Wrath (The Lieutenant Harrington Series Book 1) Page 11

  “Sounds good.”

  He clicked off from the call. I sent a text to Amy, telling her that I’d dozed off and was sitting at home, before I leaned forward and tossed my phone back on the coffee table. Bouncing around in my head were thoughts of a plastic-wrapped body, a dead neighbor of Mercer’s who I’d spoken to earlier in the day, and a missing patrol officer. I knew myself well enough to know that the longer I sat around thinking about it, the more I’d want to be on scene. My mind wasn’t going to let it go. There was no chance of me enjoying my evening no matter what I decided to do. I pushed up from the couch and walked to my bedroom. I could hear Lucky’s collar tags jingling behind me as I walked. Within a few minutes, I had changed into a suit and tie and grabbed my cell phone from the living room and keys from the kitchen counter. I walked to the front door. Lucky followed me and stopped near the edge of the couch. I pulled the door open and looked back at her. Somehow her dog face looked questioning—I figured it was her wondering where I was going or maybe wanting to join me.

  “You want to go for a ride?” I asked.

  She shot past me and outside.

  “I guess that’s a yes,” I said.

  Lucky was good in the truck, and I’d taken her to plenty of scenes when I’d been called to duty in the past. She’d suck wind on the drive, curl up and sleep in the back while I worked, and suck more night air while slobbering out of the passenger window on the way home.

  I walked to the Bronco and opened the driver’s door. “Up,” I said.

  She leapt from the ground onto the driver’s seat then slid over to the passenger side. I jumped up inside and leaned over to lower her window, which I noticed had a layer of slime from the last time that she’d ridden with me. Maybe the old truck was in need of a cleaning. I started the motor, and we pulled from my driveway.

  CHAPTER 20

  When I was five miles out from the scene, my phone rang. It was Dave. The gist of his call was that they’d found the female officer. She was alive. It was about all that I got before hanging up. Driving in my truck and talking on the phone at the same time didn’t work that well. Between the wind, the rattles, and the general noise the Bronco produced, holding a normal conversation was all but impossible. Normally, I would have pulled over and completed the call, but I was just a few minutes away—I told Dave he could tell me when I got there. I think he said “What?” right before I hung up.

  I drove past the guard shack, unmanned at that hour, and made my way around the big ponds to the road the Mercers lived on. After a turn onto their street, I could see our scene up the block. A couple of patrol cars were parked at the curb. Beneath the neighborhood’s streetlights, a few officers in Miramar PD uniforms rummaged around in the home’s front yard. An ambulance facing the wrong direction was parked at the curb in front of the house. A coroner’s van was backed into the driveway. An unmarked gray cruiser from our department, a cruiser that I figured belonged to Dave, was parked at the curb ahead of me on the right. I pulled up behind it and clicked off the ignition of my truck.

  Lucky, who’d been lying on the passenger seat, popped up when we stopped.

  “Stay, girl,” I said.

  She made a circle on the seat and flopped back down. I figured she’d be asleep within a minute or so or crawl into the back for more room. She had an amazing ability to fall asleep, like someone hitting an off switch. It was a skill that I wished I possessed. I stepped out and crossed the street to the house.

  A uniformed officer from the Miramar PD approached me as soon as I stepped into the home’s driveway. I flashed my badge at him before he could question who I was or why I was walking up to an active crime scene.

  “Have you seen the guys from Miami-Dade?” I asked. “Ramirez or Chestnut?”

  “One was inside. I saw the other with Officer Miller.”

  I gave the guy a nod and walked to the house. The front door was open. I entered and immediately smelled bleach. Inside, the living room was to my right. To my left was what looked like a formal dining room. A flight of stairs was located a bit farther into the house, and what I figured to be the kitchen area was back to the left. Straight through the home, I could see patio doors. A small hallway stemmed off the back of the living room area, which I figured led to the garage. I didn’t see any blood, or bodies, or anyone from my department. A uniformed officer stood near what I could see of a breakfast bar in the kitchen. As I headed back, the bleach smell increased. The officer leaned against the counter, writing something on a paper attached to a clipboard.

