Hot Case

  Hot Case

  By Patricia Rosemoor

  TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON

  AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG

  STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID

  PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Prologue

  Feathers of fog curled around the hood of my Camaro as I crossed the Chicago River on my way home. It was one of those weird spring nights when the downtown area looked ghostly, half-lit skyscrapers rising out of the mists like skeletons.

  I was totally exhausted after a long workday and what had felt like a longer family get-together with my mom and sister. Stifling a yawn, I tried to ignore my cell phone when it trilled and politely informed me, “You have an incoming call…. You have an incoming call…. You have an incoming…”

  I had a real love-hate relationship with technology.

  I checked the caller ID and sighed wearily as I flipped open my phone. “It’s after midnight. This had better be good, Junior.” Junior Diaz was one of my most reliable informants and the only reason I’d bothered answering.

  “Where you at?”

  Nice opening. As if this was a social call or something. “I’m on my way home. What’s up?”

  “You gotta see for yourself, Detective.”

  “See what?”

  “The body. This girl…she ain’t got no blood left. It’s all been drained outta her.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “I saw…”

  A muffled sound on the other end sounded like Junior heaving his guts.

  “Where are you?”

  It turned out he was maybe a half mile from my present location, west and north of the Loop.

  “And don’t you call for no backup,” Junior gasped. “My deal’s with you, no one else.”

  “I’ll be right there. Alone,” I promised. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  In a little more than two minutes, I made the intersection in an area anchored to the expressway. Not really a neighborhood, just a couple of blocks of red bungalows and two-flats with little to recommend them. I turned down a side street, went a quarter of a block and turned again. Then I slammed on the brakes.

  My headlights cut into the fog-shrouded alley. I flicked on the brights but still didn’t see anything.

  No Junior Diaz.

  What was his game? I’d told him not to move. Was he simply lying low until he was sure I was alone? I grabbed my cell and speed-dialed him.

  “Hey,” his recorded voice grunted. “Gimme reason to call you back.”

  Part of me really, really wanted to go home and forget he’d called at all. But another part of me—the cop who wouldn’t let go of a lead—made me look hard enough to pierce the darkness and the blanket of fog.

  Something lay in the middle of the alley. Junior or this girl supposedly with no blood?

  Only one way to find out.

  Cursing under my breath, I removed my weapon from its holster under my navy blazer, grabbed the combination lantern-flashlight from the floor in back and cautiously opened the door. This wasn’t a particularly bad area, and I wasn’t afraid, but it never paid to let down my guard.

  “Junior?” I called out, turning and swinging the light around to make certain there were no nasty surprises waiting for me. “You there?”

  No answer. My stomach knotting, I moved toward the lump in the middle of the alley. As if the fog decided to cooperate, it rolled off the body and framed it, giving me a picture I would never forget.

  She was sprawled across the alley pavement, her skirt up around her waist, panties shredded, legs spread and bruised—she’d obviously been sexually assaulted. I moved closer, my eye caught by an intricate design high on her outer thigh—a winged gargoyle. A tattoo. Even in the dim light I could see how young she was. A teenager. Just a kid. Her jaw looked as if it had been dislocated, one of her eyes rolled partly out of its socket and an ear was half ripped off.

  She’d fought her attacker like hell, I thought. She’d fought and lost.

  Her caramel skin was ash-pale, and I knew a person’s skin color came from the oxygen in the blood. Her body hadn’t been oxygenated in a while. Even so, I set the lantern down next to her and felt for a pulse. Her flesh was icy against my fingertips. Nothing moved inside of her.

  I looked for wounds and on the inside of her arm found a nasty slash that severed the median cubital vein—the primary site used to draw blood by medical personnel. Her arm was smeared with red and the gashed flesh lay open. If she were still alive, it would have been a gusher, but it wasn’t bleeding because her heart wasn’t beating and maintaining blood pressure. No other wounds that I could see. Only that gash, meaning she must have died of blood loss.

  The problem was…where had all the blood gone?

  I flashed the light around through the fog, but there were only a few splotches on the ground near her arm. The short hairs at the back of my neck rose, and I tried to tell myself that this wasn’t the primary site. That she had been killed elsewhere and dumped here. Only it didn’t look that way.

  Junior had said he’d seen her being drained of blood.…

  Where the hell was he?

  I looked all around me again, but the only thing I spotted was a book bag tumbled on its side as if it had been tossed in the struggle. Fog rolled over it and swallowed it whole.

  I heard a muffled noise, maybe a garbage can hitting a garage door.

