Chapter 12
I stood beside the dumpsters, looking up a drainpipe that led to the roof.
Sticking my face to the fence and looking left, I was able to see down the back of the building, where I spotted another drainpipe.
After finding zero damage to the fence anywhere, or any other easy access points in and out of the storage facility that didn’t involve barbed wire, I decided the drainpipe had to be the way our suspect got in and out of the grounds.
“Can someone get us a ladder?” I asked.
Hunt pulled his radio from its clip on his hip and made the request. A moment later, he got a call back from another officer saying they would check with the main office to see if someone could bring us one.
I looked up as the outdoor lights attached to the buildings of the storage complex flicked on.
We would be losing daylight inside of a half hour, and I wanted to see if there was anything left on the roof or behind the complex without doing it via flashlight.
“Let’s see if we can get that ladder sooner rather than later,” I said. “We’re going to be working in the dark in a half hour.”
Hunt requested that whoever was getting us the ladder put some pep in their step. He got a confirmation immediately.
As we waited, I looked over the edges into the dumpsters themselves.
I was looking for anything that might have been pitched, had blood on it, or could have been a murder weapon.
While both dumpsters had a couple of feet of trash in them, I didn’t immediately see anything, and I doubted that Gomez would be fishing through the stuff in the dark.
We’d have to get it collected then gone through at our forensics lab.
Our ladder arrived with about fifteen minutes of daylight to spare.
I made sure that nobody touched the drainpipe itself, on the chance that we had prints there, and went up the ladder.
I dropped down over the edge and planted my feet on the rubber roof.
I saw nothing but a big rubber rectangle roof—no trash, no murder weapons, no visible blood, no anything other than a rubber roof, a couple of vents, and not much else.
I walked toward the drainpipe in the back.
With every step, I watched my feet, looking for anything of interest—a small drip of blood, a cigarette butt, a gum wrapper.
There was nothing. At the downspout that I thought our suspect might have used, I looked down.
I didn’t spot anything in the grass or otherwise.
“Seeing anything up here?” I heard.
I turned to see Hunt walking across the roof toward me.
“Because this looks like the cleanest roof I’ve ever seen,” he added.
“Yeah, I haven’t seen anything.”
Hunt reached the spot where I stood. “Think this is where he came up?” He looked over the edge of the building at the downspout.
“Good chance,” I said.
Hunt walked to the eastmost side of the building, just about twenty feet from where I stood, and looked down over the edge. “Why would our suspect cross the roof and use the far pipe to get down instead of this one by these dumpsters here?”
“Probably to stay farther away from those.” I pointed at the bank of cameras at the corner of the building.
“Yeah,” Hunt said. “That would make sense. Maybe he saw them as soon as he got up here.”
“Or he might have already known where they were,” I offered.
I turned from Hunt and looked out at the rest of the area to the back of the property.
A small group of trees and brush were to my left.
Beyond that were some railroad tracks and then a long tree line that stretched east and west following the tracks.
Beyond the trees was the Dolphin Expressway.
As I stared out, I saw a couple of people on bicycles cruising through the trees.
“Is that a bike trail through there?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Hunt said. “Kitty Roedel bike path.”
“Has anyone looked around out there yet?” I asked.
“None of my guys, no. We were only on scene about an hour before you got here.”
“All right. I’m going to get my butt off this roof and have a look.”
“I’ll get a couple of my guys to give you a hand.”
Hunt and I left the roof and quickly got outside of the fence wrapping the perimeter of the storage facility.
At the back, I started right where the downspout came down.
Hunt and one of his officers had a look around the small patch of trees.
Mosley and another officer went toward the tracks and bike path.
Using my phone’s flashlight to assist in the waning daylight, I watched the grass as I walked toward the railroad tracks. But again, I didn’t spot blood or anything that might be considered evidence. The railroad tracks had trash strewn about, as did the tree line.
“We’ve got a couple of snapped branches over here!” one of the officers shouted.
I walked into the trees and found Mosley, the one who’d called out, a few feet short of where the trees met the bike path.
Like he said, there were some broken branches in the area.
