A Neighbor’s Lie
“Yes, I can work with that,” she finally answered.
“Fantastic. There’s already a case I want to place you on. You’d start on it tomorrow morning. Maryland State PD has been running it, but as of this morning, placed a call for assistance. I’ll be placing you alongside another agent that finds herself without a partner. The one she had been assigned folded under the pressure and called to resign yesterday.”
“Can I ask why?”
“With the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, some of the crimes tend to be a little gruesome. It happens to some new recruits…they make it through training, seeing the sample cases and even the real-life scenarios. But in the end, realizing they’ll be living in it…it’s too much for some.”
Chloe said nothing. She tried to fathom having to make such a decision and it was beyond her. She’d been wanting a job like this for as long as she could remember—for as long as she knew the difference between right and wrong.
“Will I need any additional training?”
“I’d recommend more firearms training,” Johnson said. “I’ll make sure that’s all set up for you. Your previous scores from Evidence Response enrollment in terms of firearms look quite good, but you may want a few extra skills in that area once you really get into the thick of ViCAP—should you decide to stay on.”
“I understand.”
“Well, unless you have any questions, I guess you can go ahead and get started with orientation downstairs. You’ve still got three minutes before it starts.”
“No more questions at the moment. And thanks for the opportunity. And the trust.”
“Of course. I’ll handle all of the paperwork and someone will call you about your assignment by the end of the day. And Agent Fine… I have a good feeling about this. I think you’ll be a remarkable asset to ViCAP.”
It was then, as she stood up to leave his office, that she realized that she had never been very good at accepting compliments. Perhaps it was because she had never received very many of them throughout her younger years. Now she simply smiled awkwardly and made her exit. The knot of nervousness that had been in the pit of her stomach was gone now, replaced by a flying sensation that made it feel as if her feet weren’t even touching the ground as she made her way to the elevators.
***Orientation was about what she had expected. It consisted of a list of dos and don’ts that came from a collection of seasoned agents. There were examples of cases gone wrong, of cases so bad that past agents had quit over them or even committed suicide. The instructors told miserable tales of murdered children and serial rapists who had not, to this very day, been apprehended.
As these stories were passed along, Chloe could hear little murmurs of uneasy conversation in the crowd. Two seats to her left, she heard a woman whispering to the man beside her.
“Apparently, my partner heard these stories before us. Maybe that’s why he bailed.” She said it in a bitchy way, a mean-girl sort of way that instantly annoyed Chloe.
With my luck, that’s the partner-without-a-partner Johnson wants me paired up with, Chloe thought.
The session eventually ended for lunch. When it did, the instructors on stage broke the crowd up into the specific departments. When Chloe heard Evidence Response Team called, she felt a small pang of sorrow. She watched as about twenty recruits walked down to the stage and collected on the right side. Knowing that she was supposed to be among their numbers less than three hours ago made her feel a little isolated, especially when she saw that some of the agents seemed to have already formed friendships.
When the agents in the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program were called, she got up and headed for the floor. The crowd she walked with was smaller than the Evidence Response Team. Including herself, she counted only nine. And one of them was indeed the woman who had made the comment about her partner quitting.
She was so focused on this woman that she didn’t notice the man stepping up beside her as they made their way to the floor.
“I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I feel like I need to be hiding my face. Being part of a program with the word violent in it…makes me think people are judging me.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever thought of it that way,” Chloe said.
“Well, do you have a tendency towards violence?”
He asked it with a smirk and it was that smirk that somehow helped her to realize that the man was extremely good-looking. Of course, the comment about a tendency toward violence skewed it a bit.
“Not that I know of,” she answered awkwardly as they reached the floor where their group was gathered.
“Okay,” the instructor, an older gentleman dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt, said. “Lunch first, then we’ll meet up in Conference Room Three to go over some details and run through a Q and A. Before all of that, though…” He paused here and looked at a sheet of paper, scrolling through it using his finger. “Is there a Chloe Fine here?”
“That’s me,” Chloe said, nearly breaking into a sweat from having been singled out in this group of people she did not know.
“I need to speak with you for a moment, please.”
Chloe walked toward the instructor and saw that the gentleman was also beckoning another agent forward.
“Agent Fine, I see here that you are a new addition to ViCAP, directly from the recommendation of Director Johnson.”
“That’s correct.”
“Good to have you. Now, I’d like to you meet your partner, Agent Nikki Rhodes.”
He motioned to the other agent that he had beckoned toward him. Sure enough, it was the bitchy woman from earlier. Nikki Rhodes smiled at Chloe in a way that made it clear that she knew she was beautiful. And even Chloe had to admit it. Tall, perfectly tanned skin, sparkling blue eyes, sickeningly straight blonde hair.
