Friendly Fire (15 page)

Venice typed some more. “She's got a reservation at a Hilton Garden Inn for tomorrow night.”

“There you go,” Jonathan said. “So, we know where Big Guy and I will be spending the night tomorrow.”

“Why do I have to go?” Boxers said.

“Because we're a team,” Jonathan said through a smile. “Besides, you love adventure.”

“So, what's your plan?” Big Guy asked. “You're just going to charm her into giving you lots of information that you have no right to know? And, not insignificantly, is all about you?”

“She won't know it's about me,” Jonathan said. “I'll be there as Rick Horgan tomorrow.”

“CIA or FBI?” Venice asked. There were two versions of Jonathan's best alias.

“Depends,” he said. “What I need you to do, Ven, is find out everything you can about Detective Hastings. And I mean
everything.
”

* * *

In his heart, Ethan knew that prison life would define the remainder of his years on the planet, but his brain wouldn't let him give up. Yes, he'd killed that guy, but an even bigger yes was that the guy deserved to die. As it was, his death was too easy, too calm. In a more perfect world, it would have involved more screaming and begging for mercy. But the world wasn't anything close to perfection, was it? In fact, as far as he could tell, the world was one giant booby trap waiting for innocents to turn the wrong corner or talk to the wrong person, with the result being life-altering awfulness.

He'd come
so close
to being past all that bullshit from back then. If only he'd taken the day off, or if he'd been assigned to the drive through, then maybe he wouldn't have heard the voice, and if he hadn't heard the voice, then he wouldn't be in this shit hole of a place, surrounded by the dregs of the gene pool.

Whoever had commissioned the construction of the Braddock County Adult Detention Center had apparently dictated that perpetual discomfort be a primary goal. During the day, inmates were locked out of their cells—because that made sense to somebody—but for twenty-three hours a day, inmates were confined to the indoors. That meant those who had not yet been assigned work details—people like Ethan—were relegated to spending twelve hours in the “day room”—a common area in the center of the cellblock that sported circular steel picnic tables with seating for ten, each seat surrounding the main table like moons, also made of stainless steel. Nothing was padded, and no seat allowed an inmate to lean back. The result was that no one sat for very long, but rather everyone sort of wandered in aimless circles within circles, hanging out with their homies or their fellow gangbangers. In Ethan's mind, every step they took and every syllable they spoke to each other was somehow tied to bringing harm to him.

He didn't really flatter himself to believe that that was true—he was sure there were far juicier targets than he among the general population—but if he assumed only the worst, then he could never be disappointed, right?

A television sat recessed into a wall and covered by a heavy Lexan shield, with speakers on the walls protected by heavy-gauge wire that might have been part of the security fencing. Set perpetually on either sports or religious programming—neither of which appealed to Ethan—they kept the volume at an ear-splitting level. Since no one watched the damn thing, all of the inmates had to raise their voices just to be heard in casual conversation, with the result being a cacophony of noise that put Ethan's teeth on edge.

In his real world, Ethan was a quiet guy who enjoyed quiet people and quiet times. If nothing else drove him bat-shit crazy during his time in the joint, the noise was going to accomplish the mission. Throw into the mix the guys who just loved to make noise for the annoyance value, and the result was a special kind of hell.

Ethan spent his time in an emotional state that bordered on terror. He knew he wasn't tough enough for this place, for any place where survival depended on defending one's turf. He was here on a murder charge, and that gave him some odd bit of deference, but he was so frightened of the other inmates that he knew that deference wouldn't last for long. Eat or be eaten, kill or be killed. He was doomed.

The only reasonable defense he could think of was to stay to himself. He didn't talk to anyone, he didn't occupy anybody else's space. He tried his best to lose himself in one of the paperback novels that had been stacked on shelves in the day room, but between the noise, his churning stomach, and the dozens of pages that were missing from every volume, that wasn't working so well for him, either.

One thing he was sure of was that race was a very big deal here in the Adult Detention Center. Whites stayed with whites, and blacks and Latinos stayed with their own kinds as well. Asians seemed to be the wild card, not particularly cohesive among themselves, but also neither welcome nor unwelcome among the other groups. Ethan watched, took mental notes, but kept his mouth shut about everything and everyone.

