The Midtown Murderer (7 page)

Chapter 18

Early the next morning,
Trent woke to the raw pain in his lower back. He wanted to go back to sleep, but a ruthless, forgotten dream was waiting for him.

H
e looked in the mirror and cringed. His face was bruised, and a purple half-moon with yellow highlights had developed over his reddened eye. Blood dotted the Band Aid.

Drinking
his way through a pot of strong coffee, he decided how to proceed. The first person he wanted to find was the tramp he’d passed while searching for Chloe. He was part of the Midtown scenery, and Trent had a hunch that the cell phone he had been holding might belong to the killer or the victim.

But first
Trent took a cab to a drug store and filled his prescription for the Percs. He placed them in his medicine cabinet then heated up a cold plate of mac and cheese for breakfast.

As the first light burned weak and gray through the windows, he
limped across the bridge and into the park. The landscape was plentiful: hundreds of deciduous and evergreen shrubs and trees cast long shadows, and the glasswork of the skyscrapers that faced the rising sun shined like polished silver.

Trent shuffled through the park
, careful to avoid collisions with joggers, bikers, and people on rollerblades. He questioned park workers, police, homeless people, and a mulatto man with bleached hair smoking a controlled substance.

The temperature had plunged. A biting wind blasted through the streets of the lower city. He pulled his jacket tight and
pushed his aching body to a Caribou coffee shop on Piedmont Avenue.

Seated at a
window that overlooked the park, he pulled off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. A thin waitress with brown hair drawn back into a tight bun stopped at his table. Her eyes widened when she got a look at his face. “What happened?”

“I strayed into a hornets
nest without an invitation.”

“You should be in the hospital,” she said, “not out walking around.”

“Done that, been there,” Trent said, exploring a chipped tooth with his tongue. “Is your espresso machine working?”

“
It is.”

“Could I please have a double latte?”

“Coming right up.”

She set his drink down along with a crescent-shaped tart filled with apples. “On the house.”

“Thanks,” Trent said, trying hard to smile. “There’s a putrid smell outside the front door.”

She wrinkled her face and said, “The sewer line must be backed up again
; every once-in-a-while we get that sweet-smelling odor drifting up from the corner gutter.”

“You should complain to the city.”

“The people in Midtown filed a complaint about the stench last year. The city is supposed to start an overhaul of the Midtown sewer-system next month. They even gave it a fancy name: ‘The Midtown Alliance Sewer Renovation Project.’”

“I’ll hold my breath.”

“You ought to go back to bed.”

Trent
ordered a second latte, then opened his backpack and pulled out a copy of the GID report he’d made on a Xerox machine at Office Max. He found his Spiral notebook and a ball-point pen and took notes.

The introductory paragraph stated the propriety nature of the report. ANY OFFICER CAUGHT DIVULGING ANY PART OF THIS SENSITIVE REPORT WILL BE SUBJECT TO CRIMINAL CHARGES UP TO AND INCLUDING IMPRISO
NMENT, it read.

His eyes fell
to the beautifully colored diagrams and easy-to-read figures, and he idly wondered if the officers at the Midtown Police Plaza had the same level of expertise as their art department. Probably not.

The pie chart on the first page broke down the annual Atlanta murders by district and substantiated what
Radcliff had told him.

What the sergeant hadn’t revealed was that ten of the thirteen Midtown victims-from three different gangs-had been shot with nine-millimeter
hollow-point slugs fired at close range. Ballistics confirmed that the slugs collected from the ten murders had all been fired from the same gun.

Someone had penciled a chain of little circles down the margin of the page.
Dates and tiny descriptions of the murder victims had been marked in each circle. The largest one was at the bottom and a comment had been penciled in: NO STRUGGLE HAS TAKEN PLACE. HOW DOES HE DO IT?

