by EH Reinhard
“That’s what I thought. Now let’s get the hell out of here.” David tossed the weapon into the garbage strewn in the alley and walked to the front of the van.
CHAPTER TWO
I made a right off East Fourth Avenue onto North Twenty-Fifth Street in Ybor City and pulled my new Shelby Mustang behind the last TPD patrol car in line. I glanced at the car’s thermometer—forty-five degrees, crisp for a Tampa winter morning. I killed the motor, hung my badge from my neck, and stepped out of the car. The time was a few minutes after seven thirty—my shift didn’t technically start until nine. I crossed the street and walked to the alley that ran behind a vacant old redbrick cigar factory and connected to North Twenty-Sixth Street. A small chain-link fence littered with garbage took up the right-hand side—the old factory on my left. I looked past the police tape at the scene. A pair of tarps covered what I assumed to be two bodies dead center in the small strip of roadway. I saw evidence cones around the bodies. Five or six of our Tampa PD officers walked around the roped-off area, searching the ground. I walked to the police tape and dipped under it.
Officer Henry, a uniformed patrolman, looked up from surveying the ground as I approached. “Morning, Lieutenant,” he said.
“Henry,” I said. “Just the two?” I jerked my chin at the covered bodies.
“Another three inside the building,” Officer Henry said.
I nodded and continued up the alley, spotting my sergeant and, for all intents and purposes, my partner, Hank Rawlings. He wore a winter cap pulled low over his short dark hair. Hank stood near the tarped bodies, talking with a shorter bald-headed man in a suit with his back toward me. As the man turned, I noticed he was Detective John King, from our drug unit. John’s presence at our homicide scene could only mean that our murders were more than likely drug or gang related. Hank was writing something in a small notepad. He slipped it into his suit jacket’s inner pocket as I walked up.
“Morning, Kane,” Hank said.
“Hank,” I said and then looked at Detective King. “John.”
“Anything new on the Angel Guerro front?” John asked.
Angel Guerro was a local Hispanic gang leader that had been killed a few weeks prior. His body, riddled with bullet holes and missing a thumb, was found on the shoulder of I-275, seemingly dumped out of a moving vehicle in the late hours of the night. We’d brought in a number of his associates, but no one knew anything, or they simply weren’t talking and sought retribution of their own.
“Not that we’ve heard. Dead end after dead end,” I said.
“How are the new wheels?” John asked. He motioned to my Mustang on the street, past the police tape.
I’d purchased the car a few months back. While I’d imagined spirited weekend drives and taking it to the track, the reality was I mostly drove it from my condo’s parking structure to the station’s parking structure, which was about a three-minute drive down city streets that were usually gridlocked. Fifty of the car’s two hundred total miles were racked up bringing it home from the dealership. “Only a couple hundred miles,” I said. “Can’t really open it up yet. Still breaking her in. Just you here, Hank?” I asked.
“Jones is inside,” Hank said. “I thought you were going to shave that off?”
I gripped my hand around the almost-two-inch-long dark brown-and-gray hair covering my cheeks and chin. I hadn’t had a shave in months, which was more me not caring than actually trying to grow a beard. “I opted to not. That’s a pretty winter cap, though,” I said. “Wife pick that up for you so your little ears don’t get chilled?”
“She might have. And screw that, it’s cold out,” Hank said.
“This isn’t cold,” I said.
“I suppose, being from Wisconsin, you think this is still shorts weather,” John said.
“I can guarantee you if it was forty-five degrees there right now, you could drive around and spot probably a dozen people outside in shorts.”
John smirked.
I pointed my chin at the pair of bodies under tarps ten feet away. “Who do we have there?”
“Females. Executed. Unknown identities at the moment,” Hank said. “No IDs on the bodies. One Caucasian, one African-American. Both tied and gagged. I’d put their ages around fifty or sixty.”
Females, executed, tied and gagged, fifties or sixties—nothing Hank said remotely resembled a typical homicide that we worked.
