by Glen Frost
"That's what it looks like. Tough to extract information with him being basically gagged, though."
"Tough, yeah," Jim agreed. "Impossible, no. Which brings us to the million dollar question..."
"Who."
"Yeah. Who. Why's a pretty close second, though." As seasoned homicide detectives, both men knew that the murder of a cop — particularly another detective — was a rarity. After all, just how stupid did a criminal have to be, to be willing to bring down the wrath of an entire metropolitan police department on their heads? There wasn't a police chief in the world who wouldn't throw infinite time, money, resources, and manpower in order to find the piece of shit who'd offed one of their own.
You'd have to be pretty fucking dumb. Or pretty fucking desperate...
Jim touched DiTirro lightly on the elbow and guided him off to one side. They went into the small kitchenette, and Jim closed the door for a little privacy. "I didn't know Forsberg all that well," he began, lowering his voice to little more than a whisper. "What about you?"
DiTirro shook his head. "Me either. Never drank with the guy or hung out after work, if that's what you mean. I don't think anybody at the department really did."
"Not much of a social animal, huh?"
"From what I've heard, no. Pretty much kept himself to himself."
Time to ask the questions that's on both our minds. "Could he have been dirty?" The words hung in the air between them, the five hundred pound gorilla in the room.
After the silence went on long enough to become uncomfortable, DiTirro finally said, "He shits through the same hole as the rest of us. I suppose anything is possible."The two men locked eyes.
"Yeah," Jim agreed cautiously. "That's pretty much what I was thinking too."
"So, what...we toss the house?"
"Unless something turns up in one of the usual places, I don't see that we have any choice. You know the drill as well as I do." Jim sighed. He hated the idea of going through another cop's dirty laundry, both literally and figuratively. But what the hell else could they do? Somebody had crossed the line here, big time. You didn't just off a cop, let alone a homicide detective, for no reason whatsoever, and the chances were that there would be clues that would help identify that reason somewhere in this house.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
For the next two days, Jim and Marc DiTirro earned their pay and then some.
After pulling a few strings, they were able to gain access to Forsberg's Facebook account. Roaming through the messages in reverse order, starting with the most recent and working their way back to the oldest, yielded nothing of any immediate value. He mostly talked sports with his male buddies and occasionally got a little flirty with some of the females, though nothing overtly sexual. Jim had reached the end of the instant message scroll and let out a yawn that was part boredom, part disappointment. He had been half-expecting to find messages from some bored housewife that Forsberg had been fucking, or hell, maybe even a husband for that matter. He'd seen far stranger things in his time with the department. Despite the fact that Forsberg's profile page said that he preferred women, you never really knew the truth unless you dug.
While Jim was scrolling his way through three and a half years of meaningless chit chat, DiTirro buried himself in the minutiae of the dead man's finances. He started with the credit union into which Forsberg's pay checks had been deposited.
"Based on this shit, the man's life was pretty much as dull as dishwater." DiTirro leaned back in his chair, interlaced his fingers behind his head, and let out a long, frustrated breath. "Rent payments. Check. Cable TV payments. Check. Gas and groceries. Check. And not a whole lot else from the checking account."
"What about the credit cards?" Jim asked hopefully.
"Same shit, different day. Throw in the occasional drive-thru, Starbucks, 7/11. Nothing to write home about."
"Any major debt?"
DiTirro shook his head. "Nope. Paid his bills on time, month after month. A little over six grand in a savings account, skimmed from his department paychecks every month. Even a 401k going."
Fuck. And there I am, living paycheck to paycheck. "Doesn't mean he was clean, necessarily. Just that he was careful."
"Point," conceded DiTirro. "So I guess that tomorrow, we hit up the friends and neighbors."
Which is exactly what they had done, talking to the couple who rented the other half of the duplex ("Seemed like a nice guy," "We hardly ever saw him,") and then expanding their search to include the other cops working Homicide who had shared a communal office with Forsberg. All of them told the same story. Forsberg had been a nice, polite guy who had pretty much kept himself to himself. Never wanted to go for beers or do anything social.