“Nice to meet you,” Rhodes said.
“Likewise,” Chloe said.
“Now, you two go enjoy lunch,” the instructor said. “From what I understand, you’ll be working a case early tomorrow. You were both at the top of your class, so I expect to hear some very big things about the two of you.”
Rhodes gave her a smile and Chloe could feel the fakeness of it. She hated to automatically assume someone was not a genuine or authentic person, but her gut had always been spot on with things like this. The instructor had turned to join the rest of the group, leaving the two women alone. Noticing that the eyes of a superior were no longer on them, Rhodes turned and walked away without saying anything at all.
Chloe kept back from the rest of the group for a moment, trying to get her head straight. She’d woken up this morning excited to start her career as a member of the Evidence Response Team. Everything for the foreseeable future had essentially been planned out. And now here she was, placed into a department she was not very familiar with, assigned to a partner with a stick up her ass.
“She doesn’t exactly seem like a people person, does she?” someone said from behind her.
She turned and saw the man who had walked with her down to the floor—the handsome one who had asked if she had any violent tendencies.
“No, she doesn’t.”
“Imagine having most of your courses with her at the academy,” he said. “It was miserable. Speaking of which…I don’t remember you being in any of my courses or modules.”
“Yeah…I’m sort of new. I was placed in this department this morning.”
A look of mild shock came over his face. “Oh, okay. Well, welcome to ViCAP. I’m Kyle Moulton and if your new partner doesn’t want to have lunch with you, I’d like to take her place.”
“Help yourself,” Chloe said, finally falling in behind with the rest of the group. “It’s fitting of my day to say the least.”
“How so?”
“Because nothing else has really gone as planned, either.”
Moulton only nodded as they left the auditorium. Even though Moulton was a stranger (albeit a handsome one), it was nice to have him by her side as they walked to the catered lunch waiting for them elsewhere in the building. She was afraid that if she had to step into this uncertain future completely alone, it might make her rethink everything.
“Plans are overrated anyway,” Moulton said.
“Not to me. Plans mean structure. Plans mean predictability.”
“I don’t think predictability was in the job description for our positions,” Moulton joked.
Chloe smiled and nodded but had never quite looked at it that way. Quite frankly, it frightened her a bit. Which made no sense, really. Her life had never been anything more than an unpredictable pile of utter crap, so why would her career be any different?
Luckily, she had learned to roll with the punches. And if snotty bitches like Nikki Rhodes happened to obscure her path along the way, then Rhodes could either adapt or get the hell out of her way.
CHAPTER THREE
The following morning, Chloe got a rude awakening to how the remainder of her career would be structured. Her phone rang at 5:45, the call coming from one of the assistant directors who worked under Director Johnson. She had barely managed to croak out a raspy “Hello?” before the man on the other end started to speak.
“This is Assistant Director Garcia. Is this Agent Chloe Fine?”
“It is.” She sat up in bed, her heart hammering as a surge of adrenaline flooded through her, kicking out the remnants of sleep.
“You’re to meet Agent Rhodes in Bethesda at seven a.m. You’ll be working together on what we believe is a pretty open and closed case of gang violence, likely from MS-13. Any questions should come directly to me, at this number. Agent Rhodes will be given the exact same information. Following this call, the address will be texted to your phone. Do you have any questions, Agent Fine?”
Chloe was sure she had some questions, but they were hiding in the wake of her first actual assignment.
“No, sir.”
“Good. Be safe and smart out there, Agent Fine.”
And that was it. That was how she got her first assignment. She knew that they would not come like this in the future; they’d been told this much at orientation yesterday. Still, it was quite an effective way to kick off her first day on the job.
She’d already laid her clothes out and showered the night before, doing everything she could to make sure she would not be late for whatever awaited her on the first day. She dressed, grabbed a bagel with some cream cheese, and poured a thermos of coffee that she had set to brew at 5 a.m. last night. During all of this, the text from Director Garcia came through, giving her the address in Bethesda. When Chloe got to her car, only fifteen minutes had passed since the call had come in.
She’d been to Bethesda, Maryland, several times so she knew it was a quick drive—a little less than half an hour, especially leaving this early and getting in front of the miserable morning commuter traffic. Once she was out of the grind of DC’s streets and onto more open lanes, she plugged the address into her GPS and saw that she was only twenty-two minutes away.