“Define executed,” I said.
“One in the forehead on each. One in the back on each.”
I rubbed my eyes. “Murder weapon? Anything else found?” I asked.
Hank brushed his knuckle against his mustache and sniffed. “Yeah, we have a pistol tossed among the garbage on the edge of the alley. Glock 17. Shell casings too. The weapon and casings are marked with cones. More shell casings inside the building. I have the patrol guys putting markers by anything that may be of interest to forensics.”
“Speaking of forensics, is Rick on his way?” I asked.
“I talked to him about ten minutes ago. He and Rob should be here shortly,” Hank said.
“Who called it in?”
“City bus driver. She saw the bodies in the alley while driving past,” Hank said.
“Okay.” I glanced toward the building. “Officer Henry said there was another three inside?”
“Correct. Three males,” Hank said.
I looked at John. “I assume that you’re familiar with someone inside?”
“Yeah, that’s why I got called out here,” John said. “One of them is Charles Treadwell.”
I was familiar with the name. Charles Treadwell was a known local gang leader, drug dealer, and anything but low level.
“What are you thinking? Rival gang, deal gone bad, what?” I asked.
“Hard to tell at the moment,” John said. “You can take a peek inside and see what you think. I made a few calls, though. We’ll see what comes back as far as what the latest word on the streets was about Treadwell.”
“Sure,” I said.
John’s phone rang. He took it from his pocket, glanced down at the screen, and excused himself.
I turned my attention back to Hank. “Anyone call Ed at the ME’s office?” I asked.
“I called him,” Hank said. “He just said to have Rick call him whenever forensics is wrapping up so he can come with the van. With the amount of bodies, I’m sure Rick will need a bit to go through everything.”
“All right. Let’s get a look at this.” I walked to the two bodies in the alley. Hank followed. I knelt at the first and reached for the corner of the tarp.
“That’s going to be the Caucasian one,” Hank said.
I glanced over my shoulder at him, gave him a nod, and looked down as I pulled the corner of the tarp from the body. I saw a woman’s head facing down into the dirty blacktop of the alley. A white cloth spattered in blood wrapped her eyes. A similar cloth was pulled tight into her mouth. The cloth appeared to be T-shirt material. She had shoulder-length brown hair and a noticeable exit wound from a bullet directly in the center of the back of her head. I pulled the tarp down more to expose her clothing. She wore a small yellow tank top. The straps seemed to frame the bullet wound in the middle of her back. My eyes moved to her pink-patterned fleece pants. I dropped the tarp back over her and went to her feet, where I lifted the edge of the tarp. She was barefoot.
“Taken out of bed,” I said. I ran my hand over my bald head. “She’s in her pajamas.”
“I saw the same,” Hank said.
“The other woman, dressed similar?” I asked.
Hank confirmed, and I moved a few feet to the next covered body, pulling the edge of the tarp away and seeing that the woman was also dressed for bed. I quickly glanced over the woman’s bullet wounds, which were the same as on the other female. I noticed a cut above her right eye that looked as if it could have been a couple of days old. I laid the tarp back over her and stood. “Have you been inside?”
“Just a quick walk-through.”
I motioned for Hank to lead the way into the building and followed.
Hank broke the plane of the gray metal door and entered. He continued walking as he talked. “First two floors are completely empty,” Hank said. “Our bodies are up on the third.”
I looked out into the old, empty factory floor. I figured the wide-open space to be roughly six thousand square feet. When the building was in operation, I imagined it would have been filled with workers at long tables, hand rolling cigars—all that remained was dust, worn plank wood floors, and the support beams running down the center, holding the next two floors up.
I followed Hank up a flight of stairs. The second story looked the same as the first—empty. The morning light shone through the building’s windows and window voids where the glass had been broken out. Dust from people walking on the floor above fell from the ceiling and hung in the air. We started up the steps to the third floor. I could hear people talking as we ascended the stairwell. Hank reached the top step and made a left. I did the same behind him, and towering over the uniformed officers he spoke with was a huge man in a suit—Detective Maxwell Jones. Jones lifted his head, acknowledged us, and gestured that he’d just be a moment. Jones gave his attention back to the officer that he spoke with and jotted something down in his notepad.
