CHAPTER FIVE
RJ, seated on the passenger seat, saw her through the rearview mirror. “She’s following us.”
Grant had already noticed. But he got on the radio with Sergeant Carter. “Any units on the scene yet?”
“Three are already there. They have the gunman in handcuffs isolated in a room. They’re waiting on you.”
“Okay good. And tell them no Miranda until I get there. Don’t ask him any damn questions. Don’t blow it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What have they assessed?”
“Loads of shots fired. Many wounded.”
“Any deaths?”
“Yes sir. At least two people. Maybe more.”
“ Damn ,” said RJ.
“Call other jurisdictions. Tell them to get ambulances to the scene too.”
“Will do, Chief,” said Carter, and Grant ended the communication.
“Damn,” said RJ again. Then he looked through his rearview again. “Not a bad looking chick.”
Grant frowned.“What?”
“That consultant,” said RJ, still looking out of his rearview. “She’s a nice-looking girl. I mean, she looked nice on her photo. But not like that! That photo doesn’t do her any justice.”
Grant shook his head. Two people dead, many wounded, and his second-in-command can only talk about a woman. And a consultant at that!
“I’m going to tap that for sure,” RJ was saying.
Grant rolled his eyes and sped up.
But RJ kept talking. “I’m going to see what that tastes like for sure,” he added with a smile. “I haven’t had me any pure brown sugar in a long, long time. I’m gonna hit that real hard.”
Then Grant blurted out, “ You stay away from her ,” before he realized he’d said it.
RJ looked at Grant and grinned. “Alright, I see you. Chief. You want first dibs. Okay. You earned the right. You got first. But let’s be clear: I got next. You hear me? I got next!”
Grant’s jaw tightened. He knew RJ and every other married man on the force had side pieces all over the place. But for him to think that a serious lady like that consultant was going to be that easy to conquer angered him. What did he think she was? One of those ladies of the evening they all frequented at Ma Bev’s every now and again? She was not that! And RJ even thinking that she was angered Grant. For some reason it angered him mightily.
But when Grant could hear and then see police cars all over the Wafer House restaurant on Ridge Cove, he forgot about RJ and that consultant and everything else they were talking about and raced to the scene. He and RJ hopped out and hurried toward the entrance.
When Marti arrived shortly after them she parked and hopped out of her car, too, as a cop opened the yellow tape and allowed Grant and RJ passage through. But he closed the tape right back as Marti hurried up behind them. “I’m with Chief McGraw,” she said to the officer.
“And I’m BiBi Netanyahu,” said the officer.
Marti, finding him ridiculous, yelled out beyond him. “ Chief !”
Although Grant didn’t stop walking toward the entrance, he turned around. Had his officer stopped any other so-called consultant from entering the crime scene, he would have given him a heartfelt attaboy. But when he saw Marti’s so-serious face staring at him with that plea in her massive eyes, as if she wanted him to understand that she didn’t sign up to be disrespected by his men, he understood it. He didn’t understand why he understood it. She was the enemy as far as he was concerned. But he understood it. “She’s with me,” he yelled to his officer.
When the now-stunned officer heard the chief’s reply, he quickly lifted the tape so that Marti could go under. Relieved, she hurried behind the chief, determined to stay close to him.
But as they surveyed the crime scene that still had blankets over the deceased, and as paramedics were still assessing the wounded, a detective came out of a side room where a short, white man in jeans and a black blazer was seated. From the open door, Marti could see that he was smoking a cigarette and drinking a coke.
“That our perp?” Grant asked his detective as he looked at the man too.
“That’s him.”
“Have you asked him anything?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“Has he said anything?”
“Just that he’s innocent. That he didn’t do it. Which is laughable since at least five witnesses said he was the shooter.”
“Are you sure they got it right?”
Grant and RJ were stunned to hear the consultant’s voice. They looked at Marti. The detective did too. “What do you mean are they sure?” RJ asked her.
“Who is she anyway?” the detective asked.
