Book Preview - Credo's Betrayal

Chapter One

First, watch the hands.

Then, the eyes.

If the hands disappear, then front sight.

Front sight until the hands reappear.

They didn’t, so now I have the front sight of my Glock pointed dead center at this lowlife’s chest. Standing with my back to the cold vinyl siding of a single-wide trailer, I knew I was either going to die or kill this man if my partner, Casey, couldn’t find me in the next few minutes.

The problem wasn’t necessarily the man, although my guess was that he’d spent a whole lot of his twenty-five years in prison. The tats alone told me that. The most prominent being the number fourteen eighty-eight inked into his forehead—fourteen for the number of words in some famous Nazi quote and eighty-eight, which stands for H-H or Heil Hitler.

No, the real problem was the other three wannabe members of the Aryan Brotherhood who had joined fourteen eighty-eight. They’d arrived while I’d been speaking with the lady who rents the trailer. After I’d finished the interview and turned to head to my car, these four prison-hardened skinheads surrounded me.

One carried a wooden baseball bat over his shoulder while another, whose dark brown eyes and dangerous smirk said he’d used this weapon before, smacked his palm with a rusted tire iron. The other two had their hands hidden behind their backs as if reaching for guns. None of them had obeyed my repeated orders to put down their weapons and leave. They all had varying amounts of tattoos covering the crowns of their heads, faces, necks, and arms.

So, here I was with my back against the trailer, trying to give my partner, Casey, directions over my handheld while keeping the four of them at an acceptable distance. She wasn’t that far away, but, unfortunately, the witness I’d just finished talking to lives in a trailer on a piece of land with no street names, no address, and probably twenty broken-down trailers and dilapidated houses scattered throughout.

Technically, I suppose, the one square mile this hell hole sits on could be called a neighborhood since there were remnants of paved roads and alleys. Still, it had taken me thirty minutes of driving down side streets—nameless side streets—and pounding on doors to find the woman I needed to interview.

My name, by the way, is Alexandra Wolfe, and I’m a detective in the Special Crimes Unit of the Tucson Police Department. I’d been hearing someone, presumably Casey, gunning their engine and rapidly accelerating through the “neighborhood” for some time now and vowed that in the future, I wouldn’t enter this type of wasteland without backup.

The ape with the bat called out to fourteen eighty-eight. “Hey, Drew. Perfect date for the probate, don’t ya think?” This numbnut had a complex triangular symbol tattooed on the front of his neck that I didn’t recognize as one of the typical gang tats I usually saw on the streets. Three swords made up the triangle’s sides. In the middle, a red heart had a fourth sword stuck into it. The number two-eleven had been inked in the center of the heart.

The part of my mind that wasn’t concentrating on getting Casey to my location idly thought I’d need to contact Chuck, the department’s gang expert, to find out what it meant.

A year earlier, he’d taught an in-service training specifically focusing on the racist skinhead groups in Arizona. Part of that training had been a lesson on the terms and tats used by their gangs. A “date” meant an initiation fight, and “probate” meant a ‘member-in-waiting’ who hadn’t yet become a full-fledged member of the ‘crew.’

Drew, who wore a sleeveless white t-shirt and faded jeans, smiled grimly and moved to my left, trying to draw my attention away from the other three. He stood about five-nine with a rounded but strong jawline covered in a couple days’ beard—the only hair on his otherwise bald head. His dark eyes watched me with an amused but deadly intent.

I moved left so he couldn’t maneuver me into a position where I’d be standing in the middle of all four men with one or two in my blind spot, or worse, at my back. I’d been wondering which of the remaining two was the probate until the man on my far right tossed his tire iron from his right hand to his left and back to his right. He took two steps forward, closing the gap between us to an uncomfortable distance.

Enough was enough. I can count on my left hand the number of times I’d had to pull my backup Colt Mustang .380, but I decided today was a good day to add to that exclusive list. I hitched my radio onto the back of my pants and reached down to tug up my pant leg, exposing a black holster holding my extra, technically not sanctioned, semiauto strapped to my ankle. Pulling the weapon free, I stood and held out both weapons, leaving me at the apex of a fully loaded triangle.

That stopped them in their tracks. In fact, the two closest men took a couple of steps back. The one with the flaming red beard held his hands out from his side, making sure I knew he was unarmed, and the probate holding the tire iron didn’t look quite so smug. He jerked his head to the side, flicking his long, brown bangs out of his eyes. He was the only one of the three who actually had hair on the top of his head, and I wondered if they couldn’t shave their heads until they were made official members of the gang.

I decided to retry the friendly cop spiel I’d given earlier. “Look, I’m doing some follow-up with Penny, the lady renting this trailer, that’s all. I have no clue why the hell you’re here or what you want.” Somewhere in the back of my mind, the fact that I was half-Jewish reared its ugly head.

Drew growled his answer. “You see anybody with skin that ain’t white around here? You smell like a Jew. You a Jew, Pig?” He grinned and glanced at his buddies. “A Jew pig. Get it?” They all thought that had to be the funniest thing they’d heard all day, and I would have bet money the neighbors could hear their howling laughter from a half-mile away.

