by Chris Culver
I nodded. “They found my business card in her purse and wanted to know how I knew her. The guy who killed her cut off her hand and wrote slut across her chest in blood.”
She drew her hand over her mouth and inhaled. “I’m sorry. Are you okay?”
“Not really, but Bowers wants me to see something at the scene.”
She nodded and then took another breath. “Are you thinking about having a drink?”
I broke eye contact. It’s almost hard to believe now, but I didn’t always drink. I started many years ago after arresting a man and woman who had thrown their toddler out of the house so they could have sex without hearing him cry. The boy died of exposure, clinging to garbage in a vain attempt to stay warm. At the time, I didn’t have any kids, but I had an eight-year-old niece. Rachel was smart, thoughtful, funny, everything I hoped my kids would one day be. When I saw that boy’s body, I thought of my niece and I snapped. I had seen bodies before then, of course, but something inside me broke that day.
Prior to seeing that kid’s body laid out on the street, I used to think of myself almost as if I were a chivalrous knight. I locked bad guys up, I kept people safe, and I helped people put the fragmented pieces of their lives back together. I was proud of myself and the badge I put on every morning. Seeing the coroner take that kid away, though, showed me I wasn’t a knight at all. I was a garbage man. In the back of my mind, I had known that from the first moment I pinned that badge on my chest, but it took a dead child for me to confront it and admit it. As much as I might have tried to save people, I couldn’t. That wasn’t my job. I cleaned up messes because, in the real world, the good guys usually lost.
After work that night I went to a bar and had the first drink of my life. It helped. If I had a drink in my hand, I didn’t think of that boy. Eventually, I started going out for drinks with my colleagues a couple of times a week. We talked about cases and our families. It was like group therapy, and this, too, was good. Then, I started going out with or without my colleagues. I even thought this was okay. Everybody has bad days. Then my bad days merged with the good, and I stopped needing excuses. My Islamic faith called it a sin, but I drank because life was easier drunk than sober.
“I don’t even know what I’m thinking right now.”
She stepped towards me and put a hand on my elbow, looking straight in my eyes. “You’ve been sober for 300 days now, and I don’t want you to lose that.”
A little knot in my heart kinked. I love my wife, and I want nothing more than to make her proud of me. The older I get and the more I get to know her, the more I realize how lucky I am to have her.
“I don’t want to lose that, either, but Captain Bowers is waiting for me. I need to go to work.”
She started to say something, but then caught herself. “Do what you need to do. I’ll pick up something for dinner. It’ll be in the fridge when you get back. If you need to talk, please call me. Or someone else. Just don’t do anything you’ll regret.”
“I won’t.”
Before leaving, I went into my master bedroom closet and pushed aside a row of suits to expose the steel gray lockbox in which I kept my department-issued firearm, a forty-caliber Glock 22. Unless my evening went spectacularly wrong, I wouldn’t need a firearm, but it felt wrong to leave the house without it. I grabbed my holster, felt the tendons in my shoulder snap into place as I secured the leather around my shoulders, and then felt the weight of the loaded weapon against my chest.
Some guys, a gun makes them feel unbreakable, secure in the bubble of their own delusions, but my firearm reminded me how vulnerable I really am. I’ve been shot twice and I’ve been shot at maybe half a dozen times in my career. Not once did my gun provide any sort of shelter or protection. I never leave my house without a firearm on my person, but after fourteen years on the job, I have no delusions about its purpose. I carry a gun in case I have to put somebody down. That’s it, end of story. My gun doesn’t keep me safe; it simply makes me the most dangerous man in the room.
I closed my lockbox and stood, hoping this would be a short trip.
Before leaving the house, I hugged Megan and Kaden, promising that I’d see them as soon as I could. I kissed Hannah last and whispered that I’d be back as quickly as I could. I met Bowers outside, where he had already sent away the two officers he had arrived with.
“You’ve got single-paned windows in your house,” he said, nodding.
