Wrath (The Lieutenant Harrington Series Book 1) Read online

I made a left into the subdivision as directed by my phone’s navigation app. A couple of more turns wound me back farther into the neighborhood. A right onto NW Fifty-Second Lane revealed the scene up the block. A pair of white Miami-Dade PD cruisers with their signature green stripes was parked at the edge of the road. Behind the patrol cars sat a black-on-black 1987 Buick Grand National that belonged to Steve. A few taupe-uniform-wearing Miami PD officers milled about in the brick driveway of the two-story home. I recognized a pair of officers as Rey and Donaghy. Both of the guys were from the Midwest Patrol District that was attached to our complex.

  I parked my ’74 Bronco at the curb behind Steve’s GN and hopped out. I swung the door closed, and it clanked and rattled as only a forty-some-year-old vehicle could. There was no locking of the doors, not that the locks worked, or rolling up of the windows, which, surprisingly, did work. It was how I normally left the truck. The elements weren’t going to do any more damage to it. If someone ever wanted to steal it, they’d steal it. I’d started it before with a nail file—keys for operation were more of an option than necessity. The truck had belonged to my father, who had handed it down to me ten years before. “Handed it down” might be embellishing the story a little. It went more like, “If you want that Bronco, get it out of the shed or I’m going to call someone to come and scrap it.” I got it out of the shed and up and running within a few weeks. It didn’t stay running for long. Over the years, I’d spent countless dollars keeping the old girl on the street.

  As I walked the sidewalk toward the house, I could see that the front door of the home was open, and a body lay on the floor just inside. The shadowy figures of what were probably more officers were moving back and forth inside. I made a right into the driveway and started walking toward officers Rey and Donaghy at the open garage. Past the officers, a single car was parked inside the garage, on the left. The car looked like a couple-year-old Ford sedan.

  “Morning, Lieutenant,” Officer Rey said as I walked up. Rey was a late-twenties patrol cop who had a serious infatuation with lifting weights—his muscles had muscles. While I consciously tried to hit the gym and not eat every meal from the drive-through, Rey took the health and fitness thing to an extreme. He looked as if he was about to blow the buttons off the chest of his uniform. Then again, the shirt size wasn’t overly large, so maybe that was the look he was going for.

  “LT,” Donaghy said. Donaghy was mid-thirties, average height and weight, with a short beard and almost copper-colored hair.

  “Guys,” I said. “See Sergeant Walsh anywhere?”

  “He’s inside. Probably by the front door. That’s where our body is if you didn’t see it as you were walking up,” Donaghy said. “You’re going to have to go in through the garage to get there. The scene is right at the front doorway, and the blood starts at the threshold.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Who was first on the scene, and who called it in?”

  “I was,” Rey said. “This was called in by the neighbor.” Rey pointed at the house directly across the street. “She came out to walk her dog and saw the front door standing open at the house here. She didn’t think too much of it. She walked her dog around for twenty minutes or so and came back this way but on this side of the street. She was about to cross back over to her house when she glanced over and saw our guy on the floor just inside the door.”

  “Where is she now?” I asked.

  “She’s in her house. I’m guessing she didn’t have anything to do with it. She’s about eighty,” Donaghy said.

  “Okay. What do we know about the deceased? Homeowner?”

  “The neighbor woman says so,” Rey said. “Nick Ludwig.”

  “All right.” I pulled the notepad from the inner pocket of my suit jacket and wrote the name down. “Anything else? Married? Kids?”

  “Single, I guess. No kids. She did mention some girlfriend that would come over. I told the neighbor woman that we’d have more officers who would want to talk to her. She was fine with that,” Rey said.

  “Okay. What about the crime lab or ME? Either called?”

  “I called both,” Rey said.

  “Good. I’ll be inside. If you need anything, just give me a shout.”

  “Will do, Lieutenant,” Rey said. “There are gloves and shoe covers on the dryer.” He jerked his head toward the small mudroom holding the appliances that you had to pass by to get into the house.

