Murder One

by Robert Dugoni

  Though the rain had passed, the storm had not cleared the humidity, and Rowe was glad he opted for the windbreaker and not his patrol jacket. A long morning was likely to become a long couple of days, making comfort important. He’d slipped the windbreaker over a white polo shirt, blue jeans, and patrol boots.

  Rowe flipped open his notebook and wrote the time of his arrival beneath the time he received the call from his detective sergeant: 3:22 A.M.

  “Rise and shine, sunshine, we have a homicide.”

  Beneath the time, Rowe had written “ANONYMOUS” in capital letters, underlining it twice.

  He wedged the notebook at the small of his back beneath the windbreaker, and ducked beneath the strand of yellow police tape strung across the road. A uniformed officer handed him the crime-scene log and a pen, and Rowe dutifully signed his name and noted his badge number and time of entry. Anyone who stepped beneath the yellow tape would have to do the same.

  Handing back the pen, he made his way toward the cluster of dark shadows standing in the street. His partner, Tracy Crosswhite-Jones, held a notebook and talked with the sergeant supervisor, Billy Williams, who had likely reported the homicide to their detective sergeant.

  “Long time no see,” Crosswhite said. She and Rowe had left the Justice Center together.

  “I knew I’d see you in the middle of the night sooner or later, Professor.”

  Everyone in the unit referred to her as either Crosswhite or Professor, the latter a reference to the fact that she had taught chemistry at a local high school for fifteen years. After a divorce she decided she needed to change more than just the man in her life. Having competed in pistol-shooting contests into her late teens, she enrolled in the police academy.

  Rowe noted the Prius parked outside a second strand of tape strung chest-high across the street, halfway down the block. “I see you got the first pick from the motor pool.”

  She groaned. “I feel like I’m driving a sewing machine.”

  The detective team on call took a car home from the motor pool. Everyone else was supposed to drive a personal vehicle, but some kept the cars longer than necessary, and the pickings got slim. The Prius was last choice. Crosswhite had little room to complain as the low woman on the homicide-detective totem pole, having been recently elevated to one of the highly coveted positions. An opening in the fifteen-person unit was rare, the promotion of a woman rarer still—Crosswhite being the first and only. In seven months, Rowe was already her third partner. The first, a veteran of thirty-two years, flat-out declined to work with a woman. The second relationship lasted until her partner’s wife met Crosswhite at a party and couldn’t deal with her husband being professionally wed to a tall, athletically built blonde who looked more like a fashion model than a police officer. Rowe’s wife had expressed similar reticence but solved the matter diplomatically: she told Rowe she’d kill him if he screwed around.

  “If there’s not a dead body, this is a cruel practical joke,” Rowe said.

  Crosswhite pointed in the direction of the residence.

  “The body is in a room off the patio at the back of the house. Shooter apparently shot through the sliding-glass door.”

  “Through it?”

  “So I’m told,” she said, indicating Williams.

  “Who was first in?” Rowe asked, meaning the first officer to respond.

  She checked her notes. “Adderley. He’s waiting on the porch down the drive.”

  The sloping aggregate driveway forked as they descended. The straight shot continued along the east side of the property, where Rowe could make out the strand of yellow tape strung between trees. The other path turned right and led to the residence. As Rowe pulled out his notebook to write down the address, his right foot slipped on a patch of moss, and pain shot from his hip, causing him to stop and grimace.

  “You okay?” Crosswhite asked.

  He removed the bottle from his windbreaker, shook out two anti-inflammatory tablets, and chewed them.

  Crosswhite winced. “Jesus, Sparrow. I hate it when you do that. Why can’t you swallow them like the rest of the world?”

  Most thought his nickname a derivation of his last name, but he had actually received it while working undercover narcotics. He’d grown his hair long, along with a scraggly goatee, and one of the members of the unit likened him to the pirate Jack Sparrow played by Johnny Depp in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Nobody called him Kinsington, his mother’s maiden name, or even Kins, which had been his nickname growing up.