No one on earth was any whiter than Ethan Falk, but he avoided the racial divides. It was clear to him that once you sided with your own, you automatically declared war on the others, and he didn't want to be at war with anyone. Problem was, if you didn't choose a side, you didn't have any allies. As foolish a notion as he knew it was, Ethan was rolling the dice on doing his time in in neutrality. Allies were only important if you had enemies, right? So if you just stayed to yourself—

“So, what's with the rod up your ass, Meat?”

The words startled him. Ethan had been lost in his reading when the voice blasted him from close behind. He whirled on his picnic stool to see a heavily tatted and thickly built skinhead hulking over him. The man yanked the book from his hands and Frisbee-threw it across the day room. He planted one foot on the stool next to Ethan and he leaned heavily on his knee, clearly awaiting an answer.

“I-I don't know what you mean,” Ethan stammered. It was a statement of fact.

“You give me a vibe that you think you're better than the rest of us. This disturbs me. A sign of disrespect.”

Ethan's head raced. Should he stand? Should he try to back away? Should he laugh it off, or maybe apologize?

“I don't think I'm better than anyone,” he said. “I'm just quiet.”

The Hulk dusted the side of Ethan's hair with his fingers, raising a cowlick over his ear. “I think you're more than just quiet,” he said. “I think you're scared shitless.” He sold that last part with a smile.

Ethan forced a smile in return. “Yeah, well, there's some of that, too.”

“You can't let that happen,” Hulk said. “These folks in here are like vampires. But instead of feeding on blood, they feed on fear. Dude, you're like a fountain of fear.”

“Um, I'll work on it,” he said. Even as the words left his mouth, he could hear the lameness of them himself.

“You're not showing me disrespect, are you, son?” The word
son
can be used in several ways. One is to breed familiarity and make the other party feel more at ease. This was not that way.

“I don't disrespect you,” Ethan said. And instead of just leaving it there, he added, “I don't even know you. How can I feel any way about you?”

The Hulk swelled in size and helped himself to the seat next to Ethan. “There,” he said. “What you said right there sounded like disrespect to me. Sounded like you think you're smarter than me.”

“I don't think I'm smarter than anyone.” Ethan struggled to find the sweet spot between fear and calm, but he could hear for himself the underlying tone of disrespect.

“I don't believe you,” Hulk said. “What about that black boy over there? Don't you think you're smarter than him?”

“I don't know him, either.” Ethan could think of no more terrible an outcome of this than to be dragged into a race war.

Hulk poked his shoulder. Hard. “What about me, then? Do you think that I'm smarter than that black-assed monkey boy?”

The subject of their discussion—Ethan had no idea what his name was—had dialed into the conversation and was paying attention.

“I don't want any of this,” Ethan said. “Just leave me alone.” Then, perhaps a beat too late: “Please.”

“Just leave me alone. Pleeease.” Hulk's echo came in a singsong girly falsetto.

Ethan said nothing. Maybe silence would defuse things.

Hulk brushed the other side of Ethan's head, leaving a matching cowlick. “Hey, don't be rude. I'm talking to you. Do you or do you not think that I am smarter that that trained monkey over there?”

I have piss-stained boxer shorts that are smarter than you
, Ethan didn't say. What he did say was nothing.
Just let the moment pass.

The Hulk smacked him again, harder this time. “Pay attention, Meat. Do you or do you not think that whites are smarter than blacks?”

Oh, what the hell?
Ethan thought. He might have even said it aloud.
If you're gonna die, die big.
“There is no standard by which Kim Kardashian could be considered smarter than Martin Luther King.”

The Hulk's face reddened. “That's not what I asked you.”

“Actually, it kind of is.” The smart move at this point would have been to stand up, if only to have some measure of physical leverage. He worried, though, that it would be seen as an act of aggression. If there was any immutable fact in the universe, it was that he had exactly zero chance of winning a fight with this man.

The Hulk settled it by grabbing a fistful of Ethan's orange scrub shirt and pulling him to his feet. “You need to choose a side, asshole,” he said. “Are you with your own kind, or with the monkeys?”

The target of all the insults was thinner yet taller than the Hulk, and he'd transformed himself into a menacing shadow, looming over Ethan's table. Everyone else in the unit had evaporated, their absence proving their sanity.

“How about you shut the hell up?” the newcomer said.

“Back up, Chooney,” the Hulk said. “We need to know whether this white boy is with his own kind or with you.”

