By Any Means

by Chris Culver

  The message galled him for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the sheer fact that someone was irresponsible enough to leak the story. Their hostage taker had already killed two people, so he had shown himself capable of violence. For all anybody knew, putting his story on TV might push him over the edge again and cause him to kill Rebecca.

  He called Tanaka back. He had known she had high-placed sources, but he hadn’t known how good they were until that moment. She knew everything he did, and a little more. He pleaded with her to sit on her story until they found more information, but she refused even when he offered her an exclusive interview. She said she didn’t need an exclusive interview, which made sense considering she could find out everything she wanted on her own. If he couldn’t change her mind, he’d just have to deal with the situation as it came to him.

  Bowers dropped Ash off near his cruiser about fifteen minutes after leaving Rebecca’s house. The sun had dropped a couple of degrees, lengthening the shadows cast by nearby houses and trees and lowering the temperature. Despite the minor reprieve from the heat, the air still felt sticky and tasted acidic. Normally, that would have made Ash perspire through his uniform, but no sweat formed on his brow. His head pounded as well. Dehydration wouldn’t be enjoyable, but he could fight through it. The other officers on the scene, though, shouldn’t have to. He signed the log sheet maintained by a uniformed officer on the scene’s periphery and gave twenty bucks to another uniformed officer so he could buy a couple cases of bottled water from a nearby convenience store.

  The investigative team had made fair progress in Ash’s absence but had yet to remove the Mercedes. He found out why upon walking toward it and finding Assistant Coroner Hector Rodriguez leaning inside the backseat. Dr. Rodriguez had black hair that had only recently begun graying and a skin tone somewhere between olive and brown. Ash had seen a lot of women—and a few men—from the police department and prosecutor’s office try to flirt with him, but Rodriguez barely seemed to notice. At work, he had eyes only for the dead.

  “It’s good to see you, Detective Rashid,” he said upon noticing Ash’s arrival. “I couldn’t find an ID on either of them, so don’t bother asking.”

  “What do you have?” asked Ash, crouching beside him.

  “Couple of things, maybe,” said Rodriguez. “Were the doors and windows all closed when you arrived?” Ash nodded. “It looks like our shooter blasted them from the backseat, then. At that range, we’d usually see the victim’s brain on the front window. Since we don’t have anything, our perp used something with a pretty low muzzle velocity, like a twenty-two.” He made a gun motion with his hand and pointed it at the female victim on the front seat. “If he held his gun to her head and fired, it would have enough power to penetrate the back of her skull but not enough to break through the bones in front. Instead, the round would ricochet like a steel ball inside a pinball machine. Dead almost on contact; she wouldn’t have felt a thing.”

  Ash felt a little better after hearing that. No matter who she was or what she had done, he never liked hearing that a murder victim had suffered before dying.

  “Anything else?”

  “A significant quantity of blood on the backseat,” he said. “I can’t determine the injury that would have caused it without more information, but this quantity of blood loss necessitates our victim going to the hospital.”

  That added a wrinkle to things. It also explained the scene somewhat. The shooter probably hadn’t intended to execute the driver with the vehicle still in motion, but something had happened and it became kill or be killed.

  “Would it be a life-threatening injury?”

  Rodriguez hesitated but then nodded. “Potentially, but any serious injury is life-threatening given the right circumstances and a lack of proper treatment. If he could staunch the bleeding, our shooter’s primary worry would be infection.”

  That could slow him down, but it would also make him desperate.

  “Is there any way we can make these bodies your priority at the morgue? The shooter took a hostage, so we need to find out everything we can about them.”

  “I’ve got cases we have to get to tonight, but we’ll move some other people around. We’ll start cutting first thing tomorrow morning.”

  Ash preferred earlier, but he’d take whatever he could get. “Good. Take a marked escort with you so you can get through traffic.”

  “Sure. Thanks, Ash.”

  “Thank you.”

