Cast the First Stone

by K. J. Emrick

  Christian didn’t have an office of his own. His desk sat in a corner of a room full of other desks, more secluded than the others but only just barely. I’d suggested that we meet at a diner I know over on Junction Ave, not far from here, but he didn’t want to hear about that. So much for him complaining about being off duty, because here we are.

  The Seventh Precinct of the Detroit Police Department was actually the ugliest building I’d ever seen. It was all metal and glass on the outside, with four vehicle bay doors straight out of some TV show chop shop. This place always reminds me of a box store warehouse, to tell you the truth, and when you’re driving past on M-85 the only thing that tells you it’s a police precinct are small letters at the curb spelling out “Southwest Public Safety Center.” You’ll miss them if you’re doing anything close to the speed limit.

  Thankfully I know right where it is. Me and Christian have met here before, plenty of times. Never in handcuffs, in case that’s what you were wondering. I’ve sat here at his desk discussing cases and politics and sports, and he’s always been straight with me. We both prefer straight talk over empty words.

  “I know this is going to surprise you,” Christian says to me now, “but I agree with you.”

  I accept the styrofoam cup of coffee that he hands me with a smile. “Wow. It must have hurt to say that. Like, physically hurt.”

  He grunts as he sits down in his squeaky desk chair. “I don’t mind giving compliments where they’re due. You figured out this case with almost nothing to go on. That deserves kudos.”

  “We don’t know for sure that I’ve solved this one. I have a theory, that’s all.”

  “A damned good one,” he tells me. “There’s some days that I wish you’d become a police officer.”

  “You’d hate it if I was a cop, and you know it. Our relationship works best because we don’t see each other for days at a time.” I smile at him to let him know I’m joking as I take a sip from the coffee cup.

  I gag and stick my tongue out. “Gah. This is coffee?”

  He lifts his own cup, fresh from the vending machine just like mine. “Yeah, I know. It’s the best we’ve got. Your tax dollars at work, as they say.”

  “Let me guess. It’s made with unfiltered city water.”

  “Sure is. Sorry.”

  “No, no it’s fine. I’ve just had better.” The memory of that delicious brew Harry had made for me put this brown swill to shame. “How do you make it through the day with this stuff?”

  “After a few months your taste buds burn out.”

  He lifts his cup across his desk, and I lift mine to tap it rim to rim.

  Detective Christian Caine is one of those men who find their career in helping others. Kind of like I did, except while I was slogging through deserts as a Marine he was back here, fighting crime in the urban jungle. He’s been a police officer for twenty-two years now. Started as a beat cop walking the streets, moved up to being a detective pretty quickly, and he’s made a name for himself. A good one.

  He looks good doing it, too.

  Tonight he’s not wearing his usual suit and tie outfit. Because he’s here on his time off he put on a pair of jeans and a loose-fitting shirt with three buttons at his neck, all of them undone. He’s athletically muscular, more like a quarterback than a defensive tackle. I’ve always thought his hazel eyes are stunning against his dark brown skin, and he never smiles so brightly as he does when he’s tracking down a bad guy. I’m pretty sure he told me once that he made some money in college doing toothpaste commercials. With that face and those beautiful lips, I believe it.

  It’s a wonder he’s still single, but his love life’s none of my business. Someone as devoted to his job as he is probably doesn’t have a lot of time to go out on dates.

  Then again, I’m not one to talk.

  I set the coffee cup aside. I didn’t come here to socialize anyway. “You said I was right with my hunch? So what did you find out?”

  “For one thing, Barlow Michaelson has bad luck with women.”

  “And what else?”

  He turned the computer screen on his desk so I could see it, too. “His ex-wife still lives right here in Detroit.”

  There she was, right there on the screen. The former Mrs. Andrea Michaelson. Blonde hair, square face, eyes the color of mud, skin the color of chalk. Just like Christian had said, there was a last known address for her in one of the Detroit suburbs.

  Here was my kidnapping suspect. Barlow’s ex-wife.

