Color of Justice (5 page)

Detroit police headquarters is located at 1300 Beaubien Street in Detroit. The building is called simply “thirteen hundred” by the city dwellers. In the proper vernacular, the correct pronunciation is “thirteen hunnet.”

Danny worked on the sixth floor in the SCU, or Special Crimes Unit. It was called the Sewer, the place where all the shit goes. The worst crimes in the city ended up there. Danny didn't like to think about why he'd ended up there as well.

Danny did his best hunting and pecking as he completed the reports on the incident the night before. The papers were stacked in a thick pile on his desk as he struggled to complete them. Erik sat across from him reading the morning paper.

The Sewer was a cramped room full of furniture older than time. The air had a feel to it, heavy, like something just wasn't right. The desks were placed close together and facing each other so you could talk to your partner. In the far corner was the
boss's office, with its door that was almost never closed.

The division was small, only about eight cops in all. The SCU used to be bigger, but it was downsized after a corruption scandal a few years back. There was Danny and Erik, Lisa Meadows, who had been the only woman in the unit until her partner, Gretchen Taylor, joined right before Danny. No one wanted them to partner, but they requested it. Danny guessed that neither of them wanted to deal with the shit you get from having a male partner. Brian Lane and Joe Canelli were veteran detectives, both survivors of a corruption probe, and Reuben Mitchell and his partner, a young black kid named Wendel Hamilton, rounded out the group.

The SCU leader was Inspector James Cole, an almost legendary cop, twenty-year man, commendations up the ass and the whole nine. Jim was a tall man, about the same height as Danny, only Jim had a face like a goddamned movie star. Jim's rep was that he was a ladies' man. Women were always making up excuses to come into the Sewer, and they wore the most revealing outfits when they did. But Cole took it in stride. He was all business and didn't like it when his men were distracted from their work.

When Danny arrived at the SCU, Jim had walked up to him and said, “I heard about you, since you was a rookie. I got just one rule—you don't fuck me, and I won't have to kill your ass.” Then he smiled and shook Danny's hand. Danny
knew what he meant. Danny had to behave himself, but Jim would back him up if he didn't, as long as Danny did things his way. Jim was a good boss, the kind who actually understands the job and knew how to be a leader.

Jim Cole was also best friends with the Deputy Chief, Tony Hill, the man who'd sworn in Danny as a detective. Hill had made some slick political moves, and had gotten Danny the assignment, and he wasn't complaining about it. He loved the job.

Hill had given Danny the single best piece of law enforcement advice he'd ever gotten. He'd told him that a good cop can find out what's in people's heads, but a great cop knows what in their hearts. Danny understood this to mean that he had to learn how to read people, to use his experiences on the street as a way to figure out what people were capable of. He always had notions about the people he saw and he was usually right. In police work that first instinct could solve a case or save your ass.

Danny sat at his ratty desk, opposite Erik's. He reached over for his little desk CD player and popped in the newest by DMX, a hard-core rapper who told stories of ghetto life, a world that was familiar to Danny.

When Danny came to the Sewer, he didn't want a partner. He worked alone, he wanted to tell them, but that was the kind of shit Clint Eastwood would hiss at his commanding officer in a movie. In the real world that will get your butt busted, so he took the partner and made the most of it.

When Erik and Danny met, Erik was taken aback a little by Danny's demeanor and tone of speech. He was seeing a white man but feeling a black one. He got over it quickly as most people did. All cops are race-sensitive, even if they're black, but Danny didn't want their relationship to be defined by all that nonsense. Danny could see that Erik was not the kind of guy to put anything before competency in his judgment of a person.

Danny grew to like Erik after that initial meeting but the real test would be how Erik was on the street. Danny knew Erik probably felt the same way about him. A cop can be the nicest guy in the world but if he was slow, dumb, or, God forbid, weak on the street, he would not make a good partner. Fortunately for Danny, Erik was a tough and smart cop on the street. He was savvy, had good connections, and was always watching his partner's back. Danny watched and learned from him. Erik tried to keep him in check. He wasn't always successful.

A few months back, they were investigating a murder on the west side around Livernois and Puritan, a nice enough area, but one that has grown increasingly bad in the last few years. Some woman had gone nuts with a gun. The short word was that drugs were involved. Normally the SCU would not have been called in on such a routine homicide, but Danny and Erik had been out in the area so they'd caught the case, at least for the time being.

