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“Okay. We’ll look at the dash cam. If it holds up, I think we’re gonna be okay on this. Media is gonna make a BFD out of it being a kid killed. A female. And all of these people around here, the civilians, every one of them has probably got sound and video on the whole thing. Look at them, they’re still shooting cell phone video. They’re like goddamn zombies with little metal rectangles attached to their foreheads. What happened here, it’s going all over social media. They probably know about it in fucking Oslo by now. Nothing we can do about that. It is what it is.”
The Officer Involved Shooting Unit was on the scene, dropping tiny yellow cones all over the place and taking video. Two satellite trucks from the Jacksonville stations, Fox and CNN, were being held off a block away. So far no Eye in the Sky news choppers had arrived to screw up the crime scene with rotor wash. Redding could see the hard white lights as the reporters did Eyewitness to the Shooting interviews with everyone who wanted to be on television, which was close to a hundred people by now.
Dixon blew out the smoke, turned to the three of them. “You figure she’s still out here somewhere?”
“Has to be,” said Redding. “Flagler County guys have sealed off the entire neighborhood.”
“Might have broken into any one of these houses along here,” said Dixon. “We’ll have to get foot patrols out, go from door to door.”
“Might be out there in the reeds,” said Dixon.
“I think she is,” said Redding. “That’s where we last saw her. We’ll get the flatboats out looking for her. If she went in there, Mace, we’ll flush her out.”
They turned as a burst of angry barking came from the direction of the Suburban. Two K-9 Unit officers were dragging their dogs away from the driver’s side of the truck.
Redding watched the dogs, both big German shepherds. They were both fighting to get free of their leads, barking furiously. The handlers were pulling them away from the truck, the dogs resisting as hard as they could, straining against their harnesses. Both handlers were looking confused, angry, fighting the dogs.
“What the...” said Redding, walking across to talk to one of the K-9 handlers, a serious heart-attack blonde named Jennifer St. Denis. St. Denis had the dog under a tight grip as Redding reached her.
“What’s with the dogs, Jen?” Redding asked.
St. Denis shook her head, looking exasperated and puzzled. “I have no idea.”
Now her dog, a big muscled-up German shepherd, was staring up at Redding, panting heavily, gazing up at him as if he knew him, which he did.
He’d once spent nine months with this fine dog before he’d handed him off to another K-9 officer, the one before Jennifer, a guy who was KILO now, killed in the line of duty, after which this same dog, Killington, had mauled the shooter so badly he lost his left ear, most of his left cheek, all of his left eye and over two quarts of blood from his ripped-out carotid. Killington’s DNA made him nothing less than an apex predator.
Guy later sued the Highway Patrol and the State of Florida for Excessive Use of Force. He was on Death Row at the time. He lost. A while later they spiked him dead and buried him in unconsecrated ground.
The dead K-9 officer’s friends took Killington out to the convict’s grave every now and then and they’d stand around drinking beers until they were all charged up, at which point everybody would unzip and piss on the grave, including Killington.
Redding bent down and offered a hand to the dog, which took some nerve, even if they were old friends.
“Hey, Killington. What’s up? What’s the problem?”
Killington twitched his ears and then whimpered, showing the whites of his eyes. He ducked his head and then licked Redding’s hand.
“What’s with Killington?” he asked.
“You ask me,” said St. Denis, in a low voice, “I’d say he doesn’t like whatever he can smell in that vehicle. I’ve never seen him do this. Never.”
Across the road the other K-9 guy was putting his shepherd into the back of his cruiser. He glanced across at St. Denis and Redding, shaking his head, lifted his hands in a WTF gesture.
“Got a feeling we’re not gonna get a lot of help from the dogs today,” said St. Denis.
One of the forensic guys walked across to Dixon and got into a close conversation with him, Marsh and Halliday listening in.
Redding said goodbye to Jennifer, ruffled Killington’s neck again and walked across to hear what the techie had to say.
“I don’t get it,” Dixon was saying.
The tech, Redding didn’t know his name, a skinny kid with glasses and large ears, shook his head, staring down at something in his hands, a small digital camera. On the screen, a picture of a steering wheel with black smudges all over it.