My eyes went to the floor of the room. From my position, I saw three bodies on the ground. One of the bodies was a few feet to the left of a metal table with foldout legs. The other two bodies were on the ground in between two metal foldout chairs and the table. Unlike the scene in the alley, the bodies weren’t draped in tarps. Yellow evidence cones marked shell casings near the bodies. I looked left and right around the room, which resembled the second floor and the first. Aside from the table, the dead men, and the officers, the entire floor was empty.
Hank and I walked to the body to the left of the table.
The man lay face up with his arms outstretched to the sides. One leg was bent, the other straight. He was Caucasian with blond hair that was red with blood. A blood pool had formed under his head. His eyes were open and bloodshot. I knelt for a better look—he’d taken a bullet under his chin, and the round had exited the top of his head. I looked up to see blood and matter clinging to the ceiling.
“Shot under the chin, almost as if a suicide,” Hank said.
I scanned the floor for a weapon but saw nothing. “Where’s his gun? If he was our killer and then decided to take his own life, he’d be the last one dead, and the gun would be right here. But I’m not seeing a weapon.”
I saw Detective Jones walking toward us.
“Jones,” I said.
“Lieutenant,” Jones said. His voice boomed and carried bass that I could feel. Jones had recently been promoted to my department, and aside from the patrol guys, he was the only person who actually called me by my rank as opposed to just my last name, Kane. From the couple of months since he’d made detective and been under my watch, he’d been doing a fine job. Jones looked down at his notepad. “Looks like we have possible identities on each man. We were waiting on forensics to come to see if the men actually had identification on them. Detective King said he knew who two of the three were. Officer Johnson there”—Jones nodded at the blond patrol officer in uniform—“says that the last one looks like a guy he picked up a couple of weeks back. The name is Michael Woodward on that one. The others are LaMarcus Taylor and Charles Treadwell.”
I pulled out my notepad and pen from the inner pocket of my suit jacket and wrote down the names. “Anything standing out at you, Jones?” I asked.
“We have some voids in the blood spatter across the surface of the table. The killings seem somewhat professional. One in the head, one in the chest on each man. Not really sure what is going on with that one.” He nodded at the body that had been shot under the chin.
“Any weapons found up here?” I said.
“Nothing. Just the shell casings.”
“Voids in the blood, huh?” I said. “So there was something on the desk that was removed from the scene. And a pistol found in the alley. We have at least one person that left.”
“Appears so,” Jones said.
I walked to the dead man at the left edge of the table. “Who is this one?” I asked.
Hank and Jones followed. I looked over my shoulder to see Jones referring to his notepad.
“That’s the one believed to be LaMarcus Taylor,” Jones said.
I paused and stared down at the man, who appeared to be in his thirties. His body was positioned as if he’d occupied the chair farthest left and fell off when he was shot. He faced the ceiling of the building. His hair was dark, short on the sides, and longer by an inch at the top. He had a thin mustache and small patch of beard. Above his left temple was the bullet’s entry wound—he had another bullet hole through his upper left chest. A shot through the heart. The left side of his suit jacket was red—saturated in blood. The pockets on his pants had been turned inside out.
I looked at the man lying just a few feet away to the right. He was older than the two men I’d already had a look at. “Is this Charles?” I asked.
“I never saw the guy, personally,” Hank said. “But John said that this was him when I came in earlier.”
I knelt next to the body and looked at the man. His dark hair had gray in the sides. His head faced away from me toward the wall. His eyes were open, as if he was staring out of the single window behind the table. He had a bullet hole to the left side of his head as well as another in his chest. I glanced at the man’s left wrist. His sleeve was pulled up a bit. I used the tip of the pen to lift his suit jacket and noticed that he also had the lining of his pants pocket showing.