  I left the two at the entrance to the garage, put on a pair of gloves and shoe covers in the mudroom, and walked through the door that led inside. The mudroom opened into the kitchen. Just beyond the kitchen was a dining room and a patio door that led out back. I made a right toward the open-concept living room. I could see the back of Sergeant Steve Walsh’s buzzed brown hair as he knelt next to the body. I walked over. The man lay a couple of feet inside the front door. Steve looked over his big shoulder at me as I approached.

  “I saw you walk up,” Steve said. “What do you make of this?”

  I stared at the uncovered body. The guy lay in a pool of blood, which appeared to be about every last ounce that he’d had inside of him. I noticed what looked like multiple stab wounds in the abdomen of the T-shirt he wore and another pair of wounds in the left side of his throat. Both of the man’s hands and forearms were covered in blood. The guy appeared to be in his forties. He was maybe an inch or two under six foot, though that was merely a guess, and his legs were bent. I estimated his weight to be around one seventy-five. His face didn’t show any signs of a fight. He wore single-guy pajamas of a baggy T-shirt and sweatpants. His feet were bare and only a foot or two inside the doorway.

  “He answered the door and got stabbed,” I said. “Multiple times. Do we have any kind of time line here as to when this happened?”

  “Not yet,” Steve said. He tucked the notebook that he’d been writing in back into his suit jacket pocket and stood. Steve was thirty-five and an inch or two shorter than me, putting him around five eleven, yet I bet he had twenty pounds on me. He was wide in the chest and shoulders, built like a brick. “Some of the blood is dry,” he said. “The neighbor said that she first saw this”—Steve looked at his watch—“damn near an hour ago now. I’d have to say that this was sometime overnight. Colt, or whichever of the crime lab boys shows up, will have to get us a better TOD.”

  I looped around the body and was mindful of the blood on the floor near the threshold of the doorway. I looked at the door’s jamb, striker, and lock. “I don’t see any forced entry, so our guy had to have opened the door for whoever was outside.” I looked up into the covered entryway outside. There was a light on the ceiling, but it wasn’t on. I flicked the switches next to the door with my gloved hand. The first switch I flipped turned on the light. I clicked it back off. My eyes went to the peephole on the door. “Odd.”

  “What’s odd?” Steve asked.

  “The light was off,” I said. “There’s no forced entry, so our guy went to the door and opened it. If someone came knocking on your door in the middle of the night, what would be the first thing you’d do?”

  “Flip on the light and look through the hole to see who the hell is there,” Steve said.

  “Exactly. So why isn’t the light on?”

  “The killer could have clicked it off,” Steve said. “Yet if he was doing that, he probably would have just closed the damn door.”

  “Right,” I said. “Which is why it’s odd. If the neighbor saw this an hour or so ago, it had to have been just getting light.”

  “It could be nothing,” Steve said. “He could have looked out and pulled open the door, minus flipping on the light.”

  “Sure,” I said. Another thought registered. “This could have actually been from someone in the house leaving. The deceased could have been following someone out. Maybe he walked them to the front door, they turned and stabbed him, then they walked out.”

  Steve nodded. “Possibility,” he said. “It would account for the no forced entry and the light not being on.”
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  “Did we have a look around the place yet?” I asked.

  “I walked through. Patrol cleared it when they got here. I was only here for a few minutes before you rolled up,” Steve said.

  The sound of a vehicle creeping past caught my ear. I looked out the front doorway, and a shiny new blue Ford F-150 was pulling up to the base of the driveway. The reverse lights lit, and it began to back up. The truck belonged to Colt Greenway, the tall, wiry, late-thirties lead of the Miami-Dade Crime Lab. He had a couple of superiors at the CSIS lab, but I’d never seen any of them outside of their offices. I didn’t know what their actual titles were or how their department was structured, but in the field, Colt was the man in charge.

  “Colt’s here,” I said. I turned back to Steve, who was staring down at his phone.

  “I just got a text from Garcia. He said that he will be here in a second,” Steve said.

  “Ryan?” I asked.

  “I haven’t talked to him.”

  Garcia was Luis Garcia, and Ryan was Daniel Ryan, the two detectives from my team.

  “All right. Let’s leave the body to Colt and start having a look around,” I said.

