Silent City (14 page)

“Hello?”

“Pete, it’s Carlos.”

“Oh, hey.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m in North Lauderdale. Trying to find Chaz’s apartment,” Pete said, turning the business card over in his hand.

“What?”

“I was going to tell him I’m done looking for Kathy,” Pete said, defensively. “Like we talked about.” The last thing Pete wanted was another verbal lashing from Broche. He was still recovering from the first.

“I need you to get over here,” Broche said, his voice low and rushed. “Right now.”

“Shit, what the hell is going on?” Pete said, annoyed at the idea of having to drive back to downtown Miami with his task undone. “I am literally right by his place, so it’s going to take me a while to get back to Miami, I just need to find…”

“I’m at Chaz’s,” Broche said, choosing his words carefully. “You need to get here. Now.

• • •

The scene at Chaz’s apartment building was subdued—at least compared to the crime scenes Pete had seen on television and the few he remembered as a kid, peering out from the back of his father’s car as his dad went to work. Pete could easily tell which apartment was Chaz’s by the bright yellow tape cordoning off the entrance and adjacent areas. He got out of his car quickly, having parked in the empty lot across the street, and walked over briskly. He saw Broche heading toward him and they met a few feet from the tape. Pete didn’t expect any good news.

“That was fast,” Broche said, his hands in his pocket. Gone was the cheerful uncle that embraced him when he came into the police station. This was a seasoned homicide detective looking at—worst-case scenario—a possible suspect, at best a nuisance. “Thanks for coming.”

“What the hell is happening?” Pete said, short of breath for some reason.

“I’m going to ask you a few questions,” Broche said. “Because, to be frank, this looks strange.”

“What is going on?”

“Where were you last night?”

Pete was taken aback. He paused for a second.

“Is Chaz in there? Is he dead?”

Pete’s genuine surprise seemed to soften Broche’s features slightly. His mind was more at ease. But he pressed on.

“Where were you last night?”

Pete stuck his hands in his pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. He tossed it at Broche. The older detective grabbed it before it hit the ground. He unfolded the receipt and scanned the time stamp.

“Zeke’s at 3
A.M.
?” Broche said, his eyebrows raised slightly. “Still drunk?”

Pete didn’t respond. He kept his hands in his pockets.

Broche slipped the receipt in his pocket.

“Chaz is dead,” Broche said. “At some point last night someone came into his apartment and shot him.”

Pete’s brow furrowed. He couldn’t process the information fast enough. He had just been on his way to talk to Chaz and now he was dead. Just a few days prior, he’d sat with him at the Abbey having the conversation that started all of this. His job, memories of his father, and now someone was dead. Pete swallowed.

“How did he die?”

“I told you,” Broche said. “He was shot.”

“Two in the head?”

Broche’s eyes met Pete’s, confusion in them.

“How the hell did you know that?”

“It’s the Silent Death, isn’t it?”

Broche coughed and grabbed Pete by the elbow, walking with him away from the crime scene and further out of earshot.

“Shut the fuck up about that,” Broche said, his voice low. “You have no idea who’s listening here.”

Pete lowered his voice.

“Well, is it?”

“I don’t know,” Broche said. “It has all the earmarks. Two shots to the head. No witnesses talking about gunshot noises, which points to a silencer being used. Our medical guys seem to think it happened in the evening, considering the scene, which is his M.O.” Broche looked around, toward the yellow tape before continuing. “Look, we can’t talk about this for long. But I wanted to call you—to warn you. If this is who it looks like, then you’re in trouble, too. Whatever you’ve been sniffing around is not good. You need to step back. Take a vacation. Go away for a while. And definitely, definitely quit this shit. I can’t think of a better reason to back off than this.”

“This isn’t about finding this girl anymore,” Broche said, his words quick. He was pacing around Pete. He was nervous. “This is about staying alive. Whoever found Chaz knows what you’ve been doing, too.”

“Do you think it’s Contreras?”

“What?”

“I’ve read the reports,” Pete said, no longer worried about upsetting Broche. He wanted to hear what the detective thought. He needed more insight than he could provide himself. “I know my dad thought Contreras was the guy. I think he might have been right.”

