Alex left her car in the Coronado PD parking lot and walked into work the next morning. She was still getting used to the California weather. The mornings were lovely, but, by the afternoons, she struggled with the heat. She was from Delaware originally, then moved across the country. California was by far the nicest state she had lived in, but it was also the most crowded, and it was hard for her to acclimatize. Things were different here. More casual. No longer being in the military had opened up Alex’s lifestyle completely.
Then, with her new job, she just might be feeling the pressure a little more. In past years, the Coronado PD had five to six detectives. Now there was one—her. And, true enough, there hadn’t been a murder in this city in over a decade, and the budget hadn’t allowed for officers whose mandate wasn’t being utilized so … But having come from a department with dozens of other detectives and officers to this one, where everyone looked to her to solve the issues on her own, was intimidating. Empowering. Challenging. And she loved that, but it also pushed her buttons. She had no one to turn to for help. She missed bouncing ideas off her peers. She had supervisors and a chief here of course, but that wasn’t the same as having a partner.
She also had to rely on the local police officers in a way she hadn’t had to before.
As such she hadn’t found her comfort level yet. But then she’d only been here for a month.
As usual, she sat at her desk to see papers and messages tossed on top. She booted up the computer and logged in. First thing she did was check her emails. She was waiting on the autopsy report for Marsha, but it still wasn’t in.
Neither were the lab tests back.
In other words, things were operating at the normal slow pace they always did, no matter what part of the country she lived in. She went through her phone messages until she came to one, a caller who wanted to speak to her about the McEwan case. Alex picked up the phone and dialed the number. There was no answer. She frowned and let it continue to ring, hoping for voice mail. But there was nothing.
She wrote a note to call back and stabbed it onto the spike she kept on her desk. It was an easy way to keep track of pieces of information she’d lose otherwise. They often had people calling in, wanting to say something about a case, then getting cold feet.
Those were messages or notes she couldn’t afford to forget. She had to go through the pieces of paper on that spike every day before she left work. That was the only way she didn’t miss anything. Details were the devil. But, without them, everything fell apart.
She continued to work steadily that morning. She had Macklin’s interview typed up and in the system and checked on a couple more people to interview.
For the rest of that afternoon she made phone calls to get the contact information of the men from Macklin’s unit who were overseas so she could back up his statement. She’d have to arrange to make those calls through formal channels. Depending on where the men were, what they were doing, confirming Mac’s story with them could take a few days, if not longer. Unfortunately Marsha’s murder wasn’t Alex’s only case. There’d been several break-ins at Silver Strand Housing, the military housing complex—three so far, all in the last week. In each case but one, a woman had been home alone. In each case the intruder had been chased off.
But what really bothered Alex was, in each case, the intruder got a little farther. The first case, he managed to get into the front door before the woman screamed. He’d bolted, and she had raced onto the front deck, screaming for the police, and he’d escaped into the shadows.
The police had done the usual interviews and filed reports, but they had not found anything helpful. There were no footprints outside, nor fingerprints on the door.
The second case had been similar, but he’d made it all the way through the kitchen and into living room, where the homeowner was coming down the stairs. In that case, she had a dog. The dog started barking, and the intruder bolted—getting away again.
In the third case, however, the intruder was caught upstairs. He tried to get downstairs, but the woman’s boyfriend was there. Blows were exchanged, and the assailant managed to escape again.
Now Alex had three breaking-and-entering cases, and, in each one, the intruder had been more successful than the last. She highly doubted that getting caught by a boyfriend would stop him from trying again. Having successfully circumvented any problems, she knew he would feel proud of himself for getting that far. The trouble was, she didn’t know what his end game was.
She was stuck, waiting for him to make his next move. She had officers out canvassing the community and warning the locals to beef up their security and to be extra vigilant.
In the meantime, she lacked any forensic evidence for when they did catch him. They had a visual from the boyfriend, but, outside of basic traits—young, tall, brown hair, and white—the boyfriend couldn’t give them any further details.
