by CJ Lyons
His elaborate shrug took a beat too long. “Who knows. Isn’t that your job? To find him?”
She tried changing tactics. “Sir, who else had the code to your security system?”
“Just my wife and I. And our daughter. She was always turning it off when that boy came over—” His jaw clenched and his face grew red. “Was it that boy? He dishonored my daughter, my family.”
“No, Mr. Raziq. We do not have any evidence at this time that it was Mina’s boyfriend.”
“He wasn’t her boyfriend. That mongrel, that—” He changed to a language she couldn’t understand, harsh syllables that didn’t need translating. “This is all his fault. She wouldn’t have turned off the security for anyone else. Deceitful girl. She thought she could hide him from me.”
If it was Mina who'd turned off the cameras and alarms. “And when did you get to work, Mr. Raziq?”
“Eight o’clock. My usual hour. Of course.” He turned a scornful gaze on her. “You aren’t suggesting—”
“I’m not suggesting anything. I'm just trying to see where everyone was so we can better determine who this crime was aimed at.” That sobered him. “You were at your office all day?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Until when?”
“Until I left.” She waited. “Four o’clock. I came directly home only to find—” He spread his arms, palms up. “To find, this, you people, this, this…” His shoulders slumped as words failed him.
For the first time his gaze focused on her face. Gauging her reaction? Or was it another cultural difference she couldn’t translate?
“My wife, my son. When can I see them? We should be together.”
“We sent a car to pick them up.” Strange, he never asked about the girls. Most parents would have endless questions, wanting to know the details of their deaths, what would happen to their bodies. She decided to push a little. “The medical examiner will need to examine your daughters’ bodies.” He flinched and looked away. Lucy waited, expecting him to request special treatment or religious observations in preparing the dead.
He shook his head, looked at his hands then sat down heavily onto the cruiser’s rear seat. “Please. Please. I need my wife. My son. I can’t—”
He buried his face in his hands, the prayer beads dangling between his fingers. His body shook with silent sobs.
Lucy left him with the patrolman and walked back to the house, more uncertain than ever. Was Raziq acting? Or was he a father in mourning? How much of what she saw was personality, cultural differences, the truth, or lies?
He wasn’t telling the whole truth, that much she knew. But in her experience everyone lied, even grieving loved ones of murder victims.
The question wasn’t: Was he lying? It was: What was he lying about?
Chapter 6
After a few minutes Andre and the Doc settled into a nice, comfortable pace, running up the hill past Holy Trinity. Nowhere near Andre’s old six-minute miles, but fast enough to leave him focused on his breathing rather than the world around him.
“Tell me what you see,” Callahan said.
“What’s to see?” Andre fought to keep his voice steady. He really didn’t want to look past his feet pounding the cracked sidewalk. Too afraid he might see someone… or someone might see him.
The Doc, as usual, out-waited him.
“It’s Ruby Avenue. Busted up sidewalks, busted up street. Boarded up businesses and houses. Vacant lots. Damned Terraces down at the bottom.” Andre hated the squat garish yellow brick public housing units clustered together like they were RVs at a campground. They reminded him of the cargo containers Dog Company squatted in before they were sent to build the outpost at Hajji Baba. Or worse, of Hescos, the hollow rectangles they’d shovel load after load of sand and gravel into to create defensible perimeters. “A couple of places still in business if they let the Rippers gouge them for protection money. A few nice old homes with that curly wood trim—”
“Gingerbread.”
“Yeah, gingerbread. Like once upon a time this was a fairy tale place to live.” To hear Grams tell it, that wasn’t far from the truth. His great-grandad had bought their row house way back when, between the world wars, when Homewood had been a nice “Colored” neighborhood. He’d chosen the house because it was on the same street as Holy Trinity church and he’d liked the idea of nuns and priests watching over them. What could go wrong on a street with a house of God on it?
