Still, a hunch was hard to put aside. And I had to check it out. I went through the gate and up the poured-cement path to the front door, upon which was taped another NO TRESPASSING AND THAT MEANS YOU notice.
I pressed the buzzer.
I heard a dog woofing deep inside the house, and a man’s voice said, “OK, Hauser. Let’s see who this damned son of a bitch is.”
There were sounds behind the door, a peephole sliding, a chain coming off a track, a bolt unracking. Given the modest means of residents of this neighborhood, either Wayne Broward was stashing gold bullion at home, or he was an officer in a one-man war.
Or maybe he had stabbed a woman to death on each of the past five May twelfths.
There was more barking, and then the door was pulled open. A brown-haired white man of average height and weight, in a denim shirt and jeans, holding a Winchester rifle, showed himself in the slice of open doorway.
“What the fuck do you want?” he asked.
“I’m Sergeant Lindsay Boxer,” I said, showing him my badge. “I’m looking for Wayne Lawrence Broward.”
The dog, a boxer as it turned out, lunged at the door, and the gent with the rifle used his leg to push the dog back from the doorway.
“I said, ‘What. The fuck. Do you want?’”
I pushed my badge forward. “I’m the police. Put the gun down.”
The man in the doorway scowled, but he lowered the muzzle.
I took a photo of Tina Strichler from my breast pocket. Her bloody death on a pedestrian crossing in front of about a hundred tourists was still vivid in my mind.
I said, “Do you know this woman?”
Broward peered at the photo, then opened the door wide and said, “Why didn’t you say so? Come in.”
CHAPTER 63
BROWARD HAD AS much as said he recognized Tina Strichler. But I wanted to hear him actually say it.
“You know this woman?” I asked.
“Come in,” he said. “I don’t bite. Even Hauser don’t bite.”
He yanked on the dog’s collar, shoved the dog into a bedroom, and closed the door.
I put my hand on my gun, cautiously entered the house, and looked around. The interior of the place looked like American Pickers meets Hoarding: Buried Alive.
There wasn’t one inch of clean or uncluttered surface. There were live chickens in a slatted box under a table, canned food stacked against the walls to the ceiling, boxes of ammo on countertops, and guns hanging from racks on the walls.
I scanned the room for trophies of dead women. I was looking for photos or newspaper clippings taped to the wall or signs of the abused wife. I also looked for a collection of assorted knives that might have been used to commit murder and then been taken away by the killer.
But mainly, I was so stunned by the chaos that I lost sight of Broward—until I felt a cold gun muzzle against the back of my neck.
Wayne Broward said, “Why don’t you take off your gun and stay awhile.”
“Love to,” I said, fear and shame flooding my body to my fingertips and out through my eyes. I was a jerk. I’d walked right into this, and I might die in this very room.
“I’m taking my gun out very slowly,” I said, my back to him. “Just using my fingertips.”
As I was trained to do, I spun around fast, knocked the barrel of Broward’s rifle away from me, grabbed the rifle with both hands, and wrenched it out of Broward’s grip, throwing him off balance. I flung the rifle far from where I stood. As it clattered against a wall hung with hubcaps, I pulled my Glock and leveled it at Broward’s nose.
From the chill at the back of my neck to the Glock in my hand took about ten seconds, but it felt like the last ten seconds of my life. Hauser was barking his head off, and I wondered at my luck, that Broward had underestimated me and had put the dog behind a door.
“Bitch,” Broward spat at me. “I shoulda shot you. I coulda done anything to you. No one would ever know what happened to you.”
“Turn around. Put your hands on your head,” I said.
He did it.
“I coulda given you a real good ride first,” he said mournfully. “I haven’t had a blond in a while.”
“Shut the hell up,” I said.
I holstered my gun, wrenched Broward’s arms down, and cuffed him behind his back.
“You’re under arrest for assault on a police officer,” I said. And then I read him his rights.
CHAPTER 64
I HAD BROWARD in the back of my vehicle, behind the Plexiglas and in cuffs.
As for me, I was still twitching with adrenaline because he could have killed me. That would have been my fault entirely for having made such a dumb-ass, rookie mistake.
I couldn’t stop flicking my eyes to the rearview mirror to look at him. He was wild-eyed crazy, for sure, but whatever kind of psycho he was, he didn’t seem to know or care that he was on his way to jail.
Broward said loudly, “Remember when we were living with my mama?”
“Yep. It was a trip, Wayne.”
“You used to call me Honey-boy. I just loved when you did that.”
“That was then, Wayne,” I said, playing along. “I’m over you now.”
Wayne Broward began to sing “Jesus Loves Me.”
I turned up the squawk box and kept my eyes on the road. I didn’t like what I was going to have to say to a judge about why I had been inside the house of a man who hadn’t been under suspicion of anything; my probable cause was a hunch. Thank God Broward had invited me to come in. Perhaps that and his history of threatening a judge would help me sound a little less stupid.
Twenty minutes later, I parked in the all-day lot on Bryant and tossed the keys to the guy who worked days in the shed. Broward gave me no trouble as I escorted him across the street and into the building in cuffs. I walked him through the metal detector and up the stairs to the desk sergeant on the third floor.
I said, “Sergeant, we need to book Mr. Broward for assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer. Make sure he gets a psych eval.”
Sergeant Brooks asked questions and filled out a form, and a uniformed cop came up and took Broward to booking. My rifle-wielding collar would be kept busy for the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours while being processed: There would be a body search, fingerprints, a shower, and examinations by a nurse and a shrink. Then he’d be given a jumpsuit and locked in a holding cell until I could get back to him.
After leaving the front desk, I went down the hall and through the door to Homicide. I found Conklin in the bullpen with files on drug dealers fanned out all over his desktop.
“Rich. I’m very sorry. I got hung up.” I fully planned to tell my partner about Wayne Broward, but he cut in with a news flash.
“Ralph Valdeen was hit.”
Ralph Valdeen, aka Rascal, was one of the two former stockroom boys at Wicker House. Valdeen had been charged with assault on a police officer for that punch he’d thrown at Conklin at the ballpark. But he’d been released on bail. Unlike Donnie Wolfe, who had stolen a car, we had had nothing else on Valdeen. There was no evidence that he knew the Wicker House shooters or that he knew what happened to the drugs that had been stolen from that lab.
“What happened?” I asked my partner.
“His mom went over to his place and found him dead in the bedroom,” Conklin said. “Two shots to the chest, one to the head. Makes me think someone was cleaning up after themselves. Maybe he could’ve ID’d the Wicker House shooters.”
“Another dead witness,” I said.
“And he’s all ours,” said Conklin.
CHAPTER 65
BRADY HELD AN impromptu standing-room-only meeting at the end of the shift. We were a ragged-looking crew but highly motivated to stop the growing body count and rescue our reputation, which was getting trashed by the media daily, nightly, and on weekends.