The woman with the dog had added he was slim built and fit. But he’d worn a black hood, black gloves, black athletic jogging pants, and a black jacket zipped up in the front.
The intruder had gone into the houses around the same time, which was early evening. So he was casing the victims, either assuming they were away or assuming he was in the clear, and had gone in when it was still daylight but just as darkness settled.
That was an interesting time because a lot of people were still moving about then. She’d have expected him to go around midnight or the early hours of the morning. So either he did a crappy job in assuming nobody was home, or he did not care. His next attempt would tell her which way he was going.
If he continued as is, he not only was okay with the confrontation but he was possibly looking for more. And she knew that would bring an escalation of violence.
“Alex?”
She glanced up to see Lance, one of her senior police officers, standing in the doorway. She smiled. “Good morning.”
He frowned. “I thought you’d be at the house.”
Her heart sank. “What house?”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “We had another one last night.”
She stood slowly. “I wasn’t called.”
He nodded. “I realize it’s awkward with you just taking over, but you got to go hardnose to get the respect you deserve. And you gotta do it now. Don’t give them any leeway, or it’ll just get worse. You know you’ll have to deal with that, right?”
She drummed her fingers on the desk for all of ten seconds and then gave a clipped nod. “I thought I had, but apparently I wasn’t clear enough.” She grabbed her bag. “You have the address?”
He handed her a small sheet of paper.
She glared at it, then him. “When did you find out?”
“Several hours ago,” he admitted. “It never occurred to me to call you because I assumed you’d already been there.”
She didn’t say anything, just brushed past him. “Any report in yet on it?”
“It happened in the wee hours of the morning.”
She spun to look at him and said, “When?”
“Initial reports say somewhere around three o’clock in the morning.”
She nodded. “Who were the responding officers?”
“Wilson and Owen.”
Under her breath, she murmured, “Interesting.” She didn’t have a beef with either officer. As far as she knew, they were on board with her arrival, but she’d jumped over several internal applications. However, the bosses had their reasons for bypassing those people in lieu of Alex. Still, that didn’t make it any easier for those who had applied and were rejected. Now by her vehicle, she took a moment to look up the address. She recognized it to be in the same military complex area, just slightly to the left of the other houses, but still in the Silver Strand Housing complex, according to the map on her cell. Getting in her car, she drove to the house.
When she pulled up and saw an ambulance, her heart sank. She hadn’t asked if there had been any fatalities. By going in during the middle of the night, the attacker had assumed either the house was empty, the inhabitants were asleep, or maybe he didn’t give a damn but knew he would be in the power position. After the altercation at the last break-in, it was quite possible he didn’t want to have another one.
When she arrived, one of the officers stood outside taking pictures. She stepped to his side.
He smiled. “There you are. We wondered when you were getting in.”
“I wasn’t called,” she said, her voice hard.
His smile fell away. “Oh.”
Everyone knew what that meant.
“Good enough.” She walked in the front door, careful to stay clear of the men and their equipment. It didn’t take her long to figure out this case had not only been an escalation but it had been bad.
Officer Sandra Mellon stood on the far side of the living room. She looked up and smiled. “There you are.”
Alex made her way over and repeated, “Sorry. I wasn’t called.”
Sandra’s eyebrows rose. “Really? I assumed you were busy.” She glanced at her wrist. “But it’s been hours. I should have called you myself.” She glanced around and frowned. “Owen called me after Wilson had to leave.”
Officer Owen caught sight of Alex and said, “I got the call at ten to four. Wilson came in right behind me. But he had to leave, so Sandra came in.”
Alex stared at him in disbelief. “Five hours? Five hours later and nobody called me?” She didn’t bother asking what they were still doing here at this point. An hour—two, max—was all that should have been required. Still it wasn’t her problem. Thankfully.
