Murder One (7 page)

“Let me ask you something, Filyp. What makes you think she would listen? What makes you think she wouldn’t just find another lawyer?”

Vasiliev waved the finger as if Sloane were a misbehaving student. “I don’t think so. You can be very persuasive, no? You will convince her.” The smile disappeared. “You will convince her because you are familiar with the consequences.”

“What does that mean?”

Vasiliev spoke Russian to the men behind him. The man on Sloane’s left stepped forward, tapped him on the shoulder, and handed him a cell phone.

Vasiliev said, “I believe this call is for you, Mr. Sloane.”

Sloane took the phone and pressed it to his ear, hearing it ring, then a familiar voice.

“Hello?”

Sloane felt his heart sink. “Jake.”

“Dad? I can barely hear you. Why did your phone come up as a private number?”

T
HE
T
IN
R
OOM
B
URIEN
, W
ASHINGTON

They sat beneath an umbrella at a wooden table. The first drops of rain intermittently splattered the deck, leaving large black spots—perhaps the beginning of the thunderstorms the weathermen had been predicting. Dan House, the owner, put pints in front of Sloane and Jenkins, and asked Sloane how he was doing before moving on to serve another table. When Tina had been alive, the bar and restaurant had been their favorite hangout. Since her death, Sloane had frequented it less, but that hadn’t stopped House from treating him like a member of the family.

“Do you need to go?” Jenkins asked.

Sloane ran a hand over his face, still feeling the rush of adrenaline from his meeting with Vasiliev. He had assured Jake everything was fine and told him he’d call when he got home.

Jenkins rapped on the table with his knuckles. “Do you need to go?”

Sloane shook his head. He had called Reid on the drive but she had left for a workout. When she called back she refused to check into a hotel.

“She won’t leave her house. Maybe that’s best. It’s like a fortress. She’s safer there than at a hotel.”

“Not if they can’t find her. What about you? You still have that gun?”

Sloane kept a Glock in the top desk drawer of his home office. Not that it had done him any good the night Anthony Stenopolis murdered his wife. He now took it upstairs when he went to bed, leaving it on the nightstand.

“What are you going to do?” Jenkins asked.

“What do you think I should do?”

“I think I gave up telling you what to do a long time ago.”

Sloane asked, “Should I let it go?”

“Like I said . . .”

“But now I’m asking.”

Jenkins sipped his beer. “What about Jake?”

“He and Frank leave at the end of the week.” Jake’s biological father and grandparents were taking him to Italy. With the commercial real estate business still in the toilet, Frank’s father had found his son a consulting position on a hotel project. It was the opportunity of a lifetime for a high school kid.

“Tell him to pack a bottle of ranch dressing,” Jenkins said. He and Alex had honeymooned in Italy and Jenkins complained he could get only oil and vinegar on his salad.

Sloane’s legs ached, the adrenaline giving way to lactic acid. “I’m tired, Charlie. I’m tired of people threatening me, threatening my family.”

“I’d say you have a right to be tired.”

“Do I court it? Do I go looking for this shit?”

The black spots on the concrete and wood decking multiplied. When the waitress appeared, Sloane handed her his menu without ordering. Jenkins did the same.

“You’re not thinking of doing anything stupid, are you?”

Water began to drip off the edges of the umbrella. Sloane looked into the restaurant. Dan House stood with his hand on someone’s shoulder, talking and laughing.

“Like I said . . . I’m just tired.”

“If this guy Vasiliev is connected, he is not to be taken lightly, do you hear me? They’re cowboys, the Russians. They’re smart, but they’re crazy.” Sloane did not respond. Jenkins said, “And to answer your question . . . no. I don’t think you court it. Sometimes bad things happen when you do the right thing.”

“Yeah, that’s me,” Sloane said, picking up his beer. “The guy who always does the right thing.”