When they got to the crime scene, there was a
drugged-out woman holding a gun on the uniformed officers who'd gotten there first. How they'd let their guard down Danny didn't know.

Before Erik could say anything, Danny had his gun out. The standoff was tense, and Danny could sense that the bullets would fly at any moment.

Erik stood behind the other cops and assessed, trying to talk her down. Danny had a clear shot at her. Danny didn't know if she'd jerk and fire at one of the officers, but a hit from an unsteady hand was a better bet than what they faced at that moment. The odds were good.

Danny was about to take the shot, when Erik did something that Danny would never forget. He walked over to the lady with the gun, and snatched it from her hand. She fell in a heap and started to cry as she confessed to shooting her abusive husband.

Later, Danny asked Erik why in the hell he'd stepped into the firing line. Erik said, “She didn't seem like she was gonna do it. She just didn't look like the type.”

That display of smarts, instinct, and bravery always reminded Danny that there was another way, an alternative to a violent solution, even if it meant he had to put himself in harm's way.

The SCU had gotten confessions from the three men on Tireman they'd arrested, and so Danny was feeling pretty good. The shooter was a hard case named Odace Watson. He had three warrants outstanding, and priors going back five years. He was ready for the long stretch. The other two men
had sung their asses off about how Watson was the triggerman and they were just along for the ride.

“How about puttin' some music in that thing?” asked Erik. “Marvin Gaye, Aretha, hell, I'd even settle for Whitney Houston.”

“Don't got none of that,” said Danny. “What's wrong with my man, here?” He held up the DMX jewel box, showing the rapper covered in blood.

“He looks like we should be putting cuffs on his ass, that's what wrong with him,” said Erik.

The other cops laughed. Danny and Erik had an ongoing feud about the former's choice of music. For Erik, there was only classic soul, anything else was noise.

“Don't listen to him,” said Wendel Hamilton, the young black detective. “He's just old. Turn it up.” Danny bumped up the sound a notch.

“That shit ain't music,” said Erik. “And y'all know it. These rappers just recycling old soul tunes anyway. Damned thieves. Oh hey, Danny, Marsha wants you and Vinny to come over this weekend, to eat me out of house and home.”

“Can't,” said Danny. “Vinny's real busy with her law classes, and the rest of the time, she's got reserved for bitchin' at me.”

Venice Shaw was Danny's live-in girlfriend and former partner. After she'd caught a bullet in a botched robbery, she had quit the force and enrolled in Wayne State Law School. Danny was happy at first, but the strain of her first year was taking a toll on the relationship. And it wasn't as if they didn't already have enough problems. Vinny
was black and her family, a big loving bunch, had never warmed to her living in sin with a white man.

“Can't believe you got a fine piece of woman like that.” Erik put the newspaper down. “And when she gets that law degree, she's gonna be making big bank, too. You ready for your woman to make more money than you?”

“It's all good, baby,” said Danny. “Money's money, you know. But this law school shit has been makin' Vinny a real pain in the ass. I already had enough trouble from her damned family. They practically walk around with ‘Fuck the White Boy' shirts on.”

“That's what you get for messing around with black women,” said Erik. “Safer to play with fire, or a tiger or something.” He laughed and all the detectives within earshot did, too.

Erik was kidding, but he was more right than he knew. Danny had not expected the resentment he'd get for his love for Vinny. He'd always thought prejudice was the exclusive province of white people. But black people were prejudiced, too, and something worse, they had right on their side when they said you were not good enough. To them, it was not bias, it was truth, and they had a shitload of history to back it up.

“Brown and Cavanaugh!” yelled Jim Cole from his office. Danny and Erik dropped their conversation and went over to him.

“Yes, sir,” they said almost in unison.

“Good work on those drug hits. City hall is hap
pily wiping the sweat off their nuts. But we got us another situation. I want you two to come with me to a crime scene.”

Jim put on his jacket and walked off. That was Jim, quick to the point, quicker to action and don't ask any unnecessary questions.

Danny and Erik looked at each other for a second then followed, grabbing their stuff. They were reading each other's thoughts. If Jim Cole was going to a crime scene, then something had happened that was more than murder.

The big house on Seminole was crowded with police cruisers, medical examiner's vehicles, and forensic trucks. Danny always got a thrill when he pulled up to a crime scene, a rush that could best be described as happiness. That's when you knew you had it bad for the job, when you looked at the devastation of evil and saw only the beginning of adventure. In a sense, you became an observer of life, detached from the normal feelings of men. The crime scene was an oasis, a clearing in the clutter of life.

