Last Witness Read online

  Just because you can’t see something, doesn’t mean it’s not there.

  He heard the sound before he saw the car. The crunching of tires on cement, as they rolled slowly over glass and garbage. The purr of the engine followed by the squeal of a car door. The squawk of a radio and the slam of the door, and then footsteps falling heavy on cement. The sound echoed down the alley and off the walls of the closed businesses that surrounded it, sounding larger than life. But the footsteps quickly faded in the distance as the person turned and walked in the other direction, ignoring the alley and what lay in wait.

  His heart raced with excitement and he breathed in the very scent of the night. The humid air filled his lungs, the oxygen pulsing through his bloodstream, rushing to invigorate his mind. He waited patiently until the footsteps disappeared before he unwrapped himself from the shadows. He was careful as he came upon the car, his silent footsteps deftly maneuvering past the rusty cans and broken bottles. Inside his jacket, his latexed fingers found the blade and he fingered it lightly and smiled. Electric blue and red lights danced silently off the walls of the alley in an almost mesmerizing sequence.

  Let the games begin.

  4

  ‘Alpha 816,’ Victor said into his shoulder pack, as he looked around the deserted alley in disgust. ‘I am at the location of 79th and Biarritz, responding to a thirty-eight, but there’s no one on scene.’

  ‘Alpha 816. Location was Atlantic Cable Company. NE 79th Street and Biarritz Drive. White male with a knife; request for a unit to respond.’ The crackling static of the dispatcher’s voice filled the alley, but then just as quickly dissipated when he hit the button to respond, reminding him that he was alone.

  ‘Alpha 816,’ he said, ‘there’s no one here. I’ve also checked the parking facility and both businesses at that location, but they are also clear. The scene is secure.’

  ‘Alpha 816. Will advise,’ dispatch responded.

  ‘Alpha 816. I’ll be at twelve then.’ It was 1:30 in the morning, and ‘twelve’ meant that it was time for a dinner break. A nice, greasy burger to help him get through the rest of this shitty night was in order. Tomorrow was his day off – he’d just work it off with a few extra sets at the gym.

  ‘Alpha 816. I’ll have you at twelve until 0230,’ dispatch crackled back.

  The radio went silent and he was alone again. He headed back to his squad car, thinking maybe he’d head back down to So Be and The Diner on 11th and Washington for a bite. Maybe get a good look at the mamis while he ate. Watch as they sauntered into Mynt from their limos in leopard-print catsuits and leather minis.

  He opened the car door and sat inside. He had left the car running while he walked through the mess in the alley, so that the AC would keep the car cool. Though it was November, the temperatures were still in the 80s; the humidity at 90 percent. It was enough to make even a nice Cuban boy like himself gasp for drier air.

  In September, MBPD Chief Jordan had ordered newfangled laptops be installed in all marked Beach cruisers – a sign of how progressive the department was. Never mind that the Florida Highway Patrol and the Miami Dade PD had both had them for more than two years. They were supposed to speed things up – tag searches, drivers’ license searches, BOLOs (be on the lookout), wanteds, report writing, obtaining interstate criminal information and FCIC criminal warrants. The laptops scanned, e-mailed and had internet access to everything, including CJNet – the Criminal Justice Network. Broad-reaching technology that provided, in Victor’s opinion, the ability to retrieve almost too much information, and hence – when someone like himself fucked up and missed something – the perfect excuse for an ass-reaming by a member of the brass for not looking hard enough in the first place.

  He hit the button on the pad to write yet another useless report on what he had not found in the alley and the MBPD badge screensaver disappeared. When he read the words that stared back at him in bold-faced capital letters, glowing white in the darkness of his squad car, he was at first puzzled. Within a moment, though, they became all too clear to him. But by then it was just too late.

  5

  HELLO VICTOR. LOOK BEHIND YOU.

  The back of Victor’s close-shaved head and his thick olive neck were meaty targets in the white glow from the computer screen. The piece of plexiglas that separated the front seat from the back seat slipped quietly to the floor, and his latexed hand slid out. Victor stared quizzically at the screen, the wheels in his mind turning slowly. Like a boa constrictor, the man wrapped his hand deftly around the left side of Victor’s head, until it came under his chin. Then he yanked back hard and quick, just as Victor turned his face away from the laptop to see what, if anything, lurked behind him.

