Judged (3 page)

I felt another groan coming on but kept it bottled up. I glanced left and right in search of help, but nothing was going to save me from the conversation. “Yeah, I don’t know. I guess I don’t know him well enough to have any insight for you.” I shrugged.

“Well, what do you think of him? I mean, we’ve all been out a few times now. You should be able to form an opinion.”

“He seems fine. I don’t know.” That was a lie. I didn’t care for the guy much at all.

Karen and I had talked about it on our drive home the last time we’d all gone out, and we both agreed. The guy seemed arrogant and wasn’t much for conversation unless it was about himself or how much money he made. He spent most of our last time at dinner staring at his cell phone. That was after he’d ordered an eighty-dollar steak and two forty-dollar glasses of wine when Karen and I mentioned the dinner would be our treat.

“I’m just not sure if it was the right decision, him moving here. It’s like the bad parts from our marriage are picking right back up. Input?”

I let out a breath. “Just see what happens. That’s about all you can do. If it’s meant to work, it will work. If not, well, you’re young—plenty of time to explore other options and fish in the sea. Nobody knows what the future holds. Take it as it comes and do your best to enjoy life.”

Beth rolled her eyes. “Those were about the most rational, boring, and complete bullshit sentences ever strung together.”

A smile crept across my face.

She swatted my shoulder. “I’m serious, Hank. What do you think I should do?”

“What feels right to you,” I said. “Trust your gut. If it’s not working, send his ass packing.”

“So you don’t like him, either?”

“I’m taking the fifth on that one, and what do you mean
either
?”

“My parents don’t like him. Well, not that they don’t like him—they’ve known him forever. They just don’t think we’re a good fit. It kind of seems like everyone feels that way about him.”

I shrugged but thought Beth should listen to her parents and everyone else more.

“All right, last question, and then I’ll drop it. What’s you and Karen’s secret?” Beth asked.

“Secret to what?”

Beth tucked her hair behind her ear. “You guys have been together a long time. You two seem about as happy as can be. How do you stay happy and deal with each other?” Beth stared at me as if I was going to give her some life-altering advice, which I definitely didn’t have.

I adjusted myself in my seat. “Well, we’re both fairly normal. Neither of us has any bad personality traits—at least, I don’t think we do. We don’t argue over petty bullshit. We have an interest in if the other is happy or not.”

“That’s it? Basically try to be decent human beings to each other?”

“I guess. Well, that, and I let her be in charge. I’m guessing that goes a long way.”

Beth smiled. “Okay. I’m done. But speaking of Karen, anything new with the adoption proceedings?”

“Paperwork, more paperwork, and a home interview, which is basically an inspection, on the horizon,” I said. “We’ll see. We’re still in the beginning stages.”

Beth nodded and faced the window. I figured that to be my cue to try for my nap again. I closed my eyes and drifted off. I woke only once the rest of the flight when the stewardess rammed my elbow with the drink cart.

We landed a few minutes before noon local time, scooped up a pair of rental cars from the airport, and drove for our hotel.

Beth pulled alongside me in the hotel’s parking lot and stepped out. I went to grab my bag from the trunk.

“Where’s the local office from here?” Beth asked.

I pointed north. “The map said it was less than a quarter mile from here.”

“You haven’t been there yet. I mean, it wasn’t open on your last trip here, was it?”

“No. They were still over at the old building in Miami Beach. I saw some company e-mails with photos of the new place. It looks pretty cool.”

Beth nodded.

We checked into our rooms, which were of the standard double-queen-bed-and-a-hundred-dollar-a-night variety, and dropped off our bags. I made one quick call to Karen to let her know I’d arrived and another call to Agent Couch to let him know we would be over around two o’clock. Then I grabbed my laptop bag with my files in it and left my room for the lobby. After filling myself a cup of coffee from the station near the front desk, I headed to the lounge area to wait for Beth. I grabbed a seat, kicked one leg up over the other, and stared at the television bolted to the wall and playing the news, the volume muted.

