Dead Center (The Rookie Club Book 1) (30 page)

"Then what happened?"

His gaze steadied. "He went around the house and took off in his car. Your dog followed him, but he wasn't doing too good—limping real bad and bleeding. He went up to the porch, and I didn't know what to do 'cause I didn't want you to know I was living back there."

Jamie blinked at this news. The boy had been living in her yard? For how long?

"So I rang the doorbell and ran."

Jamie stepped closer to Z, squatted down so she was below him. "You saved my dog's life."

He looked at her, nodded slowly as a smile took shape on his lips. "I guess I did."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."

"You think you would recognize that man if you saw him again?"

He pushed out his lower lip, took it in two fingers, and pulled on it lightly. Then, dropping it, he said, "I think so. You got a picture of him?"

"Not yet, but I'm going to get one while you're getting cleaned up."

"I'm glad you're not mad at me that your dog got hurt."

She shook her head. "Not mad at all. When you see someone you don't know, the best thing you can do is to hide and keep quiet until he goes away. Or come to an adult like me or Tony."

Z finished the first Peanut Butter Cup and licked his fingers. Jamie watched him, forcing herself not to cringe at the dirt on those hands. He looked over at the second half.

"Delman."

Jamie stared, felt her mouth drop open.

"It's my last name. Zephenaya Delman."

Jamie couldn't speak. Heat burned in her neck and cheeks.

"Can I have the other Reese's now?"

She blinked hard, nodded.

Z took the candy and peeled off the dark wrapper. Jamie watched him eat. She glanced at Tony, who frowned at her. She shook her head.

She couldn't say it, didn't want to be the one to tell Zephenaya that she did know his sister. Shawna Delman had been the first cop raped, more than six months ago.

A month later, Shawna Delman had overdosed on heroin.

No, Jamie couldn't bring herself to tell Zephenaya that his sister was dead.

Chapter 30

Hailey sat at the small round table at the far end of the main lab on Monday evening, waiting for Sydney. At least she'd have closure on one case today. By all the evidence, at approximately eight thirty on a Thursday morning, Abby and Hank Dennig had killed each other inside her parked minivan.

Hailey had spent more time than she could afford, trying to imagine how two people who had once loved each other could come that far. Homicide had taught her that love and hate were often bedfellows. In the Dennig case, though, she was making educated guesses. Guesses—educated or not—were not a pleasant process. Without a witness, though, there was no one to confirm her theories.

Stephanie Rusch worked in the far corner of the lab. She wore a white coat and held a small set of tweezers to separate evidence onto slides for the microscope. Hailey wondered how the night at Tommy's had changed her relationship with Scott Scanlan.

Sydney crossed the lab, sat down across from Hailey. She flipped papers, pushed them out into a halo of white on the black table. She took a long drink out of a traveler coffee mug that said "Skamania Lodge" and set it down without looking at Hailey.

Hailey guessed Sydney was a few years younger than she—maybe thirty-six—but her reddish blond hair and freckles made her look like a woman barely into her thirties. She was trim and athletic, played soccer, Hailey knew. Her husband was a soccer coach in the East Bay and they had two boys who were avid players. But Hailey didn't know much more about her. At Rookie Club dinners, Sydney tended to sit with the CSU techs and people like Devlin in Personal Crimes—crimes where no one died. She stayed clear of the women who worked the violent crimes, like Homicide and Sex.

Even in their close group of women, there were still divisions—by department, by class of crime. Maybe it came down to how dirty the job was.

In that case, Homicide was about as dirty as you could get, and Hailey tried not to be bothered by being a bottom-feeder in the world of police work.

The irony was that even with her line of work, the nastiest people she'd met were not the murderers but the people at her father-in-law's campaign functions. Even the thought of him now made her anxious to get Jim off her back.

With the Dennig case closed, she just prayed she'd be able to put Natasha's case to bed. Things were adding up. Roger had gone out to Jamie's house and taken some casts of the footprints and tire tracks from the boy's attack. They had another warrant for Marchek's house, and she knew they were closing in on him. Once they had him, she was confident he'd spill everything he saw the night Natasha was killed, if only to gain some leniency in his own case. Buying favors was an ugly part of the system.

"Okay, let's start with hair," Sydney said, her pony-tail bouncing over her shoulder as she reached for the first report.

Hailey opened her notebook, pen poised.

"We found seventeen hair samples—fifteen human, four dog. We were able to eliminate eleven of them to the victims and the children. And the dogs."

"You'll keep the others on file?"

"Until storage bursts, absolutely."

Hailey nodded. She knew the storage of evidence—especially long-term—was a growing issue within the department. Proper preservation required dry temperatures with low humidity. Blood and tissue samples, semen, and anything living, necessitated refrigeration. The lab had a huge walk-in refrigerator, but it was already near capacity—and had been for close to three years. Even after cases were tried and convictions made, evidence still had to be held in case of appeal.

"We got forty partial prints from the inside of the car alone. Another sixteen from the outside."

That wasn't many for the outside of a car. Hailey would have expected more, especially with kids. "Washed?"

