Shattered by Death (A Jo Oliver Thriller Book 2) Page 10

  “What?” Mitch’s mouth hung open. Not a good look for the stunning red head.

  “I know. That’s where we’re headed. North of the border. To the Grab N’ Go to meet Nick. He’ll catch us up with whatever else he knows, and we’ll go to the crime scene from there.”

  I pulled out of the parking lot and headed to the highway.

  “And neither one of you wants to go there alone?” Mitch pieced it together.

  Nick hated Schlichting almost as much as I did and had found creative ways to express his feelings over the years. None of that would bode well in the face of a murder investigation. If this was a murder.

  “And if it is murder, and not a suicide, you’re going to want to have solid alibis on either side of you.” She stared at me for several seconds. Wrestling with her doubts again?

  “I guess you could say that. Safety in numbers and all.” I kept my eyes on the road, voice texting Nick we’d be there in twenty as we turned north.

  Mitch looked at me for several long, quiet seconds. When she spoke, it was more of a whisper. “And then there were five.”

  Mitch and I spied Nick’s SUV at the Grab and Go and drove toward it. Sunlight glimmered through the trees, showcasing multi-jurisdictional cops as they scuttled about, just beyond the low slung building. Dim objects took on a ghastly appearance at the edge of the black and yellow tape surrounding what looked like a solid acre around a gray clapboard shack standing a hundred yards behind the Grab and Go building. A small cluster of cops encircled a large mass on the ground which featured the khaki sleeve of last year’s department-issued shirt, torn and blood-splattered.

  So, we weren’t just meeting Nick here to convoy to the crime scene; this was the crime scene. A known meeting place for both myself and Nick. This had to put some doubt into the ‘innocent’ column for us.

  I eased the car onto the shoulder of the road and turned it off. Then I pulled my sunglasses out of my purse and slid them on. I offered a silent prayer for Schlichting and his family. Heading into the horrors before us might be manageable with Nick and Mitch by my side. Just barely.

  We lumbered out of the car and walked toward the tape separating us from the group of officers standing in a half circle. Nick was in the center. The scene’s commanding officer identified himself as Mike Torrez. He was a big man, clad in tan chinos, a navy blazer, and field boots. The moment his last name hit the air, he stepped away from us, back to his peeps. He was also a man of few words.

  Nick nodded to us and walked over to my side.

  “Look like a Fed to anyone else?” I kept my voice low and my head up as we edged closer to the officers. I wanted to keep my musings between the three of us. For now.

  “Yup.” Mitch agreed, a step behind me on my left.

  “An angry one who’s about to get angrier working for me.” Nick stepped within a few feet of the men, waving the big man away.

  “Uh, oh. Another good lovin’ gone wrong in the workplace, Vitarello?” Mitch jutted out one hip and opened her jacket, giving Torrez the evil eye, just in case there was any doubt whose side she was on.

  Torrez walked toward us. The agent next to him said something that made him stop, look up at Nick, then nod and turn away with a shrug. And just like that, Nick took control of the crime scene.

  Mitch ascended a small knoll, leading the way to the victim’s body. “He sure does have a way about him.” Her voice was thick with admiration.

  “Must have something to do with his secret agent other-life,” I jabbed, making my way over the uneven ground.

  Nick smiled and strolled on in silence next to me, leaving unsaid the fact that something about Schlichting’s death connected to my department. The Glock. What if Nick wasn’t only here for me? If the powers that be deemed it necessary to unleash all that is Nick on this investigation, then something more than his abiding affection was up. Something horrible and crossing state lines. Or, was Nick the horrible thing?

  “Whoa.” Mitch was the first to reach the ring of cops. They moved aside to let her in and widened the circle further as Nick and I approached.

  “Is that a—”

  “Note?” Torrez interrupted from where he stood a few yards away.

  “Smashed knee cap?” Mitch retorted.

  “A what?” The Fed’s surprised tone alerted the others to attention.

  “Look at his knee, the way it’s bent at a ninety-degree angle.” There was no better bird dog than Mitch.

