A couple of the jail guards were standing together off to the side, smoking, either as a nerve salve or just taking advantage of an unscheduled break from the inside. Four uniformed road deputies were huddled near the still-opened back doors of a detention transport van. Nick knew that the vans usually carried anywhere from two to eight prisoners from the city jails around the county or from state prisons when an inmate needed to show up for court. The main downtown courthouse was right next door, attached by an elevated walkway. It made it easier and quicker to transport defendants back and forth to hearings and legal appearances.
At first Nick found it odd that no one was at the top of the steps guarding the door.
"Anybody been in or out of the door?" he asked Susan.
"Not since I got here," she said, standing up. "Maybe they're afraid of it."
Nick gave her a quizzical look. He'd been on assignment with Susan before. She was very good. Once they had responded as a team to a late-night homicide down by the city marina. At first it looked like a drive-by, but in the wrong neighborhood. The cops were surrounding a nice Lincoln Town Car with the driver's window blown out and were particularly closemouthed about the I.D. of the dead man slumped over the wheel inside. Susan snapped a shot of the license plate of the car just before the arriving detectives covered it with a dark towel. She called the plate numbers in to research and they matched with a prominent casino tour boat owner. The paper got a damn nice exclusive of a mob-style hit on a high-profile businessman. Mob hits were something that rarely happened in Florida. Since the days of Al Capone and the high-flying Miami Beach of the late 1920s, Florida had been considered "open territory" by the northern mobsters. Since no one mob owned it, they didn't have to kill each other. So to have someone capped Chicago-style was page one.
"What do you mean, afraid?" Nick said. "Of the door?"
She lifted her digital camera to him and started flashing through her previous shots and stopped at a bland photo of the wall just to the left of the doorframe. She zoomed in on a pattern of discoloration she'd noticed on the beige paint.
"Blood spatter?" Nick said.
"You got it. And from the height on the wall, it looks like somebody got head-shot," she said.
Nick looked back at the door in the distance, figuring, and shook his head.
"You've been at this too long, Susan."
She looked at him and grinned. "You got that right too."
Unlike a shooting in a city neighborhood or in a shopping area, there were few witnesses to talk to on this one. Reporters were milling around, no one to quote. It wasn't like you could get the guy from the house next door to say what a nice, quiet neighbor the deceased was and how you never think it could happen right here on your street. A four-story medical office building was directly across the street. Two blocks away was a donut shop where courthouse workers even now were slipping in and out, blowing on open cups of coffee and giving only a cursory glance at the growing huddle of news folks. Nick swore he could smell the aroma of 100% Colombian in the air and was contemplating a quick trip down there when Susan called his name.
When he turned to her, she nodded her head toward the portico and then raised her camera to her face. Two men had stepped out of the gray door and were standing on the top landing. The first guy out was tall and so thin that his dark suit coat hung from his shoulders as if on a hanger. He had a full head of black hair and stood with his hands in his pockets. He turned his back to the group of reporters and looked down at a slight angle at the blood pattern on the wall and then seemed to tuck his elbows into his narrow hips. He looked like a six-and-a-half-foot-tall exclamation point and stayed that way for several seconds. When he finally turned, Nick watched him give the gathering a short stare-down.
"Hargrave," Nick said to Susan as she snapped off photos. "Sheriff's homicide unit. If he's the lead on this, we're gonna be hard up for information. He hates the press. Did you get a shot of the sneer?"
"He was looking up," Susan said.
"Huh?"
She moved the digital viewer away from her face and held it over again so Nick could see a close-up of Hargrave's face: high cheekbones so sharp they threatened to split his skin, a thin mustache that barely covered a harelip and gave his mouth the impression of a perpetual sneer, eyes so dark they appeared black. He'd transferred in from somewhere in the Northeast. The other homicide guys Nick knew said he rarely spoke. He had yet to even answer a phone call from Nick on a story.
But Susan was right. The press was all at street level. Thirty yards away Hargrave was four feet above them on the landing. Yet, when he'd turned from the blood spatter he was not looking down at them. Caught on camera, his line of sight went up and behind. Nick turned and scanned the building across the street. It was typical South Florida stucco, painted some pinkish earth color with tall reflective glass on the first floor and three rows of windows above, all of them shut. At the roofline there was an attempt at some ornate scrollwork in a complementary color and an antenna of some sort rose into the sky behind it. A physical shift of the press pool caused him to turn around and reporters and cameramen began pressing and then pushing their way to the gate. Over their heads Nick could see Joel Cameron, official spokesperson for the Sheriff's Office, walking over toward them, a single sheet of paper in his hand. Press release, Nick thought, straight off the printer.
Unlike the scenes of the media mob on scripted television and movies, no one yelled out some stupid What happened? question. They all formed into a half circle. The sound folks got their microphones up front so they could record. Cameron waited until everyone was set. They'd all been through it before.
"Alright, guys. Here's what we've got so far," Cameron began, reading from the news release:
" 'At approximately seven fifty-five this morning shots were fired at the county's downtown jail facility in the eight hundred block of South Andrews Avenue during a routine transfer of detainees.
"'One man was fatally wounded as the detainees were being brought through the main jail's secured north entrance. The location of the shooting is not accessible to the public and no member of the public was in any way endangered.
" 'The Sheriff's Office is presently investigating the shooting and the name of the deceased is not being released until notification of next of kin.' "
Cameron took his eyes off the sheet, folded it and took a deep breath, knowing through experience that it wasn't nearly enough for the media machine and now he'd have to start tap-dancing to both the obvious and the unanswerable questions.
A television guy in the front asked, "Joel, we heard a report on the radio of an officer down. Were any officers or detention deputies wounded?"
"No," Cameron said. "No law enforcement or detention deputies were injured."
"How many shots were fired?" asked another.
"That's still under investigation."
"Was it a drive-by?"
"That's still under investigation."
"Is that the dead guy back there?" asked a newspaper reporter from Nick's main competition.
Cameron took a long breath, let the question sit there while the group went quiet with professional embarrassment.
"Well, we don't usually put yellow sheets over their faces if they're still alive," said Cameron, raising his eyebrows, while the rest of the news folk tried to hide their sniggering.
"Yes, that's him, Jean. And the M.E. will be removing the body as soon as the investigators are through."
Jean was known for stating the obvious at crime scenes, and took an unspoken derision from her street cohorts for being a bit ditzy. But everyone also knew she probably had an editor who demanded a source for every line she wrote. If she stood here and watched the body lie outside for three hours she would still have to quote an official saying the body lay out here for three hours.