Drew’s face morphed from thoroughly entertained to menacing in the blink of an eye. “We own this hood, Bitch, and you bein’ here pisses me off.” He showed his yellowed, sharpened teeth. “It ain’t healthy to piss me off.”

I crinkled my brow in confusion since I had whiter skin than he did. “Well, judging by the color of your eyes and the ugly black hair sticking out from under your pits, I’d say you have a healthy amount of Hispanic blood running through your veins, so I’m actually whiter than you are.” Probably not the brightest response, but ignorant racists of any color piss me off.

Thankfully, at that moment, a green sedan slid around the corner in a cloud of dust, causing all four men to dive out of the way: two to the left, one to the right, and one straight over the hood. To my surprise, it wasn’t Casey in the driver’s seat, but my sergeant, Kate Brannigan, and boy did she look pissed.

Kate is five-foot-seven, wears her blonde hair in a short ponytail, and her badass temper on her sleeve. She shoved the car into park before it came to a complete stop, threw open her door, and had tire iron man pushed against the side of the trailer before the dust settled. With one forearm jammed against his throat, she yanked the lug wrench out of his hand and threw it under the trailer.

I’m always up for a good fight. Well, that is if the odds are in my favor. I re-holstered my Colt and shoved my Glock into its holster as I ran toward the man holding the baseball bat.

He was the one who’d had to roll over the hood and was just now picking himself up out of the dirt. His eyes were laser-focused on the back of Kate’s head, and he held the bat high across his right shoulder as though he were Ty Cobb, ready to hit a home run. With his shoulders hunched in rage and his fingers white from the force of his grip, which for some reason was a quarter of the way up the bat, his attention was so totally focused on his target that he never saw me coming.

As he pulled the bat off his shoulder, I grabbed both ends and used his fists as a fulcrum to slam the knob into his ear.

He released his grip to grab his ear, and I hauled back and punched the knob into his neck so hard he fell onto his knees, then toppled face-first into the dirt, unconscious.

I threw the bat under the trailer just as the third man jumped on my back and hit me in the side of my head with a very hard fist. He must have weighed close to one-eighty, and my knees buckled, not from the force of the blow but because I’d already been off balance, and his weight shoved me down toward the dirt.

It would have been suicide to give him enough time to clobber me again, and on the way down, I twisted to my right, grabbed his ankles, and slammed his head into the ground. He still had his arm around my neck, so I drove my elbow up into his manly parts. Unfortunately for him and any future little bangers yet to be born, my adrenaline spiked, and I hit him hard enough that his eyes rolled up, and he drifted off to wherever emasculated skinheads go when they check out of consciousness.

Kate had her man handcuffed to the railing of the wooden stairs leading to the trailer door, and we both looked to my right, expecting Drew to come to the aid of his crew. I didn’t see him, but since I still knelt on the ground next to the unconscious skinhead, I searched under Kate’s vehicle, trying to locate the lower part of Drew’s legs on the far side of her car.

“Shit.” What I saw didn’t bode well for poor little Drew. I pushed to my feet and moved around the trunk toward the passenger side.

“Shit what?” Kate glanced down at my two goons, made sure they were still unconscious, and then walked around the hood to see what had caught my attention. “What the hell?”

During her dramatic arrival, when she’d careened around the corner to rescue me, she’d fishtailed to the right, corrected the slide, and skidded back around to where the men had been standing. Her skid marks abruptly stopped on the far side of a cavernous hole and then picked up on the side nearest us. Half her right front and rear tires rested on the dirt while the other half hung out over thin air. The weight of her car, combined with the vehicle’s erratic movements, had caved in the decaying roof of some type of underground chamber.

While we gawked at the hole, Casey finally found us. She skidded into the yard, plowing up another choking lungful of dust.

Emasculated Redbeard awoke and began rolling back and forth, making choking noises and clutching himself.

Casey got out of the car, quickly took in the scene, and walked over to the moaner. Pulling her handcuffs from behind her back, she tried to get him to let go of himself so she could cuff him. She ended up jerking his arm back and flipping him onto his stomach so she could get enough leverage to bring his second hand around to meet the first.

Once I saw she could manage him on her own, I turned my attention back to the hole. I inched forward until I could look over the edge and, despite the circumstances, grinned at what I saw.

Approximately ten feet down, Drew stared up at me with eyes as round and white as a full moon rising over the Catalina mountains. Incredibly, he must have fallen right into the lap of a human skeleton because scattered around his prone body were arm bones with hands still attached and two femurs fully connected to the lower legs and feet.

Resting squarely in the middle of Drew’s stomach, the fully intact remains of a stark white skull moved up and down with the rhythm of each terror-stricken breath. A toothless mouth grinned at him, apparently rendering the big, scary skinhead unable to move.

Judging by the smooth walls lining the hole, he’d fallen into some kind of basement that had long ago been covered and buried. I could understand why someone had sealed and abandoned the room since it’s generally not acceptable to have a human corpse lying around next to your washer-dryer combo.

Kate’s car had snapped the rusted rebar supporting the cement of the basement’s ceiling or, to put it another way, the cement of the floor of the house that no longer existed above it. Pieces of concrete and a large amount of dirt that had initially covered and hidden the basement littered the area around where Drew lay. Long strands of rebar hung down into the room where the combination of the car's erratic movement and Drew’s dead weight had overloaded the already cracked cement and snapped the rusty metal in half.