  “So?” Torrez’s patience appeared to be in thin supply. Feeling one-upped by a female cop?

  “So you notice anything a little unusual about it?” The excitement in Mitch’s voice leaped into my stomach. “Why isn’t the knee cap prominent underneath the pant leg?”

  Mitch was seeing something the rest of them may have missed. After only a few seconds on the scene. We were here to gather information on the death of one of our own.

  My eyes traced the line of Schlichting’s body, starting from the hip down. He lay on his back with his left leg straight, as if he were standing on it, a dent in the fabric where his left knee should have been. What were the possibilities here? I trailed over to his right leg, sharply bent, to the clear outline of his kneecap.

  Mitch took it all in next to me. “This whole tableau’s messed up.”

  “Ain’t it, though?” I crossed my arms, concentrating on the scene. “There’s no sign of blood on his pants from any sort of leg wound.”

  “But plenty of blood on the exit and entry wounds to the head.” Mitch’s tone was skeptical.

  “Do they really expect us to believe he shot himself in the head and then just happened to drop into a Saturday morning yoga position?” I whispered to keep our puzzle close to the vest for now.

  Mitch grunted and waved me on with a tilt of her upturned head. “Of course not. This is a set up.”

  I nodded my agreement. “There’s a message here, but I can’t quite read it.”

  I shook my head and shifted into silence.

  Schlichting. He’d taken up way too much space in my head during the past few months. He’d been assigned to my department against my will. We had a complicated relationship, one I’d been talking through with Kira in the hopes of defusing some of the tension and powerlessness I felt in his presence. My heart was an empty bucket. Now I’d never get to make my peace with him.

  Pig though he’d been in life, even Schlichting didn’t deserve this.

  “It’s not like the world isn’t better off without him, Jo.” Nick appeared at my right, legs braced against the contours of the uneven ground.

  I snorted.

  “From what I heard, he did have it comin’. I’ll never forgive him for putting the squeeze on you—not even once he’s six feet under. Guy like that needs to be double-tapped to the head, just to keep him from coming back.” Mitch was placating me. Afraid I’d drift off and leave her standing alone in a sea of crime scene cops?

  Nick cleared his throat, then turned and started walking to the SUV. We followed. “You’ve never heard the story of how Jo and Schlichting met?”

  “I’ve heard bits and pieces of it, and I’ve had enough encounters of my own with the guy to know the world is better off without him.” Mitch stumbled.

  I sighed. Might as well tell the story myself. Maybe something would jar my memory that could help solve the murder.

  “Okay. It’s not my greatest moment. But it is the day I started really disliking Schlichting. This was back when he was on the beat in my town, my own neighborhood, months before he started working for us at Haversport.” I took a deep breath. Maybe they would see past my shame in the telling.

  “I was waiting outside in my green shorts, black canvas wedges, and black matching—”

  “You remember what you were wearing?” Mitch interrupted.

  I ignored her. “Tank top. And my light-weight, dove-gray hoodie. It was freezing outside when the squad car pulled into my driveway. I had my arms wrapped tight around my chest. It was imp
ossible to tell who was driving, but force of habit made me walk up to the car as he parked. I waited for him to scramble out and to attention. It never occurred to me how I must look to him—I hadn’t prepared for the complete and instant dislike in his creepy brown eyes.”

  We reached Nick’s SUV and stopped.

  “I remember how angry his eyes felt, staring at me, while he slid out of the car and rose to his feet. I could tell he wanted me to give way, but I held my ground. I stood right there and watched him watch me.”

  A chill shook down my arms. The rapt looks on my comrades’ faces told me they were still with me.

  “Even back then, you could tell by his buzz cut and the way he walked that he had, at best, an unforgiving nature. His uniform was too tight. His gun stuck halfway out of its holster, wear marks on the leather from a lifetime of bad habits. His hatred for all things female oozed out of every pore. He looked over every inch of my body—clearly enjoying himself—as I stood in front of him, flash-frozen by indignation in my own driveway. He managed to curb his disdain long enough to openly admire my legs. Sound effects and all.”

