“You frightened her.”
“I know. I lost my temper, that’s all.” He shook his head. “Being there, her an’ the kids, a family, you know? An’ then her chuckin’ me out. You wouldn’t understand. Why would you? But I felt like shit. A piece of shit. An’ I meant it. What I said. Not the kids, not harmin’ them. I wouldn’t do that. But topping myself . . .” He looked at Whitemore despairingly. “It’s what I’ll do. I swear it. I will.”
“Don’t talk like that,” Whitemore said.
“Why the hell not?”
Whitemore leaned toward him and lowered his voice. “It’s hard, I know. And I do understand. Really, I do. But you have to keep going. Move on. Look — here — you’ve got this place, right? A flat of your own. It’s a start. A new start. Look at it like that.”
He went across to Pitcher and rested a hand on his shoulder, not knowing how convincing his half-truths and platitudes had been.
“Ben Leonard. You talked to him before. I’ll see if I can’t get him to see you again. It might help sort a few things out. Okay? But in the meantime, whatever you do, you’re to keep away from Emma. Right, Darren? Emma and the children.” Whitemore tightened his grip on Pitcher’s shoulder before stepping clear. “Keep right away.”
IT WAS A little more than a week later when the call came through, waking Whitemore from his sleep. The voice was brisk, professional, a triage nurse at the Queen’s Medical Centre, Accident and Emergency. “We’ve a young woman here, Emma Laurie, she’s quite badly injured. Some kind of altercation with a partner? She insisted that I contact you, I hope that’s all right. Apparently she’s worried about the children. Three of them?”
“Are they there with her?”
“No. At home, apparently.”
“On their own?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Maybe a neighbor? I’m afraid she’s not making a lot of sense.”
Whitemore dropped the phone and finished pulling on his clothes.
THE HOUSE WAS silent — the blood slightly tacky to the touch. One more room to go. The bathroom door was bolted from the inside, and Whitemore shouldered it free. Darren Pitcher was sitting on the toilet seat, head slumped forward toward his chest, one arm trailing over the bath, the other dangling toward the floor. Long, vertical cuts ran down the inside of both arms, almost from elbow to wrist, slicing through the horizontal scars from where he had harmed himself before. Blood had pooled along the bottom of the bath and around his feet. A Stanley knife rested on the bath’s edge alongside an oval of pale green soap.
Whitemore crouched down. There was a pulse, still beating faintly, at the side of Pitcher’s neck.
“Darren? Can you hear me?”
With an effort, Pitcher raised his head. “See, I did it. I said I would.” A ghost of a smile lingered in his eyes.
“The children,” Whitemore said. “Where are they?”
Pitcher’s voice was a sour whisper in his face. “The shed. Out back. I didn’t want them to see this.”
As Pitcher’s head slumped forward, Whitemore dialed the emergency number on his mobile phone.
Downstairs, he switched on the kitchen light; there was a box of matches lying next to the stove. Unbolting the back door, he stepped outside. The shed was no more than five feet high, roughly fashioned from odd planks of wood, the roof covered with a rime of frost. The handle was cold to the touch.
“Don’t be frightened,” he said, loud enough for them to hear inside. “I’m just going to open the door.”
When it swung back, he ducked inside and struck a match. The three children were clinging to one another in the farthest corner, staring wide-eyed into the light.
DARREN PITCHER HAD lost consciousness by the time the paramedics arrived, and despite their efforts and those of the doctors at A & E, he was pronounced dead a little after six that morning. Sutured and bandaged, Emma Laurie was kept in overnight and then released. Her children had been scooped up by the Social Services Emergency Duty Team and would spend a short time in care.
Tom Whitemore drove to the embankment and stood on the pedestrian bridge across the river, staring down at the dark, glassed-over surface of the water, the pale shapes of sleeping swans, heads tucked beneath their wings. Overhead, the sky was clear and pitted with stars.
When he finally arrived home, it was near dawn.
The heating in the house had just come on.
Upstairs, in the twins’ room, it felt cold nonetheless. Each bed was carefully made up, blankets folded neatly back. In case. He stood there for a long time, letting the light slowly unfold round him. The start of another day.
