In the Line of Duty

by Carolyn Arnold

  “Aw, Hershey. I haven’t seen him in a bit.”

  Terry was the one who had gifted the chocolate Lab to her for Christmas a couple of years back. And despite her initial resistance, she’d fallen for the soft fur, the velvet ears, and the loving brown eyes. At the time, though, Madison could have killed Terry for getting him without speaking to her first. They had talked about his beagles on enough occasions that he should have known how she felt about dogs. But Terry had been insistent, saying that he wanted Madison to have someone to go home to every night, and had promised that the chocolate Lab would become family. She’d never told him that he’d been right, of course. Why let something like that go to his head?

  Terry looked over at her from the passenger seat. “So Hershey’s at Troy’s? Huh.” He paused briefly. “So when are you moving in with the guy?”

  “Hush it.”

  “Well, it’s a fair question. You sleep there a lot, don’t you? And you’re picking up Hershey there. I just figured…”

  “Figure again.” She narrowed her eyes at him and then looked back at the road. She wasn’t even going to ask her partner how he knew she was spending most nights at Troy’s.

  “Have you guys talked about getting married?”

  Madison choked on her saliva, starting a coughing fit as her eyes began to water. The thought had entered her head on occasion, but no one else needed to know that. After a few seconds, she managed to get out a single word. “Marriage?”

  “Ah, look at you. You’re getting all emotional. That’s what women—”

  She punched him in the shoulder—a tough maneuver while driving, but she made it work.

  “Hey!” He rubbed his arm, at first pouting and then smiling. The latter expression didn’t last long, though. It was as if Barry’s death swept in to fall like a weight between them.

  She pulled into Troy’s driveway.

  His house was a Craftsman-style bungalow with olive-green siding and thick wooden columns supporting a front overhang. A picture window accented each side of the entry, and two dormers projected from the roof above those. A double-wide stamped concrete path cut through the front lawn and led to the door.

  She unclipped her seat belt. “You stay right there.” The last thing she wanted was for him to see all of Hershey’s toys in the living room.

  “Sure.”

  Madison keyed in the four-digit code to open the key lock box, retrieved the spare house key, and let herself in. She led Hershey into the backyard and waited for him to do his business. After a few minutes, she was picking up Hershey’s steaming gift and tossing it into a black garbage can kept there for this specific purpose.

  Maybe Terry was right about her relationship with Troy. But what was going on with her? She used to be so strong and independent.

  But lonely.

  She had to accept that was the truth. Before Troy, she had been all about the job. She still was, but now she had someone to talk to at the end of the day. She justified her weakness by reasoning that if she became engaged, that was one thing; setting a date and following through was another.

  Thinking of Troy, she pulled out her phone and texted him to let him know she was at his house to pick up Hershey. She’d just hit SEND when her phone rang.

  It was her younger sister, Chelsea, although in their mother’s eyes Chelsea was deemed more mature than Madison. After all, she had the husband and three daughters. The first strike against Madison was her career choice. Second was that Madison’s grandmother left Madison everything when she’d passed. And the third was that Madison wasn’t married with kids.

  She was tempted to ignore the call because of the effort it would take to convince her sister that she was fine and safe. To top it off, Chelsea would probably want Madison to call their mother. But at least it wasn’t her mother calling, and maybe Madison could convince Chelsea to pass along the message that she was fine.

  “Hey, Chels,” Madison answered.

  “I heard it on the news. A cop was killed! Madison, tell me you’re okay. Did you know him? What happened?” Chelsea was talking even faster than she normally did.

  “I’m fine. Calm—”

  “Don’t tell me to calm down. One day that could be you. Then what? What would I do then? What about Mom? Dad? Your nieces?”

  “Please.” Usually her sister was levelheaded and respectful of Madison’s career choice. She oftentimes even served as referee between Madison and their mother.

  Madison wanted to say something reassuring to her sister, but the words were failing her.

