Past Deeds

by Carolyn Arnold

  She went back to burying her head in the file, wishing for a miraculous epiphany, but none came. Maybe she was stressing too much about impressing Jack and should let things flow naturally. It wasn’t like she was a floundering rookie new to law enforcement. She’d solved countless murders during her six years as a homicide detective with the Miami PD.

  Jack entered Arlington, and she marveled at the buildings and architecture. The city is beautiful, was her thought, just as Jack pulled up to the outskirts of the crime scene.

  He parked the SUV and got out, and she wasn’t far behind him. He held up his credentials to one of the officers securing the perimeter, and she followed his lead, feeling pride in displaying hers.

  “I’m Supervisory Special Agent in Charge Jack Harper with the Behavioral Analysis Unit, and this is Probationary Agent Kelly Marsh. She’s with me. We need to speak with Captain Herrera.”

  Kelly couldn’t wait for the “probationary agent” to drop, but she had twenty-four months left before it technically wouldn’t apply. She tried to tell herself that the time would go fast—it always did.

  The officer studied her while she studied him. The name tag on his uniform read PEREZ.

  “Sure, just give me a sec.” Perez spoke into his radio, and voices came back telling him where to find Herrera. He went to repeat what was said to Jack, but he was already on the move.

  “Thanks,” Kelly called over a shoulder to Perez as she hurried to catch up with her boss.

  Past the tape, Kelly took in three ambulances and ten police cruisers parked haphazardly, at different angles, lights flashing. Responders were moving about the area at a hustle, stark looks on their faces, each person driven by his or her mission.

  She went past one ambulance that had its back doors open; a man in his forties was sitting on the back step, breathing from an oxygen mask. A female paramedic was by his side, and a police officer was standing nearby.

  The voices of panicked civilians carried past the barricade—some in hushed tones, others shrill with excitement and fueled by adrenaline. But it was impossible not to feel the tendrils of death clawing in the air, clinging to the skin as gauze.

  This “energy” was a reliable companion where there had been a fatality, and it was something Kelly was certain everyone felt—law enforcement and civilians alike. The only exemption would be the inanimate. The buildings that towered overhead, unable to feel anything. If she thought about it for too long, she’d become envious of the edifices, who stood as silent witnesses with no way of telling their stories.

  A trim man of just over six feet, with a head of silver hair, was rushing toward them. His face was chiseled with resolve, but years of experience had left weariness lingering in his pale blue eyes and lines etched in his brow. He held out his hand toward Jack. “I’m Captain Anthony Herrera.”

  “Supervisory Special Agent in Charge Jack Harper and Agent Kelly Marsh.”

  Agent Marsh. Kelly liked the sound of that much better than probationary agent.

  Herrera directed Kelly and Jack to follow him to a command trailer that had its front driver’s wheel up on the curb. Someone didn’t know how to park, but the vehicle was nestled in a pocket of calm surrounded by chaos.

  “As you can see, it’s still a bit of a gong show,” Herrera said, pointing around. “By now, you know the victim was Darrell Reid, a prosecuting attorney. He had his wallet on him and his identification, so that preliminary step was easy. Of course, his wife will need to provide the formal ID. She has yet to be notified, and we’re doing our best to keep his identity out of the media until that happens. Sometimes that’s easier said than done.” Herrera flailed a hand toward the growing crowd of pedestrians. Back to Kelly and Jack, he said, “The other injured are being treated, and the DB is still on the ground.”

  Dead body.

  “Other injured?” Kelly prompted. She recalled Jack mentioning panic attacks and wanted to confirm that’s all they were looking at.

  “Collateral injures. Just minor stuff…well, mostly.” Captain Herrera squinted into the rising sun. “One woman has since been taken to the hospital, complaining of chest pain.” Herrera pointed past a crowd of responders to a tall building across the street. “Shall we head that way?”

  Jack started in the direction of Wilson Place, Kelly and the police captain in tow.

  “The medical examiner on the way?” Jack asked over his shoulder.

  The captain and Kelly scurried to catch up with Jack.

  “Should be here any minute,” Herrera said. “I put the call in just after arriving on scene at six fifteen.”

  That was only fifteen minutes from the time of the shooting. “Fast response time,” she commented.

  “We try.”

  An officer who had been standing in front of the victim stepped to the side as the three of them approached.

  The body was supine on the sidewalk. His gray hair was groomed short, and his skin was pale. His brown eyes were large and open, unseeing marbles. His lips were curled in a mask of horror. Blood had poured from the chest wound and pooled to the left of the torso. Kelly kept her eyes on the corpse; she had never been fazed by the sight of death. Maybe it was because she had been exposed to it at such a young age, watching her father shot before her eyes. To her, death was nothing more than the logical progression of life—even when it was aided along.

  Kelly hadn’t thought of it earlier, but being there and seeing the body, it sank in that only a highly skilled sniper could have pulled off a shot like this one—through a crowd, vehicle traffic, and net no other casualties. A head shot would have been far easier to execute.