“No prints, but it hasn’t been wiped.”
“You saw the woman, Jack, when she hopped out of the truck, didn’t you? Was she wearing gloves?”
Redding thought about it. He had a good memory for things like that. And you always looked at the hands first. He went back for the image, concentrating on the brief glimpse he had gotten.
“No, Mace. Hands were empty. If she had gloves, they were pink. Skin colored.”
He glanced at Marsh, who grinned back at him.
“Okay, white skin colored,” said Redding.
“So maybe latex?” Dixon asked.
“Not latex,” said the tech. “We’d have residue. Anyway, there was fresh sweat on the wheel, which you wouldn’t get if the driver had been wearing any kind of gloves.”
“Human sweat?” Marsh asked. Of course everyone stared at him like he was totally bats.
He sent the vibe right back.
“Hey, she fucking disappeared, into thin air, like she was a fucking ghost. Didn’t she, Jim?”
Halliday wasn’t backing away from it either.
“Well, we were right on her ass, Cap, and she broke outta the trees and... LQ’s right. It was like she just...vanished. I’m just sayin’.”
“Lousy visibility with this rain,” said Dixon, and then there was an uneasy silence.
“Ghosts I don’t know about,” said the tech, after a moment, and mostly to himself, as if the idea was a new one to him. He smiled.
“Tell you what,” he said. “We’ll run it for ghost DNA.”
“You do that,” said Marsh, not amused.
“And while you’re doing that,” said Jack, “run it for real DNA too, see if she comes up on any database. Tell the lab we want this done right away, not a week from next Tuesday.”
The tech promised to push it to the top of the list, and then Dixon’s duty cell phone beeped at him. He glanced down at the screen, gave everybody the “sorry, gotta take this” look, stepped away a couple of yards.
* * *
The three of them, Marsh and Halliday and Redding, watched the accelerating activity that was buzzing all around them, and the people on their porches and under their garage roofs, staring out, watching. Getting it all on cell phone cameras.
The block was swarming with uniforms, the tan and black of the County guys, the charcoal gray of the Highway Patrol, the OIS people in their white pajamas. The rain was tapering away and far off in the west the sun was threatening to show up for a brief appearance at the tail end of the afternoon.
“What do you want us to do?” asked Marsh.
Redding considered the girl in the backseat of Halliday’s squad car. She was staring back at them, gunning them, a fixed and angry scowl on her pretty young face.
“Jim, you drive that...creature...to see the docs, but don’t Mirandize her yet. You follow? No Miranda. It’ll just get her attention. Get her to Immaculate Heart ER, have her checked over, and then get her admitted into one of those secured rooms on the fifth floor. Put a PW into the room with her. Tell her she’s in Protective Custody until we can figure what’s going on. Tell her it’s because her kidnapper is still on the loose. She’s in our care, right? Not under arrest. Here’s why. She’ll likely end up being charged with Resisting Arrest with Violence, Battery on a Police Officer and Attempting to Elude. Accessory to Attempt Murder of a Police Officer, if I have anything to say about it. But she’s a kid, a yoot like they say in the Bronx, and I don’t want her skating on some fucking juvie technicality.”
“I ran her ID,” said Halliday. “No hits other than a misdemeanor shoplifting beef last year. Nothing on the dead kid either.”
“Okay. Look, LQ, you go up and see to Julie. They took her to Immaculate Heart too. Stay with her. Stay close. Don’t let anybody from Depot or HQ lean on her. You are hereby authorized to shoot any media folks who get within ten feet of her. If they keep her overnight, can you stay with her?”
“I can,” said Marsh.
“Good. Thank you. Call her people, if she has any. Call whoever you need to. Take good care of her, LQ. She’s a keeper.”
“What about you?”
“I gotta see that this Suburban is sealed up and towed to the Depot. I want Forensics to take it apart in the motor pool. There’s luggage in the back, backpacks, a couple of boxes too. And it’s stuffed full of fast-food junk, candy wrappers, soda cans, like there was some kind of rolling party going on. Like serious fun was being had. I should have picked that up.”