  “See anyone from Miami-Dade here?” I asked.

  He looked up from his paper. “One of your guys is upstairs. The scene is mostly in the master bath, but we’re thinking something happened down here and was cleaned up, accounting for the bleach smell. Go up and head right at the top of the steps.”

  “Appreciate it.” I walked to the stairwell, headed up, and found the scene. The smell downstairs made me think of Mercer and his rubber gloves and underwear.

  Inside the doorway of the master bathroom, a thin man in his early thirties crouched near the deceased neighbor. The neighbor’s body sat propped up against the bathroom cabinet. A couple-foot wide blood pool had formed around the body. The man hovering over the body was Norberto Navarro, or “Bert,” a night shift medical examiner. I spotted Chestnut with Craig Town, one of our night shift crime lab guys, near what I could see of a female in the garden tub.

  “Anything of interest, Bert?” I asked.

  He glanced at me. “What, are you working around the clock these days?”

  “Nah, this here is stemming from what us day shifters had been working on all day. Figured I’d come and see what we had.”

  “We have two DBs is what we have. Stabbed and stabbed. That one doesn’t look like the same weapon, though.” Bert motioned to the woman.

  “Is it the wife?” I asked. “Grace Mercer?”

  “The deceased’s description matches what we have on her,” Chestnut said. He took a couple of steps toward me and scratched at his short blond buzz cut. Chestnut looked like a cop. He had a square head and thick mustache. Any time I’d ever seen him in the daylight, he wore chrome aviator sunglasses. Any time I ever spoke to him, his face looked like he didn’t believe what I was saying, and he had an air of arrogance about him. I’d met a lot of guys on the force with the same attitude.

  “Murder weapons? TODs?” I asked.

  “The female has been dead a bit. Somewhere between twelve to fifteen hours is my guess,” Bert said. “This man died a short time ago.”

  The flash of a camera—it was Craig from the crime lab—caught my eye. He snapped a few photos of the woman in the tub. Too many people were in the bathroom already, so I couldn’t get much closer for a better view, but the woman appeared to be blond and thin. Her skin was a shade of gray. Blood was present around the top of her head, at least the part that I could see. Craig snapped another photo.

  “What’s Dave doing?” I asked.

  “He was with the wife of this man here. That and speaking with the female officer who was tucked into the trunk of her cruiser.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, that was where the missing officer was. The tracking on her cell phone came back to here. We found her cuffed and gagged in her trunk.”

  “Mercer put her there, I assume?” I asked.

  “She got roughed up a bit too. The EMTs were attending to her.”

  “She has to have a story,” I said.

  “I’m sure she does, but I haven’t gotten it.”

  “All right. Let me see what is going on with that,” I said.

  I left the bedroom and the house and made my way outside. Off to my left, a couple of people gathered at the back of the ambulance parked at the curb. The rear doors were open. I walked over. Dave leaned against one door. Standing with his back toward me was a male EMT who was treating a female uniformed officer who was sitting on the back bumper of the ambulance.

  Dave gave me a nod
as I walked up. “I thought that was what I made out from your end of the call—that you were almost here,” he said.

  “Yeah, talking on the phone in the Bronco sucks. I popped inside for a second, but what’s going on here?” I jerked my chin at the woman.

  “This is Officer Miller. The EMTs are just getting her patched up. She took a thump to the head.”

  The officer, thirties and stocky with shorter hair, looked up at me. “He pistol whipped me.” She shook her head. “I don’t remember anything after that.”

  “Hold still for me, please,” the EMT told her.

  “You’re the one who stopped in and attempted to make contact?” I asked.

  She nodded but said nothing.

  “And this was Chris Mercer that, what, attacked you?”

  I got another nod.

