by Chris Culver
I glanced at my daughter and picked up two parts from the floor that looked as if they belonged together. “Where were you two hours ago with that advice?”
She shrugged and kicked her legs. “Probably at school.”
I put the pieces on my workbench and leaned forward, resting my forearms on the bench in front of me and looking at the ground. My garage had post-and-beam construction with exposed oak trusses supporting the roof, a poured concrete floor, and thick fiberglass insulation beneath drywall installed one summer just five years ago. It kept me warm even on the coldest December night. I’d probably find that useful when Hannah asked me to sleep in it.
“Your mother is a very kind, forgiving woman. She’ll understand.”
Megan picked up a juice box and sucked until the straw hit air bubbles. “If you say so.”
I glanced at her. “You want to talk about what happened at school?”
“No,” she said, kicking her legs harder. “Can we get a Christmas tree this year?”
I bent and picked up a rubber mallet, the inspiration for and source of my current troubles, from the floor. “We’re Muslims, so we don’t celebrate Christmas. And let’s try to stay focused on one topic. I think we should talk about what happened at school.”
“Lelia’s family had a Christmas tree last year.”
I hung the mallet on its hooks on the pegboard wall above my workbench. “We’re not Lelia’s family.”
The glare of the overhead light caught off Megan’s black hair so that it almost shimmered as she shook her head. “Mr. Abaza said Christmas isn’t religious anymore.”
“Mr. Abaza, with all due respect, doesn’t know very many Christians, then.” Megan started to respond, so I held up a finger. “And even if he was right, we’re not celebrating Christmas.”
Megan blinked once, and then twice at me, and I could practically see the neurons firing in her brain as she hatched a plan. “Does Ummi know you took her chair?”
“Not yet.” I turned to my workbench and twisted the orange top of a container of wood glue to close it. “Sometimes it’s better if a husband fixes things before his wife asks. You’ll learn that if you get married when you grow up. I’d like to talk about school now. Did you see Sydney today?”
“Of course. I sit beside her.”
“Did the other kids make fun of her?”
Megan lowered her chin and raised her eyebrows as if she planned to say something obvious to anyone but the most obtuse. “Not after you kicked Mrs. Mitchell’s ass.”
Sydney was one of Megan’s friends in her second-grade class, and while I didn’t know her family well, they lived just a few blocks from us. Yesterday, my wife charged me with picking the two of them up from school, where I found out that Sydney had peed her pants when Mrs. Mitchell refused to let her go to the bathroom without a bathroom pass. After seeing the stain on Sydney’s pants and hearing her story, I gave her my suit jacket to wear and escorted the girls to the front office, where I had a discussion with Mrs. Mitchell and their principal. I might have lost my temper and raised my voice slightly.
“I didn’t kick anyone’s anything,” I said, putting my hands on Megan’s shoulders. “And that’s not a word you should use.”
“Which word?”
“You know which word.”
She grinned so widely that she nearly had to close her eyes. “Kicked?”
“The next time you use the a-word, I’ll put you in time out,” I said, turning my attention toward the pile of wood on my garage floor and wondering how the hell I would ever turn it into a functioning rocking chair again. “Did Mrs. Mitchell say anything?”
“She wasn’t there. Mr. Raymond said she might not be back for a while.”
At least I had accomplished something. “If you ever have a teacher who prevents you from using the bathroom or doing anything else you need, tell me or Ummi,” I said, feeling my phone buzz in my pocket. “We want to know these things.”
“I know.”
Megan jumped off the workbench and nearly tripped on two slats of wood as I reached into my pocket. I caught her and glanced at my phone to see who had called. The number belonged to Paul Murphy, a buddy of mine from work. Paul and I had never actually worked together on a case, but I respected him more than I did most detectives. Some guys, they get as many years on the job as Paul and I have, they think they know everything, that they’ve seen everything, that the world can’t possibly toss anything new their way. Paul and I both thought differently. Twice a year—on his own dime—he went to law enforcement conferences to learn about new investigative techniques, new crimes, and new technology. He had a good head on his shoulders and a decent heart. I had liked him from the moment we met.