The murder victim's family was a bust as well. His parents lived in Wisconsin, and he had a kid sister who was studying economics at Penn State. Both of his grandparents were dead. According to Wentzl, who was checking in with them three times a day, Forsberg's mom had lost it so badly when she had learned the news of his death that the paramedics had been called to the family home. Annie Forsberg had left in an ambulance, sleeping off the effects that came with five milligrams of Valium.
"Nobody has a bad word to say about the guy." The frustration he felt was very apparent in DiTirro's voice. "Not his landlord. Not his colleagues. Not his friends and family. Nobody."
"Nobody wants to speak ill of the dead," Jim countered. "And besides, there's still the duplex."
"Reckon we'll find a meth lab down in the basement?" DiTirro asked skeptically. Jim shook his head.
"I don't remember there even being a basement. Come on, let's go toss the house."
They took a car from the motor pool across to Golden. Jim was all too happy these days to not put any unnecessary miles on the Blazer, for fear that it would hasten its inevitable demise.
"If we don't find anything," DiTirro said from the passenger seat, "We're going to have to consider option B. Damn, that tastes good." He sipped at the skinny latte that he'd just gotten from the Starbucks drive-thru.
Jim didn't have money to waste on fancy coffees. He needed it all for booze. "Option B is looking more and more likely to be the right one."
Option B, as the detectives had taken to calling it, was the possibility that Jeff Forsberg had been killed not because of something he'd done in his private life, but because of something — or someone — he'd gotten too close to at work.
Forsberg's only case in progress was that of the dead pastor, found murdered in The Lucky Star motel, minus his dick. The case was currently without a detective. Jim and DiTirro had asked Wentzl to give it to them during their status meeting earlier that morning. Initially, the Captain had been skeptical, unwilling to assign two high-profile murders to the same pair of detectives...not from a lack of faith in their abilities, but more out of concern that they could be overwhelmed.
Jim had countered with the argument that, while he understood and appreciated the Captain's concerns, Forsberg's murder and that of the priest could easily be intertwined. Tracking down the perpetrator in one case might lead them to the other; in fact, they may actually have been committed by the same person...or persons.
Wentzl had finally bought in, albeit reluctantly. The end result was that Jim and Marc DiTirro now found themselves the not so proud owners of both murder cases, along with the veiled threat that if they didn't solve them — and soon — then things were going to go badly for them, at least so far as their career prospects were concerned.
"Well, option B's starting to look real fucking good right about now," DiTirro said tersely, some four hours later. They'd spent the morning searching most of Forsberg's part of the duplex from top to bottom, front to back, and found precisely nothing.
"There's still the attic," Jim pointed out. Then it's fucking Miller time.
Both men looked up towards the square door in the ceiling, right at the top of the stairs. It was about three feet on a side. Jim fetched a chair from one of the bed
rooms. Planting it directly underneath the attic opening, he reached up and tugged at the handle that was set into the trapdoor. Forsberg must have been into home improvement, because when the door opened downwards towards him on well-oiled hinges, he found the bottom of a folding metal extension ladder that appeared to be mounted to the attic floor.
Jim tugged at the ladder, drawing it down toward him. Unlike the trapdoor hinges, the ladder fly section squealed. It was obviously in need of a little TLC and some WD-40.
"Don't look at me, buddy," laughed DiTirro, gesturing first up at the trapdoor and then down at his own bulky frame. "Age before beauty. This is all you, man."
"Figures." Shooting his partner a sour look, Jim planted a foot on the lowest rung and took hold of the side beams. The thing was rickety as all hell, but he only needed to make it eight or ten feet up in the air. He tried his damnedest not to look down at the staircase, which yawned away into the distance beneath his feet. Ever since he was a kid, he had hated heights. It was one of the main reasons why he'd chosen the police academy over the fire academy.