  “What happened? He was shot filling his gas tank? That’s what they’re saying on the news.”

  “Yeah.” Madison couldn’t help the sadness that crept in with that admission.

  It wasn’t missed by her sister. “Oh… I’m so sorry, Maddy. You did know him, didn’t you?”

  Madison nodded as if Chelsea could see her.

  “Maddy?”

  “Yeah… Both Troy and I were rather close to the family. He seems to be having an especially hard time with it.”

  “Sorry, sis…”

  There was a pause on the line, and it had Madison’s eyes filling with tears. She cleared her throat. “I better get going.”

  “Yeah, of course. But…please be safe.”

  “I will be.” Madison hung up, wiping her eyes and sniffling. She remembered then that she’d meant to ask Chelsea to pass along a message to their parents, but shook aside the passing thought. If they were worried about her, they’d call her. “Come on, buddy,” she said to Hershey. “Time to go.”

  Any other time, she might have found some humor in what she had said given what Hershey had just done, but she led him somberly through the house to the front door, where she leashed him up. “You’re going to go see the girls.”

  Sometimes moments like this would make her realize just how much she had changed. For starting off with no desire for a dog to talking to him as if he were a person… And now the employees at the kennel were “the girls.”

  She shook her head. Before Hershey, she thought dog lovers went a tad overboard, especially those who referred to their pets as children. What really used to get her was when people called their dogs people names, such as Max, Lexy, Todd, Chelsea… Her sister’s name was Chelsea. It was hard to imagine a four-legged animal responding to the same name. But since Hershey had wormed his way into her heart, she now understood the attachment, the bond between animal and owner. She was even to the point where she didn’t like to refer to herself as Hershey’s owner. She was his person. Yeah, that’s what she was. Although a lot of days she’d catch herself referring to herself as “Mommy.”

  She locked up Troy’s place, replacing the key to the lock box, and opened the back door of the sedan. Hershey jumped in without issue. He sat behind Terry, sniffing at the air, and stretched out his neck to reach her partner. His pink slip of a tongue came out and got Terry from the base of his neck up to his ear.

  Madison couldn’t help but smile at that. She closed the rear door and then got back behind the wheel. She looked over at Terry to find him facing the backseat, rubbing Hershey’s head and mumbling words that sounded an awful lot like baby talk.

  “He’s getting big,” Terry said, returning to adult English.

  “Tell me about it.” Before she’d starting sleeping at Troy’s so much, she’d been considering buying a king-size bed, but with Troy’s one rule being that Hershey slept on the floor, space was no longer an issue.

  Terry stopped petting Hershey and turned around to face forward. “Troy’s got quite a nice place. He probably has a fenced backyard, too. It’s a good neighborhood to raise a—”

  Images flashed through her mind of her in a wedding gown standing at an altar, then a montage of photos of her and Troy smiling in some exotic location. Their honeymoon? And then her with a round—

&nbs
p; She slammed on the brakes.

  “Are you trying to kill us?” Terry rubbed the back of his head where it had hit the headrest.

  “We need to talk.” She put the car in park. They were still in Troy’s drive. The back end of the sedan was probably hanging over the road, but oh well. “You’re like a brother to me, but so help me, if you say one more thing about me and—”

  “It’s obviously a sore subject. You want him to propose and he hasn’t, is that it?”

  “Terry.” Her tone cautioned him against saying any more.

  He held up his hands. “Sorry. Not another word.” His statement hung in the air. “I’m just trying to get my mind off what happened to Barry.” He held her gaze for a while longer before turning to face out the windshield.

  “Which is next to impossible,” she said.

  Terry nodded. “It feels like we’re living in a nightmare.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.”

  -

  Chapter 10

  HERSHEY WAS ALL SET AT the kennel when Madison had gotten the call that Hines was already home from the hospital. She and Terry were headed there now and were hoping to get some of the inconsistences of her story sorted out. Specifically, the squealing tires and the number of shots fired.

