Chapter 11
I pulled into the parking lot of a Hialeah self-storage complex around five o’clock.
I hadn’t gotten any more details of the homicide on my short drive over, so I would be going in blind.
As I drove slowly toward an empty parking space near the main entrance, I saw a pair of patrol cars blocking the first aisle of garages on my left.
I parked the Explorer and quickly brought up a map with an aerial view of the facility.
The main building of the complex was a U shape, surrounded by a larger U shape of unconnected buildings that wrapped the perimeter.
The outer, larger buildings were unconnected at the corners and looked to have a pair of matching dumpster areas to the east and west that sat in the gaps between buildings.
With a good look at how the property was situated, I hopped out and walked to the patrol cars sitting near the open gate to access the storage garages. As I reached them, one of the patrol car doors opened.
“Lieutenant Nash Harrington,” I said to the female officer as she stepped out. “Our scene back here?” I pointed.
“Hey, Lieutenant. It’s Jenks. Remember me?”
I did when I got a look at her face. Officer Jenks had given us a hand when we took down Alan Chestnut, our former night shift homicide sergeant turned homicidal maniac.
“I remember,” I said. “How have you been, Jenks?”
“I’d complain, but nobody would care,” she said. “Nah, things have been good. Real good. I got engaged.” She held up her hand.
I happened to notice that there wasn’t a ring on her finger.
“Wow, that probably looked stupid,” she said. “Force of habit. I don’t wear the ring at work for obvious reasons.”
I waved away her comment. “Ring or not, congrats,” I said. “That’s great.”
“Yeah, I’m happy,” she said.
“Did you get a look at the scene? What am I walking into back there?” I asked.
“A DB in one of the storage units. The staff noticed a truck back there and saw a door with no lock on it. They banged on the door with no answer. When they finally opened the garage door, they found the deceased. The cause of death appears to have been blunt force trauma. And pretty bad. I didn’t get a super up-close-and-personal look, but that’s about the gist of it. ”
“All right. Who do we have running things out here?” I asked.
“Sergeant Hunt is on scene. Officer Mosley is back there too.”
Mosley had also given us a hand on the Chestnut thing.
“Okay. I suppose I should head back and see what we have. I have a forensics guy that should be here shortly.”
Jenks gave me a nod. “I’ll send him on when he gets here. Straight back toward the dumpsters, make the right, and you’ll see everyone,” she said.
I thanked her and started my walk to go see what we had.
At the corner just shy of the dumpsters, I made the turn to the right and saw a bunch of patrol cars, an ambulance, and probably a dozen Hialeah officers standing around.
There had to be fifty or more garages split between my left and right, and with only one of the doors open, I imagined that storage unit to be our scene.
Just beyond the open garage door sat a maroon Ford pickup that had to be the vehicle Jenks had mentioned.
As I got closer, I saw a gray-haired guy in a suit come from inside the garage—R.
J. Hunt, a Hialeah patrol sergeant. He put eyes on me as I neared.
“Lieutenant, how are you doing?” Hunt asked.
“Not going to lie, I would rather have been heading home than here,” I said and shook his hand.
“Well, you, me, and everyone else could have probably been here this morning had the employees checked this out earlier in the day. The man inside has been deceased since sometime last night. The front office has him using his key card on the way in at about twenty after ten last night. Video seems to show that the homicide took place right around ten thirty.”
“So we have video?” I asked.
“Yeah, but unfortunately, it doesn’t show us a ton. The suspect appears on the security footage while the victim is in the storage unit. He came from back over there in the corner by the dumpsters.”
Hunt pointed toward the dumpsters on the opposite end of the building, the ones that I passed as I came in.
Hunt continued, “He walks down the aisle here, straight toward the truck, and then pauses for a moment before going into the storage unit. It appears that he wielded something that he took from his pants. What he pulls out, which I imagine is the murder weapon, you can’t really make out.
But he goes into the storage unit, which is off camera, does whatever inside, and he’s back out in under a minute.
Maybe thirty seconds. He walked back the way he came, and that was it. ”
“Okay. What do we know about the suspect from the video? Is the footage good enough to use for an identification?”