Holding onto the top step with one trembling hand, Jim reached up gingerly and took a grip on either side of the entrance hole, planting his hands on what felt like bare wooden boards. He pushed off with both feet and used his arm strength to boost himself up through the opening, ducking at the last minute to avoid smacking his head on the lip.
It was dark in the attic, and after a few seconds spent groping around for the light switch, he finally figured out that there probably was none. Frowning, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his iPhone. Switching on the flashlight function, he swept the beam around in a circle, confirming that there definitely wasn't a light up here. All he could see were cardboard boxes full of what looked like junk, which went some way toward explaining why Forsberg's living space had been so sparse and neat.
Aside from being pitch black and windowless, the attic smelled musty, along with an odor that he soon recognized as being stale piss. Jim had just concluded that the most dangerous thing up here was going to be a Brown Recluse spider or some other crawling nasty, when the floorboards behind some stacked cardboard boxes in front of him creaked loudly.
Without conscious thought, he drew the Glock 19 from its pancake holster at his hip and leveled it at the center mass of the boxes. He felt a little awkward, holding it in just his right hand, but the iPhone flashlight took up the left.
"Get your ass out from behind there and show me your hands. RIGHT NOW."
DiTirro's voice floated up from downstairs. "Jimmy, what's—"
"Draw your weapon and cover me. Somebody's up here."
"You got it."
Returning his attention to whoever was hiding behind the boxes, Jimmy ordered them a second time to come out with their hands on display. "This thing doesn't have a safety, and if you don't hustle, I'm going to put a bullet through those boxes and right into your ass." Which was true, as far as it went; the 19 was a point and shoot weapon, and like other Glocks, it lacked the external safety catch that came as standard on most handguns. Internal safety features meant that the pistol would only fire when the trigger was fully depressed.
Short of being faced with a genuine armed intruder, Jimmy wasn't actually planning to fire. Like those in most duplexes, these walls were paper thin. A stray round could hit somebody next door, or passing by in the street. He simply daren't risk it unless the threat was both real and imminent. But there was no way that whoever was hiding behind those boxes could have known that.
"Last warning. The next one will be a nine millimeter."
Hesitantly, a pair of hands appeared in the glare of the flashlight beam. Then a set of dark-colored bangs, above a set of eyes that bulged white with terror.
"Don't...please don't shoot."
"Come out here and get down on your knees." Jim kept the front sight pointing at her center of mass, not at her head. The woman was African-American, in her early twenties, and dressed in a pink T-shirt and baggy grey sweat pants. She was painfully thin, her arms little more than two sticks. Obediently, she sank slowly to her knees. "That's good," he said grudgingly. "Now take your hands and put them behind the back of your head."
The woman did as he ordered, interlacing her fingers behind her head and splaying her elbows out wide. The hands shook.
"Are you armed?"
She shook her head, no. Jim didn't trust her answer as far as he could throw her, and he called for DiTirro to come and search her.
"Be right up."
The heavy thunk thunk thunk of shoes climbing the ladder rungs was reassuring. Jim took a breath and stepped backward, continuing to cover the woman with his Glock. He asked her what her name was, never taking his eyes from her for even an instant.
She looked up at him with those expressive brown eyes and said, "They call me Chastity. Chastity White. But my real name is Natasha."
"Oh, you have got to be shitting me..."
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Chastity wasn't armed, which had come as a pleasant surprise. They hadn't cuffed her, if for no other reason than the fact that it would have made getting her down that stepladder a cast iron son of a bitch.
"Natasha, we really want to help you. Just in case you didn't know, you're a person of interest in a murder case right now." Jim felt comfortable enough to holster his Glock, and DiTirro had followed suit. They went into the living room to talk, none of them wanting to sit down. Jim watched the hooker closely. She had quite deliberately turned her back on the circular maroon bloodstain. The house was still a crime scene, which meant by turn that it was still in police custody. Although the crime scene techs had done their thing, finishing up the bulk of their work yesterday morning, nobody had cleaned up the matted blood and brain matter yet, just in case they needed to go back and draw more samples.
