“Singer,” I answered.
“It’s me,” Bloch said. “Got a sec?”
I glanced at the bread lying on my plate like a piece of bathroom tile. “Sure.”
“You know that snubbie and the guns we found in Danny’s car and at his love nest? I took them to the lab and had them test fire some rounds, then ran them through IBIS.”
“Do I want to know what the results were?”
“They came up in seven unsolved shootings from the last ten years. Southeast. Prince Georges County, Maryland. Northern Virginia. Most were fatalities.”
I whistled low. “Unsolved?” I said. “Assumed to be drug violence, gang-on-gang kind of stuff?”
“Yeah—hey, you okay? You sound funny.”
“I’m fine,” I said, and tried to inject some enthusiasm into my voice. “What about those shootings?”
“Three of them were drive-bys, but no ID of the car. One report of a group of three or four guys involved, but—okay, this is gonna shock you—no witnesses and no one willing to talk to the cops about it.”
“Any connections between the shootings?” I asked.
“You mean, besides drugs? Like, were they all the same gang?”
“Yeah.”
“Negative,” Bloch said. “These were equal-opportunity assaults. Victims were Black, Hispanic, the odd freelancer.”
I was quiet. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”
“I think so. I wish I weren’t.”
“Danny was moonlighting,” I said. “Taking out drug dealers and gangbangers on his own time.”
“Looks that way,” Bloch said. “If he wasn’t already dead, I’d kick his ass.”
“The guns, the cot, the medical supplies…that place we found was his staging area, his command post.”
We both thought about it for a second. I don’t know if it’s every cop’s desire to go rogue, but I know it sure as hell goes through your mind once in a while. Particularly after a bust gone bad. Or, worse, a bust gone perfect…and then the guy walks thanks to light sentencing or a technicality.
“He did it,” I said. “Lived the dream.”
“Probably got sick of seeing guys he’d busted back on the street in a week.”
“Or, being undercover, saw a ton of action he knew he’d never be able to pin on anyone,” I said. “And he had everything he needed to work it.”
“Sure. He had a decade of street experience. Any hard-to-get intel he couldn’t squeeze from his contacts, I delivered from HIDTA sources. Then he probably picked up a couple of off-record guns on busts or through his contacts, stockpiled some medical supplies, and kept his nose clean the rest of the time. I gave him all kinds of slack on the job, so he had plenty of time to plan his takedowns.”
I sat down at the dining room table and put my feet up on the chair across from me. “You know, if reports say a drive-by, my experience as a detective tells me that’s at least two. Witnesses say maybe three or four. And everything about the bolt-hole says at least three to me.”
“You’re thinking his partners were the other guys who got killed? Someone’s murdering the whole crew?”
I sighed. “I don’t know. It fits nice and neat on the surface, but what were the connections? These were cops from all over the Metro area. Different ages, different departments, different squads.”
“I can dig a little on my end, see if there’s a connection.”
“Okay,” I said. “Just to cover all our bases. If not them, who else could’ve been working with him?”
“Hell if I know. I’ll look at the other guys on my squad, but all these undercover boys are lone wolves. I can’t see them wanting to share or even being able to keep it to themselves.”
“Not for ten years,” I said.
“Hell, no. Jesus, can you imagine? Sitting around the doughnut shop, ‘Hey, remember that time we sprayed down the 11th Street gang?’”
“This changes our position,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, with all due respect, this doesn’t sound like the serial killer with a thing for cops that we thought we were after. Danny’s murder sounds like some guy moonlighting who got whacked by bad guys when he wasn’t paying attention.”
“Either way, it got him killed. And, either way, we’re still looking for the guy who did it.”
“Sure, but we’re not searching for the Son of Sam. We could just be looking at a drug bust gone bad. With a couple of unrelated murders that happened to occur around the same time.”
“I’m not going to believe that,” Bloch said, sounding ready for a fight.
“Ease up. I’m just putting it out there,” I said. “I’ll keep digging. All I’m saying is, the goal is to stop whoever’s killing cops, not to give ourselves a pat on the back proving a conspiracy theory.”