As I answered my phone, Megan told me she was going inside. I nodded and patted her back, prodding her toward the door.
“Paul,” I said, smiling and hoping it was evident in my voice. “Hannah and I are going out tonight, so I can’t talk long. What’s going on?”
“Cancel your plans. You’ve got something heading your way. Are you at home right now?”
The smile slipped from my face. “Excuse me?”
“I don’t know what’s going on,” said Paul, his voice a throaty whisper. “But Mike Bowers just tore out of here, and he’s heading to your house.”
Mike Bowers oversaw the Crimes Against Persons unit at my department. He and I didn’t always get along, but he was a good cop, save for rare occasions when he shoved his head so far up his own ass that he couldn’t see obvious things right in front of him.
“Why would Mike come to my house?”
Paul paused, but I heard him wheeze as he caught his breath. Even at six feet tall and half again as wide, Paul somehow managed to meet or exceed the department’s physical fitness requirements. I have no idea how. In all the years I’ve known him, I had never seen the man physically exert himself beyond reaching for a pastrami sandwich or a cigarette, one of which he seemed to have every time we met.
“I don’t know. Something big. Kent Graham and Nancy Wharton pulled a case this evening. African-American female, mid-twenties, found on Fall Creek Road near the Hamilton County border. It’s supposed to be real ugly. They went out to the scene and called us twenty minutes later. Now Bowers is looking for you. That ringing any bells?”
I shook my head and started pacing the length of my garage, stepping over pieces of the chair. “I haven’t been up there since July when I taught a gun safety course to the Boy Scouts at Camp Belzer. It was a community relations gig.”
“Yeah, well, this is supposed to be a really bad one. Bowers already has a hard-on for you, so you might want to put your lawyer on standby just in case.”
Before Paul could say anything else, I saw a blue-and-white light flashing through the blinds on the only window in my garage facing the street. I crossed the room and spread the aluminum slats with my fingers to get a better view. A marked patrol vehicle had pulled to the front of my house, and Captain Mike Bowers and two uniformed patrol officers stepped onto my front lawn.
“Thanks for the heads-up,” I said, stepping back from my window. “But I think it might be a little late for that call.”
I grabbed my jacket from a stool in the corner of the garage and jogged outside. Despite its being just a little after five, ominous black clouds were draped across the horizon, while a cold early-December wind ripped at the skin of my hands, face, and neck. Bowers and the two uniformed officers who accompanied him stopped walking when they saw me, and I crossed my driveway in five strides, meeting them on the front porch and silently cursing the architect who had designed my house and failed to connect the garage with the main structure. Considering he had likely been dead for the past sixty or seventy years, I doubted he cared.
“Evening, officers,” I said, nodding to Captain Bowers and then the two men beside him in turn. “What’s going on?”
“I need you to listen, and I need you to be honest,” said Bowers, reaching into his pocket for his cell pho
ne. “I’ve got a picture on my phone, and I need you to tell me if you recognize the woman. It’s gruesome.”
“How about you tell me what’s going on first?”
“We don’t know what’s going on. That’s why we’re here,” said Bowers, flicking his finger across his phone. “You’ve been out of town since your hearing, haven’t you?”
My “hearing” referred to a disciplinary hearing before a captain’s review board the previous week. A couple of months back, Bowers had accused me of conduct unbecoming an officer for pretending to offer a drug user heroin in exchange for information in a human trafficking case. In actuality, I had offered that drug user bundles of brown sugar made up to look like heroin.
That interview and the information it garnered me allowed me to save the lives of almost a dozen young women, but Bowers and the review board seemed to care only about the rules I had broken. The angry part of me hoped they’d fire me so I could wash my hands of the whole department, but the other part of me, a much bigger part, fervently hoped they’d let me keep the one job in the world I wanted to do. I anticipated and dreaded receiving their verdict any day now.