SEVEN

W
EDNESDAY,
S
EPTEMBER
7, 2011
L
AURELHURST
S
EATTLE
, W
ASHINGTON

K
insington Rowe stepped from the blue Impala and grimaced, sucking air through his teeth and blowing out the pain until the initial wave passed. He bent back inside the car and retrieved his black go bag, which resembled a tool bag with multiple pockets and interior compartments. Rowe clenched the blue laser light on his key chain between his teeth as he rummaged through boxes of sterile gloves, booties, and evidence containers until he found the small plastic bottle and slipped it into the pocket of his windbreaker. Overhead, the blades of a helicopter thumped, a white light spotting the residence along the shores of Lake Washington. If the storm hadn’t kept the neighbors up, the helicopter certainly would.

It had been raining hard when Rowe left the Justice Center in downtown Seattle at midnight, the end of his shift, and he’d heard a steady patter on the roof shingles and skylights when he got home. He climbed into bed in time for the thunder to frighten awake his three-year-old son and had barely calmed him when his cell buzzed on the nightstand, never a good thing when you were the homicide detective on call.

Though the rain had passed, the storm had not cleared the humidity, and Rowe was glad he opted for the windbreaker and not his patrol jacket. A long morning was likely to become a long couple of days, making comfort important. He’d slipped the windbreaker over a white polo shirt, blue jeans, and patrol boots.

Rowe flipped open his notebook and wrote the time of his arrival beneath the time he received the call from his detective sergeant: 3:22
A.M.

“Rise and shine, sunshine, we have a homicide.”

Beneath the time, Rowe had written “ANONYMOUS” in capital letters, underlining it twice.

He wedged the notebook at the small of his back beneath the windbreaker, and ducked beneath the strand of yellow police tape strung across the road. A uniformed officer handed him the crime-scene log and a pen, and Rowe dutifully signed his name and noted his badge number and time of entry. Anyone who stepped beneath the yellow tape would have to do the same.

Handing back the pen, he made his way toward the cluster of dark shadows standing in the street. His partner, Tracy Crosswhite-Jones, held a notebook and talked with the sergeant supervisor, Billy Williams, who had likely reported the homicide to their detective sergeant.

“Long time no see,” Crosswhite said. She and Rowe had left the Justice Center together.

“I knew I’d see you in the middle of the night sooner or later, Professor.”

Everyone in the unit referred to her as either Crosswhite or Professor, the latter a reference to the fact that she had taught chemistry at a local high school for fifteen years. After a divorce she decided she needed to change more than just the man in her life. Having competed in pistol-shooting contests into her late teens, she enrolled in the police academy.

Rowe noted the Prius parked outside a second strand of tape strung chest-high across the street, halfway down the block. “I see you got the first pick from the motor pool.”

She groaned. “I feel like I’m driving a sewing machine.”

The detective team on call took a car home from the motor pool. Everyone else was supposed to drive a personal vehicle, but some kept the cars longer than necessary, and the pickings got slim. The Prius was last choice. Crosswhite had little room to complain as the low woman on the homicide-detective totem pole, having been recently elevated to one of the highly coveted positions. An opening
in the fifteen-person unit was rare, the promotion of a woman rarer still—Crosswhite being the first and only. In seven months, Rowe was already her third partner. The first, a veteran of thirty-two years, flat-out declined to work with a woman. The second relationship lasted until her partner’s wife met Crosswhite at a party and couldn’t deal with her husband being professionally wed to a tall, athletically built blonde who looked more like a fashion model than a police officer. Rowe’s wife had expressed similar reticence but solved the matter diplomatically: she told Rowe she’d kill him if he screwed around.

“If there’s not a dead body, this is a cruel practical joke,” Rowe said.

Crosswhite pointed in the direction of the residence.

“The body is in a room off the patio at the back of the house. Shooter apparently shot through the sliding-glass door.”

“Through it?”

“So I’m told,” she said, indicating Williams.

“Who was first in?” Rowe asked, meaning the first officer to respond.

She checked her notes. “Adderley. He’s waiting on the porch down the drive.”

The sloping aggregate driveway forked as they descended. The straight shot continued along the east side of the property, where Rowe could make out the strand of yellow tape strung between trees. The other path turned right and led to the residence. As Rowe pulled out his notebook to write down the address, his right foot slipped on a patch of moss, and pain shot from his hip, causing him to stop and grimace.

