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OFFICER JEFF COMBS stood outside April Childress’s house, isolated from the whirlwind of quiet activity. Three patrol cars, an ambulance, and two plainclothes vehicles crowded the drive. The victim had already been pronounced dead, and the evidence team was inside. He’d already seen enough to know nothing he could do would help.
When the stretcher emerged he looked away, wanting to blank out the sight of the shrouded victim. Frozen tears broke loose, dusting sparkles onto his dark coat.
Officer Leonard Pike followed the body down the steps but veered away from the ambulance and headed to him. “I’m off shift, heading out. Sorry about your mom, Combs. We’ll get the bastard who did this. The putz has no chance.” He clapped the younger man on the back.
Combs gritted his teeth to curb curses. He felt gut punched, and wanted to hit back. He’d seen drug killings, overdoses, child battery, spousal abuse, accidental homicides and planned ones including suicides. The worst of the worst. But nothing compared.
This was his mother.
Mom, who never turned away a stray dog or kid. A woman dedicated to the church prayer chain. Who prayed for absolution for saying “drat” out loud. So proud he’d made detective, yet never spoke of his shame when it was taken away. When Cassie filed for divorce over a disturbed adolescent’s fantasies, his mom had never wavered. She convinced her brother Stan to go to bat for him, or he’d not have his badge today.
“You know what’s right,” she’d always told him, “God won’t make you wait too long. Trust yourself, honey.”
Mom. Her beautiful red hair matted and stained, her blood splattered against a stranger’s living room wall.
Rage shook him like a seizure. Pike reached to steady him, and Combs reflexively swung before he could stop himself. His partner dodged, grabbed and pinned his arms. “Get off. Son-of-a-bitch, let me go.” Pike moved well for being so overweight.
“Hey kid, take it easy. Hang on.” Pike tightened his hug for a long moment until Combs’s struggles stopped. “Okay?” He released his grip and stepped away with a quick gesture toward the still-open front door. “They want to talk to you.”
He’d never realized seeing red was literal. Combs took a half-step toward where his mother’s body waited in the ambulance.
“Leave her be. For now.” It was the first time in six months Pike had showed compassion. He wasn’t known to take it easy on himself or anyone else. Pike had troubles in his own life, including a doted on disabled grandson, but he mostly kept such things to himself.
Combs knuckled his eyes. “Sorry, man. And thanks.” He’d been an albatross dumped in the old timer’s lap. Pike didn’t have the clout to object, and didn’t want to rock the boat his last year before retirement.
Combs managed to rock everybody’s boat without trying. Last year, he and his old partner had built a case against a Cheese factory by getting close to one of the young kids who’d been sucked into the drug life. “Cheese” was slang for a mix of black tar heroin and cold medicine that looked like grated parmesan, and had accounted for countless teen deaths in Dallas since it was first identified in 2005. The thirteen-year-old informant ended up dead, and shortly thereafter, Combs’s own career was DOA. He’d become a political hot potato, and Pike made no bones about his opinion of “babysitting duty” as he called it. Now he acted almost human.
“Doty needs you inside. Go talk to the detectives.”
Combs straightened, scoured his face with gloved hands, and marched into the house.
The medical examiner hurried out. “Terrible thing, Combs, terrible thing. It was quick, though. The boys will fill you in on my prelim, and we’ll find out anything else ASAP. This tops my priority list, Combs. The very top.”
Combs nodded, grateful the man hurried away so he didn’t need to think of a reply. He wasn’t sure how his voice would sound or how long it would hold up. He looked away from the bloodstained sofa that commanded the living room.
“In here, Detec...I mean Officer Combs.” Detective Kimberlane Doty, a forty-something blond Amazon with close-cropped hair whispered to her partner, Detective Winston Gonzales, a bantam rooster of a man half her age. They waited in the nearby kitchen.
Great. The bitch who destroyed my career and her whiz kid protégé get assigned to Mom’s murder. His anger ratcheted up another notch, and he cautioned himself not to let them push his buttons.
Gonzales checked his notepad. “Victim is sixty-three-year-old white female.” He looked up. “I understand you found her. Pike called it in at two fifty-seven.” He paused, and acknowledged Combs with a chin jerk. “Wilma Combs was your mother. Sorry, man.”
Doty broke in. “Why didn’t you call it in yourself? And why’d you wait so long to tell Pike?” She ignored her partner’s surprise.
Gonzales recovered, his tone apologetic. “We have to ask.” Doty’s lips tightened but she didn’t comment.
Combs gave a slight nod to Gonzales. He appreciated the gesture even if the man had replaced him in the detective lineup. “When nobody answered the door, I looked in the window but couldn’t see anything. Too much frost. Tried the door and it wasn’t locked, so I came in.”
Doty peeled another stick of gum and added it to the wad she chewed. The whole department knew she’d quit smoking a month before. The smell of clove gum combined with blood stench was too much to bear, but she didn’t seem to notice or care. “Did you have reason to believe there was a problem?”
“Hell no. She’s my mother, babysits here five days a week, and I give her a ride when the weather’s bad.” He couldn’t stand still. He paced from the sink to the small kitchen table and back again. His shoes crunched. He looked down. Dog food and Cheerios. “Today I was late. Twenty-freaking-minutes-late.” His foot bopped a one-shoe jig until he consciously planted both feet. Calm down. Be a cop. For Mom. He looked away, unwilling to share his grief, and tried to speak without expression. “The wounds...” He swallowed hard and continued with effort. “Injuries were fresh. No pulse. But she was still warm.” Better. He sounded like a professional even if he wanted to scream. Twenty minutes would have made all the difference. Damn the weather, damn the traffic, and damn Pike and his turtle-slow driving!
