Lieutenant Kane: Dedicated to Death 01-The First Shot

by EH Reinhard

I nodded.

  “Probably why the first couple of shots you thought that you put into him from outside didn’t have the desired effect.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Did they get that deputy some help?”

  “A couple of cars rolled up just as I was coming in here.”

  “Good,” I said. I walked to the hallway where Hank said we had another DB. The guy, large in stature, lay halfway down the short hall. A blood smear on the wall followed him to his position on the blood-soaked carpet. The door at the end of the hallway hung from the hinges. “These guys probably took those shots we heard when we were down at the trailer park,” I said. I continued to the man and knelt. The man lay on his side—his head with two bullet holes farther from me. I saw another two gunshot wounds in his chest. My eyes briefly went to the wall a couple feet up from where his body came to rest. Pieces of matter clung among the blood. I looked away and back toward Hank.

  “So why did he kill them?” Hank asked.

  “Good question.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  I looked up from my desk at someone walking through my office doorway—Rick.

  “More things coming through?” I asked.

  He held a thin manila-colored folder under his arm. “We just matched up the bullets removed from the bodies at the gentleman’s club with a rifle found at the house out in Saint Leo. This is the ballistics report on that,” Rick said. He walked it over and looked for a clear area on my desk to set it—he didn’t find one.

  “I’ll just take it,” I said and held out my hand.

  Rick passed it to me, and I set it on the shelf to the right of my desk.

  “I came up before, but you weren’t in your office. We also matched up the twenty-two pistol and the bullet that came from Tim Morgan’s head. That sheet is in the file too.”

  “Appreciate that, Rick.”

  “Okay. We’re just getting started on everything that we pulled from that Saint Leo house. I’m going to say that we probably won’t be through all of it until next week.”

  “No problem.”

  “I’ll get the stuff up to you as we get it.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Rick gave me a nod and left my office. I went back to sorting through papers scattered across the top of my desk. I was trying my damnedest to put together everything we knew on the investigation to that point. We had identities on the two deceased men we found in the hallway of the Saint Leo house, Chris Calig and Bradley Corley. Our shooter was David Trussel, a man who had a rap sheet as long as my arm. Bradley Corley had been linked to Tim Morgan and was one of the men that he was to have no contact with.

  I heard a rap on my open office door and looked up from my paperwork.

  “What’s the word?” Hank asked. He walked into my office and plopped down in one of the guest chairs across from me at my desk.

  I grabbed the ballistics report that Rick had just dropped off and slipped them into a larger file folder. “Trying to get this paperwork in an organized fashion.”

  “Yeah, good luck with that,” Hank said.

  I looked up at him. “I could always just pass it off to you,” I said.

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” Hank said.

  “So did you just come in here to sit on ass in my office?” I asked.

  “Nah, I wanted to see what the plans were for lunch.”

  “Haven’t thought about it,” I said. “I have a mountain of paperwork to sort out.”

  Hank leaned back in his chair and rattled his fingertips on the armrests. “I’m thinking tacos,” he said.

  “Hey,” I heard.

  Captain Bostok stood at my doorway.

  “Cap, what’s up?” I asked.

  “You guys need to head out to the Land O’ Lakes Detention Center. David Trussel wants to give a full confession.”

  “Really?” I asked. “Full confession?”

  “That’s what he said. I just got off the phone with Sheriff Sigman from Pasco County. He says that Trussel’s public defender will be there within the hour. The sheriff is there now and waiting on you.”

  I rose from my desk. “Let’s get out there.”

  Hank pushed himself up from my guest chair.

  “Call me on your way back,” Bostok said.

  “I will,” I said.

  Hank and I took an unmarked cruiser from the lot. We hit the interstate and headed from the city—the drive took us the better part of forty minutes.

  We pulled into the giant Land O’ Lakes complex that housed all of the Pasco County offenders awaiting trial, or sentenced to less than a year. At any given time, the facility held twelve hundred plus men and women. We walked toward the front entrance and were greeted immediately inside of the lobby by a mid-fifties man with short gray hair and a thick gray mustache. He wore a dark suit and red tie—Sheriff Sigman. I’d met him a number of times at various police functions in the area.

  “Lieutenant,” he said. “Sergeant.”

  “Sheriff,” I said. “How are you doing?” I shook Sigman’s hand.

  “Still kicking,” he said.

  The sheriff gave Hank a handshake.

  “The deputies that were with us on scene the other day, Collard and Dobson. What’s their condition?” I asked.

  “Collard went home this morning. Dobson will be there for a day or two yet. I went and saw him this morning. He seemed to be in good spirits. Both should make full recoveries.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “Why don’t you guys follow me.” Sheriff Sigman turned and waved for Hank and me to follow him into the building. “We have Trussel sitting in an interview room in the detention center. I’m sure he’ll probably get shipped off to Hillsborough as soon as the investigation gets sorted out, but we don’t mind hanging on to him for now. The public defender showed up about twenty minutes ago. He’s in with him now.”

  “What has he said?” I asked.