Sydney nodded. "Probably within ten days, and some rain, too, I'd guess."

Hailey nodded.

"Then there's the rest of it." She pushed the report to Hailey, who scanned the list of other items taken from the car—fiber samples, carpets, threads from another two-dozen places that had to be individually sorted and identified under the microscope.

A fully-staffed lab could spend weeks on a single case. And from the look of it, the two victims had killed each other. Hailey had found, more often than not, if it looked like a duck and walked like a duck...

Still, she knew better than to be rash. In a case like this, Hailey had asked CSU to run the prints for known felons. Though it was time-consuming, the process was easy enough. Technology had come a long way and prints could be scanned and compared with both California's justice system records as well as NCIC, the National Criminal Information Center, which the FBI maintained.

"No felony matches?"

Sydney shook her head. "No, but we've got a dozen partials that couldn't be matched."

"But it's like a bus—you've got kids in and out of there all the time."

Sydney nodded. "I've got some adult prints, too, but nothing comes up."

"And the blood?" The initial process with blood was to take samples to identify the blood types of the victims and rule out a third party.

"AB and O, both positive. Victims' types."

"And in the places you'd expect them?"

"The pattern of blood splatter looks consistent with the theory that they killed each other."

"And they were known for being aggressive," Hailey added. "There had been two instances of domestic disturbance in the past."

Sydney nodded.

"What about toxicology?"

"Won't be back for weeks. The Unit's way too backed up on more pressing cases."

Hailey knew there were convicts awaiting lab results before going to trial—men and women who sat behind bars while the labs scurried to prove whether or not they were really guilty of anything. "Then we've got to close it. The Dennigs murdered each other."

Sydney gathered her notes, started to stack them for Hailey to take with her. Hailey was thankful the case was over.

She'd probably spent fifty work-hours on it, enlisted the help of at least three other cops to make calls and visits to friends, neighbors, and the kids' school. The case should have been closed at that.

But because of the nature of the victims—that is, rich and high profile—the chief had pushed the lab to look through the rest of the evidence for anything else.

"How long did it set you guys back?"

Sydney shrugged. "Day and a half, maybe a little more."

Even in a case where they didn't have the assailant, CSU could test only a small sample of the evidence brought in—five percent was aggressive. It was just too much. Things were scanned with black lights for traces of blood, and then particular spots were tested. But the funds and time to test everything weren't available. "I'm glad to put it behind us."

Sydney handed the papers to Hailey, frowned.

"What's up?" Hailey asked.

"Seemed too simple, you know?"

Hailey paused, thinking maybe it was. But she knew better than to dismiss another cop's gut. "Can you think of something we should look at again?"

Sydney hesitated, shook her head. "Not a thing."

"I know what you mean. With the pressure from the chief, it would have felt better to find something more."

Sydney looked up. "But that's how it goes, you know? That's annoying, but it's not what's bothering me."

"What's bothering you?"

Sydney was quiet a moment. "I guess the fact that they had kids. Why the hell would you leave your kids without a parent?"

Hailey couldn't answer that one. The simple truth was emotion often got the best of people.

Sydney shook her head.

Hailey couldn't find anything to say, at least nothing reassuring. "If anything else comes up, call me. I'll be writing it up for a few days."

Hailey left the building with none of the sense of triumph she often had when they'd closed a case. She only hoped she'd get it by closing Natasha's case.

* * *

Back at the Hall, Hailey rode to the top floor and wound around the busy corridors until she reached the stairwell. Then she walked down step-by-step, her black flats echoing on the cold concrete. In a decade of coming in and out of this building, the stairwells had always been the quietest spot. People were just lazy, herself included. Somehow, though, she'd thought the walk might clear her head. Unfortunately, it didn't work.

She arrived at the fifth floor and peered down the stairs that led back to her own floor. But she knew she had to do it now, get it over with. Bruce Daniels—the name brought on a wave filled with so many warring emotions, it was impossible to sort them all. Today, frustration might have won out.

Walking toward IA wasn't something any cop liked to do and Hailey was no exception. Even walking down the hall, people seemed to give the door a wide birth as if it were surrounded by an invisible fence that shocked anyone who got too close.

With the list IA had put together, Daniels was her best bet to get this investigation moving. She knew there were absences on that list.

She thought about the promise she'd made to God, the one where she'd never see Daniels again if Mackenzie was all right. Maybe now was the time to end things anyway. She hesitated at the department door.

Unlike most cops, she didn't have anything specific against IA. She thought a good portion of the bad rap they took wasn't fair. They did a job and Hailey had seen enough bad cop behavior—like Scott Scanlan's—to know that there had to be a system in place to police the police.

She also knew there were some cops who lived to persecute others. Some cops pegged the people in IA as the kids who had been bullied and picked on in school. As children, they'd had thick glasses or red hair, were chubby boys or girls. They didn't blend the way Hailey had, just barely staying on the fringe of normalcy. And so they'd decided to bully the ultimate bullies. Those were the ones they thought went to IA. She knew that was sometimes true, too.