The local forecast for the week showed every day in the upper seventies and sunny, except Saturday, which had a small picture of a cloud beside the sun icon. The news went on to show the upcoming stories for the rest of the telecast, which by the watch on my wrist, took about ten minutes. The final piece of the news hour was an opinion segment on the Miami Vigilante—the tagline at the bottom of the screen asked
Justice or Murder?
I looked around for a remote control to turn on the volume but didn’t spot one. I set my coffee down next to the magazines on the table beside me, pushed myself from the chair, and went to the television to turn it up the old-fashioned way. I stood directly in front of the screen, running my hands along the top, bottom, and then sides. I found nothing.

“Are you trying to steal that TV?” Beth asked.

I turned to see her standing with her arms crossed over her chest. “Yeah, give me a hand. I’ll pull it from the wall and you run with it.”

“Funny,” she said.

“I’m trying to find the damn volume buttons,” I said. Then my fingertips found a row of buttons tucked into the right-hand side. I clicked them randomly until the volume turned up. “There we go,” I said. “There’s a news segment on our guy coming up. I want to catch it quick before we head over to the field office.”

“Sure,” Beth said.

The news came back from commercial shortly thereafter. I stood two feet from the front of the television, sipping my coffee and watching the anchor sitting casually in a chair, delivering his opinion piece on whether the actions of this person were justified. The reporter’s words turned to background noise as I didn’t have much use for the view of a single person who was being paid to give it. My eyes focused on the viewer poll in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen—apparently, of the twelve thousand viewers that voted, twenty-three percent believed the killings were acceptable. I clicked the button on the side of the television to turn the volume back down—I’d seen enough. “Guess I didn’t need to find the volume button after all.”

“What do you mean?” Beth asked.

“I thought it would be something of substance instead of an opinion segment.”

“I wonder if that viewer poll was made up,” Beth said. “I mean, almost a quarter of their sample thinks this person murdering people is acceptable. There’s just no way.”

“It’s probably just the demographics of the people watching,” I said.

“I don’t follow,” Beth said.

“Think about it—an afternoon telecast. Younger people will get their news from the Internet when they have time. Most middle-aged people are at work. I’m betting their viewer base watching right now is mostly retirees, people who have been around long enough to see the changes the area has gone through. This place was a killing field in the coke wars of the eighties. Then it got better, and now with all the recent murders and crime, the city seems to be heading back into dark times. I could see how one person taking out the so-called trash could appeal to some.”

“I guess,” Beth said.

“All right, let’s hit the road. I told Agent Couch we’d be over around two o’clock, and it’s around two o’clock.”

We headed outside from the hotel. I pulled the keys from my pocket and clicked the button to unlock my rental car’s doors.

“You’re driving?” Beth asked.

“Sure. You kick back and relax. Let me handle the drive this time.”

“Isn’t the office like two blocks away?”

I opened the rear door of the car, grinned, and set my bag with the files in the back. “Yeah.”

Tim sat in the office of his sister’s home. Piles of folders littered the desk and every flat space around. File boxes were stacked in the corners.

Tim’s journey had started with a fifth of whiskey, a simple opening of a box, and a flip of a folder’s cover sheet—three years prior. Since that night, he’d sobered up, investigated, and compiled his list of those he deemed guilty, who would pay at his hand—a tribute of sorts. The list, almost entirely checked off, had just a few names left. He had saved the most difficult murders, or at least the ones most likely to get him caught somehow, for last. By the time the cops caught up with him, which he was sure would happen, it would be too late, and the names would be crossed off. Tim’s eyes ran down the page to the final two names—the names of the guilty men who’d set everything in motion.

He took his gaze from the names and flipped through the notes he’d gathered, along with the police file, on his next target. The man’s name was Quincy Hightower, a local drug dealer with gang affiliations—or as Tim liked to think of him, a waste of air. The man was a career criminal and would regularly get himself locked up but always managed to rat on someone to find his way back out onto the streets to peddle more of his poison. Quincy’s habit of ratting people out led to some of his so-called friends being awfully talkative. A man by the name of Adrian Watson, recently deceased, had given Tim a wealth of information on Quincy.