  Ash stood up from the Mercedes, his head feeling light and his mouth dry. He took a breath, steadying himself on his feet. The sun would go down in a couple more hours, and he’d get a drink. Hopefully he could avoid anything strenuous until then. As he took a step away from the Mercedes, he noticed a forensic technician named Haley Fox dusting one of the front doors for prints. The last time Ash saw Haley, she had been a college intern at the scene of a methamphetamine bust. She smiled, blushed, and stood upon catching his glance, reminding him of the awkward young woman he had met eight months earlier.

  “Hi, Detective Rashid. It’s nice to see you. I heard you talking to Dr. Rodriguez, but I didn’t want to interrupt.”

  Ash forced himself to smile to make her a little more at ease. He had difficulty, though; given the situation, he didn’t have a lot to smile about.

  “You too. Tell me you have something good.”

  Haley looked at her feet. “Somebody wiped down the car. I couldn’t even find prints on the interior side of the door handles.”

  Ash grimaced. A lot of criminals tried to hide their prints, but few had the technical knowledge to accomplish it. The fact that this guy did didn’t bode well for their investigation. At least they had his blood on the backseat. They might be able to get a match from that.

  “Thank you for looking. If you find anything, let me know.”

  Haley held his gaze for a moment, but then her eyes lost their focus.

  “This is the first homicide I’ve worked. It’s a little scary.”

  “I puked on my partner’s shoes on my first homicide, so as long as you didn’t do that, you’re one up on me.”

  A flicker of a smile touched her lips, but it disappeared before reaching the rest of her face.

  “Yeah, at least I didn’t puke on anyone.”

  Ash nodded and let her go back to work before walking toward Detective Alvarez’s parked cruiser, which, from the looks of things, he had turned into a makeshift command center.

  “We’ve got nothing,” he said, flattening an oversized map against his car’s stamped metal hood. He circled three intersections with a blue ballpoint pen. “We’ve got roadblocks at all three of these intersections, but nobody’s found anything. We’ve also talked to everybody who’s walked by the scene, but no one admits to seeing anything. Meanwhile, I’ve got every officer who’s ever patrolled this neighborhood pounding on doors. To a man, they’re telling me the same thing: nobody’s talking to us.”

  Ash flattened an edge of the map that threatened to blow away. Most of the houses had large black Xs on them, but Alvarez had circled others and even left some blank.

  “You can drop the roadblocks. Greg Doran found Rebecca’s car near Shadeland Avenue.”

  Alvarez shook his head and exhaled hard, flexing his fingers.

  “Nice of somebody to tell me I’ve been wasting my time.”

  Ash caught the detective’s gaze and held it.

  “I’m telling you now. I just found out myself. Is that a problem?”

  “No,” said Alvarez, his shoulders dropping and his voice softening. “Of course not. Sorry. I’m just a little on edge.”

  “Everybody is,” said Ash, flattening the edge of the map again. “Why are some of these houses crossed off?”

  Alvarez leaned against the car and pointed at the map again.

  “They’re dead ends. The houses are empty or the residents are openly hostile. I circled the ones where my guys thought we made progress. I don’t know if the homeowners saw anythin
g, but at least they didn’t swear at us.”

  Ash counted almost three times as many Xs as Os. He ground his teeth, frustrated.

  “Our victims weren’t here to go sightseeing. Someone in this neighborhood knows something, and I want to find out what. Get some men, get some tactical vests, and get some shotguns. I want you to go back to every house that’s been crossed off and start checking for outstanding warrants against the residents. Get some cuffs on people, and get some leverage. They’ll talk.”

  Alvarez raised his eyebrows. “If we start rounding up the residents en masse, someone will notice. We might get some TV time, and it’s probably not going to be too flattering. You okay with that?”

  Ash looked up from the map and nodded. “If it happens, blame me. I’ll deal with the push-back.”

