Private Heat (40 page)

“What did they look like?” asked Franklin.

“Blue coveralls. One of them was carrying a brown sack.”

“Thanks,” said Franklin. The train parted and we drove through. Franklin called off the dogs and sent them down to the overpass. “Smart cookies,” he said, “they knew we'd be looking on the east side of the track.”

Franklin pulled up in the truck dock next to a marked patrol unit that sat empty and flashing red and blue rollers. Ron pulled up next to the patrol car. We all got out. Shephart told me and Ron to wait outside. He and the sergeant were shown into the warehouse by a uniformed officer posted by a door that stood ajar on the loading dock. We had a short wait. Franklin came back and invited us in. We gave our names to the patrol officer keeping the log at the door.

“You know who this is?” asked Shephart.

The male body lay facedown in a narrow hallway that led to a darkened stairwell. The back of his head and most of his brains spackled the walls and ceiling in shades of gray, pink, and white. A couple of small bloodstains spread around dimples on the back of his shirt, between the shoulder blades.

“Neil Carter,” I said. “Up until a couple of days ago, he was the assistant U.S. attorney in charge of this case.”

Neil's pockets had been turned out and the scene may have been taken for a robbery, but the floor around the body was littered with coins and folding money. His wallet had been rifled but the credit cards lay scattered among the litter on the floor. Next to the body, nearly lost in the coinage, lay a gleaming piece of forty-five caliber brass.

“A fan of your favorite caliber,” said Shephart. “Shoots a cannon just like yours.”

I squatted down to look at the brass. “This isn't right.”

“If he could talk, I'm sure he'd agree with you,” said Franklin.

“Yeah, that, too, but the brass shouldn't be next to the body, and that's way more damage than you see with a forty-five—looks more like shotgun damage.”

“Yeah, I'll take note of that,” said Shephart. He folded up his notebook and put it away. “We got one more body upstairs. Don't touch the hand rail on the way up. On the landing there's a spilled toolbox. Don't be kicking that shit around.”

Ordinarily, dead bodies don't bleed much because once the heart stops, there's no pressure to force the blood out. But due to the position of this body, it was an island in a pool of red that quickly collected a scum of rusty brown. The corpse knelt on the floor, its torso flopped over and arms spread to the sides. The back of the skull had a ragged hole about the size of a nickel where the hair had been singed away, and the scalp was blackened. The face of the corpse folded out and away from both sides of a gaping hole where the nose should have been.

“That's the clothing that Arnold Fay was wearing when I filmed him this afternoon,” said Ron.

Another piece of forty-five caliber brass glinted brightly in the darkening puddle. “I think the placement of the brass was a little gratuitous here, too,” I said, “and ditto everything I said about the body downstairs.”

“That's it, you're outta here!” said Shephart.

“You find the money?” I asked. “It had to be on the boat.”

“The cylinder heads were pulled off the engine,” said Shephart. “How much money did you think was there?”

“There's eleven million bucks missing,” I said.

“That's a truckload of money,” said Franklin. “The guys we chased sure didn't haul it away in that little bag they had.”

“Not if it was cash,” I said.

“Maybe it was quarters,” said Shephart. He laughed. “Listen, hotshot,
there ain't no money here. So, whatever your brilliant theory was, it's bullshit. Now, I need you out of here before you screw up the scene.”

“Where's Cox?” I asked.

“Not here and not your business. Sergeant Franklin, I'd like you to escort these two civilians out of here. I need statements.”

In the downstairs hallway, Franklin stopped and looked at the body. “Okay,” he said, “I know Shephart doesn't want to hear it, but I'm interested. Tell me what you see here.”

“Fay was shot execution-style,” I said. “Carter didn't know his number was up. He ran. Remember, Ron told us about a couple of small-caliber pecks before the big bang.”

Franklin nodded.

“They shot him in the back, and when he went down, they blew his head off. He was probably still crawling because they didn't get the muzzle right up against his head like they did with Fay. He had something they wanted and it wasn't the money in his pockets.”

“You think they got it?”

“All of his pockets are turned out,” said Ron. “Either it was in the last pocket they looked in, or they didn't find it.”

