THURSDAY AFTERNOON, IN her office in the Daly Building, Bree realized that by agreeing to become chief of detectives, she’d also agreed to go surfing on a tsunami of memos, overtime requests, and high-pressure meetings at which she was called upon to defend her handling of a job that she hadn’t been given enough time to learn.
The good times on the Delaware shore, watching Alex and Ali playing in the waves, seemed such a distant memory that Bree wanted to throw something just to hear it break.
A knock on the doorjamb jolted her from her funk. Detective Kurt Muller ducked his head in and said, “Howdy, Chief Stone.”
Looking at his waxed mustache, she couldn’t help but grin. “Howdy?”
“I’m showing my inner Oklahoman today,” Muller said. “Anyway, I know you’re COD now and all, but I’m going to Terry Howard’s storage unit. His ex-wife gave me permission to look through it, and she also gave me the combinations to two safes, which he evidently gave her in case he died.”
“I didn’t even know Howard had an ex-wife,” Bree said. “Patty,” Muller said. “They divorced seven years ago. She’s remarried to a veterinarian. Lives in Pensacola. She said she’s in shock about Howard’s suicide and the cancer. He never told her, or their daughter, who is nine. Anyway, I wanted to know if you felt like tagging along.”
Bree almost dismissed the offer out of hand. The case was closed. Why would she want to pick through a dead man’s storage unit?
But then she remembered Alex’s dissent when Chief Michaels declared the homicides of Tommy McGrath and Edita Kravic solved, pinning them on the bitter ex-cop who’d blown his head off with the kind of gun he had never owned and didn’t like to use.
“Sure, I’ll go with you, Muller,” Bree said at last, getting up from behind her desk. “It’ll help me to clear my head, get me out of the spin cycle I’ve been on.”
“I felt like that once,” the detective replied. “Inner-ear infection. You would have thought I was on deck in a hurricane sea or drunk off my ass. I couldn’t tell which way was up.”
On the way to the storage unit in Tacoma Park, Bree actually enjoyed listening to Muller drone on about the role of the eustachian tube in regulating equilibrium.
They cut off the lock to the unit and threw open the overhead door. Near the wall to their immediate right was a baby’s crib with a mattress, mobiles, and folded dusty blankets. Behind that were stacks of boxes, an old bicycle, a rolled-up volleyball net, and two large Cannon 54 safes.
“You have the combinations?” Bree asked.
“They’re on here somewhere,” Muller said, pulling out his phone.
Bree went to the safes, noting four green army-surplus ammunition boxes on top of one.
“You still think Howard shot himself?” Bree asked, taking one box down.
Muller shrugged, still scrolling on his phone. “Seems a little convenient in retrospect. McGrath and Howard have a bad beef. Howard kills McGrath and shoots himself because he has cancer and because he’s had his revenge.”
“It wraps up in a nice package, doesn’t it?” Bree said.
She opened the box and found smaller cardboard boxes of .40-caliber ammunition stacked neatly inside. The second box was half full of nine-millimeter ammunition. The third box carried .30-06 rounds and a single cardboard container of Federal .45-caliber pistol ammunition.
CHAPTER
56
BREE PICKED UP the box of ammunition and opened it.
Six of the twenty bullets were missing from the plastic rack inside.
But there they were: fourteen .45-caliber bullets. Ammunition for a gun Terry Howard had claimed he never used.
“Got the combinations,” Muller said. “Ready, Chief?”
“Gimme a second,” Bree said, pulling out one of the bullets, noting the copper full-jacket bullet and the slight hollow spot at the tip. She inspected the primer and the rim around it and saw something that made her pause.
After a moment, she dug in her pocket and put the bullet and the box in an evidence bag.
“Ready?”
“Just let me finish here,” she said, opening the fourth ammo box.
Bree found a gun-cleaning kit with jars of bore solvent, all tightly closed but still tainting the air with their peculiar smell. She reached in and pulled out a small bottle of Hoppe’s #9.
She opened the top and sniffed. The liquid bore cleaner smelled like she remembered it, sweet, almost like hot caramel. It was bizarre that something that smelled that good stripped out spent gunpowder and metal fouling.
Something deep in her brain stopped her train of thought. She stared at the bottle of Hoppe’s #9 and sniffed it again, grasping for a memory and not knowing exactly why.
“You ready now, or do you want some glue to sniff?”
“Funny,” she said. She put the gun-cleaning kit away and stood in front of the safe’s electronic keypad. “Tell me.”
Muller called out a series of numbers that she entered and soon there was a chunking noise as the locks released. Bree opened the safe and shone her flashlight inside.