A Neighbor's Lie

by Blake Pierce

  She tapped on Mike’s name, bringing up his contact information within Kim’s phone. He was listed as Mike Dillinger. His phone number was right there for the taking. But even being her first official case, Chloe knew that calling a man like Mike Dillinger would only clue him in to the fact that he was in trouble, causing him to run.

  “I’ll make the call,” Rhodes said.

  Of course you will, Chloe thought.

  As Rhodes called in an information request on Mike Dillinger, Chloe looked through the rest of the text messages. There was nothing else alarming, nothing to indicate that Kim Wielding had any real enemies. If anything, they showed that Kim had been very loved—by the Carver kids, her mother, and her sister.

  She listened as Rhodes was placed on hold, understanding that with the iPad, she was essentially holding a dead woman’s last few memories. Again, though, she wondered what they might find on the laptop. She looked through the records the State PD had left for them and found the contact number of the officer in charge. She made a call, which was fielded by a receptionist, and she left a message to be notified when a final report of all findings on Kim Wielding’s computer was completed.

  She ended her call just moments before Rhodes concluded her own call. “We’ve got a home address and a work address,” Rhodes said. “We also have confirmation that Mike Dillinger has a police record. A single B and E charge from when he was eighteen, and a slap on the wrist for being involved in a bar brawl a few years back.”

  “Seems like a strange fit for a respected nanny working in an area like this one,” Chloe said.

  “I was thinking the same thing. But…well, we don’t always choose the best men, do we?”

  “That’s for sure,” she said, thinking of Steven. “How far away is Dillinger’s work?”

  “Right here in Landover, somewhere downtown.”

  And that was all that needed to be said. They both left the Carver home, Chloe carrying the iPad. She showed it to the Carvers again when they made their way to the car. “We’ll need to hang on to this. Thanks again for giving it to us.”

  They both nodded, but seemed not to really care. “Can we…” Bill Carver started to say. He collected his thoughts and, from the looks of it, his emotions, and managed to finish: “Can we go back inside?”

  “Yes. You can live in your house again,” Chloe said. “It looked to me like the State PD did a good job making sure the place was clean. And if you do think of anything else that might help with the investigation, please give us a call.”

  She handed Sandra Carver one of her cards—the first business card she had ever handed out as an agent. In the back of her head, she filed it away as a meaningless milestone.

  “One last thing,” Chloe said. “Where did Kim live when she wasn’t here?”

  “She has an apartment over on Lyndon Street,” Bill said. “It’s not even ten minutes from here.”

  “Do you happen to have a key?”

  “No,” Sandra said. “But she gave us access to her hide-a-key. It’s hidden under the topsoil in a flowerpot by her door. There’s a lock on it and the combination is two-two-five.”

  “Thank you,” Chloe said, turning away toward the car.

  With the Carvers slowly making their way to their front porch, Chloe and Rhodes backed out of the driveway. Because Rhodes was back behind the wheel, Chloe was able to see the look of fear and uneasiness on Bill Carver’s face as he and his wife cautiously stepped through their front door.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Kim’s apartment was a cute little townhouse mockup that was clustered tightly between two identical apartments. She lived in a quaint little apartment complex that looked like just about any of the other hundreds of similar complexes between Landover and the maelstrom of DC.

  Before heading into her apartment, they cruised around the parking lot looking for a car with the license plate number the State PD had provided. After ten minutes, and two full circuits of the parking lot, they were unable to find any matches.

  They parked and found Kim’s apartment. Chloe found the key exactly where Sandra Carver had indicated, digging under a layer of topsoil to get it. She rolled in the combination on the silver ridges on the underside of the hide-a-key box and opened it up. With the key in hand, she unlocked Kim’s apartment and stepped inside.

  Right away, she felt like she was trespassing. Not only had this poor woman been savagely killed, but now two women she had never met, much less known, were about to snoop through her apartment.

  “Cute place,” Rhodes said as she stepped in front of Chloe to take the lead.

  It was a cute place. And it only reminded Chloe that she still needed to unpack all of her boxes at her own apartment. Maybe one day it would be this cute. There were twin built-in bookshelves in the living room, one on either side of an entertainment center that held a small flat-screen television. The kitchen was attached but separated by a decorative room separator. The entire place was immaculately clean and organized. It looked barely lived in at all.

  They looked the place over with a rookie’s level of care, making sure every nook and cranny was checked so as to not miss any potential clues. Once the living room and kitchen were thoroughly combed over, they ventured into the rest of the apartment, which was only a bedroom, a small office space, and a bathroom.

  The found nothing in the bedroom. It, like the rest of the apartment, was well organized and uncluttered. It made searching the place very easy. They found a MacBook that they could not get into due to the unlock-by-touch ID feature, but nothing else. There was a journal of sorts in the nightstand drawer but it contained only what looked like old to-do lists, inspirational quotes, and what appeared to be attempts at original poetry.

  The bathroom turned up nothing of interest, with the exception of a bottle of Oxycodone that had been prescribed about a year ago. The same was true of the office. The space was essentially empty, occupied by only a desk that held several books, and some out of season clothes that had been tucked away in the closet.