Poor old man would have a stroke if he saw the hood now. Every block with its own set of gangsters dealing. All run by the Ruby Avenue Rippers. Constant turf wars to protect their territory from outside gangs. Got so bad, the school buses wouldn’t even come down here; parents had to drive their kids down to Penn Avenue, meet the bus there. And Holy Trinity? The priest and nuns remained hidden behind their thick wooden doors and stone walls, too damn stubborn to leave a lost cause, too damn weak to do anything about it.
“Any people on the street?” Callahan’s voice interrupted Andre’s thoughts.
“A few cars. I dunno.” He really didn’t want to know. He was perfectly content to stay inside his little bubble of anonymity—just a black man in a mask and hoodie out for a run. Any other neighborhood in the city and he’d be the center of unwanted attention. But not here, not on Ruby Avenue.
“Let’s slow down a bit. Take a breather.”
Pride let Andre fool himself into thinking it was the Doc who needed to catch his breath. He slowed down. This was the block where the war between the Rippers and Gangstas had broken out last summer. The tenement they’d torched still stank of burnt wood. The smell gagged him as memory ambushed him.
“Talk to me, Andre. Your heart rate just spiked.”
Andre couldn’t talk. He was too busy breathing, gasping for air, air that wasn’t super heated, filled with flames, there were flames crawling everywhere, his face, his head… God, where was his helmet, how had he lost his goddamned helmet, shit, now he was really screwed… Flames down his arms, down his chest, heat scorching between his body armor and his shirt, the fabric melting into his skin, oh God, oh God, he was burning, he had to let go of the girls, put the flames out, but he couldn’t he couldn’t he couldn’t…
“Andre! Breathe, breathe. In, hold it, now out, hold it. Good. You're okay, you’re okay.” Callahan’s voice was a metronome, slowly throttling Andre’s panic.
Andre looked up. He’d turned and run back towards home. By now he was just a few blocks away. His chest hurt, his arms ached, his hands were cramped into tight fists he couldn’t open, but he was almost home, almost to safety, and he was alive.
“Gotta go home, Doc. Can’t do this.”
“Stop. Use your bag if you need it. It was just a panic attack. You’ve been there, done that—”
“Got the t-shirt,” Andre finished the corny joke. He pressed his gloved hand against the barred window of a barbershop closed for the day. Leaned his weight against it, realizing the Doc was right. He was okay. He’d survived. Again.
“What was the trigger?”
“Place burned down, the block where the Rippers and Gangstas torched most everything.”
“You were still in the hospital then—”
“Yeah, but I read about it. Then tonight, ran past and smelled that—”
“It was the smell. Most powerful memory activator there is.”
“You’re so sexy when you go all scientific on me, Doc.”
Callahan laughed. “Glad you appreciate it. My wife usually falls asleep. Let’s get you home and wrap this up. I have a hot date.”
“Right. You said. I never got that whole Nutcracker shit. I mean who takes their kid to see a bunch of scary toys come to life? I’d have nightmares rest of my life.”
“Good thing I’m not taking you.”
“Good thing. Because I’d be the one giving them nightmares.” He felt the Doc’s disapproval radiate through the phone—smack talk and jokes were one thing, but Callahan didn’t like it when Andre u
sed his humor to mask self-pity. Neither did Andre. But it was time for him to face his new reality. A life where everything was off the table: a wife, trips to the ballet—hell, trips to the grocery store.
Andre pushed away from the barbershop window in time to see three guys with red Ripper ball caps staring at him as they crossed the street. He shook his head to drop his hoodie back, freeing his peripheral vision. Panic vanished as adrenalin sang through him. The hum of impending battle. This, this he knew. This didn’t frighten him. No, this feeling was an old friend he’d last seen half a world away. God, how he’d missed it.
He tightened his grip on the Beretta M9. “Doc, we might have a little trouble here. I’m going to ditch the ear piece and put you on speaker.”
“Need me to call the police?”
“No. Not yet.” The Rippers were close enough that he recognized the one in the middle. Maddoc, "affectionately" known as Mad Dog or MD. He was older than the other two, the same age as Andre, twenty-seven, and from his swagger he'd moved up the ranks since Andre left Ruby Avenue eight years ago.