“I don't see any keys,” I said. “He had to have keys for the car he drove. I think our guys took his keys.”

“You know,” said Ron, “the box and tools all over the landing might be the ones he carried in. Maybe his keys are with the toolbox.”

“Stay here,” said Franklin. “I'll be right back.” He went up the stairs. In a couple of minutes we could hear Franklin and Shephart on the stairway landing above us.

“What the fuck you mean, you ain't got a flashlight?” asked Franklin. “What kinda detective are you?”

“Yeah, my sergeant always had a flashlight,” said Shephart.

“In uniform, I got a flashlight. In civvies all I got is this plastic pocket lighter.” A click announced some diffused light from the stairwell, followed by the clatter of tools.

“Hey, don't move that shit around ‘til we get some pictures,” said Shephart.

“It's still a pile of tools,” said Franklin. “And there it is! Ouch, goddamit!” The light went out.

“What?”

“I burned my thumb. This lighter's getting hot.”

“My heart pumps peanut butter for you,” said Shephart. “What do you mean, ‘there it is'?”

“A key.”

“What key?”

Another click and a dim light glowed from the stairwell. “That key, on the green plastic tag. Shit!” said Franklin. The light went out. “What did it say on the tag?”

“How the fuck should I know? Give me a little light!”

“Read fast.” The light came back.

“Crest Haven Motel, room 116,” said Shephart.

The light went out. “I thought it would be like a storage locker or something. Where the hell is the Crest Haven?”

“It's on the Beltline just south of Twenty-Eighth,” said Shephart. “When I worked vice we did some ‘Escort Service' stings there.”

“That's in Kentwood,” said Franklin.

“Metro Task Force,” said Shephart.

“I'm on my way.”

“This is a homicide case.”

“So send somebody when Cox shows up. Ouch! Oh, shit!”

“Now, what?”

“I put the goddam lighter in my pants pocket!”

Before the fire, the Crest Haven Motel had been two stories of gray stucco and white aluminum siding surrounded by six to eight acres of cracked and battered blacktop. When we arrived, not many knew about the fire yet—we didn't—and about five acres of steel haulers, eighteen wheelers, and reefers with their cooling units running sat parked around in random groups.

Sergeant Franklin drove a lap around the motel to find the room and sniff out a good place to set up. The trucks made the trip a tour through a maze.

Room 116 turned out to be on the first floor and nearly at the back of the horseshoe-shaped motel. The horseshoe pointed away from the highway with the empty middle area used as space for a large swimming pool. A fat discharge line from a siphon pump pulsed the past winter's collected snowmelt from the pool into the parking lot.

We didn't get to watch for long. Our one lap around the building revealed a serious hindrance to any long-term surveillance. Smoke poured out from under the door of room 116.

Franklin picked up the mike to summon the fire department, but got interrupted by a red pickup truck that pulled up next to us. The passenger-side window went down and a hand—a really big hand with hairy knuckles—came out holding a snub-nosed revolver and pumped two rounds into the Chevy's engine compartment.

We all ducked and came up with our weapons in our hands, but the pickup had already roared off. It slid through a turn and disappeared behind the motel. Franklin forgot about the fire and started telling the dispatcher that an officer needed assistance.

“Both of you, out!” said Franklin.

“Don't chase him!” Ron and I said at the same time.

“Out!”

We got out. The force of the Chevy's acceleration slammed the doors. A woman wearing a towel on her head and a bathrobe ran out of room 115 and yelled that someone was screaming in the room next to hers. She ran up the row of rooms, pounding on doors and yelling, “Fire!”

We found the door to room 116 locked and ran around to the pool side. Each room had a double glass sliding door to provide access to the pool. Room 116 belched smoke from this side, too, and the slider had been jammed with the brass rod from a pole lamp.

Out in the parking lot someone cut loose with two short buzz bursts of automatic gunfire from what had to be a Mac 10. Sergeant Franklin rocketed by, driving backward, laying rubber, and leaving a trail of steam from the radiator of his Chevy.

We picked up the poolside trash barrel—a fifty-five-gallon drum painted white with a red candy stripe—and heaved it into the window. It bucked back and landed at our feet. We both stared at it and then at each other. Just as we picked it up for another go, the red pickup squealed to a stop in the parking lot.