The cement and rebar meant either the basic frame of the basement and ceiling had been left intact after the accompanying home had been torn down, or there had never been a home, and the basement had been built as a standalone structure similar to an underground fallout shelter or bunker.

Parts of the room remained in darkness because not all of the ceiling had collapsed. Enough had fallen, however, that I could see the side walls were roughly fifteen feet on all four sides. Since I could see the four corners, I felt safe knowing where the support beams formed the outer frame, and I carefully circled to the opposite side, where a set of dilapidated steps led down into the basement.

I thought I’d find an open hole over the stairs, but when I got down and brushed the dirt away, I found a metal plate padlocked shut with a rusty lock. I called across the gaping hole. “Hey Kate, do you still carry those bolt cutters in your trunk?” She had the reputation of carrying everything that might be remotely needed at a crime scene, and we’d used her bolt cutters on many, many locked fences, sheds, and garages.

“Yes, hold on.” She retrieved the cutters and came around to make short work of the lock.

I bent my knees, grabbed the handle, braced myself, and heaved on the heavy door. The hinges creaked from age, and once I’d hauled it past ninety degrees, I let it drop with a clang. We both peered down to the room below, but unfortunately, the rickety stairwell descended to a section completely bathed in shadow.

The combination of skeletons and eerie darkness had my imagination ramping into overdrive. I got down on my stomach and hung my head over the edge to get a better look into the shadowy patches where any number of angry spirits might dwell. I could vaguely see into the area surrounding the stairs, but directly beneath them, the complete blackness yawned with the ghosts and ghouls of my vivid imagination.

To understand my overabundant imagination, you should know a little of my history. My paternal grandmother came from the backwoods of Pennsylvania. She made her own hard cider, ran a hundred-acre farm, and canned everything in sight. She also read everything she could get her hands on, and that habit made her into a very talented storyteller.

I alternately loved and hated her visits. Don’t get me wrong, I loved her more than I can say, but when night fell, she’d take me outside with only a small flashlight to light our way and weave the most wonderfully terrifying stories. She created incredible worlds from the shadows thrown off into the darkness by our lights—worlds full of shapeshifters and trolls, lost spirits, and ghouls.

When I pushed to my feet, I bumped into Kate, who stood over me, waiting.

She indicated the stairs with a flick of her hand. “Checking to see if they’ll hold you?”

I shook my head as I wiped the dirt from my hands. “Looking for ghosts.”

Her jaw jutted sideways as she seemed momentarily at a loss for words. Her eyes hardened into impatience, and I put my hands up. “Okay, okay, I’m going.” I gingerly put my foot on the first rung, but she grabbed my arm to stop me. “That plywood is riddled with termite holes, Alex, which means the stairs probably are as well. Stay to the sides of each step, and you’ll have a better chance of reaching the bottom. If we didn’t need to get down there to make sure he’s not too badly hurt, I’d say wait, but…”

I grabbed the railing and shook it, testing to make sure the thing would hold my weight. Once again, when I went to step, Kate grabbed my arm. I looked back, and the anger in her eyes surprised me.

“We’ll talk about the stupidity of coming into a neighborhood like this without backup when we’ve finished here. You’re lucky this shithole used to be in my beat when I worked patrol, or neither Casey nor I would have gotten to you in time.”

I raised my eyebrows, “I had it covered, Boss.”

She snorted as I turned back to the steps and gingerly made my way down. When I came to the bottom, Drew turned his head one tiny inch at a time in my direction and whispered, “Get this thing off me.”

A chill raced down my spine at the terror in his voice, and, mimicking his quiet tones, I asked, “Why are you whispering? The guy’s dead. He’s not gonna hear you.”

“There’s a snake inside.”

I’d been glancing behind me into the shadows, and when he said, “snake,” I whipped my head back around. “What?”

He hissed his reply, “A fucking snake! Get it off me.”

I looked back at Kate, who had her attention focused on the reliability of each step as she made her way down the stairs. I needed to control my rising panic. I hate snakes. Hate is perhaps not a strong enough word. Maybe despise, abhor, or detest might better describe the loathing I feel for the wriggling spawns of Satan.

Swallowing the fear rising in my throat, I knelt next to Drew’s shoulders to look into the skeleton’s empty orbs. “I don’t see anything.”

He hissed back at me through gritted teeth. “I hate fucking snakes. Get it off me!”

Giving him my best ‘you idiot’ look, I picked up his left arm and pointed to the diamondback rattler tattooed from his shoulder down to his wrist. “What’s this then, Dumbass?”

His glare would have singed an ice cream cone.

I waited for Kate to get to the bottom and join us. “Watch him, okay?” To Drew, I said, “You move, and I’ll stuff the snake’s head down your throat, understand?”

Kate knelt on the extremely hard and uncomfortable concrete, grabbed his left hand in a wrist lock, pulled his arm straight, twisted it, and then jammed the palm of her free hand into his extended elbow. Her low growl emphasized the danger in her words, “She might stuff it down your throat, but if you even twitch in her direction, I’ll dislocate your elbow, leave your upper arm on the ground, and stuff your hand down your ear canal, understand?”

