Stone Cold (12 page)

Rossi and Fowler had come through the academy together, Rossi itching for a life on the street catching bad guys, Fowler reaching for the next rung up the administrative ladder. Rossi forever looked like he’d either been up all night or slept in his clothes. Fowler was as clean, pressed, and starched as his dress uniform. They hadn’t gotten along at the academy, and nothing had changed since.

It was their mutual bad luck that found Fowler serving as Rossi’s boss. The lines between them were drawn when Fowler first took command of Homicide, coming down on Rossi after his hard-nosed tactics had landed another suspect in the ER.

“Banging heads isn’t the way the detectives under my command are going to do things,” he told Rossi.

“So what do you want me to do the next time some asshole comes at me with a knife? Kiss him?”

“All I’m saying is tone it down. Nobody else in Homicide gets in as many scrapes as you do.”

“And nobody else closes as many cases as I do, so what’s your problem, Commander?”

Fowler puffed up his chest. “This sort of thing reflects poorly on my leadership.”

“And that would be a joke if your leadership wasn’t so pathetic.”

Fowler’s phone rang. He looked at the caller ID. “It’s the chief. I have to take this call, but we aren’t finished.”

Rossi knew they were. He was too good at what he did for Fowler to do anything about the way he did it. Fowler admitted as much by continuing to assign Rossi to the heaviest cases.

It was nine o’clock, Monday morning. More than forty-eight hours had passed since the murders, and every detective in the room knew that the chances of solving either case, let alone both, dropped by as much as fifty percent when that window closed.

By now, anyone who knew something or thought they did would have calmed down, the loss of emotion putting distance between them and the crime, fear of retaliation eroding any lingering inclination to cooperate. That’s why many shootings on Kansas City’s east side were never solved.

“The neighborhood canvass was a bust,” Fowler said. “Nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything, and nobody knows anything.

“Par for the course,” Gardiner Harris said as he took a seat next to Rossi.

Harris was a veteran homicide detective with a worn, haggard face and barrel chest that had tricked many a thug and gangbanger into thinking he was slow and soft. He’d grown up on the east side, beating the odds by going to Missouri State on a football scholarship, unlike his younger brother, who dropped out of high school, joined an offshoot of a local Crips gang, and was shot to death the night Harris graduated from college. He and Rossi had worked enough cases together to bond over dead bodies, good bourbon, and a shared opinion of Mitch Fowler.

“CSI says all the blood, hair, and tissue they recovered from the Henderson scene belongs to the victims,” Fowler continued. “They’ve got some fibers that didn’t come from the victims’ clothing, but we’re a long way from tying the fibers to a suspect.”

“You mean to Dwayne Reed,” Rossi said.

“Reed is a person of interest and that’s all he is until we’ve got something more than your hard-on for him that proves he did any of this,” Fowler said.

“Everybody knows Rossi’s dick is a fucking divining rod,” Harris said. “If Dwayne Reed gives him the wood, that’s proof enough for me.”

The room erupted in laughter until Fowler rapped his fist on a desk.

“Knock it off! Knock it off! Five people are dead. You want to joke about it, do it on your own time. We’ve blanketed the east side since Saturday, knocked on every door, and run down anyone who might have had a reason to kill Chapman or the Hendersons, including Dwayne Reed. All we’ve done is use up our allotment of overtime for the month. That means that everybody except for Rossi and Harris goes back to their other cases and back to their regular schedule. No more OT.”

“Where do we go?” Rossi asked.

“My office.”

Harris clapped Rossi on the back. “Hey, buddy. Sounds like Miller time.”

Once in his office, Fowler didn’t ask them to take a seat, pointing instead to four three-ring binders on his desk.

“Those are the Chapman and Henderson murder books. Go through them and figure out what we’re missing, and then go find it. And by
it
, I mean the killer or killers. The chief is on my ass. If it had only been Chapman that was murdered, he wouldn’t have picked up the phone. But those Henderson kids and the mother,” Fowler said, shaking his head, then looking squarely at them, “that’s a fucking nightmare.”

“For who?” Rossi asked. “You and the chief or the Hendersons?”