Sasha Solutzkof—an axe handle wide at the shoulders and well over six feet tall—stepped out of the truck with a Mac 10 in his hand. If his blue, double-breasted suit was wool, somewhere a lot of sheep were shivering. He had a clean-shaven face and a pronounced widow's peak of short, wiry, grizzled hair. Two long stack-and-stagger magazines taped end-to-end protruded from the magazine well of the Mac.

“Sasha,” I said. “Didn't recognize you with your pants on.”

Solutzkof covered the distance in a dozen long strides. He made an ugly face at Ron, raised the Mac, and hosed the slider. Heat rushed out of the room in a chunky belch of smoke and pebbles of safety glass. Bright flames leapt up and danced on both the double beds in the room. We heard someone yelling and pounding in the bathroom. I couldn't make out the words but the panic was real.

The front end of Franklin's unmarked Chevy appeared past the edge of the wall. A shotgun blast took out the windshield of the red pickup. Solutzkof hosed the front of the Chevy. The headlights and plastic grill-work turned into a cloud of confetti. A car door slammed. The Chevy disappeared in a squeal of tires.

Solutzkof pointed his left index finger at me. “Later,” he said, but from him it sounded like a bullfrog croaking “lay-dur.” He reversed the magazines in the Mac. “Busy now,” he said and walked back up to the pickup truck. He buzzed a casual burst into the parking lot, stepped back into the truck, and departed in the direction that the Chevy had retreated.

I ran for the pool's discharge line and dragged it to the room, spewing a stream of putrid water. I turned the flow onto the blazing beds, making a pale smoke that burst into flame as it hit the now-blackened ceiling. Ron snatched the mattresses, first one and the other, and flipped them over. The flames subsided but the smoke thickened. The bathroom door wasn't locked. I jerked it open and had to step back from a shower of sparks that leapt from the door molding.

Volody Rosenko lay on the floor, clad in a white cotton dress shirt and black trousers that gave off a cloud of simmering ether that looked like steam. Handcuffs shackled his right wrist to the plumbing under the sink. His arm was bloody to the elbow from trying to pull free. The room smelled of charcoal lighter fluid. Rosenko's pants exploded into flames—a capsule of blue and orange flashed over him.

I turned the pulsing discharge hose on him as he flailed and screamed. Ron grabbed the terry-cloth bath mat, now soggy from the discharge line, and smothered the flames on Rosenko's legs.

The motel room started to crackle again. I knelt down to get below the smoke.

“For the love of God, Colonel,” said Rosenko, “shoot me or get me loose!”

Ron duckwalked the discharge line out and turned it onto the flaming beds and carpet, coughing and covering his face with a wet washcloth. I
drew my satin nickel Colt Commander and racked the hammer with my thumb.

“Pretty gun,” Rosenko said. He let his head rest back on the floor and closed his eyes, exposing white eyelids—islands of white in a sea of soot. “Lawyer Martin betrayed us both.”

I stepped over Rosenko—his dress shirt looked tie-dyed with scorch marks—put the muzzle of my pistol on the chain connecting the handcuffs, turned my face away, and pulled the trigger. Rosenko's body jerked and shards of ceramic tile peppered the side of my face. He opened his eyes and rolled his gaze around his body before he fixed me with a puzzled stare. I thumbed up the safety and holstered my weapon. “Time to check out,” I said.

Rosenko had no eyebrows and his short white hair had been singed back to the crown of his head. I hooked my left hand in his armpit and hoisted. Ron abandoned the hose on the burning bed closest to the bathroom. We carried Rosenko out between us and found the air outside alive with sparks and sirens.

The red pickup raced by the end of the motel. A heartbeat later two Kentwood police cars followed in hot pursuit. The black Chevy sputtered and lurched to a stop, smack in the middle between the horseshoe prong ends of the building. Franklin leapt out with a shotgun in his hands and ran after the Kentwood cars.

Rosenko stood on unsteady legs. “I am pleased you find me,” he said. “Never did I think I would say this. You are too much trouble. I send people for you to kill and you don't kill. When I clean up, you interfere. You should have been in jail from my little joke down in Berrien County.”