The two officers looked at each other and then shrugged. “At least you’re here now,” Owen said. “I don’t have a formal report written up, but I can give you the gist of it. The perp broke in about three this morning. The owner… the resident is Melanie Schaefer. She was sleeping alone. She heard a noise downstairs. She has no security in the place and no dog. She got up to investigate and was grabbed from behind. A fight ensued. She took a bit of a beating but not bad. She was knocked out. When she woke up, he was gone.”
“Was she raped?”
Owen shook his head. “It doesn’t look like it. We’re still figuring that out.”
“So she was fully dressed?”
Owen nodded. “Yes. She called the police soon after waking. We were here within fifteen minutes. But of course he was gone. She doesn’t know how long she was unconscious. She’s currently at the hospital being checked over. She did a quick examination of the house but didn’t recognize anything missing.”
“Right. I’ll do a walk-through.” She was still miffed but needed to focus.
Turning her attention to the house, she did a careful walk-through, checking how the intruder entered, which appeared to be via the backyard.
And then he went up the stairs to the bedroom. Nothing seemed to have occurred while the owner was out cold. It was almost as if, when the intruder came in, the woman woke up right away, came downstairs, a fight ensued, and then he took off. But, if the woman was unconscious, he was free to do what he wanted, at least until she regained awareness. She had no camera system inside or out, no security on the doors or windows. Which was typical of all the houses in this area. The intruder picked the lock and just walked right in.
Alex stopped in the kitchen and stared at the backyard. A short fence surrounded the yard, but there was no back gate, no entrance or exit coming in from the other properties. Short of jumping the fence, that was certainly possible. She’d seen it happen. These cookie-cutter homes and cookie-cutter backyards were fenced to give each person a little bit of privacy and a little bit of space. But, if someone wanted to, it was easy to hop between houses.
He likely came in over the fence to hide the true direction he had traveled from.
She turned back to Owen. “Did she hear a vehicle?”
He shook his head. “The first sound she heard was him accidentally kicking a kitchen chair. She has no pets so knew she had an intruder.”
“So she came downstairs instead of calling the police? Even though we’ve put it out everywhere on the news we have a rash of break-ins?”
Both Sandra and Owen nodded.
“Send me a report as soon as you’ve got something written up.” She stepped outside the back door and surveyed the small porch. No clear footprints could be seen in the grass as it had been trampled by law enforcement.
She turned back to Owen. “Did anyone find tracks out here before it was trampled?”
“There was bent grass but not necessarily footprints,” he admitted. “We have photos.”
“I want to see those images to confirm how he approached the property.”
Owen brought out his phone. “I have a few here.” He flicked through his cell phone and then held up one of the snapshots.
She studied the backyard. The trail came from the corner. “We need to check the other houses in this area.”
“I can do that,” Sandra said. “Several officers are going door to door, to see if they heard or saw anything. But no one has spoken with these adjacent owners.”
“Let’s get on that. This guy will hit again and soon.” Alex turned to the light yellow-toned house. “But I don’t know what he’s after. I need to know that,” she murmured. “He was interrupted here too. But then he knocked the woman unconscious and had the entire house available to pore over and steal what he wanted with no more interference… and yet he didn’t.”
Owen nodded slowly. “At least not that the owner’s seen.”
“The TV is too big for him to carry away for a long distance,” Alex said. “The owner’s purse is still here. Her wallet with money and cards are still inside,” she mused. “Did she have any expensive jewelry?”
Owen shook his head. “No, she was quite puzzled when she realized he hadn’t taken anything. But, as you look around the house, not a whole lot is a quick snatch-and-grab.”
“How about a laptop?” Sandra asked. She turned to view the house. “I don’t remember seeing a laptop.”
Owen checked his notes. “Yes, it was still there.”
“There has to be some reason why he was here,” Alex said. “All these women were alone in their homes at the time of entry, except one. I’m concerned he’s getting up the nerve to do so much more.”
Sandra and Owen winced.
And Alex knew they understood what she meant. “Sometimes people need several trial runs to prepare for what it is they really want to do. But I would have thought an unconscious woman was a perfect opportunity. Maybe he thought he’d killed her?” she said a bit absentmindedly. “Maybe, when she collapsed, he thought he’d hurt her worse than he had, and he took off, scared?”