  Victor’s head slammed back, pinned fast against the seat. Then the man wrapped his arm around Victor’s throat, pulling him up and his head back through the cut plexiglas. The knife sliced through the back of Victor’s uniform, but did not cut him. Instead, it pinned his shirt to the back of the vinyl seat, so that Victor’s head hung off the neck rest, his face staring up at the roll bar on the roof of the car, his throat exposed. Victor’s body jerked about, and instinctively, his hand went for his gun, snapped in a holster to his right side, but the man in the back seat had already anticipated that. While one hand squeezed Victor’s larynx closed, the other reached down past him to the SIG-Sauer P-226 at his side. Within seconds, the gun was his, and Victor’s one hand flailed uselessly in search of it, as his other desperately tried to pry the fingers from his throat. His legs began to shake and kick out, and the horn beeped loudly when his foot hit it. The laptop toppled off the stand to the floor of the squad car. He writhed violently, trying to free himself from the seat, but the angle was awkward and the knife held him fast.

  Then the muzzle of the SIG-Sauer pressed hard against Victor’s right temple, and the latexed hand slowly released his throat.

  ‘Shhh,’ he whispered.

  The heavy weight of cold metal against Victor’s head instantly stopped the struggle. He listened to Victor’s frantic panting, and could almost hear the thought as it sprang from Victor’s head.

  ‘You won’t make it. I’ll blow your head off before your leg is even halfway to the seat.’ He knew all about the surprise Victor had strapped to his left ankle. Victor’s scared eyes darted furiously about, but he could not see the face behind him.

  The police radio next to the officer’s head squawked to life. ‘Alpha 922, Alpha 459. 1530 Collins. Forty-one down. Possible three thirty-two. Black male unresponsive on the side of the road. Fire rescue responding.’ The radio crackled with assorted responses from other units in police jargon. Units that were, at that very moment, racing across the Beach to the scene of the emergency. Unfortunately for Victor, it just wasn’t his emergency.

  ‘What… do… you want?’ Victor stammered. His voice was choked, and the man knew that big, bad Victor was about to cry.

  ‘Don’t cry just yet, Victor. We’ve got some things to discuss first.’ Behind the seat, the man pulled out another knife from underneath his jacket. This one was special. He brought it around the left side of Victor’s head to where Victor could see it now.

  Victor Chavez’s eyes grew wide with fear. He felt the wet warmth of his own piss spread across the front of his pants. He kicked his legs out again furiously, uselessly.

  ‘Okay, Victor,’ the man said and smiled. ‘Now open wide.’

  6

  The sound of her beeper startled her and C.J. groped at the nightstand beside her in the darkness to find it and quickly silence it.

  ‘Is that you?’ murmured Dominick groggily in the darkness. He nudged her gently as he rolled over, facing her, his eyes still closed.

  ‘Sorry it woke you. I’ve got it,’ C.J. said softly, her fingers finally finding the beeper and pressing the button to turn it off.

  ‘Are you on duty this week?’ he murmured, his arm reaching out under the covers for her.

  But she pulled away and swung her legs out of be
d, pulling her hair, still damp with perspiration from the nightmare, back off her face. She didn’t want him to know she’d had another. ‘That’s me. I’m the lucky winner.’

  Beeper duty, as it was called, was part of her job, assisting police officers after 5:00 p.m. with questions about probable cause, searches, warrants, and arrests. It was the policy of the State Attorney, Jerry Tigler, that prosecutors be available 24/7 to help cops with their cases, particularly since – unlike District Attorney’s offices and complaint rooms in other major metropolitan cities, which operated around the clock with prosecutors handling complaints – the Miami SAO shut down pretty much at five. So the county was divided up logistically into two response regions – north and south – and every one of the 240 felony prosecutors in the office saw week-long felony beeper duty more than a few times a year.