  It only hit me after I’d left his apartment tonight, and I was kicking myself for not thinking of it sooner. He’d mentioned his ex-wife the very first time we met but I didn’t have any reason to even give her a second thought until I’d gone back to ask him more questions. That’s when he’d told me all that stuff about his ex calling him a fool for divorcing her. “She said no woman would ever make me happy again.”

  I know every spurned woman says stuff like that to make the guy angry, but let’s think this through.

  Barlow’s ex is the jealous type who uses a cellphone tracking app to keep tabs on him, just like he’d been doing with Katarina. She threatens Barlow that no woman will ever make him happy ever again, which sounds like she’s just upset because of the divorce… until the next woman to make him happy disappears.

  So I had to ask myself. Was this Barlow’s ex-wife making good on her threat?

  “She kidnaps Katarina,” Christian says, laying out my theory in simple terms, “and forces her to clean out Barlow’s bank accounts, hoping he’ll have to crawl his way back to her. That is one sick woman.”

  “If it’s true,” I say, still hedging on my own idea. “We won’t know until we talk to her.”

  “Oh, I think we can do better than that.” He brings the keyboard over closer and starts tapping away with a speed that turns his fingers into a blur. “I think we can be pretty sure that Andrea’s our kidnapper.”

  “Why’s that?”

  He finishes his typing with a slap of his index on the Enter key. “Because, she has two orders of protection against her, both for physical altercations that she was involved with. That’s why her picture’s in our little system here. Things went pretty much downhill for her after the divorce and she started taking it out on everyone around her. Lost her job. She bought this house over on Dwyer Street after Barlow left her but she’s in default on the loan and she’s in danger of losing it to the bank. She’s got a temper. She threatened Barlow after he divorced her. She’s jealous of the new girl in her ex’s life. Yeah. In my book, it all adds up.”

  Yeah. That’s pretty much what I thought, too. “So what do we do next?”

  Those hazel eyes of his rotate my way. “We?”

  “Yeah, we. I brought this to you, Chris. Katarina Borishev is my case and my responsibility. I’m in this to the end.”

  Slugging down the rest of his coffee in one swallow—his taste buds really must be burned out—he tosses the cup in the short waste can beside his desk. “You’ve got no employer,” he reminds me, leaning his elbows on his desk. “No employer, no case. No case, no responsibility to Katarina Borishev. I’ll take it from here, Sid.”

  I could still picture Katarina in my mind, sitting on that bed and chained to the wall. I’d been right there in the room with her, and unable to save her. I wasn’t fast enough to find out where that house was, or smart enough to think of jumping out into the hallway to catch a glimpse of who had kidnapped her before Harry’s magic pulled me away. I’d screwed up in a big way, and maybe that wasn’t fair of me to take all that on my shoulders, but it was the way I felt. I’d failed Katarina once. I wasn’t about to just let someone else ‘take it from here.’

  “I’m guessing,” I say out loud to him, “that you’re going to look into Andrea’s last known address there on your screen?”

  I matched his gaze with mine, and he did the same, in an adult version of a staring contest.

  “Mm-hmm. That’s the plan. Only, I’m going to do mo
re than go up to the door and knock. Me and some of the uniform guys will raid the place when I get the warrant I’m about to apply for, based on your statement and the exigent circumstances. We’ll go in at the crack of dawn, when there’s enough light to see what’s going on and when people least expect to see cops at their door. If Andrea is holding Katarina there she’ll be taken off guard and we’ll get this done and over before I have to start my next shift. I won’t get any sleep, but hey. Them’s the breaks.”

  “I’m going to be there,” I tell him flatly.

  That causes him to blink. “Uh, come again?”

  Smiling because I’d just won the staring contest, I stand up from the chair on this side of his desk, up to my full five-foot-seven height. “I’m going to be there.”

  Blink again. “You’re going to be where?”

  “At the raid. I’ll be there just before dawn.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says me. That’s who.”

