“How’s that?”
Hurdle nodded at Curtis. “Who’s your friend?”
“Erik Curtis. Fairfax County Police.”
“Uh-huh. Figured you’d show up.”
“Well,” Curtis said with a half-smile, “you are in my parking lot. Good to know we’re not gonna have any problems working together.”
“Before we talk about working together, I was told you were on the task force several years ago.”
“Whoever told you that seems to be a reliable source.” Curtis grinned again.
“Yeah, he is. We’ll have OPR do a backgrounder on you PDQ,” he said, referring to the Service’s Office of Professional Responsibility. “Make sure there’ve been no warrants issued and no bad shit smeared on you since you left the task force. Everything checks out, you’re back in the saddle. That’s the official line. Unofficially, look in my eyes.”
Curtis did as instructed.
“Anything I need to know about? Anything that would come up in the background check that’d make it impossible for you to serve on CARFTF?” he asked, ignoring the silent “F” and pronouncing it “cartif,” for Capital Area Regional Fugitive Task Force.
“Nothing.”
Hurdle studied his face a moment. “You’re onboard as of now, on my authority. You’ll be deputized as soon as the paperwork comes through. If we do our jobs efficiently, and the FBI doesn’t get in the way, we’ll have this Marcks dude wearing handcuffs before the ink’s dry on your application.”
Vail lifted her brow. “You sound very confident.” And more than a little condescending.
Hurdle walked toward them and leaned against the adjacent work table. “Damn straight. I’ve been tracking down these assholes for eighteen years. I know what I’m doin’. You people are here because it’s the right thing to do. Cooperation with state and local. And FBI, in cases like this, because—well, because some clueless idiot bureaucrat, who knows shit about what we do, decided we have to work with you people. I get it—but that don’t mean I gotta like it. Or that it makes sense.”
“You didn’t really think the intimidation act would work with me, did you?”
“’Course not. I try it all the time with the Fibbies, never works. Can’t blame me for trying.” He cracked a smile—which looked genuine.
“Bottom line,” Vail said, “is—”
“Bottom line is that we’re gonna catch Roscoe Lee Marcks. And you guys will claim all the credit for a job well done. Ask any marshal on any task force in the country, he or she will tell you the same thing. That’s it in a nutshell.”
Perhaps that nutshell is more than a little cracked.
“I can do this shit in my sleep, Vail.”
“I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’d rather you keep your eyes open on this one.”
“The question is not if we’ll get him,” Hurdle said, ignoring her. “It’s when. How long’s it gonna take us? Don’t know. But we will get our man. Assuming you don’t fuck up.”
“Me?”
“You. I work dozens of these cases a year. In eighteen years, that’s a lotta violent fugitives. And I gotta say, the FBI always does its best.” He paused and looked into Vail’s eyes. “To grab the limelight. And yeah, screw things up. You guys don’t play well in the sandbox. You don’t share your leads. But you sure do look good on camera.”
A number of responses populated Vail’s thoughts—and none of them were polite or politically correct. Instead, she said, “Guess I’ll have to do my best. To prove you wrong.”
“Don’t get my hopes up.”
“You got any problem with the county police?” Curtis asked.
“Not generally, no. You guys are serviceable. Know your place.”
Vail and Curtis shared a look of disbelief.
“Okay,” Hurdle said, turning his back on them and walking toward the front of the room. “Let’s get started. Rest of the task force will be rolling in within the hour. You know how this works?”
“I’ve got an idea,” Vail said.
“There are regional task forces—Pacific Southwest Regional Fugitive Task Force, Southeast Regional Fugitive Task Force, this one, the Capital Area Regional Fugitive Force, and so on. We apprehend the most violent and dangerous fugitives in DC, Maryland, and Virginia. Like I said, we work with federal, state, and local law enforcement.”
“Even though you prefer not to,” she said.
“Even though. Yeah.” He gestured to a map mounted on the wall. “Districts can have their own local task forces, too. So the Marshals Service in the District of Arizona has warrant squads in Phoenix, Tucson, and Yuma that track fugitives in their area.” He turned back to them. “Overall, there are about sixty local fugitive task forces. Most are full-time. Why? Because we’ve got a lot of bandits out there tryin’ to avoid doing their time.”