  “If that’s how you want to handle it, I’m on it,” said Alvarez, already reaching for a police radio. He called his officers back to the scene while Ash walked to his cruiser. He wanted to drive to Shadeland Avenue, but the case had become too big to micromanage. Detective Doran could handle an abandoned vehicle without help. More important than that, Ash needed to visit the finance company that leased John and Jane Doe’s Mercedes before it closed for the day, and the longer he lingered, the more time he wasted.

  He put the address into his cruiser’s GPS and followed its directions northwest of town to a stucco-covered strip mall with a large organic grocery on one end and a high-end appliance dealership on the other. Retail shops spanned the length from one end to the other; none, unfortunately, looked like a finance company. Ash turned in anyway and swore to himself when he found the address the Mercedes had been registered to. It was a copy shop and mailbox center called QwikMail. Hopefully the shop’s proprietor knew something.

  Ash parked and got out of his car. QwikMail occupied a narrow space packed with commercial copy machines and heavy metal racks of postal supplies. A long, wooden counter at the rear of the store separated the public space from the private, and a curtained archway led into a back room. A doorbell rang as Ash opened the door, and a college-age kid stepped up to the counter, his eyes bleary and red. The entire store reeked of marijuana.

  “I thought the front door was locked,” said the kid, turning his head to the archway as someone in back giggled. “What can I do for you, Officer?”

  The stoner emphasized the word Officer, which shut up the giggler quickly. Ash hadn’t driven all the way out there for a drug bust, but the smell gave him cause to secure a search warrant if he wanted. Even if the stoners turned out to be uncooperative, they had given him leverage. He liked when people did that.

  “I’m looking for a company called Commonwealth Financial Services. They list this as their address.”

  The stoner’s shoulders dropped, and he took a step back, nodding, probably relieved that Ash hadn’t searched him for drugs yet.

  “They rent a mailbox from us. It’s one of the services we provide.”

  “Great. Where’s their actual office located?”

  The stoner shrugged and looked around. “Not here. That’s all I know.”

  “Where’s their mailbox? I want to see if they have anything.”

  “We don’t have boxes like other stores. People have their mail sent here, and we sort it into baskets in the back. That way we catch junk mail before our clients see it.”

  “And your clients get a street address that looks like a physical address rather than a mailbox at a strip mall.”

  The stoner nodded, a smile building on his face. “That’s right,” he said, making circular motions with his hands. “It’s all part of our full-service package.” The stoner in the back giggled again, presumably at the word package. Ash leaned his elbows against the counter and glowered. The stoner dropped his hands and took another step back, moving just enough air that Ash caught a fresh whiff of marijuana.

  “How much does a mailbox cost?”

  “Five hundred a month, but we take care of everything. We sign for packages, call you when they come in, sort your junk mail. It’s a good deal when you consider everything.”

  Full service or not, it was well over three times what the post office charged for even their largest box.

  “What else do your clients get for that kind of money?”

  The stoner smiled broadly. “Our award-winning customer service.” Ash raised his eyebrows, incredulous, causing the stoner’s smile to shift into a frown. “Listen, man, I wish you had come by earlier, but I’m about to close for the night and get some food. Maybe you can come back tomorrow and talk about a box when my boss is here. If you say you’re a cop, he’ll even give you the policeman’s discount.”

  “You’re not closing. You’re going to talk to me about Commonwealth Financial Services and the business you conduct with them.”

  The stoner sneered. “You can’t tell us what to do just because you’re a cop. I’ve got rights. I’ve read the First Amendment.”

  Ash didn’t know how to respond to the stoner’s unorthodox legal analysis of the First Amendment, so he didn’t say anything for a good fifteen or twenty seconds. The stoner crossed his arms in a self-satisfied manner.

  “Keep your hands where I can see them, but come around the corner. I’m going to pat you down for drugs or weapons, so if you’ve got anything in your pockets that can hurt me, tell me now. If you’ve got a knife in your pocket and don’t tell me, I might get pissed off and accidentally stab you with it.”