Andre palmed the Bluetooth, slid it into his pack, switched the phone’s speaker on, and muted it. He kept his back to the storefront. It was as good of place to make a stand as any. His right hand was on his Beretta. But he didn’t draw it. Not yet.
Calm settled over him. He assessed the three men approaching with cocky swaggers. Layers of flannel, sweatshirts, and parkas were between their hands and the semi-automatic pistols shoved into the waistband of their baggy jeans, aimed at the family jewels. Idiots wouldn’t last a day with Dog Company.
They’d only taken four steps towards him and he’d already catalogued their vulnerable spots—throat, eyes, spine—and killed them several times in his head. One good thing about PTSD, its hyper-vigilance gave him an edge.
Not like he needed it, not with eight years of combat under his belt, not with fools like these. But it was nice to know that although he was literally afraid of his own shadow, much less anyone else seeing it, although it took more courage these days to leave his house than it had to race into a burning building, although his mind was fucked up and his nerve had deserted him, despite all that, he still had what it took to step into battle.
A tiny whisper scuttled through his mind faster than a scorpion crawling under a rock: If he played it right, maybe this time he’d get his wish. Maybe this time he would die.
Chapter 7
Lucy had just rejoined Walden on the porch when a black Suburban with its four-ways flashing stopped in the middle of the street. A tall man in his late thirties, Middle Eastern coloring, wearing a black trench coat over a gray suit jumped out of the driver’s seat without closing the door behind him and ran across the yard.
“Where is he? Where’s Raziq?” the man shouted at the uniformed cop who intercepted him.
“Sir, I need to see—”
He pushed past the cop and rushed up to where Lucy and Walden watched, attempting to move through them like they weren’t there. Walden crossed his arms over his chest and stood, implacable, while Lucy closed the door to the house, barring the newcomer from getting a glimpse inside.
“DEA?” she asked. “Agent Haddad?”
“Yeah. Out of my way.”
“Not until we have a little chat.”
He gave up trying to outstare Walden and finally deigned to glance down at her. “Who the hell are you?” Despite his appearance and name, his accent wasn’t Middle Eastern. Midwest. Maybe Detroit?
“Supervisory Special Agent Guardino and Special Agent Walden.”
“What’s the FBI doing here? Raziq is my guy. Let me through. I need to see—” He stopped as the door behind them opened and the medical examiner’s team came through with the second body.
Lucy pulled the DEA agent out of the way. His eyes went wide and a hand flew up toward his neck when he saw how the tiny body on the stretcher didn't take up all the space in the body bag. “It’s one of the kids?”
“The youngest daughter,” Lucy said.
“Little Badria? Oh no, oh…” He turned away, leaned over the porch railing as if he might vomit. Not the reaction she’d been expecting.
Walden shrugged and watched closely as he gave her space to comfort the agent. Lucy put her arm around his shoulder. “I’m sorry. Her sister was killed as well.”
“Mina?” His voice was choked with tears. “Where’s Raziq? Fatima and Ali? Are they okay? What happened here?” He straightened abruptly, spun around. “Home invasion? Did you get the guys?” Then he frowned and stared down at Lucy. “Why the hell is the FBI here?”
“The locals called us. When they ran Raziq’s name through NCIC they saw your flag.” The National Crime Information Center was the fastest way for law enforcement agencies to share data.
“They should have called me. I’m the agent of record.” Sounded like he was a lot more than that to Raziq and his family.
“We did. We’ve been waiting for you—”
He stared at the ME’s van as it pulled away from the curb. No hurry, no lights or sirens. But somehow the entire block got quieter as if taking a deep breath.
“I got a message to report here, but I was already on my way—” His voice trailed off as the van turned the corner and vanished.
“How long have you known the Raziqs?”