Figuring that was a rhetorical question, I didn’t wait for his answer. I pulled out my cell phone, turned on the flashlight, and held it close to the empty orbs of the bone-white skull. I hesitantly peered down through the eye socket.

What I saw made me say a small prayer of gratitude for allowing me the evil I was about to commit. Yahweh must not like skinheads very much either because tucked in close to the back of the skull, a reasonably large desert horned lizard peered out at me. I put an artificial tone of strain and fear into my voice and cringed back. “Oh my God, you’re right. It’s a mean-looking one, too.”

I sat back on my heels, leaned in, and gingerly grabbed the back of the skull. When I raised it, the lower jaw fell open, and the horny toad jumped out onto Drew’s chest. He shrieked and tried to scooch backward. Unfortunately for him, Kate’s twisting hold on his arm prevented him from doing so. He froze when the toad, as this particular species is wont to do when startled, squirted blood into his face from the corner of its eye.

I grinned down at the big bad skinhead who reached up with his free hand and, in his panic, smeared the blood all over his face. I said helpfully, “I’m pretty sure the blood’s not poisonous unless you get it in your eyes or mouth.” Which, of course, he’d already done.

His glazed and terrified eyes focused on me, and off to the side, I recognized Kate’s ‘I’m gonna kill you’ growl. “Alex.”

“What?” I pointed to the swastika covering most of the asshole’s chest. “Payback’s a bitch, Boss.” I leaned close to Drew’s ear. “What do you know? Saved by a Jew.”

Kate still hadn’t allowed him to get up, so I set the skull to the side and carefully scooped up the horny toad. I put him next to one of the walls where he wouldn’t get trampled by the many, many boots that were about to descend on this place.

Drew wore his hatred like a tight-fitting shirt, and every muscle in his face pulled taut in a rictus of loathing.

Kate kept him in the armlock but finally allowed him to stand. She pointed to the wall near the steps with her chin. “Move over there and sit.” His muscles bulged with homicidal malice, and when he didn’t budge, she put more pressure on the elbow.

He squeaked and dropped to his knees. Unfortunately, he plunked down in the middle of the skeleton again, scattering a few more ribs.

Kate rolled her eyes, pursing her lips into an irritated scowl. She spoke to him in the same forced calm she often uses on me, “Stand up. Do not step on any bones.” She said this very slowly to make sure he understood. “Move to the wall.”

Wincing—this guy really was all bark and no bite—he immediately complied, but not before he picked something off the ground and snuck it into his pants pocket.

“Hold it.” I moved toward him and held out my gloved hand.

“What?”

Wiggling my fingers, I said, “You know what. Give.”

When he didn’t move, I felt his pocket to make sure he had nothing sharp in there. Satisfied I wouldn’t get poked, I slipped my hand in and pulled out a ring. “What’s this?”

He shrugged, and I showed it to Kate, who shook her head. I held it closer so she could see it better. “It has some kind of symbol etched into it.”

Drew mumbled, “Stupid bitch.”

“Right, as if you know what it is.” I turned on the phone flashlight and studied the symbol. It looked like nothing more than an arrow pointing straight up.

I guess Drew couldn’t stand me thinking he didn’t know something. “It’s a Tyr.” At our blank looks, he rolled his eyes at our stupidity. “You know. The god of war? The Nazis used it to mark the graves of the SS officers.”

Kate shoved him forward. “Move.” She continued to twist his arm, and he gingerly stepped over or around any stray femurs and tibias lying scattered about. Before she allowed him to sit, she called up to Casey, who’d remained topside guarding the other three. “Casey, throw down a zip tie.”

After a long moment, a car door slammed, and Casey’s face appeared over the rim of the opening. She held out one of the zip ties, so I knew she was going to drop it, and then tossed it down.

I caught it, and when Kate pulled one of the man’s arm behind his back, I did the same to the other. I ran the tie through his belt and secured it around his wrists.

Once he’d lowered himself to the ground, Kate shouted up again. “Casey.”

Wisps of Casey’s short-cropped blonde hair blew in the breeze as she once again poked her head over the side. “Boss?”

“Figure out some way to get this guy out of here safely. I’m not sure these stairs are going to hold.”

If anybody can scrounge around to find something we need, it’s my partner. She owns a small farm where she keeps a horse, a donkey, two pigs, seven goats, and God knows how many dogs, cats, and birds she’s adopted over the last several years.

I’ve seen her use a rubber bicycle tube to stop a leak in a water pipe that supplied one of her livestock watering troughs. Heck, once, when we were looking for a stray dog someone had seen abandoned in the desert, the tie rod on her old truck broke. She’d grabbed a pair of pliers from her toolbox, cut a length of baling wire she’d stashed in the bed, and, with the stabilizing help of a sturdy stick, had the rod patched enough to hold until we were able to limp back to town.

Not usually long on words, she simply nodded and disappeared.

Drew’s fall had majorly disrupted our crime scene. In fact, he’d broken most of the skeleton’s ribs, snapped the spine, and sent the skull tumbling down onto his chest. I walked over to where he’d fallen and knelt to survey the area better. “Hey Kate, look at this.”