  “Junior, are you here?”

  No response. No nothing.

  Continuing to call out for him would be futile, so as the fog drifted over the body once more, I checked for my cell phone but couldn’t find it. I raced back to my car where I’d left it. Since I was off duty, I didn’t have a radio to call in to dispatch, so I dialed 911.

  “This is Detective Shelley Caldwell, Area 4 Violent Crimes Unit,” I said, squeezing my ears against a sudden weird, high-pitched noise. What the hell was wrong with the damn cell phone? I’d never heard anything like this before. I raised my voice as I settled back into the seat. The fog was too thick to see anything anyway. “Call Dispatch. I have a body…”

  Or I’d had a body.

  By the time they arrived on scene a few minutes later—uniforms followed by a case supervisor and CSI—the fog had lifted, leaving me with a few bloodstains, a book bag and nothing else.

  The dead girl’s body had vanished.

  Chapter 1

  Three months later…

  He was a hell of a lot bigger than me. Bigger and frickin’ scary-looking.

  With lightning speed, I grabbed his wrist and twisted, and before he could turn, I used my free arm—palm to forearm—to slam him hard in the back below the shoulder.

  Bam! He went down.

  As I pushed a knee in his back to keep him there, the room went up for grabs.

  “Woo-hoo!”

  “Sweet!”

  “Yo, Jackson, I thought you was a tough guy,” someone said with a snicker.

  I climbed off him. “At ease!” I commanded. “You’ll all get your turn.”

  An embarrassed Gary Jackson quickly rose from the floor without looking at me. I couldn’t spare him a moment’s pity. He wouldn’t get any out on the street.

  “That’s what we call rolling the ball,” I told the recruits who’d just reported to the gym. “If you do it right, it works, no matter how big the suspect.”

  That’s why I’d picked Jackson—I might be tall and strong but he beat me on both counts, and I’d wanted to make a point and fast.

  The regular gym instructor was out on sick leave, and because I was PSS certified—the Police Safety System, which combined moves from several different martial arts—and because I was a novice instructor at the training academy, I’d been pulled from my assignment with new detectives to teach control tactics to recruits.

  I’d been one of them about nine years ago. That’s when I’d joined the Chicago Police Department in hopes of following in my mother’s footsteps.

  But that’s another story.

  The story of the moment was that I was under-whelmed by the work I’d been doing for the past month. It took a certain talen
t and patience to be an instructor—traits that I didn’t have. Just as it took a particular talent and yes, guts, to be a detective.

  That was me—Detective Shelley Caldwell, formerly Violent Crimes Unit, Area 4. Now I was an instructor at the training academy, and the sucky situation wasn’t one I could easily correct. If ever. I should have been hip-deep in investigations, identifying offenders and getting them off the streets of my city. That was what I was really best at—using my brains to solve crimes rather than brawn.

  “All right, it’s your turn,” I said to the room of more than thirty kids in their early twenties, mostly fresh-faced and without a clue as to what they were getting into.

  Most of them were just out of college, idealistic, and few of them knew the reality of the streets…or the hell they would be in for during training, courtesy of all the instructors. That was standard CPD practice—breaking them down like the army did to boot-camp soldiers and then building them up to be cops tough enough to survive the mean streets. They wouldn’t all make it through the training.

  I told the class, “Time to pair up and take turns being the offender and the uniform.”

  “You want us to do what you just did with Jackson?” one of them asked.

  “To start,” I said. And then demonstrated again, with another recruit, this time in slow motion, step by step. “Your turn.” I picked up the stopwatch from a cord that hung from my neck and shouted, “You’ll have thirty seconds to get your partner on the ground…starting…now!”

  I kept an eagle eye on the pair-ups working on mats, mostly guys but a few young females with male partners, as well. They were dressed alike no matter their gender—navy shorts and gray T-shirts with their names on the back, so I could keep track of who was who.

  Recruits fell like sacks of potatoes in half the time allotted. Good. A few more seconds and everyone who was supposed to be down was down.

  But before I could blow my whistle, a female cry got my attention. I whipped around to see a slender brunette on the floor beneath the knee of her decidedly bigger partner, one Fred Guerro. She started sobbing and Guerro popped right up, his expression disconcerted.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he mumbled.

  The name across the female recruit’s back identified her as Lara Morris.

  “What’s the problem, Morris?” I asked.

  She turned big blue eyes wet with tears toward me. “He was too rough! I think he bruised me.”

