shotgun. The barrel is on a hinge attached to the wooden stock. To load it, the barrel is released from the stock and snaps forward on the hinge, exposing the barrel for a round or rounds to be slipped in. The barrel is then closed, seating the rounds against the breech plate and the firing pin. A lot of people forget where their hand is when they snap the barrel closed. It didn’t take much for me to hear the sound in my head of a shotgun closing on fresh rounds. The sound is as loud and distinctive as a bone cracking. It also didn’t take much for me to think about the fact that the last sound those kids heard was the sound of the killer sliding a fresh round into his shotgun and closing the breech.
We stepped into the storage room. The blood drops were over by the walk-in freezer and in the bathroom, near where Bryon’s body was still lying on the floor. More drops were near some boxes next to the door into the store. We walked back inside the store and found still more spots around the corner and by the dairy case and also at the door to the beer cooler. The cooler door handle was stained by a bloody smear.
Inside the beer cooler there were more spots on the floor. The tracks seemed to lead in the direction of the meat counter, which made even less sense. I said to Bill, “He went into the freezer and the beer cooler.” We left the door closed in case there were any prints on the handle.
Bill looked at me with a puzzled expression, which was unusual, coming from him. “What the hell did he think was in there?”
Something was stirring in the back of my mind, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. At least not yet. Clearly, the shooter had been looking for something and he must have thought it was in the freezer or the walk-in cooler. Bill went over to the forensic techs and told them to check for prints on the beer cooler. The techs were already busy, taking swabs from the blood drops on the floor and placing a ruler next to the bloody footprint for photographs. The ruler would allow us to get an exact perspective of the shoe size. If we were lucky, maybe there would be some type of wear pattern in the shoe that we could match if we nabbed him with the same shoes on. If we were even luckier, maybe there would still be blood on his shoe. Most people have no concept of how hard it is to get rid of all traces of blood, particularly on the bottom of a shoe.
Like I mentioned earlier, there is a symmetry to homicide scenes. This guy was a shooter and he was a cold-blooded killer. This guy was no cherry; this certainly wasn’t his first crime. Anybody who could do this had been around and had gotten used to violence. Most likely, he was a convicted felon. And, most likely, he had done something earlier that had involved violence. As usual, it was Bill who said it: “My guess is this asshole just got out of the joint.”
“And that woman they found in the bathroom?” I asked.
“Connie Barbo?”
“Yeah. What do we know about her?”
“I talked to Kenny; he said the docs say she’s loaded, most likely meth.”
Bill and I walked out of the store. We had seen it. We knew what was there. There were witnesses that needed to be talked to. Hopefully, our people had gotten what they could from the Rios boy before he went into surgery. And, we needed to get a statement from the neighbor who had shot and been shot.
In a homicide investigation, the fewer people trying to take a statement the better. Unless you are recording the statement, what is said becomes a combination of the memory of the investigator and perception of what was said. People are not designed to remember exact words quotes and they almost never repeat a statement in exact quotes. What is reported is what people think they heard. The more people taking the statement, the more muddled it can become, even for professional investigators. But the opposite is true when it comes to checking the crime scene; the more people who look over a crime scene the better the results, as long as they aren’t all tromping around at the same time. Kenny had gone to do his thing and we had stayed to do ours. My job was to make sure that I had a complete idea of what had happened at the scene. And so we surveyed the store one more time. We had three kids dead and no idea who the shooter was. All we knew was he was out there and he had to be brought in quickly. For him, killing was obviously an easy thing. At this point, there was absolutely no reason to believe he would hesitate to kill anybody who got in his way, including a cop.
I vividly remember walking out of the store. I didn’t look to see if Ray and Fran were still there. I certainly hoped not. A small crowd was still milling around, waiting, I suppose, to see the coroner bring the bodies out. The television news crews were gone and the only newsperson still there was a photographer who stepped in front of us. I remember that a sheriff’s deputy waved him off, and Bill and I stood for a moment outside of the shaft of light coming through the slightly cracked open door to the storage room. This is the moment when your mind begins to filter through all of the observations and statements, trying to come up with a coherent theory. For the first time that night, my mind began to focus on Bryon Schletewitz as a person. So far, I had stayed detached, but on murder cases as soon as you slow down your emotions can catch up with you real fast. Especially when you know the young kid whose blood is still slowly seeping out onto the floor.
Both Bill and I were smoking a cigarette, reviewing the entire scene in our minds. Sometimes your mind can be working on something while you are asleep or while you are concentrating on something else, and then the thing you are trying to remember just slips forward. I suddenly remembered why going in the freezer had touched a nerve with me. The first time I had been in Fran’s Market was for a murder case involving one Clarence Ray Allen, a case where Bryon Schletewitz had been a witness to a burglary involving the market. “Bill, it just came back to me. There has always been a rumor that Ray Schletewitz kept a second safe in the walk-in freezer, with lots of cash in it. I remember from the Clarence Allen murder case that his gang was convinced Ray Schletewitz had a safe with twenty-five thousand or more stashed in it. Ray always insisted that wasn’t true, but maybe that’s what this guy was looking for.”
Bill shook his head. “There wasn’t any safe in there, never was. I hope those kids didn’t die because of some rumor.”
I blew out the last draw from my cigarette. “You know that Bryon was a witness in a major murder case and now he’s a victim in a major murder case. There’s a real irony there.”
Bill wasn’t given to philosophical introspection. He looked at me and I’ll never forget his words. “It would be something if that case and this one were connected.” I realized that it was going to be a very long night. During the ride back to the office, I leaned back against the headrest and closed my eyes as Bill drove. I could feel my mind compartmentalizing as I went through what I had seen. I couldn’t close my mind on the old case and I couldn’t seem to open my mind and just focus on the new one. I began to draw mental lines across the page between the facts of the two cases. Somewhere, deep in the back of my mind, a voice was whispering that there was a connection here, but logic told me that a connection was not realistic. I didn’t have time to waste running down motives that didn’t make sense. But this case didn’t make sense.
I couldn’t help thinking about the facts of the first murder. It had been the first really big murder case of my career. You promise witnesses that nothing will happen to them. You mean it. If there was a connection between that case from over three years ago and the deaths of those three kids, then we were dealing with something that was the worst nightmare of any cop or D.A.
PART
II
A MOTHER’S VENGEANCE
4