“Yeah. Hannah and I took the kids to St. Louis. Megan wanted to see the Arch. Why?”
Bowers didn’t look up from his phone. “Because our victim died two to three days ago. I needed to eliminate you as a suspect.”
I crossed my arms. “What victim?”
As if I had said the magic words, Bowers turned his phone to me to show me a picture. A dead woman stared back. I uncrossed my arms and dropped them to my sides. As Paul had said, the victim was a young African-American woman. A jagged gash so deep I could see her vertebrae ran from one side of her neck to the other, while reddish-black blood puddled around her. Pain had twisted her face into an effigy of the kind and intelligent young woman I knew, the young woman whose face adorned a Christmas card in our front hallway. Her eyes, usually a rich, deep brown, stared back at me, dead and glassy. I had to look away before I got sick.
“Do you know this woman?” asked Bowers.
I closed my eyes and whispered a short du’a, a prayer, for her, before nodding.
“Her name is Michelle Washington.”
“Good. How do you know her?”
I tried to clear my head by shaking it. Bowers repeated the question.
“She’s my AA sponsor.”
“Alcoholics Anonymous?” asked Bowers.
I nodded. “I just started a few weeks ago. Right after you filed conduct-unbecoming charges against me.”
Bowers held up a hand. “Forget about those charges for the moment. What is the extent of your relationship with Ms. Washington?”
I tried to put the image of her out of my head, but I couldn’t blink it away. My legs felt weak, so I leaned against the wooden rail that separated my porch from the yard.
“She’s a friend,” I said once I regained enough composure to speak. “I’ve called her once or twice when I had a bad day, but that’s it.” I took a deep breath and exhaled a cloud of frost. “Someone needs to talk to her family. Her brother lives a couple of blocks from her house in Irvington, and her parents live in Ransom Place, I think. I might have their contact information inside.”
“We’ll get to them,” said Bowers, his voice surprisingly calm. “I need you to talk to me now, though. Can you think of anyone who would try to hurt her? A boyfriend, maybe?”
I turned to face him, shaking my head. “I don’t think she had a boyfriend, but no one would want to hurt her. She sang in her church choir, and she volunteered for Habitat for Humanity. She was a good person. Everybody liked her.”
Bowers ran his finger across his phone and then straightened. “I need you to look at another picture and tell me if it means anything. It might be a little disturbing.”
“Okay,” I said. He turned his phone so I could see it. The picture was a wide-angle shot of Michelle’s body. Someone had ripped off her shirt and bra. A dark liquid glistened against her brown skin, forming a word from her neck to her navel. I felt sick, but I forced my face to remain impassive, a skill I had picked up from several years working homicides.
“The liquid is probably blood, and it says slut,” said Bowers. “Someone cut off her hand—before she died, according to Dr. Rodriguez—and then used her fingertips as a brush.”
I’ve been a police officer for a long time, even spending a couple of very good years as a homicide detective. Rarely did I hear things that took me aback, but this did. You’ve really got to hate somebody to dismember her while she’s alive, to hear her scream as the knife strikes bone, and to keep going until the deed is done.
“How’d you connect her to me?”
Bowers glanced up from his phone, but then glanced back at the screen. “She had your card in her purse.” He slipped the phone back into his pocket. “And you can’t think of any reason why someone would want to hurt her?”
I started to tell him no, but a sick thought hit me. Michelle and I hadn’t met by chance. Ten years ago, she and her brother had witnessed a murder. It was one of the first homicides I ever worked, and their testimony helped send a violent and very well-connected gang leader to prison for murder. I didn’t often keep up with the criminals I put away, but Santino Ramirez had a special place in my heart. He was the first and only man I ever sent to death row. Unless he won a last-minute appeal, he’d get a needle in the arm in a couple of days. The world would be a better place without him.
I swallowed a lump in my throat and hoped I was wrong about what I was about to say.
“She testified against Santino Ramirez ten years ago,” I said. “His old gang might have just called her out.”
