The Abbey (18 page)

She nodded and hugged me again once I handed her my keys. I pointed my car out, and she walked up the street towards it while I put the deputy’s cuffs on the porch. Lieutenant Bowers came out a few minutes later. He wore a navy blue T–shirt with the word ‘Police’ written across the chest. Like the last time I saw him, it looked as if he hadn’t shaved in a few days. The bags underneath his eyes were gone, though; instead, there was almost a twinkle. The corners of his lips were upturned.

“Glad you finally made it. Thought I wasn’t going to see you this morning.”

I crossed my arms.

“What are you doing in my house?”

“We’re searching it. Being a detective, I thought you would have figured that out.”

“I understand that. What are you searching for?”

Bowers shook his head, the smug smile widening.

“This and that. And by the way, where’d you park? I want to search your car personally.”

I tilted my head to the side, considering how I wanted to respond. They could search my house all they wanted, but they’d never find anything. My car was another matter. It still had the vials of
agua rica
in it.

“You’ll have to show me the warrant for that.”

“Gladly,” said Bowers, reaching to his back pocket. He held out a light–blue document and handed it to me. Two things jumped out at me. They were searching for the missing vial from my niece’s case, the one that supposedly disappeared from the crime lab. The vial was small, so it could have been hidden just about anywhere, which meant they could tear our house apart looking for it. On the other hand, the scope was narrow. The search authorized the police to search my house and
curtilage
, the standard terms our department used on search warrant affidavits.

“You know what the word ‘
curtilage
’ means?” I asked.

Bowers stared at me blankly.

“Fuck you.”

“Didn’t think so,” I said. “Curtilage is a legal term. When a warrant says you’re allowed to search someone’s house and curtilage, it means you’re allowed to search the home and surrounding grounds and buildings. My car is parked on the street in front of the neighbor’s house. I would have parked in my driveway, and you would have been able to search it, but some dip shit in an unmarked Crown Victoria took most of it up. As a detective, I thought you would have planned for that sort of thing.”

The smile disappeared from Bowers’ face.

“We’ll talk later,” he said before turning around and walking through my front door.

I waited on the front porch for another twenty minutes for them to finish their search. They left in a big group. Bowers, Doran and Smith – the two detectives I had found staking out my house a day earlier – and three uniformed officers. None carried anything out. Hannah must have been watching because she joined me on the porch a moment later. Bowers smirked at us.

“Guess you guys were clean after all. Sorry about the mess. We had to be certain you weren’t hiding anything.”

I ground my teeth, but didn’t say anything. Hannah threaded a hand through the crook of my elbow.

“Can we go inside now, Officer?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Yeah. Have fun.”

She tugged on my arm, pulling me toward the house before I could say anything further. Hannah and I stepped through our front door a moment later.

I had executed a lot of search warrants when I was a detective and always made a point of reminding everyone in my search team that our suspect was innocent until proven otherwise. We treated his or her possessions with as much respect and care as possible. That’s not a Constitutional requirement, just common courtesy. Most detectives have similar policies. Bowers was evidently not like most detectives, though, because our house was trashed.

We checked out the living room first. Our coffee table was overturned, the foam from our couch cushions had been removed and it looked like someone had run beside our bookshelves with his arm stretched out so he could knock everything off. The damage was cosmetic, though. Everything could be repaired.

I squeezed Hannah’s arm and stepped down the hall to our bedroom. Every dresser drawer had been pulled out and overturned, and it looked like the contents had been sifted through. My wife’s undergarments had been given special attention; they were strewn all over the floor. Our bathroom and closet had similar treatments. There were tubes of toothpaste on the ground in the bathroom, and our clothes had been thrown on the ground in our closet. It looked like an angry toddler had gone on a rampage.

The kitchen was the same way. I tried to be careful, but I stepped on a wooden spoon, a wedding gift from one of Hannah’s aunts, cracking it. It was just stuff, and it could all be repaired and put back, but I felt violated. Worse, I couldn’t have stopped them if I tried. They would have slapped cuffs on me and thrown me in jail. I clenched my jaw so tight I thought I was going to crack my teeth.

