Dockside Danger
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Carol Ericson
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18,1K
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22
Chapter One
FBI Special Agent Tim Ruskin flattened his body against the metal wall of the warehouse, his nose twitching at the smells of rot and urine coming from the corners of the building. He shifted, and his knee pinged the corner of a cage. The rage he’d felt the first time he entered this space rushed back through his body, and his chest prickled with heat. He didn’t want to imagine Lana...or anyone else, trapped in here.
A pen light flashed twice from across the room. Tim tensed and reached for his weapon. As he curled his fingers around the cold, hard metal of his gun, he set his jaw in determination. He’d shoot to kill if one of these cockroaches even touched a weapon.
The warehouse door rattled, and Tim coiled his muscles. He gritted his teeth at the sound of screeching metal as the door cracked open. A single beam from a flashlight fell across the floor, illuminating nothing but the dirty cement.
Tim held his breath, willing the intruder to enter with more than a flashlight in his hand. The door swung wider, and the silhouette of a man appeared in the entrance. The figure hissed and then coughed as he shuffled into the warehouse, dragging something on wheels behind him.
Tim’s eyes watered from the strain as he peered into the darkness behind the man. Where were the others? His finger twitched on the trigger.
The man entering the warehouse whistled an off-key tune and turned to his right to grab the lever that would flood the space with light—only it wouldn’t. Tim and his team had made sure of that. The intruder slammed the lever upward and nothing happened. He swore in Spanish.
Spanish? Tim licked his dry lips, and his gaze shifted to his left as if his team member had an explanation for the different language. Would the stranger’s cohorts follow him inside now to investigate the lighting situation?
The man tried the lever again with the same results. He flicked his flashlight at the ceiling, as if he could find the answer there among the fluorescent tubes lined up like dormant soldiers awaiting orders. Then the intruder kicked the item he’d dragged in behind him and metal clanged in the recesses of the warehouse.
Tim stiffened. What the hell had he brought with him? Another cage? More restraints?
Nobody else had followed the man inside the warehouse. He hadn’t addressed anyone outside. The knots in Tim’s gut tightened. Even if they nailed just one of these bastards, he could work with that. There were ways of getting people to talk, to rat out their associates...and Tim had used them all.
The man turned toward the door, and Tim made his move. They couldn’t let him walk out. “Stop! Hands up!”
Light flooded the space as one of the agents turned on a spotlight, but the intruder didn’t wait to see what was waiting for him inside. He lunged for the door and slammed it behind him.
Tim yelled. “I got him. I got him.”
He sprinted toward the door and flung it open. As he lurched outside, he tripped over the bucket the man had left in his path. Why did the man bring a bucket to a prison?
Tim looked up as he scrambled to his feet just in time to see the man galloping across the parking lot toward the boat slips. They might have a speedboat ready. He couldn’t lose him to the water. They may never get this chance again.
Tim lengthened his stride, closing the gap between them. He muttered, “C’mon. Come at me with a gun.”
The figure began to falter as he neared the water’s edge. Maybe his companions had left him high and dry.
Tim thrust his gun in front of him as he slowed his pace. “Stop! On the ground, or I shoot.”
The man hesitated, turned his head for a final look at Tim and then went into the water.
Tim swore...in English. He dropped his weapon on the edge of the dock and jumped in after the struggling figure splashing and gulping water, not even making an effort to swim away.
He grabbed the man’s clothing, his hands feeling for a weapon. The guy fought against him, but he was fighting against the water, too, and finally figured Tim was the better bet.
Tim hauled him to the side of the slip, his breath coming out in short spurts. “Crawl up there and stay on your stomach.”
Tim grabbed his own gun and hoisted himself out of the brackish water that felt oily against his skin. He aimed it at the man as he dragged himself onto the slip, flattening onto his belly, his dark hair plastered to his skull, his moustache dripping water like a walrus’s.
The suspect coughed and spluttered. “Señor, señor, please don’t shoot.”
“You can cut the act. You’re under arrest for human trafficking, and I’m sure a helluva lot more.” Tim released the cuffs from his belt and jingled them as he shook them out. Maybe this man could tell him about Lana.
“Traffic, what? Señor, I there to clean the building.”
“To clean the building?” Tim stared into the man’s dark, frightened eyes, the whites shining clear in the moonlight, and knew he was telling the truth.