  The office’s A, B and C prosecutors, those assigned to trial divisions and responsible for prosecuting first-, second- and third-degree felonies, handled the more generic felony questions: Do I need a warrant to search this guy’s house if his wife lets me in? Do I need to tell the parents of a juvenile that I’m questioning their delinquent son about a robbery I know he committed last year? Can I search a car if I think the driver’s got a 357 under the seat? Some questions were more basic than others, some more involved. The tricky ones were when a cop regurgitated a series of facts and events, and then asked the sleepy-eyed prosecutor if he had enough probable cause to make an arrest. Tricky, because probable cause – an elusive and difficult-to-quantify amount of facts needed to justify the arrest of a person – was a cop’s decision to make on a scene, not a prosecutor’s. Was it more probable than not that a crime was committed and that this is the guy who committed it? Tricky, because officers, on occasion, were known to stretch the facts to fit the crime. Or, alternately, to delete a few crucial ones.

  The prosecutor’s legal function was to come in after an arrest was made and prosecute the offender. To allow each office to operate without the constant threat of being sued, the Florida legislature conferred qualified immunity on the police for their discretionary actions in policing, and to the State Attorney’s Office and individual prosecutors for their discretionary actions in prosecuting. But the two were not interchangeable, and Tigler’s office policy often forced a prosecutor to walk that fine, treacherous line between giving out friendly advice at three in the morning and actually playing cop.

  Specialized crimes were handled by specialized prosecutors, which required specialized beepers. Sexual batteries were responded to by Sex Bat prosecutors; felony domestic violence crimes by DVU prosecutors; major drug cases by Narcotics prosecutors; major fraud questions by Economic Crimes (ECU) prosecutors; and all homicides were rotated between the office’s Division Chiefs and the senior trial attorneys in Major Crimes. And the media cases, the O. J. Simpsons in their white Broncos – those readily apparent to even a rookie five minutes out of the academy as a mess just waiting to happen – were handled exclusively by Major Crimes. The elite ten prosecutors assigned to Major Crimes handled a smaller caseload compared to other prosecutors and Division Chiefs, but they were the most sensational of homicide cases, their facts horrific and brutal, their issues complex and involved. Most, if not all, of their defendants faced death as their ultimate penalty, either by lethal injection or electric chair. C.J. had been with the office twelve years, assigned to Major Crimes for the past seven.

  No one ever had a major fraud question at three in the morning, but there certainly were enough homicides in the city to consistently chime a homicide beeper in the middle of the night. And another Jerry Tigler policy was that every homicide had to be responded to on the scene. So when the beeper went off, you knew you were not just getting up – you were going out. As a Major Crimes prosecutor, C.J. saw homicide beeper duty at least once every eight weeks, and as the Assistant Division Chief of Major Crimes, she was assigned to permanent beeper duty for all police shootings and use-of-force cases. An added bonus. Thoughts of a transfer to ECU often drifted into her head after a 3:00 a.m. beep.

  ‘Uh-oh. You better stay down and cover your eyes,’ she said before flicking on the light switch. Dominick groaned and pulled a pillow over his head.

  As she dialed the number, he asked, ‘What are you on? Homicide duty?’

  ‘Both this week,’ she replied as the phone rang in her ear. ‘Go back to sleep. I’ll probably have to go to the scene, whatever it is.’

  The line picked up in her ear and a male voice answered, ‘Nicholsby.’

  She recognized the name. Miami Beach Homicide. ‘Detective, this is ASA C. J. Townsend. I just received a beep—’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, Ms Townsend. I just called Criminal Intake. They said you’re the prosecutor handling homicides tonight. You’re Major Crimes, right?’ The detective’s voice sounded more anxious than she expected, given that a dead body at four in the morning was nothing unusual for a homicide detective. C.J. had learned that pretty much nothing fazed most homicide detectives. In fact, they usually liked to have a little fun with the more squeamish prosecutors in the office, loading up on the grisly details of their cases right before sitting down to lunch.

  ‘Yes, that’s right, Detective,’ she replied. ‘I’m on homicide and also on police shooting duty. What have you got, a homicide or a police shooting?’

