Stone Cold

Chapter Twenty-One

Commander Mitch Fowler stood outside his office in the Homicide Unit addressing the detectives in all three squads. They had been on the Chapman and Henderson murders since Saturday, no one grabbing more than a few hours’ sleep each night.

Hank Rossi sat at one of the scarred and dented fifty-year-old metal desks, listening as Fowler summarized where the investigation stood, which Rossi knew was ass deep in bullshit. If it weren’t, they’d have solved both crimes and would be hungover from celebrating.

Rossi and Fowler had come through the academy together, Rossi itching for a life on the street catching bad guys, Fowler reaching for the next rung up the administrative ladder. Rossi forever looked like he’d either been up all night or slept in his clothes. Fowler was as clean, pressed, and starched as his dress uniform. They hadn’t gotten along at the academy, and nothing had changed since.

It was their mutual bad luck that found Fowler serving as Rossi’s boss. The lines between them were drawn when Fowler first took command of Homicide, coming down on Rossi after his hard-nosed tactics had landed another suspect in the ER.

“Banging heads isn’t the way the detectives under my command are going to do things,” he told Rossi.

“So what do you want me to do the next time some asshole comes at me with a knife? Kiss him?”

“All I’m saying is tone it down. Nobody else in Homicide gets in as many scrapes as you do.”

“And nobody else closes as many cases as I do, so what’s your problem, Commander?”

Fowler puffed up his chest. “This sort of thing reflects poorly on my leadership.”

“And that would be a joke if your leadership wasn’t so pathetic.”

Fowler’s phone rang. He looked at the caller ID. “It’s the chief. I have to take this call, but we aren’t finished.”

Rossi knew they were. He was too good at what he did for Fowler to do anything about the way he did it. Fowler admitted as much by continuing to assign Rossi to the heaviest cases.

It was nine o’clock, Monday morning. More than forty-eight hours had passed since the murders, and every detective in the room knew that the chances of solving either case, let alone both, dropped by as much as fifty percent when that window closed.

By now, anyone who knew something or thought they did would have calmed down, the loss of emotion putting distance between them and the crime, fear of retaliation eroding any lingering inclination to cooperate. That’s why many shootings on Kansas City’s east side were never solved.

“The neighborhood canvass was a bust,” Fowler said. “Nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything, and nobody knows anything.

“Par for the course,” Gardiner Harris said as he took a seat next to Rossi.

Harris was a veteran homicide detective with a worn, haggard face and barrel chest that had tricked many a thug and gangbanger into thinking he was slow and soft. He’d grown up on the east side, beating the odds by going to Missouri State on a football scholarship, unlike his younger brother, who dropped out of high school, joined an offshoot of a local Crips gang, and was shot to death the night Harris graduated from college. He and Rossi had worked enough cases together to bond over dead bodies, good bourbon, and a shared opinion of Mitch Fowler.

“CSI says all the blood, hair, and tissue they recovered from the Henderson scene belongs to the victims,” Fowler continued. “They’ve got some fibers that didn’t come from the victims’ clothing, but we’re a long way from tying the fibers to a suspect.”

“You mean to Dwayne Reed,” Rossi said.

“Reed is a person of interest and that’s all he is until we’ve got something more than your hard-on for him that proves he did any of this,” Fowler said.

“Everybody knows Rossi’s dick is a fucking divining rod,” Harris said. “If Dwayne Reed gives him the wood, that’s proof enough for me.”

The room erupted in laughter until Fowler rapped his fist on a desk.

“Knock it off! Knock it off! Five people are dead. You want to joke about it, do it on your own time. We’ve blanketed the east side since Saturday, knocked on every door, and run down anyone who might have had a reason to kill Chapman or the Hendersons, including Dwayne Reed. All we’ve done is use up our allotment of overtime for the month. That means that everybody except for Rossi and Harris goes back to their other cases and back to their regular schedule. No more OT.”

“Where do we go?” Rossi asked.

“My office.”

Harris clapped Rossi on the back. “Hey, buddy. Sounds like Miller time.”

Once in his office, Fowler didn’t ask them to take a seat, pointing instead to four three-ring binders on his desk.

“Those are the Chapman and Henderson murder books. Go through them and figure out what we’re missing, and then go find it. And by it, I mean the killer or killers. The chief is on my ass. If it had only been Chapman that was murdered, he wouldn’t have picked up the phone. But those Henderson kids and the mother,” Fowler said, shaking his head, then looking squarely at them, “that’s a fucking nightmare.”

“For who?” Rossi asked. “You and the chief or the Hendersons?”

Fowler glared at him, bracing his hands on his desk. “Just find whoever did this. I don’t care if it was Dwayne fucking Reed or Santa Claus. Find him and try not to kill anyone while you’re at it.”