And while the snapped twigs did appear fresh, without any blood or anything else around them, we couldn’t be sure that they had anything to do with our homicide.
With our daylight all but gone, we ended our search, and I headed to the main office of the business to have a look at the video.
Hunt joined me, and his officers went back to the storage unit our homicide had occurred in.
After Hunt introduced me to a manager named Mike Waterman, the guy pointed at the monitors above the front counter, which displayed the complex’s camera feeds. The monitor on the right was full frame with what I figured to be the captured video of the suspect still cued up on screen.
“Did you want to just see him coming and going or…?” the manager asked.
“From the point our victim scans in,” I said.
“Okay. Give me one second.” He brought up the footage from the gate cameras, and I looked up as I watched our victim on screen.
The man leaned out of his driver’s-side window, scanned his card in the reader, and passed through the gate when it rose.
The truck disappeared off camera a moment later.
I watched it again and looked for any vehicles in the background waiting around or possibly watching. There was neither.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s see his drive back to his unit.”
The manager obliged, and I watched as the truck passed the area where Jenks had been parked in her patrol car when I came in.
The footage was coming from one of the roof-mounted cameras aiming to the north that I’d seen while on the roof.
The truck went down the aisle toward the cameras and eastmost dumpsters and made the right turn without anything questionable.
“This is the last look that we have here,” the manager said. He pulled up the other footage from the roof-mounted cameras that faced our victim’s storage unit.
I watched as the pickup traveled down the aisle, made a U-turn, then parked one unit shy of his own. The victim stepped from the truck, opened the door of his storage unit, and disappeared inside.
“A minute max and you’ll see our suspect,” Hunt said.
I continued to watch, and as Hunt had said, the silhouette of a man appeared from back by the westmost dumpsters. The man walked straight toward the truck, paused for a few seconds as it looked like he removed something from his hip, then went straight into the unit.
“You can’t zoom in on this at all, can you?” I asked.
The manager shook his head.
I continued to watch but saw nothing else until our suspect left the storage unit and walked back the way he’d come.
He appeared to be wearing all black, head to toe, with a black baseball hat.
I didn’t see him carrying anything as he casually walked back the way he’d come and disappeared by the west-side dumpsters.
“That’s pretty much it,” the manager said.
“Any other cards scanned in through the night?” I asked.
“Nope. And the reader is on a timer to shut down between eleven at night and seven in the morning. Grant was the last one in last night.”
“Did you know the victim?” The fact that he’d used the victim’s given name made me think he did.
“Not personally. A little chitchat here and there. He’s had a storage unit here for years, and I pretty much work every day.”
“Have you seen anything questionable around here in the last few weeks? Anyone following people in or anything off with the victim?” I asked.
“No,” the manager said. “I hadn’t talked to Grant in probably a month or more. But haven’t seen anything off. No hits from the cameras after hours or anything.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to have one of my tech guys come out and get us some copies of the video you have.”
“Sure,” the manager said.
I thanked him for letting me have a look then called Wade on my way to the storage unit.
“Hey, Harrington,” he answered.
“What’s up, Wade. I’ve got some video out here at this storage unit that I need retrieved.”
“Okay. I’ll send someone out. I already took off for the day, and James was still working on that phone in the lab.”
“Any luck with anything yet?” I asked.
“Not that I heard. I got some still images from the video of the supermarket shooter that I cleaned up, but they are still kind of so-so. If we are planning on sending anything out to the local press in hopes for an ID, I think we should just use the video. At least then, people can see how the man moves, walks, etcetera.”
“All right. We may end up having to go that route,” I said. “Anything else?”
“That’s about it since we wrapped up the meeting before,” he said.
“Okay. Do you have an ETA on getting someone out here?”
“I’ll call the office now,” Wade said. “Twenty minutes. Half hour.”
“Sounds good. Appreciate it.”
“Yep. I’ll catch you in the morning.”
I ended the call just as I neared the storage unit.
I wanted to tell Gomez that we needed to print the downspouts, retrieve the contents of the dumpsters, and have a better look around the area by the bike path.
But with darkness setting in, there was a good chance the search would have to resume in the daylight.