  “Do you think we should dig further into her background before we go to her place? An officer has an eye on her,” Terry said from the passenger seat.

  “Gardener told us the basics. That should be enough for now at least.”

  She spotted the police cruiser as soon as she turned onto Hines’s street. It was parked in front of a single-story brick house. Iron railings lined the steps to the door and the square landing. A narrow paved drive—barely wide enough for a car—led to a shed.

  Madison parked behind the cruiser, and she and Terry walked up to the door. Before Madison even reached the doorbell, the door swung open.

  “What do you want?” Hines snapped. She crossed her arms.

  The young woman who had been frightened and sad at the crime scene was different now. She was aggravated, inconvenienced, and clearly not open to conversation based on everything from her wording and tone of voice to her closed body language.

  “We need to come in and ask more questions.” Madison wasn’t going to wait for an invitation and stepped past the girl into the home.

  Hines sighed and moved over to give Madison the space to get by. “I told everything to the officers at Rico’s.”

  The stress of fainting had left a mark on the woman’s body. Her eyes were red and puffy, her complexion pale. And while Madison felt for Hines, she had to stay focused.

  “They hadn’t finished taking your statement before we showed up,” Madison pointed out. “And then you passed out.”

  “Uh-huh, and the doctor said it was brought on from extreme stress. I saw a man get shot…” The last two words came out through clenched teeth. “Killed…right in front of me.”

  Madison couldn’t allow herself to get pulled into Hines’s emotional state. “Let’s sit down.”

  The living room was to the left of the entrance, and Madison helped herself to a spot on the sofa. Terry opted to sit next to Madison while Hines chose a chair across from them.

  “I should be in bed sleeping. That’s what the doctor suggested.” Hines pulled her legs up under her.

  “How many shots did you hear fired this morning?” Madison asked, delving right into things.

  “Three,” Hines huffed out, apparently exasperated from needing to repeat her statement.

  “Will you just close your eyes for me for a second?” Madison asked. Victims of traumatic situations—directly involved or witnesses—oftentimes had images that would replay in their heads over and over. Madison was hoping to tap into Hines’s.

  “Okayyyyy… Why?”

  Terry looked over at Madison, but she remained steadfast. “I want you to put yourself back there and—”

  “You want me to relive all of this again?” Hines’s pitch took on a high octave, and her eyes widened. “I just want to forget all of it.”

  It took all of Madison’s self-control not to respond in haste. She wanted to forget? Wow, they should stop asking her questions right now. If only forgetting was an option, a solution to reverse time and consequence. And really, at the end of the day, how did Barry’s death truly impact her life? He was just a customer to her. Meanwhile, Barry’s family didn’t have the option to forget all of it.

  “How well did you know the officer who was shot?” Madison asked, somehow managing to detach further and pace her words.

  “I didn’t really. He was married, though, wasn’t he?” She added the last part as if an afterthought, and her face seemed to pale even more. “I remember him talking about his wife. He said something the one day about their anniversary coming up and how he wanted to make it special.” She wasn’t looking at Madison or Terry; her eyes were sort of drifting about the room.

  “Did he regularly fill his cruiser at Rico’s?” No one from the Stiles PD accounting department had gotten back to them on that yet.

  “He did,” Hines said with a nod.

  “At the same time of day? About five in the morning?” Terry asked.

  “Not always. Sometimes at night.”

  “You normally work the midnight shift?” Terry sounded concerned.

  Fury licked Hines’s eyes. “Are you implying that a woman can’t take care of herself at that time of night?”

  Terry shook his head. “That’s not what I meant at all.”

  His response and calm demeanor doused her anger, and she shrugged. “It pays better.”

  Madison let a few seconds pass in silence and then broached the subject of the shots again. “Will you please close your eyes?”

