Power-style barrel locking. The P210 was known as an incredibly accurate military handgun.
According to the guys in ballistics, it was not a likely choice for someone on the streets. Too fancy, more show than they needed for what they were doing. Which meant it was stolen. Almost certainly. Now they just needed to tie Carson back to the robbery at Dennig Distribution to find a link to the murders. But they weren’t having much luck with that part, either.
“It ain’t mine,” Carson protested.
Neill stepped forward. “Had your prints all over it.”
“So I touched it. Touched the door to that Beamer too. Don’t mean I own it.”
Hal studied the gun, felt Carson watching him as he turned it in his hands. “You think we can link this gun to murder, Dwayne?”
He didn’t answer.
Hal hitched his thumb toward the door. “How about the other two? Because we do that, you know where you’re headed?”
Carson tipped his chair back, shook his head. “I told you. Ain’t got nothin’ to do with guns.”
Neill shoved his chair flat again.
Carson jumped up. “Hey, man.”
“Sit down,” Neill commanded.
Carson moved the chair to the far end of the table and sat.
Hal pulled a holster from the box, the one they’d found strapped on Carson’s ankle. “How about this? You just happened to have it?”
“Got it from a friend. A gift.”
Hal laughed coarsely, and Carson started slightly from the sound, which echoed in the small room. He knew how to rattle these guys. “Weird gift for a guy with no gun.”
“Yeah, my friend, a weird dude,” Carson said, his voice dropping, the tone less confident.
“We’ve got a lot of dead kids, Carson. You don’t start talking, you’re going upstate.”
Carson didn’t answer.
“Maybe there was someone else out there, someone we couldn’t see.”
Carson narrowed his eyes as though sensing a trap. “Yeah. Sure.”
“You see anyone else?” Neill asked.
“Nah. No one else.”
“Was there a white guy?”
The Rookie Club Thriller series Box Set Page 33