I stood and focused my line of sight on the surface of the table and noticed the voids in the blood that Jones had mentioned. The first appeared rectangular, roughly eighteen inches by twelve. Another void was near the first, also rectangular.
“This one blood void could have been where a briefcase sat. Looks to be about the right size,” I said, pointing at the larger of the two spaces.
“Kidnapping and ransom payoff, maybe,” Hank said. “Accounting for the tied-up women outside. Something didn’t go right, and everyone dies, including the abducted. Kidnappers take the money and personal belongings then hit the road.”
“Could be,” I said. “This guy is still off, though.” I nodded at the blond-haired man. “These guys were the guests to this meeting, judging by the empty chairs and their positioning.” I pointed at the two dead men at the table. “Both took shots from someone over there. Possibly our guy with the blond hair.” I pointed back toward the body. “But if he killed himself after, how did his gun get outside?”
Hank’s face said he was going over what I’d just said. He walked to the blond man and knelt before him. “Hey, check this out.”
I went to Hank’s side and crouched down.
“His shirt is all stretched out at the front. Like someone had it balled up in their fist.”
I focused on the fabric and noticed what Hank was looking at. “So someone probably put the gun under this guy’s chin. Ed could probably have a look at the trajectory when he does the autopsy and give us an answer on that.”
I rose and walked to the window to have a look down at the scene in the alley. I spotted a brown-haired guy with a blue jacket that said “Forensics” on the back, kneeling next to an evidence cone. “It looks like Rick is here. Let’s go have a chat,” I said.
Hank and I left the building, walked outside, and headed for Rick, still in the same spot as when I saw him from inside of the building. He stood as he saw Hank and me approach.
“Rick,” I said.
“Kane, Rawlings,” he said. Rick pulled an electronic cigarette from the breast pocket of his gray shirt and took a couple of puffs. The tip lit a blue color. I’d noticed Rick to be a heavy smoker since I took the lieutenant spot after moving down to Florida from Wisconsin a couple of years back. Every few months, he’d be trying so
mething different to kick the habit, be it patches, gums, lozenges, or whatever the latest stop-smoking aid was. It appeared he’d moved on to the electronic cigarettes that month.
“Looks like you’re going to have your hands full here,” Hank said. “We have most everything that we found marked off for you.”
“Appreciate that,” Rick said. He stretched his back and let out a long breath. “I have Rob with me. We’ll just knock it out piece by piece. Have you guys been through the entire scene?”
“We did a walk-through,” I said.
“And what all do we have marked?” Rick asked.
“Single firearm, multiple shell casings,” Hank said.
“Okay,” Rick said. “I’m going to go grab my kit, get everything photographed, and then get gloved up and dive in. Are you guys sticking around?”
“Yeah, we’ll be here,” I said.
CHAPTER THREE
We stayed on scene for the better part of three hours. Ed Dockett, our county’s chief medical examiner, came and removed the bodies one by one after getting the go-ahead from Rick. I left Ed with instructions to call me as soon as he had any information on the bodies themselves. Rob, Rick’s forensics assistant, removed bullets from the floors to take back to the lab for ballistic testing. Hank and I shadowed Rick from one piece of evidence to another. Rick ran a GSR test on the bodies—only the blond-haired man came back with a positive result. Rick had explained that the blood spatter on the ceiling didn’t line up with where the body was found, leading him to believe that someone had shoved the man backward after shooting him. The man did not commit suicide, and our shooter was not dead at the scene. Rick bagged and tagged everything and lifted prints from various parts of the factory—mainly the door leading into the building, the table area, and the chairs. The only additional evidence put together on scene was that the shell casings, both in the alley and the third floor, matched the caliber of pistol we’d found—that, and the fact that not one person had a wallet, identification, or any valuables on them. We left Rick on scene to wrap up. When Hank and I left, he’d said that they had only another few minutes before going back to the station and starting with all of the processing.