“Not even close,” Hunt said. “That’s where the footage is coming from.” The sergeant pointed toward the top of the building at the corner where I’d turned—halfway back toward where Jenks was blocking the aisle.
I turned around and spotted the bank of cameras at the top of the building, the ones aimed down the aisle toward us.
They had to be pushing two hundred feet away.
I looked back the way I’d been facing and saw a similar bank of cameras about the same distance from us but nearer the dumpster area where our suspect supposedly came and left from.
“What about those over there?” I poked my chin at them.
“They face down the other aisle,” Hunt said. “They have all the video inside if you want to go through the feeds.”
“Sounds good,” I said. “How about our vic? Do we know anything?”
“The man’s name was Grant Minter. Sixty-seven. Local guy. Hialeah address. The truck here comes back to him. The key card for the facility here does as well. And the guy in the garage matches up with the DL photo we have for Mr. Minter.”
“Gotcha,” I said. “Did our suspect leave with anything from inside the unit? Was this a robbery or what?”
“It doesn’t look like it on the video. And while I haven’t touched the body, the guy is wearing a chain-drive wallet, and it appears to still be inside of his pocket. So it doesn’t even look like our suspect attempted to take it.”
“And he didn’t rummage through the truck or anything?” I asked.
“He passed it in and out of the storage unit as if it wasn’t even there.”
“Interesting,” I said. “This would be my second homicide of the day where we don’t really have a surface-level motive.”
“Were you working that supermarket thing this morning?” Hunt asked.
“Yeah. The suspect just walked up and took the victim out. Full magazine unloaded in broad daylight in public. Then took off in a car that belonged to someone else who is apparently missing. I don’t know. But that’s a whole different can of worms that we need to sort.”
Hunt bobbed his head. “You ready for a look in here?”
“May as well get started, yeah,” I said. “See if I can still get home at a reasonable hour tonight.”
“Fair warning. It’s not pretty.”
“They usually aren’t,” I said.
He lifted his eyebrows, gave me another nod, and pointed me into the storage unit. “Watch the blood. Not that I probably need to tell you that.”
I walked into the unit. The lights were on, giving me a good look at a single-car garage packed with boxes and whatever else our sixty-some-year-old victim didn’t feel necessary to keep at his home but not so unimportant that he would toss it out.
Our victim lay on the ground about six feet in from the doorway.
A blood pool, half dry, seemed to have spread away from his head.
I didn’t spot any footprints moving away from the body.
Around the downed man were the contents of a box that must had been spilled during the attack.
With a couple of steps closer, I began to get a better look at what had killed the man.
“What the hell,” I mumbled.
“Yeah,” Hunt said. “I warned you.”
Once I stood above the victim, I looked down.
The man faced the wall to my right, lying mostly on his side.
The blood pool stretched out two-plus feet in almost a perfect circle around his head.
The damage the victim took was extensive.
His forehead and top of the skull were unnaturally sunken in.
At the crown of the head was a hole with brain matter protruding, and more brain matter looked to have spilled out into the blood.
With a quick look around the body, I spotted quite a bit of blood spatter and small chunks of brain, bone, and flesh that had been cast off onto the boxes and surrounding items in the storage unit.
“Looking at everything here,” I said, “it seems to me like this guy saw it coming. Maybe turned with his hand still on that box when he heard footsteps or someone call out to him or something. Then took a strike to the top of the head or forehead.”
“That might be pretty close,” a voice said.
I glanced over my shoulder to see Gomez standing in the doorway of the open garage.
“Come get a look,” I said.
As Gomez came in, I left the garage. Hunt was on my heels.
“So no robbery, and a suspect who came and went with no other apparent reason than to kill our victim here.”
“That’s how it looks,” Hunt said.
“What are we looking at over there where he came and went from?” I motioned toward the dumpsters that Hunt had mentioned.
“There’s not much of anything to see,” Hunt said.
“Did he cut through the fence or…”
Hunt shook his head. “Nah. I’ve got to think up and down from the roof. We didn’t see any damage to the fence, and with the barbed wire still intact at the top, I have to think it was avoided altogether.”
“I’m going to take a look back there, and then I’ll want to have a peek at the security footage.”
“I’ll walk with you,” Hunt said.