Shakedown

Chapter Seven

When I was assigned to the Dallas office, we lived in a new subdivision that must have been landscaped with a steamroller, it was so?at. Half the families that lived on our block were with the Bureau, some of the agents buying their houses from the agent they were replacing, knowing they would sell it to their replacement a few years down the road. We knew each other’s spouses, kids, and dogs. Everyone looked out for everyone else, watching each other’s houses when someone was away for the weekend. The level terrain and the absence of trees more than eight feet tall made it easy to see everything.

We were watchers, noticers, detail people. Something strange, someone new, something that didn’t look or feel right, we picked up on it. It was what we were trained to do.

Frank Tyler lived three houses down from us. He was a computer programmer, worked out of his house, jogged every morning, waved to me when I drove Kevin and Wendy to school. Every year he dragged his Weber grill to the end of the street for the Fourth of July block party, grilling hot dogs and making balloon animals for the kids.

I must have seen his face a thousand times. Brown, welcoming eyes pinched at the corners; they always seemed to me to be from laughter and sun. A once-broken nose, crooked enough to make his face slightly off-kilter in an interesting sort of way. His mouth was full, his smile quick and easy. He wore his dark hair in a casual cut, angling across his forehead. That’s all I saw. It wasn’t enough.

Joy always picked the kids up from school. One day, she had car trouble. Frank worked at home and she asked if she could borrow his car. He told her that he had some errands to run and would be happy to swing by the school and pick up the kids. Wendy had Girl Scouts that afternoon. Kevin was the only one who would be coming home. She called the school to let them know that Frank would pick him up.

When Frank didn’t come back, Joy called the school. They told her that Frank had been there, shown identification, and signed the form confirming that he was taking Kevin as she had authorized. One of the teachers remembered seeing Kevin get in the car with Frank.

Worried, Joy went to Frank’s house, knocked, and went in when she found the door unlocked. She walked through the house, stopping in the den, where she found stacks of child pornography on a coffee table. That’s when she called me.

Today it’s called an Amber Alert. Back then we didn’t have a name for it. We didn’t need one. All agents dropped what they were doing to find Kevin. The Dallas police scoured the streets. A highway patrolman spotted Tyler’s car southbound on I-35 between Austin and San Marcos a few hours after he’d taken Kevin. The chase lasted thirteen minutes. It ended when Tyler ran over spikes the patrol had spread across the interstate to puncture his tires, the car swerving into the concrete median barrier. I was in a helicopter heading for the scene when Tyler shot Kevin and then put the gun under his chin, blowing up the face that had fooled me.

I thought about Kevin each time I stepped into a crime scene, promising him I would get it right this time, that I wouldn’t let him down and be deceived again by a friendly smile, an anguished cry, a poker face, or any of the other masks people wore.

I learned to trust hard facts, lab work, and the polygraph. My jury consultant friend, Kate Scranton, was different. She was all about behavioral clues-leakage, she called it-the face more than the body, the heart more than the mind. I wanted proof beyond a reasonable doubt. She wanted the truth, saying they weren’t always the same thing.

I stood in the doorway, absorbing the scene, letting the dead and the details talk to me, comparing the images with the hours of surveillance tape I had watched. I recognized the card table Marcellus used to conduct his business and the Louisville Slugger standing in the corner that had earned him his reputation. Plastic sandwich bags containing crack were scattered across the table’s vinyl surface, all of it probably worth less than ten thousand dollars on the street. It may have been enough to kill five people for, but at least for this killer, it wasn’t enough to steal after they were dead. That didn’t mean the murders weren’t about drugs. It only meant that the murders weren’t about these drugs.

The walls were bare. No pictures, no mirrors, no clocks. The hardwood?oors were warped, a dimension I couldn’t see on the video; an upturned box of Chinese leftovers sat in one corner, a trail of fried rice littered across the?oor. The only other furniture was two folding canvas chairs. This was a place of business, not a home, the old television in the corner the only concession to comfort.