Quite a mouthful,
Trent thought, as he resumed reading. Seven of the Midtown hits were individual, but last Wednesday three thugs were murdered in a crime-infested neighborhood across from the Atlanta Botanical Gardens. Ahhh, Trent thought, recalling the picture on the front-page of last Sunday’s paper.

The Midtown killings had taken place over the last four months, and the majority of GI
D officers believed that a vigilante killer was roaming the area.

“That’s a bright group,” Trent said, as the same thought kept whirling around his head:
for no one to hear the shots, the shooter had to be performing some kind of a magician’s trick.

Of the remaining Midtown murders, one had been committed with a knife, one with a shotgun, and the other was a hit-and-run.

Trent nibbled his tart and read the second chapter. It examined the success and failure of illegal drug laboratory busts in Atlanta over a twelve-month period.

A vertical bar graph compared the
local drug cartels and substantiated that Triple’s operation had the highest percentage of failed meth lab busts.

The general
consensus was that Triple had been one step ahead of the police, clearing the toxic chemicals from a targeted site before the drug interdiction team arrived. An internal investigation had been launched to find the source of the leak, but thus far they had been unable to locate the department spy.

Another chapter detailed the individual
meth lab busts. Each page was dedicated to a site and included the date, time, ground and aerial photos, and text discussing the outcome of that specific bust.

An entire chapter was dedicated to a fatal
meth lab explosion that occurred last August. The lab, which had been hidden in an abandoned pump shed, had belonged to the Outlaws.

Four Midtown officers
were killed in the fire, and the investigative board believed that the department spy tipped the Outlaws to the raid. The lab basement had been flooded with accelerants, and the fire was so intense that a positive ID of the remains could not be carried out.

Trent studied t
he accompanying photographs. A police helicopter pilot had taken pictures of the lab a week before the fatal fire. From those photos, he could see a small concrete-block shed situated next to a stand of Pecan trees. Subsequent photos shot at ground level showed the burned-out structure from various angles.

The text that followed discussed rewriting the SOP’s for entering a suspected
meth lab so as to ensure the safety of future drug interdiction teams.

The last page of the report discussed the near-epidemic levels of meth overdoses inside the Atlanta Beltway. The prevailing theory was that a cartel
-possibly Triple’s-was operating an enormous clandestine lab somewhere downtown.

Chief Clay had penned the concluding statement. It stated that until more information was collected, no mention of the vigilante killer, the department spy, or the super meth lab would be made public.

Trent glanced at his watch. Leave it to a politician, he thought, placing the latte-stained GID report in his bag.

It was time for him to fulfill his end of the bargain he had made with
Garcia.

Chapter 19

Trent left a ten-dollar bill on the table to cover the tip. He decided he’d rather be caught by the police giving a copy of the GI
D report to the Apostles than suffer sleepless nights wondering when Utah and his thugs would ambush him.

He descended the stairs into the cold hard air of the city, shuffling along a sidewalk that rimmed the park, head down, hands in his pockets while the wind whipped his hair around.
He spotted the agreed upon steel-mesh trashcan. An instrumental ‘Jingle Bells’ from a store competed with a bar-belled muscled man ringing a handheld bell by a red bucket. When Trent loitered by the trash bin, the man turned toward him. “Drop it in the bin,” he said gruffly.

“It’s
damn cold out,” Trent said.

“Keep walking
, Palmer,” the man said. “It’ll warm you.”

T
rent dropped the copy into the bin and hurried along.

Fortified by the caffeine,
he continued down Fourteenth Street and turned into a harmless looking neighborhood in search of the house where the triple homicide had occurred.

The first block
consisted of high-rise condos and retirement homes; further in, the neighborhood deteriorated rapidly, becoming a dreary wasteland of rundown tenements blighted by corruption and poverty, violence and drugs.

Trent had reached the Midtown Public Housing Project.
The temperature was hovering just around the freezing point. Thick, misty fog, streaked and dirty, complemented the weed-infested yards, seedy wood-frame houses with bars and grills on the windows, and old dented cars at the curb.