“Lot of shit going on at the time,” said Marsh.
“Should have seen it anyway. Make sure Forensics goes through all that stuff. Get receipts for everything. Truck has OnStar so get our IT people to contact them for any route info they might have. I want every parking ticket and restaurant receipt and candy wrapper bagged and tagged. We’ve got their iPhones so lean on the carrier to unlock them and get location data and a list of calls. Also get our people to look at all the security film they can get from gas stations and restaurants they went to. That stuff will be on their credit card records, so jump on VISA and AMEX and those guys.”
“They always give us grief, Jack.”
“Give them more. Scare the fuck out of them. Tell them there’s a killer loose, and if she kills again because they fucked us over, we’ll put it on Fox and CNN and make them look worse than United Airlines did last year.”
“Yow. Okay.”
“Yeah. Look, mainly I want to know why a kidnapped girl would try to kill the cop who freed her, and why her sister was helping. I want to know where the rest of the Walker family is, the dad and the mom and the other sister. I want to know where those three broads have been the last few days and nights, why were they in New Orleans and what they were doing there and who they were doing it to.”
“If she’ll talk,” said Halliday. “She could lawyer up, the PD would start up with all that Juvenile Offender bullshit—”
Redding glared at him, a cold steel look.
“We’re not gonna make it look like that. Like I said, we’re just gonna be these Officer Friendly cops, we’re just worried about her—is she traumatized, can she tell us what happened? That’s why no Miranda. If she does lawyer up, we make sure she gets the right PD—”
“Hobie Pruitt is the PD on duty tonight,” said Marsh. Redding took that in.
“Good. That helps. He’s not a complete idiot, and his father was a city detective in Savannah.”
Marsh and Halliday said nothing.
They knew he wasn’t finished.
“One last thing, guys. I think that runner is still around. If she is, I’m gonna try to have her in the back of my squad before the night’s over.”
He paused, smiled at them.
“So. We’re good to go?”
“We are,” said Halliday.
* * *
Dixon finished his call, stepped back to Redding, a troubled look on his face.
“That was Rod Culhane from HQ. Fernandina Beach PD called a while ago. They were doing a search around the island.”
“Yeah? And?”
Dixon’s expression was grim.
“They located the rest of the Walker family.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
Dixon shook his head.
“It isn’t. Couple of their harness guys found them in a storage unit that belonged to the Walkers’ condo. Down in the second-level basement, off in a corner. Padlocked, pretty much airtight to keep out the bugs and rats. But it had one of those roll-down gates. Stuff was leaking out from under it.”
“Oh jeez.”
“Yeah. They were inside, all three of them—mom, dad and the little sister. If it was done by the runner, she must have had a gun on them. Not easy to control two adults without one.”
“Didn’t find one in the truck.”
“So she’s still got it, I figure. They’d been tied up with plastic cable binders, had their mouths duct-taped, left there on the floor. Ten days.”
“Cord cuffs and duct tape sounds like she came prepared. The runner, I mean.”
“Not really. The storage unit was full of that kind of thing. The dad is some sort of collector, had boxes full of bones and shit.”
“All dead?”
“Two of them. The wife and the little girl. Heat stroke and dehydration. But the father, Gerald Walker, he was still alive—”
“After ten days?”
“Yeah. Guy must be half-lizard. He’s in the ICU at Baptist. Got a pulse like a moth in a bottle. Might make it. Might be a vegetable. No way to tell. Who the fuck could do something like that?”
It was a rhetorical question. They’d both been cops long enough to know that the world was packed with people who could do that and much worse.
Dixon shook his head, threw his Old Port into a ditch. He sighed heavily.
“Fuck this. I’m gonna go up to the ER, see how Karras is doing. Then I’m gonna go up to that kid’s room and turn her inside out. You wanna come for that? If your runner is still here, which I doubt, Flagler County will find her.”
Redding thought it over.
“No, I’m gonna stay here, Mace. Whatever the hell happened up at Amelia Island, this runner is at the heart of it. I’m not leaving until we get her.”
Dixon considered him for a while.
