14th Deadly Sin

CHAPTER 62

WAYNE LAWRENCE BROWARD’S house was a brown, wood-shingled shanty, the third one in from the intersection of Hollister Avenue and Hawes Street. Standing behind a chain-link fence that was hung with a dozen no trespassing signs, the house looked like a seething box of paranoia.

I parked in front of the fence and clipped my badge to my lapel so that the gold metal would glint against the navy-blue twill. I unbuttoned my jacket so that my gun was visible on my hip. Then I pushed open the short chain-link gate.

Even as I put my hand on the gate, I knew I was way off the rails here. Tina Strichler’s murder was being worked by Inspectors Michaels and Wang of our department, but even though they were new, or maybe because of that, I didn’t feel comfortable asking them to look into a fairly baseless hunch conceived by Joe and me.

Still, a hunch was hard to put aside. And I had to check it out. I went through the gate and up the poured-cement path to the front door, upon which was taped another NO TRESPASSING AND THAT MEANS YOU notice.

I pressed the buzzer.

I heard a dog woofing deep inside the house, and a man’s voice said, “OK, Hauser. Let’s see who this damned son of a bitch is.”

There were sounds behind the door, a peephole sliding, a chain coming off a track, a bolt unracking. Given the modest means of residents of this neighborhood, either Wayne Broward was stashing gold bullion at home, or he was an officer in a one-man war.

Or maybe he had stabbed a woman to death on each of the past five May twelfths.

There was more barking, and then the door was pulled open. A brown-haired white man of average height and weight, in a denim shirt and jeans, holding a Winchester rifle, showed himself in the slice of open doorway.

“What the fuck do you want?” he asked.

“I’m Sergeant Lindsay Boxer,” I said, showing him my badge. “I’m looking for Wayne Lawrence Broward.”

The dog, a boxer as it turned out, lunged at the door, and the gent with the rifle used his leg to push the dog back from the doorway.

“I said, ‘What. The fuck. Do you want?’”

I pushed my badge forward. “I’m the police. Put the gun down.”

The man in the doorway scowled, but he lowered the muzzle.

I took a photo of Tina Strichler from my breast pocket. Her bloody death on a pedestrian crossing in front of about a hundred tourists was still vivid in my mind.

I said, “Do you know this woman?”

Broward peered at the photo, then opened the door wide and said, “Why didn’t you say so? Come in.”