  Reid was dressed in a black suit, tailored to his fit frame, and a white-collared dress shirt with a tie. He wore a platinum wedding band on his left hand and a gold pinkie ring on his right. Peeking out from beneath his left sleeve was a Bulgari watch. Not that they were within Kelly’s price range, but her best friend Brianna back in Miami had one, and it had cost five figures. Everything about the man’s wardrobe was high-end, down to his Salvatore Ferragamo shoes, the toes of which pointed upward.

  Kelly lifted her gaze, her eye on buildings farther away and her mind on where the sniper may have built a nest.

  Another take at the body, she started to make deeper observations. Who had this man been in life, besides a prosecutor? The shoes, watch, and cut of suit didn’t testify to someone working on the right side of the law. If Reid had been a defense attorney, the expensive wardrobe would be much easier to reconcile, as criminals paid much better than the government.

  “Prosecutors make, what, fifty thousand a year?” she asked.

  “Somewhere around there, depending on the office where they work,” Herrera said.

  Jack faced her, one eyebrow raised in curiosity. Maybe she should take that as a cue to keep quiet, but she felt doing so would be more of a crime than speaking up. Besides, she finally had a contribution worth making.

  “The file we have on Reid said he worked out of the commonwealth’s attorney’s office. He was fifty-five, had seniority, but still, his clothes don’t match up with his earnings.” Kelly watched Jack as she spoke for any tells that she was displeasing him somehow, but she couldn’t see any.

  “What do you think that means?” Herrera was studying her, his eyes squinting in the rising sun.

  She glanced at Jack, briefly tempted to elaborate on her leanings toward Reid possibly being involved in criminal activity or on the take, but without anything to back up her suspicions, she thought it best to keep quiet. “Too soon to say,” she said, pegging that as the safe road and determined to remain there. She recalled Jack telling them this neighborhood was near the Courthouse District. “Do we know why Reid was here this morning?”

  “Wish I could tell you,” Herrera replied.

  “Could be for his job,” she tossed out.

  “Sure, but we do
n’t know for sure. It’s still something we need to figure out. That guy—” he gestured with his head toward the man sucking back on an oxygen mask “—is the building’s doorman. He might talk to you, but my men haven’t been able to get much out of him.”

  Kelly was eager to head right over, but Jack remained grounded, his gaze on Reid. As she looked back at the gaping wound in the man’s chest, she was pretty sure the bullet had struck his heart. If it had, was that where the sniper had aimed and, if so, was it of any significance?

  -

  Four

  It wasn’t often that we were called to investigate a case this close to home. It certainly made it easier than needing to set off across the country on a government jet. But it was still sobering that someone had been killed and we needed to catch the bad guy—and preferably come out the other end alive. That’s where the bulletproof vest came in, but it wouldn’t do much against a knife or a shot to the head. I tried not to dwell on that, but the severity of the situation was never far from mind as the vest added a good thirty pounds to my lean frame.

  Paige and I got snagged in traffic on Interstate 95 all because a car broke down on the side of the road and everyone slowed to gawk, making the drive about forty minutes longer than it should have been.

  As we approached the scene of the shooting, people were huddled in masses, crying and hugging, pointing, and trying to make sense of what had taken place.

  Being here emphasized our shooter had no qualms about making his or her kill in a very public place. Seeking to “make a splash?” With the numerous buildings facing Wilson Place, it would make it rather easy for the sniper to do the deed and get away.

  After Paige parked and we cleared the barricade, we found Jack and Kelly standing with a man at the front door of Wilson Place, a corpse at their feet.

  The man with them held out his hand to Paige and me and introduced himself as Captain Herrera.

  Paige looked up at the building, and I followed the direction of her gaze. Residential, at least fifteen stories tall. People pressed their faces against windowpanes or stood gawking from their balconies.

  What is it with people and gawking?

  “Do we know what brought the prosecutor down here?” Paige asked.

  “We,” Herrera referred to Jack and Kelly, “were just talking about that, matter of fact, but we don’t know yet.”

  “I’d say something likely brought Reid here regularly,” I concluded. “Either that or he had this visit planned in advance. The sniper would have needed time to select a perch and plan this out.”

  “Running with the assumption that Reid was the mark,” Kelly interjected. “But even if he was, it could just be that the right person—or wrong person, really—knew where he’d be and when to strike.”

  “The doorman might be able to help us fill in some blanks.” Jack nudged his head toward a man at the back of an ambulance.

  I thought the place looked nice enough to warrant a doorman, but that would mean… I looked down at Reid’s body and its positioning. It wasn’t that far from the entrance, and the way he was lying would suggest he’d just come out of the building. “He was shot upon exiting?”

  “That’s right,” Herrera confirmed.

  That meant our sniper had the timing fine-tuned. “Was the doorman injured?” He was being tended to by a female paramedic, but I was more interested in the extent of his injuries.

  “He’s just shaken up,” Herrera said. “He got some blood on him.”

  I let the picture play out in my mind—the doorman holding the door for Reid, Reid walking through, getting shot in the chest. “Our shooter knows what they’re doing,” I drove home again.