Fowler glared at him, bracing his hands on his desk. “Just find whoever did this. I don’t care if it was Dwayne fucking Reed or Santa Claus. Find him and try not to kill anyone while you’re at it.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

ROSSI AND HARRIS WENT down the hall to an interrogation room where they could spread out. A rectangular table and four black chairs were the only furnishings in the white-walled room lit by a pair of naked fluorescent tubes embedded in the ceiling. A raised steel bar to secure a suspect’s handcuffs was bolted to the top of the table. Interrogations could be observed through a two-way mirror set in one of the walls. The linoleum floor was scuffed from heels dug in against hard questions.

A dozen homicide detectives had worked both investigations, generating enough paper to fill two three-inch binders on each case. Before the investigations were over, there would be more paper and more binders.

For now there were reports by the responding officers listing the location of each crime and the names and ages of each victim and a summary of each officer’s observations upon arrival. A log had been kept recording the name of every person who was allowed inside the yellow tape at each scene. Every cop who’d worked the cases had filed reports documenting what he or she had done.

There were photographs of the victims, details on the positioning of their bodies and the condition of their clothing. Preliminary autopsy results described the external and internal condition of each body and recited the cause of death. Initial forensic reports summarized fingerprints and hair, blood, and fiber samples taken from each victim and each scene.

Every item of physical evidence had been identified, tagged, photographed, and inventoried. Both scenes had been documented with videotape, photographs, and surveys noting all relevant dimensions.

A list of people contacted through the neighborhood canvass had been neatly typed and was supplemented by statements from those few who had been willing to go on the record to say that they didn’t know a damn thing about anything.

Rossi leaned back in his chair, feet on the table and the Henderson murder books in his lap stacked one on top of the other. Harris scooted his chair in close, elbows planted on the table, shoulders hunched as he pored over the Chapman books. Neither man spoke, Harris scribbling notes in a pocket-sized spiral, Rossi thumbing pages back and forth, reading and rereading.

An hour later, Harris pushed his chair back, grunting as he stood, and left. He returned with two cups of coffee, handing one to Rossi.

“Chapman’s case is simpler,” Harris said, settling into his chair. “So I’ll go first.”

“After you,” Rossi said with a wave of his hand.

Harris used his shirt to rub smudges off his glasses, putting them on and sliding them halfway down his nose before consulting his notes.

“Kyrie Chapman, African American male, age twenty-three, died as the result of a gunshot wound to the back of the head. Judging from the entry angle of the wound and burn marks on the scalp, the shooter was aiming down with the muzzle a few inches from the victim’s head.”

“Execution style.”

“That or the shooter was standing on a ladder and capped Chapman when he walked under it.”

“Bad luck, walking under a ladder,” Rossi said.

“Getting popped with a .45 is even worse. Bullet bounces around inside your head like a fucking pinball.”

“So,” Rossi said, dropping his feet to the floor, “the way Chapman went down makes it look personal or like the shooter was sending a message.”

“Personal sounds like Dwayne Reed.”

“Anything about Chapman having a beef with somebody, maybe in his gang or another one?”

“Whole lot of nothing. Marco King in the gang unit is checking with his CIs.”

“Get back to Marco and light a fire under his ass. Some of those gangbangers will die for the cause before they’d snitch, but a few will drop a dime for the right price. Let’s find out who they’re willing to give up.”

“I thought you liked Dwayne Reed for all this. Sounds like you aren’t so sure.”

“I’d bet my left nut that Dwayne is good for all of it, but I don’t want some mealymouthed defense hack saying we made up our minds before we ran all the traps. What’s Chapman’s time of death?”

Harris flipped a page in his spiral pad. “Between eleven Friday night and one on Saturday morning.”

“Same window as the Hendersons. Where was Chapman’s body found?”

“In a Dumpster in an alley off of Independence Avenue half a block east of Brooklyn.”

“Close enough for Dwayne to have done Chapman and then made it to Henderson’s.”

“True enough,” Harris said, “unless Dwayne had nothing to do with it.”

“You got another theory?”

“Yeah. I had a case just like it last year; same area and same MO. Marco helped me out on it. He told me that stretch of Independence Avenue is Eastside Locos’ turf. They’re a Mexican gang tied into a cartel that ships dope from south of the border all the way up I-35, including a stop in Kansas City to supply the Locos, who sell the shit to the black gangs on the east side.”

“What happened in your case?” Rossi asked.