  I left out the part about him landing his crude gaze on my thighs. I rose up on my toes to stretch, sucking in air, taking a break before the hard part of the story. I leaned against the door of the car, my friends in a protective semi-circle around me.

  “You can’t imagine how hard I willed myself to move, how I was regretting every choice I’d made so far that morning—mostly the one where I’d called the police to report Del’s abuse. I could see this would not end well. I was disgusted with myself, with my weakness.

  “I remember trying to find my anger, hating that it had fled sometime in the first five seconds of Schlichting’s ocular assault. I kept thinking that this cop was not going to help me—no one was ever going to help me. That I’d have to figure out my life and my marriage on my own. Kept thinking I never should’ve agreed to get the latest episode on the books like some average Jane Citizen. It was a mistake.”

  My voice trailed off. Did I have the courage to share the next part with them? Did I even want to? I rested for a moment on the gravel, leaning up against the SUV.

  “It wasn’t so much what he said, at first. It was the way he said it. He all but hissed at me. ‘Mornin’, ma’am.’

  “‘It’s…’ I managed to get that one word out before my voice faltered. I’d lost my cool, and I couldn’t get it back. Not with him staring at me like a piece of discount beef. I fell into blaming myself, wishing he would pull his eyes out of my crotch, get back in his squad car, and back out of my driveway. But I just stood there, powerlessness crashing over me.

  “Then he yelled, ‘It’s what?’ He pulled out a pair of reflective sunglasses and edged them on.

  “I could see my hoodie in the lenses. My tank top blazed back at me in the sunlight, and I realized the half-zipped jacket showed the latest collection of bruises circling my throat.”

  Mitch laced her arm through Nick’s, her eyes glistening. A single tear tracked down Nick’s cheek.

  “I stared at Schlichting, starting to feel numb as his tone narrowed to a sharp, threatening point. He said, ‘So, what’s the problem, ma’am? Or should I be talking to the man of the house?’ He must’ve mistaken my squad car in the driveway for Del’s. Then he said, all menacing, ‘Gotta be married to a cop. You seem the type.’ He got up in my face, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. He seethed at me then: ‘So, are you? The type? You a badge bunny?’”

  The nausea crept up my throat as it had on that day. I reached for the driver’s door of the SUV, opened it, and put my foot on the running board. The pose gave me enough strength to look back on how I’d gotten my nerve back. How the weight of his words—the insinuation—had fallen all around me, and my anger had risen up.

  Fury had coursed through me—at the thought of being pushed around by this angry cop as I stood in the middle of my driveway, wearing shorts and wedges, at nine o’clock in the morning on Memorial Day. I finally found my strength, my voice, my legs.

  When I drifted through hallways of battered women’s shelters… floating past a sea of anguished faces… I used to wonder when I’d look up to find my own frightened eyes looking back at me.

  “Chief? You still with us?” Mitch put her arm on my shoulder.

  “Sorry!” I shook off the chilling memory. “After he pushed me around, it took me a minute to collect myself. So I closed my eyes, feeling the warm sun on my skin, and I drew strength from who I am and the women and men who depended on me day in and day out. My power, my best self, the woman I always aspire to be—returned to me. And finally, listening to him disrespect me on my own property started to really tick me off.”

  I stepped off of the running board and closed the door. I didn’t need the protective barrier. These were my friends. And this was the good part of the story. At last.

  “My brain and my mouth started working again, and I looked right at him and told him to stop talking to me like that. Now. His head snapped up at the tone of my voice. I can still see him, glasses pushed up, sneering at me, looking right into my eyes, and trying to run that foul yap of his.

  “I didn’t let that happen. I told him to keep his mouth shut and open that pad of paper, pull out his pen, and take down my statement. I told him once he had it, he was going to get back in his squad car and get out of my driveway.”

  “I wish I could have been there for you. You shouldn’t have had to go through that kind of humiliation.” Nick had heard this story more than once over the years. Each time, his sorrow showed.