  ‘Well, it’s a homicide.’ He hesitated slightly. ‘But this one’s a little more than that.’

  ‘Is it a multiple?’

  ‘Nope. Just one – but it’s… well, it’s pretty bad.’ In the background she heard the continued high-pitched sounds of multiple police sirens approaching. From the number responding, it sounded like a pretty big scene. She heard Nicholsby suck in a deep drag on his cigarette before continuing. ‘I’ve got a dead cop down here on the Beach, Ms Townsend, and he’s one helluva mess.’

  7

  ‘Shit,’ she said softly, her fingers massaging her temples, rubbing away the headache which she knew was about to come on. She gently rubbed Dominick’s back. ‘I’ve got to go, hon.’

  Dominick Falconetti could immediately tell by the change in her voice that the news was not good. He unburied his head from under the pillow. ‘What is it? What’s happened?’

  She looked at him. His chestnut eyes squinted up at her in the harsh bedroom light, his salty brown hair tousled on the top of his head. She shook her head. ‘It’s a cop,’ she said quietly.

  ‘A shooting? Where? What department?’

  ‘No, not a police shooting.’ She took a breath. She knew this would be hard for him. It was always hard on a cop to hear that one of their own just took one for the team. They took it personal, even if they didn’t know the guy. ‘It’s a homicide, Dom. On duty. I’m sorry. I don’t know anything else, not even an ID.’

  Dominick sat upright in bed. ‘Holy shit. A cop? What the hell – how? Where?’

  ‘That was Nicholsby with the Beach,’ she said, up and moving now toward the closet. ‘He didn’t say how, he just said to get down there.’ She emerged from the walk-in, a pair of tan pants in hand, buttoning a cream silk blouse.

  Dominick rubbed the sleep from his eyes and ran his hands through the top of his hair. ‘I’ll come with you. Just let me get dressed,’ he said, watching as she pulled on her pants, then sat on the bench at the foot of the bed to put on her shoes.

  ‘Now why would you come with me? Beach Homicide is there. They’ll handle it.’

  ‘Because a dead cop means FDLE will probably be called out to assist anyway. Because it’s four in the morning and you’re headed to what I’ll bet is a real crappy part of the Beach.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Because I don’t want you to go alone at this hour.’

  She stopped putting on her shoes and smiled at him across the foot of the bed. ‘Thanks, but an escort’s not necessary, Prince Charming. I can handle myself. Besides, there will probably be about a hundred other Glocks attached to blue uniforms swarming all over that crappy part of the beach. It sounded like a
pretty big scene. Sleep. Maybe the call won’t come and you can actually get eight hours tonight.’ She headed into the bathroom to brush her teeth.

  He knew it was useless to argue with her. C.J. was an independent and headstrong woman. And even though plenty of things had happened in her life that could spook her from being alone at four in the morning, he knew she would do what needed to get done, silently bulldozing aside any fear she might encounter along the way. They had been together for three years, and remarkably, he found her to be stronger now than when they had first met. In his years in law enforcement, he had seen many a victim get swallowed up by their crime, too paralyzed by fear to even open their doors, to live their lives, always mistaking the backfire of a car for the blast of a shotgun and ducking for cover. But not C.J. It was as if she challenged her fears to defy her every day, not just by walking out the door, but by then driving herself to a job where she would surround herself with the worst criminals society had to offer up, taking on more cases, more tragedy. Like a parachute jumper who has had a bad accident when the chute doesn’t open, instead of walking away from the sport, C.J. simply jumped from a higher altitude each time.

  ‘A dead cop, huh? Jesus! The Beach must be a zoo. And Nicholsby didn’t say who or how?’

  ‘No. He was very tight-lipped. And he sounded pretty anxious, though, so I’d better go.’ She leaned over him on the bed. Their lips touched, a soft, lingering kiss. Hers were cool and she tasted minty. His hand wrapped around the back of her neck, his fingers lost in her dark-blonde hair, pulling her closer to him. The other gently touched her face, his thumb lightly rubbing her cheek. He still missed her whenever she left. He still worried whenever she left.