“You know about the officer’s murder, I take it?” Vail asked.
“What officer?”
“The one who was watching Jasmine Marcks’s house.”
Hurdle ground his jaw. “No.” He checked his watch. “When did this happen? And what—”
“Curtis and I are headed over there now. Want to tag along?”
Hurdle cursed under his breath, turned to a man behind him and issued some orders, then grabbed his coat and followed Vail out the door.
THEY ARRIVED TO find crime scene tape encircling the entire block where Jasmine lived. Police cruisers blocked the entrance to the street and personnel milled about, mouth vapor offering proof of the chilly temperature. A police helicopter buzzed by overhead.
Vail and Curtis pulled up seconds before a car driven by Hurdle. They got out and walked along the asphalt to the vacant police department sedan. Its door was open and a crime scene technician was kneeling, dusting for prints.
“I don’t see no blood,” Curtis said.
“That’s ’cause he wasn’t killed here,” the man said. “In a planter, up the block.”
“Karen!”
Vail turned and saw Leslie Johnson—her former partner from when they were rookies with the NYPD. What the—
“You lookin’ good. Robby been treating you well, looks like.” She advanced on Vail and threw her arms around her, dreadlocks swinging into Vail’s face.
“What are you doing here? How come you didn’t call me? We would’ve had you over for dinner.”
Johnson pulled back. “Lots has happened. Shit with the department went down. So I moved here, got a gig with the PD. Yesterday was my first day on the job. Took a big pay cut, busted down to a detective again, but all—”
“Wait,” Vail said. She glanced at Curtis, who was observing this with a modestly open mouth. “You’re Curtis’s new partner?”
“You two know each other?” Curtis asked.
“I knew they gave you that detective’s shield for a reason,” Vail said with a shake of her head. “Must’ve been the hug. Or when I asked why she didn’t call me.” She turned back to Johnson. “Why didn’t you call me?”
Johnson shrugged. “Things didn’t end good in New York. My mom’s out here in Silver Spring, so I put in some applications. Fairfax County had an opening. Only been here a few days. Wasn’t kidding, yesterday was my first day.”
“I wanna hear all about New York,” Vail said.
“Makes two of us. Including what went wrong.” Curtis lifted his brow. When Vail glowered at him, he added, “Hey, that was your idea half an hour ago.”
“Later,” Vail said. “We’ve got a murder that needs our attention. We’ll catch up. Dinner or lunch or something.”
Curtis gazed skyward at a police helicopter that was circling overhead. “So what’s the deal here?”
“What happened to Hurdle?” Vail rotated her neck, scanning the area for the marshal. She did not see him, so she faced Johnson.
Johnson pointed toward th
e house. “Woman who lives here, Jasmine Marcks, woke up this morning and looked out her window at 7:55 AM and saw the officer out there in his car.”
“Where is Jasmine?” Vail asked.
“Don’t know. Not here. I was able to reach her by phone. She refused to disclose her location. But she gave me an accounting of what happened. Got her number if you want it.”
“We have it.”
“We’re gonna need to meet with her,” Johnson said. “I told her—”
“Got it covered,” Curtis said. “I’m sure it won’t be a problem. Go on.”
Johnson frowned and shifted her feet. “Yeah. So she said she went about making her breakfast and getting showered and dressed and happened to glance back outside at around 11:35. New guy was there, so she figured they changed shifts. An hour later, he wasn’t in the car, so she thought he was walking around, checking the property. After lunch, about 1:00 PM, she looked again and again he wasn’t in the car.
“Ms. Marcks started to call Detective Curtis when she heard something outside. She hung up and went to the window, saw her neighbor running down the street. The woman was shrieking. Jasmine went out and discovered the officer’s body, saw he’d been murdered. She found his body in a well-concealed planter between two shrubs. Jasmine grabbed her purse and tore out of here.”
“The officer?”