  “Fine,” Hines complied. With her eyelids closed, they appeared more purple than red. She really did need her rest. Hopefully, they could get their answers quickly.

  “How many times did you hear the gun fire?” Madison asked.

  “One, two.” Tears streaked down her cheeks, and she wiped them with her palm. “Three…” Her brow compressed. “Four.” Her eyes shot open.

  “Four?” Madison’s heart beat faster, knowing this supported Kayla’s statement.

  “Yes. It was four.” Hines’s eyes drifted to Terry. “I’m not sure how I missed that.”

  “It would have been a traumatic thing to witness,” Terry offered, his voice comforting.

  “It was.” Hines fell quiet for a few seconds. “And I didn’t realize how loud guns were before…”

  “Do you know when the officer fell to the ground?” Terry asked.

  Hines looked at him. “I don’t know. I was on the floor after the first shot.”

  “Did the shooter yell at him and then fire right away?” Madison asked.

  “No.” Hines’s eyes widened. “He yelled— Well, I thought it was just before he fired, but it all happened so fast. He might have even yelled out as he fired. I don’t know…”

  Hines didn’t sound certain, but if the shooter didn’t yell before firing, it would explain why Barry hadn’t hit his panic button sooner. But if the gun fired at the same time as the man yelled, Madison found it hard to accept that Hines heard him say anything. It seemed most plausible that the shooter yelled and quickly fired. Hines’s recollection could be off due to stress.

  “You’re certain that the shooter yelled out, though?” Madison asked. “Even though the gunfire was so loud?”

  “Yes.” Hines clenched her teeth. “He said, ‘Die, cop.’”

  “Was there anything that stood out to you about the voice? Anything that made it unique?” Terry asked. He nodded at Madison when she looked at him, acknowledging that the two of them had discussed this aspect with Gardener at the gas station. He obviously wanted to hear it firsthand.

  Hines
shook her head. “Nothing. Just that it was a man’s.”

  “How old?” Terry kept the questions rolling.

  “I wouldn’t know. I didn’t see him.”

  Terry’s jaw tightened. He flicked a sideway glance to Madison. “Just in general, then. Did his voice sound older, younger?”

  “He sounded young, I guess.”

  “Adult or teen?”

  Hines’s face contorted, taking on sharp lines, and she pressed her fingertips to her brows. “I’m not sure. Maybe a teenager? Maybe in his early twenties?”

  Street gangs recruited young men, and usually required that they prove themselves with some sort of criminal act, most often a violent one. Killing a cop, sadly, would buy them a lot of respect on the streets.

  “You’re sure it was a younger man?” Madison pressed.

  “Pretty sure, yeah.”

  Madison jumped to her feet and rushed to the front door. She heard Terry tell Hines that they’d be in touch again soon, and then his steps pounded after Madison. She knew they hadn’t broached the subject of the missing person from pump two or asked if Hines had heard squealing tires, but all that seemed inconsequential in light of what Hines had just given them.

  Madison pulled her cell and dialed Winston. “Sarge,” she said when he answered, “I think Weir was targeted for a gang-initiation ritual.”

  -

  Chapter 11

  SERGEANT WINSTON AND SOME OTHER detectives, including Sovereign and Stanford, were already in the squad room when Madison and Terry arrived. The district attorney, Amos Buchanan, was there, too. Winston must have invited him to the briefing. Buchanan may have had the appearance of a grandfather figure with his gray hair, ruddy cheeks, toothy smile, and deeply set dimples, but he was definitely a man who was all business.

  Troy was also in the room, looking like a caged animal planning his escape. He wasn’t making eye contact with her, but that didn’t stop her from walking over to him.

  “Hey,” was all he said when she got closer to him.

  “Hi,” she said with a frown. Grief really had a way of transforming loved ones into strangers. She wanted him to know she was there for him, but she sensed she had to watch how she communicated that. She wanted to take his hand or touch his arm, but she couldn’t do that there.