Chapter 6 #2
“Not with my people. Andre got along with everybody.” Danny paused, turning his cup.
“But there was one thing. About a month ago, some guy showed up at the site looking for him. Not a worker. He was dressed wrong for it. I was in the trailer, saw him through the window. He and Andre talked in the parking lot for maybe five minutes. Andre’s whole body language changed.
He was stiff, tense, nothing like how he usually carried himself.
The guy left and Andre went back to work, but he was off the rest of the day. ”
“Can you describe the man?”
“Older. Sixties, maybe. Built like he’d been somebody once. Thick through the chest, but going soft. Face looked like it had been through a few wars.” Danny pointed to his own nose. “Crooked. Like it’d been broken more than once.”
Jack and I didn’t look at each other. We didn’t need to.
“Did you ask Andre about it?”
“I did. He said it was nothing. Just an old friend checking in. But he was lying.” Danny met Jack’s eyes directly. “I’ve managed crews for thirty years. I know when a man’s lying, and I know when a man’s scared. Andre was both.”
“Did you see that man again?”
“No. Just the once.” He reached for his phone. “You want to talk to his crew? They’re pouring foundation this morning at the Riverside site, but I can call ahead.”
“We’d appreciate that.”
* * *
The Riverside site was a sea of red dirt and heavy equipment, cement trucks rumbling in and out, the air thick with dust and the grinding roar of machinery.
We found Gutierrez’s crew near the foundation forms—six men in work boots and safety glasses, most of them splattered with concrete up to their elbows.
Gutierrez himself was in his fifties, wiry and weathered, with a gray mustache and the permanent squint of someone who’d spent three decades working under an unforgiving sun. He wiped his hands on his jeans when Jack showed his badge and waved his men over.
“Danny called,” he said. “Said you’d be coming by about Andre.” He shook his head, his mouth set in a grim line. “Tough news. Real tough.”
The other men gathered around us, forming a loose semicircle. Their faces were guarded but curious—cops on a job site meant something had gone wrong.
“We’re trying to put together a picture of Andre’s life,” Jack said. “Anything you can tell us would help.”
“Dre was solid,” Gutierrez said. “One of the best I’ve had in years. Showed up early, stayed late, never cut corners.” He rubbed the back of his neck, leaving a smear of concrete dust. “But you already know that, or you wouldn’t be here. So what do you really want to know?”
I liked Gutierrez. No wasted time.
“We need specifics,” Jack said. “Things that might not seem important but could help us understand what was going on in his life.”
The younger guy with the sleeve tattoos and gold cross spoke up first. “His girl’s name was Tiana Williams. Works at that bank downtown.
First National. That’s how they met. She helped him open an account, and he asked her out right there at the window.
” He smiled despite the circumstances. “Said she made him wait two weeks before she’d say yes. ”
“What about the boxing?” Jack asked. “Did he talk about that?”
“All the time.” The younger one with the tattoos grinned. “Dre was serious about it. Said his trainer thought he could go pro someday. He’d come in sometimes moving a little slow, you know? Sore from training. But he never complained. Just popped some ibuprofen and got to work.”
“He ever come in looking worse than usual? Beat up beyond what you’d expect from training?”
Gutierrez and the younger guy exchanged a look.
“Few weeks back,” Gutierrez said slowly. “He came in looking rough. Real rough. I asked if he was okay, and he just said he’d had a hard weekend. Wouldn’t talk about it.”
“But that wasn’t from training,” the older man added quietly. “I’ve got a cousin who boxes. I know what training bruises look like. What Dre had that day…” He shook his head.
“Did Dre ever talk about money?” Jack asked. “Where it was coming from, what he was planning to do with it?”
The men exchanged glances again—quick, uncertain.
“He talked about striking it rich,” Gutierrez said carefully. “Said he had something going on. Something big. But he never said what it was. Just got this look on his face sometimes, like he knew something the rest of us didn’t.”
“He ever seem worried?” Jack asked. “Scared of anything?”
“Not Dre. Steady as they come.” The younger guy shook his head. “Nothing rattled him. Except maybe when Tiana texted.” He smiled a little. “Then he’d get all distracted, checking his phone every five seconds like a lovesick teenager.”
“That day he came in beat up,” I said. “Did he say anything else about what happened?”
The older man with the gray hair shifted his weight, looking uncomfortable.