His gut roiled and he fell back on his hands. They’d missed the Bratva again...and this time he knew someone had tipped them off.
DETECTIVE JANE FALCO dropped her purse in the bottom drawer of her desk and locked the drawer. Pretty sad when you had to lock up your purse in the Homicide Division of the LAPD, but she didn’t want to take any chances. She hadn’t been here long enough to assess her coworkers’ trustworthiness, and she’d gone through too much at Pacific Division to let down her guard. She patted the locked drawer. Better safe than sorry.
Lieutenant Figueroa burst into the room, waving a piece of paper. “You’re up, Falco. Where’s Carter?”
“Some personal business, LT.” With the key still in her hand, Jane unlocked her desk drawer and grabbed her purse. “Another domestic?”
“Seems like it. Body of a woman located in her bathtub. Boyfriend nowhere to be found.” The lieutenant cocked his head at her. “Show some enthusiasm, Falco. You’re good at these.”
“Because I’m a woman?” She hitched her purse over her shoulder and snatched the info sheet out of Fig’s hand. He didn’t know about her personal background, so it couldn’t be that.
Figueroa rolled his eyes. “Word of advice, Falco. Lose the chip on your shoulder. You’ll fit in a lot better here.”
“Yes, sir.” She nodded once, flicked her ponytail over her shoulder and breezed past him on her way to her third domestic in seven weeks.
Not that she didn’t find satisfaction in solving these cases and bringing the perpetrator to justice, but solving was a generous term for what she did. Typically, all the evidence screamed out at her, pointing her in the direction of the husband or the boyfriend or the ex. Flipping through the restraining orders and the X-rays of previous broken bones and listening to the 911 calls made her blood boil. By the time she got involved, it was too late for the victim.
It had almost been too late for Mom.
On her way to the victim’s house in Hollywood, she called her partner and left him a voice mail about the case they’d caught. Carter had been out to lunch the past few months dealing with an ugly custody battle. Seemed his ex wasn’t too happy with Damon moving on with a new girlfriend. Jane had kept his secrets and his absences to herself. The surest way to draw attention to herself at the Northeast Division would be to rat out her partner. She didn’t mind his absenteeism, anyway. She preferred working alone.
When she pulled up to the sad little tract house in North Hollywood, she scanned the clutches of people on the sidewalk gawking at the commotion of police cars and yellow crime scene tape. She predicted tales of drunkenness and cruelty from the neighbors. If they all had known this would happen—and that was what they’d claim—why didn’t anyone do anything to help the woman?
Jane huffed out a sigh and grabbed her jacket from the back seat. Once out of the car, she slid her arms into the sleeves of the jacket and smoothed it over the gun on her hip.
Flashing her badge at the officer manning the perimeter, she ducked under the tape and approached a fresh-faced uniform perched on the first step of the porch, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth.
She studied the green tinge to his face and raised her eyebrows behind her sunglasses. “Bad?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He swallowed and then widened his eyes, wishing he hadn’t.
“Are you sick...” she peered at his name tag “...Officer Tran?”
“No, no, ma’am.” He pulled back his shoulders.
She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “If you feel the urge, do it around the corner of the house.”
“Y-yes, ma’am.”
Jane plucked her sunglasses from her face and dropped them into her jacket pocket as she stepped across the threshold of the messy house. She could taste the metallic scent of blood on the back of her tongue, but she didn’t make the same mistake as Tran by swallowing. That only made it worse.
A sergeant stood guard at the hallway to the back rooms, although by the looks of things the victim didn’t need protection anymore.
He nodded at her. “Sergeant Washington, Detective Falco.”
“You’ve got a nauseous officer on the porch, Sergeant.” She snapped on her gloves.
“Tran’s a newbie, Falco. I think this is his first homicide...” he tipped his head toward the open door he was blocking with his muscled frame “...and it ain’t pretty.”
“It never is.” She approached him, and they did a little dance in the hallway to trade places. “Have you talked to any of the neighbors, yet?”
“Just the one next door, who said the victim, Natalya Petrova, lived here with her boyfriend—Austin Walker. He’s nowhere to be found.”
She jerked her head toward the front of the house, her ponytail swinging to one side. “Is that the neighbor who called it in?”
“Maybe. Anonymous call to 911. Told us what we might find.” He lifted his big shoulders. “Could’ve been the boyfriend calling it in, feeling guilty.”