  CHAPTER 3

  My detective, Garcia, gave me a nod and grabbed Detective Ryan. They left the living room. I’d just given them orders to start door knocking the neighborhood. I also wanted them to get into one of the patrol cruisers and see what they could find on our deceased homeowner, Nick Ludwig.

  “Did you get anything over there?” Steve called from the kitchen.

  “Two wineglasses on the living room coffee table.” I crouched and got a look at the pair. “Red wine and what looks like lipstick or lip gloss on the one. The wine is still fluid. My guess would be from last night. It would seem that he had a guest, and a female one.”

  “Unless he was into guys in lipstick. Which, hell, who knows these days,” Steve said.

  I shrugged. He had a point. “Anything over there?” I glanced at Steve, who was poking through the trash.

  “Nothing aside from it looking like there was some serious cooking going on. We have a number of bowls and utensils in the sink, a meat hammer, and dirty pots and pans on top of the stove. I may go out on a limb and say chicken parm was on the menu,” he said. “We have some bread crumbs, eggshells, chicken breast packaging, an empty can of marinara, and some packaging from cheeses in the trash here.”

  “Nice detective work,” I said.

  Steve chuckled. “Nah, there doesn’t look like anything worth getting excited about.”

  “Not much of anything over here, either. This may have started and ended at the door,” I said.

  Colt, our crime lab lead, was crouched over the body, snapping photos. Another one of his guys, Gomez, was taking photos of the front entrance.

  “Anything standing out at you, Colt?” I asked as I walked over to him.

  He took two steps to his right, probably for a different view of the body, and snapped another pair of photos. Colt let his camera hang from the cord on his neck and brought his glasses back down over his eyes. The glasses had been perched over the couple-of-inches-long blond hair hanging over his forehead. He pointed at the man’s midsection. “We have a half dozen stab wounds in the abdomen. A couple appear as if they were wrenched around a bit.” Colt made a motion as if someone was yanking a blade up and down. “And then the pair in the side of the neck. The weapon wasn’t too big. Blade height of probably only about an inch, inch and a half, maybe. The total length you’ll have to get from the ME. He’ll stick a ruler down into one of the wounds.”

  “Time of death?” I asked.

  “One second. I can give you a fairly educated guess.” Colt went into the kit sitting beside him and removed a digital thermometer. He stuck it in the man’s ear, got a reading, then looked at the ceiling. He seemed to be computing. “Just about eight hours give or take one. Body temp is right around ninety-two. Now, there are about a thousand factors that can affect my estimate, but it’s an educated guess. Skip will give you his findings on TOD as well.”

  Skip was the nickname of our county’s chief medical examiner. His given name was Bill Skipman. He’d been in his position since I’d been a cop.

  “So what time does that put us at?” I looked down at my watch—a twenty-year-old Seiko automatic diving watch that my father had bought me for my high school graduation. Somehow, it had stuck with me through the years and now had quite a bit of sentimental value. The watch was scuffed, dented, dinged, and scratched but had been snugged around my wrist for most of my adult life. It had damn well proved its worth. The time of death was right around midnight, going by Colt’s estimation.

  “Midnight,” Steve said. It seemed that his mental math was a smidgen slower than mine but right nonetheless. He joined Colt and me by the body.

  “Defensive wounds?” I asked.

  “None,” Colt said. “Either he didn’t have time to react or he was too injured by the time it registered.”

  “Does the body positioning and blood tell us anything?” I asked.

  “Sure,” Colt said. He stood and took a couple of steps toward the front door and the man’s feet. He began pointing as he spoke. “Our guy was stabbed here first.” Colt pointed about two feet in from the front door. “My guess, probably holding the door open.”

  “Do you think our killer came from outside in, or went from inside out?” I asked.

  “It really could have happened either way,” Colt said. “I can’t give you anything concrete on that right now.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Go on.”

