A Study in Sin (5 page)

Chapter 4
Officer Barrera and the Homeless Drunk

It was still early in the afternoon as we drove away from Capitol Hill. Remy insisted we stop and grab coffee. The car wasn’t even in park yet, when she jumped out, instructing me to ‘stay here’ and that she would be right back. I watched as she took a few steps and then took her phone out, lifting it to her ear as she walked through the door of the coffee shop. A few minutes later, she emerged holding two extra-large cups of coffee and smiling from ear to ear.

“Nothing beats a new murder investigation, does it Watts? I’ve already put most of the case together, but, we might still be able to learn a thing or two from this patrol officer. You never know what Lambert might have missed. So what do you say? Couldn’t hurt.”

“You really think you’ve got it figured out already? I mean, how could you know all those things? It just seems impossible.”

“Impossible? Nothing of what I’ve said is anything you or any other thoughtful observer couldn’t perceive. You just don’t know how to see. All I’ve done is relay facts, nothing more. For instance, the first thing I saw when we arrived was a streak of yellow paint on the curb outside the house. As soon as I touched it, the chips fell away, meaning it was very fresh. That is how I was able to say the two arrived in a yellow car. Absolutely nothing special about that.”

“Alright,” I said. It did seem fairly simple when she explained it. “But you described exactly what this guy would look like, how’d you manage that?”

“Have I ever told you that my uncle practically raised me?” She had never said anything about her family life before. “He saw over my sister and I quite a bit when we were young. He could be brutal at times, drank a lot, but the one thing he understood was that people were losing touch with their animalistic sides. The more we wall ourselves up in our cities, the more we separate ourselves from the nature that defines us. So he made sure that I spent a lot of time outside. He taught me how to hunt, to live off the land, and how to track. Those survival lessons taught me more than any new officer will ever learn at the academy. The things you can learn from knowing how to read the footprints of a creature; I’ll tell you Jay, half of what I’m able to do I owe to my drunk ass uncle.

“The first thing I do at any scene is check for footprints. The outside area of that rowhouse was a disaster, but I was still able to narrow down four or five impressions that were the freshest of the lot. Once we got inside, I could instantly see the two belonging to our victim and suspect. The thing about footprints is that you can paint an extremely accurate picture of someone by the characteristics of those impressions. One set of prints I immediately recognized as being from dress shoes; those were the victim’s. He took hurried, backpedaling steps. The others were much more spaced out, from a longer stride. That’s how I knew he was tall. The matching impressions from outside were also deeper than the rest, so he was not only tall, but heavy as well.”

“Wow,” I said. She wiggled in her seat, looking satisfied with herself.

“I also know where all the blood came from,” she responded, smirking at me.

“Well, yea, the victim obviously got in a few blows of his own.”

“Not even close. The blood was from the killer, you’re correct there, but when we catch this guy, you’ll see he’s completely unharmed. Arruda isn’t going to find anything at the hospitals. The blood followed the taller man’s steps; there were drops centered between each step he took. But his movements weren’t hurried, nowhere near as frantic as Mr. Cormack’s. If you were stabbed or shot, would you walk around calmly while you bled out? I think not. So you tell me, what would cause the blood to fall directly in line with each step, but obviously didn’t bother him?”

I had no idea. I could see Remy wasn’t going to let me off the hook, though, so I tried to play the scene over in my head. The taller man walks around calmly, but is already bleeding, as the shorter guy freaks out. He’s not shot, not stabbed, but is bleeding everywhere. Then the short guy ends up on the floor with blood all over him. It didn’t make any sense. I sat there thinking, trying to put myself in the shoes of this cold blooded killer. Suddenly, the answer hit me like a fastball to the temple.

“A nosebleed,” I said.

“Very good, Jay,” Remy responded, like a third grade teacher to a child who just figured out a long division problem. But her tone was genuine, not like the way she had mocked Lambert earlier.