  Chloe and Rhodes spoke very little while they looked around. Things felt tense between them, though Chloe wasn’t exactly sure why. She supposed most new agents, freshly partnered up with one another, experienced something similar. And if she was being honest, she assumed it was even worse among competitive females who were paired up.

  They spent nearly forty-five minutes looking through the apartment. When Chloe was done scouring the bedroom, she went into the living room, where Rhodes was looking at the titles on the built-in bookshelves.

  “Thoughts?” Rhodes asked without turning to look at Chloe.

  “I think she might stay at the Carvers’ more than she stays here. The place is ridiculously clean and well kept.”

  “That’s for sure,” Rhodes said. She pointed to one of the books on the shelf on the right side of the television. “Speech Writing Essentials,” she said with a chuckle.

  “Makes you wonder how her life might have turned out to be if she’d remained in DC and kept pursuing politics,” Chloe said.

  “It also makes me wonder what changed to make her abandon it,” Rhodes said, turning away from the bookshelf. She seemed to actually ponder this for a moment before heading for the door. “Ready to go look into Mike Dillinger?” she asked, flipping the topic of conversation in a nearly mechanical manner.

  “Yeah,” Chloe said.

  She took one final look around the apartment, finding it hard to believe they’d found nothing. She knew that if the case got out of hand, they’d confiscate the laptop and someone at the bureau could hack into it for any helpful material that might be saved on it. But for now, that seemed like a very extreme measure to a case that, so far, was very boring and uneventful.

  ***

  Mike Dillinger’s place of employment had been listed as Duke’s Service Center, located in downtown Landover. However, when Chloe and Rhodes pulled up in front of the place, it was clear that it was closed—and not just as a result of business hours
but from an apparent lack of business. There was a neglected and crooked sign in the garage’s central window of the front office that read: FOR RENT OR SALE.

  “This doesn’t really strike me as the kind of neighborhood where a garage like this would have really prospered,” Rhodes said.

  Chloe nodded her agreement. She’d seen much worse, but the neighborhood was the sort where old men sat on their filthy stoops, sipping from brown paper bags—the sort where teens huddled around street corners during the afternoon and cop cars routinely canvassed late at night.

  “Well, it’s still early,” Chloe said. “Maybe we can catch him at home before he starts his day.”

  Rhodes had apparently been thinking the same thing because she wasted no time pulling away from the garage and heading further into the downtown district. It was just now beginning to creep toward nine in the morning, so most businesses were just now starting to turn on their lights and unlock their doors. Chloe saw a few people gathered at a derelict public bus stop and one woman pushing an old shopping cart, walking as if it hurt her bones to do so.

  As an agent, she knew that it was stereotyping to label a place as the “bad part of town” but that’s exactly where they were. And while she knew that poverty did not automatically equate to “bad,” the gang markings on some of the buildings she passed certainly did. She was again stuck on the question of how a woman like Kim Wielding had ended up dating a man from this side of town.

  Ten minutes later, Rhodes pulled onto a one-way street and parked at the end of the block. She pointed to the apartment building to their right and said, “This is it. Apartment Twenty-eight.”

  They got out of the car and walked inside. The lobby wasn’t so much a lobby as it was an empty space with a single bench bolted into the floor against the far wall. There was an elevator to the right but it was blocked off with an old sawhorse, a hand-lettered sign stating that it was out of order.

  They bypassed the elevator and headed for the stairs, which were just as grimy as the lobby. A few stairs up, there was something sticky on one of the steps—coffee or soda that had been there for quite some time. It was clear to see that this building was not high on the maintenance list of the city council.

  When they reached the second floor, they found it empty. A single window at the far end of the hallway shone musty morning light into the hall. It did a much better job of illuminating the hallway than the series of overhead lights—many of which were burned out. The start of the hallway was home to Apartment 21. Apartment 22 sat adjacent on the other side of the hall. Chloe and Rhodes walked down the hallway toward Apartment 28, listening to the muted sounds coming from within the building: the drone of a morning television news program, a woman coughing, someone slamming a door shut.

  They came to Apartment 28 and Rhodes wasted no time in knocking. She rapped firmly, not bothering with any attempt to try to seem passive.

  “I don’t get how a woman who seemed to have been as high-profile as Kim Wielding would have ended up with someone who lives here,” Rhodes said, echoing Chloe’s earlier thoughts. “It makes me think there’s a longer story tied to them.”

  “Or that my assumption that he’s the ex the Carvers mentioned is wrong,” Chloe admitted.

  Rhodes knocked again, a bit harder this time. Chloe was pretty certain Mike Dillinger wasn’t home. It would be inconvenient to leave here empty-handed, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world. They had evidence that he had been involved with Kim and they even had a phone number to pin to him.

  “I doubt this creep has a social life,” Rhodes said, hammering at the door again. “If he’s not home, where the hell is he?”

  While Rhodes hammered on the door, Chloe just happened to turn around to peer back down the hallway. A man had come to the top of the stairs and paused in mid-stride as he started down the hall. His eyes were locked on them and the only part of his body that was moving was his right arm. It was slowly moving inward, as if he intended to hold his stomach.