“Why’s that?” Broche said. “I’m not even going to ask how you got to those.”

“Chaz was arrested a few years ago for harassing someone at a bar on South Beach,” Pete said, surprised at his facility with the information he’d read the night before. “The Clevelander’s a nice joint. Fancy. For people with money to burn. And from what I’ve read, he’s got some stuff going on outside of just running Casa Pepe’s. Maybe the kind of stuff that puts schlubs like Chaz Bentley in his debt.”

Broche cleared his throat and pursed his lips. He was thinking.

“Ok, hotshot, fair enough,” he said, turning to the crime scene but still talking to Pete. “So why kill Chaz Bentley now?”

“Because he fucked up,” Pete said. “He shared too much information with some has-been newspaper editor, who has nothing better to do than sniff around Contreras’ operation.”

Broche turned around, concern in his eyes.

“You reminded me of your father for a second,” Broche said. He cleared his throat. “Sure, you may know what the score is, but whoever did this,” he said, waving his arm toward the crime scene, “can do a lot worse to you.”

Pete nodded.

Broche grabbed his arm. “No one is going to help you with this,” Broche said. “No one is on the other side of this guy except me, and I can’t do much. If you expect the Miami PD to do anything, you’ve already lost. This city doesn’t speak his name.”

“I know,” Pete said, shaking off Broche’s grip. “I’ve heard all the stories. We don’t even know this is him, though.”

“You just put the pieces together yourself,” Broche said. “Now you’re having doubts?”

“I guess once the rush of figuring it out faded away, I realized I could be dead any minute now.”

P
ete pushed the security chime at the Miami Times employee entrance after realizing that his security pass had ceased to work, as Vance had said over the phone when he was suspending him. He waved and put on a smile as he saw Gustavo, the Times’ elderly security guard, make his way to the door. He didn’t wave back.

Gustavo pushed the intercom button, his eyes squinting at Pete.

“Your pass not working?”

“Guess not,” Pete said, waving it in front of the two-way glass for some reason. “Probably been in my car too long.”

Gustavo nodded in disagreement, his movements slow and deliberate. “No,” he said in his accented English. “Your pass was deactivated. I saw you last week. Worked fine.”

Shit. He’d hoped for a few things to fall into place when—on his way home from the crime scene surrounding Chaz’s apartment—he’d decided to go back to the Times building. One was that his access card still worked. Another, in lieu of a working card, was that he’d be able to charm Gustavo, into letting him in. His plan was falling apart.

“It’s weird,” Pete said, talking louder than usual because of the glass between them. “I guess it just stopped working. Can you let me in?”

Gustavo nodded “No” again, pulling out a reporter’s notebook from his back pocket. Inside the notebook was a folded piece of paper with printed text on it. Gustavo slowly unfolded it and turned it so Pete could see the text. It was a list of names, mostly people from his department. He figured the numbers were identification codes of some kind. His name was highlighted.

“You’re not here anymore,” Gustavo said. “Bosses say your pass not working. No pass, no entry.”

Pete started to turn back, but stopped himself. He approached the glass window, hands up.

“Look, Gustavo,” Pete said, making a point of using the guard’s name, hoping the sense of familiarity would help his cause, “I just need to get a few things from my desk. I wouldn’t bother you if it wasn’t important. I just have a few pictures of my ex in there and…I know this sounds terrible, but it’d mean a lot to me to get them back.”

Gustavo kept his eyes locked on Pete. He nodded, almost imperceptibly, before turning the door handle and opening the security entrance. Pete walked through and half-bowed, sheepishly.

“You hurry up,” Gustavo said. Pete felt a pang of guilt for playing to the wizened security guard’s kindness. “I get in major trouble if bosses know I did this.”

“I know,” Pete said, pushing the elevator button that would send him upstairs. “Thank you.”

Gustavo returned to his post and Pete waited impatiently for the elevator, the beeping sound that signaled each floor the only noise in the poorly lit entrance.

• • •

The third floor was empty and dark when Pete got off the elevator. He’d chosen the floor—which housed mostly ad sales representatives and the business people who worked standard 9-to-5 schedules—because the last thing he needed was to run into a coworker, much less one who’d wonder why he was snooping around the Times. He made an immediate left and tried the first set of offices—Online Ad Sales. Locked. He walked down the hall and tried the next door—Classified Ads. The door creaked open. Pete looked around quickly, noticed no one, and slipped into the office.