“What time did you arrive, Officer?” Gonzales maintained a neutral expression and matched Combs’s professional tone.
By the book. Doty must have reformed. Combs cracked his knuckles at the sardonic thought, and cautioned himself not to pick further at the scab not yet healed. Screw the past. Only his mom mattered today. He recited the facts, drily, with no inflection. “I looked at my watch when we pulled up. It was two-fifty. I banged on the door for maybe two minutes. No answer. Tried the door and it was open. There was blood everywhere and the place was ransacked. I thought the perp might still be in the house. So I yelled at Pike to secure the outside while I did the inside.” He puffed his cheeks and blew out breath, but the tension remained wound tight. “Mom was already gone, so there was no hurry to get her help. Once we cleared the area Pike called it in at two fifty-seven.”
“You sure you didn’t want to get a head start on the evidence hunt, Officer?” Her tone was mild.
But Combs bristled. “Give me a break, I was a good detective. You know that better than anyone.” He’d smack that feral mouth if she said one more word. Why not? His career was over anyway.
“Cool your jets, Combs. Just saying I wouldn’t blame you.” She shrugged. “Rules are rules, but all bets off if something like that happened to my grandma. She raised me. Nobody messes with my family.” Clearly her feelings included relatives of cops.
Combs took a long, shuddery breath. He hadn’t expected that. But he’d take it. Just the facts, he told himself. Feed the team. “Pike didn’t even come inside. He steered clear of trace. I didn’t touch anything—except to check Mom for vitals.”
Doty cocked her head and gnawed the end of the pencil, her brown eyes narrowed in thought. “You sure this doesn’t have something to do with last year? Coming back to bite you on the butt through your mom?”
Combs winced. “That dog won’t hunt, Laney.” He wouldn’t give her the satisfaction, but he’d had the same thought.
They’d caught two of the three brothers who operated the lab. One was in prison, the other dead. The third had a long memory, if Spider could be believed. Despite the tiny girl’s venomous tattoos of her nickname, she’d been terrified of the brothers. “If Ghoul Patrol had something to do with this, they’d want me to know.”
Ghoul Patrol. The code name fit the Goth kids. Spider had had a serious case of hero-worship toward him, and Doty had pushed Combs to encourage her. “Young girls always want to feel special,” she told him, “so you give her what she wants, and she’ll feed us what we need.” But Spider didn’t tell all her secrets, after all. She reserved her most intimate fantasies—about him—for her diary. Water under the bridge, he thought.
Gonzales tapped his pencil on the pad. “Pike found lots of footprints out there, boot prints and tennis shoes, small, maybe a size six.” He waited a beat. “A child or a woman. We found similar prints in the front room in the blood.”
Combs nodded. “April Childress lives here with her son Steven. Probably their prints. The kid’s a little guy, maybe five or six years old I think. Maybe that’s why they’re both MIA.”
“Yeah, the yellow PT Cruiser out front is registered to April Childress.” Gonzales made a note. “Funny she left the car if she ran with her kid. Did she call a cab, or get a ride, or what? There’s at least three other tire treads out there, besides your patrol car. But I can’t see a soccer mom doing the deed, unless it was an accident.”
“Naw, the ME said it was up close and personal. Takes a special kind of badass to shoot someone in the face.” Doty jerked her chin at Combs. “Assuming your mom was an innocent bystander, my money’s on a third party. Single mom, a kid—where’s the dad? Custody issue and the victim is collateral damage?”
Gonzales flipped a page on his pad. “Trace found another single muddy print on the hardwood of a man’s dress shoe, size ten or eleven. Nothing outside.” He looked at Doty. “Maybe it iced up by the time he left.”
“Good, that makes more sense.” Combs noticed his leg once more jounced to its own rhythm, and he walked a few steps to stop the urge. “Besides, the whole house got trashed. Somebody tossed it and got mad when they couldn’t find whatever they were looking for.” Good, good, he thought, turn thoughts away from that final picture of Mom.
At least Dad wasn’t alive to see this. But he’d have to call Uncle Stanley. And his sister, Naomi. Aw shit—between the two of them he’d be pressed hard for constant updates. He couldn’t sit on the sidelines, had to be part of it, had to find Mom’s killer. He couldn’t let his family down again. This was bigger than a ruined reputation. Whatever it took, even suck up to Doty, it’d be worth it to get first crack at the bastard who did this.
He braced himself to eat shit and like it. “Doty, we worked together for what, five years? I won’t pretend not to want in on this. Make room on the team.” Before she could shoot him down he added, “It’s my mother, for Christ’s sake.”
“Good reason to keep your distance. You know the brass won’t authorize that. Hell, they’ll put you on administrative leave as soon as they find out.” She stared at him, and a slight smile twitched her normal icy expression, and for a moment he thought she might relent. “Even if I wanted to, that’s not my call. And after last year you used up any benefit of the doubt.”
“You’re just covering your ass. Again.”
“Bite me.” She popped her gum. “Look, Combs, go ahead and hate my guts if it helps. It’s my case whether either one of us likes it or not. I want the bastard who did this as much as you. Okay, not as much, but dammit, this is personal for me, too.” She looked away, nostrils flared.
She was right. Using Doty as a verbal punching bag wouldn’t help find Mom’s killer. But he’d be damned if he’d let Doty freeze him out. Whether officially or not, he’d find the killer. He’d nail his balls to the wall.
The phone on the kitchen wall rang. The three looked at each other. Before either detective could react, Combs scooped up the receiver. “Who’s speaking please?”
“Hey, there. Just checking in, I was worried about the little guy.” The deep male voice boomed so loud, Doty and Gonzales easily heard. “Is September there? This is Humphrey Fish over at the radio station.”