“That makes sense,” Owen said. “There’s got to be some reason he left.”
Alex walked back inside. “Where did she wake up?”
Owen led her into the living room. “She woke up here, on the floor in front of the couch.”
“And that’s where she’d been fighting with him?” That made no sense. The coffee table was still perfectly straight in line with the couch. “They didn’t have a fight in here. Nothing’s shifted. Nothing’s moved. Nothing’s broken. The lamps are perfectly fine. The tables and everything are lined up as if nobody had even been in here.”
The two officers stood aside and surveyed the living room. “No, you’re right. That doesn’t make any sense.” Owen checked his notes. “I just have down that she was in the living room. But I don’t know exactly where they were fighting.”
“Or the intruder straightened the furniture. But why?” She turned to him. “Find out where they’d been fighting and ask if she straightened up the furniture herself. I especially want to know if she was laid on the couch itself because that would show a different level of compassion for an intruder.”
Owen snapped his notebook shut. “I’ll head to the hospital now and get a few more details.”
“No, on second thought, I’ll go to the hospital,” Alex said. “You guys finish this up. Check with the neighbors and see if they heard or saw anything, particularly the three that are kitty-corner to this property. And make sure he didn’t hit two houses last night. For all we know, this house was an afterthought with the real hit being somewhere else.”
The others nodded and broke away. Alex returned to her car and stood for a long moment. She also had to deal with the problem of why she hadn’t been called. She pulled out her phone and called dispatch.
After one ring, dispatch answered, “Good morning, Alex.”
“Why wasn’t I called when the break-in came in?” she asked.
“We have a call logged to your phone at the same time as Owen and Wilson were called. Are you saying you didn’t receive one?”
“No, I didn’t receive one.”
“We have a call logged in though.”
“And did you speak with somebody?”
“I didn’t make the phone call. I just have it down that the call was made. Oh, it says no answer.”
“Okay, that needs to be checked. Because I was never called,” she said, her voice sharp. “I can’t have that happening again.” Alex realized she should be talking to the supervisor, not the woman on the line. “Don’t worry about it,” she said quickly. “I’ll sort it out.”
She ended her call and quickly checked her phone history. Although it was stupid, she was relieved to see she hadn’t missed a call. That would be too embarrassing. She couldn’t think of any time in her career that it had happened, but there was always a first.
Back in her car, she turned it around and headed toward the hospital. When she got there, she found the woman had already been released. Alex growled quietly and said, “Do you have forwarding contact information for her?”
The nurse pulled up a file and brought out a sheet of paper. “She said she would be staying with her friend Kimberly Lane. This is the address. This is the phone number.”
“Did she have her cell phone with her?”
“Yes, her number is this one.” The nurse took a moment to run through the file and then jotted down the injured woman’s phone number.
“So she wasn’t badly hurt then. Just how severe were her injuries?”
The nurse smiled. “She got off lucky. She was just shaken. She had a small head injury, which would account for her being unconscious. She also had a few bruises and was shaken up, that’s all. She was in shock more than anything. But a friend came to collect her, and they went to have breakfast.” The nurse gave her a name of a popular local hotspot.
Alex nodded. She took the piece of paper and stepped outside. When she dialed the woman’s number, nobody picked up right away. She let it ring several more times and then decided she’d head to the restaurant herself. If the women were having breakfast, it would be a good time to catch both.
She walked into the restaurant, but there was no sign of two single women at a table. Feeling like an idiot, she turned and headed toward the front door as she called the woman’s cell phone again.
*
Macklin walked into the gym. If ever there was a day he needed to work out, this was it. He barely had the bar set up with weights when he heard a shout behind him. He turned and grinned when he saw a group of his teammates walking toward him.
“Hey! You could have at least told us you were alive and well,” Ryder said.
