There Are No Innocents

Chapter 1-1

We had a problem.

Although it was just seven in the morning, the sun was coming up, and the heat was beginning to build. It was late July. July in this city meant only three things: wind, heat, and more heat. The wind was blowing a steady gait from out of the south. That meant it was going to be a hot day. A witheringly hot day.

The blue shirt underneath my sport coat was damp. And the day was just beginning. By time nine o"clock rolled around I would have to change shirts and ditch the coat. Later on, after we finished our initial investigation, I’d be nothing more than a piece of melted cheese dip. Already I could feel the heat radiating off the car beside me. The small Caddy, black as coal, was going to turn into a boiler in about an hour. There’s nothing like a black car and black leather seats which can absorb heat and magnify it tenfold. Throw a dead body into the car, add in about three tons of humidity, and you can imagine the rest.

But that wasn’t the problem.

As I walked around the driver’s side of the black Cadillac CTS-V I kept glancing at the front windshield. Punched through the glass about six inches above the upper rim of the steering wheel was a bullet hole. Striation lines radiated outward from the hole. But the windshield itself was intact. A quick glance at the back window had the bullet’s exit point. About half the window was gone. The remaining glass was coated in blood and brain matter.

Slumped back across the black leather seats of the car was the victim. The front part of his head was there. The back half wasn’t. The dead man looked to be in his ‘30s or early ‘40s. He had on a blue suit. Dark navy-blue. Hand stitched and tailored to perfection. Made from imported Egyptian cotton. Maybe worth a grand or more. Minimum.

Underneath the suit was an off-white linen shirt. Not something found in a typical Wal-Mart. Around his neck was a signature red silk tie. Again, maybe one or two C-notes for a price tag. Expensive Italian leather for shoes and wraparound shades still sitting perfectly on the bridge of his nose completed the picture.

Whoever this guy was, he wasn’t worried about balancing his check book like the rest of us. Not so long ago I used to think twice every time I wanted to buy a Daffy Duck tie off the racks at K-Mart. Times have changed. So has the health of my bank account. But this guy ... this guy looked as if he never had to worry about money. Hell. His car alone–new–was two and a half years my salary. Give or take a couple of nickels. The guy, when he was breathing, was awash in cash. Very rich. That meant very powerful. He would have powerful friends. Powerful friends usually expected quick results whenever one of their kind checked out unexpectedly.

But that wasn’t the problem.

No.

The problem was the dead man and how he died. Specifically, in the place where he died. Hearing steps behind me, I turned and watched my partner, a red-headed and bearded Neanderthal wannabe with the IQ equal to a couple of Einstein"s, approaching. Glancing at me, the guy mashed his thick eyebrows together and whistled softly.

“This doesn’t look good.”

“Yes. I was thinking the same thing.”

He turned and looked out over the railing of the parking garage slot the Caddy was parked in. Third floor of a four-floor parking garage. The Caddy was facing to the south, parked up against the southern cement retainer wall. In front of him was nothing. Nothing for twenty square miles. Just an empty wheat field which stretched out forever.

“You know what the problem is, right?” Frank grunted, shoving hands into his wrinkled gray slacks as we faced the wheat field and stared off into nothingness.

“Let me guess. The trajectory of the bullet doesn’t come up from the wheat field. It’s coming from slightly above the parking garage.”

“Yep, that’s the ticket,” nodded Frank, grinning maliciously, “But there’s more.”

“Uh huh,” I nodded, turning to look to the north. To the direction the bullet was heading after it passed through the victim’s cranium and the back window. Another goddamn wheat field. “The bullet can’t be found. So, we have no evidence, other than a dead man and a couple of bullet holes, to start from.”

The parking garage, with the attached five-story office building of black glass and black granite beside it, set in an industrial park on the city’s south edge. A quarter of a mile to the west was I-475 sweeping around the city. All six lanes of the cement ribbon were filled with morning traffic. You could hear the constant hum all the way out here. The one paved street leading to the crime scene sliced through mostly farm country. But there were a couple of new office complexes around and a third in the process of being constructed. Downtown was ten miles to the north and east. In between was nothing but wheat fields and a few brand-new housing developments.

“There you go. On the money. That’s why they made you the youngest detective sergeant on the force. Brilliant, my friend. Brilliant!”

I turned, looked at my partner, and grinned.

Smartass.

Did I tell you Frank has no neck? No? Well, he doesn’t. Just a head built like a block of steel-reinforced cement sitting on a set of shoulders wide enough to make the flood gates at Hoover dam jealous. His hair is a floridly brilliant colored carrot red. Stringy and always blowing around unruly in the slightest breeze. Somehow the red hair and short-trimmed but equally red beard complimented his square head nicely. If you enjoyed looking at nightmares.

