CHAPTER THREE

The following morning, Chloe got a rude awakening to how the remainder of her career would be structured. Her phone rang at 5:45, the call coming from one of the assistant directors who worked under Director Johnson. She had barely managed to croak out a raspy “Hello?” before the man on the other end started to speak.

“This is Assistant Director Garcia. Is this Agent Chloe Fine?”

“It is.” She sat up in bed, her heart hammering as a surge of adrenaline flooded through her, kicking out the remnants of sleep.

“You’re to meet Agent Rhodes in Bethesda at seven a.m. You’ll be working together on what we believe is a pretty open and closed case of gang violence, likely from MS-13. Any questions should come directly to me, at this number. Agent Rhodes will be given the exact same information. Following this call, the address will be texted to your phone. Do you have any questions, Agent Fine?”

Chloe was sure she had some questions, but they were hiding in the wake of her first actual assignment.

“No, sir.”

“Good. Be safe and smart out there, Agent Fine.”

And that was it. That was how she got her first assignment. She knew that they would not come like this in the future; they’d been told this much at orientation yesterday. Still, it was quite an effective way to kick off her first day on the job.

She’d already laid her clothes out and showered the night before, doing everything she could to make sure she would not be late for whatever awaited her on the first day. She dressed, grabbed a bagel with some cream cheese, and poured a thermos of coffee that she had set to brew at 5 a.m. last night. During all of this, the text from Director Garcia came through, giving her the address in Bethesda. When Chloe got to her car, only fifteen minutes had passed since the call had come in.

She’d been to Bethesda, Maryland, several times so she knew it was a quick drive—a little less than half an hour, especially leaving this early and getting in front of the miserable morning commuter traffic. Once she was out of the grind of DC’s streets and onto more open lanes, she plugged the address into her GPS and saw that she was only twenty-two minutes away.

She found herself wanting to call Danielle. She felt herself driving toward one of the more memorable and meaningful moments in her life and felt the need to share it with someone. But she knew Danielle would still be sleeping and that she would also probably not understand the excitement of it. And that was fine with Chloe. They had different interests and passions, and neither one had ever been particularly great at faking their enthusiasm.

She arrived at the address two minutes ahead of the time her GPS had given her. It was a rundown one-story apartment building, the kind that was usually visited by the police at least a dozen times over the weekend for violence, drugs, sexual assault, and just about anything else imaginable.

She’d fully expected to be there ahead of Rhodes but was a bit dejected to see the other agent not only already there, but walking up the porch steps toward the crime scene.

Annoyed, she parked along the side of the street and hurried up the sidewalk. She made it up to the porch just as Rhodes opened the door to head inside.

“Good morning,” Rhodes said, clearly not meaning it.

“Good morning. What did you do…fly here?”

Rhodes only shrugged. “It doesn’t take me very long to get ready in the mornings. It’s okay, Agent Fine. This isn’t a race.”

As they stepped inside, they saw a man standing in the center of a small cluttered living room. He turned toward them and his eyes seemed to hang on Agent Rhodes for a moment. She was wearing very modest black slacks and a conservative white top. Her hair had been straightened and although she’d claimed she took very little time to get ready, it was obvious that there had been some makeup work done that morning.

“You with the bureau?” the man asked.

“Yes,” Chloe said quickly, as if making sure the man knew there were two agents present, not just the tall pretty blonde one.

“Agents Rhodes and Fine,” Rhodes said. “And you are?”

“Detective Ralph Palace, Maryland Homicide. I’m just taking a few final notes, as I understand this is your case now.”

“What can you tell us to get us started?” Chloe asked.

“It’s pretty basic. Gang-related murder. MS-13 is a big one in this area, so that’s what we’re going with. The bodies of a husband, wife, and thirteen-year-old son were removed yesterday afternoon, about seven hours after the call was placed. Reports of shots fired, and this place ended up looking like this.” He waved his arms all around, indicating the mess of the apartment. “Some pretty simply police work revealed that the father once had ties with a rival gang, the Binzos.”

