By Any Means (3 page)

Bowers introduced himself and Ash, after which Rebecca's father, Jonathan Reid, introduced Rebecca's mother, Francis, and her husband, Scott. Scott put the kids in the basement so the adults could talk without interruption; the family would tell the kids what happened later, hopefully with a counselor or other professional present who could help explain things in language understandable to children.

“Before we say anything, we need to ask you a couple of questions to make sure we're at the right house,” said Bowers. “Can you tell me what Rebecca does for a living?”

“She is a school nurse with IPS,” said her husband. He looked at his father-in-law and then at the table. “I'm, uh…I'm in college.”

That helped explain the living arrangements at least. With her husband in school, money was probably pretty tight. Rebecca was lucky to have parents who could still take her family in.

“Your wife carried a red cell phone, correct?”

“Yeah,” he said, clearing his throat. “I got it for her last year so we could stay in touch. It wasn't fancy—just a cell phone.”

“Did she ever loan it out to anyone?” asked Ash.

Scott shook his head. “Never.”

Ash looked at Bowers knowingly.

“I'm deeply sorry to tell you this,” said Bowers. “But Mrs. Cook has been involved with an incident.”

Bowers led them through the story as they knew it. The family took it stoically until the end. Then Rebecca's mother buried her face in her hands and sobbed. Jonathan put his arm across his wife's shoulder and reached for his son-in-law. They hugged at the table, while Jonathan whispered that it would be okay.

Ash couldn't remember wanting a drink that badly in a long time.

The two police officers left the house fifteen minutes later, Rebecca having become more than a name on a police report for both of them. She had two children, a loving mother and father, and a devoted spouse. Despite the relatively low salary, she worked as a school nurse in the Indianapolis Public School system and volunteered twice a week at an after-school program for impoverished children. With decent, benefits-paying jobs scarce and an economy yet to recover for many working-class families, Rebecca and a volunteer physician provided what might have been the only non-emergency care children in the program received.

Ash knew what it felt like to struggle to pay the bills, to miss his kids because he had to work overtime just to make ends meet, to work himself ragged so his family could have the things they deserved. Not only had Rebecca done all that, but she had also volunteered to help others who badly needed it. No one deserved to be the victim of a crime, but it seemed especially wrong when it happened to someone like her.

Ash checked his messages as Bowers drove them back to the crime scene. A patrol officer had found Rebecca's Toyota abandoned in the parking lot of a shuttered strip mall on the city's east side, but, despite having every squad car in the neighborhood on alert, no one had found her yet. Meanwhile, Detective Doran had called a van from the forensics lab to check out the car, but they hadn't been there long enough to find anything. Ash made a mental note to call him back for another update in a few minutes.

In addition to his message from Doran, Ash had two messages from Kristen Tanaka, a reporter with one of the local television stations. She had an uncanny ability to scoop every other news organization in the city on crime stories, mostly because she'd do anything with anyone if it enabled her to get a story. Someone had told her about Rebecca's abduction, and she wanted to know if Ash had any comment before she went live with it on the six o'clock news.

The message galled him for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the sheer fact that someone was irresponsible enough to leak the story. Their hostage taker had already killed two people, so he had shown himself capable of violence. For all anybody knew, putting his story on TV might push him over the edge again and cause him to kill Rebecca.

He called Tanaka back. He had known she had high-placed sources, but he hadn't known how good they were until that moment. She knew everything he did, and a little more. He pleaded with her to sit on her story until they found more information, but she refused even when he offered her an exclusive interview. She said she didn't need an exclusive interview, which made sense considering she could find out everything she wanted on her own. If he couldn't change her mind, he'd just have to deal with the situation as it came to him.