We walked into Megan’s room last. It was the smallest bedroom in the house and had just enough room for a twin bed, a dresser, and rocking chair. There were clothes on the floor, and the rocking chair was overturned. The room could be cleaned, though, and the clothes could be put back. Those didn’t bother me very much. I walked to the bed. There was a stuffed lion on it named Tom. I have no idea why the lion was named Tom, but it was Megan’s favorite toy. My mom had given it to her.

Bowers’ men had cut it open along its back and pulled out the stuffing as if they were searching for something inside. It was a kid’s toy, and we could probably buy one just like it for a couple of bucks, but Megan loved it. And a stranger had come into my house and ruined it. I kissed Hannah’s forehead and whispered that I’d be right back. I didn’t bother looking at what I stepped on as I jogged through my house.

There was something in me that I hadn’t felt before. I didn’t get mad, not exactly. It was more like I relaxed the constraints that held my anger at bay. It was visceral, black and bubbling under the surface. I had been bottling it up since Rachel died and probably before that. Bowers and his men were still beside his car in the driveway, which meant they were probably signing the warrant so they could return it to the judge’s clerk that afternoon.

I slipped through the crowd and grabbed Bowers’ shoulder, spinning him around.

“You went too far, Lieutenant. If you want to come after me, do it. Don’t you dare try to hurt my family again.”

The officers around me formed into a semicircle of blue with Bowers at the center. He smiled, but his eyes were as black as any I had ever seen.

“Are you threatening me, Rashid?”

I shot my eyes to the officers around me to see if any had gone for their weapons. They hadn’t.

“No, I’m not threatening you. I’m giving you some advice. Stop paying so much attention to my family and start paying attention to your own. I hear your wife gets lonely when you work such long hours.”

That might have been uncalled for, but I didn’t care about civility. Bowers stepped forward and grabbed my shirt. The officers around us shifted on their feet uneasily, and I noticed more than a few hands stray towards their weapons.

“What does that mean, Rashid?”

“Ask around. I’m sure any number of guys in your station will tell you exactly what it means. Probably in graphic detail.”

Bowers lunged at me as if to ram his shoulder into my midriff, but I stepped to my left and jammed my right knee into his side. I heard him grunt, but I didn’t have more than a moment to enjoy the situation before I felt arms pulling me back and to the ground.

I hit the pavement hard. The jolt traveled through my body and into my spine. A sudden weight on my back pressed me forward, and my face was on the concrete before I could even gasp from pain. I twisted and tried to ball up, an instinctual move to protect my internal organs, but someone was pulling each arm flat to the side. I squirmed and thrashed, trying to get up anyway, but someone put his knee in my upper back and ripped my hands behind me. Steel cuffs bit into my wrists after that.

I tried to shout for Hannah to call a lawyer, but someone put his knee on the back of my neck, pressing my face against the ground so I couldn’t speak.

“You’re under arrest for assaulting an officer. If you don’t shut up, we will shut you up. Do you understand?”

I guess Bowers counted those as my Miranda rights because two of the uniformed officers threw me in the back of a squad car after that. One of the officers even made a point of putting the windows up. My entire body hurt, and I tasted something coppery and metallic. I was dizzy, but that could have been the heat. With the windows up and the sun blazing, the black vinyl seats were so hot they almost burned the exposed portions of my body.

As I waited, the heat scorched the hard edge of my anger away, and my rationality returned. Assaulting an officer was a felony, but Bowers wouldn’t charge me with that. Not if he wanted the charges to stick. I partially instigated the attack, but he made the first move. I saw it, my wife saw it, and I’m sure some of my neighbors saw it. The officers on the scene would close ranks around their Lieutenant and say whatever they could to make it look as if he had acted in good faith, but it’d get ugly.

Hannah stood in the doorway. Her shoulders rose and fell quickly, and her eyes smoldered; I was glad they weren’t directed at me. The back seat smelled almost vinegary from its previous occupant’s body odor, but that was better than vomit. I don’t know who made the call, but the patrol vehicle’s back door opened about twenty minutes later, and Jack Whittler stuck his head in.

“You really pissed in somebody’s sandbox here, Detective,” he said, sitting on the seat beside me. “This car stinks. Hold on a second.”

