by EH Reinhard
“So he’s okay?” I asked.
“As far as I was told. We have another problem, though. Where did this guy get the Buick, and who did it belong to? I have the patrol units knocking on doors and trying to figure that out now. We’re looking for the car as well.”
“Did he give a description of the guy?”
“He said baseball hat with a beard. White and maybe forty.”
“Okay.” I ran my hand over my shaved head, feeling a bit of stubble pull against my fingers. “Keep me updated,” I said.
“I will.” Timmons clicked off.
“Son of a bitch,” I said. I slid my phone back into my pocket.
“What was that?” Hank asked. “What happened?”
I looked over my shoulder and spoke. “Officer Reiter seems to have been shot by our guy. I guess one in his left arm and one in his vest.”
“Is Reiter going to be okay?” Jones asked.
“As far as Timmons knows. He’s going to keep me updated.”
“What do we know about the car and guy?” Hank asked.
“Older Buick. Reiter’s description of the guy was baseball hat with a beard, forty, and white.”
“Is patrol out looking for the car this guy was in?” Jones asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“This looks like our spot up here,” Jones said. He pointed out of the windshield.
We pulled into the blacktopped lot of the gas station and diner. Six gas pumps stood under an awning in the center of the lot. The rectangular building was wrapped by an elevated wooden patio area with outdoor seating. A few outdoor tables with black-and-white checkered tablecloths sat empty aside from salt and pepper shakers and a rack of condiments. A homemade-looking wooden sign hanging over the entrance read Barrilleaux’s Pit Stop. Jones parked in one of the free spots.
We got out and walked toward the entrance. I climbed the four stairs and read the A-frame sign standing on the patio as Jones pulled open the front door—in chalk, it read “Crawfish dinner, $8.99.”
Hank and I followed Jones inside. The interior of the building was standard gas station fare except for the small restaurant area tucked in the far right corner. The walls in the restaurant area were wood paneled and covered with miscellaneous pieces of flair, which all looked to be Louisiana themed. A group of four tables with checkered tablecloths stood before a small diner bar with some red stools. Beyond the bar was a single doorway with an oval glass window that I assumed led to the kitchen. A soda machine and garbage can finished off the decor of the dining area.
The main gas station registers stood directly to our left. We walked up to the counter.
A man looking the better part of sixty, judging by his short white hair and mustache, leaned against a stool behind the counter at the register. He wore a black polo shirt with an embroidered logo of the sign hanging above the front door.
“We’re from the Tampa Police Department. We called a little earlier regarding taking a look at some video,” I said.
He rose from his stool and stretched his hand over the countertop for a handshake. “Terry Barrilleaux,” he said. “You spoke with me.”
“Owner?” I asked.
“Unless you ask my wife,” he said. “Speaking of which, let me get her to watch the counter quick, and I’ll let you guys have a look at that video.”
“Appreciate it,” I said.
The man walked through a small doorway behind the counter. A moment later he reappeared with a woman about his age. She looked at our group and gave a smile and nod. The man walked from a small swinging gate at the end of the main counter and came to us. “Our office with the video equipment is back behind the restaurant. Why don’t you guys follow me.”
“Sure,” I said.
We followed the man to the restaurant side and through a doorway with the oval window behind the diner bar. We passed a small kitchen filled with stainless ovens and refrigeration units on our left. A few employees stood around talking but then tried to look busy when they spotted Mr. Barrilleaux.
Barrilleaux made a right through an open doorway, and we entered the small office behind him. Jones stood in the center of Hank and me—our shoulders touched his as we stood side by side in the cramped area. Mr. Barrilleaux sat at his desk in front of a large computer monitor. I took in the office briefly. Like the restaurant, it was wood paneled. A Louisiana flag took up the right wall. Some framed photos scattered the rest of the room’s walls. His desk was covered in papers. There were no guest chairs, just some random boxes stacked in the corners.
“From Louisiana?” Hank asked.
“Yes, indeed. Retired here a couple years back. I wanted to get into the gas station biz, but the wife wanted to open up a restaurant.” He held up his hands, referencing the business that he sat in. “Here you have our compromise. I run the gas station, and the wife runs the restaurant. You’ll have to excuse me for not having any chairs for you guys to sit. Don’t really have people back here. But if you feel like pulling up a patch of carpet, or grabbing a couple chairs from the restaurant, by all means.”
“We’ll be fine,” I said.
“So you didn’t really mention what you boys were looking for, or from when,” Mr. Barrilleaux said.
“We’d like to see early this morning,” I said. “And then track back a few days if possible.”
“Sure, sure. What are we looking for?” Mr. Barrilleaux asked. He pulled his computer keyboard closer and began clicking keys.
“A man inside and a vehicle outside,” I said.
“I’m sure we have plenty of both of those. Got a time that you’re looking for specifically?”
I thought about it for a second and looked at Hank.
“We have a time frame of any time after three a.m. and before two thirty this afternoon. Almost a twelve-hour window,” Hank said.
