Джеймс Паттерсон - 14th Deadly Sin:

Broward peered at the photo, then opened the door wide and said, “Why didn’t you say so? Come in.”

CHAPTER 63

BROWARD HAD AS much as said he recognized Tina Strichler. But I wanted to hear him actually say it.

“You know this woman?” I asked.

“Come in,” he said. “I don’t bite. Even Hauser don’t bite.”

He yanked on the dog’s collar, shoved the dog into a bedroom, and closed the door.

I put my hand on my gun, cautiously entered the house, and looked around. The interior of the place looked like American Pickers meets Hoarding: Buried Alive .

There wasn’t one inch of clean or uncluttered surface. There were live chickens in a slatted box under a table, canned food stacked against the walls to the ceiling, boxes of ammo on countertops, and guns hanging from racks on the walls.

I scanned the room for trophies of dead women. I was looking for photos or newspaper clippings taped to the wall or signs of the abused wife. I also looked for a collection of assorted knives that might have been used to commit murder and then been taken away by the killer.

But mainly, I was so stunned by the chaos that I lost sight of Broward—until I felt a cold gun muzzle against the back of my neck.

Wayne Broward said, “Why don’t you take off your gun and stay awhile.”

“Love to,” I said, fear and shame flooding my body to my fingertips and out through my eyes. I was a jerk. I’d walked right into this, and I might die in this very room.

“I’m taking my gun out very slowly,” I said, my back to him. “Just using my fingertips.”

As I was trained to do, I spun around fast, knocked the barrel of Broward’s rifle away from me, grabbed the rifle with both hands, and wrenched it out of Broward’s grip, throwing him off balance. I flung the rifle far from where I stood. As it clattered against a wall hung with hubcaps, I pulled my Glock and leveled it at Broward’s nose.

From the chill at the back of my neck to the Glock in my hand took about ten seconds, but it felt like the last ten seconds of my life. Hauser was barking his head off, and I wondered at my luck, that Broward had underestimated me and had put the dog behind a door.

“Bitch,” Broward spat at me. “I shoulda shot you. I coulda done anything to you. No one would ever know what happened to you.”

“Turn around. Put your hands on your head,” I said.

He did it.

“I coulda given you a real good ride first,” he said mournfully. “I haven’t had a blond in a while.”

“Shut the hell up,” I said.

I holstered my gun, wrenched Broward’s arms down, and cuffed him behind his back.

“You’re under arrest for assault on a police officer,” I said. And then I read him his rights.

CHAPTER 64

I HAD BROWARD in the back of my vehicle, behind the Plexiglas and in cuffs.

As for me, I was still twitching with adrenaline because he could have killed me. That would have been my fault entirely for having made such a dumb-ass, rookie mistake.

I couldn’t stop flicking my eyes to the rearview mirror to look at him. He was wild-eyed crazy, for sure, but whatever kind of psycho he was, he didn’t seem to know or care that he was on his way to jail.

Broward said loudly, “Remember when we were living with my mama?”

“Yep. It was a trip, Wayne.”

“You used to call me Honey-boy. I just loved when you did that.”

“That was then, Wayne,” I said, playing along. “I’m over you now.”

Wayne Broward began to sing “Jesus Loves Me.”

I turned up the squawk box and kept my eyes on the road. I didn’t like what I was going to have to say to a judge about why I had been inside the house of a man who hadn’t been under suspicion of anything; my probable cause was a hunch. Thank God Broward had invited me to come in. Perhaps that and his history of threatening a judge would help me sound a little less stupid.

Twenty minutes later, I parked in the all-day lot on Bryant and tossed the keys to the guy who worked days in the shed. Broward gave me no trouble as I escorted him across the street and into the building in cuffs. I walked him through the metal detector and up the stairs to the desk sergeant on the third floor.

I said, “Sergeant, we need to book Mr. Broward for assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer. Make sure he gets a psych eval.”

Sergeant Brooks asked questions and filled out a form, and a uniformed cop came up and took Broward to booking. My rifle-wielding collar would be kept busy for the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours while being processed: There would be a body search, fingerprints, a shower, and examinations by a nurse and a shrink. Then he’d be given a jumpsuit and locked in a holding cell until I could get back to him.

After leaving the front desk, I went down the hall and through the door to Homicide. I found Conklin in the bullpen with files on drug dealers fanned out all over his desktop.

“Rich. I’m very sorry. I got hung up.” I fully planned to tell my partner about Wayne Broward, but he cut in with a news flash.

“Ralph Valdeen was hit.”

Ralph Valdeen, aka Rascal, was one of the two former stockroom boys at Wicker House. Valdeen had been charged with assault on a police officer for that punch he’d thrown at Conklin at the ballpark. But he’d been released on bail. Unlike Donnie Wolfe, who had stolen a car, we had had nothing else on Valdeen. There was no evidence that he knew the Wicker House shooters or that he knew what happened to the drugs that had been stolen from that lab.

“What happened?” I asked my partner.

“His mom went over to his place and found him dead in the bedroom,” Conklin said. “Two shots to the chest, one to the head. Makes me think someone was cleaning up after themselves. Maybe he could’ve ID’d the Wicker House shooters.”

“Another dead witness,” I said.

“And he’s all ours,” said Conklin.

CHAPTER 65

BRADY HELD AN impromptu standing-room-only meeting at the end of the shift. We were a ragged-looking crew but highly motivated to stop the growing body count and rescue our reputation, which was getting trashed by the media daily, nightly, and on weekends.

Brady is a hard-ass, but he wasn’t saying “you guys.”

He said, “We have a big problem. All of us. More than a dozen people are dead, including one of our own and his family. Some of the dead are victims of crimes, some are witnesses, and some are perps. I’ll be frank. I’m not sure we always know who is who.

“This is what I see.

“The nature of the war between the drug dealers and us has changed. Cops may be involved in drug-related crime, and drug dealers are firing back. No one can say with certainty who is doing what to whom, and that makes it even more, I don’t know, disgusting.

“This cannot go on.

“Everyone here, you are all working a piece of this war. Talk to your CIs. Think about things that have been said or done and you looked the other way. I don’t want any crap about never ratting out a brother. One of our brothers was tortured before he and his family were murdered.

“This was a first in my experience, and I don’t have to tell you that this can never happen again. My door is open to all of you. If you have a clue, even if it involves someone we know and trust, you tell me in private.”

Brady paced a little in front of the room, then asked if there were any questions. There were none. There were no strangers in our bullpen, just people who’d had our backs for years.

One of them had left an anonymous note on my desk saying WATCH YOUR BACK.

Brady went on.

“Boxer and Conklin are primaries on Wicker House and the homicides of Tom Calhoun and his family. If you’re assigned to those cases, report to them.