The Drought
By James O. Born
The photograph of the girl hadn’t changed since the first time Broward Sheriff’s Office detective Ben Stoltz had looked at it three years before. She looked pretty much like she had when he walked up to her in the center of yellow crime-scene tape in a vacant lot off Sunrise Boulevard. Something about her nose and eyebrows reminded him of his own daughter, and that was really all it took. One of the things that had saved his sanity was the rise in the murder rate in Broward County, which had kept him too busy to really consider how he had failed her ever since a jogger had first discovered her body on that cool March evening. Now that things had slowed down, he had time again. Shit.
A musical ringtone shook him out of his daze as he looked at the photograph. He missed the practical and obnoxious rings that phones used to make. Sitting at the same desk he had occupied since entering the detective bureau, using the same Paper Mate pen he had used his first day in plain clothes, he wondered why the phones had undergone such an evolution. Some had a gentle, breezy electronic chime; others sounded like a tiny fire alarm. His phone had whatever was programmed into the damn thing when some pencil-necked geek had plopped it down four years before. If it weren’t for the weary secretary who, tired of taking his messages, had set up his voice mail, he’d be the only one in Homicide without the precious service.
Now, staring at the files of his open cases, Stoltz wished someone would call and get him off his dead ass and doing something. He feared these slight lulls in the murder rate. The times when he might have to sit in the office and look over his mistakes. That’s what he considered his open cases. Why not? If he was unable to solve them, then it was his mistake. He had failed. Aside from his deep desire to retire in Homicide, he knew what his duty was. It was to catch the assholes who killed other people. Sometimes it was more personal or more rewarding. Sometimes he just felt like the referee in some giant game in which one group shoots up another. Of the four files in front of him, three were drug related. He wanted them closed but never felt satisfied with the result. Somewhere, maybe a few years down the road, some dumbass would get picked up on a trafficking charge and give up the triggerman on a drug homicide. Or, as had happened to him several times, a gun would be recovered and traced back to the killing. Once, they had lifted some DNA off the grip of a Beretta that had led to a conviction. These were back burners.
The fourth file. Jane Doe number sixty-eight was a girl that had died around the age of twenty. Jenny’s age. Except this girl wasn’t a junior at the University of Central Florida. She was some lonely girl whom someone had stabbed and left in a vacant lot off Sunrise Boulevard. Still in unincorporated Broward County, about two blocks from the city limits of Sunrise. At first, his boss asked, almost pleaded, for him to say it was in the city’s jurisdiction. But geography didn’t lie, and neither did he. It was their case. No witnesses, no leads, no motive, and no true name for the victim. His sergeant looked like he was about to have a seizure. Then the sergeant had a stroke of genius. Suicide. Stoltz had to bring up the uncomfortable question of how someone stabbed themselves four times to commit suicide and then didn’t leave a weapon near the body. His sergeant was ready. Animals had carried it off. After all, it was a vacant lot. But as the lead investigator, Stoltz refused to go with the “well-armed raccoon” theory and had carried the case for th
e past three years. Three years, two sergeants, nineteen cases, and one marriage ago. Felt like a lifetime.
He sensed more than saw the figure of Chuck, his partner on most cases, as he dropped into the chair next to his desk.
“Ben, what’s the good word?” asked the only detective who was senior to him in the Homicide Unit.
Ben Stoltz just looked out over his cluttered desk and sighed.
“Yeah, I know. Droughts like this bring up a lot of old shit. I’m recanvassing the neighborhood where we found Cassie Brown’s body.” The heavyset detective looked across at the other cops at their desks. “You never see this many guys in here at once. Rumor is that they may shift some of us to other areas.”
Stoltz looked up and paid attention for the first time. “Like where?”
“Dunno. Fraud is hot right now, and there’s always sex crimes.”
“We got nothing to worry about. We’re senior.”
“Ben, you and I got no juice. These young guys, they’re climbers. They talk to the colonel and the sheriff. They get ‘face time,’ and all we do is get cases and clear ’em. We’ll be the first to go. They’ll tell us some bullshit like it’ll do us good to see something other than corpses.”