“What time do you open?” I asked.
“Five a.m. on the gas station side,” Mr. Barrilleaux said. “The restaurant opens at eleven.”
It trimmed our window down by only a couple of hours.
“What time do you close?” I asked.
“We lock the doors around ten. The pumps stay on all night for credit cards, though.”
“Did you work this morning?” I asked.
“I got in around eight o’clock.”
“Did you see a guy in all black with a baseball hat in here this morning? He’d have a beard.”
“Can’t say that I did.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s just try running the footage you have from the time you opened this morning and then we can backtrack and go from there.”
“How many cameras do you have and what do they cover?” Jones asked.
“One outside and four inside,” he said. “Outside covers the pumps and faces out toward the street. Two inside ones are for the cash registers. Then one on the restaurant and one on the gas station interior pointed toward the beer. We had some kids trying to lift some a while back and just kind of left it pointing over there.”
“It might be easiest to just watch the outside ones until we see his vehicle,” Jones said.
I agreed with Jones, and we had Mr. Barrilleaux que up the footage starting at five a.m. He turned his computer monitor so it was visible to us.
The first car pulled up to the pump around a quarter after five. They came more frequently as it neared six
We watched the footage in eight times speed, stopping only to identify the vehicles that came and went. The time on the recording showed after eight o’clock. We’d been watching for a little over twenty-five minutes and hadn’t seen our vehicle.
“Okay. Pause that for me for a second,” I said.
Mr. Barrilleaux clicked his computer mouse, and the frame went still.
“You’re sure that you didn’t see anyone matching that description we gave you in here this morning?” Hank asked.
“I took over the register after I got here. Put my opener on stocking the cooler when our truck arrived. But lik
e I said, I didn’t see the guy. I’m a little older, but my mind isn’t gone yet.”
“Right,” I said. “You said ‘when your truck arrived.’ What does that mean?”
“Delivery truck. Food supplies for the restaurant this morning. The guy parks out back and brings the cases through the rear door that’s on ground level.”
“Does anyone else park in the back?” I asked.
“Not customers,” Mr. Barrilleaux said.
“Okay.” I let out a breath. “Let’s try running the footage inside the gas station here in the same time frames. Open until you got here.”
“Sure,” Mr. Barrilleaux said. He clicked away at his keyboard.
While the footage inside was a bit grainy, I felt it good enough that we’d be able to make an identification on our man. We ran through the same process of pausing the footage when we spotted anyone inside of the building. The first person through was a woman—no luck. An overweight man, who clearly wasn’t the guy who shot at Hank and me, came next, then a pair of men wearing construction vests—also not our shooter. At five fifty eight, we had a contender. A man wearing a baseball hat and dressed in black crossed the monitor and walked to the back of the gas station.
“Play that,” I said. “Actually, go back a couple of seconds and then play it.”
Mr. Barrilleaux did as I’d asked.
Jones, Hank, and I stared at the screen. The man walked the aisle on the rightmost side of the gas station toward the beer cooler at the back. We saw him only from the rear, so we couldn’t see if he had a beard. A bank of coffee dispensers stood in front of the gas station’s fountain machines. The man walked to the soda machines and grabbed a cup from the rack. He filled it and turned around—we saw his beard. He took a couple of steps toward a rack filled with packaged doughnuts and pulled one from the shelf—his hands were ungloved. He stood in place for a moment and inspected the pastry before putting it back on the shelf and walking to the front counter. There was a good chance that we were looking at our guy, and if we were, he’d left his prints on a doughnut—provided someone else hadn’t purchased it since our video.
“Can we switch to the register feed?” Hank asked.
“One second.” Mr. Barrilleaux worked the controls and brought up the other video feed. The man set his soda on the counter and pulled from his pocket a couple of loose bills, which he handed to the clerk. I took in the guy’s appearance—under six foot, average build, baseball hat and thick beard. No hair stuck out from under the hat. The man wore black, head to toe, just as our shooter did. He matched the description Reiter gave of the guy who shot him. The clerk gave the guy his change, and the man disappeared off camera.
“What does that time say?” I asked.
“Six oh one,” Mr. Barrilleaux said.
“Let’s get the outside footage from the same time,” I said.
We waited as Mr. Barrilleaux pulled it up. “Here we go,” he said.
I glanced at the time on the screen and then at the fuel pumps. The screen read 6:01 a.m., and no cars were at the pumps. The guy entered the frame, coming down the last two stairs of the four-stair flight at the front patio. He made a right in the parking lot and walked off screen. If he was in a vehicle, it was parked off to the far west side of the building and out of the camera’s view. We continued to watch. The camera angle went straight off the front of the building. Beyond the awning over the pumps, we could see the road directly out front. A vehicle never came into frame.
“Try back a couple of minutes,” Jones said. “Maybe he came from the other direction and we can get a shot of him passing out front before he pulled in and found his parking spot.”
Mr. Barrilleaux rewound the footage at Jones’s request. Four minutes prior to the man walking into the gas station, we caught headlights aiming directly at the camera. They faded and then disappeared.