  “Never could,” he said, “even as a kid.”

  “But you can chew them?”

  “Everyone can chew.”

  Crosswhite shuddered. “It gives me the willies.” They continued down the path. “Why don’t you have the surgery?”

  The hip had been a problem since Rowe’s senior year playing football for the U. The team doctor had called the injury a hip pointer, and Rowe had played through the pain. More extensive X rays later in life revealed a fracture that had developed avascular necrosis from a decreased blood supply to the head of the femur. Rowe fell back on his degree in criminology and applied to the FBI but couldn’t pass the medical exam, so he joined the police force. He would eventually need an artificial hip.

  “Because I only want to go through this once.”

  “Don’t they use titanium now? I thought that stuff lasts forever.”

  “Twenty to thirty years, according to my doctor.”

  “I hope someone lets Boeing know.”

  “Boeing?” he asked.

  “I read they make airplanes out of that stuff now.”

  At thirty-nine, Rowe felt too young to be walking around with an artificial hip. But every time he stepped on the front lawn to play football with his sons, reality replaced fantasy; the pain inched him closer to pulling the trigger. Until he did, he chewed the ibuprofen.

  A Mercedes Roadster sat parked near the front entrance.

  “So this is how the other half lives,” Crosswhite said, looking over the car and the three-story residence. Rowe estimated the house to be nine thousand square feet, several million dollars, at least. Expensive home, expensive car—the owner had money or a lot of debt.

  Two uniformed officers approached.

  “Who’s Adderley?” Rowe asked.

  The taller of the two, African-American, adjusted the utility belt around his waist. “That would be me.” The bulletproof vest beneath his navy blue shirt puffed him up like a marshmallow.

  Rowe introduced himself, and Adderley explained that he had received a call from dispatch, an anonymous report of a prowler.

  “A prowler? Not shots fired?” Rowe asked.

  “Prowler.”

  Under the word “ANONYMOUS” in his notebook, Rowe wrote: Prowler? And beneath that: Thunder and lightning.

  “What next?”

  Adderley explained that after backup arrived, he radioed dispatch to try to reach someone inside the home to tell them not to shoot him in the ass. “I asked that they keep the air open while we walked the perimeter. We found the victim in a room off the patio. Shooter shot through the sliding-glass door. I called it in ‘person down’ and held for more resources.”

  “Did you attempt to enter?”

  Adderley shook his head. “No.”

  Adderley and the second officer both wore black gloves. “You wearing your gloves, then?” Rowe asked.

  “Haven’t taken them off.”

  “Show us.”

  Adderley led Rowe and Crosswhite to a concrete patio at the back of the house. The sliding-glass door was shut, the glass pierced by a single hole that had caused a spiderweb of cracks, though the glass had not crystallized. Blood splattered the interior, and Rowe could see the bloodied back of a head resting on the arm of a leather sofa. A pool of blood had accumulated on the hardwood floor where the Persian rug did not reach. The flat-screen television mounted on the wall remained on, a movie Rowe did not recognize.

  “When SWAT arrived, we
cleared the house, taped it off, secured the perimeter, and waited,” Adderley explained.

  “Did you do anything else? Talk with anyone? Go anywhere else on the property?”

  Adderley shook his head.

  “Search the yard?”

  “Just a visual from the patio. Something else, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I asked dispatch to run a background check.”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “Thought I recognized the name of the owner.”

  “And . . .”

  “This is the guy who was in the papers. The feds were after him for dealing heroin. He owns a bunch of used-car dealerships.”

  THREE TREE POINT

  BURIEN, WASHINGTON

  Sloane exited the Cadillac and wiped beads of perspiration dripping down his face with the front of his sweatshirt. He heard a car engine and lowered the shirt in time to see a Volvo station wagon roll through the intersection, unconcerned about other cars at four in the morning. The neighbor down the block worked for one of the local television stations. No one else in his right mind would be awake and up this early.