  Sheriff Sigman made a right down a hallway with white walls and floors. “Not much. Just that he’d like to make a full confession and requested his public defender. That’s when we called your station to get you guys out here.”

  “I guess we’ll see what we get,” I said.

  “So how is your investigation coming otherwise?” the sheriff asked.

  “Things are starting to come together,” I said. “A full confession would probably tie up a few loose ends, though.”

  “It usually does.” Sigman stopped at a window manned by a guy wearing a deputy uniform, and we were let through the secured door at the end of the hall. We entered another white hallway and continued walking. Sigman made a left where the hallway came to a T. A few doors lined the sides, with another security door at the hallway’s end. We stopped and were buzzed through into another hall.

  “He’s in there,” the sheriff said.

  He pointed at a door coming up on our left.

  We walked to the door, and the sheriff gave it a knock. The door opened a moment later, and a man in a suit stepped from inside.

  “This is Lieutenant Kane, the arresting officer. Is your client ready?” Sigman asked.

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “So he’s prepared to give a full confession?” I asked.

  The attorney—tall, thin, and wearing a suit that looked a size too big—shrugged. He ran his hand over the top of his balding head. “That is his wish.” He let out a long breath.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I’ll go and get your monitoring equipment set up,” Sheriff Sigman said. “We’ll get the audio turned into a transcript and have him sign off on it.”

  The attorney nodded.

  Sheriff Sigman walked to a door, which I figured to be an observation room, such as the arrangement at our station.

  Hank and I followed the attorney inside of the room. We approached the metal table that David Trussel was chained to. The rest of the room was a stark white cinder block. Trussel wore an orange detention center jumpsuit and stared at me as I pulled out a cha
ir. His eyes were gray, hollow, and beady. They didn’t blink as he watched me take my seat. He focused on me like some kind of predator waiting to strike.

  “You’d like to make a full confession to your actions?” I asked.

  “May as well,” he said. His demeanor changed, almost relaxed from the hollow stare I received while taking my seat. “I’ve spent almost more time inside than outside. This was my last go-round. Figured I’d make enough money to lie on an island somewhere for the rest of my life, or just commit to spending it in prison.”

  “It was you who shot at us at the home of Tim Morgan?” I asked.

  “Yeah, after I stabbed the chick,” Trussel answered without the faintest hint of remorse—completely matter-of-fact.

  “What were you doing there?” Hank asked.

  “Trying to find the money Tim had at the house from the last couple jobs.”

  “Her death? How did that happen?” I asked.

  “I had her in the kitchen, threatening her a bit to try to get her to tell me where the money was. She told me but then went for my gun, so I chopped her hand in half.” He chuckled. “She ran for the door a little bit later, so I chased after her and stabbed her to death. I would have just put a bullet in her right away, but I didn’t want anyone to hear the gunshot.”

  “Tim Morgan?” I asked. “How did he die?”

  David raised his cuffed hands, causing the chain attached to the table to slide across the metal surface. He made a gun with the fingers of his right hand and pressed it to the side of his head. “I shot him in the head for being a bitch. The other guys didn’t know that I did it, though. We took his body from the strip club. Brad and Chris took him up north and torched his body and the stolen van we’d been using. They did that while I went to search Tim’s house for the money and kill his girlfriend.”

  I rubbed my eyes and shook my head. I wondered what exactly was broken inside of David Trussel’s brain to not only commit the crimes that he did, and take the lives that he did, but also to describe his actions so straightforwardly.

  “All right,” I said. “Why don’t we start from the top.”

  “Guerro was the first we went after.”

  “Guerro?” I asked, interrupting.

  “Yeah, I killed him,” David said. “We went into his house in the middle of the night. Looted the place and took him with us. I thought he may have some more money and maybe I could torture it out of him. I cut off his thumb, and he just wouldn’t give me anything. So we drove him out to the middle of nowhere, and I put damn near a whole magazine into him. After that, we rolled him in plastic and brought him back to the city, where we dumped him along the side of the freeway.”

  I made a mental note to get Rick to try to match the bullets removed from Guerro’s body to one of the weapons recovered from the Saint Leo house.

  “Treadwell. The female hostages?” I asked.

  “That was a bit more involved. We ended up getting to one of his little worker bees and kidnapped the kid’s mother. We used that as leverage to get at Treadwell’s mother and find out how much money he had on hand. He paid us two hundred grand to get his mother back, or at least that’s what he thought he was doing. We took the money, and I just killed everyone. Well, I guess I didn’t kill everyone. The Michael kid killed Treadwell and LaMarcus. That was our agreement for him to get his mother back. But after he did that, I put a bullet through his head. Then we went outside, and Brad brought the van up with the women. We pulled them out, and I iced them in the alley.”

  I let out a hard breath and grumbled. “The gentleman’s club?” I asked.

  “Um, kind of just a smash and grab. See, I knew all of these people, well, not personally, but knew who they were from a little drug-dealing venture I tried out back in the day. Anyway, I knew that the guy had a bunch of coke money. We checked out his house first, but it wasn’t a good spot for us to do anything. Figured we’d just go into his club at closing time and get what we could. I guess it worked out fine. We got some decent money from the place. The Tim thing, me killing him, should have been put on hold. But I had an opportunity, and he was causing problems, so I took it.”