Johnson pulled out her spiral notepad and thumbed to a couple of pages. “Arrived at eight, relieved the night watch officer. Gregory Greeling. Thirty-one years old, wife and son.” She shook her head. “Anyway, he’s got some strange markings on his body. ME’s still here, with the body. You wanna see for yourself?”
“Hell yes,” Vail said, and she and Curtis followed Johnson down the street.
Hurdle intercepted them midway and gave them a halfhearted salute. “I’m off.”
“Off?” Curtis said. “We’re going to look at the body.”
“Already done. Weird shit, not sure what it means. But it’s not important. Whoever did that’s got some problems.”
That might be the understatement of the year.
Hurdle backed away. “What matters is we got a bad dude out there on the run with a nice head start. On my way back to the command center. Gotta catch us a fugitive and every goddamn minute is precious. You find the daughter, let me know. I wanna make sure she knows to call us if she hears from her father. That’s about all I gotta do here. Be back at the motor home at five, ready to roll up your sleeves.”
“He’s kind of abrupt,” Curtis said as he watched Hurdle move off. He nodded at Vail. “Reminds me of you.”
Johnson chuckled.
“Hey,” Vail said, giving Johnson’s shoulder a shove. “Don’t encourage him. Besides, I’m nothing like Hurdle. I mean, he’s a deputy. I’m a special agent. He’s Marshals Service, I’m FBI. He’s a man. I’m a woman. See what I mean? We’re totally different.”
“Okay. Whatever you say.”
Vail continued walking toward the medical examiner. “I respect the guy. No nonsense. Knows what he needs to do and does it. Helps to have someone like that in charge.”
They stopped a few feet from the body and Vail took in the scene. The ME turned and watched them approach.
“First homicide, your second day on the job.” Curtis glanced at Johnson. “Welcome to Fairfax, partner.”
“Definitely not my first homicide,” Johnson said. “I worked in New York, remember?”
“Karen Vail, FBI,” she said to the ME, holding up her badge. “This is Erik—”
“I’m Lindy Dyson. I already know Detective Curtis. And Detective Johnson and I have met. Guess you want to hear about our victim. Time and cause of death?”
“That’d be a good place to start,” Vail said.
“TOD looks to be within the last four hours, consistent with what Jasmine Marcks said relative to when she last saw Officer Greeling. Cause boils down to a laceration of the carotid. Massive hemorrhage. Clean margins, so your killer used a very sharp knife.” She swung a hand around, gesturing off to her left. “As you can see from the amount of blood in the planter and the arterial spurt on the surrounding foliage, he was killed right here. And then there’s this.” Dyson moved the white canvas down to the officer’s waist.
Vail swallowed. She had seen it before—but always in photos. The abdomen featured deep parallel slice marks carved into the skin, down to the muscle layer. “Not deadly, and done postmortem. Right?”
Dyson nodded slowly. “Correct.”
“And I assume his penis and—” Vail cleared her throat. “The male genitalia have been excised?”
She drew back the sheet farther. “Right again.” Dyson rose from her crouch. “You’ve seen this before?”
“Not in the flesh.” She winced. “Sorry. Didn’t mean that. Only in photos. But yeah, I’m familiar with the mutilation pattern.”
Curtis licked his lips and turned away. “Okay, let’s cover that baby up. Please.”
Johnson was squinting, the back of her right hand covering her mouth. “That’s pretty goddamn disgusting,” she said, her palm rising and falling as her lips moved.
“Welcome to my world.” Vail gestured to Dyson to recover the body. “We’ve got a marshals task force set up.”
“Hurdle,” Dyson said. “Just met him.”
Vail gestured at Dyson. “You’ll make sure we get all the reports ASAP?”
“Soon as I can, yeah.”
“You think of anything, let us know. The guy who did this just escaped from Potter Correctional. Any detail could be crucial. You know the drill.”
“Unfortunately, I do.”
“LOOK,” JOHNSON SAID as they walked back down the street. “I just want you to know it wasn’t anything bad. The thing with the NYPD. You don’t have to worry about me not having your back. It wasn’t anything like that, nothing bad.”