“Gangbanger name of De’Andre Waiters tried to rip off the Locos’ stash. The Locos caught him, and one by the name of Luis Flores got the honor of putting a bullet in the back of his head. They threw his body in a Dumpster like they were taking out the trash.”

“Did you close it?”

“Yeah. One of Marco’s CIs tipped him to where we could find the gun. Flores’s prints were in the system and on the gun. When we picked him up, he didn’t deny it, practically bragged about it. Took a deal for life with a shot at parole in twenty-five.”

“Why’d the CI drop a dime on him?”

“Cause the asshole was fucking the CI’s sister.”

“Is that so bad?”

“It is when the sister is ten years old.”

“So you think the Locos may have caught Kyrie trying to steal from them?”

“Could be.”

Rossi sighed. “That would let Dwayne off the hook.”

“Maybe not.”

“Why not?”

“De’Andre Waiters and Dwayne were in the same gang, so Dwayne would have known what happened to De’Andre. If he wanted to make it look like the Locos killed Chapman, he’d have known just how to do it.”

“Either way, let’s nail it down.”

Harris nodded. “How about you? Anything to work with on the Hendersons? What about the gun used to kill Jameer?”

“Different gun, nine millimeter. It was another close-up, like Chapman, only face-to-face. Close enough for blood to have splashed back on the shooter. Lena Kirk is testing some fabric we found in the fireplace at Dwayne’s mother’s house. After the way Jameer testified at the Wilfred Donaire trial, if any of the victims’ blood is on that fabric and we can tie the fabric to Dwayne’s clothes, we’ve got him cold.”

“What about the rest of the Henderson family? Anything in their background that would make someone besides Dwayne go after them?”

“Not so far. I checked Henderson out after he testified against Dwayne. Best I could tell, they were just a family trying to get by.”

“What about the way the wife and kids were killed? Any help there?”

Rossi took a deep breath. “It was fuckin’ ugly, man, what happened to them. Autopsy found flakes of aluminum on the kids’ skulls and in the mother’s vagina. The aluminum is the kind used to make baseball bats. Whoever did this cracked the kids’ heads and then raped the mother with the bat. If he hadn’t strangled her, she would have died from the internal injuries.”

“Man,” Harris said. “I been doing this a long time, and I still don’t know what kind of man does something like that.”

“I do,” Rossi said. “The same kind of man that cuts another man’s dick off and shoves it down the victim’s throat.”

“Hey,” Fowler said as he opened the door to the interrogation room. “Things have changed.”

“What?” Rossi asked.

“I just got off the phone with Tommy Bradshaw. Judge Upton released Dwayne Reed on his own recognizance.”

Rossi came out of his chair. “You are fuckin’ kidding me!”

“I wish I was. It gets worse. Bradshaw says that Reed threatened the doctor at Truman who sewed him up, a woman named Bonnie Long. Said he was going to be waiting for her when she got home from work.”

Rossi started to leave, stopping when Fowler put his hand on Rossi’s arm.

“Where are you going?”

“To warn the doc, and then I’m going to find Dwayne and put his ass back in jail.”

“No, you aren’t. Dwayne was probably just mouthing off, but in case he wasn’t, I’ve alerted Truman Medical’s security and I put two uniforms on her house. So I don’t need you warning the doctor or harassing Dwayne Reed. You handle solving crimes and I’ll handle preventing them.”

Rossi rolled his eyes, giving Harris his can-you-believe-this-bullshit look.

“I’m not asking your opinion, Detective Rossi,” Fowler said. “I’m giving you an order. You’ll do things my way or you’ll take your cowboy act to the rodeo. Are we clear?”

Rossi clenched his jaw. “Crystal clear, Commander.”

“Good,” Fowler said and left, head high, triumphant.

“What are you going to do now?” Harris asked.

“Like you’ve got to ask,” Rossi said.

Chapter Twenty-Three

ALEX HAD BEEN SWEATING since she left Judge West’s chambers, her encounter with Dwayne on the courthouse steps ratcheting her body temp up another notch. The day was half over and she was as drained as she’d been after running the Warrior Dash, a 5K obstacle course that included mud pools, barbed wire, and fire pits. She did it to test her limits, and when she finished she was elated. Now she was just grimy and edgy, looking over her shoulder, sensing that trouble was gaining on her.