“She’s that consultant,” said RJ. “A know-it-all consultant.”
“Look lady,” the detective said nastily, “why don’t you go in the corner like a good little girl and consult, and let us grownups do the hard police work alright?”
“Just because Chief let you through that tape doesn’t mean you get a say in our investigations,” RJ added.
The detective was even more upset. “Our hands are full trying to deal with this disaster and you have the nerve to ask me if we’re sure a man five people said pulled the trigger might be telling the truth and all the witnesses are liars?”
“I didn’t call anybody a liar,” Marti pointed out. “I was just saying--”
“You don’t need to say anything but get out of the way,” the detective said. “This is my crime scene. Now scat!”
“Put a lid on it, Dawson,” the chief ordered his detective.
RJ and the detective glanced at each other, and then at Grant. “This okay with you, Chief?” asked RJ.
It wasn’t okay with him at all. He didn’t like the fact that Marti was intruding in their crime scene either. But she didn’t come across to him as a frivolous person. They’re the ones arresting innocent people, not her. They’re the ones with the horrible record. She saw something that they, namely he, might have missed. “Why do you think the witnesses could be wrong?”
“Look at all those bullet holes,” Marti said.
All three men, two of which didn’t want to give her even that legitimacy, looked.
“You see the trajectory,” said Marti. “If you’re righthanded, those holes by virtue of how they were shot will have a right slant. If you’re lefthanded, those holes will have a left slant.”
The detective couldn’t believe such craziness. “That’s utter nonsense!”
“ Bullet slants ? Really?” RJ couldn’t believe it either. “Is this what we’re doing?”
But Grant wasn’t ready to dismiss her out of hand. He hadn’t noticed before, but he now could see what she was saying. “Let’s say you’re right,” he said. “How would that make our suspect innocent?”
“And all five of our witnesses wrong?” added RJ.
“That man over there, in that room, is righthanded,” Marti said.
“How would you know?” asked the angry detective.
“He’s smoking with his right hand. He’s holding his soda with his right hand.”
“This is nuts!” said the detective in charge. “He could be both left-and-right handed for all you know!”
“An ambidextrous shooter cannot consistently have a lefthanded slant. The slant will be more ambiguous. At least from what I’ve seen.” She was looking at those bullet holes again. “They wouldn’t look like this.”
Grant exhaled as he opened his suitcoat and placed his hands on his hips. “Where’s the video? Does this place have video?”
“Yes sir,” the detective said.
“Have you seen it?”
“Haven’t had a chance to, sir. I got here and secured the suspect and the crime scene.”
“Where is it?”
“In the manager’s office down that hall.”
The chief was heading down the hall. RJ and the detective followed him, with RJ ordering two cops to stay with the suspect at all times. “No conversation,” he ordered.
But when Marti tried to follow the chief, the detective in charge wouldn’t hear of it. “Your ass staying right where you are,” he said. Then he ordered another cop to keep her in her place.
But when the chief and his men got in the manager’s office and the manager racked up the video to the time of the shooting, they got an eyeful. The perp was a customer. He had apparently eaten his meal and was at the cash register to pay. He was short, white, and wore jeans and a dark blazer.
But after exchanging words with the cashier, he pulled out a gun and fired on her. And aimed his gun on all the other fleeing and screaming customers and started firing on all of them.
But two things were for certain as the chief, RJ, and the detective in charge looked at that video: The man all five witnesses insisted was the perp, and the man the detective was certain was their guy, wasn’t. And he most definitely, just as Marti had said, was left-handed!
The chief looked at his men with disgust on his face. They were about to do it again. They would have hurried out to the media, told them they had the culprit already in custody, and then they would have watched that video in horror. And even worse, had it not been working that day, or had that recording never come to life, an innocent man sitting in that room just might have gone to prison behind their shoddy work!
But that begged the question: If he didn’t do it, who did? “Keep it rolling,” the chief ordered the store manager.