She came over, and I pointed to the smashed remains of a wooden chair lying underneath the skeleton. “He or she might have died sitting in a chair, and look…” I used one finger and, without actually moving anything out of place, carefully lifted the end of a paddle-shaped piece of wood that had probably been one of the chair’s armrests.

Underneath were the tattered remains of old twine or some cordage that had almost completely disintegrated. What had initially caught my eye was the edge of a yellowed piece of the stuff poking out from beneath the wood. I leaned in to get a closer look and could just make out a faded red or orange stripe spiraling the length of the strand. “It’s a pretty distinctive color. We might be able to identify it.”

“We haven’t been given the case yet, Alex. I need to talk to Sergeant Logan to see what he wants to do.”

Jon Logan ran the homicide unit. Depending on the number of cases he was fielding at the moment, the chances were fifty-fifty he’d keep the case for his detectives.

I love a good mystery and sat back on my heels. “I think they’re pretty busy right now and probably don’t want to work a cold case. Casey and I aren’t swamped. How about just giving it to us and letting him know after the fact?” I knew it didn’t work that way, but figured it was worth a shot.

Kate rolled her eyes, pulled out her cell phone, and stepped gingerly around the scattered bones as she made her way to the other side of the room. This left me alone in the semidarkness, and every now and then, I thought I saw something moving out of the corner of my eye. When I turned, there was nothing there.

Kate held the phone down by her thigh and pointed behind the stairs. “Check out the places that we can’t see. I need to know if there are any more skeletons hidden about.”

I glanced over to the pitch-black triangular alcove and then back to Kate. “Um…”

She cocked her head. “Do I need to come hold your hand?”

“No.” Even though I might have preferred it, I immediately headed for the stairs, mumbling, “Hold my hand. I don’t think so.” I had to step under the treads to let my eyes adjust, and when I did, all of my grandmother’s stories rushed to the fore. I’ve worked a lot of homicides. In fact, we’d worked a case a few months earlier with human bones in the holding tank of a camper, but that was different. They were mostly just chopped-up bones. This skeleton, even though he or she had been scattered by Drew’s untimely and uncoordinated fall, was whole, and that, therefore, in my weird imagination, meant the ghost might be whole as well.

A penetrating cold surrounded me, and I quickly decided there weren’t any other human bones back there of any consequence. Brushing the hair on the back of my head to get rid of the feeling of being smothered in cobwebs, I moved to the other dark area—a small alcove that I assumed had initially been a closet.

Rusted hinges hung from the frame, but there was no accompanying door. Remembering the flashlight on my cellphone, I pulled it from my pocket and held it up. Inside the tiny closet, brackets for six shelves lined both walls on either side of the opening, and three held pieces of shelving that were still more or less intact.

One held an old bottle of bleach, a container of Comet, and a plastic tub. Another held a couple of magazines stacked in a neat pile, some types of manuals, and a 1930s Underwood typewriter. Fascinated, I forgot all about the wraiths, phantoms, and revenants of my grandmother’s stories and squeezed in to take a better look.

Kate’s impatient voice came from somewhere near the staircase, “We’re waiting, Alex.”

I’d forgotten about my assignment and quickly called out, “No bones in here, Sarge. Nothing under the stairs either.”

I continued studying the typewriter’s classic lines and thought it probably belonged in a museum. Long metal bars with letters at the end stretched in an arc between two round ribbon spools. The keyboard’s simple design consisted of metal rings with letters or numbers on top. The layout of the letters matched that of a modern computer, and I gently pushed down on the J to see what would happen. One of the metal bars between the ribbon spools lifted, and I saw the corresponding J formed into the end of the bar.

I jumped when Kate put a hand on my shoulder and tugged me back out of the way. “What did you find?”

I stepped out so she could go in herself. “Not much, papers, magazines, and cleaning supplies. Oh, and that antique typewriter.”

Casey shouted down to us, “I found an old painting ladder still strapped to the side of an abandoned work truck. It’s rusted, but it should do the trick.”

I called up to her. “His hands are zip-tied behind his back. How’s he supposed to climb?”

“Cut ‘em off, and I’ll put cuffs on him when he gets up here.”

“By yourself? I’m not gonna follow him up the damn ladder, Case. He’d probably kick me off.”

“Jimmy Weatherby showed up.”

Since Jimmy was with her, I knew she’d be fine if this jamoke tried anything stupid. Jimmy had been on the department a little over a year. He wore his bright red hair clipped into a buzz cut, a nod to the four years he’d spent as a grunt in the Marines. Even though his frame is muscular and well-defined, he doesn’t have the bulky muscles of a typical weightlifter. He stands five-six and is built more like a gymnast than a linebacker. Still, I’d be happy to have him as my backup in a fight any day.

I took out my pocket knife and motioned for Drew to stand.

He did and then leaned in close and spat his words through clenched teeth. “You’re dead meat, Jew.”

I looked innocently over my shoulder at Kate, “Hey, Boss? Could you turn around a minute?”

She’d been kneeling next to the skeleton but pushed to her feet and walked over to us. “Just cut him loose, Alex.”

