“ABD.”
“Whatever,” I said. “I want to celebrate. You deserve it. Hell, I deserve it.”
Her eyes were shiny. “Thank you, Marty. I couldn’t have done it without you.”
I smiled and squeezed her arm. “No sweat, kid. I could say the same.”
Chapter Three
By four the next morning, the sleep thing wasn’t working. Pre-dawn hours weren’t anything new to me, of course; as a homicide cop, rising early was practically a job requirement. But most cops look forward to retirement as a chance to get some real sleep and learn how to wake up at more human hours. And I probably could’ve trained myself out of getting out of bed before the sun with a few months of late-night TV and beer. But last year I’d received news that would keep anyone awake at night.
Stage two colorectal cancer.
I’d like to say I handled the news well, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t rock me. I thought my life was over. There was the basic issue of staying alive, of course, but then all the things that made life worth living seemed like they were being taken away, too. Like being a cop. Doctors told me I didn’t have to retire, that plenty of people worked through their disease, but it wasn’t like I answered phones for a living. I was a cop. I couldn’t afford to fall down—literally—on the job. So I quit rather than let anyone down.
Doing the right thing didn’t make it more palatable, though. It was a retirement that I hadn’t wanted or planned for. I was angry and scared and sick. A few things kept me distracted—like helping keep Amanda alive while she was being stalked by her mother’s killer, for instance—but a poor night’s sleep became a constant. When the disease didn’t have me up, pacing the floor, anxiety did.
Hopefully, though, it wouldn’t be long before I had some news. Round one of chemo was over and I was due to go to my oncologist’s for a checkup soon. I had no idea if the news would be good or bad. Amanda had been a rock through the months of chemo, coaching me to think positive, look for silver linings.
But silver linings and wishes weren’t always enough to keep the fear and the anxiety and tension away.
So it was still dark out when I grabbed a bowl of plain oatmeal, sat at my kitchen table with the overhead light on, and put Bloch’s files in front of me. I started to read. And read. And read some more. By the time the sun peeked over the trees in my backyard, I’d already been through his files twice and was going back to re-check some of the facts. I’d made my own notes, a list of questions, and a rough timeline. The question was how to proceed.
Terrence Witherspoon was a twenty-six-year veteran of the MPDC, never making it past Master Patrol Officer. In the Army, he would’ve been a corporal. Some guys are just cut out for the beat. They don’t want or can’t do anything else. Which is fine, we need all the cops we can get and there were plenty of times when a patrol officer coming through with a tip was better than what the guys on my own Homicide squad could do.
Witherspoon had worked the First District, which put him solidly in Southeast, the roughest part of DC and where the city’s most spectacular violent crime went down. That alone was a feather in Witherspoon’s cap, but adding to that was the fact that he worked Police Service Area 106, which had a reputation for violence and drugs even in Southeast. The demographic was solidly black. Hispanic and Asian gangs generally stayed out or sourced drugs, guns, or prostitutes to the black gangs. What surprised me the most, though, was that Witherspoon actually lived in his PSA. It’s something the chief always wanted his troops to do—it made for good press, our DC cops are vigilant and caring enough to live in the place where they worked, yadda yadda, but most cops wouldn’t even consider it. There were bennies, like having 90% of your rent knocked off if you parked your cruiser in front of the apartment building, but you weren’t going to get any love if you took a run at the local crack dealer…and he happened to be your landlady’s nephew. Or supplier.
Witherspoon had been killed in early March. He was the first victim in what Bloch was lumping together as a serial murder, but I refrained from thinking of him as “the first” of anything. I had to keep an open mind. There might not be a serial killer, or Witherspoon might be the third and we didn’t know about the first two yet.