  “Sidney, you are not,” blink, blink, “going to be at that raid.” Blink.

  “Oh?” I let my lips curl into a little smirk. “Now says who?”

  “Says me… stop that. Listen, Sid, I’m the cop here and you’re the P.I. I’ll let you know what happens afterward, but you are not going to be there.”

  Leaning down over his desk, my hands on top of his neat stacks of files, I flash him one of my winning smiles. “How’re you going to stop me? You already showed me the address.”

  His eyes close and his nostrils flare as he draws in a deep, deep breath. He knew I was right. The only way he’d be able to stop me from going now would be to arrest me. But, since I hadn’t done anything wrong yet, there was nothing to arrest me for. If I showed up tomorrow morning and he arrested me then it would cause a big disruption right before their raid and blow the whole operation. I had him over a barrel, and he knew it.

  “Fine, you can be there,” he finally says, blowing out his breath all at once. “If you do anything at all to screw this up, Sid… so help me God…”

  “You don’t have to say a prayer for me, Chris, I know what’s at stake.” Katarina’s life, that was what.

  “Fine.” He’s repeating himself now. He only does that when he’s really mad at me. “You know what? Better yet, you can meet me back here in four hours. I’ll drive you over.”

  “Really? I didn’t know you cared.”

  “I do and I don’t, but I definitely do not want you rolling up on scene in that Frankenstein of a Mustang you drive.”

  “Hey, be nice. Roxy’s got feelings. Just because she’s made out of five or six different cars from the same year doesn’t mean that she’s a Frankenstein.”

  “Whatever.” He tries to hide it, but I see the smile on his lips. “Go on. Get some food and some sleep. And if you can get some for me too, that’d be great. I’ll be here when you get back.”

  “Promise?” I ask him.

  “Yeah, yeah. I’ll still be here doing paperwork if nothing else.”

  “If you stand me up on this, just remember, I know where you work.”

  “Yeah, and I know where you live. Now go on.”

  I watch him for just a moment, picking up papers and pulling his desk phone closer to start making calls. He was going to have a lot of work to do, thanks to me, and he hadn’t complained about it once. Just sat down in his chair, and dove right in. He was the kind of guy I was glad to call a friend.

  Four hours. I wasn’t going to get much sleep, but he was right, I should at least try. Tomorrow was going to be a long day for both of us.

  I’m all the way across the room, about to push through the glass door on my way out, when he calls over to me.

  “Hey Sidney?”

  Hand on the door, I hear the words before he says them, and I have to smile.

  “Good work.”

  Detroit is only about fifteen miles across, East to West. If it wasn’t for traffic you could be anywhere you wanted to within the city limits in under a half an hour. With traffic? Well. Let’s just say we left an hour early to get to Andrea Michaelson’s place by dawn. Just to be safe.

  Funny fact about Detroit. We’ve got two other cities tucked away inside of ours. Hamtramck—pronounced ham-tram-ick with an invisible ‘i’ tucked in there—and Highland Park, both of them completely surrounded by the Motor City. As far as I know we’re the only major city in America where that happens. From the seventh precinct house we passed in and out of Hamtramck on our way to the other side of Detroit, to Andrea’s house on Dwyer Street.

  Chris was driving. He’d insisted on it, and it was his car after all. Or rather, we were in the unmarked charger that the city of Detroit had given him to use while on duty. It was gray on the outside, and gray on the inside, and I bet if I lifted the hood that the engine would be all gray, too. “This car has no character,” I point out, running my hand along the stodgy lines of the dash. Stodgy isn’t a word that I use much—or ever—but it sure fits.

  “It’s an undercover police car,” he says, turning off Charles Street and onto Dwyer past a little liquor store. “It’s supposed to blend in. There’re times when I need to disappear in traffic, or on surveillance. Which is exactly why I didn’t want you to bring that puzzle-piece of a car you slept in last night.”