Stoltz looked around, seeing, for the first time, his competition. He had always just done his job and been left alone. Would that work in today’s environment? He looked at the other detective. “You’re in DROP. I didn’t come on the Sheriff’s Office until I was thirty-one. I got four years, just to go into the DROP for five more.” In reality, Stoltz didn’t view the DROP retirement incentive as a chance to make more money but as an opportunity to stay a while longer. The Deferred Retirement Option Plan allowed a cop to collect retirement in a savings account and still work for a five-year period. The intent was to move old-timers out of the job.
Chuck loosened his tie. “Man, that would suck to finish up in another unit.”
Stoltz didn’t acknowledge the comment. He was distracted by his sergeant, who, at thirty-four, was nearly twenty years younger than he. The balding young man who never smiled said, “Ben, we got an officer-involved shooting.”
“Where?”
“Our favorite beach town, where else?”
“The cop okay?”
“Of course. That bunch are shooters, not targets.”
“Any weapon?”
“Not from the stiff. Looks like he took the cop’s ASP and the cop fired twice. You two get over there. Crime Scene is on the way.” He ran a bony hand through thinning blond hair. “Ben, you’re the lead. I’ll be along shortly.”
“Got it, Sarge.”
The young sergeant added, “Carla Lazaro is the assistant on it.”
Stoltz gave an involuntary shudder. “She’s not in the Homicide Unit.”
“Public Integrity. They get police shootings. Watch your ass so she doesn’t swallow you whole.”
“I’m still the lead investigator. She’s just an assistant state attorney.”
“But she has a big mouth and bigger ego. If she called the captain and wanted you removed, she’d probably pull it off. Just watch it. She’ll use a case like this for political advantage.”
“I don’t follow politics.”
“But she does.”
Stoltz nodded, not worried about whomever the state attorney had assigned to the case. He just found and repeated facts.
His partner said, “The drought breaks, good thing you’re the duty detective. This’ll give you some juice to stay here if things go bad.” He paused and added, “Too bad the Queen of the Damned is assigned.”
“She won’t bother us.”
“You hope.” He stood and headed toward his desk. “Like I said, at least you caught a case. That’ll look good during review time.”
Stoltz hated to admit it, but he had already thought of that. He had his “go kit,” with a tape recorder, camera, and note pads, all zipped up and ready within a minute. This was the kind of stuff that had kept him sober and sane as the last year had unfolded. Mary’s leaving him, Jenny’s college expenses, and Craig’s Christmas revelation had shaken him out of the life he had found so comfortable. Thank God he still had Homicide.
HE PARKED MORE than a block away from the point of the shooting, so he could take in the scene and get his bearings before anyone noticed him and started to tell him what had happened instead of him discovering what had happened. He could see the outer edge of the yellow crime-scene tape coming from the convenience store one block east of the Intracoastal. The Sheriff’s Office had a memo of understanding with the town that the S.O. Homicide Unit would investigate their officer-involved shootings. The previous sheriff had signed the memo, not realizing that there would be more shootings in this small beach town than in all other municipalities combined, and no one knew why. In addition, none of the suspects, five of whom were dead, had ever had a weapon. They had reached for wrenches, umbrellas, tape players — one had used a car — but none had had a gun or knife. That didn’t mean the cop hadn’t acted in self-defense; it just looked bad in the media. Stoltz didn’t care about the media or even the reasons why there were so many shootings in the town. All he cared about was doing a good job on the investigation and finding out what had happened in this shooting. If the cop had acted incorrectly, he would note it. If the shooting was justified, he would note that too. That was his job, and the only thing he had going for him now.
As he neared the tape, he heard a voice say, “Detectivesaurus Rex, I thought you had retired.”
Stoltz looked over at the forty-year-old police chief of South Fort Lauderdale Beach. He had known the chief since the guy was a patrolman and never thought he’d be a chief of police. At least not in the United States. “Hey, Howie, your man doing okay?”
“He’s a little shaky. The perp wrestled with him for a good five minutes before he finally had to drop back and fire. This’ll be an easy one for you.”
“Will he talk to me?”
“Through the PBA attorney. Just to be safe.”
“Whatever he wants.”