I shoved him around so that his face was smashed into the wall, folded one of his hands back onto his wrist in a control hold, and slit the plastic tie. Before I let him go, I closed the knife and slipped it back into my pocket.

After quickly glancing around to make sure there weren’t any weapons within reach, I stepped back and stood with my legs shoulder-width apart, one leg slightly behind the other, ready for a fight.

He sneered as he reached for the ladder's side rails and placed his foot on the bottom rung. “I can’t kill you here, Jew, so I won’t even try, but one day, it’ll just be me and you, and then you’ll understand what the term ‘superior race’ means.”

I looked at Kate. “Did he just threaten me?”

Kate raised her eyebrows. “Technically not right then he didn’t. But,” She held up a hand before I could protest, “the four of them did threaten you earlier, and all of them are heading to jail.”

I raised my hands to shoulder height. “Fine.” Glancing upwards, I yelled to Casey, “He’s coming up.”

He ascended the ladder, and when his knees reached the height of the top rung, Casey and Jimmy each took an arm and hauled him out of the pit. They put him on his stomach with the bottom half of his legs hanging over the edge, and the distinctive clicks of handcuffs ratcheting shut made me smile.

By that time, the sun had dropped low in the western sky, and dark shadows hung over most of the basement floor. I scanned the room and visually cataloged everything as best I could.

Kate followed Drew up, and I waited below with the headless skeleton. Well, technically, I guess he wasn’t headless since his head now rested next to his hand. But really, if a guy walked up to me with his head literally in his hand, I’d definitely radio in that I was out with a headless man. I mean, who wouldn’t?

A phone rang up above, and Kate answered. Hopefully, Jon Logan decided to give us the go-ahead.

Before too long, Casey came down the ladder carrying her crime scene processing kit. She paused at the bottom to get her bearings, and I pointed out the obvious. “You got your basic skeleton over there. That’s where Drew landed… right on top of it. All those spindles probably belonged to some kind of kitchen chair or something.

“There’s a metal folding table over there in that corner,” I pointed behind me to a dusty white table that miraculously hadn’t been destroyed when the roof caved in. “Oh yeah, there’s some type of twine near the body we’re gonna have to photograph and bag. Speaking of which, I need to run up and get my camera.”

I poked my head out of the hole just as the third patrol car pulled away with the last two of our skinheads. Kate had her head in her trunk, gathering supplies.

I headed to my car to retrieve my camera, and Nate Drewery, a detective in our unit, pulled onto the property and parked behind me. Nate’s six-foot-two height easily qualifies him as the tallest detective in the unit. His ready smile, combined with his Scots Irish features, made him a sought-after commodity with many of the women on the department. When he stepped out of his car, Kate called over to tell him he’d be handling the assault case against the four skinheads.

I started back to the ladder but didn’t make it in time to miss Kate’s promised “talk” about my solo foray into the area.

“Alex, come over here.” She’d gone back to her trunk to finish sorting through her supplies.

I sighed heavily and trudged over to the car. “Yeah, Sarge?”

She straightened, careful not to bang her head on the still-open trunk. “What the hell were you thinking coming out here without backup?”

I held my hands out to my side. “I had no idea what kind of a crappy neighborhood this was. I had a witness to find, and this is where I found her.”

“Do you think, maybe, when you got here and saw it was a shithole, you should have called Casey to back you up? Use your head, Alex. You’re not invincible, and God knows you’re far from perfect.”

That hurt, even though I knew it was true. “Thanks. And yes, next time I come, I’ll bring Casey.”

She nodded and turned a slow circle, reacquainting herself with the area. “When I worked this beat, it belonged to the Westside Crips, and before that, I’m talking probably fifteen or twenty years, this was a fairly nice low-cost housing community.”

She pointed to a dilapidated shed in the next yard over. “The Crips used that shed over there to jump in new initiates. I’ve been to more than one ‘man down’ call inside.” The shed could have been a small one-car garage at some point, but now one of the walls had collapsed in on itself, the single window on the opposite wall had long ago been shattered, and weeds and vining poison ivy had overtaken the interior and exterior walls.

Kate continued her walk down memory lane, and I waited patiently, hoping she’d be done before the sun set. “I haven’t been back for a while, but now it looks like the white supremacists have taken over in the middle of a Hispanic area of town. Go figure.” She turned back to me. “Why did they come after you?”

I shrugged, “I don’t know. One minute, I was talking to the lady who lives in that trailer. The next minute, they had me surrounded. I didn’t hear them approach, and they didn’t say anything while I had my back turned talking to Penny. That’s the witness’ name, Penny.”

She knocked on my head with her knuckles, “Situational awareness, Alex. That’s rookie 101.” She held my gaze a moment. “You have something on your mind, or just have your head up your ass?”

“Head up my ass, Boss. Sorry, won’t happen again.” I raised my eyebrows, trying to convey sincerity and cooperation. She was right, though. I should have been aware of my surroundings, especially in a neighborhood like this. “Pretty stupid, huh?”