  Ramirez waved for me to follow him from the back of the ambulance. We stepped up onto the grass, and he led me toward the home’s driveway.

  “She’s a little, I don’t know what you want to call it…” Dave said.

  “Fortunate that he didn’t kill her?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but disappointed in herself, I guess you could say.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “She came, knocked on the door, and didn’t get a response. There were lights on that hadn’t been on her previous pass. She chalks it up to being on a timer and starts for her car. As soon as she turns around, the house door opens. She looks back to see Mercer standing there with a gun aimed at her. He tells her if she makes a move or goes for her weapon, he’ll kill her. So he instructed her to put a cuff on one wrist. She does. He keeps her at gunpoint and gets her linked up, hands cuffed behind her back.”

  “He’s doing this in his front yard?”

  “Well, right there in the entryway, but basically, yes. So after he gets her linked up, he walks her out to her car and puts her in the driver’s seat. He says he wants to use her computer, asks her how to look someone up. She won’t give him anything, won’t tell him. He hits her with the butt of his pistol. She still won’t give it up. He hits her again. This is when she says she realizes that him searching for someone will at least give the police somewhere to look if he decides to kill her. Plus, it will stall him further. So she gets him into her system. He takes her to the back of her car, hits her again, which I guess knocks her out, and dumps her into the trunk.”

  “Who did he search for?” I asked.

  “We don’t know. He ripped the computer from the mount in the car.”

  “Are the searches logged anywhere?” I asked.

  “The computer. Which isn’t here. I have to think that he took it with him.”

  “Obviously he wanted someone’s address bad enough to go straight after a cop,” I said. “Whose address and for what? And what the hell is going on with this guy?”

  “Yeah, I don’t know. Aggressive is what the woman uni said.”

  “More than aggressive. I mean, your wife cheats on you with another man. You kill them both out of rage. It’s at least somewhat understandable. Not that I’m condoning homicide, mind you.”

  “Obviously,” Dave said.

  “But killing the neighbor? Going after a cop?”

  “His wife cheating on him maybe scrambled his eggs or something.”

  “Sure. That still doesn’t account for what he was after on the computer in the cruiser. Right now we have a killer on the loose who just looked up someone in a patrol car. Either the person he searched for was someone that he thought could help him or—”

  “He’s set his sights on someone else to kill,” Dave said.

  CHAPTER 21

  The cop’s computer gave him an address. From a little internet stalking days ago, he knew she was still in the area. He knew her last name was the same that it had been in college—she hadn’t married, or else she had and returned to her maiden name. The home was in Doral. He would have driven straight there, yet he imagined the police would be looking for his truck in short order. Chris pulled into a twenty-four-hour big-box store and dialed a cab. The taxi picked him up a couple of minutes later. The drive to the neighborhood he wanted would take the better part of a half hour. Chris closed his eyes as they drove.

  CHAPTER 22

  Bert had taken the neighbor from the home, bagged and on a gurney. His wife had to be kept at bay by the local officers while he was loaded into the van. Dave had gone to her. I figured it was half in an attempt to get her to gather herself and half to get more information on what her husband was doing at the Mercer property.

  Chestnut and I stood in the master bedroom. I looked into the bathroom as Bert, and Craig from our crime lab, removed the woman from the garden tub. I’d got a good look at her a moment earlier. Mrs. Mercer had been beaten severely before meeting her end. Deep lacerations exposed skull beneath, spanning her forehead and brow area. It was hard to imagine that her husband, any woman’s husband, could commit that kind of violence to their spouse—infidelity or not.

  Craig had collected everything he needed before they removed her body from the tub. Photos were taken, prints were lifted, and anything that resembled evidence was gathered. The only real bit of information that we learned was how Craig thought Grace Mercer had died—bludgeoned then stabbed in the throat with a shard of a broken wine bottle. He’d come to that conclusion after Chestnut found a shattered and bloodied wine bottle in the garage trash.

  “Door knocking?” I asked.