The bodies rested in pools of blood beneath where they’d fallen. I’d let the crime scene specialists find the bullets, calculate the trajectories pre- and post-entry, but it wasn’t hard to pin down the basics.

Marcellus was on his back, his shoes less than five feet from the door, closer than the Winston brothers by several feet, the difference enough to make him the first victim the killer had confronted. That fit with me hearing him yell “what the fuck?” the instant before I heard gunfire. The entry wounds on Marcellus’s body were in his gut and chest, the volume of blood indicating that at least one bullet had hit an artery, probably causing him to bleed to death.

The Winston brothers were slumped on the?oor on either side of the television. Rondell had taken a round in the belly and a round in the groin. DeMarcus was hit in the left thigh and the neck.

A professional would have put all his rounds in the killing zone-the center chest, making sure with a final round in the back of the head after his targets were down. This looked like the work of an amateur who had gotten lucky, except amateurs weren’t likely to use night-vision goggles. That wasn’t the only mixed message.

The killer was organized, turning off the power, using night-vision goggles, picking up his shell casings. Organized killers were the most difficult to catch because they left so little evidence at the scene.

But then there were the bloody footprints. The killer had stepped in Marcellus’s blood, leaving dark red footsteps going up the stairs. He’d stepped in the blood a second time, leaving another set of footprints from Marcellus’ body to the back of the house. I couldn’t be certain about which set of footprints came first, but my sequence made the most sense. Kill these three, then do Jalise and Keyshon, then out the back door.

I followed the second set of prints through the kitchen and turned on the back porch light. The rain had washed out any other footprints, though I hoped the crime scene people would find trace amounts of blood in the concrete. I walked back to the stairs, reassessing a killer who had been good enough to shoot three men in the dark and who had been organized but careless enough not to wipe his feet.

Someone on the SWAT team had also stepped in the blood, proving that it was easy to do. His ridged boot prints were easily distinguished from the?at, rounded prints left by the killer. There were a few partial prints that were clear enough to indicate the surface of the sole. It didn’t have a pattern like an athletic shoe and it didn’t have the smooth, even appearance of leather shoes. And it was wider than a normal shoe, like it was made by something that had been slipped over a shoe. Maybe the killer had worn galoshes so he wouldn’t get his shoes wet in the rain or bloody in the house.

I hesitated before going upstairs, turning toward the front door, conjuring the killer as he entered the house, testing another assumption I’d made. There had been only one killer. If there had been more, there likely would have been another set of footprints that didn’t match those left by the SWAT team.

The smell of blood and bodies hit me as I climbed the stairs. It had been there all along, but I’d been too focused on the scene to notice. It was a too familiar stench, but I never got used to it. My stomach was churning as much from the pungent odor as the anticipation of what I would find in the bedroom.

The clothes hanging in the closet had been swept to either side like a parted curtain, exposing where Jalise Williams had been hiding. She was on her knees, bent over her child, the back of her head a pulpy mess, with two more entry wounds in the middle of her back. Keyshon’s hand was wrapped tightly in his mother’s hair, the rest of him hidden.

I crouched next to her, my chest trembling, the shakes waiting to be let loose and wanting to touch the boy’s hand. I searched for a glimpse of his face, finding it buried against his mother’s neck, and wondered in a fanciful moment if our two sons-hers and mine-would somehow find each other on the other side. Mine was not a conscious faith, born of study and contemplation. I had more hope than belief that pain and suffering and good deeds would be rewarded in some afterlife. I accepted the notion of free will but had seen enough to doubt the wisdom of a God who had bestowed it. I didn’t wonder whether pure evil existed. I had seen it firsthand. I pulled back, the mother cradling her child evidence enough of what had happened.

The rest of the room was a mess, clothes lying on the?oor where they’d been dropped, bed unmade, makeup and jewelry littering the dresser lining the wall opposite the bed. The disarray was natural, the product of people who never cleaned up after themselves. It wasn’t the result of the killer tossing the room in search of something.

