Jonathon King - Shadow Men

By the time I hit the traffic of west Broward County, it was after nine, but the city lights and the bustle recharged me. I drove straight into Fort Lauderdale, and when I pulled around the corner to Richards's street and saw the kaleidoscope of spinning red and blue emergency lights, my heart felt like it had suddenly doubled in mass and dropped down into my rib cage.

I didn't remember parking. I tried to control myself, like a cop, a professional. I walked around the news trucks and patrol cars and gawking clumps of neighbors. I caught a glance of a yellow tarp draped over a body on Richards's front lawn. I passed two uniformed officers who must have mistaken my demeanor and stride as belonging to their brotherhood, but before I got to the house someone grabbed my elbow.

"Excuse me, sir," said the man's voice. "Do you have an I.D., sir?

I could not take my eyes from the yellow sheet, and I instinctively pulled my elbow out of the questioner's grip.

"Who is it?" I said, still not looking at the cop behind me.

"I'm gonna need some I.D., sir. This is a secure crime scene, and…"

I spun on him and the kid took a step back, a touch of alarm in his face. Then I heard her voice behind me, from up on the front porch.

"It's OK, Jimmy. He's with me."

She was still in her work clothes, a light gray suit and black heels. But she was disheveled in an uncharacteristic way. She said something to a man in a shirt and tie with a clipboard, then came down the steps to meet me. We walked together around the corner of the house by the driveway gate entrance. I wanted to step in to her and hold her, but held back.

"McCrary," she said, looking down at first, avoiding my eyes. "Kathy called me and asked if she could come over while I was still on duty. She was crying and said she needed a place to stay, so I told her where the key was and that I got off at six."

I bent my head down so that our foreheads were almost touching. We were having a discussion, quietly informational, not intimate.

"Didn't take McCrary long to figure out where she'd gone, and he shows up in uniform and starts banging on the front door. The neighbors see a cop and figure, hell, he's got something going on."

She looked up and I could see the tears welling up, even though she was fighting them.

"He put his shoulder into the door, splintered the lock and came at her."

"She shot him?"

"Yeah," she said, quickly wiping at her eyes with the sleeve of her jacket, hoping no one would catch the movement. "With her service weapon. The neighbors heard the shot, saw an officer lying in the yard and called in a 911 officer down."

"Cavalry time," I said.

Richards nodded, took a deep breath, and gathered herself.

"She's still inside, talking with homicide. Can you wait until they're gone?"

"Of course. Sure."

We went through the gate around back and Richards went inside through the French doors. I saw a knot of men huddled around the end of the couch where Harris had sat watching a movie with us just a few nights ago. Richards closed the doors behind her and I sat down heavily on the steps. The pool lights were on, but the aqua glow seemed to have gone cold.

I listened to the murmur of low, male voices and tried to blank it out because I knew what they would be saying. Did he threaten you? Did you fear for your life? Had he crossed the threshold of the doorway? Was he backing away or coming forward when you fired? I had been through it all before. So had Richards. After another hour I heard the door close, and cars out front were started. It was several more minutes before Richards stepped out with a steaming mug of coffee in her hands. I thanked her without saying so.

"She wanted to stay with me but IAD thought it was a bad idea, like we would stay up all night and concoct a story," she said, sitting in a chair next to me and pulling her feet up beneath her.

"She have a place to go?"

"Her grandmother is up in Pompano Beach."

"You get here with everyone else?" I said.

"Right along with the rescue squad and about thirty other cops coming in from every damn patrol sector in the city."

"He dead when you got here?"

"Yeah. Right there on my front lawn. Bastard."

I let the quiet sit uninterrupted for a while. Richards had already been through the mill, and no doubt would have another session with IAD in the morning, when they would want her to take them through Harris's relationship with the deceased. After a time I tried to offer some solace.

"He deserved it," I said.

I had expected a quick agreement, but Richards was thinking, thinking in that way good detectives think, without letting emotion get in the way of seeing the scene.

"She said he stumbled back out of the door and fell after she shot him." Her tone was unconvincing. I let her think about it. If she wanted to share, she would.

"One shot. In the mouth," she said after a few seconds. "She would know enough to take a head shot. She'd know he was wearing a vest."

"He still deserved it," I said, and then shut up. If Richards wanted to work through her question of premeditation versus an act of fear and self-defense, she was entitled, but I wasn't going to join her there. I sat my cup down and reached out and put my warmed fingers on her wrist and listened to the night. She sighed and I thought I finally heard her give it up.

"Billy tell you that the Highlands County sheriff was asking after you?" she finally said.

"Yeah. What was that all about?"

"A sergeant friend of his with the office called me, knowing that I knew you. He said the sheriff had met you and wanted to verify some background. I gave him the basics. Hope you don't mind."

"I met the guy outside a cafe up in Placid City when I went up looking for the Reverend Jefferson. Seemed a bit inquisitive for a small-town sheriff."

"My friend says the guy is as thorough as any cop he knows but a little obsessed. He says Wilson's on the hook for four homicides in the last fifteen years. All similar. All unsolved."

We were talking shop again, but I let her go on, hoping it would keep her mind off the possibility that her friend Harris had committed a justified but illegal assassination in her own home.

"He says they were all killed by the same big round. A heavy caliber. Possibly all from the same gun."

I stopped drinking the coffee and the look in my face must have confused her.

"What?" she said. "Max? What?"

"He tell you the exact caliber?" I said while digging the cell phone out of my pocket.

"No. I'm not sure the sheriff told him, exactly."

I speed-dialed Billy's home number and got the machine. I tried his office. He picked up on the first ring.

"Hi, Max. Any luck getting Richards?"

"Yeah, I'm at her place now."

"Good. I've been able to contact the prosecutor in Collier I told you about. He's willing to get a forensics team together, but he'd like to get some interagency cooperation. Maybe Sherry can help us with that."

"That's great, Billy, but we might have a more urgent problem," I said, trying to hold back my speculation. "Did Lott get back to you with anything on that old rifle?"

"No. My guess is he just stored it away. We didn't put any priority on it. What's up?"

"We need him to check it, Billy. We need to find out how recently it's been fired. Now."

The attorney went quiet for a second while he did his logic thing.

"Max, what's up?"

I told him about my encounter with Sheriff O. J. Wilson up in Placid City. The way the little bulldog had charmed me into letting him look for a weapon in my truck. Then I filled him in on how Wilson had tried to check me out, through Richards's friend and the string of homicides that had made him so paranoid.

"All large caliber. That could be anything, Max," Billy said. But he was too good a lawyer to dismiss it as coincidence that easily. "Did you call this Wilson and let him know about the gun in Jefferson's barn and its history?"