  Chestnut nodded. “Patrol was out doing it. We haven’t heard anything so far.”

  “And no word of sightings on his vehicle?”

  “Nope.”

  “Pardon us, fellas,” Bert said. He pushed the gurney Grace Mercer lay upon from the bathroom into the bedroom. She’d been zipped into her bag.

  Chestnut and I followed Craig and Bert down the stairwell. We descended one step at a time as the two guys kept the gurney steady. Outside the house, I caught up with Dave. He was walking back toward the Mercer home from the neighbor’s front yard. Behind Dave, I could see the wife of the neighbor standing in her front yard, staring over at us. She had one of her twin daughters attached to each leg. She slowly turned and walked back to the door of her home.

  “What did you get?” I asked.

  Dave stepped before me a few feet outside the open garage door.

  “She says he came over here to try to make contact with the Mercer wife. At her request, which, as you could imagine, isn’t sitting well with her at the moment.”

  “What was her reason for sending him over here?” I asked.

  “I guess she was worried that something had happened to Mrs. Mercer. And by that I mean she was concerned that Chris Mercer had done something to her.”

  “What gave her that impression?”

  “I guess just the way in general that Chris Mercer behaved toward his wife, combined with the police looking for her and how strangely her husband said Mercer had acted this morning.”

  I wanted to ask about “the way in general” that he’d acted toward his wife, but I needed something else addressed first. “Did you see any blood inside that didn’t belong to the neighbor?”

  “Can’t say that I did.”

  “Where was she killed?” I asked. I looked up at the rear of the coroner’s van. Craig and Bert were getting Grace Mercer’s body loaded in beside that of the neighbor, John. “Craig!” I called.

  He looked back at us. “What do you need?”

  “Did you see any blood anywhere else in the house? Blood that could be attributed to the woman being killed?”

  He shook his head. “If there was, it was cleaned up. Which would account for the bleach smell in there.”

  “Underwear and rubber gloves this morning. That’s what Chris Mercer was wearing. Let’s find where she was killed. I’m guessing it was somewhere in the kitchen. The smell seems to be the strongest in there. Let’s get that checked off the list.”

  “Absolutely. My kit is still inside. I have a few photos to take
in the master bath now that both bodies are removed, but I can get going on looking for a cleaned-up scene as soon as I’m done with that. I also wanted to have a look around for some plastic and tape. If I can find some and match up some ends, we’ll know the stuff came from here.”

  “Good,” I said.

  Bert swung the two rear van doors closed and walked to Dave and me. “We’ll have both reports probably by nine a.m.”

  “All right,” I said. “Before nine, get them to Dave. After, to me.”

  “Sure thing,” Bert said. “I’m heading out with them unless you needed anything else.”

  Dave ran his hand through his short black hair. “You can leave with them. I’ll give you a call in a few hours to check in.”

  Bert gave a single nod and walked to the driver’s door of his van.

  I turned my attention back to Dave. “Did the neighbor woman expound on the general nature of how Chris Mercer treated his wife?”

  “She said they heard shouting from time to time. She found it odd that newlyweds fought as much as they did.”

  “Newlyweds, huh?”

  “I guess. They got married, and Grace Mercer moved in here last winter, she’d said.”

  “Getting married to one man and telling another who you’re having an affair with that you love him inside of one year,” I said. “Sounds like everything went downhill pretty rapidly.”

  “I guess so,” Dave said.

  He reached for his pocket and pulled out his phone, which was lit and buzzing. “This is Burns,” Dave said. “I have to think they must be almost done out there.”

  Dave clicked Talk. “Yeah, Burns,” he answered.

  I couldn’t hear what Burns was telling him and figured I’d head back inside to see what if anything Craig was coming up with. I took a single step and heard a name—Laurie Jillette. I knew a Laurie Jillette. She was one of Amy’s close friends. While I wouldn’t say I knew her well, she and Amy had been friends since college. I immediately turned around and went to Dave. “Did you say Laurie Jillette?”