Bowers dropped Ash off near his cruiser about fifteen minutes after leaving Rebecca's house. The sun had dropped a couple of degrees, lengthening the shadows cast by nearby houses and trees and lowering the temperature. Despite the minor reprieve from the heat, the air still felt sticky and tasted acidic. Normally, that would have made Ash perspire through his uniform, but no sweat formed on his brow. His head pounded as well. Dehydration wouldn't be enjoyable, but he could fight through it. The other officers on the scene, though, shouldn't have to. He signed the log sheet maintained by a uniformed officer on the scene's periphery and gave twenty bucks to another uniformed officer so he could buy a couple cases of bottled water from a nearby convenience store.

The investigative team had made fair progress in Ash's absence but had yet to remove the Mercedes. He found out why upon walking toward it and finding Assistant Coroner Hector Rodriguez leaning inside the backseat. Dr. Rodriguez had black hair that had only recently begun graying and a skin tone somewhere between olive and brown. Ash had seen a lot of women—and a few men—from the police department and prosecutor's office try to flirt with him, but Rodriguez barely seemed to notice. At work, he had eyes only for the dead.

“It's good to see you, Detective Rashid,” he said upon noticing Ash's arrival. “I couldn't find an ID on either of them, so don't bother asking.”

“What do you have?” asked Ash, crouching beside him.

“Couple of things, maybe,” said Rodriguez. “Were the doors and windows all closed when you arrived?” Ash nodded. “It looks like our shooter blasted them from the backseat, then. At that range, we'd usually see the victim's brain on the front window. Since we don't have anything, our perp used something with a pretty low muzzle velocity, like a twenty-two.” He made a gun motion with his hand and pointed it at the female victim on the front seat. “If he held his gun to her head and fired, it would have enough power to penetrate the back of her skull but not enough to break through the bones in front. Instead, the round would ricochet like a steel ball inside a pinball machine. Dead almost on contact; she wouldn't have felt a thing.”

Ash felt a little better after hearing that. No matter who she was or what she had done, he never liked hearing that a murder victim had suffered before dying.

“Anything else?”

“A significant quantity of blood on the backseat,” he said. “I can't determine the injury that would have caused it without more information, but this quantity of blood loss necessitates our victim going to the hospital.”

That added a wrinkle to things. It also explained the scene somewhat. The shooter probably hadn't intended to execute the driver with the vehicle still in motion, but something had happened and it became kill or be killed.

“Would it be a life-threatening injury?”

Rodriguez hesitated but then nodded. “Potentially, but any serious injury is life-threatening given the right circumstances and a lack of proper treatment. If he could staunch the bleeding, our shooter's primary worry would be infection.”

That could slow him down, but it would also make him desperate.

“Is there any way we can make these bodies your priority at the morgue? The shooter took a hostage, so we need to find out everything we can about them.”

“I've got cases we have to get to tonight, but we'll move some other people around. We'll start cutting first thing tomorrow morning.”

Ash preferred earlier, but he'd take whatever he could get. “Good. Take a marked escort with you so you can get through traffic.”

“Sure. Thanks, Ash.”

“
Thank you
.”

Ash stood up from the Mercedes, his head feeling light and his mouth dry. He took a breath, steadying himself on his feet. The sun would go down in a couple more hours, and he'd get a drink. Hopefully he could avoid anything strenuous until then. As he took a step away from the Mercedes, he noticed a forensic technician named Haley Fox dusting one of the front doors for prints. The last time Ash saw Haley, she had been a college intern at the scene of a methamphetamine bust. She smiled, blushed, and stood upon catching his glance, reminding him of the awkward young woman he had met eight months earlier.

“Hi, Detective Rashid. It's nice to see you. I heard you talking to Dr. Rodriguez, but I didn't want to interrupt.”

Ash forced himself to smile to make her a little more at ease. He had difficulty, though; given the situation, he didn't have a lot to smile about.

“You too. Tell me you have something good.”

Haley looked at her feet. “Somebody wiped down the car. I couldn't even find prints on the interior side of the door handles.”