  Sloane pushed through the gate in the hedge and trudged up the back steps, his legs leaden. Just inside the door, he hung the keys on the life-size cardboard cutout of Larry Bird, Celtic legend, and filled the kettle with water, putting it on a lit burner. He retrieved a ceramic mug—world’s best dad, a birthday gift from Jake—and set it on the counter, then pulled down the box of tea and set a bag inside the mug. He pulled a cup from the shelf and filled it with tap water. He had drunk half the glass when he felt his throat constrict. He gagged and dropped the cup into the sink. The muscles of his stomach contracted, and he threw up the water, then endured half a dozen dry heaves.

  He gripped the counter, trying again to catch his breath. The vomiting began not long after he returned to Three Tree Point following Tina’s death, a physical manifestation, he assumed, of his guilt and anxiety. Research on the Internet said such things were often associated with PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder. The first time had been a Friday afternoon, Sloane’s first trip back to the Tin Room. He had taken a seat toward the back, sipping a beer, trying to relax but unable to slow his mind or get rid of the image of Tina standing on the steps, calling out to him just before her chest exploded in a red bloom. The image flickered and clicked in his head like a movie reel in constant rewind. He had gagged, began to retch, and barely made it into the alley before throwing up.

  On the drive home, he had passed the St. Francis of Assisi church. Raised with no faith, Sloane had never been religious, but shortly after they moved to Three Tree Point he began attending mass with Tina and Jake. He hadn’t experienced any epiphanies; it had been a way to spend more time as a family. He parked and went into the church alone and sat in the pew staring up at the cross. Every so often a person would step from one of three doors at the side of the church, and another would enter, mostly older women. After about half an hour, when there was no one left in line, the middle of the three doors opened and Father Allen, the young Catholic priest whom Sloane knew through Tina and Jake, stepped out. If Allen was surprised to find Sloane in the pew, he didn’t show it. He asked how Sloane was coping, what he was doing to keep busy, and sought details about Jake’s life in California.

  Sloane returned the following Friday, but neither the priest nor anyone else entered or exited the three doors. A woman at the rectory informed him that the three doors were the confessional and available only the third Friday of the month. Father Allen, she said, was in the schoolyard.

  Sloane found the curly-haired priest wearing shorts that extended to his knees and high-top tennis shoes, shooting a basketball. When Allen tossed Sloane the ball, Sloane buried a jump shot from the top of the key. When Sloane buried a second shot, the priest challenged him to a game of horse, which Sloane lost. Horse led to what started as a friendly game of one-on-one that became a battle that left Allen, fifteen years Sloane’s junior, the victor and both men spent. The pickup games became part basketball, part counseling. During one of the games, Father Allen got down to the crux of their discussions. “You wanted to kill him,” he said, meaning Stenopolis.

  “I thought I did.”

  “And you’re wondering if that makes you a bad person to have those kinds of thoughts.”

  “Does it?” Sloane had never given the concepts of heaven and hell much thought, but now, with Tina gone, he wondered.

  “Thoughts of revenge are natural, David. You suffered a great loss, a great injustice. You wanted someone to pay for it. But always remember, it’s our actions that define us, not our thoughts, and even then God will forgive those who seek His forgiveness.”

  “What about an eye for an eye? I thought I read that somewhere.”

  “That’s the Old Testament. That was not Christ’s message. Love was his message. Even your enemies.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not something I can bring myself to do.”

  “Most of us find it a hard concept.”

  “And if I can’t?”

  “Then you’ll be like ninety-nine-point-nine percent of us. Imperfect.” That caused Sloane to smile. “You’re not alone. You only think you are.”

  “I don’t have your faith, Allen. The only time I’ve ever really prayed was when Tina was dying, and that didn’t turn out too well.”

  “And what about when you punished this man? Did that make you feel any better?”

  “No.”

  “And do you think it would have if you had pulled the trigger?”

  “You’re asking . . . if I had the chance, the chance to do it again . . . would I pull the trigger?”

  The kettle on the stove whistled.