Somehow, that seemed to make sense to Chooney—what the hell kind of name was that?—who puffed up as big as the Hulk and seemed to be likewise waiting for an answer.

Ethan knocked Hulk's hands away with an overhand sweep and took a giant step backward. “What do you want from me?” He shouted the question loud enough to reverberate for two seconds through the canyon they called a cellblock. Plenty loud enough to be heard by guards who were nowhere to be seen. “You want me to say shit that will get me killed. I want none of this! Just leave me alone!”

“You need to choose a side,” Hulk said.

Ethan took another step back. Call it maneuvering room. “No, I don't,” he said, this time modulating his voice. He redirected his eyes to Chooney. “Do I have any shot at joining your side if that's what I wanted to do?”

“Hell no.”

He returned his eyes to the Hulk. “That,” he said. “You don't want me to choose anything. You want me to pledge allegiance to you. And you want
him
to have reason to hurt me. Why would I do that?”

The Hulk turned redder still. “How 'bout you do it so I don't kick your ass?”

In that second, reality poured over Ethan like a waterfall. He drew a deep breath and settled his shoulders. “You know what?” he said. “You're going to do that no matter what I say. So why don't you just get on with it?”

Three seconds later, it got very, very ugly.

Chapter Fifteen

D
etective James Patrick Dooley (retired) lived in a 1950s-era brick rancher on Duff Street, not far from the center of the City of Ashland. A long-unused basketball hoop stood sentry at the top of the concrete driveway, just to the side of the closed one-car garage. What Pam noticed the most was the perfectly cut diamond mower tracks in the browning front yard. In Pam's experience, cops tended to be slobs or super-neat. Clearly, Dooley leaned toward the anal-retentive side of spectrum. An ornamental fruit tree of some sort—Pam supposed cherry, but plants weren't her thing—spread wide with green leaves just to the other side of the driveway, opposite the basketball hoop, and to the left of the tree, an American flag moved in the lazy breeze atop a tall flagpole.

North Central Ohio was further along in autumn than Braddock County, Virginia, and as Pam opened the door to her county car, the chill was refreshing. The four-hundred-mile trip had taken nearly eight hours, and she felt thoroughly wiped. But the BCPD bean counters felt more comfortable spending $600 in gas than buying a $350 plane ticket. A lot of life's niggling problems would evaporate if we could ship the budgeteers to an island.

Pam had walked only halfway up the thirty-foot driveway before the garage door rumbled up, revealing Jim Dooley literally from the feet up.

He wore khaki cargo pants and work boots, along with matching untucked khaki shirt. Somewhere under there, she imagined he carried a firearm. As she got closer, she noticed that the shirt bore the logo for the Ashland Police Department on his left breast. You can take the man away from the cops, but you can never take the cop away from the man. An ample gut testified that he knew his way around pasta and beer, and his face displayed a bright smile as he walked to meet her.

“Detective Hastings?” he said as he extended his hand. His left hand held a small gym bag that rattled as if filled with tools.

“Pam,” she said. “Thanks for taking the time to meet me.” They shook hands.

“I'm retired,” he said. “I got nothing but time. Thanks for making the drive. It must be a long one.”

“If police work were easy, everyone would do it,” Pam said with a smile.

Dooley pointed to her car. “Do you mind driving some more? We've only got one car and my wife has a mahjong tournament at three.”

“The computer game?”

“Nope, the real one. They play it with tiles and I have no idea how it works. But my wife loves it, and you know what they say: A happy wife is a happy life.”

Pam forced a chuckle. One of the precious few parts of the cop's life that she disliked was the constant husband-wife bullshit comments. The whole ball-and-chain meme had worn thin to the point of see-through. She got that no one ever meant any harm, but it got wearisome having to always feign amusement.

In a perfect world, she'd have preferred some time to stretch her legs, but Dooley apparently didn't want her to come into the house. If experience was any judge, that meant that the interior was less pristine than the exterior.

She led the way back to her car, pressed the button to unlock the doors, and slid in behind the steering wheel. Dooley helped himself to the shotgun seat and Pam cranked the engine.

“You need to head west,” Dooley said. “Maybe ten miles.”

She pressed a button on her console-mounted computer screen and pulled up pre-programmed turn-by-turn directions. “Got it right here,” she said. She pulled a U-turn in front of the house, and they were on their way.