“Yeah,” I said, drawing the syllable out and wondering why he chose that moment to comment on my home’s historic windows. “The house is old. I haven’t had time to put the storm windows up for the season yet.”
He blinked a couple of times and then cleared his throat. “I didn’t mean to, but I heard part of your discussion with your wife.”
“Which part?” I asked, my back straightening.
“The part about 300 days. Had I known, I wouldn’t have come out here. Staying sober is more important than police work.”
I ran my fingers through my hair. “I appreciate your concern, but I’m fine.”
He held out a hand. “You know, if you need somebody to talk to, I’m here. Give me a call.”
“Thanks. Let’s just head out.”
Bowers nodded. “Sure. Let’s go.”
I lost my take-home vehicle to budget cuts a couple of months back, so we got into my wife’s old Volkswagen—she had upgraded to a gently used minivan a few weeks back—and I turned on the car. The address Bowers gave me was on the extreme northeastern quadrant of the city. I took the interstate most of the way, but I exited onto Shadeland Avenue and then hung a right onto Fall Creek Road. The street narrowed from four lanes to two, and skeletal, leafless trees replaced the overhead lights of the highway. Darkness smothered the landscape, limiting my visibility to a narrowly defined corridor directly ahead of my vehicle.
“Last I worked a scene like this, I used a portable generator and lights from the training academy on Post Road,” I said, glancing at Bowers. “It might be worth calling in.”
“If the generator worked, it would be,” said Bowers, crossing his arms tightly across his chest. “We’ve made do the best we can.”
Neither of us spoke again for the next few moments. As I neared the address, I saw flickering blue police lights through the trees, and I pulled to a stop on the shoulder behind a gray Chevrolet Crown Victoria, preparing myself for a long night. It was just a little after eight, and according to my dashboard thermometer, it was twenty-nine degrees. I wasn’t on duty, but I reached across Captain Bowers anyway and grabbed a fresh notepad from my glove box and wrote down the time, date, and conditions upon my arrival.
I stepped out of my car. My breath turned to frost as I sucked down car exhaust from passing vehicles. Bowers hung back near the car to make some calls while I walked to the scene. Pines and other coniferous trees dotted the woods, limiting my visibility to the right, but there were three police cruisers straight ahead of me and a van from the forensics lab beyond that. Blue and white police lights lit the evening like a nightclub but did little to penetrate the woods to my right. Yellow crime scene tape roped off an area roughly the size of an elementary school classroom around a silver Ford Focus. The car’s right wheels dipped into a drainage ditch, while its left wheels just barely touched the asphalt. A young evidence technician knelt at the Ford’s side, lifting prints from the door handles.
I walked forward and called out but stayed on the outside of the tape. “You find anything?”
Before the tech could say anything, a uniformed officer stepped out of the nearest cruiser, holding up his hand, palm toward me.
“You need to turn around and leave, sir,” he said. “This is a crime scene.”
“I realize that,” I said, pulling back my jacket to expose the badge on my hip. “I’m Detective Sergeant Ash Rashid. Captain Mike Bowers is just up the road.”
The officer took a couple of steps toward me, squinting. He was probably in his mid-twenties, and he had short red hair, bush
y eyebrows, and a lopsided smile that created a dimple on one cheek but laugh lines on the other. He looked more like the sort of guy a Hollywood director would cast as the goofy but lovable rookie in a comedy about cops than an actual officer.
“You’re the Sergeant Rashid?”
“I never considered that there might be more than one of us. Do I know you?”
He walked toward me, his hand extended. I shook it.
“I’m a big fan of yours,” he said, pumping my hand up and down. “You came up at the academy a lot. My instructors said you were reckless, but I always supported you.”
I dropped my hands to my sides, already dreading the direction of our conversation. “I appreciate that.”
“I was really impressed by how you handled your niece’s death. You didn’t let anybody get in your way. You just took care of the people who killed her.”