“We’ll find out soon enough when we trace that call—if we can. Do you know if the caller had a Russian accent?”
“I didn’t hear the call and nobody said.”
“How’d you ID the victim?”
“Neighbor told us her name. Sort of butchered the last name, but we checked the purse in the living room and got her license.”
Jane’s gaze flicked to the bathroom behind Washington and zeroed in on a streak of blood running down the wall. More than Natalya’s last name had been butchered.
The tinny odor of the woman’s blood saturated the air, and Jane put her gloved hand over her nose and mouth for a second. “Thanks, Sergeant. Start canvassing the neighbors. I’ll have a look at the scene before the CSI team gets here.”
Washington ambled out of the house, and Jane stepped into the bathroom, her gaze darting from the sink to the toilet to the shower, its curtain printed with mermaids firmly drawn across the tub/shower combo. Nothing in this small bathroom, cluttered with makeup and hair products, indicated a struggle. The living room hadn’t been pristine, but no signs of a life-and-death battle in there, either.
Jane shuffled forward and hooked a finger on the shower curtain, the mermaids shivering at her touch. She eased it to the side, and the shower curtain hooks clacked like disapproving tongues.
Her gaze dropped to the tub. She’d expected water, but the young woman with the gash across her throat and the multiple stab wounds to her chest and abdomen lounged in an empty tub, her hair dry, except for the blood that matted it against her nude body and the porcelain behind her. A tattoo of one of those Russian nesting dolls on her thigh was the only splash of color that wasn’t blood.
Crouching next to the bathtub, Jane murmured, “Did your boyfriend do this do you, Natalya? Did he do this after claiming he loved you more than anything in the world?”
“Detective Falco?”
Jane cranked her head over her shoulder without an ounce of embarrassment at being caught talking to the murder victim. Sometimes when you talked to the dead, they told you things. “Hey, Lori. Is the rest of Forensics here?”
The young fingerprint tech nodded, her gaze avoiding the mess in the tub. “They are. You ready?”
“Not yet.” Jane scratched her chin against her shoulder, not wanting to touch her own face with her gloved fingers. “Have you started dusting for prints, yet?”
“I’m going to start in the bedroom. There’s a glass on the nightstand in there and a lot of other junk, but no evidence of a struggle.”
“Give me a few more minutes. I’ll grab the team when I’m done. Coroner van here, yet?”
“Nope.” Lori covered her face with her hands. “There must be a lot of blood in that tub.”
“A river.”
Lori cranked her head over her shoulder and called out to the others. “Detective Falco isn’t done yet.”
As Lori backed away from the bathroom door, Jane turned her attention back to the woman in the tub. She slid a finger beneath Natalya’s wrist and lifted her hand, studying her neatly clipped fingernails. No broken nails and nothing beneath them—not that she could see. The CSI would bag the hands and check the fingernails for skin cells not visible to Jane’s cursory examination.
She skimmed a finger along Natalya’s hand. “You didn’t fight back, girl? Did he take you by surprise?”
Jane couldn’t see any injuries on Natalya’s body other than the obvious fatal wounds—no bruising on her face, no contusions to the head, no purple necklace of prints around her neck.
How did Natalya’s killer manage to get her into a dry tub, naked, and slash her without disrupting anything else in the house? Even if Natalya had been in here ready to take a shower, she’d have tried to avoid the knife, pulling down the shower curtain or bumping her head and suffering defensive wounds on her arms.
Of course, if she knew her assailant and had welcomed him into the tub with her, she never would’ve had a chance to react after he slashed her throat from behind—which brought her back to the boyfriend.
Jane took a few of her own pictures and recorded some observations before relinquishing the space to the CSIs. She gave her summary to them before emerging into the hallway and taking a big breath.
She caught Lori’s sleeve as the fingerprint tech joined the crowd in the bathroom. “Any signs of a break-in that you could see? Any bloody prints on the doors or windows?”
“No blood, prints or otherwise, in the rest of the house. One of the officers said all the doors and windows were locked.” Lori’s jaw tightened. “It was probably the boyfriend.”
Lori would know a thing or two about that, as her own brother was in prison for murdering his girlfriend. Why did everyone with violence in their pasts manage to find jobs where they could relive it every day?
Jane said, “Probably open-and-shut.”