She patted me on the back as we walked to the ladder. “Stupid mistakes in other jobs get you a reprimand. Stupid mistakes in our job can get you killed. And after what that skinhead said to you, you need to be doubly careful. Now,” She pointed to her car. “Start up here. Get pics of my car, of the surrounding area, and of the hole itself. Then, work your way down the ladder, taking shots of the interior as you go. By that time, we should have the lights set up.”

“How are you gonna move your car?”

“I’m not. A tow truck is on the way. Once they start hooking up, we need to get out of the basement in case my luck runs out and my car falls in.” We stared at the two wheels that should have gone over the edge. Luckily for Kate, she’d stopped on the very edge of the basement roof. An inch or two to the right, and she’d have taken a plunge.

She went down to take the supplies to Casey while I took the exterior photos she wanted. The tow truck arrived just as I was kneeling next to the rear tire for a closeup. The flatbed pulled halfway into the yard and stopped. One of the lime green doors opened, and a big guy swung out of the cab. I mean, a really…big…guy. So big I had to crane my neck to look into his eyes. He didn’t walk over to me as much as he rolled. His thick, untrimmed beard hung over a massive chest, and although he had a big belly, it seemed to belong. He wore a t-shirt sporting a picture of a squirrel in boxing gloves with the slogan, “Protect Your Nuts,” printed above it in bold, red letters.

I pointed to his shirt and grinned up at him. “You’re too late. I just sent a guy to jail whose nuts may never descend into the correct position again.”

He formed a painful “O” with his lips and groaned. His rumbling voice came from deep within his chest, and when he looked down at me, he grinned. “I could’ve gone all day without hearing that.”

He noticed me reading his shirt and pulled down the bottom to give me an unwrinkled view. “My granddaughter gave me that, if you can believe it.” He glanced at the car and whistled. “Wow, somebody better say their Hail Marys tonight. That could have been a disaster.”

“It still could be if you don’t get it right.”

“Huh.” Grunting at the truth of my words, he lifted his baseball cap off his head and scratched beneath his thinning brown hair. “True that. Anybody down below?”

“Yeah,” I called down to Kate and Casey. “Tow truck’s here.”

The two of them climbed out and went to stand next to the single wide.

It took about a half hour of careful planning and maneuvering on the driver’s part, but he eventually pulled Kate’s car safely away from the edge. After he unhooked and Kate signed his paperwork, he gave us a two-fingered salute, climbed into the truck’s cab, and left.

By then, the sun had set, and two more detectives, Tony Rico and Allen Brody, pulled onto the property, bringing our night equipment: several free-standing work lights, a couple of tripod-mounted dual headlights, and head-mounted lights for all. Everyone used to be issued their own set, but cops kept stealing them for personal use. Go figure.

Casey and I returned to the basement to finish photographing the scene. On the way down the ladder, I casually asked, “Hey, Case. Do you believe in spirits that haven’t gone to wherever spirits are supposed to go?”

“Yes.”

That didn’t help my growing unease. I moved closer to a piece of blue cloth near where we thought the body had originally sat and zoomed in for a closeup. Then I backed up a bit and took another shot and then another from a standing position. I pulled a small white ruler out of my back pocket, squatted again, and set it next to the cloth to give a size perspective to the photos. I snapped a few more shots and, for the second time, felt a coldness engulf me.

I’ve heard stories about cold filling you up when a ghost either flies into you or comes near, and I backed toward the ladder where Kate had just stepped off the bottom rung. I bumped into her and spun around, almost hitting her with the camera lens. “Jeez, Kate! Warn me when you’re gonna do that!”

“Do what? You ran into me. What’s wrong with you today, Alex?”

“There’s a ghost down here. A cold ghost.”

Her eyebrows descended, and she lowered her chin. “Really?” She sighed. “Look, there’s no ghost. There’s no such thing as ghosts, so finish taking the pictures so the ladies from the medical examiner’s office can come down and collect the bones.”

I slowly turned back to the skeleton and immediately felt an ice-cold aura envelop me. I spun back around. “There! Did you feel that?”

Kate put both hands to her face and began rubbing her eyes.

I randomly pointed the camera into the darkness and took a picture. “Okay, okay. But if I get possessed or something…”

Casey held out my ruler, and I grabbed it from her. The hair on the back of my neck was standing straight up, and I kept glancing over one shoulder and then the other, expecting to see an apparition floating by. On the last turn, I happened to focus on the far wall, which was filthy and covered with dust.

Casey, who’d been about to use a small brush to uncover some of the bones, looked up. We’d worked together so long that both of us were attuned to the other’s every movement or lack of movement at a crime scene.

I stepped to the dusty wall to get a closer look and then motioned her over. “Hey, Case, come here. Bring your brush.” When she joined me, I pointed to an area slightly darker than the other places. “Can you clean off the dust here?”

She did as I asked, and I repositioned the light to get a better look. “Hey, Sarge, do you have any luminol with you?

Kate grunted an affirmative and rooted in her bag, pulling out a half-full dollar-store spray bottle. She brought it over to me. “What do you have?”

“I don’t know. Here.” I took the bottle from her and began spraying around the darkened area.

She had Casey turn off the lights, and lo and behold, the luminol fluoresced bright blue on a patch of blood approximately one foot wide with rounded, irregular edges. Kate pointed below the spot. “Spray down here.”