The jewelry looked real, though I was no judge. The last diamond I’d bought was for Joy’s engagement ring twenty-eight years ago. Like the drugs left on the card table downstairs, there was enough jewelry worth taking even if it wasn’t enough to kill for.

I reminded myself that this was a crack house. I’d found the drugs and jewelry. Now it was time to look for the guns and money. I tried a series of deep breaths to sti?e the shakes, glad that it worked for the moment.

Using a pen to pull open drawers without leaving fingerprints or disturbing those already there, I did a quick and dirty search of the bedroom and bathroom. I found a few hundred dollars in cash, not the stacks of twenties I would have expected. That didn’t mean money wasn’t hidden elsewhere in the house or that the killer hadn’t found it in the bedroom and decided it was the one thing worth stealing.

The guns were hidden behind a panel in the bathroom wall. A couple of sawed-off shotguns, three 9mm Smith amp; Wessons, and enough ammunition to make a point. It wasn’t exactly an arsenal, but it was more than one man needed to protect hearth and home. The serial numbers on the weapons had been filed off, making them untraceable and worth more than the drugs or jewelry to someone in the business of killing people. They would have been easy to find and easy to steal.

My search was interrupted by a whimpering sound coming from beneath the bed. I lifted the blanket draped over the foot of the bed, finding a dog, its paws covering its nose, peeking at me. I scooped the dog up, examining the honey-colored, curly-haired mutt, guessing its weight at around fifteen pounds, confirming that it was a she. The dog licked my face and peed, the shower just missing my pants.

“You go, girl,” I told the dog, setting her down and checking her collar, reading the name on the tag. “Stick with me until we find a new home for you, Ruby.”

The dog followed me back down the stairs. I picked her up so that she wouldn’t step in the blood, and took her outside. The rain had stopped. The yellow patio light faded to black at the edge of the concrete slab. The dog ran toward a tree on the side of the yard, disappearing in the darkness. I heard her scampering back and forth until she found a suitable spot, quiet as she relieved herself once more. Satisfied, she trotted back to me, jumping up and planting wet paws on my leg. I reached down to pet her, finding a twenty-dollar bill matted against her wet coat.

I peered into the night outside the ring of patio light, unable to see anything more than the outline of a tree. Lights were on in houses on either side and in the houses that backed up to these. It was the middle of the night, but no one was asleep. In spite of all the lights, deep pockets of darkness remained, black boundaries cutting people off from one another. The helicopter closed for another pass.

The killer hadn’t stolen the drugs or jewelry that had been left in plain sight or taken the guns he could have easily found. He’d left bloody footprints leading out the back door onto the patio, his trail disappearing either because of the rain or because he’d removed whatever he’d been wearing over his shoes. Now Ruby, the newly orphaned dog, had retrieved a twenty-dollar bill from Marcellus’s backyard. A bone, I would have believed. A double sawbuck required a leap of faith I was in no mood to take.

I retraced Ruby’s route, wet, spongy ground squishing beneath my shoes as I approached the tree, the shakes starting their drumbeat in my torso. My eyesight adjusted to the darkness enough that I could see clumps of twenty-dollar bills scattered amidst fallen leaves. I guessed there was at least a couple of thousand dollars, maybe more, lying on the ground. Maybe enough to steal. Maybe enough to kill five people for. Then why leave it out in the rain? Ruby had followed me, nosing the money, pawing at it.

The police helicopter hovered overhead, capturing me in a cone of blinding light. I shielded my eyes, squinting past the tree, catching a glimpse of a silhouetted figure running away, a?eeting sense of recognition washed out by a shouted command from behind to stay where I was. I recognized Troy Clark’s voice over the din of the chopper, wondering why he would give me such an order. Then I knew why. He didn’t recognize me. I was bent over at the waist, my face buried against my knees, shaking so badly I could barely stand.