“So, you think you have a lead on this case?” Dooley said.

“I don't know that I'd call it a lead in the sense that it will bring you any closer to your killers, but I think I've found a connection.” She relayed the story that Ethan Falk had told, filling in some of the details she'd left out of the previous conversation on the phone. By the time she was done, they were already on Wells Road, the street where the shoot-out took place eleven years ago.

“It's down there on the left, about three hundred yards,” Dooley said, pointing through the windshield with a bladed hand.

They were in farm country now, but with a feeling that times were tough. White clapboard was the standard for the houses, and she didn't see a single one that didn't need a new paint job.

“Have you talked to the current owner?” Pam asked. “Are they expecting us?”

“Technically, the county is the owner,” Dooley said. “Word travels fast out here, and no matter how far you drop the price, it's tough to get rid of a place that hosted a triple murder and has a torture chamber in the basement.”

“So it's been empty for eleven years?”

“Yeah. The owner of the place at the time—a guy named Mullins—had taken a job transfer to Cleveland and had hung on to the place as an investment. Back then, he'd rented it to a Robert and Gayle Rancek, but of course those turned out to be fake names. They paid in cash, though, and Mullins never thought to ask any questions.”

“So, Mullins built a house with a torture chamber?”

Dooley laughed. “No, that was an addition by the renters. Mullins was freaked out by it when he heard. I'm not sure he ever stepped foot into the house again after that. He put it on the market, couldn't sell it, and then died of the big C about five years ago. The house went into probate, then foreclosure, and finally the bank wrote it off completely. I'm sure the county will give you a good deal if you want to buy it.”

“Not today,” Pam said.

“This place here.”

Pam pulled the left turn onto a long an unmanicured gravel driveway. Ahead lay the drooping remains of a clapboard saltbox with a sagging roof, surrounded by the remains of a picket fence. She found it surprising that the front windows were still intact. “No vandalism,” she observed.

“Like I said, word travels fast. You know the place is now haunted, right?”

She shot him a look.

He laughed. “Hey, if enough people say it, it has to be true.”

Pam parked her car in front of the remains of the fence gate, and they got out of the car together. “Tell me what you found during your investigation.”

Dooley led the way to the front door. “The shooters came in through here and through the back door,” he said. “You can still see some of the splintering in the jamb there.” He pointed to the scars on the knob side of the door panel, just above a closed padlock. “After the investigation, Mullins paid to have the doors repaired, and once the property reverted to the taxpayers, we paid for the locks and hasps.”

“Do you have a key?” Pam asked.

“This is an official investigation, right?”

“Right.”

“Cleared through the Ashland chief of police?”

“Yes. I talked to him yesterday.”

“Okay, then.” Dooley took two steps back and fired a massive kick with the sole of his boot-clad foot. The door moved but it did not open. A second kick moved it more, and the third did the trick. “That was the only key I had,” he said with a big smile. “God, it's been a long time since I've gotten to do that.” He pulled a long-handled MagLite from his gym bag and clicked it on. “Let's go in.”

Pam's MagLite was much smaller, carried in a loop on her belt. She clicked hers on and followed Dooley into the darkness of what had once been a living room. A musty, mildewed odor spoke of an unrepaired water leak somewhere, and judging from the growth of mold on the walls, it had been leaking for a long time. Shag carpeting covered the floor, but it was heavily stained, and no doubt served as the home for all kinds of mites and bugs. The linoleum surface of the tiny square that probably had been called a foyer was covered with hundreds of rodent turds.

“Think of it as a fixer-upper,” Dooley said.

“Where's all the furniture?”

“On the heels of the shooting, and in the absence of any evidence, we seized just about all of it for examination. We logged what little we found, and when we offered to return it, Mullins said just to trash it. That's what we did. Like I said, he was pretty freaked out.”

“So go back to what happened,” Pam said.

Dooley panned his flashlight beam to a burn spot on the far side of the living room where the floor met the wall. “We found a spent flashbang grenade there,” he said, “and there's another one on the other side of the wall and down the hall near the back door. We figure that the shooters coordinated their entry front and back and tossed flashbangs to mess with the decedents' heads.”

“Are those bullet holes?” Pam asked, pointing to erupted bits of the far wall.

“Yes, but they're exit holes. Here, let me show you.”