Ash grimaced. A lot of criminals tried to hide their prints, but few had the technical knowledge to accomplish it. The fact that this guy did didn't bode well for their investigation. At least they had his blood on the backseat. They might be able to get a match from that.

“Thank you for looking. If you find anything, let me know.”

Haley held his gaze for a moment, but then her eyes lost their focus.

“This is the first homicide I've worked. It's a little scary.”

“I puked on my partner's shoes on my first homicide, so as long as you didn't do that, you're one up on me.”

A flicker of a smile touched her lips, but it disappeared before reaching the rest of her face.

“Yeah, at least I didn't puke on anyone.”

Ash nodded and let her go back to work before walking toward Detective Alvarez's parked cruiser, which, from the looks of things, he had turned into a makeshift command center.

“We've got nothing,” he said, flattening an oversized map against his car's stamped metal hood. He circled three intersections with a blue ballpoint pen. “We've got roadblocks at all three of these intersections, but nobody's found anything. We've also talked to everybody who's walked by the scene, but no one admits to seeing anything. Meanwhile, I've got every officer who's ever patrolled this neighborhood pounding on doors. To a man, they're telling me the same thing: nobody's talking to us.”

Ash flattened an edge of the map that threatened to blow away. Most of the houses had large black Xs on them, but Alvarez had circled others and even left some blank.

“You can drop the roadblocks. Greg Doran found Rebecca's car near Shadeland Avenue.”

Alvarez shook his head and exhaled hard, flexing his fingers.

“Nice of somebody to tell me I've been wasting my time.”

Ash caught the detective's gaze and held it.

“I'm telling you now. I just found out myself. Is that a problem?”

“No,” said Alvarez, his shoulders dropping and his voice softening. “Of course not. Sorry. I'm just a little on edge.”

“Everybody is,” said Ash, flattening the edge of the map again. “Why are some of these houses crossed off?”

Alvarez leaned against the car and pointed at the map again.

“They're dead ends. The houses are empty or the residents are openly hostile. I circled the ones where my guys thought we made progress. I don't know if the homeowners saw anything, but at least they didn't swear at us.”

Ash counted almost three times as many Xs as Os. He ground his teeth, frustrated.

“Our victims weren't here to go sightseeing. Someone in this neighborhood knows something, and I want to find out what. Get some men, get some tactical vests, and get some shotguns. I want you to go back to every house that's been crossed off and start checking for outstanding warrants against the residents. Get some cuffs on people, and get some leverage. They'll talk.”

Alvarez raised his eyebrows. “If we start rounding up the residents en masse, someone will notice. We might get some TV time, and it's probably not going to be too flattering. You okay with that?”

Ash looked up from the map and nodded. “If it happens, blame me. I'll deal with the push-back.”

“If that's how you want to handle it, I'm on it,” said Alvarez, already reaching for a police radio. He called his officers back to the scene while Ash walked to his cruiser. He wanted to drive to Shadeland Avenue, but the case had become too big to micromanage. Detective Doran could handle an abandoned vehicle without help. More important than that, Ash needed to visit the finance company that leased John and Jane Doe's Mercedes before it closed for the day, and the longer he lingered, the more time he wasted.

He put the address into his cruiser's GPS and followed its directions northwest of town to a stucco-covered strip mall with a large organic grocery on one end and a high-end appliance dealership on the other. Retail shops spanned the length from one end to the other; none, unfortunately, looked like a finance company. Ash turned in anyway and swore to himself when he found the address the Mercedes had been registered to. It was a copy shop and mailbox center called QwikMail. Hopefully the shop's proprietor knew something.

Ash parked and got out of his car. QwikMail occupied a narrow space packed with commercial copy machines and heavy metal racks of postal supplies. A long, wooden counter at the rear of the store separated the public space from the private, and a curtained archway led into a back room. A doorbell rang as Ash opened the door, and a college-age kid stepped up to the counter, his eyes bleary and red. The entire store reeked of marijuana.