“If MS-13 is involved how is ICE not on this?” Chloe asked.

“Because it hasn’t been proven yet,” Palace said. “With immigrant-related gang crimes, we have to be pretty certain. Otherwise, we can expect lawsuits and grievances about the unfair treatment of ethnic groups.” He gave a shake of his head and sighed. “So if you guys could prove this one way or the other, that would be great.”

He made his way to the front door, taking a business card from his wallet as he did. It was no surprise at all when he handed it directly to Rhodes. “Call me if you need anything else.”

Rhodes didn’t bother with a response as she pocketed the card. Chloe assumed she had been the kind of girl in high school and college who had gotten acclimated to having guys ogle her all the time. This encounter with Detective Palace had no doubt been just another one of those tiresome moments.

Chloe took a moment to look around the place. The coffee table in front of the couch had been overturned. Something—a dark soda from the looks of it—had been spilled from the table during the melee. The dark fluid had mixed with what was clearly drying blood on the pale shag carpet that covered the entire living room up until the adjoining kitchen. There was more blood splattered on the walls. There was also some smeared on the linoleum floor in the kitchen.

“How do you want to split this up?” Rhodes asked.

“I don’t know. If shots were fired, there’s a good chance one went into a wall or the floor. And from the messy look of the place, it wasn’t a simple shootout. There was a struggle. And that tells me there’s probably fingerprints somewhere as well.”

Rhodes nodded. “We also need to figure out how the killer got in. Did you get a look at the front door? No signs of forced entry. So that means one of the family members let the guy in—maybe someone they knew well and trusted.”

Chloe agreed with all of this and found herself impressed with Rhodes and the way she had already checked the door before even stepping inside.

“Why don’t you look around outside for signs of forced entry?” Rhodes suggested. “I’ll see if there are any signs of what type of weapons were used in here…see if there are any bullet fragments or anything like that.”

Chloe nodded in agreement but was already sensing that Rhodes was doing her best to angle herself as the lead in the investigation. Chloe took it in stride, though. Based on what Palace had told them—and the fact that this had been assigned to two brand new agents with the oversight of an assistant director—she knew it was considered a small-time task in the grand scheme of things. So if Rhodes was going for some sort of power play already, it wasn’t anything to get bent out of shape over. Not yet, anyway.

Chloe headed back outside, running the scenario through her head. If the killer was someone the family knew, why the struggle? If the killer had used a gun, three shots one right behind the other would not have allowed much time for any sort of struggle at all. But the door had indeed showed no signs of being forced open. So really, some sort of forced entry was more likely than the killer simply being allowed inside. But if not at the front door, then where?

She walked slowly around the building, realizing that calling it an apartment building was a bit of a stretch. She became more and more certain that it was some sort of urban housing, perhaps offered as some form of government aid. It was at the very edge of a collection of four identical buildings, separated by a strip of mostly dead grass between each one.

The left side offered nothing. It was mostly featureless with the exception of a small gas tank and a busted spigot where a water hose was coiled uselessly on the ground. But when she got around back, she saw several opportunities. First, there were three windows. One looked into the kitchen and the other two looked into bedrooms. There was also a set of concrete stairs that led up to a back door. She checked this door and found it unlocked. It opened up into a very small area that looked to have served as a mudroom. A few pair of dirty shoes were on the floor and a tattered dirty coat hung from a hook on the wall. She checked the door and the frame and found that it was all sound. From her point of view, she could not see where it had been forced open at any time in the recent past.

She went back to each window, looking for anything suspicious, and was not disappointed. On the third window, looking into what she assumed was the master bedroom, there were two small chunks of wood removed from the frame. They had been crudely removed, as if chipped away. One was along the bottom edge, where the frame sat against the edge of the pane. The other was along the top of the bottom portion of the frame. Whatever had happened to chip the wood had also caused a crack to form in the glass, though nothing hard enough to break it.

She did not want to touch anything out of fear of damaging any prints that had been left behind. But by standing on her tiptoes, she could see that this particular chip in the wood would have allowed someone from the outside to push down to disengage the window lock.