“Man, is this how all your cases end up being? This is ridiculous. So these two guys show up at an empty rowhouse on Capitol Hill in the middle of the night. One murders the other, while nursing an epic nosebleed, but doesn’t leave a mark on the dead guy’s body. You say it’s poison. I’m inclined to take your word, but how does that even work? The tall guy forced the poison on the shorter guy? Then we find a woman’s ring and the word ‘CAPITAL’ written in blood, which also had to be written in the killer’s own nose blood; I mean come on, that’s absurd right?”

Remy let out a sweet sounding laugh that made my blood run hot.

“Yea, it does seem odd, I can’t disagree, but we still have a few things left to figure out. I’m sure of the major facts though. And forget about the word in blood, it has no bearing on the case. It would have been better if we never found it. I suspect it was just meant to throw us off his tracks for the time being. Whether that’s to give him time to disappear, or for other reasons, I’m not yet sure, but this has nothing to do with anything political. I’ll have to remember to ask him why he chose to write that word when I find him. Anyways, that’s all the details you’re getting. A girl has to have her secrets after all.”

“Well, you’re full of surprises. And you’re like a freaking hound when you’re on someone’s trail. Remind me never to get on your bad side.”

I thought for a second that I noticed a flush come to Remy’s cheeks. Either way, she looked at me in a way I had never seen before, and I knew, she took pleasure in what I had said. I suspected that if I told her she was beautiful, or that I loved how her hair would fall into her eyes, or that her boring outfit still managed to bring out the color in her eyes, she wouldn’t have felt a thing. But if I mentioned she was good at her work and that I was impressed at what she had figured out, I could have her eating out of the palm of my hand.

We sat together, both of us smiling, as we pulled up to the night officer’s address. Officer Barrera’s apartment building was an odd grayish-green colored pile of bricks. There was nothing appealing about it. Inside, we stepped into the elevator and rode up to the fifth floor, ignoring the squeaking sound coming from the mechanics above and below us. The inspection log had been signed a month earlier; it didn’t make me feel any better. The elevator chimed, although it sounded more like a burp, to let us know we had reached our floor. I stepped out into the dimly lit hallway and was greeted by a carpet that was a color green I didn’t even know existed. The place depressed the hell out of me.

Remy and I hurried down the hall until we were in front of the door marked 512. She wasted no time, ringing the doorbell three times. At first, nothing happened. Then, after a moment, nothing continued to happen. Remy decided fifteen seconds was too long to wait and commenced slamming her fist into the door. That was met with the sound of movement from inside and a tired voice yelling, “Who the fuck is it?”

“My name is Remy Moreau. I’m consulting on the case in Capitol Hill. Detective Lambert said I could find you here.”

I could hear the sound of the chain and deadbolt being retracted, and the door swung open. Joe Barrera stood in front of us in all his glory. He was about five foot seven, overweight, with greasy hair that streaked forward. He had shaved recently, but it was a losing effort against the perpetual race of his growing facial hair. The guy looked more like an ape than a man. He wore dark blue gym shorts, that I was positive had never seen the inside of a gym, and a stained white t-shirt, that I was positive had never seen the inside of a washing machine.

“What do you want?” he said, wiping the sleep from his face.

“I’m sorry if we woke you, I know you worked the nightshift last night. I just need a few seconds; there are some questions I have about what you found last night.”

“I already went through everything with the detectives, just talk to them,” he said, scratching at himself as he talked.

“I’d like to hear it from you. If you want me to call Detective Lambert so he can tell you it’s alright, I can –”

“I know who you are. You gave me shit a few months ago about that guy who got mugged on Thanksgiving. Just because I know who you are doesn’t mean I want to talk to you.”

“Ah, Joe Barrera, I thought I remembered you.” Remy’s demeanor changed as she took a small step forward into the doorway. For the second time in the last half hour, I saw her face do something I had never seen before. She was flirting. And she was good at it.

“Look, Joe,” she started, leaning up against the door frame, “Lambert can be a bit of an idiot, which I’m sure is nothing new to you, so it would really help me out if I could get a couple minutes just to make sure he hasn’t screwed something up.” She smiled shyly and looked up at him, shifting from one foot to the other. “How about this, how about you let me ask my questions, just to verify everything, and I’ll pay for a few rounds,” she said, pulling a twenty from her pocket.

