Cornell Cleaver stepped under the yellow police lines and made his way into the apartment. He flashed his badge at the uniformed police officer guarding the door and was allowed to pass.
“What the fuck is IAD doing here?” Detective Smith shouted from across the room. “Nobody’s fucked shit up yet.”
“Curtis Miles!” Cleaver smiled. He walked to where the homicide detectives were standing and shook his friend’s hand. “It’s been a long time.”
“What’s your ugly face doing here?” Miles asked.
“Just passing through,” Cleaver told him.
“Passing through, huh?” Miles asked suspiciously. “Bullshit. Whose balls are you trying to break? IAD doesn’t crawl out of its little cubicle unless it’s trying to bust balls.”
Cleaver lifted his hands and shrugged. “I’m just passing through, Curtis. Honest to goodness.”
Miles waved to the gentleman standing next to him. “This is Detective Harmon Brittingham. He’s one of my best detectives, and he’s going to be the lead detective on this case. Harm, this here is Cleaver; he’s IAD. Used to work for me in Homicide, used to work for me in Vice before that, used to work Narcotics before that. He used to be a real cop once, and now he’s a ball buster.”
“You flatter me with your kind words, Lieutenant,” Cleaver told him.
“You come here to fuck with my guys, you let me know,” Miles told him with a “don’t fuck with me either” look on his face. “Those are the rules of the game. You don’t fuck with my guys without me knowing about it, you got that?”
Cleaver nodded. “Where’s the victim?”
“She’s in the bedroom.” Miles peered up at the door. “Holy fuck, what the fuck we got going on here, a convention? This is a homicide investigation, not a goddamn policemens’ ball! What do you two numb nuts want here?”
Cleaver turned and spied Ellington and Davis making their way toward them.
“What the fuck is vice doing here?” Miles asked.
“We heard that she was connected,” Ellington told him.
“I haven’t heard that,” Miles shot back.
“You’re Homicide, not Vice, so you wouldn’t have heard that, now would you?” Ellington asked in an aloof tone of voice.
“Letoya, you’re looking mighty tasty as usual.”
“And you’re still looking desperate, Lieutenant.”
“How’s your mother?”
“Good, since she’s never met you.”
Lieutenant Miles threw back his head in laughter. “I see your tongue is still sharp.”
“And I see that your belly’s getting rounder. Picking up some weight, are we?” Ellington placed her hand over Miles’s stomach and giggled at his belly.
“Watch it. Moves like that make it turn hard.”
“How would you know?” Ellington smiled. “You haven’t seen that shriveled little piece of meat since Nixon was in the White House.”
The detectives and officers around the room laughed heartily.
“What we got here?” Davis asked, peeking through the bedroom door.
“Female, black, early twenties, death by strangulation, looks like. Coroner’s on his way; we’ll know more then,” Harmon Brittingham explained. “You wanna see some weird shit?”
The detectives followed Brittingham into the bedroom. He pulled back the covers, displaying Markita’s naked body. “She got fucked in the ass, probably right before her death.”
“Or perhaps even during,” Ellington suggested.
“Sick bastard,” Cleaver chimed in.
“Judging from the amount of blood, it wasn’t something that she did on a regular basis,” Brittingham advised.
“Raped?” Davis asked.
Harmon Brittingham shook his head. “Doesn’t look like a forced entry. No pun intended. No forced entry into the apartment either.”
“She knew the perp,” Cleaver added.
Brittingham shrugged. “Apparently. It looks like the sex was consensual. I mean from what I can tell, she let the guy in, she’s not bruised or beaten, so it looks as if she voluntarily had sex. But something went wrong. No telling what made it turn bad.”
“The apartment looks like it’s been ransacked,” Ellington observed.
“Talked to the neighbors, and apparently the victim kept a pretty messy apartment,” Brittingham explained.
“Any leads?” Cleaver asked.
“Forensics are on their way. We got semen, tissue maybe, definitely skin cells, sweat, perhaps some hair. All the usual trace elements from sexual intercourse,” Brittingham advised.
“Whoever did this doesn’t give a fuck if he’s caught,” Davis observed.
“He’s probably not planning on being in town long enough to give a shit about any evidence,” Ellington said.
“All right, spill it!” Miles ordered, watching Ellington and Davis summarize a case, although he had no clue what they were summarizing.
“What?” Ellington asked.
“What the fuck are you working on that made you show up here today? And how did you come to the conclusion that this son of a bitch is planning to skip town? I want to know what you know, Detective, and I want to know now!” Miles said forcefully.
“Remember the assault on the old lady that happened last month sometime?” Ellington asked. “The really brutal one?”
Miles scratched his head as he tried to remember. “I think I do. The old woman from the projects. She was raped. Fucked in the…”
“Jesus!” Brittingham whistled. “Same fucking MO. You think they’re related?”
Ellington nodded. “I know they are. The girl that he was looking for when he attacked the old lady was her best friend,” said Ellington, pointing to Markita’s dead, naked body.
“Why in the fuck didn’t you say so when you first walked in?” Miles shouted. “What, is this a fucking poker game or something? We holding our cards close, Detective?”
“What the fuck does Vice have to do with any of this?” Brittingham asked.
“The girl’s husband was a major dealer who got popped. He was a Vice target. She was also a Vice target. Her new boyfriend popped her husband; he was a major dealer, and a Vice target, and then he got popped,” Ellington explained.
“Who’d he get popped by, her third boyfriend?” Miles proclaimed. “Talk about some bad-luck pussy.”
“So who are we after here?” Brittingham asked, just wanting his job to be as simple as possible.
Ellington shrugged. “I wish we knew. The only thing we do know is that this guy is a fucking nut case.”
“I want the file on this one,” Miles told her. “I want to know everything that you know, and I want to know it yesterday. I’m getting this son of a bitch off the streets.”
Two dark-suited men stepped into the bedroom. They were young, clean-shaven, well-dressed. They screamed Feds.
“And you two are?” Miles asked, not playing any more games with his crime scene.
“I am Agent Harbinger, and this is my colleague, Agent Covington. We’re from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
“FBI?” Miles huffed. “What’s your jurisdiction here?”
“Excuse me?” Josh asked.
“Well, we got Homicide, Internal Affairs, and now FBI. I guess DEA and Customs will show up next, telling me that she was smuggling for the cartel. This whole thing stinks to high heaven. Why are so many noses interested in a young, dead black woman with no criminal record, no known boyfriends, vices, or any other red flags in her history? Why is the FBI here, at a homicide scene? Don’t tell me: She was kidnapped at the age of four? You heard me, why are you here?”