“You okay?” Crosswhite asked.

He removed the bottle from his windbreaker, shook out two anti-inflammatory tablets, and chewed them.

Crosswhite winced. “Jesus, Sparrow. I hate it when you do that. Why can’t you swallow them like the rest of the world?”

Most thought his nickname a derivation of his last name, but he had actually received it while working undercover narcotics. He’d grown his hair long, along with a scraggly goatee, and one of the members of the unit likened him to the pirate Jack Sparrow played
by Johnny Depp in the
Pirates of the Caribbean
movies. Nobody called him Kinsington, his mother’s maiden name, or even Kins, which had been his nickname growing up.

“Never could,” he said, “even as a kid.”

“But you can
chew
them?”

“Everyone can chew.”

Crosswhite shuddered. “It gives me the willies.” They continued down the path. “Why don’t you have the surgery?”

The hip had been a problem since Rowe’s senior year playing football for the U. The team doctor had called the injury a hip pointer, and Rowe had played through the pain. More extensive X rays later in life revealed a fracture that had developed avascular necrosis from a decreased blood supply to the head of the femur. Rowe fell back on his degree in criminology and applied to the FBI but couldn’t pass the medical exam, so he joined the police force. He would eventually need an artificial hip.

“Because I only want to go through this once.”

“Don’t they use titanium now? I thought that stuff lasts forever.”

“Twenty to thirty years, according to my doctor.”

“I hope someone lets Boeing know.”

“Boeing?” he asked.

“I read they make airplanes out of that stuff now.”

At thirty-nine, Rowe felt too young to be walking around with an artificial hip. But every time he stepped on the front lawn to play football with his sons, reality replaced fantasy; the pain inched him closer to pulling the trigger. Until he did, he chewed the ibuprofen.

A Mercedes Roadster sat parked near the front entrance.

“So this is how the other half lives,” Crosswhite said, looking over the car and the three-story residence. Rowe estimated the house to be nine thousand square feet, several million dollars, at least. Expensive home, expensive car—the owner had money or a lot of debt.

Two uniformed officers approached.

“Who’s Adderley?” Rowe asked.

The taller of the two, African-American, adjusted the utility belt around his waist. “That would be me.” The bulletproof vest beneath his navy blue shirt puffed him up like a marshmallow.

Rowe introduced himself, and Adderley explained that he had received a call from dispatch, an anonymous report of a prowler.

“A prowler? Not shots fired?” Rowe asked.

“Prowler.”

Under the word “ANONYMOUS” in his notebook, Rowe wrote:
Prowler?
And beneath that:
Thunder and lightning
.

“What next?”

Adderley explained that after backup arrived, he radioed dispatch to try to reach someone inside the home to tell them not to shoot him in the ass. “I asked that they keep the air open while we walked the perimeter. We found the victim in a room off the patio. Shooter shot through the sliding-glass door. I called it in ‘person down’ and held for more resources.”

“Did you attempt to enter?”

Adderley shook his head. “No.”

Adderley and the second officer both wore black gloves. “You wearing your gloves, then?” Rowe asked.

“Haven’t taken them off.”

“Show us.”

Adderley led Rowe and Crosswhite to a concrete patio at the back of the house. The sliding-glass door was shut, the glass pierced by a single hole that had caused a spiderweb of cracks, though the glass had not crystallized. Blood splattered the interior, and Rowe could see the bloodied back of a head resting on the arm of a leather sofa. A pool of blood had accumulated on the hardwood floor where the Persian rug did not reach. The flat-screen television mounted on the wall remained on, a movie Rowe did not recognize.

“When SWAT arrived, we cleared the house, taped it off, secured the perimeter, and waited,” Adderley explained.

“Did you do anything else? Talk with anyone? Go anywhere else on the property?”

Adderley shook his head.

“Search the yard?”

“Just a visual from the patio. Something else, though.”

“What’s that?”

“I asked dispatch to run a background check.”

“Why’d you do that?”

“Thought I recognized the name of the owner.”

“And . . .”

“This is the guy who was in the papers. The feds were after him for dealing heroin. He owns a bunch of used-car dealerships.”