Chapter 5
I jammed what remained of a free bacon-egg-and-cheese breakfast sandwich the manager had given me into my mouth and washed it down with a sip of coffee, also on the house.
I stood in the back office of a small national chain coffee shop that was one of the outbuildings on the far side of the supermarket parking lot.
The stand-alone coffee shop, mainly a drive-through establishment, was fairly close to where our suspect and victim had entered the supermarket’s lot.
The franchise owner, a mid-fifties guy named Jeff Whistler, claimed he had a couple of cameras that aimed in the direction that we wanted and might have caught something.
“Do we have a specific time that we’re looking for?” he asked.
“Nine oh seven,” I said, remembering the exact time that I’d jotted down about twenty minutes earlier.
Mr. Whistler confirmed and began going through the camera feeds on his computer.
“Um, this looks to be what we have from the time you said.” He spun his laptop around, and I leaned down to see what he was showing me.
The footage was already playing, and the moment I looked at it, the two vehicles in question were visible on the screen.
After a few seconds, I realized we weren’t going to have much luck with what his camera had caught—I never got a look at the Honda’s tag at all.
The quality of the footage, even enhanced, more than likely wouldn’t net us anything.
The cars disappeared from frame a moment later.
“Can we watch that once more?” I asked.
“Sure.”
The coffee shop owner spun back the footage and played it again. On second viewing, I confirmed that there did appear to be a missing mirror on the passenger side, but again, there was no view of the license plate and not much else to work with.
“Did you have another camera that could have caught this?” I asked.
“Not that is aimed right where this one is. But I have a pair of drive-through cameras that could have possibly caught something. Let’s see.”
I again waited and again had a sip of my coffee, which was surprisingly good. My phone buzzed against my leg. I slid it out to see that it was Steve calling. I excused myself, stepped from the coffee shop office, and took the call. “Yep,” I answered.
“We have the tag,” Steve said. “The plate comes back to a Keegan Sloan.”
“Is that a guy or—”
“Male, address in Hialeah,” Steve said. “But there’s a problem. A couple, actually.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“He’s twenty-four. Blond hair and six two.”
“Hmm,” I said. “That doesn’t quite jibe with a brown-haired, of average height forty-some-year-old that the witnesses were talking about. And thinking back to the video, our suspect didn’t exactly move like a twenty-year-old. And didn’t look six two.”
“Yeah. What do you think?”
“Video can be deceiving on height, and you know how witnesses’ memories can be,” I said. “But that’s a couple things that don’t line up.”
“Yeah.”
“Was Wade able to do something with the supermarket footage on scene here? Is that how we got the tag?” I asked.
“Nah. Some officers and I were checking the neighboring strip mall businesses. The little liquor store a few doors down caught the Honda speeding past. We were able to get a good look at the tag there and ran it.”
“Nice. Are you still there now?”
“Out front, yeah. Wade is in with the employee running the place. He’s securing us a copy of the footage.”
“All right. I’ll be over in a minute.”
“Okay.”
I ended the call and got a quick look at the coffee shop drive-through video, but there was nothing captured that would help.
I thanked the owner for the sandwich and coffee, stuffed a ten into a little plexiglass tip box near the register, and let him know that someone would be over to get a copy of the video his cameras caught.
Then I headed to the liquor store, where I found Steve and Garcia standing out front as I walked up.
“We got that tag added to the BOLO report,” Steve said.
“Good.”
“So what’s the plan?” Steve asked. “Are we grabbing some patrol guys and heading to this guy’s address or what?”
“I think that would probably be the thing to do,” I said. “Did we call on a warrant?”
“First thing I did,” Steve said. “Cap should have it to us shortly. He was going to send someone over with it.”
“Okay. Is Garcia here yet?”
Steve pointed into the parking lot, where Garcia hopped out of an unmarked Explorer—apparently, he’d just arrived. We waved him over and brought him up to speed with what we had going on.
“So did you want me to run this here while you guys go there?” Garcia asked. “Or do you need someone to boot a door at this guy’s house?”
“Run this until you have to head to your appointment,” I wagged my finger in the air with the words.
“Works for me,” Garcia said.
“All right. I’m going to grab a couple Midwest officers, and we’ll roll as soon as we have that warrant in hand,” I said.
“Yep,” Steve said.
After a quick chat with the Midwest guys, Rey and two other uniformed officers would join us to see what we could get at this Keegan Sloan’s address. Within ten minutes, our warrant arrived, and our group left the supermarket en route to the possible suspect’s address.
As we drove, Steve tapped away at the screen of his phone. His facial expressions told me that he was searching and not finding anything.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
“Ah, just trying to see if I can find who all lives at this house. I pulled the place up. It’s a year-old house in a master plan community. I don’t see a twenty-four-year-old owning the place and living there alone when he drives a nineties Honda.”