She scooted past Lori and stood with her hands on her hips, surveying the living room. How did Natalya’s boyfriend manage to get out of the house after that carnage without leaving a trace of blood? He must’ve changed in the bathroom, bagged his bloody clothes and the murder weapon and walked out of here without leaving any evidence. Hardly the crime of passion that usually accompanied these cases. Typically, domestics didn’t involve a whole lot of planning.
She stepped onto the porch and took a bigger breath. This one actually included some fresh air. She peeled off her gloves and nudged Tran’s shoulder. “Feeling better, Tran?”
The officer wiped his hands on his slacks. “A little. I’m past the puking stage, anyway.”
“Progress.” She took her sunglasses out of her pocket and clapped them onto her face. Peering through the lenses, she spotted Sergeant Washington on the sidewalk talking to a woman gesticulating wildly. Looked like he had a live one.
She joined the sergeant on the sidewalk. “Is this a witness?”
The woman turned her protruding blue eyes on Jane. “I didn’t see anything...this time, but those two are always fighting. I seen him shove her around before.”
“Are you talking about Natalya’s boyfriend?”
“Austin Walker, that’s him.” The neighbor crossed her arms over an ample breast and hunched her shoulders.
Washington edged away, leaving Jane to deal with the woman.
Jane fished a notepad out of her pocket. “Your name, ma’am?”
“June Horman.”
“And you live next door to Natalya and Austin?”
She pointed a finger with chipped red polish on the nail to the run-down stucco bungalow next to Natalya’s house. “Right there.”
“Did you know the deceased well? Her boyfriend?”
June blinked her pale lashes. “Not really, just to wave. One time we had a good jolt out here from an earthquake, and the Russian girl got all excited.”
“He wasn’t Russian, though, the boyfriend?”
“No.” June’s thin lips twisted. “He was a biker type—long hair, leather jacket, tattoos. I always thought he might be dealing drugs in there. People coming and going—women coming and going.”
“We’ll certainly take a look.” Jane slipped a card out of her pocket. “If you think of anything else, June, give me a call.”
“I will.” She clasped her hands in front of her. “Poor little thing. How’d she die?”
“I can’t tell you that, June. Thanks for the information.”
Jane talked to several other neighbors, hitting the ones Washington had missed. Before the sergeant left, he handed over his notes on his interviews.
He rolled his big shoulders. “Nobody saw anything. Time of death must’ve been last night, right?”
“As far as I can tell. The coroner will have more.” She shoved her glasses to the top of her head. “Thanks for helping out here today.”
“Where’s your partner?”
“On other business.” She pivoted toward the house. “I’m going to talk to the CSIs and the medical examiner before I leave.”
She scooped in a few more breaths of fresh air before ducking into the house again. Nobody could tell her much more than she’d gleaned herself. The rest of the investigation would take place in the labs and on the computers. Her first order of business would be finding Austin. Already looked bad for him that he wasn’t at home and hadn’t reported the murder.
After Jane checked in with the lieutenant and her partner had put out an all-points bulletin on Austin’s car, she packed up her files and laptop. She could finish working at home.
A half hour later, she left the freeway and took the winding road to her home in Benedict Canyon with ease. She’d lived here long enough to have every turn and bump memorized, even in the dark—she usually arrived home after nightfall.
She didn’t feel one ounce of guilt getting this house in the divorce from Aaron. It had always been more hers than his, anyway. He’d hated the isolation, hated being away from the bright lights, big city. He’d managed to work his way back to the excitement he craved, even before they separated.
Yeah, Aaron owed her this house. She’d let him off easy.
She pulled into the driveway that dipped toward the house. The front, shrouded with trees, looked foreboding, but the back of the house faced a canyon, the open space flooding the rooms with light during the day.
She parked and grabbed her bag and jacket from the front passenger seat. Her low heels crunched on the gravel that led to her front porch. A shadow moved to her right behind the bushes that gave the house its rustic aspect.
Always in hyperalert mode, Jane felt the hair on the back of her neck quiver. She dropped her bag and pulled her gun from her waistband.
Aiming it at the bushes, she growled. “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t shoot you.”
The shadow took shape as it stepped from its cover. The man held out both of his hands. “It’s Tim Ruskin, Jane.”
All her senses percolated, and she cocked her head. “Give me another reason.”