He was quiet. Wounded, maybe. I felt for him. We were making headway, but what we were finding took some of the air out of his balloon. He’d been sure we were looking for the next big serial killer, something that would justify the flack he’d been given by the other departments, something he could hold up to them and say,
See? You should’ve listened to me
. What we were uncovering—as much as it pained me to say it when talking about other cops—were routine murders, easily explained by that all-encompassing motive, greed.
His voice was tight, but he said, “You’re right. This isn’t about me. We still got to stop whoever it is. Keep pushing on those other killings. I’ll let you know if I find anything else. Sorry if I ruined your dinner.”
I stared at the soup, now cold. “No worries. It was already a goner.”
ii.
White was a lousy color for couches. And carpet. And pillows. When it got dirty, it was a motherfucker to clean and never did look quite right again. Spill some red wine or some Chinese take-out on it, you might as well throw the whole thing out and get a new one, because stains were something that the honeys picked up on right away. And then it was all over.
He could show them the whole apartment—the glass and steel and leather, the thousand-dollar stereo, the half-case of Cristal in the fridge—and if they saw one damn stain on the couch, they’d be up and out of there. Lucky for him, low lighting worked wonders on just how bad some of those stains looked. And with the music going good and enough booze in the glass, it didn’t hurt his chances of slipping his Johnson where he wanted, either.
But another thing bitches couldn’t abide was a messy pad. So he took an hour every day to make up the living room and the bedroom, even if that meant he had to shove most of his shit in a closet. You never knew when you were going to talk some sweet young college thing—tired of doing it in frat houses—into coming back to your place. Didn’t need her walking out on you because you lived just like the dudes she was trying to get away from. And when you were twenty years older than them, you needed every play in the book.
It was that time again. He’d just put the stereo on, to give himself something to listen to while he cleaned the place, when he heard a knock on the door. Curious, he went over and opened it, smiling wide when he saw who it was.
“Hey, man,” he said, stepping back to make room. “Thanks for coming by. That was pretty lucky. I almost didn’t hear you knocking with my music going on.”
Chapter Eighteen
My phone rang again early the next morning. I reached over and answered it without opening my eyes. I didn’t want to pick it up. Somehow, I knew who it was and what he was going to say.
“Singer.”
“We have another one.”
A cold ache swelled behind my breastbone. I opened my eyes. “Where?”
“Rockville. Cop named Clay Johnson. Killed in his apartment a few days ago. I haven’t been paying enough attention or I would’ve heard about it as soon as it happened.”
“M.O. fits?”
“All the way,” Bloch said. “Beaten to a pulp.”
“Think Rockville PD will talk to me?” I asked.
“I’ve already called in some favors,” he said. “Though I didn’t really have to. Rockville hasn’t lost one of their own in thirty years. They want to nail whoever this is and they don’t care who they have to hold hands with to do it.”
“So they’ll take the help, but they’ll want their share,” I said.
“Yes. Which is fine. That’s what I was after in the first place. But don’t give them anything unsubstantiated. Go up to Rockville, and see what you can find out. If Johnson’s case is related to the rest of these, maybe it’ll shed light on Okonjo’s killing. If not, we can decide where it fits with the others.”
“I’m on my way,” I said, and hung up.
. . .
A tired-looking homicide detective met me by the front desk at the Rockville PD headquarters. He was a heavy-set black guy, maybe five-nine, with a salt-and-pepper mustache. He wore a plaid blazer and green Dockers. Police work was the only profession I know of where the black guys dressed as bad as the white guys.
“Singer?” he asked, holding a hand out.
He had a thick hand that I had trouble getting my own around when we shook. “That’s me. Call me Marty.”
“Charlie Goodwin. A Lieutenant Sam Bloch said you were willing to come up and help us with Clay Johnson’s murder. Said it might have something connected to a couple other cases in the District?”
“Arlington, too. Maybe,” I said. “Nothing’s for sure yet, but Johnson’s death comes at a really weird time to be coincidence. Sam asked me to look into it and a few others.”