I flipped open a new file. Brady Torres lived a completely different life from Witherspoon. Young, just six years out of the Academy, already off the beat, working the gang detail. It was a dangerous specialty, but fast-track stuff that would get him noticed and promoted to Detective inside of three years if he didn’t get shot or start to love the work so much that he never left. Gangs were serious business in the whole Metro area, but they seemed to really gravitate to Arlington, where Torres had worked. Maybe it was the easy access to highways, or the strip malls, or the cheap housing. Whatever the reason, Torres had made a number of good busts against the white supremacists and had just started making inroads into the Latino gangs when he was killed in his own apartment on Columbia Pike. He’d been single, with a reputation for partying off-duty, so no one paid much attention to the noises coming from his two-bedroom pad on a Friday night. A buddy coming over for a Sunday afternoon hockey game had found the body. It had been in March, too. In fact—I flipped back to Witherspoon’s file—it had been four days after the DC beat cop had been killed.
The body of Danny Garcia had been found in the back of an abandoned auto repair shop in Southeast. Not Witherspoon’s beat, but not far away, either. Date of death was a shot in the dark. A small-time chop-shop crook had broken in looking for something to rip off, found a whole different set of “parts” than he’d bargained for, and called it in. Garcia’s body had been there for some time, which made pinning down a time of death problematic. The coroner had put it somewhere in the last week of March, but in the notes had allowed himself a lot of leeway.
Isaac Okonjo had been with the Montgomery County Sheriff’s department just seven months when he’d been killed, off-duty, in the parking lot of a bar in Rockville, Maryland, just steps away from his cruiser. Like Witherspoon, he was a patrolman, but assigned to Bethesda and Chevy Chase; more affluent areas than Witherspoon had ever seen. Okonjo was the son of Nigerian immigrants, had attended high school in Rockville and had graduated from the Maryland Police Academy, finishing unspectacularly in the middle of his class. He’d been killed mid-April, several weeks after Witherspoon, though potentially only ten days after Garcia.
Since Okonjo’s body hadn’t been beaten, his case was obviously different from the others. The fact that he’d been killed in the parking lot of a bar suggested a rushed or botched attempt. Either something had gone wrong and the murderer had been kept from going through with his gruesome routine…or Okonjo’s murder simply wasn’t connected. The discrepancies bothered me. Only the damning fact that he’d been shot with a small caliber bullet, like the others—and so close in time—kept me from pulling out all the references to his murder and putting it in a “not the same” box.
I squinted at the clock on my microwave, then at the golden rays filtering in my kitchen window. It was just before seven. I picked up my cell phone and called Bloch, betting that he was an early bird. He picked up on the second ring.
“Bloch.”
“It’s Singer. You told me to give you a ring when I was ready.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, so I’m going to have to interview some people,” I said. “I saw some next of kin stuff in some of the files, but I wanted to get your thoughts on who else I should approach.”
“Got something to write with?”
“Yep. Shoot.”
I heard him drum his fingers on something hard and hollow. “Witherspoon left a widow, Florence. They got one kid. They still live in Southeast. Same one as his beat, by the way.”
“I saw that,” I said.
“Torres, there’s not much to go on. Single, hot-shot guy in his twenties. There’s the friend who found the body. I’ll have to get back to you on a name. Maybe some guys in his squad. But Gangs is a tight group. They might get uppity that a civilian is poking around.”
“Something you could smooth out for me?”
“I can try,” he said, but his voice wasn’t brimming with confidence.
“While we’re on the subject,” I said. “What exactly is my status on this? Interested bystander? Concerned tax-payer? Nosy s.o.b.?”
“I can get you put on the HIDTA payroll as a ‘valued informant.’ Doesn’t give you much status, but at least people can call me if they want some kind of official confirmation.”
“Great. I’m in the same class as your snitches?” I asked.
“More like an expert witness. Anybody gives you a hard time, steer them my way,” he said, then cleared his throat. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but try not to, ah, stick your nose in too far, get me? If you piss off a half-dozen chiefs around the Metro area, our case’ll get shit-canned for sure. It’ll be over before it’s started.”
“I smell what you’re cooking,” I said. “Now, what about the others?”
“Danny’s got a wife and son. Libney and Paul Garcia. Paul was just about to start up at the Academy when Danny went missing. He’s put it off indefinitely. I don’t know anything about the wife.”
I scribbled down the address and a phone number that Bloch gave me. “Garcia was found in Southeast. I know the neighborhood, but not the exact address. Anything you can tell me?”