And that’s what I had feared. The legend of Ash Rashid the gunslinger had made its way to the police academy. When my niece died of a drug overdose a couple of years back, the department originally called it an accident, but I knew my niece didn’t do drugs. I investigated on my own and found a group of wackos dealing drugs out of a nightclub called The Abbey. It took some work, but I put the ringleader in prison and the rest of her followers in the ground.
“Do you have a log sheet?” I asked.
He fumbled a notepad from his utility belt.
“Sure, here,” he said, pressing it toward me. I signed my name and rank.
“Where’s the body?” I asked, returning his notepad and pen.
He vaguely pointed to the woods behind him. “Somewhere back there. I haven’t seen it. I think the coroner might have taken it. I’d have to call my CO to be sure.”
I raised my eyebrows and waited for him to do just that. He seemed confused at first, but then his face lit up and he reached to the radio on his shoulder. “Sergeant Grimes, can you come to the road, please? Sergeant Rashid is here. He wants to see where the body was dumped.”
“Thank you,” I said, looking at the ground around us while I waited. A thin layer of frost covered the grass. That could have helped us, given that frozen grass held footprints in a way normal grass didn’t. But so many people had trampled on the ground near Michelle’s car that any footprints we had were gone. I looked up. “Did you get pictures of the ground upon your arrival?”
The officer shook his head. “No, why?”
“Because the number of different footprints might have given us an indication of how many suspects we should look for. You should have roped the scene off and avoided touching anything.”
He straightened. “It was grass, so I didn’t even think about it.”
“Now you know. We all screw up. Get it right next time,” I said, looking toward the woods as two men walked towards us. One was Detective Paul Murphy. A lit cigarette dangled from his fingertips and a halo of smoke surrounded his head. Even from that distance, he looked tired. Not that I could blame him. He and his wife had recently started watching their only granddaughter full-time while their daughter went to law school, coincidentally the same law school I had attended. Hopefully she’d put her legal degree to better use than I had put mine.
The second figure, a uniformed sergeant, was in his midforties. Unlike the guy manning the logbook, he actually looked like a cop. After fourteen years in uniform, I can tell quite a bit about my colleagues just by the way they use their eyes, and as this sergeant walked toward me, his eyes never stopped moving, never ceased looking for threats. One look and I knew he had spent his career on the streets.
“Good to see you, Ash,” said Paul, holding out his hand. I shook it, and Paul then nodded toward the sergeant. “This is Sergeant Grimes. He found Ms. Washington. I’ll show you where.”
Before I could suggest we wait for Mike Bowers, Paul turned and walked toward the woods. With just the lights from patrol vehicles to guide me, I couldn’t see the small break in a dense row of pine trees until we were almost upon it. Even in the day, I doubted I’d have been able to see it from the road. That meant our killer was familiar with the area. As Paul entered the woods, he held back the limbs of trees so they wouldn’t smack me in the face. Once I got past the initial tree line, the vegetation thinned considerably, likely because summer sunlight couldn’t penetrate the canopy above my head.
The clearing was maybe thirty feet away. Little light from the street reached that deeply into the woods, but I could still hear cars and smell exhaust.
“Forensics cleared this place yet?” I asked.
As if to answer, Paul tossed his cigarette to the dirt and ground it beneath his heel.
“They have,” he said. “Found a ton of stuff, but I doubt any of it will help us. The neighbors say people camp here all the time.”
It wasn’t a bad spot for that. We were still relatively close to the city, but it felt isolated and private. Not a bad spot to dump a body, either.
“You mind if I take a walk?” I asked.
Paul held out his arm toward the clearing. “Be my guest. We were about to close up here anyway.”
Grimes held out a heavy, black Maglite. I took it and thanked him before stepping out into the field. The clearing was about the size of a football field. Trees bounded it on all four sides, but I could see lights from a neighboring home through the woods on the north. Michelle’s wounds were so horrific those neighbors would have heard her scream if she had died in that field.