  EIGHT

  LAURELHURST

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  Acrowd loitering in the street of an upscale neighborhood before dawn would normally generate police interest, but in this case, police interest had generated the crowd. Rowe had put everything on hold to prepare a search warrant, a necessity since he could not be certain the victim lived alone, and therefore he could not rule out if anyone else had a privacy interest in the residence. With the sleeves of his windbreaker pulled up his forearms, Rowe continued to hunt-and-peck on the laptop keyboard balanced on his knees, the screen a blue-white glow. At least he wasn’t lonely. Three CSI detectives, women dressed like triplets in black BDU cargo pants and black T-shirts and vests with gold letters proclaiming crime scene investigator on the back, sipped coffee and waited. The detective team next up in the rotation had also arrived, though Rowe had directed them to canvass the neighborhood, photograph license plates, and talk with the neighbors to determine if one of them had made the anonymous call or had seen or heard anything.

  Rowe didn’t think so.

  Normal cell phones registered the number with dispatch, making it a simple matter to run a reverse directory to get a name and address. But dispatch had indicated that the number of the anonymous caller was not registered, which meant the caller had likely used a disposable TracFone, which could be bought for ten dollars at almost any store.

  Why?

  Rowe had written that word in his notebook along with a reminder to determine if they could trace the phone to a particular retail store. If so, they could check sales receipts to determine whether the buyer used a credit card. Fat chance. The store might also have a video camera that recorded the transaction, including a beautifully clear picture of the purchaser. Even fatter chance. Rowe had also made a note to determine if they could use cell phone towers to triangulate the call to at least determine the GPS coordinates when the call was made.

  Crosswhite approached. “He’s the only registered owner. Three in the morning. If someone else lived here, you’d expect to find them home.”

  Rowe drafted the subpoena with that assumption. He wanted it as broad as possible, because his initial impression—shot fired through the sliding-glass door—was that the forensic evidence would be m
inimal. However, if Vasiliev had been moving large quantities of heroin and using his used-car businesses to launder the proceeds, he had to have kept records to account for the shipments and the money. Rowe had learned from his time on the narcotics unit that the drug trade was a cash business, and distributors like Vasiliev had suppliers and distributors to pay. If he had been executed, and it certainly appeared that way, Rowe wanted to spread a wide net to identify the man’s known business associates. Maybe someone would talk.

  “Is that the search warrant?” Rowe looked up at the sound of a familiar voice and watched Rick Cerrabone make his way down the driveway wearing a blue and red Boston Red Sox cap.

  Rowe made a dramatic gesture to check his watch. “Nice team spirit, Morty,” he said, borrowing a line from his favorite Bill Murray movie, Meatballs.

  “Some of us need more beauty sleep,” Cerrabone said. “I’d recommend a week for you, Sparrow.”

  “Everyone’s a comedian this morning.”

  Cerrabone, a King County senior prosecuting attorney, was a member of the Prosecutor’s MDOP unit. The Most Dangerous Offenders Program had been started to involve the county’s most experienced prosecutors in the earliest stages of violent crime investigations. Some detectives weren’t thrilled to have an attorney peeking over their shoulders. Rowe had been one of them until a four-month stint sitting beside Cerrabone at a homicide trial gave him an appreciation of what Cerrabone and his colleagues were up against. It didn’t take much for an enterprising defense attorney to exploit even the most insignificant mistake and blow it up to look like grievous police misconduct. Involving the prosecutor early in the game was intended to minimize those mistakes.

  Rowe smiled. “Yankees ever going to win another pennant, Rick?”

  Cerrabone shifted the hat back, revealing a bald spot. “Fucking Red Sox.”

  Cerrabone’s language became more colorful and his Brooklyn accent more distinct when he discussed anything Boston. A diehard Yankees fan who resembled the former skipper, Joe Torre, with his thinning hair, high forehead, hangdog eyes, and perpetual five o’clock shadow, Cerrabone had somehow managed to marry an equally diehard Red Sox fan—a clerk for the Superior Court.