“The auto shop turned out to be a sometime crack house. It was cleared out before anything went down. Junkies aren’t talking.”
“Big surprise. Whose turf is it?”
“Black gang. The Chosen.”
“I know them,” I said. I flipped some pages, frowning. “Isn’t there anybody Garcia was working with? Even his last case or something. Talking to the family’s going to help, but I doubt it’ll get me any closer to whoever’s killing these guys.”
Bloch grunted, then I heard the unmistakable
whump
of a stack of folders being moved from one large pile to another on a desk. “Maybe. Write this down. Bob Caldwell. He’s an old pro with the DC office of the DEA. He and Danny collaborated on a number of cases over the years. Nothing recent, unfortunately, but Danny was such a lone wolf that there isn’t anybody at HIDTA he was close to and I doubt anybody in MPDC could give you much either.”
“That’ll help,” I said. “Where’s he?”
“He’s kind of a crank,” Bloch said. “Lives on a sailboat on the DC waterfront, working off a disability.”
“What’s the name of his boat?”
“
The Loophole
.”
I snorted. “What about Okonjo?”
“Young. Single. Popular, I gather, judging by the rumblings I’m hearing over at the Montgomery sheriff’s office. You might get too much cooperation when you go over there, if you know what I mean,” Bloch said. A voice in the background intruded. After a muffled exchange, Bloch came back on the line. “Singer, I gotta go. You have enough to get started?”
“Yeah,” I said. Life went on, even for worried HIDTA lieutenants. “Can I give you a buzz later if I need to?”
“Sure. Wait, use this,” he said, giving me another number. “That’s my cell. Use it instead of the office phone. It’ll be easier.”
“And no one at the office will know about our little side investigation.”
“That, too,” he said, without embarrassment. “It might be a sideshow, but I’m not taking any chances. I don’t want anyone coming in and scooping this. Or, worse, telling us to walk away from the whole thing.”
“Fat chance,” I said. “I’m a retired cop with too much time on my hands and no supervision. I’d do this for free.”
“Who’s paying?” he asked and hung up.
Chapter Four
After my call with Bloch, I hopped in the car and headed west to the Garcias’ house in Chantilly. I’d debated with myself if I should start the murders chronologically. Beginning with Terrence Witherspoon would’ve made more sense, probably, and would’ve helped me straighten the corners on the investigation, so to speak, by following the killings in order. Being methodical can be its own reward, and produce results you might not have gotten by winging it. But the reverse is true, too: it was Garcia’s murder that felt the most charged, the most at risk, and of course had been the one drop-kicked into Bloch’s lap. Something felt right about beginning there instead of at the starting line. And how much time did I have before another cop died? “Methodical” didn’t seem to be the right approach to use in this case.
The neighborhood was a suburban plan made up of nearly identical split-level homes, all of them with funny, canted roofs that, on one side, went from the peak of the house down to almost ground level so the extension became the roof of an attached carport. The effect was to make the houses seem lopsided, as though they were about to tip over. It was a silly, house-of-the-future design that only the sixties could’ve spawned. Plenty of home-owners seemed to agree. There were extra walls, doors, porches, brick faces, siding, and landscaping, all added in an effort to differentiate one home from the other and soften the effect of the architecture. Unfortunately, none of these superficial changes could take away the rakishly tipped roofs, so the homes all seemed like kids trying on their parents’ clothes. But they still looked like kids.
I found the Garcias’ house and parked on the street. They had converted their carport into a garage and done some nice things to the porch, but it was still obviously part of the overall community plan. One car, a burgundy Corolla, sat in the short driveway leading up to the garage. I watched the house for a minute. At ten o’clock on a Sunday, I might strike out if they were at church, but failing that, I was hoping this was the best time to visit. I could’ve called, but it’s easy to say no over the phone. I got out and went to the door and knocked.
There was no immediate answer, so I had time to admire the newly mown grass, the clean windows, the swept front porch. My expectations tapered off as I waited some more. The third knock was a formality, just to say I tried, and I was already half turning to leave when the door opened. Good things happen in threes.