Hellhound (11 page)

As soon as they had settled into their chairs, Leonhardt opened his hands.

“The dog.”

“Trey?”

“We’ve got a few minutes. But he’s on his way, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“It’s a big black dog, but not like any I’ve seen before. His body looks like a big bulldog and his face looks like a normal ol’ dog.”

“Like the police dog?”

“Like Bones, yeah. Long nose.”

“Snout.”

“
Snout
.”

“You said you had a picture of him.”

Becca looked down at her hands. “The police dog had a camera on him when all the cops got shot.”

“You
have
the camera?”

Becca nodded. It took all of Leonhardt’s self-control not to exit the room and go to retrieve the camera immediately.

Get what you can from the girl
, he told himself.

“What’s the dog doing on the camera?”

“Watching. The police rush in, everybody starts shooting, Mrs. Fowler comes out and starts shooting, and the dog just watches.”

“From the doorway?”

“I guess. It’s just strange. The camera on Bones bounces up and down. He’s fighting and running. This dog just stands still like nothing’s happening. It’s so weird-looking.”

“What happens then?”

“Once everybody was dead, the dog just kind of walked away. Then, last night, he and Alvis came back around my apartment. It was sniffing under the door.”

Leonhardt was cringing. That a girl this young could talk so easily about such grim, horrific violence was something he found unsettling.

“And it was on the roof with Alvis just now?”

“Yep, same dog. It attacked Bones.”

“And before that?”

“Same thing. Just watching Alvis shoot, calm as you please.”

Calm as you please
. The girl sounded like Leonhardt’s grandmother. “And then it left again?”

“Walked past me on the stairs,” Becca said, her demeanor shifting enough to tell Leonhardt this wasn’t the whole truth. “I don’t know where it went.”

“Had you seen it before the shooting in your hallway?”

“Yeah. It was with Mr. Preston before he died and then was with Mrs. Fowler when she went crazy. It gets next to people and makes them kill.”

“Wait, who’s Mr. Preston?”

“The first one. You guys just thought it was a suicide. The dog drove him to do it like it did Mr. Lester.”

Leonhardt wasn’t ready for this assessment, but pressed on. “You think Mrs. Fowler killed Devaris Clark?”

“I know she did.”

“But why?”

“Because the dog told her to.”

There was a knock on the door and Leonhardt went to answer it.

“Got Trey,” Garza said when he saw Leonhardt.

“You stay with them, but give the time they want,” Leonhardt said quietly. “She earned it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll fill you in later. I’ve got to get back to East Harlem.”

•  •  •

They hadn’t told anybody about the shoeprint in Devaris Clark’s blood. The idea that anyone else had been involved hadn’t leaked. The story was that he’d gotten high and fell. That was it.

That there had been a shoeprint. That a witness had seen Devaris flying up the steps. That the time between Devaris’s interaction with the detectives and the first call about the body on the pavement left him no time whatsoever to have smoked out.

All of this had been held back from the press.

For his own peace of mind, Leonhardt had run the math a few times. The only way Devaris could’ve hit the ground at his time of death was if he left the detectives, ran back to the building, ran up the steps, and immediately ran off the edge. He might’ve slowed down for some of it, but it happened so quickly that the detective had actually wondered if somebody who had seen him and Garza stop the young man might imagine they had a hand in his death.

When Leonhardt entered the apartment of Mrs. Fowler for the second time in twelve hours, he didn’t even bother turning on a light. He walked straight through her living room to the bedroom which smelled of rosewater and mothballs. He turned on the light in her closet and began going through her shoes. All were orthopedics, whether slippers, tennis shoes, or nurse’s shoes, but none matched the printout he had brought of the partial shoeprint.

The apartment was so meticulous that he worried the shoes could only have been in the closet or on her feet during her last moments. If that was the case, the amount of bullshitting he’d have to do to get at them might be significant.

But then he realized that, if what Becca had said was true, Mrs. Fowler might not have been herself lately. So he moved into her bedroom and began looking around for the shoes there.

