Блейк Пирс - A Neighbor’s Lie

Rhodes didn’t bother with a response as she pocketed the card. Chloe assumed she had been the kind of girl in high school and college who had gotten acclimated to having guys ogle her all the time. This encounter with Detective Palace had no doubt been just another one of those tiresome moments.

Chloe took a moment to look around the place. The coffee table in front of the couch had been overturned. Something—a dark soda from the looks of it—had been spilled from the table during the melee. The dark fluid had mixed with what was clearly drying blood on the pale shag carpet that covered the entire living room up until the adjoining kitchen. There was more blood splattered on the walls. There was also some smeared on the linoleum floor in the kitchen.

“How do you want to split this up?” Rhodes asked.

“I don’t know. If shots were fired, there’s a good chance one went into a wall or the floor. And from the messy look of the place, it wasn’t a simple shootout. There was a struggle. And that tells me there’s probably fingerprints somewhere as well.”

Rhodes nodded. “We also need to figure out how the killer got in. Did you get a look at the front door? No signs of forced entry. So that means one of the family members let the guy in—maybe someone they knew well and trusted.”

Chloe agreed with all of this and found herself impressed with Rhodes and the way she had already checked the door before even stepping inside.

“Why don’t you look around outside for signs of forced entry?” Rhodes suggested. “I’ll see if there are any signs of what type of weapons were used in here…see if there are any bullet fragments or anything like that.”

Chloe nodded in agreement but was already sensing that Rhodes was doing her best to angle herself as the lead in the investigation. Chloe took it in stride, though. Based on what Palace had told them—and the fact that this had been assigned to two brand new agents with the oversight of an assistant director—she knew it was considered a small-time task in the grand scheme of things. So if Rhodes was going for some sort of power play already, it wasn’t anything to get bent out of shape over. Not yet, anyway.

Chloe headed back outside, running the scenario through her head. If the killer was someone the family knew, why the struggle? If the killer had used a gun, three shots one right behind the other would not have allowed much time for any sort of struggle at all. But the door had indeed showed no signs of being forced open. So really, some sort of forced entry was more likely than the killer simply being allowed inside. But if not at the front door, then where?

She walked slowly around the building, realizing that calling it an apartment building was a bit of a stretch. She became more and more certain that it was some sort of urban housing, perhaps offered as some form of government aid. It was at the very edge of a collection of four identical buildings, separated by a strip of mostly dead grass between each one.

The left side offered nothing. It was mostly featureless with the exception of a small gas tank and a busted spigot where a water hose was coiled uselessly on the ground. But when she got around back, she saw several opportunities. First, there were three windows. One looked into the kitchen and the other two looked into bedrooms. There was also a set of concrete stairs that led up to a back door. She checked this door and found it unlocked. It opened up into a very small area that looked to have served as a mudroom. A few pair of dirty shoes were on the floor and a tattered dirty coat hung from a hook on the wall. She checked the door and the frame and found that it was all sound. From her point of view, she could not see where it had been forced open at any time in the recent past.

She went back to each window, looking for anything suspicious, and was not disappointed. On the third window, looking into what she assumed was the master bedroom, there were two small chunks of wood removed from the frame. They had been crudely removed, as if chipped away. One was along the bottom edge, where the frame sat against the edge of the pane. The other was along the top of the bottom portion of the frame. Whatever had happened to chip the wood had also caused a crack to form in the glass, though nothing hard enough to break it.

She did not want to touch anything out of fear of damaging any prints that had been left behind. But by standing on her tiptoes, she could see that this particular chip in the wood would have allowed someone from the outside to push down to disengage the window lock.

She went back inside through the back door and made her way into the master bedroom. There was no clear indication that anyone had entered through the window. But she also knew that a thorough dusting might tell a different story.

“What are you doing?”

She turned and saw Rhodes standing in the doorway to the bedroom. She had a skeptical look on her face as she studied Chloe.

“This window has been tampered with from the outside,” Chloe said. “We need to collect prints.”

“You got evidence gloves?” Rhodes asked.

“No,” Chloe said. She found this ironic; had she started her day as a member of the Evidence Response Team as she had originally planned, she’d have them on her. But after Johnson had switched her department yesterday, she hadn’t thought to bring any evidence-based equipment along.

“I’ve got some in my car,” she said. She then tossed Chloe a set of keys with a look of annoyance. “In the glove box. And please lock it when you’re done.”

Chloe muttered a subdued “Thanks” as she passed by Rhodes while leaving the room. She wondered why Rhodes would keep evidence gloves in her car. As she, Chloe, understood it, each agent would be supplied with the appropriate equipment and materials for any given case from the bureau. Had Rhodes been given the correct supplies? Had her late addition to the ViCAP program already come back to bite her in the ass?

She went outside and found a box of latex gloves in Rhodes’s glove compartment. There was also an evidence kit, which she took out as well. It was a small emergency kit but better than nothing. And while it showed that Rhodes was prepared, it also indicated that she wasn’t going to go out of her way to help Chloe. Why keep it a secret that she had gloves and an emergency evidence kit in the glove box unless she had planned on keeping them for herself?

Determined not to get too bogged down by such details, Chloe slapped the gloves on as she walked back into the house. As she passed by Rhodes again, Chloe handed her the evidence kit. “Thought we might need this, too.”

Rhodes gave her a biting look as Chloe headed back for the window. She checked the area that has been chipped and found that her hunch was correct. It would allow someone from the outside to apply just enough force to the lock to get it to pop open.

“Agent Fine?” Rhodes said.

“Yeah?”

“I know we don’t know one another, so I’m going to say this as polite as I can: Can you please watch what the hell you’re doing?”

Chloe turned back toward Rhodes and gave her a defiant look. “Excuse me?”

“Look at the carpet under your feet for God’s sake!”

Chloe looked down and her heart sank. There was a footprint there, just a partial one but clearly the top half of a footprint. It was made of what looked like dust and mud.

And she had stepped on it.

Shit…

She stepped back quickly. Rhodes took her place by the window, kneeling down to look at the print. “Hopefully you didn’t ruin it enough to make it unusable,” Rhodes spat.

Chloe bit back the retort that jumped up on her tongue. After all, Rhodes was right. She’d somehow overlooked something as glaringly obvious as a footprint. It’s because I’m just in my head too much, she thought. Maybe Johnson switching departments on me is affecting me more than I thought.