  “Well, we have a small amount of castoff on the floor, then it moves backward into the home another couple of feet. He probably took a few steps back then was stabbed again. It looks like we have some blood smeared by footprints there.” He pointed. “Those would be from our killer, but I’m not seeing anything in those smears that is going to give us a shoe size, or sole pattern or anything. Though, we’ll have a guy out there with bloody shoes somewhere. Um, let’s see, what else. Basically, right under where his feet are right now is where the bulk of the stabbing occurred. You see these smears in these couple drips of blood?” Colt pointed.

  “Yeah, I see what you’re pointing at,” Steve said.

  I nodded, seeing the area around the guy’s ankles.

  “He went to his knees. That explains two things. From the position his body is in with his knees bent sideways and beneath him, it seems he was on his knees and fell over backward. And this little bit of weird-shaped blood on the edge of the big blood pool? I believe that is from arterial spurting, and the blood pool kind of joined with it.”

  “So he was stabbed at the door, took a step back, was stabbed again, went to his knees, then got stabbed in the neck,” I said.

  “That’s what I believe,” Colt said. “I would also imagine that there’s some blood drips outside that came from our murder weapon. Gomez!” he called.

  “Yeah!” I heard Gomez call back.

  “You got blood out there?” Colt called.

  “Yeah,” Gomez said, appearing in the doorway.

  “Get cones on it,” Colt said.

  “Roger,” Gomez said.

  “All right. Any idea on male or female suspect?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” Colt said.

  “Have you talked to Skip?” Steve asked.

  “I did on my drive over here,” Colt said. “I’m guessing he should be here in a couple minutes.”

  “Okay.” I looked over at Steve. “So all we know was that there was a good chance that we had a woman here with our guy last night. Let’s dig around the rest of this place and see if we can turn anything up that may tell us who the woman was. That and find this guy’s cell phone.”

  “Yup,” Steve said. We left Colt and the body and started up the stairs to the second level and the bedrooms. I made a right at the top of the stairwell, the only way that I could go, and walked to the first open doorway—a spare bedroom. Other than a made bed and a dre
sser, there was nothing there. The room appeared staged, as if never used. We walked in, checked the closet—which had a couple of hanging shirts, shoes on the floor, and boxes— then moved to the dresser. Each drawer was empty aside from the top one, which was filled with assorted junk. Steve and I left the room and continued down the hall. The next door on our right was a bathroom. Beyond that was another spare bedroom that looked as if it was used as a music room. A pair of electric guitars were propped against the wall near an amp. A single chair and small table sat in the corner. Three acoustic guitars lined the right wall. Again, nothing looked out of place or showed any signs that someone had disturbed the room. Nothing in it was going to lead us to the identity of the woman.

  We left the spare room and entered the single door on the left side of the hall into the master suite. A big king-sized bed with black balled-up blankets sat against the room’s back wall. A single window on the right was above one of two glossy black nightstands that bookended the bed. A matching dresser took up the left wall in the center of a pair of windows that looked out at the side of the neighboring house. No drawers were out of place. Nothing looked as if it had been gone through. Steve walked past me and made a left down a hall that I assumed led to the master bathroom. I walked to the nightstand on the right of the bed and pulled the top drawer open. Only magazines were inside. I looked across the bed at the other nightstand—a phone and a wallet. I rounded the foot of the bed and went for the items.

  “Got a wallet and phone,” I called to Steve. I scooped up the wallet and placed it on the top of the dresser.

  “I have the woman, I think,” Steve said.

  To my left, he was standing in the master bathroom, just past a big walk-in closet in the short hallway. “What did you find?” I asked.

  “Prescription paperwork. I couldn’t tell you what the hell the drug is, but it’s for a woman.” He walked the papers to me and held them out.

  “It was in the trash,” Steve said. “The date on it is yesterday. Grace Mercer.”

  I took the papers and brought them up to eye level. The woman’s address was listed as Miramar, about a half-hour drive from where we currently stood. As Steve had said, the prescription had been filled the day before. No phone number was listed, though there was a number for the pharmacy that filled the prescription. I pulled out my phone and dialed. After a few prompts, I got an answer. The call was quick. They told me the prescription was for birth control, but they weren’t giving me the woman’s phone number without some paperwork ordering them to do so. At least the woman I spoke with was polite as she told me to go fly a kite. I set the papers on the dresser.