  “What problems? You had a rift with the guy?” Hank asked.

  “I don’t know if you’d call it a rift. I had my plan of how I wanted to do all of this, and he was kind of putting a wrench into it. He was trying to be professional and take charge and all of that. Planting little bugs in Chris and Brad’s ears. See, when I killed them, I wanted it to be out of nowhere so they weren’t expecting it. Him stirring up shit beforehand was going to cause a problem with that.”

  “When you killed them?” I asked.

  “Well, that was always my plan. Get them to help me steal a bunch of money and then just kill them, take the money, and be on my way. I was going to wait a bit to kill them, until we left town, but they pissed me off. They’d gone through my room when I was out, looking for my money, I assumed. And they kind of left me hanging when I was at the place of that old guy I killed. So when I got back to the house, I snuck out through the back window of my bedroom, looped around, and came back in the front. That’s when I took them out. I snuck up behind Brad. He was sitting in the chair, listening to his headphones. I put a round through the back of his head. He never saw it coming. After that, I waited for Chris to come and see what happened. He came running from the hall. As soon as I saw him, I put a pair in his chest, then went to the hall where I repainted it a bit with his brains. That was right before you guys showed up.”

  The crass description of him killing his partners was sickening.

  “So this was all about money?” I asked. “Start to finish?”

  “Sure. Rob those who would never go to the police. Kill everyone so they don’t come looking for you after. Then kill the guys who helped me so I had all of the money. Pretty straightforward,” David said. “What about the cops? Did I get any?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Not even that pig that tried stopping me in the car?”

  “No.”

  “Damn,” he said.

  I buried my anger from his comment, and we went through it all again, getting David to expand on everything. The same as his first go-around, he didn’t show an ounce of remorse for killing any of his victims. We explained to him that the audio would be turned into a transcript and he’d have to sign it as his confession. He agreed without issue.

  David Trussel was escorted from the room. The chain connecting the shackles around his ankles to his hands skidded along the floor as he was taken away. Hank and I left the interview room for the hall. The sheriff met us outside of the interview room door.

  “That’s one cold son of a bitch,” Sheriff Sigman said.

  “He’s something,” I said. “Let’s just be thankful he’s off the street. Do you need anything else from us?”

  “Nope. We’ll get the video and audio transcripts of the confession sent over to you guys as soon as they’re ready.”

  “Appreciate it, Sheriff,” I said. “Give our thanks and get-wells to the deputies.”

  “I will.”

  I shook the sheriff’s hand, and Hank and I walked from the building. We got in our car and headed south.

  The first few minutes of the ride were silent.

  “What the hell was wrong with that guy?” Hank asked. “Just I killed this person like this, killed that person like that.”

  “Who the hell knows,” I said. “Just didn’t care at all for human life. At least we got something that can close up the Guerro thing that we weren’t expecting to get.”

  “But he just didn’t give any kind of a shit. I mean not even a hint of it.”

  “That wasn’t a normal person that we were just talking with. That wasn’t someone who happened to kill someone in the heat of the moment. His attitude toward the killings was like a normal person stepping on an ant. It was almost like they didn’t even register as people to him.”

  Hank shook his head.

  “I’m
done thinking about it,” I said.

  “Well, I have something else for you to think about,” Hank said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Karen mentioned something about all of us getting together this weekend.”

  “I have to work,” I said.

  “No you don’t.”

  “Whatever. Who is all of us?”

  “Karen, me, you, Steph.”

  “You guys have to quit with trying to set me up with her.”

  “Go out with her one more time and see. We can all go and see this play on Saturday and then hang out or whatever.”

  I turned my head slowly to the right and looked at him. “Play?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why the hell would I want to go and see a play?” I asked.

  “Actually, I think it’s a musical.”

  “That’s not helping persuade me in the least,” I said.

  “But you don’t even know what it’s about.”

  “I bet it’s about something awful. I also bet that Karen told you that you were going to go and see it. How close am I?”

  “Pretty close. I think the play is about a young woman coming of age in 1800s London. But it’s supposed to be some kind of a comedy.”

  I squinted and shook my head. “Yeah, that might be the worst thing that I ever heard,” I said.

  “We already bought you a ticket. Plus, I was thinking that maybe we could just get smashed beforehand.”

  I chuckled. “Not going to happen.”

  “Come on. Throw me a bone here,” Hank said. “I don’t want to have to go through this alone.”

  I rubbed at my eyes.

  “Coin flip?” Hank asked. “Leave it to chance?”

  “Ugh,” I grumbled. “Fine.”

  “All right. We’re in business.”

  I glanced over to see Hank fishing through his pocket. I shook my head.

  Hank’s hand came back with a quarter. “Heads you don’t have to, tails you go,” he said.

  “Whatever.”

  Hank flipped the quarter, caught it, and slammed it down on the top of his other hand.

  I glanced over as he lifted his hand from the coin.

  “Damn,” I said.