  “No, but it had a happy ending. For me. The idiot swooped in toward me with his nasty breath hovering above my chest. But before he could touch me, I stepped back—enjoying it immensely when he lost his center of balance and stumbled forward. Then I pushed him with both palms in the center of his lungs, hard.”

  “The dummy charged you?” Mitch’s mouth hung open for a few seconds.

  “Yeah. He spun around, furious, and came straight at me. But I didn’t move a muscle.”

  “That’s our girl.” Nick had his arms folded across his chest. He seemed to be enjoying the retelling. This part, at least.

  “And that’s when we had a ‘come to Jesus’ meeting. I looked at him and said, ‘Go ahead, you stone fool. Lay a hand on one of your own. Let’s see how far your little manhood and your little badge’ll get you then. Go ahead, ‘cause I’m gonna enjoy every single second of this.’

  “That’s when the recognition crept across his broad face. The mix of hatred and raw lust in his eyes had finally been joined by real fear. And then I busted his chops, big time.”

  I sliced my hand through the air, leaning into them, egged on by the wide-eyed response of my friends. Were they proud of me?

  “I said, ‘What’s the problem, officer? You’ve never seen an angry Chief of Police in denim shorts before?’ I glanced at his badge and then back at his sweaty upper lip and said, ‘Let me tell you a little secret, Schlichting. I know where you work. I’ll know where you live before you make it all the way down my driveway, and I know your Chief better than you know your wife. I could have your worthless head any day, any time. But, you know what? I could not be less interested in you or your badge. You just finish your report at the station. Get back in your teeny-weeny squad car, and get off my property. Then you go and spend some quality holiday time wondering what exactly I’ll decide to do about our little encounter today.’

  “Six months later, the guy had been transferred to my station, against my strong objections. Favors owed between two mayors.” I shrugged.

  “That’s cold, Chief. Cool, but cold.” Mitch’s intensity burned in her eyes.

  I held her gaze for a moment and then glanced up the hill toward Schlichting’s body. “Well, it didn’t turn out all that hot. For us or for him.”

  We stood together in silence. Heat poured over my face and neck, but it was receding, bringing a welcome coolness in its wake.

&
nbsp; Mitch unfolded her arms and placed her hands on her hips, calling out her inner cop. “Is it just me, or is someone going around eliminating some of our Chief’s worst enemies in a strikingly similar fashion?”

  The words floated past me so I could examine them in fragments before letting them soak in too deeply. My pulse sped as the three murder scenes pieced themselves together. There had to be a sense of order. I had to create coherent thoughts and forge steel tracks to the next stop in this nightmare before another train wreck—before another murder.

  “But that just can’t be.” So much for coherent thoughts. I shook my head, but nothing else came out.

  “But it is, Jo. Look, I didn’t buy the similarities theory before, but I do now. We’ll have to wait ‘til the crime scene boys do their thing, but we know what we’re going to find. Don’t we?” Mitch dug her feet into the soft earth, widening her cop stance.

  “All three murder scenes do look to be connected.” Nick’s voice was softer than usual. It wasn’t like him to use vague language.

  “What do you mean, ‘look to be connected’? They didn’t teach you better than that at Quantico? You don’t know that they’re connected, or are you just not saying what you know?” The chords in my neck strained under my skin, and my ears were heating up. Where did Richardson fit in the midst of this theory?

  It seemed like we were at a funeral, my funeral, and everyone kept talking about how great the body looked. But hey, people, I’m dead! How good could I really look? Dead don’t look so good in my book! I needed some quality time alone. I needed a safe place to sort this all out.

  Nick stepped into my space, placing his finger under my chin before turning my face toward his.

  “A word with you, Chief?” A wisp of heat flowed through me as I met his gaze. It melted away as splintered glass broke open in my stomach. Nick nodded his head toward his SUV, cocking an eyebrow at me.

  Leave it to him to sense what I needed and to offer it—a little one-on-one with my favorite man-hunter. Or was he turning his scope on me next? I blinked and took a deep, settling breath.