On the ride over, Jim had informed Eric and Danny that a couple had been murdered and that they were going to get the case. The victims were John and Lenora Baker, rich and well connected. The Bakers were millionaires who owned gas stations, McDonald's franchises, and lots of other shit. They were also close friends with Mayor Crawford and had helped bankroll his election
campaign. That's why Jim had come along. Someone important was dead.

Danny snapped on plastic gloves as he stepped into the house. He was always worried about contaminating a crime scene. When he'd started as a detective, he used to literally shove his hands into his pockets to keep from touching anything accidentally. Today a single smudge or print could win a case, so he took no chances.

The forensic team swarmed around the room. There were twice the number of people as usual. They dusted, looked for samples, and tried to get shoe prints from the floor. They had cleared a path across the big living room. A sheet of plastic ran through the room and up the staircase like a malevolent yellow brick road. But this was not Oz or Kansas. It was a murder scene and somewhere in this former place of safety there were people whose lives had been taken.

Jim veered off to talk to the tech team leader. Danny and Eric walked into the back to check the point of entry. The killer had come in via the rear door, which led into a pantry. The alarm system on the adjacent wall had been neutralized.

“The bastard disabled the alarm like a pro,” said Danny.

“Maybe he's one of them master burglars,” said Erik.

“He didn't take anything,” said Danny. “He came to kill.”

“A lot of trouble just to pop somebody,” said Erik.

“All depends on how important the killing is to you,” said Danny. “Remember that lady last year who killed her husband because he was cheating on her with the woman's own sister? She waited until she got a business trip to China, took a two-day trip into the country to get a rare herb she'd read about. She slowly poisoned her husband for over a year before he died.”

“I remember,” said Erik. “She was cold-blooded. She'd've gotten away with the shit, too, but she was so fucked up with guilt that she confessed.”

Danny and Eric watched the techs finish their work then decided to take the plastic road upstairs. When they got back into the living room, Danny saw that Jim had been joined by Tony Hill, the Deputy Chief of Police. Hill was an intense-looking man who was known to have an unfailing sense of duty. He'd killed the former Chief, Bill Fuller, in a shootout when Fuller had gone bad in a murder investigation. Hill and Cole stood next to each other in that way only partners can, like friends and much more.

Tony Hill caught sight of Danny and nodded. Danny acknowledged him and moved on upstairs.

Before he got to the room, Danny smelled it, the pungent odor of something that wafted out of the kill room. Danny and Erik put plastic bags on their feet and walked to the door.

In the master bedroom, forensic techs worked feverishly on the scene. Danny's eyes focused on what his nose had already confirmed.

The room had been covered in dirt.

The killer had brought a bag of potting soil from the downstairs and tossed it all around the room. He'd done this after the victims were dead, because the bodies had been covered in soil as well.

“What the fuck?” said Erik.

“I smelled it, but I didn't expect this,” said Danny.

“Is he crazy?” asked Erik almost to himself.

“Maybe he's smart, making sure it's not easy for us.”

Danny and Erik walked inside on a path that had been vacuumed through the dirt. All around the room, the techs worked and cleared the dirt at the same time. Danny could feel their frustration as he made his way to the bodies on the bed.

The bodies were still tied up, their hands placed on their chests. The dead couple was black and in their mid-fifties. Their faces were ashen and their bodies bloated and discolored. The wounds that had been inflicted were covered by thick electrical tape to stop the bleeding. There was some blood on the bed, which had seeped through the tape.

Erik scanned the place, taking it all in. He was methodical, and didn't like to rush into anything.

Danny saw a flash of white from the corner of his eyes. He turned and walked over to the forensic team leader, Fiona Walker, a woman whom he knew from several cases. Fiona was brilliant, dogged in her investigations, and a bit of a smart-ass. He liked her.

Fiona looked at Danny with her pale eyes,
which were lodged inside even paler skin. Fiona was an albino, an affliction which she took in stride, but which usually shocked anyone who didn't know her. Fiona's albinism was extreme. Her skin was almost translucent, her hair a stark white, and her eyes a color that Danny had never seen. If he'd had to guess, he would have said they were a light gray. She wore tinted glasses because her eyes were light-sensitive, something she called photophobia.

But what Fiona lacked in pigment, she made up for in brilliance. She had solved several major cases in the last two years and had even been asked to consult on a joint task force with the Justice Department a few years ago.