“I asked him straight out if somebody was giving him trouble. Told him if he needed backup, he had friends here.” He paused.
“Dre just smiled and said he had it handled. Said sometimes you had to take a few hits to get where you wanted to go.”
“What did you think he meant by that?”
“At the time?” The man shrugged. “I figured it was boxing talk. Something about his training, moving up to harder opponents. But now…” He trailed off, staring at the ground. “Now I don’t know what to think.”
These men had worked alongside Dre, shared lunches and jokes and the long hours of physical labor that built calluses on your hands and bonds between co-workers.
But they’d only known the version of him he chose to show them.
The hardworking kid who loved his mama and his girl and dreamed of something bigger.
Whatever else was going on in his life, he’d kept it locked away.
Gutierrez walked us back toward the edge of the site, away from the noise of the cement trucks. He pulled a bandana from his back pocket and wiped the sweat and concrete dust from his face.
“Dre was a good kid,” he said quietly, so his crew wouldn’t hear. “But the last few weeks, something was different. He seemed… I don’t know. Wound tight. Like he was waiting for something to happen.” He stuffed the bandana back in his pocket. “I should have pushed harder. Asked more questions.”
“You can’t predict the future any better than anyone else,” Jack said. “Someone made the choice to murder Andre. And the responsibility of that lies solely on the killer.”
“Yeah,” he said. Gutierrez looked back at his crew, at the foundation they were pouring, at the ordinary workday that was continuing despite the news they’d just received. “But it doesn’t make the regret go away.”
* * *
The sun was high and merciless when we walked back to the Tahoe, the heat pressing down like a physical weight. I could feel sweat gathering at the small of my back, the silk of my blouse clinging uncomfortably to my skin.
Jack started the engine and cranked the air-conditioning up high. Neither of us spoke for a moment, letting the cold air wash over us.
“Tiana Williams,” he finally said. “First National Bank.”
“Let’s see if she’s in,” I said. “Word will have traveled. I wonder if someone reached out to her.”
Jack pulled out of the construction site, tires crunching over gravel.
I stared out the window at the passing scenery—strip malls and fast-food restaurants, a gas station, a church with a message board out front promising that God had a plan.
The ordinary landscape of King George County, going about its ordinary business while we chased down the details of a young man’s death.
I thought about Dre Washington—twenty-four years old, working construction by day, training to box by night.
Sending money to his mother, saving for a future, falling in love with a girl at the bank.
By all accounts, he’d been doing everything right.
Playing by the rules, working toward something better.
And yet someone had tortured him for days and put a bullet in the back of his head.
The disconnect nagged at me. Good kids from stable backgrounds didn’t usually end up dead in dumpsters. Somewhere in the life Dre had been living, there was a shadow we hadn’t found yet. A door that led somewhere darker than construction sites and boxing gyms.
Thirty thousand dollars in cash hidden behind a wall. A betting slip tucked in a nightstand drawer. A trainer who knew secrets Dre’s own mother thought nobody else had.
The pieces were there. We just hadn’t figured out how they fit together yet.
“What are you thinking?” Jack asked.
“I’m thinking everybody loved Dre Washington.
He was a good kid, a hard worker, devoted to his mother, crazy about his girlfriend.
” I turned to look at Jack’s profile, the set of his jaw, the focus in his eyes.
“But somebody tortured him for days before they killed him. That’s not random.
That’s not a robbery gone wrong. That’s personal. ”
“Or professional.” Jack’s hands tightened on the wheel. “We already know what his body told us. This was organized. Infrastructure. But infrastructure needs a revenue stream, and right now the only one we’ve found is a duffle bag full of cash and a betting slip nobody wants to claim.”
“Vic shut down the second you mentioned that slip.”
“He did. And everybody keeps painting the same picture of Dre—the good kid, the hard worker, the one who was going to make it. But somebody in his life knew a different version of him.” Jack glanced at me.
“I’m not saying he was a bad kid. But good kids can get pulled into bad situations.
Especially when they’re desperate to make something of themselves. ”
I thought about the apartment we’d searched. The military precision, the monk-like discipline, the protein powder and meal prep containers. Dre had been building toward something. Working toward a future he could see clearly in his mind.
What had he been willing to do to get there?
“Let’s see what Tiana has to say,” I said.