Joe wanted to say no, it was obvious. He wanted to tell us to leave him the hell alone, probably worse. But then Remy tucked a hair behind her ear and he let his guard down, snatching the twenty from her hand. It was an even more impressive display than her earlier one.

“Fine. Come in. Make yourself at home. You want anything to drink?” he said, grabbing a beer from the fridge.

“No, we’re fine. Thank you, though.”

We made our way over to the tiny living room. The coffee table was littered with beer cans and an empty pizza box. Each of us found a seat. Remy started.

“Tell me about your shift last night.”

Barrera took a deep breath, like the act of talking was going to somehow tax him more than he was ready for, “I was half-way done. It had been a quiet night, just some random calls, one rowdy party that got called in for a noise complaint. Nothing special. You know, I signed up thinking I was going to get to shoot somebody in the fucking face. But all I do is drive around and babysit drug addicts and deal with domestics.”

“Right, what about Capitol Hill?”

“Yea,” Barrera said, refocusing, “I met Lou for a coffee and a bite to eat. Dispatch radioed to be on the lookout for a suspicious looking guy in a hooded sweatshirt in my area. So I was just driving around. I pulled onto that street, and it was pitch black. It was raining pretty hard. I noticed a beam of light coming from one of the houses. When I pulled up, I saw the place was being renovated and that nobody could be living in it. And the front door was open a little.”

“Did you see anyone walking the neighborhood? Any cars that drove by? Anything?”

“Naw. Well there was a cab that went by when I took the right onto the street, but no cars parked near the house or anything. It was after three.”

“Ok, keep going.”

“I thought it might be the perp dispatch had radioed about. My cousin had told me that renovated houses were being stripped of all the wiring and that you could sell that shit for hundreds of dollars. Hell, I need to go find some renovated homes.” I couldn’t tell if Barrera was joking or not. He continued.

“I knew Lou was nearby, so I radioed him for backup. I announced myself, pushed the door open, and went into the room where the light was. The victim was in the middle of the floor and the light was coming from a flashlight that was on the fireplace mantel.”

“Right. Then you walked out the other side of the room and secured the rest of the house, calling in the body,” Remy said. “Then what?”

Barrera’s forehead wrinkled and he tilted his head to the side like an ugly, confused bullmastiff. “Yea. Then – then I went back out front to wait for Lou.”

“Did you remove anything from the body?”

“No, I didn’t touch the stiff. You should’ve seen how freaking foul this dude looked.”

“Good. That’s good. So did you see anyone outside?”

“Nope. Completely deserted outside. Well, at least until that drunk ass mick ran into me.”

“So there was someone?”

Barrera started laughing, an awful grizzled noise from the bottom of his throat. It quickly turned into a fit of coughs and we had to wait for him to regain his composure. He went on, chuckling to himself.

“Yea, so Lou shows up and we’re outside sitting in my car, busting each other’s balls, just waiting for the detectives to show up. Then this homeless guy slams right into the back of the car. Almost knocked himself out cold. Scared the shit out of Lou.”

“Did you get a good look at him?”

“The guy was hanging all over me; of course I got a good look at him. It took both Lou and me just to hold the guy up. Heavy bastard.”

“What else?”

“I don’t know,” Barrera said, “he was just a freaking homeless guy. Annoying as hell is what he was. I would have thrown him in the back of the car if it wasn’t for the body lying on the floor inside.”

“So you let him go?”

“Yea, pushed him on his way. He was mumbling some bullshit as he left.”

“One last thing, did you notice a cab parked anywhere on the street?”

“Not that I can remember.”

Remy smiled sweetly at the officer and got up to leave.

“Thank you for your help, Officer Barrera. You’ve cleared up quite a bit for me. Let’s go,” she said, eyeing me with a frustrated look.

“You sure you don’t want to stick around and have a beer or something?” Barrera called, as we walked through doorway. Remy let it slam behind us without a response.

She stomped down the hallway towards the elevator. The rusted doors had barely shut when she erupted.

“That ignorant human sloth! Moron! I swear, sometimes I think we’d be better served to get rid of the police, let citizens arm themselves, and go back to survival of the fittest. Even when they get as lucky as that asshole, they still can’t take advantage of it.”