“So what we got?” asked Danny.

“I see dead people,” said Fiona, laughing.

“We noticed that,” said Erik. “What's with the dirt?”

“Someone's making my life hell,” said Fiona with anger. “Definitely intentional.”

“Was it meant as a clue or something?” asked Danny.

“How the hell should I know?” said Fiona. “If I had to guess, I'd say all he wanted to do was taint the room before we got here. From my point of view, that's the scariest damned thing in here. This guy knows my business, the sonofabitch.”

A young black kid in a lab coat started a vacuum and began to vacuum some of the dirt. He moved slowly, carefully, and checked the floor after each stroke.

“That's Jacob,” said Fiona. “He's the newest genius who's come to take my job from me. It was his idea to vacuum all the dirt for analysis. This killer's already a pain in my ass.”

Danny saw her point. The killer was smart enough to know that the cops would try to get forensic evidence, so he threw dirt all around the room to make it impossible to do so. If anything was found that led to the killer, he'd say it came from the taint.

“So, how'd they get it?” Danny asked.

“They got shot,” said Fiona. “Looks like a small-caliber weapon, probably a .22. Then the sick fuck stopped the bleeding with this.” Fiona showed where the bodies had been taped up over the wounds.

“Why the hell would he do that?” Erik asked, looking at the corpses with growing interest.

“They stayed alive longer,” said Danny.

“Right,” said Fiona. “A bullet tears through vessels and organs and causes bleeding. Body cavities fill up, and the victim drowns in his own fluids. It would take a while. And our boy was clean. No prints, not even foreign fibers as far as we can tell so far, but who the fuck can tell for sure in all this mess?”

Fiona kept talking as Danny tuned her out. He wanted to look at the murder scene and try to get a notion of what had happened. Danny had learned a long time ago that all crime comes from simple human motivations, and could be solved only by the same kind of elementary logic. If you
assumed too much complexity in a crime, you could miss the obvious motive.

With this in mind, Danny looked at the faces of the victims. The killer had put gags on them, thick elastic bands with a plastic ball in the middle. But that was not what held his attention. On the sides of their faces, he saw a red mark where the gags had been, only it was wider than the band itself.

“How come these marks are so wide?” Danny asked, cutting off Fiona.

“What?” she said.

“These marks on the sides of their faces, the gags made them, but why are they so damned wide?”

“I'll be,” said Fiona. “I didn't notice that. I'd've caught it later, though, Mr. Smarty Pants. Maybe they tried to get them off.”

“How?” asked Erik, and pointed to their still bound hands.

“Jesus,” said Fiona. “Don't be asking me questions, okay? I'm a scientist.”

“Maybe he moved them,” said Danny. But why? he thought to himself.

Danny and Erik left Fiona to her work, promising to call on her after she had some hard scientific data. They walked back down the plastic road to their boss, who was now alone. Jim saw them and waved them over.

“We don't have a lot of time,” said Jim. “This thing's gonna hit the front page tomorrow, and the high-society types will be calling city hall trying to find out why these two were killed and if they
should mourn or hop a plane to Barbados. We get anything from Fiona and her people?”

“No, sir,” said Danny. “It's a straight-up whodunit so far.”

“And some sick shit,” Erik added. “This boy's got to be a psycho.”

“I'm with you,” said Jim, “and you can never predict what a sick fuck will do. Still we have to try to head this off as much as possible.”

“Victims have any family?” asked Erik.

“We're checking it,” said Jim. “Right now, I got a tip from the Deputy Chief that these two had some bad blood with some other high-enders just a few days ago. I need you two to check it out tomorrow.” Jim gave Danny and Erik the names and an address.

“They know we comin'?” Danny asked.

“Yes,” said Jim. “They're not suspects, but try to get a lead out of them.” Jim walked off, pulling out his cell phone.

“Political shit,” said Erik.

“Society shit,” Danny added. “Five or six kids get smoked every day and I give a fuck about this?”

They walked out of the house carefully as the tech team kept at it. The plastic covering their shoes was cleared of the dirt they'd tracked, then put back into the room.

It was a fact that a killer always left something behind at the scene of the crime. In the age of microscopic evidence, that was more likely than not.

Danny wondered what the team would find in
the mess left by the killer, and if it would lead to anything. Beyond his preliminary thoughts about the case, however, he was deeply troubled by the thought of a killer who was so determined to kill and had the knowledge and foresight to thwart a forensic investigation.