Frank Zafiro - And Every Man Has to Die

Val smiled.

1123 hours

Renee sat in her office, reading through the first reports on the Battaglia homicide. She was dressed in a pair of jeans and a Seattle Mariners T-shirt with the number eleven and her favorite ballplayer’s name on the back. Behind her, the coffeemaker gurgled and hissed.

She’d seen the light on in the chief’s office. The parking stalls belonging to several of the top brass, usually empty from Friday afternoon until Monday morning, were all full. It didn’t take a fortuneteller to know they’d be having a high level meeting today, given last night’s events. And it was just as sure that she’d be getting a call at home anyway, so it made more sense to come in on her own and get her ducks in a row.

She’d identified the guy with the shotgun almost immediately as the same Russian that Katie MacLeod had fought over a week ago during a domestic violence call. Ivan Cherny was his name. He had a local arrest history, and a triple-I check came back with several arrests in Seattle before he emigrated east to River City. She had a request in with Interpol, but that’d take several weeks to come back. Maybe she could get the chief to call and explain that they were investigating a slain officer. That might speed things up a bit, but she didn’t see the point. Cherny was a thug. He was muscle.

Sergey Markov was another matter.

As near as she could tell, he didn’t have any convictions in River City. Or even arrests. Or either one anywhere in Washington or the United States. She wondered what Interpol would have to say about him. If he had any arrests, they were probably a long time removed.

Markov owned nothing. His car and home were registered to his wife, Marina. He’d filed a tax return the previous year as a business consultant with very modest earnings, but enough to support the home and the car, barely.

And yet, when she’d asked Detective Tower about Markov’s clothing and jewelry, he told her that the dead man was wearing custom cut designer clothes. He had at least twenty thousand dollars worth of gold and diamonds in the necklaces and rings he wore. Plus, he’d been found dead in a white Mercedes that cost more than he supposedly made in a year.

Sergey Markov was a boss. She was sure of it. Proving it would be another matter.

Renee sighed. The last gasping sounds of her coffeemaker filled the room.

“Good,” she said. “I’m going to need the help.”

And then her phone rang.

1207 hours

The chief of police sat behind his large mahogany desk. His usually spartan desktop was scattered with piles of papers, which annoyed him. He went to great lengths to make his life orderly, and this mess was anything but.

Captain Reott and Lieutenant Crawford sat in front of him. Renee, the crime analyst who had proven to know her business better than some of his commanders, sat off to the side. He was secretly delighted to find her already at work on a Saturday when his secretary called her to come to this meeting.

He contemplated for a few moments. “What do we know that we didn’t know three hours ago?” he asked, looking at Captain Reott first.

“Not much,” the patrol captain answered. “We’ve still got troops on the perimeter to assist Homicide in the investigation, but our part as anything other than supporting the dicks is largely finished.”

“And you’ve notified the widow?”

Reott winced slightly at the description. “Yes. The chaplain and I were out there a little after 0100 hours.”

“She understood why it was you and not me?”

Reott nodded. “She’s a cop’s wife. She understood.”

The chief pursed his lips, thinking. It bothered him not to have been the one to tell Mrs. Battaglia that her husband had died in the line of duty. But he’d been in the early stages of a major crime investigation. It had been what he and his fellow military officers used to call a shooting war. And you didn’t stop to notify widows and orphans while the bullets were still flying.

He turned his attention to Lieutenant Crawford.

“We’ve got CFSU up at both scenes, processing the evidence,” he said. “I have lead detectives at both scenes, along with two support investigators at each scene. They have almost completed the canvassing at the hotel. Finch and Elias just finished debriefing Agent Leeb, the FBI agent from the hotel, about an hour ago.”

“That’s what you’re doing . What do we know ?”

Crawford didn’t miss a beat. “Leeb couldn’t positively identify the dead scumbags over at the warehouse, but he said the car was the same one that left the hotel. Since Chisolm jumped on the Mercedes just as it was leaving the hotel, that gives us a good connection. More importantly, the two shooters at the hotel were armed with a shotgun and a large caliber handgun. The two dead mopes at the warehouse had a shotgun and a.44 Magnum.”

“But two got away?”

Crawford nodded. “That’s what Chisolm says. Two men. One of them fired at him inside the warehouse. We found 9 mm casings, so whoever fired was probably not the guy who shot Battaglia through the door. The cop killer was dead in the back seat of the Mercedes.”

“Chisolm shot them both?”

Crawford shrugged. “Hard to tell until the ballistics come back. Chisolm said he never saw the guy in the back seat until he came back out of the warehouse. Agent Leeb fired rounds into the Mercedes as it was leaving the hotel, so it could’ve been him.”

“The FBI agent shoots a 9?”

“Yeah. And Chisolm carries a.40, so we might be able to tell, if we recover any part of the bullet. Also, Tower might be able to tell us something from the blood patterns in the back seat.”

“Like what?”

Crawford shrugged again. “If he took a round at the hotel versus at the warehouse, you might see different smears and patterns. I guess it’s hard to make heads or tails out of sometimes. It’s like fucking voodoo, you ask me, but they say it’s scientific.”

“What’s next?” the chief asked.

“Well, the autopsy is tomorrow.”

“Already? That seems quick.”

“It is,” Crawford said. “But the wife requested that we expedite matters. She wants to bury him Monday.”

The chief nodded. “What else, then?”

“Forensics, mostly. But I don’t know that we’re going to get anything from the scene that will help us much. We may piece together the order of events a little better or confirm that our two dead assholes were in the hotel room, but I don’t know that we’ll get much more than that.” Crawford frowned. “Essentially, this is a solved case.”

“Solved?” The chief looked at him, astounded. “Lieutenant, two men got away!”

“I know,” Crawford said, unfazed. “The driver and the lookout. And I say we rattle every Soviet tree in River City and club the shit out of every Russian that falls out until we find them. But it looks like we already have the shooters. And that’s the core of the case.”

The chief sat and contemplated for a moment. He’d never been a cop nor an investigator, a fact he reminded himself of whenever he thought he might know better than someone who was both. Still, Crawford’s attitude irked him, even if the man was right.

He turned to Renee. “What do we know about these two dead suspects?”

Renee held a stack of paperwork in her hand, but she spoke without referencing it. “The one with the shotgun is Ivan Cherny. He appears to be criminal muscle, based on his arrest record. Most recently, he spent a couple nights in jail after assaulting his wife and then fighting with Officer MacLeod.”

“This is the guy who broke the officer’s leg?”

“Ankle,” Renee corrected. “Yes.”