“So you said.” Curtis continued on for a few steps. “No offense, but you lost your job. How can that be anything but ‘bad’?”
They stopped at Vail’s car. Johnson rested her hands on the roof and glanced around. Satisfied no one important was around, she said, “I got a good guy letter.”
Vail nodded. “I figured.”
Curtis looked from Vail to Johnson. “What’s a ‘good guy letter’?”
“A letter from the commissioner saying you’ve retired from the NYPD in good standing.” Vail shrugged. “It basically lets you get another job in law enforcement so you can carry a firearm.”
“So the good guy letter ain’t actually a bad thing. But it’s not sounding so good, either.”
“Because there’s more to it,” Johnson said.
There always is.
“Remember the Martinez shoot about ten years ago?”
Vail jutted her chin back. “Yeah. Good shoot. You were cleared, no one had a problem with it. So what?”
“I had another shoot I don’t think you knew about. No problems with that one, either.”
“So what am I missing?” Curtis asked.
“I had one last month that was …” Johnson squinted. “Questionable. I was off duty. Actually, I was an off duty lieutenant, out for a drink with a friend in Jamaica. On the way back to my car I see this asshole, looks like bad news. Acting like he’s high, carrying what I think is a handgun. He’s harassing a couple homeless people. It’s late, a few minutes before 1:00 AM. I follow him, call it in. He goes over to some woman trying to sleep in an alley and puts the gun to her head. I yell for him to stop, drop the weapon. He turns to me with the gun. I shoot him before he can shoot me. Only turns out it wasn’t a real gun. Some fuckin’ toy pistol. No red tip.”
“Let me guess,” Vail said. “No witnesses, no video.”
“Right. Not to mention I’d been out with friends at a bar. And no, I wasn’t drunk.”
“Okay.”
<
br /> “And,” Johnson said, “the guy was black.”
“So are you.”
“Probably the only thing that saved my ass.”
“Again,” Curtis said, “what was the problem?”
“Leslie was forced to resign in case it got out about the shooting.”
“I didn’t have a great relationship with my chief,” Johnson said. “So he didn’t have my back.”
“Someone did,” Curtis said. “If you got that letter from the commish.”
Johnson laughed. “Trust me. That was done to help the department more than it was to help me. It was done to save face. If the media found out, another unarmed black guy getting shot by a cop …”
“Too many dicey ‘issues’ with the shoot,” Vail said. “Once the media starts digging and finds the first two—they put ’em under the microscope. Remember, this is New York City. Big stage as it is. Stuff can get blown out of proportion. And you know how it is. Some good shoots can look bad. Depends on how you spin it.”
Curtis frowned. “No shit.”
“So we good?” Johnson looked at him. “Partner?”
Curtis pulled open his door. “We’re good.”
Vail pointed at Johnson. “I still expect a dinner.” She gave her a broad smile, then got into the car.
12
After stopping by her office, Vail walked into the relatively small mobile command center and found it crammed with several people. Curtis was not present, even though it was straight up 5:00 PM.
She had guests coming over for dinner and Robby was taking care of the meal, so she hoped this did not drag on past 6:30.
The oblong room was considerably more crowded than the first time she had been here: with four more large bodies, there was not a lot of clearance to move about.
“Okay everyone,” Hurdle said, a sheaf of papers in his hand. “Let’s get this thing going.”
The door swung open and Curtis walked in.
Hurdle made a point of checking his watch and then making eye contact with Curtis. He was a no-nonsense leader. If he told you to be there at five, he meant it. And he was making sure Curtis knew he meant it.
“Let’s do some quick introductions.” He nodded at the far end of the room and a short, stocky Latino man in his thirties began speaking. “Ray Ramos, DHS, Homeland Security Investigations. You can call me ‘Rambo,’ like everyone else does. Did three tours in Iraq, then hooked on with West Virginia State Police for nine years before scoring the gig with HSI. Been on CARFTF almost two years. I got no wife and no kids and no siblings so I’ll be working this thing sunup to sundown. Pretty much.”
The Darkness of Evil Page 7