  “That doesn’t sound like it’d be an accident.”

  “You figured that out all on your own. Good for you.”

  The stoner took a step back and raised his hands as if trying to show that he had nothing to hide.

  “You can’t touch me.”

  Ash motioned him forward. “Yes, I can. It’s called a Terry frisk. I have reasonable suspicion that you’re in the process of or about to commit a crime and a reasonable belief that you’re armed. I’m worried about my safety.”

  The stoner held his hands even higher. “We’re just a shipping center, man. If there are drugs here, they’re not mine.”

  “I’m sure you wouldn’t mind turning out your pockets for me, then. I’ve got this sneaking suspicion that you’re carrying something you shouldn’t be.”

  The stoner seemed to think for a moment before putting his hands down and looking left and right. He leaned forward. “I’ve got some ganja in my pocket, but it’s not mine. It’s my friend’s. He asked me to carry it for him.”

  The stoner tilted his head toward the archway. Ash thought about calling IMPD’s dispatcher and requesting backup, but he was more interested in information than a bust. If he started making arrests now, he’d waste time he didn’t have.

  “Here’s the deal,” said Ash, taking a notepad from a pouch on his utility belt and dropping it on the counter. “Tell your friend that I’ll help him out if he helps me out. I need to see the records you have on Commonwealth Financial Services. You show them to me, and I’ll forget about the drugs.”

  The stoner narrowed his eyes and furrowed his brow, apparently thinking. After a moment of silence, he nodded.

  “You’re all right, dude,” he said, walking toward a computer on the other end of the counter. “I’ll print out their file. But after that, you’ve got to go. I’ve got work to do.”

  Ash agreed, and his new stoner friend turned to the computer. Within two minutes, he handed Ash a printout with fields for a mailbox user’s name, home address, phone number, and e-mail address. It would have been helpful had it been filled out. The only field with information on it noted that a representative from Commonwealth had paid in cash for a six-month lease and that he didn’t want to receive cobranded offers from QwikMail’s partners. Ash dropped the paper on the counter.

  “You’re messing with me, right? This better be a joke.”

  “No man,” said the stoner, shaking his head. “This is all we have in the system. If a customer pays cash, that’s all we ask for. That’s the whole point of
this place. If you don’t have a regular address, you can get your mail here.”

  Despite the stoner’s profession of innocence, Ash had a pretty good idea of what the “whole point” of QwikMail was. A couple of months back, David Lee, a detective in the narcotics squad, joked that with some recent crackdowns in the local drug supply chain, the postal service had become the biggest drug dealer in town. Shipping drugs had one big problem, though: You need a safe place to ship them to. If a user ships them to his own house, he’ll eventually be caught and the police will know who to arrest. If he ships them to a friend’s house, chances are that his friend will smoke his weed. If he ships them to a place like QwikMail, though, he’s got anonymity and security, at least for a time.

  “Who picked up the mail?”

  The stoner shrugged. “Some woman. I think her name was Kate. Or maybe it was Kim. I don’t know. It was one of those K names.”

  “Was she blond, about thirty years old?”

  “That’s right,” he said, grinning and nodding. “She had a nice pair of snuggle puppies.” Ash scrunched his eyebrows, not understanding. The stoner cupped his hands above his chest. “Her boobs. They were nice. I don’t think they were real, though.”

  Ash wrote down the name but omitted any facts about her anatomy.

  “Did Kate have a last name?”

  “Probably,” said the stoner. “Most people do, unless they’re like Bono or Madonna.”

  Ash forced himself to smile. “To clarify, you’re telling me that you don’t know her last name?”

  “I asked, but she wouldn’t tell me.”

  Had Ash known Kate before she passed, he would have congratulated her for her common sense, something found in an increasingly small portion of the population.

  “Do you know anything else about her?”