I snapped on my light. I didn’t know what to look for, so I just started walking, sweeping the light along the grass. I found some footprints, but other than those, nothing stood out to me until I came to a campsite near the center. It contained a fire pit, a steel trash can similar to the ones in public parks, and benches made from split logs. By the pictures Bowers showed me, I knew patrol officers had found Michelle’s body beside the fire pit, but I saw very little blood on the ground. You cut off someone’s hand while her heart still beats, you’ll have blood everywhere, so that confirmed what I had thought earlier: she hadn’t died there.
In addition to the lack of blood, something else about the ground stood out to me, but it wasn’t until I squatted down that I saw it. Someone had scratched faint lines in the dirt, making the area around the fire pit look like the sand trap of a golf course. They had raked the ground. Maybe campers would have a reason for doing that, but I doubted it. This was someone covering up his tracks.
I stood, looked at the bloody spot, and felt a lump build in my throat. It was all that remained of my friend.
I had met Michelle and her brother Dante on a case ten years ago. As a detective, I’m not supposed to become involved with the witnesses I interview, but I couldn’t help it with Michelle and Dante. They were kids, but unlike almost everyone else in their neighborhood, they had the guts to stand up for a stranger, to point their fingers at a violent gang leader and say, “He did it. He killed this man, and he deserves to be punished.” And unlike me, they couldn’t leave that neighborhood at the end of the day. They couldn’t escape the stares, the threats, the harassment. They took everything that gang threw at them and became stronger for it. Both Michelle and Dante went on to college—they were the only two in their high school class to do so—and they both made something of their lives, she becoming a social worker and he becoming an attorney.
And now she was dead.
I looked around the field and found Paul Murphy, Sergeant Grimes, and a uniformed officer about fifty yards away from me near a pair of beige sheds. They were talking, but as I approached, Paul left the group and met me maybe ten yards from his companions.
“You find anything?” asked Paul.
“You’re looking for at least two suspects,” I said upon reaching him. “What’s up with the sheds and the patrol officer?”
“How do you know we’re looking for two suspects?” he asked.
“I’ll tell you if you tell me,” I said.
Paul looked at the rest of his group and then back at me. “I’
ll show you the sheds, but I’ll warn you first: they’re kind of weird.”
Chapter 4
I followed Paul around the edge of the clearing until we reached a pair of beige metal outbuildings maybe five feet square each and built on concrete slabs. They’d keep the rain out pretty well by the looks of things, but someone had cut the padlocks on the doors. Sergeant Grimes and a young woman in a patrol officer’s navy blue uniform waited for us. She looked straight into my eyes, almost challenging me. The badge on her belt reflected in the moonlight, but I couldn’t see it well enough to make out her rank nor did I want to stare, something men probably did to her quite often. One look at her, and I recognized someone strong and confident, maybe even a tad overconfident. I could respect that. Without a word passing between us, I liked her.
I looked at Paul. “I assume the padlock was cut when you arrived.”
He nodded to me and then to the woman. “It was. This is Officer Emilia Rios. When we saw the shrine, Sergeant Grimes called her in because he knew she was interested in this stuff.”
I raised my eyebrows at the word shrine but didn’t say anything and instead held out my hand for the officer.
“Ash Rashid,” I said, shaking her hand. She had a firm grip. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“Likewise,” she said. “Emilia Rios.” She nodded at Sergeant Grimes and answered one of my questions before I got the chance to ask it. “Jim was my FTO two years ago.”
Field Training Officer. That explained how the two of them knew each other. She walked to the nearest shed and slid the door to the right, exposing the interior. I knelt beside her to take a look.
Green carpet, like the stuff found on a miniature golf course, covered the slab, and on that rested a pedestal crowned by a skeletal statue of a female grim reaper. The statue had black hair nearly down to her waist, and she wore what looked like a dingy wedding dress. A green robe hung loosely off her shoulders, covering most of her form and most of the dress. In one hand, she carried a scythe wrapped in a twenty-dollar bill, while the other held a miniature globe. To her left, someone had placed a vase full of wilted white roses and four white candles, and to her right, he had placed a nearly empty bottle of tequila. Last, I noticed a black votive candle adorned with a white skull directly behind her.