The young chief straightened his tie and adjusted his suit coat. “You haven’t changed. Still the Joe Friday look.”
“The dress code is shirt and tie.”
“Yeah, but short sleeves and a blue clip-on?”
“Never had a client complain.”
The chief smiled. “Nice to see some things never change.”
“I could say that about how your cops react to threats.”
“Stoltz, you know that’s not fair. Just because you never had a rough patrol zone, don’t think it’s not dangerous out there.”
He looked around at the beach shops and the park that extended five blocks. “You call this a rough patrol zone?”
The chief ignored him. “C’mon, I’ll take you to the scene.”
Stoltz followed the younger man to the tape, where a female officer in a city uniform wrote down his name as he entered the scene. She looked young enough to be one of his kids. He ducked under the tape that sealed off the entire ten-car parking lot at the Beach Snack Shop. He noticed that the S.O. Crime Scene people were already photographing the area. One tech had a detailed sketch of the lot and was placing yellow markers next to the two spent .40-caliber casings on the ground in front of the store’s door. Inside the brightly lit store, Stoltz saw six people leaning or sitting near the back wall, one of them a small man with a dark complexion, wearing a bright-red shirt with a badge that read beach snack shop.
This was what he had been trained to do and why he hadn’t had a bad day in his six years with the unit. His mind seemed to understand the template to use to set down the case. Interview the witnesses, interview the cop, get the radio transmissions, talk to the dead guy’s family, pull together crime scene and ballistics, throw in a few photos, and he had a case that would make sense. That was what he loved, pulling order out of chaos. That was all he had left.
He turned to find his partner next to the worried-looking chief. “Chuck, ta
lk to the witnesses inside and get me an idea of what happened. Chief, I’ll need your radio tapes and the cop’s clothes and gun. You have something for him to use until we’re done with the examination?”
He nodded.
“Can we use your PD for interviews and stuff? It’s a lot closer than the S.O.”
“No problem.” He paused and then said, “Ben, you’re not gonna bury this guy, are you? Albury is fairly new but a good cop.”
“C’mon, Howie, you know I gotta look at this with an open mind.”
“That’s all I ask.”
“Why would you think I wouldn’t?”
“Because Carla Lazaro is waiting at the PD to sit in on interviews.”
Stoltz patted the chief on the arm and said, “Don’t worry, Howie. She doesn’t conduct the investigation and she doesn’t influence me.”
“I’m just worried about her using something like this to make a name for herself.”
“It’ll be fine. I’m sure she won’t interfere. She’s just a dedicated assistant state attorney.”
They both started to laugh as they moved on through the scene.
BEN STOLTZ FELT a sort of Zen pattern with homicide investigations. When he was on the scene of something like this, nothing else mattered. The problem he had experienced was that, when working a hot case, an activity that often took days or weeks after a body was discovered, he excluded almost everything else from his consciousness. He had missed Jenny’s dance recitals and cheerleading contests, more than one anniversary, which explained his current one-bedroom apartment in the town of Davie, and would have missed Craig’s sporting events if he had ever played sports. He did miss his son’s slow transition from rock to punk to Goth to whatever the hell he was now, with the piercings and tattoos. That was one favor the job had done for him.
Now, he let his instincts dictate what steps to take in the case. He didn’t worry about family, salary, or even Jane Doe number sixty-eight. The drought in homicides had lasted so long, he had to savor this activity of checking in with all the cogs that made an investigation run. The young woman from Crime Scene showed him where the body had fallen and where a small amount of blood had leaked onto the cement sidewalk. He tried to visualize where the body had landed. He didn’t like to call them “victims” in officer-involved shootings because he cringed when he heard the TV reporters refer to them that way. It made the cop sound like a murderer even if he was doing what he had been paid to do and was protecting the public. Contrary to Hollywood lore, Stoltz had never actually seen anyone use chalk lines on a body. If the corpse had been involved in immediate violence, like a drive-by, he or she would have been rushed to the hospital so every effort could have been made to save the person. If a body was found that was days old, Crime Scene took hundreds of photographs to provide an accurate view of how the corpse was discovered and what condition it was in. Chalk lines served no purpose. At least at a homicide scene.