Mason and the other guys all clustered around. Mason commented, “I wasn’t sure they would let you out so fast.”
Macklin shrugged. “She just asked me some questions.” But he knew they didn’t believe him.
They stayed and waited.
He sighed. “I’m trying to get used to the idea myself. But unfortunately it looks like somebody’s setting me up.”
And, typical of his friends, they all continued to wait, arms crossed over their chests. They wouldn’t let him go until they had the details. Not because they had morbid curiosity but because they wanted to know how bad things really were.
He explained, finishing with, “And, to top it off, somebody wrote my name in blood at the crime scene, as if Marsha had named her killer.”
Corey whistled. Ryder’s face was almost comical with the anger twisting up his features.
It made Macklin feel good to know they were behind him all the way. “I think the detective believed me, though I certainly had no alibi for the night Marsha was murdered. I was home alone.”
“We’ve been saying you should have another girlfriend,” Corey said with a big grin.
Macklin shook his head. “Remember that adage about, if you keep doing the same thing repeatedly, how do you expect a different outcome? Well, I don’t have any intention of repeating the Marsha scenario.”
“You do know not all women are like Marsha?” Mason asked seriously. “Still, this is bad news. Did Alex Carson have any other evidence pointing to you? DNA evidence, forensic evidence? A name is one thing that could be just a bitchy woman making sure she stabbed you once again in the back as she died,” he said. “I know that sounds terrible, but we’ve all met people who are so soured on life and so angry at everything that they’d do anything, including blaming the wrong man.”
Ryder interrupted. “Any chance she committed suicide and made it look like murder?”
“Not unless she smashed her own head hard enough to knock her out and gave herself a skull fracture.”
“So then could she even have been alert enough to write your name in blood?” Corey asked.
Right. Macklin’s gaze went from one man to the other. He liked that about these guys. They didn’t question his guilt. They already knew instinctively he was innocent. They were just figuring out the how and the who. Anybody could have made this look like Marsha had done it.
“I’m not exactly sure. Maybe I need to talk to Alex… Detective Carson, a little more about that,” Mac said slowly. “I wonder how long Marsha had been in her place? How many people would have known she was there?”
“Don’t get involved,” Mason said quietly. “If you’re too interested, it’ll look bad.”
“But I don’t have a choice,” Macklin said. “I’m not sure anybody else in the department will fight to clear me. If I look too damn good for the job, you know they’ll just charge me with it, so they can close the case and move on.”
“Caitlyn said Alex isn’t like that,” Ryder said. “They haven’t known each other all that long, but Caitlyn says Alex seems to be fairly straight up.”
“But we’ve seen lots of people who are on the up-and-up. But, when the pressure is on to close a case, they must do what they must do. Not necessarily in the best interests of anybody else around.”
“What do you think is going on?” Mason asked.
Macklin looked at him. “I think Marsha pissed off the wrong person.”
“But apparently you pissed them off too,” Ryder said quietly. “There was no need to write your name in blood, except to point the finger at you.”
“Are we absolutely sure there’s no way she could have written that?”
Macklin looked at Corey and shrugged. “Anything’s possible. For all I know, she lay there bleeding out, wrote the name, and somebody came and clunked her on the head. Does it make any sense? No. Is it a working theory? No. I’m grasping at straws. There was something wrong with her. She was fixated on me. She was a stalker and just two steps away from a full-blown psychopath. But the bottom line is, she didn’t commit suicide. And that means, whoever killed her used that moment to point the finger at me.”
“So the next question that must be answered is, who hates you enough to do that?”
“I don’t know.” Macklin stared moodily out the windows. “Since I saw the crime scene photos, I’ve been wondering the same thing.”
Corey’s tone was hard. “We all know law enforcement officers who took the easy way, not the right way.”
Macklin admitted it was a concern, but he had no way to judge Alex’s performance based on his interview. He shrugged. “It’s too early to tell.”
“The problem is, I think they are also short-staffed and overworked.”