He kept rolling it. And the chief and his men kept looking to see just where the real gunman had gone. They saw him do his deed, and then they saw him flee out of a side door.
“ Got dammit!” said Grant. “We’ve got a gunman on the loose!”
They all hurried up front as Grant got on the radio with Sergeant Carter, ordering a canvassing of the entire area and who they were looking for, while RJ and the detective explained the situation to the cops already on scene and ordered them to hit the streets too. They also ordered a group to go find more video.
Marti at first was confused by the sudden pickup in activity, until the chief got off of the radio and looked over at her. He didn’t say she was right. He didn’t have to. The look in his eyes, that they had got it wrong again, said enough. The fact that the chief himself told the man in that side room that he was free to go, said it all.
And for the rest of that day she was left to observe while the chief and all his minions went about their business the way cops normally would at such an enormous crime scene. But this time, she noticed, they weren’t trying to wrap it up as if police work was a piece of cake. They were taking their time. They were painstakingly going through the evidence. They were behaving as a department under the microscope should.
For the rest of the day, Grant didn’t say another word to Marti. But every time she so much as glanced in his direction, she would catch him staring at her. There would be two detectives explaining what they’d discovered so far, and he’d be listening to them while staring at Marti. Or this group of cops or that group of cops would be talking to the chief about the surveillance cameras or the witnesses or whatever else they needed to talk to their chief about, and he’d be standing in the midst of them, listening to them, but staring at Marti. Or when he was seated in a chair against the wall, his legs and arms folded: obviously exhausted. But Marti noticed that he was still watching her.
But as Grant sat in a chair against that wall, he wasn’t watching her with animosity in his heart as she might have thought. He was watching her because he couldn’t take his eyes off of her. And it wasn’t because of any of that superficial crap: He could tell already that she didn’t view herself as some maven of beauty – although she was. She was strikingly beautiful to Grant. From her smooth, dark-brown skin, to her high cheekbones and perfect lips, to her sultry deep brown eyes, she was stunning to him. But that wasn’t the draw. That wasn’t what was pulling him to her. There were plenty of stunning-looking ladies in Belgrave, and he could bed most of them with the snap of a finger. And already had.
But he couldn’t stop watching Marti because of what he felt inside every time he looked her way. Something came alive in his heart. Something about her intrigued him. Something about her interested him for the first time in he couldn’t count how many years. Women were to him a transaction. He wined and dined them, or threw money their way when they needed it, and they slept with him. That was the deal. As simple and as base as that. Which rendered every single relationship he had as artificial. Superficial. Emotionless. Baseless .
But this girl? What was going on with this ? He couldn’t figure it out. That was why he stared. That was why every cop in that room kept elbowing each other as they all saw, at one time or another, their chief seemingly mesmerized by the woman they all perceived as nothing more than their archenemy.
Marti felt their hatred too. She felt it to the roots of her hair. Every time a cop looked her way, she saw their sneers. She felt their animosity. They all assumed she was going to write a bad report on their willingness to believe traumatized eyewitnesses so easily, without verifying anything, when they had to know that kind of evidence was among the weakest. And the chief, she assumed, felt the same way his men felt.
But she was also getting a different vibe from the chief. As she continued to walk around and observe, taking mental notes at every turn, she was pleased with at least one thing he did that nobody else in his circle had wanted to do: He listened to her suggestion that they just might have the wrong perp. He listened to her. And then investigated for himself. That said something about his character to her.
But the fact that she knew he had been staring at her so often was because she had been taking a lot of peeps at him herself, said something about her character too. That maybe she wasn’t as over it with men as she thought she was. That maybe this man, this particular man, had caught her attention when no other man could. But it bothered Marti.
Because it made no sense.
Because she couldn’t comprehend for a second why somebody overseeing the worst police department she had ever heard of would catch anything from her but a cold shoulder and a devastating report of incompetence?
That was a different matter altogether.
A matter too deep, too messy, too complicated for her to even try to funnel through.
She kept her distance from that particular man, as she continued to do her job.