Look For Me (Detective D.D. Warren #9)(5)
“Possible, though it’s now been a bit for a girl and two dogs to be taking a stroll. I issued a BOLO for the girl, Roxanna Baez, five one, Hispanic, long dark brown hair. And what the hell, the dogs, as well, two elderly Brittany spaniels, which, just to keep things interesting, are both reported to be blind.”
D.D. blinked. “Okay.” She glanced at her watch. Nearly ten A.M. now, almost an hour since the initial call of shots fired. Did seem a long time for a teenager and two old blind dogs to be walking. Plus, you’d think all the police cruisers and flashing lights might catch the girl’s attention.
“Uniforms are canvassing the streets,” Phil continued, “looking for the girl and dogs, while all detectives have been assigned to door-to-door sweeps. You know how it goes.”
D.D. did. In a situation like this one, with a missing youth who might have simply stepped out or might have been abducted, they had to cover all bases as quickly as possible. The uniforms would be their foot soldiers on the ground, looking for a teenager who might be walking her dogs, might be hanging with friends, or might be whatever. While the detectives had the trickier job of knocking on doors and politely but firmly demanding entrance for a quick visual search. Anyone who refused would be marked for further investigation later. Assuming, of course, the girl didn’t magically reappear, wondering what the police were doing in her home.
And D.D.’s job in this madness? To assess and strategize. Did they have a contained situation, where four members of a family had been tragically murdered while the fifth luckily escaped? Or did they have an ongoing crisis, four dead, one abducted—in which case Phil’s “Be on the Lookout” would be escalated to a full Amber Alert, with every law enforcement agent in New England joining the fray?
The scene was an hour old. Meaning D.D. was already sixty minutes behind.
She followed Phil into the home. The foyer was five feet deep and crowded with a dark red bench covered in a pile of coats and shoes. More coats hung on the wall, while a high shelf held wicker baskets most likely filled with hats and gloves. Small home for such a large family, and the entryway looked it. She had to step over a pair of kids’ sneakers, navy blue, with the blinky lights on the side. Jack would love those sneakers.
Not the kind of thing to think about now.
They stepped into a larger sitting area straight ahead. D.D. noted gleaming hardwood floors—obviously recently refinished—a fairly new flat-screen TV, and a dark gray L-shaped sectional dotted with bright red accent pillows. Sitting on the sofa was a middle-aged male, head slumped forward, three blooms of red across his chest in macabre coordination with the decorative pillows.
A crime scene photographer stood to their left, snapping away. D.D. raised a hand in greeting. The photographer nodded once, kept working.
“Charlie Boyd,” Phil informed her, gesturing toward the body. “Forty-five, local contractor, and current homeowner. According to the neighbors, he bought the place a couple of years ago and has been fixing it up.”
“Explains the floors,” D.D. said. She approached close enough to inspect for signs of powder burns around the wounds while trying to keep out of the photographer’s way. No speckling on the skin, no handgun conveniently dangling from the dead man’s fingers. Though last she knew, it was pretty hard to commit suicide by shooting yourself three times in the chest.
Phil kept walking; she kept following. They passed through a cutout to a tiny kitchen, big on white-painted cabinets and short on counter space. They had to squeeze their way around a rectangular table that was definitely too big for the kitchen and probably too small for a family of five. The table was currently covered in a vibrant floral tablecloth and mounds of groceries.
Which brought them to body number two. Middle-aged female, gunned down to the left of the table, just before an open cabinet. She’d fallen on her side, a can of cream of mushroom soup inches from her fingers. Also multiple entry wounds, also no sign of powder burns, so the shooting hadn’t been up close and personal.
“Juanita Baez, thirty-eight, worked as a night nurse at St. Elizabeth’s,” Phil rattled off. “Moved in with Charlie last year. Mom to the three kids.”
D.D. nodded. She noted an assortment of details in no particular order. That, even dead, Juanita Baez had the kind of glossy black hair and fine bone structure that marked her as a looker. That the house had a half-windowed back door with a bolt lock, currently undone. That Juanita’s gunshot wounds were to her chest, not to her back, as if at the last minute she’d turned away from the open cabinet, can of soup in hand, and faced her killer.
Also that the woman’s black leather purse sat next to the collection of groceries, zipped up tight and presumably untouched. Much like the collection of high-end electronics in the family room.
Phil gestured to their right, where a flight of stairs led up to the second floor. They resumed their tour.
“At one point,” he informed her, as they hiked up, “the residence was split into two one-bedroom apartments, one up, one down. Apparently, first thing Boyd did was convert it back to a single unit. Handy, given that he then hooked up with a woman with three kids.”
D.D. nodded. She had to breathe through her mouth now, the smell stronger as they crested the stairs. And not just blood, which was thick and cloying, but a tinge of ammonia, as well. Urine. Because when people said things like I was scared enough to pee my pants, they weren’t kidding. D.D. had worked enough crime scenes to know.