Macklin got a short bark from Mason. “Isn’t it always that way? There’s a rash of break-ins and not enough law enforcement. It’s not good news.”
Macklin glanced at him. “I haven’t heard any details.”
“They have been warning everyone on the Silver Strand Housing complex. Four houses in about a five-block radius have been hit in the last week. One of them was early this morning.”
“Just break-ins?”
“Whenever he’s come across a resident, he’s had an altercation but only with the intent of escaping. We have an awful lot of hotshots and hotheads here. So that could account for the temperament on both sides of the law.”
“So high potential for the suspect to have been military personnel as well.”
“Certainly the odds are there. It doesn’t mean it’s a fact though. We have an awful lot of supporting staff here as well. And a lot of service people who are not military.”
“Any connection to Marsha?” Corey asked thoughtfully. “She was living alone as well. Didn’t she live in that area?”
Macklin pondered that. “A couple blocks away from the housing complex.”
“But definitely close enough to be possible. They may have to widen that grid soon.”
“But how does that make any sense? It was my name written in blood. It’s not exactly a common name and not exactly one to be mistaken for somebody else’s.”
“It could easily be that the break-ins were a cover-up,” Ryder said. “Completely distracting the investigation away from the murder.”
“The problem is, it’s all a guesstimate now. We don’t know anything. And unfortunately I don’t think the police do either.”
“Do we know any of the people who have been targeted?”
Corey walked a few steps away and brought up his phone. “Ryder, what about Caitlyn talking to Alex?”
“I don’t think they’re that close of friends. And, if Alex is any decent law enforcement officer, she won’t talk out of turn.”
“The news will have updates on where the homes were. We can always take a drive through the area and see if we see anybody we know there. I don’t believe I know any of the people targeted.”
“That’s a very valid word,” Mason said. “Targeted. Just like you were.”
Macklin looked at him strangely. “You’re thinking there’s a link between Marsha and these houses that were broken into?”
“Or there’s a link between you and past men of these other women. All single women. Likely all with relationships in their history. What’s the chance someone in that history is connected to you?”
“Huh.” Macklin shook his head. “I hadn’t thought of that. The trouble with that theory is, I’ve lived here for a lot of years. We’ve been working here for many more. My life will have intersected with these women who obviously have ties with the military, given they live in military housing.”
“Exactly. And the men they were associated with. So the question is whether that association is something somebody might hold against you.”
“I’ve made a ton of enemies, but I would have said they were all overseas. No terrorists should know my name, but we’ve been on a lot of missions and stepped into some government coups.” He shook his head again. “It’s kind of hard to believe it would be somebody close to home. If you’d asked me even last week who hated me, the only person I could have said was Marsha herself.”
“And, for all you know, this is still her doing,” Corey said quietly. “It’s never quite so straightforward. And, when we’re dealing with somebody like Marsha, it’s even less so. First off, let’s find out more about her psychological problems, if she had any suicide attempts, anything that could possibly lead to the idea she may have hired her own murder, a suicide made to look like you did it.”
Silence.
Macklin looked at Corey with respect. “That’s a hell of a theory. It fits more in a horror novel than in my life, but it is a theory.”
Corey grinned. “I told you that I like writing fiction on the side, right?”
Everybody laughed.
Mason smacked the weight bar in Macklin’s hand. “Are you just going to stand around and talk, or were you planning to get some work done here?”
At that, the serious conversation dissolved, and joking took over. The men went through their workouts, helping each other, pushing each other, working against and for each other, until they all sat dripping in sweat and exhausted. But Macklin’s grin was bright. Fierce.
“The only good thing about doing a workout like this is it revives that sense of fighting. That sense of ‘I won’t let this beat me.’”
Mason chuckled. “In that case, it did its job. Not to mention you’re getting stronger, faster …”
“Uglier,” Corey interjected.
“Than ever,” Mason finished triumphantly.
The men headed off to the showers. But for all the levity and the fact that he did feel much better, Macklin knew it wasn’t over. This was just the beginning.