“Two years,” he answered distractedly, his gaze still following the path of the van. “DEA eradication operation in Kandahar. He was one of the few local cops who took our efforts seriously. Introduced me to the tribal chiefs and village elders, arranged sharias, meetings, gave me whatever assistance he could. Raziq saved my life. Taliban ambush,” he said in a defiant tone, sounding more like a defense attorney than a DEA agent.
“That’s where I got this.” He rubbed a scar above his eyebrow with his thumb. He sucked in his breath, still staring out into the night. Lucy had the feeling he’d forgotten she was there. “Fatima, she’ll be devastated. I was on my way here for dinner. I should have been here, should have gotten here sooner, I could have—”
His words spun into a confused silence and she realized he was in shock. Babbling. Strange. Very strange. Raziq was obviously more than a cooperating witness or confidential informant. This was personal to Haddad.
“Take me inside,” he said, his tone grim.
Lucy and Walden exchanged glances.
“I need to see,” Haddad said.
The bodies were gone, only the blood remained behind. She nodded to one of the uniforms who opened the door, waited for Haddad to don his protective gear, and escorted him into the scene.
Once the door shut behind Haddad and the uniformed officer, she motioned to Walden. “We need to get Raziq and Haddad to the Federal Building. Have Burroughs bring Fatima and the baby there once he locates them. Protective custody until we understand what these threats are all about.”
“Our offices?”
“No. Let’s use the DEA’s. We’ll get more cooperation from everyone involved if we keep this on their territory.” Why was it whenever she had to deal with the DEA she always felt like she was wrangling a bunch of testosterone-addled adolescents? Not even the ATF was as bad. Thankfully, since the SAFE unit was multi-agency, encompassing local, state, and almost every branch of federal law enforcement, Lucy had plenty of experience in negotiating interagency cooperation. “And get me Haddad’s supervisor. I’ll need to let him know what’s going on.”
“On it. Want me to call in Taylor?” Taylor was their youngest team member and their best computer analyst.
“Good idea. Get him working on piecing together Raziq’s background, family connections, any Afghan political involvement. He can help Jenna with the threats as well.” She thought about the weapons collection in Raziq’s study. “I can’t get over how personal this all feels. Some of the tribes over there still carry out vengeance killings. If Raziq’s helping the DEA, maybe they tracked him here.”
Walden grimaced. Not only because it was a long shot, but because
juggling local law enforcement, the DEA—including an agent who obviously took anything involving the Raziq family very personally—and a possible motive stemming from a country half a world away was like walking through a minefield blindfolded. “Burroughs was right. This case has crazy written all over it.”
As if on cue, Burroughs came running from the rear of the house, his phone to his ear. “Are you fucking me?” he was shouting. “Get to the car service, I want that driver in my office with GPS records. Get a warrant, call the goddamned cell company.” He hung up and turned to Lucy. “Patrol just called. Wife and son weren’t at the friend’s house. Friend says they left around one o'clock, right after lunch.”
“That’s hours before the 911 call,” Walden said.
“No sign of them here. And the car service can’t raise their driver.” His phone rang. He listened for a moment. “Fuck an egg. I’ll send CSU and the ME. I’m on my way.”
“They found the driver,” Lucy said. She wasn’t asking.
Burroughs nodded. “Driver’s dead. Car’s empty. No sign of the mom or baby. Looks like we have a double kidnapping in addition to our double homicide.”
Chapter 8
Burroughs left to check out the second crime scene. Lucy cursed silently, keeping a professional tone as she and Walden worked their phones to mobilize their team for a high-risk abduction.
She glanced at the patrol car where Raziq waited. She had to let the father know what was going on. To keep him in the dark any longer was inhumane. The dining room was clear but, no, that smell… She sighed. It’d have to be in the vehicle.
Walden met her at the street. “Troops are on their way into the office. We should get moving.”
“You go with Haddad. I’ll move Raziq to our vehicle and let him know about Fatima and Ali.” Both Haddad and Raziq were potential witnesses as well as victims; she needed to keep them separate.
“You get anything from him the first time around?”
She shook her head. “He’s a hard read.”