“Play that,” I said.
He did. We watched as the headlights started from far away at first and then got closer before hitting the street, making a quick left-hand turn and appearing to turn right into the lot. We didn’t see any other vehicle in the frame. It had to be our guy.
“Rewind and pause it just before the car turns,” I said.
He did.
I stared at the screen. The only thing that I could really tell was that the car was dark and had roughly the same shape as our VW that we were hoping to see. I glanced at Hank, who silently watched at my shoulder.
“That could actually be it,” Hank said.
“Agreed,” I said. “I don’t remember seeing a road on the far side of your driveway here.” I looked at Barrilleaux.
He shook his head. “It’s not a road. It’s a long driveway that leads back to a small trailer park.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
I dropped the doughnut that I believed the man touched into a clear plastic evidence bag that we got from Jones’s car.
“What’s the plan?” Jones asked.
He stood next to me in the aisle between the coffee machine and rack of pastries.
“You remember seeing anyone who matched that guy on the video’s description when you were running through everyone?” I asked.
“You mean the associates and that of Tim Morgan?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
Jones shook his head.
“All right. We need to get this doughnut picked up and back to the station to get printed,” I said. “We also need to get someone from tech out here to get copies of all of this footage. I want it gone through. Right now we’re at an it could be the car and that might be the guy. I want to know for certain.”
“Is the sergeant still on the phone?” Jones asked.
“Yeah. As soon as he’s through with that, we’ll head across the street to see what we can find out. Do me a favor quick, Jones. Call up the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office and see if they can send a car out to us. Even if they can’t, let them know that we’re doing a little door knocking in their area.”
“Got it,” Jones said.
“Put this in the kit in the trunk,” I said. I handed Jones the bagged doughnut.
He walked toward the front door of the gas station to make the call, passing Hank, who was walking back toward me on his way.
“Rick is coming,” Hank said.
“He couldn’t send someone else?” I asked.
“Guess not. He had to call a couple of his people out into the field. They found where the car our guy was driving had come from. Also found a deceased man inside the house, so now they are out processing that scene as well. When I told Rick that we might actually have this guy’s prints, he seemed pretty eager to get out here and get on it. He said that he was just finishing up with the truck and would be on his way.”
“Another DB?” I asked.
Hank nodded.
I jammed my palm into my eye. “Okay,” I said. “What about the tech department?”
“Terry is on his way,” Hank said.
“Good.”
“I called Bostok as well. He wanted to know what our plan was. I said that we were going to go shake some trees in the trailer park across the street. He thinks it would be a good idea if we called the local department to let them know that we’re working an investigation in their area.”
“I just told Jones to make that call.”
“Then we’re good to go,” Hank said.
We thanked Mr. Barrilleaux for his help and let him know that we had a couple of guys coming to get a copy of his footage. Hank and I walked from the front of the gas station.
Jones sat at one of the checkerboard tablecloth–covered tables. He clicked off from his call and stood. “Pasco is going to send us a car. They said five to ten minutes. I told them we’d be in the trailer park.”
“Great. Let’s head over there,” I said.
Hank, Jones, and I piled into Jones’s car. Hank again sat in the back. We pulled from the gas station and turned into the dirt driveway across the street. Aside from a scrappy t
ree line up the driveway in the distance, I saw nothing. To our left and right was nothing more than long wild grass and weeds—a field for the most part.
The dirt driveway jogged left and then right into the trees and brush. An opening came up ahead to our right—I could see a small single-story house with a detached carport sitting on roughly an acre of cleared land. The dirt road continued past the house. Farther down the road, I could see the trailer court.
My eyes went back to the single-story home approaching on our right. A dark blue pickup truck was parked near the home’s front door. Farther left was a maroon 1980s four-door Cadillac.
“Pull up to that place,” I said. “Let’s check it out before heading back. Could be the landlord or property manager for the trailers in the back. That might be our best bet for someone seeing our vehicle, or maybe, guy in question.”
“Sure,” Jones said.
Jones made a right into the gravel driveway that stemmed off from the main dirt road. We pulled up behind the twenty-year-old pickup truck, and Jones killed the motor.
I stared at the small house as we stepped from the cruiser. The home was cinder block—painted in a faded green color. Four windows and a front door were all that distinguished the front. A pair of window air conditioners took up space in the farthermost windows on the house’s corners. A large television antenna jutted up from the home’s roof, which looked as if it needed replacing. A chimney stood a few feet from the antenna—no smoke. The landscaping that surrounded the home was sparse—just a pair of overgrown pygmy palm trees surrounded by sunken-into-the-earth white bricks. Patchy areas of grass and sand led up to the front door. A pair of old bicycles leaned against the house’s right corner.
Jones reached out and gave the front door a knock. We waited, but no one came.
I reached out and knocked on the door again. “Tampa police,” I called. Again, no response.
“Two cars and no one home,” Hank said.
“Or not answering,” I said. I reached out and knocked again. Still, no one came.