I did, and we found smaller traces of blood on the wall below the primary smear. I sprayed the floor and saw a bright blue stain that covered a relatively large area at our feet.

Kate moved out of the way, and on a hunch, I sprayed the floor leading to the chair the skeleton had been sitting on. Sure enough, something had been dragged from the wall to the chair. I sprayed the wall on both sides of the stain and found smaller blood splatters.

Kate took the bottle from me. “Well, that means we need to get the crime scene techs down here to do a complete search of the walls and floor. Alex, if you’ve finished photographing the bones, go tell the M.E. to come get them.”

We turned the lights back on, and I stared at the wall, adjusting one of the tripod lights as I did so, bringing it so close the bulb almost touched the wall. I angled it up toward the ceiling. About seven feet up, a shadow darker than the rest angled upward from a black spot barely discernable in the dusting of silt covering the wall. “There. Look.”

Kate had been watching, and she stepped forward to see what I’d found. “Huh. Looks like someone drilled a hole for some reason. Get a pic of it, and I’ll get the techs to measure circumference and depth. Good job, Alex.” She patted my shoulder and walked back over to the skull, where she knelt to examine it.

 I climbed up the ladder and walked over to the two women from the Office of the Medical Examiner waiting patiently by their van. The shorter one swung her arms in an arc as she told her partner a story about a family she’d encountered when she’d gone to pick up the body of an elderly woman on the Northside of town.

To their left, a patrol officer and his sergeant stood off to the side, killing time. The animated officer’s grin stretched wide as he told his boss about his latest date.

I peeled off my blue gloves and rolled one into the other while listening to both stories simultaneously. Neither the M.E.s nor the cops paid any attention to the other conversation happening not ten feet from where they stood.

The woman from the M.E. laughed and said, “So, the son, who’s about forty, points to the cat…”

Speaking to his sergeant, the officer says, “When I go to the door to pick her up…”

The M.E grins and continues her story, “…and says, ‘If you’re taking my mom, you have to take the cat, too…’”

The cop shakes his head, “…her dress, well, what there was of it…”

“…And I said, we don’t take cats…”

“…Then she stomps back into her bedroom all pissy like…”

“…So, the son says I have to take the cat because it’s in her will that the cat has to be buried in the casket with the old lady….”

“…and comes back buck naked except for a ferret she has draped around her shoulders…”

“…I look at the cat—that’s still alive, mind you—and tell the son again we don’t do cats, and he blinks at me like it would be the most logical thing in the world for me to take the cat and…” The M.E. sees me and breaks off her story midstream. “Sorry. I didn’t see you. Are you ready for us?”

“What happened to the cat?”

She waved her hand in the air, “Oh, that. Long story short, I convinced them to put a toy cat in the casket and ended up adopting the real one.”

I nodded slowly, thinking maybe there were jobs out there more bizarre than mine. I rubbed the back of my neck while collecting my thoughts. “So, we have an old crime scene down there, but I’m not sure how old. There’s a skeleton, kind of.”

The woman listening to the cat story asked, “Kind of?” The furrows on her forehead deepened.

I gave her a rueful look and tried to explain. “You’re gonna have to search for some of the smaller bones because a man fell through the roof and landed in the middle of the skeleton’s lap.”

The smaller, younger woman, a petite brunette with long hair pulled into a bun on the back of her head, chuckled. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Nope.”

They glanced at each other. The older lady, who must have been in her early fifties, uncrossed her arms and shrugged. “Okay, then.” She motioned for the younger one to grab what they needed from the back of the van. These two weren’t medical examiners. They were attendants sent to collect the body, or in this case, the bones, and transport them back to the M.E.’s office.

While the younger woman put together the supplies, I held out my hand to the first. “Alex Wolfe.”

She gripped my hand firmly and nodded. “Jayne Townsend. That’s Kendra getting our equipment.”

“You probably don’t remember, but we’ve met before. We don’t generally do dead bodies. Homicide usually handles them, and we’re from Special Crimes, but you sat next to me at one of Ruthanne’s barbecues.”

Recognition lit her eyes, and she gave me a wide, toothy smile. “You and your red-headed friend beat everyone at beer pong.”

I shrugged humbly, “It’s a gift.”

Kendra returned with two large cases, one under each arm and two smaller ones she held in each hand. She handed a set to Jayne, who gave me a friendly smile before heading down the ladder.

I’d already worked three hours of overtime and rolled my head from side to side, trying to ease tense muscles. I hoped Kate didn’t want Casey and me to stay all night because someone had to protect the hole from looters until the Crime Scene Techs arrived in the morning.

It took Kate a little while, but eventually, her head emerged from down below. She pulled out her phone as soon as she pushed off the ladder.

I went and stood next to my car and began brushing the dirt off my pants. A cloud of dust rose around me, and I stepped to the side so I wouldn’t have to breathe in the stuff.

Casey came over and began wiping the dust from my back. “Kate says the night detectives will take shifts guarding the hole. She wants us to meet at the office in the morning to work out a game plan.”

“Thank God for small favors.” After we finished dusting each other off, I climbed into my car and headed home.