Quincy was in fact responsible for countless overdoses, for he laced his heroin he sold with fentanyl. The overdose that had made the news was a seventeen-year-old girl from an upscale part of town. Her name was Amy Cowan. Her friends claimed she’d gotten the drugs from the block that Quincy normally held down. The drugs that remained were in a bag marked by a sticker that Quincy was known for, yet the local authorities could never link him via the drugs directly to her death. Tim heard different from Adrian Watson. Watson claimed that Quincy was proud of taking the life of a ‘rich white bitch.’ While the authorities didn’t know enough to remove Quincy from the streets, Tim did. He flipped the file closed and glanced at the clock—almost two in the afternoon. His plan was set for the night—or the early-morning hours, more accurately. Tim turned his chair away from his desk and stood. He needed to get to Mrs. Davis’s house to take her to the grocery store.

I pulled into the driveway of the Miramar field office and took in the complex from a distance. The gray glass-and-steel buildings didn’t appear to have a straight edge on them. I imagined they formed some kind of an H from the air, with the center structure running horizontally and adjoining two larger buildings. We drove alongside an untouched nature area with a large pond filled with cattails and pulled up to the guard shack. I removed my credentials from my inner suit pocket and took Beth’s from her hand before lowering my window.

A man in tactical gear, looking better suited to be conducting a SWAT raid, exited the shack and walked to my window. Dark sunglasses wrapped his eyes.

“Agents Rawlings and Harper to see an Agent Couch in serial crimes,” I said.

He nodded his head and disappeared back into the small building. He returned a moment later and handed our two sets of credentials back.

“North lot,” he said. “All the way around the building and use the main entrance. Serial crimes is up on two, but you’ll have to check in.”

“Appreciate it,” I said.

I raised my window and passed through when the gate lifted.

I stared right through Beth’s passenger side window as we rounded the building, which appeared to twist as we did. I found a spot, put the rental in park, and killed the motor.

“This place is insane,” Beth said.

I dipped my head and looked up through the windshield in awe. I’d never seen a building even remotely similar to the field office in front of us. While there wasn’t one symmetrical thing about the structure, which had curved edges mixed with almost triangular protruding walls, it was a sight to be seen. Beth and I stepped from the car. I scooped my bag from the backseat, and we made our way toward the north entrance. We passed another security check, which paged Agent Couch for us, and entered the lobby. Blue tinted glass made up half of the walls as well as the staircase leading up. The ceiling of the lobby was white abstract shapes with large voids of more blue glass and steel. The place smelled of new construction—an odor of paint, drywall, and wood. Agents and federal employees hustled about.

“Rawlings,” I heard.

I glanced up at the staircase to see a six-foot, two-hundred-plus-pound agent with short gray hair and black-rimmed glasses—Supervisory Agent Henry Couch.

He made his way down to our level, walked up, and stretched out his hand. “Hank,” he said.

I shook his hand and introduced him to Beth. “This is Agent Beth Harper. Beth, Supervisory Agent Henry Couch.”

Beth shook his hand. “Supervisory Agent,” she said.

“How about ‘Couch’?” he asked. “The ‘Supervisory Agent’ thing is going to get a little long in the tooth after a few days. Plus, I don’t think anyone other than my eighty-year-old mother or wife calls me Henry.”

“Fair enough,” Beth said.

“You guys want to follow me up to my office? We have a little bit of news.”

“Sure,” I said.

Beth and I followed him up the flight of stairs and down a long gloss-white-floored hallway and approached a large blue-glass-walled office. I could see inside before Couch pulled open the door, which read Serial Crimes in dark-gray lettering. I spotted roughly thirty agents, countless desks, and more glass offices inside. A handful of the rooms off to the right appeared to have been designated for meetings, judging by their size. Couch led us off to the far back corner of the room and entered an office with his name, in black letters, written across the door.

“Grab a seat,” he said.

Beth and I did.

“The new digs are pretty nice,” I said.

“Hell yes, they are. Between however many years I spent crammed in my tiny office during my time in the armed forces, and my old office in Miami Beach, you’ll never hear me complain about this,” Couch said. “Plus, it’s about time the bureau gets modern down here.” Couch rounded his big cherry-wood desk and took a seat in a large pleated-leather office chair—both of which looked new. Miscellaneous plaques and awards filled the shelves of the wall behind his desk. He pulled a file from a stack, flipped open the cover, and slid it toward Beth and me. “Handwriting analysis came back, cross-referenced from things written around the house and signatures verified against bank checks. Our victims wrote the confessions,” he said.