  “I’d say so. Kill shot through a crowd, and only one person taken down.” Herrera crossed his arms and puffed out a breath of air. “So, what do you think we’re looking at here? Is the threat still active, the first in a series of planned shootings, or a one-off?” Herrera was looking at Jack for answers.

  “It’s too soon to know for sure,” Jack said, tapping a hand over his shirt pocket where he kept his pack of cigarettes. I wasn’t a certified shrink, but it was easy to conclude they were his coping mechanism.

  I scanned the area, taking in the surrounding buildings, curious where our sniper had built a nest. “Have you been able to figure out where the shot originated?”

  Herrera shook his head. “We figure the sniper set up a nest thataway.” He pointed north. “But that’s about it. We’ll need to determine the angle of the shot to figure out any more, and for that, we first need the body examined by the ME.”

  And any answers on that front probably wouldn’t come until after the autopsy. From there, it would take a lot of calculations to triangulate the direction of the sniper’s nest—and given the number of buildings in the area, we’d likely have to eliminate a few before we found what we were looking for.

  “Anyone recall seeing anything?” Jack asked. “A flicker of metal in the sunlight?”

  Jack was reaching, especially if we were dealing with a professional sniper. The gun—lock, stock, and barrel—would be black or covered in flat, black tape for the purpose of concealment.

  “Nothing that’s surfaced yet,” Herrera confirmed.

  Jack gestured up the side of the building. “We need to get officers knocking on doors, talking to these lookie-loos. Someone might have seen something from their apartments.”

  “I was going to get that started when you showed up.” Herrera waved over an officer, instructing him to gather other officers and knock on every door in the building.

  The officer scurried off to carry out his captain’s orders.

  “It’s time to start getting some answers.” Jack put his attention on Herrera. “You said Reid’s family hasn’t been notified.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Kelly and I will take care of that.”

  Herrera nodded. “Have at it. Not my favorite part of the job, anyway.”

  None of us touched that because notification was the dark cloud of law enforcement.

  Jack looked at Paige. “You and Brandon go talk to the doorman.” Then he turned to Herrera. “Do we know his name?”

  The captain nodded. “Ronald McBride.”

  Jack said to Paige, “See if you can get any answers as to why Reid was here. When you’re finished there, I want you to stay on the ground, talk to as many eyewitnesses as you can, and join the officers knocking on doors.”

  Somehow I managed to bite my tongue, but canvassing was the job of uniforms, not FBI profilers.

  “You got it, Jack,” Paige said.

  “We’ll meet back at the Arlington PD at—” Jack consulted his watch “—let’s say two o’clock this afternoon. We’ll have a better idea where we stand by then.”

  “I’ll have a conference room ready for you,” Herrera promised.

  Paige and I set off in the direction of the doorman, and I saw two men cutting through the street toward the victim. The younger of the two was pushing a gurney and trailing a gray-haired man with a determined stride and carrying a medical bag.

  “Looks like the ME and his assistant are here,” I said, and Paige simply nodded.

  As we got closer to McBride, I’d put him in his fifties, though he looked older at the moment. His eyes were bloodshot, and his face pale except for the splotches of blood on his cheeks and forehead. He was breathing with an oxygen mask, and a paramedic had a hand on his shoulder. She was advising him to take slow, deep breaths. She scowled at our approach.

  “Are you Ronald McBride?” I asked, ignoring the woman’s apparent attitude.

  The man nodded, the apparatus bobbing with the movement.

  “We have some questions for you,” Paige said with kindness and respect, but it did nothing to soften the paramedic’s grimace.

  “Mr. McBride has been through an aw
ful lot. Maybe a little later would be better.” She packaged her request like a suggestion, but I wasn’t fooled for what it really was. But there was no way I’d be going back to Jack and telling him we’d been stonewalled by a paramedic.

  I squared my shoulders. “Unfortunately, we don’t have the time to wait around. There was a murder, and it’s imperative that we get the bottom of exactly what transpired here.”

  The paramedic met my gaze, and her body stiffened, but she eventually stepped aside. “Keep it brief.”

  “Mr. McBride,” I said, “we have just a few questions for you.”

  McBride went to pull off the oxygen mask, and the paramedic made a motion to keep it in place, but he shooed her away and removed it.

  The paramedic shook her head and wandered off.

  “I’ll help in whatever way I can,” McBride said.

  “We appreciate that,” I said. “Can you tell us what happened…from your perspective?”

  “I…I was just holding the door—” he took a hit of oxygen, lowered the mask again “—the door open for him. It all happened so fast.”

  Paige sat on the ambulance’s back step next to McBride. “It must have been terrifying.”

  He looked over at her. “Never seen anything like it. Hope to never again.”

  “Did you see or hear anything before the man went down?” I asked.

  “No, like I said, it all happened so fast.”

  “Fair enough.” It was probably too much to hope that he’d been looking in the direction of the sniper and caught a glimpse of something that would expose the nest.

  “There was…” McBride licked his lips, “a woman who came out just ahead of him. She’s fine, as far as I know, but don’t quote me. I kind of lost track of everything after…”

  “Do you know who she was?” Paige asked.

  “Even if I did, I’m not at liberty to say, Miss.”