He led her through an archway to the back part of the house, to what used to be a kitchen. Only the sink remained, barely balanced atop the rotting remains of wood and Formica cabinetry. The mold was much thicker on the walls here, and the linoleum floors had buckled badly. “Watch your step,” Dooley cautioned. “Have you seen any of the crime scene photos yet?”

Pam shook her head. “That's on the agenda for tomorrow when I stop by the station. I wanted to get the lay of the land before I get lost in the photos.”

“I get that,” Dooley said, as if offering his approval. He walked through the kitchen into another small room, maybe ten by ten feet. A dining room, perhaps? Pam supposed it was possible if you ate off a card table. Dooley pivoted to the wall separating that room from the living room and indicated a vertical space in front of the bullet holes. “A tall chest of drawers sat here,” he said. “My wife would call it an
armoire
.” The he took a long step backward, into the center of the room. “This is where we found one of the bodies. You'll see it in photos. He was shot at close range—from right there on the other side of the archway—a perfect triple-tap. Chest, chest, forehead. Five-five-six through and through. Those holes in the wall are from where the bullets went through the decedent, through the drawers and then through the wall. Standard ball ammo, we found all but one of the bullets in the cushions of one of the living room chairs. We figure the other just fragmented all to hell.”

“Were there shell casings?” Pam asked.

“Exactly three,” Dooley replied. He pointed back through the archway toward the kitchen. “They were on the counter, as I recall. Maybe one on the floor, but there were only three.”

“Why do you keep emphasizing that it was exactly three?”

He recoiled as if it were the most obvious question in the world. “Three kill shots is good shooting,” he said. “And at this range, to select such precise targets—as opposed to yelling, ‘oh, shit!' and spraying bullets—says professionalism to me.”

“Professionalism,” Pam said, tasting the word.

Dooley's confusion deepened. “I thought you said you'd read the reports,” he said. “I've made my thoughts on this as clear as crystal since the very beginning. There's no doubt in my mind that this was a hostage rescue of some sort.”

She had, indeed, read that in his reports, and that was, indeed, where her inclinations lay, if only because of the vehement testimony of Ethan Falk. But she wanted to know about his reasoning. “What makes you so sure?”

Dooley seemed to sense that he was being gamed, but then he shrugged, as if to say it didn't matter. “Follow me,” he said. He edged past her and led the way back through the kitchen toward the back door in the far corner on the right, and then he buttonhooked left.

He addressed a heavy-duty door that stood closed, directly across from the comparatively flimsy back door. “Just so you know, Mullins didn't know anything about this door until we showed him pictures. The occupants at the time installed it on their own.”

“The door to the torture chamber?” Pam guessed.

“Well . . . indirectly,” Dooley said. “Remember, you wanted this tour.”

Something about the way he said that last part chilled Pam's neck at the spot where it attached to the base of her skull. She tried to imagine—while trying not to imagine—what this place would have looked like through the eyes of an eleven-year-old. As that thought formed, she realized that she now undeniably believed every word that Ethan had said.

“Watch your noggin,” Dooley cautioned as he rapped a knuckle against the low overhead. Not an especially tall man, he had to cock his head to the side and bend his knees to negotiate the steps. Pam probably could have made it standing upright, but she ducked anyway. The beam of her flashlight reflected straight back from Dooley's shirt, but the beam from his seemed to get consumed by the absoluteness of the dark. Dampness and mildew and rodent shit combined to form a nauseating, toxic stench.

“I know this is pretty awful,” Dooley said without looking back at her, “but I'll tell you that it actually smells better now than it did the first time I was here. Coroner estimated that the bodies had been dead for about seven, eight days when we found them.”

The low ceiling continued the length of the twelve stairs to the concrete floor of the basement, which was roughly the size of the house's footprint. The stairway more or less split the space. Pam played her light to the right, which revealed a wide open space, concrete floors rimmed with moldy white-painted bricks.

“When you look at the pictures, you'll see that this whole side of the space was lined with hard-backed wooden chairs.”

“Lined?”

“Along the walls. Well, those two walls there.” He pointed to the back of the room and the far wall that ran perpendicular to it. “They were arranged like they were a dance floor or something.”

Or as a place from which to evaluate your next human purchase,
Pam thought. She played her light to the left. That view revealed an archway, beyond which there was a narrow hallway whose far wall was lined with four closed heavy doors. The ceiling hung low down here, barely allowing them to stand.