Then he saw them. They were beige with a slight quarter-inch lift from faux wooden heels. She hadn’t even bothered to clean them. The blood stain matched the one in the print-out exactly.

Leonhardt sat down on the floor and stared at the wall. The ramifications of the discovery washed over him. They were planning to search Mrs. Fowler’s apartment for PCP they could trace to Alvis’s apartment. They’d already found a match there for what had been found in Mr. Lester’s stomach. It would’ve made this one easy.

But now he was on telepathic dog duty. A dog that told people to kill.

That’s when something rang a bell way in the back of his mind. It was an old memory and took some time to excavate, but after a minute or two, he had a name.

Harvey
.

“W
here’s Ken?”

“Don’t know. They said they were calling him. He’s supposed to pick me up.”

Trey nodded. He glanced up at Garza but then stared deep into Becca’s eyes.

“You know what’s going on in there. You
need
to communicate that to Ken. When you get home, you’ve got to throw some shit in a backpack and get the fuck out of Dodge. You walk in, you walk out. Got it?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t mean to rain on your parade here, but she’s going to need to stay in the area in case we need to question her,” Garza interjected.

Trey regarded Garza for a moment before turning back to Becca. “No. You’re not listening to that guy. If you’re not under arrest, they can’t make you stay. You get the fuck out of here. Understood?”

“Hey!” Garza interjected. “You want us to put some kind of other charge on you?”

“Knock yourself out, dickhead,” Trey said without looking. “You know how many people have died in my building the past few days? The numbers aren’t great. You want to throw another charge on me? That just means I’m safely locked up out here away from all that for a couple more days. Not the case with my sister or brother, got it?”

Becca tried to hide a smile. It wasn’t that Trey was defending her as much as him calling her his “sister” without qualifying it with some verbiage about “half-” or her having a different mom.

Garza considered a response, but then bit his tongue. Trey turned back to Becca, lowering his voice.

“There are going to be a lot of opinions about what you did. For me, I think it was pretty brave. I know you were scared, I know you weren’t sure about what you were doing, but what you did know was that something bad was going to go down and you walked out the front door to do something about it. I don’t care if you’re nine or ninety, that’s a rare thing in a person. I’m proud of you.”

Becca had tears in her eyes as Trey reached out to touch her arm.

“Was that your girlfriend?” she asked.

“She might’ve been one day,” Trey replied with what he thought a decent man would say in that situation. “She was pretty special. I think you would’ve liked her.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I. But that’s on Alvis. I don’t want you thinking about it twice, okay?”

“Okay,” Becca said quietly.

Trey tightened his grip on her arm as she wept more freely.

•  •  •

Ken arrived a few hours later to find Becca asleep on a bench. His manager had given him shit about leaving him in a lurch, so Ken had quit on the spot and gone back home in the mistaken belief that Becca was home. He’d received several messages about the incident, but information about Trey’s arrest hadn’t been a part of it. He was in agreement with his younger brother, however, that the answer was to leave. He’d cashed out some savings and called a coworker about borrowing his SUV. By the time he got to the police station, he’d already called a hotel down in Ocean City on the Jersey Shore and booked a pair of rooms.

“I thought you might want some time to yourself,” he explained to Becca, who was indeed grateful for his thoughtfulness.

Like Becca, Ken was allowed in to see Trey, but for a shorter amount of time. Trey told Ken exactly what happened. When Ken nodded to Garza, particularly when Trey mentioned running to get the gun from Alvis’s couch, Trey shrugged.

“I appreciate you thinking I’m smart enough to come up with a good lie to get me out of here, but I’m stuck. The truth is probably the only thing I’ve got going for me.”

Ken couldn’t help but agree.

“You have enough money for the week?”

“It’ll be tight, but yeah. You have some big stash I don’t know about?”

“My cut of the money from selling Mr. Lester those pills,” Trey offered.

Garza grunted from the corner of the room. “Don’t push it, kid.”

Ken sighed.