He stepped out before I could respond. A moment later, one of the uniformed officers, a young blond guy this time, opened the door nearest to me and pulled me out.

“You’re not going to do anything stupid if he takes off those cuffs, are you?” asked Whittler.

I shook my head, and the officer unlocked me. I rubbed my wrists where the cuffs had been, hoping to regain circulation. Whittler put his hand between my shoulder blades and led me to a black Mercedes with dark tinted windows parked on the street. We sat in the back with the air conditioner blaring. The seats were supple black leather, and there were dark burl wood accents on the doors and vents. Under normal circumstances, I probably would have questioned how a public servant could afford the car; given what I was in there for, I thought it might have been inappropriate.

Whittler didn’t say anything at first. He stared at me as if waiting.

“Did you nail this Lieutenant’s wife?” he finally asked.

I rubbed my wrists and shook my head.

“I’m about the only one who didn’t from what I heard.”

“Did he nail yours?”

I shook my head no again.

“Then help me understand what’s going on. ‘Cause I stepped into a cluster fuck that I do not appreciate.”

I filled Whittler in on the details of my previous encounter with Bowers and with the surveillance detail he had put on me the night before. Whittler folded his hands in front of him and stared at them for a moment when I finished.

“The search didn’t turn anything up, so you’re fine there. Problem is you got into a Goddamn fistfight on your front lawn. You know how that would look if that got out? A decorated Lieutenant and one of my lead investigators? Jesus. I heard you were smart.”

The hidden undercurrent was ‘do you know how that would hurt my chances in an election?’ Whittler shook his head and wiped sweat off his forehead before speaking again.

“I want you out of my office. E–mail a letter of resignation to my secretary. Say it’s for personal reasons or that you got a better job offer from another department. I don’t care. If you do that and keep quiet, I won’t press charges.”

I figured that was coming. Unfortunately, it meant the next stop on my roller–coaster career was probably a mall security office.

“Can I ask you something first?” I asked.

“What?”

“Did you see the affidavit Lieutenant Bowers used to secure the search warrant?”

“Of course I saw it,” said Jack, staring out his window. “That’s part of the reason you’re not under arrest. The warrant was issued by Judge Thurman. I could shit on a piece of paper, and he’d sign a search warrant for the White House.”

“What was Bowers’ probable cause to search my house?”

Jack shook his head and ran his hand across his mouth before answering.

“Said he had a confidential informant who swore you had a test tube full of something called
agua rica
. He said you hid it in a stuffed lion in one of the bedrooms. Whole thing was bullshit, and you took the bait. If you had sucked it up…”

He kept ranting, but I tuned him out. Mike Bowers shouldn’t have known about the
agua rica
, and nor should he have known about my daughter’s stuffed animal collection. Whoever was tipping him off had been in my house. I spoke up when he finished speaking.

“Thank you. I’ll get on that e–mail.”

The Mercedes pulled away as soon as I shut the door. Bowers and the other officers followed shortly after. I met Hannah on the front porch and slumped beside her on the steps.

“I think you should go back to your sister’s house.”

She looked over her shoulder at our hallway.

“We need to clean up first,” she said. “Megan will be fine with Jack and Yasmina for a little while.”

“I’m not worried about her right now. You know those people who sent Megan flowers? They’ve been in our house.”

Hannah stayed long enough to fill a duffel bag with clothes before driving back to her sister’s house. I hated watching her go, even if it was for the best. She wanted me to go with her, but it was too late for that. Azrael and Karen Rea had already killed Robbie Cutting and Rachel. Unless I missed my mark, their organization had probably also taken out Rollo and James Russo. I doubted they’d hesitate to take me out, too. If I quit, Hannah, Megan, and I were dead.

I started to walk back inside but stopped in the front entryway. The frame around my front door was cracked, leaving a gap between the door and sill big enough that every bug in the state could crawl into my living room. I didn’t have time to reframe it before dark, so I grabbed a sheet of uncut plywood from my garage and nailed it against what was left of the door frame. It wouldn’t stop anybody from getting into my house if they were really determined, but at least it’d keep the squirrels from getting into my living room.