Goodwin motioned for me to follow him through the security door and down a hall. I got a good look at Rockville PD HQ. It was like every other station I’d been in, with the same smell of burnt coffee, disinfectant, and cologne laying heavy on the air, along with a subtle office odor of paper and copier ink. Energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs gave off a ghastly sterile glow that might save the city money, but bounced off every surface and made the room look sick.
“How’s it going so far?” I asked as we walked.
“We’ve been giving it everything we’ve got.”
“I hear a
but
in there.”
“But we’re chasing our damn tails because we got the message from higher up to do what we had to do, but not too publicly, if you can believe it.” Goodwin had a voice with the richness and timbre of an opera baritone. “It’s not even an election year and the mayor’s got a wild hair about not looking too partial in the prosecution of crimes. We’re under a microscope, everyone making sure we don’t spend an unfair amount of time on a cop’s murder when there are so many others deserving of our time.”
“Like meth labs taking out their owners in a blaze of glory,” I said. “Or six-time DUI’ers running over pedestrians out by the mall.”
“I see you’re familiar with our work,” Goodwin said, amused. “Bloch says you were a homicide dick for twenty years.”
“Thirty.”
“Seem like fifty?”
“Some days,” I said. “Others, it seemed to flash past, when we were hot on something and cases were falling our way.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Goodwin said.
“You’re okay with me poking my nose in this thing?” I asked.
Goodwin shrugged. “You check out. And it’d be nice if you share.”
“I can do that,” I said. “How about your higher-ups?”
“Can’t say the captain would be too happy if he knew a freelancer was running around with this thing.”
“But what he doesn’t know won’t hurt you?”
“I wouldn’t mind an extra set of legs on the case,” Goodwin said with an easy smile.
“I won’t tell if you won’t.”
We arrived at what once would’ve been the bullpen but now would be called a cubefarm. Goodwin took the lead, weaving between desks until he got to one with his nameplate on it. A half-wall separated it from the next cube. I picked a chair in the empty cube and watched as Goodwin sat down heavily at his desk and tip-tapped on his computer keyboard. After a minute, he stood and went to a block of printers at the center of the room. He drummed his fingers impatiently on the plastic tray, then grabbed a handful of pages spat out by the nearest printer, which he stapled with a
kerchunk
and brought back to me.
“Evidence list and autopsy,” he said. He talked to me over his shoulder as he went around a cube wall. “Look through that while I get you the case file.”
I flipped through the stack of sheets, trying to get a high-level view before diving in. The autopsy and crime scene report portrayed the same god-awful tableau as the other murders. Johnson had been killed in his own apartment, a fate he shared with Torres, though the location was an anomaly compared to the others. Minor, maybe. The problem was that, since the crime occurred in a home, nearly every item the man owned was included in the evidence list, which ran to ten pages. Not everything had been tagged, bagged, and brought in, of course, but anything of note had made it into the list. Johnson had been found on his living room floor, so the TV, the magazines, the end table, the lamps, the ashtrays, the knick-knacks, damn near everything was there.
Goodwin came back with a cardboard box, the kind with handles and a lid. Johnson’s name and initials, along with the date, had been scribbled on it in Magic Marker. “This is the summary stuff. If this isn’t enough, let me know if I can get you the other ten boxes.”
“Thanks. Can we talk about it for a minute before I jump in?”
He eased into his chair and put his hands behind his head. “Shoot.”
“You were investigating officer on the scene?”
“Yes.”
“Give me the rundown.”
Goodwin closed his eyes. “Forced entry into the apartment. Lights were on when we got there. Clay was on his back in the living room, all beat to hell. He’d tricked the place out like a real bachelor pad, trying to impress. All glass and steel. White leather couch, fake white bearskin rug, blond hardwood floor. So the blood just stood out everywhere. Just pulsing, man, you know? Even though he’d been dead for a while.”
I glanced down at the autopsy report. “M.E. put it at thirty to thirty-six hours?”
Goodwin nodded. “Clay had a couple days off coming to him, so no one down here noticed when he didn’t show up.”