“Do me a favor and call my phone every chance you get,” the older of the brothers requested. “When you find out when you’re getting out, call me. We’ll be here to pick you up.”

“I don’t know what kind of bail they’re going to set.”

“We’ll raise it. We’re family. We’re all we got. Okay?”

“Okay.”

The brothers embraced. A moment later, Ken collected Becca, signed a stack of papers presented to him by a new and less irate social services worker, and carried the tired little girl out to the car.

By sunrise, they were southbound on the Jersey Turnpike.

Two hours later, asleep in adjoining rooms two blocks from the beach.

•  •  •

“Morning, officer. We haven’t met. I’m Detective Phil Leonhardt, NYPD.”

Leonhardt extended his hand. Bones eyed the offering for a moment from behind the chain-link gate of his narrow concrete kennel, but then leaned forward and gave it a sniff.

“I know you’re accustomed to being on the enforcement side of things, but you’ve become a witness on this case. Means that you might be pressed into service before you get to fully recover.”

Leonhardt reached into a duffel bag he’d brought into the kennel with him. He began extracting evidence bags and opening each, placing the contents on the floor in front of Bones.

“These were taken from the apartments of Mrs. Fowler and Mr. Lester,” he explained, setting out two impromptu dog dishes as well as towels and blankets he’d collected off their respective floors. “I’ve always been told that I had a good nose, but yours is supposed to be legendary. Well, I need you to use it now.”

Bones sniffed the items through the gate and became excited. Leonhardt had been told the shepherd would still be groggy from being put under the night before, but it was clear something to do with the items had gotten the animal’s attention.

“Yeah, you know that smell, huh?” Leonhardt grinned. “They say there’s nothing more suspect than an eyewitness account. But something tells me your nose is slightly more accurate than most humans’ eyes. What do you say?”

Bones met Leonhardt’s gaze. The detective smiled, taking this to mean the shepherd was looking for a rematch.

“Good. ‘Cause this may not be your ordinary everyday dog.”

•  •  •

Ten days passed.

That was how long it took Detective Leonhardt and Bones, quietly and with occasional assistance from Detective Garza, to search the buildings of Neville Houses from top to bottom. Officially, they were on the hunt for drugs, which is why they were allowed such latitude. The police department hadn’t publicly identified a link between the deaths at the different buildings, but if Garza’s theory about drugs held any water, they’d happily announce it from the rooftops.

But after ten days, Bones hadn’t alerted to a single thing related to the mysterious missing dog. While he had led to a handful of minor drug arrests and the identification of four more squats used by illegals, this had nothing to do with what Leonhardt wanted out of him.

“Pretty sure it’s half past time to pack it in on this one,” Garza announced on day nine. “This just isn’t getting us anywhere.”

By then, even Leonhardt had to agree with this. They’d asked several residents to give them a call if they came across a strange dog in the area. So spooked was everybody that the calls came rolling in. Neighbors’ pets were reported, stray cats were added to the mix, and one lady turned in her own pooch.

Twice.

But not a one successfully described the animal on the footage from the Fowler shooting.

With Trey’s permission, his laptop had been recovered from the Baldwin apartment, as well as the camera. Threats were made about additional charges, but Leonhardt made sure that these went away as quickly as they were put forward.

“Jesus Christ,” muttered Garza as he watched the video for the first time. “Nobody should ever see this.”

“Wishful thinking,” Leonhardt replied.

The truth was, as soon as it came in the door, copies of the digital recording were sent to the mayor’s office, the office of the police commissioner, and the team tasked with investigating the shooting. Within the hour, however, duplicates made it into every precinct in Manhattan and quickly fanned out to the other boroughs. By evening, word would leak to the television news, and screen grabs would make it online.

“So, what now?” Garza asked on day ten, the day the lieutenant formally asked for their report. “Send the dog back to Pittsburgh?”

Leonhardt didn’t have a ready answer.

“I mean, the dog’s clearly gone, right? He’s there in the video, I believe the little girl that he was there on the roof. Something whacked our fellow officer around. But that’s the end of it.”