"Actually, two," DiTirro pointed out. "If we count this one."
"Which we do," Jim finished, irritably.
"I didn't have nothing to do with none of this shit," Natasha said firmly, folding her arms across her chest. It was amazing how quickly you got your sass back when there was no longer a gun pointed right at you.
"One fuck of a coincidence then," DiTirro shot back sarcastically. "What with you happening to be present at the scene of two murders. Fleeing one — which is a crime in itself, by the way — and hiding at the scene of another."
"I was scared. I didn't know what to do."
"Both times?" DiTirro sounded as though he could hardly believe it.
"Both times," she insisted. "Fuck y'all if you don't believe me."
Alright, Jim thought to himself. Good cop didn't work. Time to go with his bigger, badder partner. He leaned in close to her, until his face was mere inches from her own, and dropped his voice to a silky half-whisper.
"If we don't believe you, honey, it will be you that's getting fucked. In jail. By some huge bull dyke." He threw up his hands suddenly, startling her and making her recoil. "Of course, maybe that sort of thing is what floats your boat."
"I didn't do nothing wrong!"
"That's still to be determined." DiTirro planted his fists on his hips, towering over the woman who was, Jim reminded himself, currently their prime suspect. "Now, we're taking your ass to the station, and you can tell us everything you know there."
"I want a lawyer."
"You'll get one. The best that taxpayer money can buy." Jim escorted her out to the car, and before he put her in the back, turned her around so that DiTirro could cuff her. "Just don't expect him to keep you alive."
"What the hell are you talking about?"
Jim favored her with his best unflinching stare. "If you're telling the truth about not killing those two men, then somebody else did. Somebody else that you saw. And that means they're going to want you dead before you can testify, doesn't it...Chastity?"
They hadn't made it more than three miles from Forsberg's duplex before she started to spill. If her story was to
be believed — and both detectives found it to be more than a little batshit crazy — then she had been hiding in that attic since the night of the murder, which would have been three days ago now.
"God, I'm so hungry," she moaned, just seconds after she had started to talk about the men who had murdered Jeff Forsberg. "I ain't eaten in four days."
Without moving their heads, the two detectives shot each other a sidelong glance. Whether she turned out to be a legitimate suspect or just a source of information, either way, they were willing to do whatever it took — within reason — to pry that information out of her. Back at the station, that would mean a public defender and a recorded conversation. But if they could stall it just a little longer...
DiTirro, now driving, swiveled around to glance at her. "Which do you like better...McDonald's or Burger King."
Natasha's eyes lit up. "Burger King," she answered without a second thought. "Their Bacon Whopper is the fuckin' bomb."
"There's one about six blocks away on Sheridan," Jim said. "If we get you your Bacon Whopper, maybe some fries to go with it, is that gonna make you feel better?"
"If there's a Coke with it, it sure as hell will."
With a look that said we're both on the same page, right?, DiTirro moved over to the right hand lane and began to keep an eye out for the fast food joint. It wasn't long before he spotted the big plastic sign, and pulled into the parking lot.
While his partner went inside to order the food, Jim walked around to the back of the car and opened the rear passenger door. Natasha shrank from him at first, but then she saw the tiny key in his hand, and turned her back to present him with the handcuffs. Her wrists were so thin that the cuffs practically rattled. They came loose with a sharp click, and Jim popped them off, returning them to the pocket of his baggy cargo pants.
Shooting him a wounded look, Natasha rubbed her wrists one at a time in an attempt to restore the circulation. They waited in silence for a few minutes, with Jim positioned to carefully block the door in case she got any stupid ideas about making a break for it. When he returned with a large paper bag and a holder containing three sodas, Natasha's eyes locked onto the food with all of the remorseless precision of a cruise missile homing in on its target.