The room was relatively small, with a few cubicles stationed in the middle of the room and two locked offices on the west side. Pete decided against turning on the main light and slid into the nearest terminal. He scanned the computer—which was archaic and probably slow, much like his old work computer—and cautiously booted it up. While he waited for the machine to wheeze into existence, he pulled out a tiny black book from his front pocket. Kathy’s address book. He flipped to the back of the book and folded it slightly to keep it from closing on itself. He waited for the usual login screen to appear on the computer monitor, prompting him to sign into the Miami Times internal editing server and employee network. But instead of using his own username and password, which, he guessed, had been deactivated along with his security pass. He carefully typed in the login and password from Kathy’s book, hoping that he’d guessed correctly what the two words were. The slightly loud whirr coming from the old computer confirmed that Pete was right, and the login screen went blank and morphed into something else. The screen was still monochromatic, which reminded Pete of his computer classes in middle school. the Times’ usenet, or SCI as the tech support guys called it, was basically just a glorified file-sharing network, where a reporter or editor had his own private “basket” of files, either stories in progress, notes or miscellaneous text, and a number of public baskets. Depending on where a story was in the editing process, it could be in one of any number of baskets, from “Slot,” meaning it was in the hands of the duty editor to “1A,” meaning it was edited and ready to be placed on the front page. But Pete was very familiar with SCI and knew that the most interesting stories were the ones tucked away, either in reporters’ private files or in the kind of baskets no one really bothered with, like “Enterprise,” which was just a fancy way of saying it was a story you, as a reporter, had decided to research or begin working on without much editorial guidance. It was there that Pete started.

Since he was logged in as Kathy, he could not only access and view any folders that were public to all editors and reporters in the system, he also had access to areas that were restricted to news staffers and areas that were for Kathy and her administrator’s eyes only. The Enterprise folder was barren, Pete discovered. Thinking about it for a moment, he figured not many reporters would want their work in a relatively public place before it was final. With a few clicks he was in a basket labeled “KBENTLEY.” Kathy’s private area. It was littered with files, about 30. Some were obvious, like “browardcourts09notes.” But what would the title to her big, unfinished story be? Pete scanned the folder for the obvious choices. No “Silent Death.” No “Miami Murderer.” No “Contreras.” After a few minutes he’d clicked on almost every file in the main KBENTLEY folder when he went back and found a subfolder, which he’d previously ignored as irrelevant. It was titled “Published Stories/Old Notes.” He’d disregarded it because he knew this story hadn’t been published—but it would be a good place to put a story you didn’t want anyone to find very quickly, Pete thought.

He double-clicked on the sub-folder and found another handful of files. Most were, in fact, notes for stories Kathy had written. A recap of a double murder in Hialeah. A convenience store robbery in Opa-Locka. An interview with the outgoing police chief from three months’ back. Pete was getting frustrated. That’s when he heard the footsteps. He couldn’t tell which direction they were coming from, but he’d definitely heard them. Whoever was outside wasn’t walking in a straight line, but stopping and starting. Probably to avoid being discovered. Pete turned the monitor off with a quick push of a button and knelt down by his desk, which gave him a view of the office door, but also gave him cover.

Who would be wandering this floor so late in the day? Pete had no idea, but whoever it was didn’t want to be found. He waited. A few minutes passed and the silence persisted. The hum of the computer was the only sound Pete could make out. He tried to keep his breathing low and calm. He let another minute pass before he got back on his chair and turned to face the computer, his ears still on full alert.

Pete tried to focus. He turned the monitor on and took a moment to scan the dark office. Empty. The noises had been nothing, he thought. Probably a custodian or someone trying to catch up on work.

He went back to the subfolder and continued to scan the list of file names. All were fairly standard, and obviously were for stories that had already run—except one. Titled ‘groceries,’ the file seemed innocent enough, but from what Pete could tell, it was also the file most recently edited by the user KBENTLEY. Pete double-clicked the file icon and waited for it to load.