“On your knees. Do it.”
The guy looked like an athlete. Vincent calculated whether or not he could take him. It might not be easy.
That would be tight too. But he couldn’t risk being taken in. “Please, Officer, I need to-”
“Now.” The cop leveled the gun at his chest.
Desperation swallowed everything. This was it. He had to go for it, had to risk it, had to act now, before more officers got here. He started to bend down as if he were obeying the officer, but then used his bent knee to propel himself forward and lunge for the gun.
Years of college football and weight lifting had made Vincent quick and tough and not afraid to mix things up. He went hard at the cop, snagging his hand and knocking the gun away. Then he balled up a fist and aimed a blow at the officer’s kidney, but the guy blocked it just in time.
He deftly grabbed Vincent’s wrist, twisting it to control him.
Countering, Vincent threw a hard hook with his other fist, connected solidly with the guy’s jaw, but that didn’t stop him-he drove his shoulder into Vincent’s chest and slammed him to the ground.
Vincent tried to wrestle free but the cop was wiry and strong, and as he rolled to get away, he felt his arm being wrenched behind him to subdue him. Vincent strained fiercely to get away, but the cop twisted his arm more, toward the breaking point.
“No!” Vincent couldn’t help but yell. If he didn’t get away-
But then he was cuffed and the officer was pinning him down with his knee, calling for backup. “Do not move,” he told Vincent.
“You don’t understand-”
“Quiet,” the officer said. “This is Detective Bowers.” He was talking into his radio. “I’m on the southeast corner of Twenty-sixth and Wells. I have the suspect.”
“Please,” Vincent gasped. “He has her. If you don’t let me go, he’s going to kill her. You can’t let that maniac kill my wife!”
3
I paused. “Who has her?”
“Some guy-I don’t know his name! He broke into our house, told me I had to take a black man to that alley. Please-he said if I got caught, it’d be too late for last rites, that he’d slit her throat. Slit her like a pig.” The guy’s voice cracked. “That’s what he said.”
I patted him down. “Where are they?”
“I don’t know. You have to believe me!”
No weapons. A wallet. Car keys. A portable phone in his pocket. Not just a pager, an actual portable phone. Though they were starting to become more popular, it spoke of wealth. I removed the items. “What’s your name?”
“Vincent Hayes.”
A few seconds ago he’d knocked my gun, a.357 SIG P229, away, and now I quickly retrieved it and slipped it into my holster, then held Hayes down firmly.
I scanned the shadows to make sure no accomplices were coming to assist the guy, but the view in all directions was restricted. After evaluating the sight lines, the distance to the nearest intersection, and the spacing between the streetlights, I realized I didn’t like our position here at all.
“You said he told you to do it. Did you meet with him?”
“On the phone!”
It was possible for someone to be making something like this up on the spot, but it seemed unlikely. The best way to ferret out a lie is with a follow-up question. “Who are you working with, Vincent?”
“No one.” A pause. “What do you mean?”
“Abducting the man in the alley. Who else was involved?”
“No one. It was just me.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“He made me do it! I swear. Stop wasting time. He’s going to kill her if-”
“Where do you live, Vincent?”
He rattled off an address and I radioed it in to get a car over there. I was still holding him down and he was a hefty man, so I was glad that, at least for the moment, he’d stopped trying to roll away.
“No, no no, they’re not there-” Then abruptly, he seemed to change his mind. “Wait. You can’t go in. If he sees you, he’ll kill her! He said no cops!”
There was no question that I needed to check out this guy’s story to see if his wife was safe. “Go in dark,” I told dispatch. “Possible hostage situation.”
Swift, light footsteps approached us. I whipped out my SIG, snapped around, ready, wired. But it was just Sergeant Brandon Walker, the guy we called Radar, entering the circle of light tossed down from one of the streetlights about thirty meters away.
At thirty-seven, Radar was twelve years older than me and was the one officer Lieutenant Thorne thought wouldn’t be threatened or insulted partnering with the youngest homicide detective on the force. He’d been right. Radar was a good cop. A good man. A great dad. Even though he wasn’t an imposing guy-slim, balding, stuck with a nose that was a little too big for his face-Radar was scrappy and smart, and I was glad he was my partner.
I holstered my weapon, hailed Radar, then asked Vincent, “Why would he kill her?”
“I don’t know! He made me do it. Like I told you, he said if I got caught, he’d slit her throat! You have to-”
“You alright, Pat?” It was Radar jogging toward us, weapon out to cover me.
“I’m fine. You hearing this?”
“Yeah.”
He arrived at my side.
“Get two cars over here, Radar. I want this guy in a cruiser ASAP so we can talk to him in private.”
He was eyeing my face where Vincent had punched me.
“Go on,” I told him.
“You sure you’re okay?”
Only then did I become aware of the pain emanating from my jaw and pounding through my head. It was hard to imagine that I hadn’t noticed it a few seconds ago, but adrenaline does that to you. My index finger ached too; it’d gotten wrenched pretty badly when Vincent yanked at my SIG, and now the proximal interphalangeal joint felt thick, swollen, hard to move. “I’m good. Make the call.”
While Radar stepped away to radio the cruisers, I asked Hayes, “How would he know you did it? Were you supposed to meet him? Call him?”
“He said he’d be watching.”
“From where?”
“I don’t know.”
I scrutinized the area again. “Tell me what happened. Make it quick.”
He snatched a breath and quickly recounted the story. “I came home, found blood in the kitchen. He’d taken her. There was a note with a phone number and I called it. He told me I needed to leave a black man in his twenties, naked, cuffed in that alley, that if I got caught or went to the cops, he’d kill Colleen.”
“Did he tell you that alley on Twenty-fifth, that specific one?”
“Yes.”
That was the alley where, back in 1991, Konerak Sinthasomphone had been found. The teenage Laotian had been drugged and was disoriented, but had escaped apartment 213 when his abductor, a serial killer named Jeffrey Dahmer, briefly left him alone.