I clicked my tongue. “Good point. Finding anything?”
“Nah. I think the place is too new to have much in the way of online records that come back to the address. We’re just going to have to wait and see, I guess.”
“Well, if we drive down the block and see an Accord in the driveway, we’re going to let SWAT do their thing,” I said. “I’ve got Christmas plans that don’t include getting shot.”
“Are you and Amy still planning on coming over for our parties?” Steve asked.
Steve and Sasha were on their third or fourth year of having huge Christmas parties where everyone pretty much got blackout drunk and ended up at the casino.
Then he did the same thing again for New Year’s.
Amy and I planned to go, probably to both, but the Christmas party would be an early night for us.
I didn’t want to spend our holidays hungover or broke.
“Yeah, we’ll be there,” I said. “But the Christmas party probably won’t be an all-night thing for us. Remember, I scheduled you and me to work Christmas Day.”
“Yeah, I know. Christmas on, New Year’s Day off. And we’ll switch it around next year.”
He was right, and that was how we’d been scheduling our team for the last few years.
“What’s your Christmas plans?” Steve asked.
“Christmas Eve night, before we go over to your place, Amy and I will do our Christmas. Then we are going to shoot up by her sister after work Christmas Day to do Christmas with her family. We’ll stay by her, and then in the morning on the twenty-sixth, we’ll head up north and do Christmas with my parents.
Spend the day up there. And then back home and back to work. ”
“You’re in for New Year’s, though, right?” Steve asked. “I’m smoking a big brisket.”
“Yeah, we’ll be there. That’ll probably be our party night.”
“Nice,” he said.
“How about you guys?” I asked.
“We’re just having everyone come to our house Christmas night. Sasha’s family, mine, whoever else is coming. Make it easy.”
“Yeah, that sounds a lot easier than what we’re doing.” It made me think that Amy and I should probably pitch that to our families.
I glanced at the dash, seeing that we were just a few miles from our suspect’s address. We needed to put on our game faces.
“Pull up a satellite map of this house and find us a place to stage,” I said.
“On it.” Steve tapped away at the screen of his phone.
From a quick glance over at him in the passenger seat, I could tell that he wasn’t having any luck. He held out his phone to me so I could get a look. The satellite image on the screen showed what looked like a trailer and a construction site.
“The place is too new for a satellite image,” I said.
“It would appear so.”
Only a half mile out, we would learn what we were dealing with soon enough.
We pulled up to a gated new-construction neighborhood a minute later.
The gate was open, but Steve and I, leading our group of four cars, pulled off to the side near the entrance, parked, and stepped out.
The address of our suspect was just a couple of homes inside of the gate on the first street to our right, and I didn’t want to potentially reveal our presence before we were ready.
The rest of the guys stepped from the cars, and we gathered on the sidewalk.
Rey, who was part of the Midwest SWAT team, had another officer with him who was also with the unit. “How do we want to do this?” I asked him.
“Where is the house?” he asked.
“It looks like five houses in on the street immediately right. Right there.” Steve pointed in that direction.
I could see the back of the homes over a concrete perimeter fence surrounding the neighborhood and counted them off.
“The two-story with the blue shutters there?” I asked.
“Um.” Steve looked at his phone again. “It should be that one, yeah.”
“Let’s take a quick look,” I said.
We walked in on foot. Just through the gate, we made for the intersection with the street that our suspect resided on.
The air smelled of construction, and farther back in the neighborhood, properties were still being built.
Every house was almost on top of the next, separated only by about three feet of grass on each side of the driveways.
Each home had some small shrubbery and one or two small freshly planted palm trees still being propped up by two-by-fours.
I didn’t need to bother counting the five houses in.
Not a single car was in sight in any driveway on the side of the road our target property was on.
“Okay. Not a ton to see here,” Rey said. “Let’s head back to the cars for a second.”
We did and gathered at the trunk of Rey’s cruiser.
“Dradon and I will take the front door,” Rey said, poking his chin at one of his guys. “Martinez and Smith will keep eyes on the back so we don’t have anyone slipping out. Harrington and Walsh, you guys back us up at the front, off to the sides.”
Assignments received, everyone agreed.
“We don’t know if this is our guy or not, but we all saw what the guy did at the supermarket, if it was him,” Rey said. “Eyes open. Be ready for anything and everything. Gear up if you have gear. Radios on Channel 3.”
I went to the rear gate of our Explorer and pulled the two Police-tagged plate carriers from the back.
I hung one over my suit jacket and cinched up the Velcro straps.
Steve did the same. I grabbed a pair of radios, turned them both to Channel 3, clipped one on my belt, and handed the other to Steve.
With everyone ready, Officer Dradon grabbed a door ram, and we advanced on the property.