  “Rhodes,” Chloe whispered. “Company.”

  Rhodes turned in that direction. By the time she did, the man’s hand was now touching his hip, as if tugging at the waist if his pants.

  “Don’t move,” Chloe said, going for her sidearm. “We’re federal agents. Keep your hands where I—”

  The man pulled a gun from the waist of his pants just as Chloe freed her own. He wasted no time in moving, firing off two shots as he fled back down the stairway. Chloe was too shocked to fire her own. She was also too busy falling to the floor, fairly certain she’d actually heard one of the rounds pass by her head. She slid against the opposite wall, pressing herself to it and aiming her sidearm down the hall. It was a Sig Sauer .09 millimeter, the only gun she’d ever truly been comfortable with.

  “Rhodes, did you…”

  But Rhodes, also on the floor, wasn’t moving. She was moaning, however, and there was a growing pool of blood starting to gather around her waist.

  “Shit,” Chloe said. With her gun still aimed down the hallway, she slid over to Rhodes. She’d been hit low in the stomach on the right side. She was holding her sidearm with her right hand and cupping the wound with her left.

  “Rhodes, can you—”

  “Go after him,” Rhodes interrupted. Her voice was soft and clearly pained. “I’ll be fine. Get my phone. Call nine-one-one.”

  Chloe was shaking but managed to look past it as she fished Rhodes’s phone out of her partner’s pocket. She dialed 911 but Rhodes snatched the phone from her hand. “Go!” she hissed through a sigh of pain.

  “Yeah,” she said, really just as a confirmation to herself.

  She tried to remain as calm as she could as she sped back down the hallway. But as she strode ahead with stealth that surprised even her, a flood of curse words ran through her head like some meditative chant.

  Day Two on the job and I’m going to die. Right now, right here in this shitty building…

  She came to the edge of the wall where the stairway started. She collected her breath, putting a plan together in her head. If he was there, waiting for her, she’d have to shoot him. But if he wasn’t there, she was going to have to give chase. And who was to say he had gone down to the lobby, toward the street? Maybe he had run up the stairs to the third or fourth floor in an attempt to throw her off.

  She gathered up her nerves and pivoted out into the open air at the top of the stairs. Her finger was pressed against the trigger, ready to fire off a shot or two or God only knew how many. Her nerves were on fire, her muscles drenched in adrenaline.

  But the man was not there.

  Working on gut instinct, she ran down the stairs. It would just make more sense for him to have run for the streets, opening up innumerable methods of escape. She ran down the stairs, not even sure if she’d have it in her to shoot a man—at all, much less on just her second day on the job.

  She came to the bottom of the stairs and tuned right, back toward the lobby.

  Something moved to her right, something big and fast. She barely saw it at all but managed to get her arm up into a defensive posture in time. That was how she was able to block a clubbing blow with the butt of a Glock that would have knocked her back on her ass.

  She did stumble at the attack, but moved quickly and folded her blocking arm over the man’s attacking arm. This pointed the gun away from her while also forcing him to take a hard step to the left to prevent his arm from being wrenched from its socket. As he took this step, Chloe twisted his arm hard and then swept his moving left leg out from under him. When he fell backward as a result, she fell on top of him, throwing a hard forearm into his neck.

  As he coughed and gagged, she kicked his weapon away and then rolled him over. He tried to fight against her as she did it, but he was weak from the blow to the throat. She threw an elbow into his ribs to make it even easier. She then grabbed his right arm and pulled it back behind him., She did the same with his second and applied the first set of handcuffs in her career.
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br />   Holy shit, I just did that, she thought. There was pride in it, but a pungent sense of terror as well. This was real now. It was all real—more than just some dream.

  What now?

  She honestly wasn’t sure. So she did what seemed smartest to her. She couldn’t leave Rhodes to bleed out upstairs but she also couldn’t leave this asshole down here alone to escape on foot.

  She stood a few feet behind him and leveled her Sig at him. “On your knees and then to your feet,” she said.

  “Go to hell.”

  “Now, asshole. If you do it now, I may be able to make it upstairs and help my partner. If you don’t and she bleeds out, you’ll be convicted of murdering a federal agent. So I suggest you get to your fucking feet. Now!”

  He considered this for a moment but then managed to get to his knees with Chloe’s hesitant assistance. He then got to his feet and when he was standing, Chloe gave him a push toward the stairs.

  “Second floor,” she said. “Try anything stupid and I will take out your knee.”

  He walked faster than she expected. She wondered if the gravity of what was happening to him had finally sunken in. As they made their way up the stairs, she tried to imagine this man texting Kim Wielding.

  “Is your name Mike Dillinger?” she asked.

  He said nothing. He only turned his head slightly in her direction.

  “I suggest you answer me. You’ll only make it harder on yourself.”

  “Yes. I’m Mike Dillinger.”

  “Why did you find it appropriate to fire at federal agents, Mr. Dillinger?”

  He shrugged and looked to the ground.

  When they reached the top of the stairs, Chloe nudged him forward with the barrel of her gun. It was probably irresponsible and frowned upon at the bureau, but she didn’t care. She’d nearly died, Rhodes might die, and this man seemed to not care about any of it.