  I sighed. This one wanted to be a cop? Cops can’t cry, not on the job. He bruised her? Guys on the street could do a lot worse to a woman who couldn’t handle herself.

  No pity, I reminded myself.

  Pity could get her killed.

  I gave Guerro an exaggerated disapproving expression and said, “Shame on you, Guerro! You hurt Morris. What’s wrong with you?”

  Then I turned to Morris, and for one heart-stopping moment she reminded me of my sister, Silke, all innocence and trust. But I wasn’t looking at my twin. This was a wanna-be cop. A woman who had chosen a tough, sometimes unforgiving profession.

  So, my voice sweet and solicitous, I said, “A gang member would never hurt you, Morris. No, no. He’d just hold his gun to your head and blow out your frickin’ brains!”

  Lara Morris was the first recruit to quit.

  After teaching a second morning class, I entered the cafeteria and filled my tray with more food than I could possibly eat. But it was moments like this that I ate to assuage that wretched feeling that told me I’d failed. Food took away the edge of disappointment, but then I had to run a couple of extra miles to work it off. A recruit quitting was not a big deal, but on the first day and because of me? I took it personally, as if it was another strike against me.

  “So how’s it hanging, baby?” Al Washington took a seat at my table.

  Al and I had worked the street together way back when. He’d been hard on me, but he’d also been fair. One of the really good guys. His kinky hair had grayed, and his gaunt dark face had started to sag. He was getting close to that potential twenty-year retirement, which in my mind would be a big loss to the department if he took it. He was a good cop. A great cop. I’d respected him when we’d worked together and had even more respect for him as an instructor. He was one of those officers who had both the talent and patience to be an instructor, and I couldn’t help wishing I were more like him.

  “I’m surviving.” I forced a smile.

  “Such enthusiasm.”

  “I’ll get into it.”

  “Sounds like you’d rather get into something different.”

  “Yeah, well…”

  “No law against you asking to be sent back.”

  Go back. Could I really? I’d made detective nearly two years before and because of one case I’d lost my post. You would think my dedication would have been enough to earn some respect. Instead it had nearly ruined my career.

  “I don’t know, Al. I just have to get used to the change is all.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Really,” I mumbled, stuffing my mouth with another forkful of food.

  He knew me too well to believe me. Not that I was admitting to anything.

  “I suppose you’ll want to say hi to the district commander before she leaves.”

  “Mom?” My mother, District Commander Rena Caldwell, was one of the highest-ranking women in the department. I frowned and swallowed. “She’s here?”

  “In a meeting with Aniceto. I saw her go into his office a while ago.”

  Commander Maurice Aniceto was in charge of the training academy. Considering he was out of the crime loop, I wondered what business Mom had with him. Curiosity nagged at me all through lunch and the afternoon while I taught another session in the gym. Thankfully I got through that one without anyone quitting on me.

  But the whole time, my instincts were on alert and I couldn’t help but wonder if my future was somehow involved. Mom had pushed me to make detective. I knew she didn’t like me working at the training academy. Not that it had been my choice. She and Aniceto were on the same level in the CPD hierarchy, and they undoubtedly did each other favors. That’s the way the department rocked.

  So, had she asked him for a favor today? Involving my future?

  I was showered and dressed and on my way out when I spotted Mom coming out of Aniceto’s office. As usual, she was wearing her uniform rather than street clothes—her choice, not a mandate—and she’d scraped her lush chestnut hair, so like my own, back into a twist.

  Pulse humming, I hurried to catch up to her. “Hey, Mom!”

  When she turned, she didn’t so much as smile at her own daughter. “Detective.”

  The way she said it was meant to remind me I that on CPD ground I was just another cop, not her daughter. “Can I speak to you for a moment, Commander?”

  “Certainly. You can walk me out to my car.”

  I waited until we were out the door, then asked, “So what’s the big deal? Why were you here all afternoon?”

  “A meeting. I’m not sure I like your tone.”

  “Are you speaking to the detective or to your daughter?”

  “Either one.” Mom stopped and faced me. Her shoes had big chunky heels that put her on my five-foot-ten level. The skin around her gray eyes was furrowed. “Respect goes two ways.”

  I know, I know. If I wanted it, I not only had to earn it, but I also had to give it. How many times had I heard that? Only I gave respect where it was due. I swear. I respected the hell out of Mom. Dad died on the job, when Silke and I were seven. Afterward, Mom changed drastically. Suddenly becoming the head of the household, she had taken responsibility superseriously. She’d concentrated on working and making her way up in the ranks so she could give us everything we ever needed.