Trent found the
creaky house where the killings had occurred. The dirty windows were boarded-up, the stained paintwork was cracked and chipped, and rusty junk and rubbish littered the yard.

The police said the killer had not gone out the back because an eight-foot fence with strands of barbed wire rimmed the adjoining property. Trent knew the
police were thorough; he had no reason to doubt them. That left the street. The only way out of the neighborhood was back to Fourteenth Street and then left or right.

Trent went door-to-door asking questions.

After an hour he was bone-cold and shivering and had decided to pack it in for a rum and coke, when he spotted a disabled man in a wheelchair rolling down the street. He wore a water-proof bomber jacket, had a round pink face, and wore an Atlanta Braves baseball cap.

“Hey there,” Trent said.
The wind gusted harder now, with snow at times.

“Goddamn litter bugs,”
the man said, using a metal pole with a trigger and a grabber-claw to pick up coffee cups and fruit bar wrappers.

Trent dropped a few singles in
to his coffee tin.

“Thanks,” he said. “You don’t live on this street.”

“No. I’m checking into the triple murder; know anything about it?”

“Today’s Wednesday. Been a week.”

“That’s right.”

“You a cop?”

“No.”

“A PI?”

“No,” Trent said, handing him a business card.

The man studied Trent’s card and said, “
Peoplefinders.com. So you ask questions and find people?”

“
That’s it. I’m searching for the little girl who was abducted from Piedmont Park.”

He tilted his head to one side. “What happened to your face?”

“I get paid to take a few bumps and bruises. Now, about the murders . . .”

“I know it was Wednesday because that’s when the garbage truck
s come through; those guys spill half the shit they take out. I was picking up trash.”

“Anything unusual happen?”

“Yes, sir,” he said, tilting his head forward and back, as if trying to bring Trent into focus. “I would’ve told the cops, but they never came back.”

Trent stared back at him. “Told them what?”

“That truck and trailer.”

“What about it?”

“Well, there’s always a lawn crew that comes on Wednesday morning.”

“So?”

“A Latino crew cuts that yard,” he said, pointing at the house directly across the street from where the triple homicide had occurred. “They’d finished, packed up, and split. Five minutes later this jet black pickup truck pulling a black covered trailer whips into the neighborhood. Driver does a one-eighty in that cul-de-sac and parks right there,” he said, nodding at Trent’s feet.

“Uh-huh,” Trent said,
examining the oil-stained asphalt.

“
Guy wearing a black hoodie and big black sunglasses gets out and sets an orange cone down in front of the truck; puts one behind the trailer, too. You know, real careful like. No one does that shit on this street.”

“O
K.”

“Then he crawls in
side the trailer, drops an aluminum ramp, and drives out on a black riding lawnmower. Cuts the lawn then uses a black leaf blower in the driveway and around back.”

“What’s odd about that?”

“House is a repo. Lawn’s been neglected for months.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah. I’d never seen the truck or driver before.”

Trent smiled.
There it is, he thought. The break in the case that Chief Clay didn’t want to acknowledge existed.

“Any company name on the guy’s rig?”

“No. Just that shiny paint job. Black as death.”

“Why didn’t you call the police?”

“Had to go to the VA hospital that morning and get my lungs cleared out,” he said, drawing on a filterless cigarette. “Ended up in intensive care for two days. ‘Give up fags,’ the doc says. ‘Fuck him,’ I say. What with living in a wheelchair, smoking is the only pleasure I have.”

“Sorry, man.”

“Aw, it’s all right. Fuck those dopers. Fuck the Midtown Blue.”

Trent spent
a few minutes grilling the guy, but he couldn’t describe the driver or the type of truck or provide any other details.

“Damn garbage men,” the wheel-chaired man said, waving a hand at the street.

Trent knelt and picked up a piece of trash. “You’ve been a huge help, and I appreciate your time.” He peeled off a twenty and stuck it into his tin. Then he walked out of the neighborhood.