Chapter 3
At any given time Indiana had maybe a dozen men on death row, so we didn’t have many executions. That meant Ramirez was big news, especially after a recent botched execution in Oklahoma. Bowers recognized his name without a reminder.
“Ramirez’s gang ever threaten her before?”
I shook my head. “Not that she’s ever mentioned, but this close to the big show, we’ve got to consider it.”
Bowers swore under his breath. “I’ll have Kent Graham contact the other eyewitnesses who testified against Ramirez. Meantime, I need you to come to the scene with me to see something.”
I cared deeply about Michelle, so I wanted to do everything I could for her. But already my hands shook, and I felt a lump growing in my throat. I swallowed it down and hoped my voice wouldn’t crack.
“A good friend of mine is dead. I’m not in any shape to go anywhere.”
He nodded and looked genuinely sympathetic. “I understand, but there’s something at the scene I need you to see. You might be able to help.”
“And there’s no one else who can do this?” I asked.
“You knew the victim. No one on our team did.”
I looked off into the evening sky. The sun had set gloriously half an hour ago, but the stars had yet to make their evening appearances. They would, though; it’d be a pretty night. I wondered what Michelle saw before she died. Hopefully something nice.
“I’ll need to tell my wife.”
Bowers didn’t blink. “I’ll wait out here.”
I knew my front door was locked, so I went through the side door that led to my kitchen. As soon as I did, my daughter’s cat, Garfield, tried to dart out between my legs, so I bent down and picked him up. He hissed at me and pawed at my arms but didn’t extend his claws, which I interpreted as a subtle way of saying he loved me and thanked me for protecting him from the cold. As soon as I put him down in the kitchen, he bounded toward the hallway that led to our living room and the rest of the house.
“Somebody needs to feed the cat,” I said, scraping my feet on the mat beside the door.
“I already did,” said Megan, looking over her shoulder while my wife helped her scrub her hands at the sink. I looked at her and forced a smile to my lips.
“That was very grown-up of you.”
&nbs
p; She beamed at me, brightening ever so slightly the melancholy mood I could feel myself slipping into. While Megan turned back to my wife, I crossed the kitchen to our breakfast table and tousled my little boy’s hair.
“Hi, Baba,” he said, between bites of a cracker. I knew Kaden would grow up, but he still surprised me almost every day with the new things he did. Recently, he had started telling stories about his about his day and the adventures he went on with his mother. They didn’t always make sense, but they did always make me smile. I bent down and kissed his forehead, which he promptly wiped away.
“Garfield’s eaten, but the kids haven’t,” said Hannah, looking directly into my daughter’s eyes. “Which means we need to hurry and get ready if we’re going to make it to Aunt Yasmine and Uncle Jack’s on time.” She looked up at me. “They rented a movie for the kids and wanted to watch it before Kaden falls asleep.”
My wife had thick black hair that just barely kissed the top of her shoulders and laugh lines around her eyes that showed up every time she smiled. She’s the best friend I’ve ever had. On most nights, I couldn’t help but smile when I saw her, even when she was doing something as mundane as helping our daughter wash her hands. Tonight, no smile cracked my lips.
“We need to talk,” I said. I glanced at Megan. “Alone.”
Hannah kept her hands on our daughter’s shoulders, holding her in place.
“What’s going on?” she asked, lowering her chin.
“Captain Bowers is on the front porch.”
Hannah didn’t take her eyes from mine. “Megan, go to your room and pick out an outfit for tomorrow and some pajamas for tonight. And take your brother.”
“Can I pick out anything I want?” she asked.
“If it’s warm.”
She nodded, took Kaden’s hand, and then ran—her default mode of transportation—past me and down the hallway to her room.
“What’s going on, Ashraf?”
I took a breath. “Michelle Washington is dead. Murdered. It’s pretty bad.”
Hannah looked confused for a moment, but then I saw a glimmer of recognition in her eyes. “Your sponsor? That Michelle Washington?”