She found herself wanting to call Danielle. She felt herself driving toward one of the more memorable and meaningful moments in her life and felt the need to share it with someone. But she knew Danielle would still be sleeping and that she would also probably not understand the excitement of it. And that was fine with Chloe. They had different interests and passions, and neither one had ever been particularly great at faking their enthusiasm.
She arrived at the address two minutes ahead of the time her GPS had given her. It was a rundown one-story apartment building, the kind that was usually visited by the police at least a dozen times over the weekend for violence, drugs, sexual assault, and just about anything else imaginable.
She’d fully expected to be there ahead of Rhodes but was a bit dejected to see the other agent not only already there, but walking up the porch steps toward the crime scene.
Annoyed, she parked along the side of the street and hurried up the sidewalk. She made it up to the porch just as Rhodes opened the door to head inside.
“Good morning,” Rhodes said, clearly not meaning it.
“Good morning. What did you do…fly here?”
Rhodes only shrugged. “It doesn’t take me very long to get ready in the mornings. It’s okay, Agent Fine. This isn’t a race.”
As they stepped inside, they saw a man standing in the center of a small cluttered living room. He turned toward them and his eyes seemed to hang on Agent Rhodes for a moment. She was wearing very modest black slacks and a conservative white top. Her hair had been straightened and although she’d claimed she took very little time to get ready, it was obvious that there had been some makeup work done that morning.
“You with the bureau?” the man asked.
“Yes,” Chloe said quickly, as if making sure the man knew there were two agents present, not just the tall pretty blonde one.
“Agents Rhodes and Fine,” Rhodes said. “And you are?”
“Detective Ralph Palace, Maryland Homicide. I’m just taking a few final notes, as I understand this is your case now.”
“What can you tell us to get us started?” Chloe asked.
“It’s pretty basic. Gang-related murder. MS-13 is a big one in this area, so that’s what we’re going with. The bodies of a husband, wife, and thirteen-year-old son were removed yesterday afternoon, about seven hours after the call was placed. Reports of shots fired, and this place ended up looking like this.” He waved his arms all around, indicating the mess of the apartment. “Some pretty simply police work revealed that the father once had ties with a rival gang, the Binzos.”
“If MS-13 is involved how is ICE not on this?” Chloe asked.
“Because it hasn’t been proven yet,” Palace said. “With immigrant-related gang crimes, we have to be pretty certain. Otherwise, we can expect lawsuits and grievances about the unfair treatment of ethnic groups.” He gave a shake of his head and sighed. “So if you guys could prove this one way or the other, that would be great.”
He made his way to the front door, taking a business card from his wallet as he did. It was no surprise at all when he handed it directly to Rhodes. “Call me if you need anything else.”
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.
But she knew that was a lame excuse. After all, so far this crime scene had essentially been nothing more than evidence collecting—which was what she had been wanting to do all along in the first place.
Feeling embarrassed and enraged, Chloe walked out of the room to collect her breath and her thoughts.
“Jesus,” Rhodes said as she observed the print. “Fine…why don’t you see what you can find out there that might of some use? There are bullet holes in the kitchen wall I didn’t get a chance to look at while you were outside. I’ll wrap this up…if it’s even possible.”
Again, Chloe had to bite back quite a few vile comments. She was in the wrong here and that meant she had to overlook Rhodes being a bitch. So she kept quiet and headed back out into the central area of the apartment, hoping to find some way to redeem herself.
She went into the kitchen and saw the bullet holes Rhodes had mentioned. She saw the casings in each hole, several inches deep into the plaster. She was sure they’d be able to find out what kind of gun had been used based solely on that. So as far as Chloe was concerned, the bullet holes were a gimme—an easy clue that would give them just enough information to keep the case chugging along.
Maybe there’s something else, though, she thought.
She walked back toward the hallway and stopped where it connected with the living area. If the killer had indeed come in through the window in the master bedroom, this would likely be where the shooting had started. The lack of blood or chaos in the bedroom indicated that nothing violent had happened back there.
She looked to the couch and saw the spray of blood on the floor in front of it. Probably the first shot, she thought. She observed the layout of the place and could see it all in her head. The first shot had killed someone on the couch. That would have caused anyone else on the couch to jump up quickly, perhaps knocking over the coffee table. Maybe they tripped over it or tried jumping over it. Regardless, the blood and spilled soda on the other side of the overturned coffee table indicated that this person did not make it out.
Still, it made her wonder. She slowly walked into the living room, following the path she assumed the bullets had gone. The amount of dried gore on the back of the couch gave her enough evidence that the person sitting there had died right away. She could see no entry on the couch where the bullet had torn into it, meaning it had lodged somewhere in the victim’s head.