He’s got hands the size of dinner plates. When he rolls them up into fists, they look like giant wrecking balls a crane uses when they throw them around to knock down buildings. No, he’s not much to look at. Actually, he’s like sushi. He’s an acquired taste. You either like him or you don’t. There’s no in-between. I liked him. We’ve been on the force together for over twelve years. Partners in the South Side Precinct most of those twelve. You can’t ask for a better man. They don’t make ’em better. And there is a plus to this guy. His looks make him look like a dumb mug straight out of a mental ward. But he’s just the opposite. He knows every detail about everything.

You can’t stump him.

I know. I’ve been trying to since the day I met him.

“Wanna give me an idea on the murder weapon, genius?” I asked, grinning.

“Nine millimeters. Hard nose. Maybe from, say, at an elevation of about eight or ten feet off the floor. Or, more precisely, about fifty feet from ground level.”

“Out there,” I said, waving a hand toward the wheat. “Fifty feet above the ground.”

Frank nodded, grinning that evil little grin of his I was all too familiar with.

“Oh no,” I said, shaking my head firmly and lifting a hand up, palm outward, toward him. “I had the last Sherlock. Remember the Levant Case? That was a Sherlock. It’s your turn. You are the lead investigator on this one, buddy.”

A ‘Sherlock’ was our little way of telling each other a particular case was not going to fit the typical run-of-the-mill murder we police types are so fond of. This one had all the markings of something that was going to be tough to figure out. Most homicide cases are relatively simple. Nine times out of ten the victim knew his killer. Six out of ten times the murder was a spur of the moment affair with all kinds of witnesses and evidence lying about to finger the perpetrator. (The Perp… jeez, I hate that word. Too many cop shows on TV.) So, most of the time cops simply follow the leads, like a good machinist follows his blueprints, and eventually you wind up with the guilty party.

But.

Sometimes there’s a monkey-wrench thrown into a cop’s normal routine. A case comes drifting along and gets dumped into your lap which doesn’t follow the rules. The evidence is usually very little. Or nonexistent. Typically, there are a multitude of possible suspects. Each with several reasons on why they would pull the trigger. To solve a case like this means you had to work like Sherlock Holmes. Deductive reasoning. Ruling out all the possibilities until you came onto the one possibility, no matter how absurd it might be. That one possibility which answered all the questions. Frank, for all of his fabulous smarts, hated these cases. Hated them so much he became very creative in throwing them back to me.

“Naw, I had the last Sherlock. The Hutch case.”

“The Hutch case? Jesus. That was a pimp shooting one of his girls in broad daylight in front of a Dunkin’ Donuts. Sixteen witnesses saw the shooting. She lived long enough to tell us her pimp did it. The pimp confessed, for chrissakes. How could that be a Sherlock?”

“But we couldn’t find the gun, Turn. It took me, oh, a couple of hours to figure out where he hid the murder weapon. That’s what made it a Sherlock. So, it’s your turn. Quit squawking.”

A wiry smirk played across my lips.

What the hell. I don’t mind taking these cases. Frank hates ’em. I find them stimulating. I enjoy the banter the two of us go through every time one of them comes up. Work with a guy long enough and you either begin to enjoy his company, or you hate his guts. I liked Frank. We worked well together.

Maybe I should introduce myself. I’m Turner Hahn. Detective Sergeant Turner Hahn, South Side. I’ve been a cop ever since I graduated from college. Twelve years. Ten with the gold badge of a detective. I’m a little over six feet three with black hair and gray-blue eyes. I used to be a football player. I played linebacker in college. Played for a college in the Big 12 conference. Once I had dreams of playing in the NFL. But this kid from Syracuse, built like the back side of Mt. Everest, decided to use my legs for bowling pens. He threw a rolling block on me, caught my right leg under his fat ass, and that was that. So long NFL.

Yes. I was married once. Childhood sweetheart from high school. But then one day I came home and found a note on the table informing me she decided to run off with an accountant by the name of Rodney. At least he would be home at night. So now I call myself a confirmed bachelor. I live in a rundown building on Floyd Street about two blocks from the Brown River. Floyd is down in the industrial section of town. The place I have is a red-brick mass of badly constructed masonry. But cheap enough for me to afford on a detective sergeant’s pay. No. I couldn’t afford to buy a building. Not on my pay scale. I can afford it because my grandfather gave the building to me. The old coot claims to be a farmer living upstate. He does own a big farm and a good portion of the year he can be found living in the main house up there. But the old man has secrets. Secrets he doesn’t share. Secrets I don’t want to know about, frankly. But there"s one secret that"s not so secret. He’s rich. Rich with a capital “R” in front of it. Rich enough to make the legendary King Midas look like a shyster. He and I are much alike. He’s an old widower who loves cars. He refuses to marry and likes to tinker with his toys when he’s not planting wheat or irrigating corn. And he likes to come to the city and share a case or two of beer with me and talk about cars.