When he finally arrived home, it was near dawn.
The heating in the house had just come on.
Upstairs, in the twins’ room, it felt cold nonetheless. Each bed was carefully made up, blankets folded neatly back. In case. He stood there for a long time, letting the light slowly unfold round him. The start of another day.
The Drought by James O. Born
The photograph of the girl hadn’t changed since the first time Broward Sheriff’s Office detective Ben Stoltz had looked at it three years before. She looked pretty much like she had when he walked up to her in the center of yellow crime-scene tape in a vacant lot off Sunrise Boulevard. Something about her nose and eyebrows reminded him of his own daughter, and that was really all it took. One of the things that had saved his sanity was the rise in the murder rate in Broward County, which had kept him too busy to really consider how he had failed her ever since a jogger had first discovered her body on that cool March evening. Now that things had slowed down, he had time again. Shit.
A musical ringtone shook him out of his daze as he looked at the photograph. He missed the practical and obnoxious rings that phones used to make. Sitting at the same desk he had occupied since entering the detective bureau, using the same Paper Mate pen he had used his first day in plain clothes, he wondered why the phones had undergone such an evolution. Some had a gentle, breezy electronic chime; others sounded like a tiny fire alarm. His phone had whatever was programmed into the damn thing when some pencil-necked geek had plopped it down four years before. If it weren’t for the weary secretary who, tired of taking his messages, had set up his voice mail, he’d be the only one in Homicide without the precious service.
Now, staring at the files of his open cases, Stoltz wished someone would call and get him off his dead ass and doing something. He feared these slight lulls in the murder rate. The times when he might have to sit in the office and look over his mistakes. That’s what he considered his open cases. Why not? If he was unable to solve them, then it was his mistake. He had failed. Aside from his deep desire to retire in Homicide, he knew what his duty was. It was to catch the assholes who killed other people. Sometimes it was more personal or more rewarding. Sometimes he just felt like the referee in some giant game in which one group shoots up another. Of the four files in front of him, three were drug related. He wanted them closed but never felt satisfied with the result. Somewhere, maybe a few years down the road, some dumbass would get picked up on a trafficking charge and give up the triggerman on a drug homicide. Or, as had happened to him several times, a gun would be recovered and traced back to the killing. Once, they had lifted some DNA off the grip of a Beretta that had led to a conviction. These were back burners.
The fourth file. Jane Doe number sixty-eight was a girl that had died around the age of twenty. Jenny’s age. Except this girl wasn’t a junior at the University of Central Florida. She was some lonely girl whom someone had stabbed and left in a vacant lot off Sunrise Boulevard. Still in unincorporated Broward County, about two blocks from the city limits of Sunrise. At first, his boss asked, almost pleaded, for him to say it was in the city’s jurisdiction. But geography didn’t lie, and neither did he. It was their case. No witnesses, no leads, no motive, and no true name for the victim. His sergeant looked like he was about to have a seizure. Then the sergeant had a stroke of genius. Suicide. Stoltz had to bring up the uncomfortable question of how someone stabbed themselves four times to commit suicide and then didn’t leave a weapon near the body. His sergeant was ready. Animals had carried it off. After all, it was a vacant lot. But as the lead investigator, Stoltz refused to go with the “well-armed raccoon” theory and had carried the case for the past three years. Three years, two sergeants, nineteen cases, and one marriage ago. Felt like a lifetime.
He sensed more than saw the figure of Chuck, his partner on most cases, as he dropped into the chair next to his desk.
“Ben, what’s the good word?” asked the only detective who was senior to him in the Homicide Unit.
Ben Stoltz just looked out over his cluttered desk and sighed.
“Yeah, I know. Droughts like this bring up a lot of old shit. I’m recanvassing the neighborhood where we found Cassie Brown’s body.” The heavyset detective looked across at the other cops at their desks. “You never see this many guys in here at once. Rumor is that they may shift some of us to other areas.”
Stoltz looked up and paid attention for the first time. “Like where?”
“Dunno. Fraud is hot right now, and there’s always sex crimes.”
“We got nothing to worry about. We’re senior.”
“Ben, you and I got no juice. These young guys, they’re climbers. They talk to the colonel and the sheriff. They get ‘face time,’ and all we do is get cases and clear ’em. We’ll be the first to go. They’ll tell us some bullshit like it’ll do us good to see something other than corpses.”
Stoltz looked around, seeing, for the first time, his competition. He had always just done his job and been left alone. Would that work in today’s environment? He looked at the other detective. “You’re in DROP. I didn’t come on the Sheriff’s Office until I was thirty-one. I got four years, just to go into the DROP for five more.” In reality, Stoltz didn’t view the DROP retirement incentive as a chance to make more money but as an opportunity to stay a while longer. The Deferred Retirement Option Plan allowed a cop to collect retirement in a savings account and still work for a five-year period. The intent was to move old-timers out of the job.
Chuck loosened his tie. “Man, that would suck to finish up in another unit.”
Stoltz didn’t acknowledge the comment. He was distracted by his sergeant, who, at thirty-four, was nearly twenty years younger than he. The balding young man who never smiled said, “Ben, we got an officer-involved shooting.”
“Where?”
“Our favorite beach town, where else?”
“The cop okay?”
“Of course. That bunch are shooters, not targets.”
“Any weapon?”
“Not from the stiff. Looks like he took the cop’s ASP and the cop fired twice. You two get over there. Crime Scene is on the way.” He ran a bony hand through thinning blond hair. “Ben, you’re the lead. I’ll be along shortly.”
“Got it, Sarge.”
The young sergeant added, “Carla Lazaro is the assistant on it.”
Stoltz gave an involuntary shudder. “She’s not in the Homicide Unit.”
“Public Integrity. They get police shootings. Watch your ass so she doesn’t swallow you whole.”
“I’m still the lead investigator. She’s just an assistant state attorney.”
“But she has a big mouth and bigger ego. If she called the captain and wanted you removed, she’d probably pull it off. Just watch it. She’ll use a case like this for political advantage.”
“I don’t follow politics.”
“But she does.”
Stoltz nodded, not worried about whomever the state attorney had assigned to the case. He just found and repeated facts.
His partner said, “The drought breaks, good thing you’re the duty detective. This’ll give you some juice to stay here if things go bad.” He paused and added, “Too bad the Queen of the Damned is assigned.”
“She won’t bother us.”
“You hope.” He stood and headed toward his desk. “Like I said, at least you caught a case. That’ll look good during review time.”
Stoltz hated to admit it, but he had already thought of that. He had his “go kit,” with a tape recorder, camera, and note pads, all zipped up and ready within a minute. This was the kind of stuff that had kept him sober and sane as the last year had unfolded. Mary’s leaving him, Jenny’s college expenses, and Craig’s Christmas revelation had shaken him out of the life he had found so comfortable. Thank God he still had Homicide.