  I stick my tongue out at him for calling Roxy names. I did sleep in her backseat last night, though, and I had the crick in my neck to prove it. I figured by the time I got home, and explained everything to Harry, and climbed into bed, I wouldn’t have been able to lay down for more than an hour. It just made sense to sleep in my car. Not the first time I’ve done it. Probably won’t be the last, either.

  Dwyer Street is a low-rent residential section of the city. Cracked and crumbling sidewalks line both sides of the street. Fire hydrants poke up on the edge of every tenth lawn. The houses are older, and most are in need of serious repair, and there’s trees everywhere.

  I tried to match the area to what I’d seen from that house where I found Katarina, but a tree’s a tree. I couldn’t even tell you what color the outside of the house had been. So when we pulled up to the last known address for Andrea Michaelson, all I could say was… maybe.

  It was a two-story house with faded blue siding and a steeply pitched roof over the second story. Trees ringed the property, separating it from the houses to either side. I was itching to go around back to see if there was a rusted swing set out there but what I was even more anxious to do was get inside. If Katarina was here, then this whole thing could be over with in just a few minutes.

  I actually crossed my fingers and said a little prayer. No matter how good I was at my detective work, it could never hurt to hedge my bets in as many ways as possible.

  Two marked patrol units pulled up behind us, out of the direct line of sight from the house behind the edges of that line of trees. There was no telling what Andrea would do once she knew she was found out. The four officers who stepped out of those two cars were ready for anything. Bulletproof vests. Shotguns. Tasers at their hips. It was the kind of show that was going to attract a lot of attention really quickly once we got started. Granted, it was only quarter to six in the morning, and the sun was only just starting to peek up over the horizon, but I had no doubt there were already people awake in these houses, watching through their bedroom windows, ready to record everything on their phones and post it to YouTube later.

  Christian gathered everyone up at the back of his car and gave them their directions. Two of them were to go to the back of the house and watch the exit there, while he made entry through the front with the other two. “Make sure you avoid the windows,” he reminded everybody. “Let’s try to keep this a secret until we’re going in.”

  A younger officer with a cocky face asked, “We’re not announcing ourselves, right sir?”

  “Not until the door is open and we’re inside. That’s the beauty of a no-knock warrant. Just to be clear, entry is only through the front. If our suspect runs out the back, you two are to cont
ain her. You’ve all seen the photo of Andrea Michaelson, and you’ve seen the photo of our possible kidnap victim, Katarina Borishev. Don’t mix the two up but take both into custody if located.”

  After everyone nodded their understanding, Christian sent the two guys off to their posts in the back. “You have two minutes to get into position and then we’re going in the front. Stay off the radio unless something goes wrong.”

  From his trunk he takes out a bulletproof vest of his own, strapping it on right over his shirt. He already has the holster of his .40 caliber sidearm looped through his belt at his hip. Geared up and ready, he closes the trunk up slowly, so that it wouldn’t slam.

  In that moment it suddenly occurs to me that I don’t have a bulletproof vest. My .38 is tucked into the small of my back for easy access, but I sure wouldn’t mind some of that protection the boys are wearing.

  With a tap on Christian’s shoulder, I clear my throat. “Got one of those for me?”

  “No. Because you aren’t coming in the house. Not yet.”

  “What! Christian, you promised me.”

  “I promised you could be here for the raid. Here you are. However, I am not putting one civilian in harm’s way while I try to save another civilian’s life. That kind of math doesn’t add up for me.” With a stern look, he points at the passenger side door of his car. “You stay here. You watch.”

  “Uh-uh. No way. You wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for me.”

  The look that crosses his face tells me he’s not in the mood to argue this one. He reaches out to take me by the elbow…

  But I’ve already moved away because I saw it coming.

  He’s a little surprised when I dodge him that easily, but he doesn’t let it show. Not in front of his officers. “Sidney, you can either stay here in my car, and watch us do our jobs, or Jackson there is going to handcuff you and throw you in the back of one of the patrol cars. Either way, you’re sitting this one out. Which is it?”