His First Surrender (Stonewall Investigations Miami 3)

“And she was going into Jesse’s room?”

“She said she heard a weird noise. I think it was his last breath. She just went to check if he was all right.”

I looked up the staircase, wondering who I would have to bribe to get into the crime scene. Sometimes the cops were all right with an outside detective coming into an active scene, but most of the time, they were angry dickheads who had raging attitude problems.

“I’m going to look upstairs, see if I can spot anything. I’ll ask the neighbors if they heard or saw anything. This must have happened sometime in the past three hours, so chances are good that we’ll find whoever did this.”

“Thank you, Rocky. Again. I ah, mean, Detective Hudson, thank you.”

“Of course,” I said, never able to receive gratitude with grace. “Just wait down here, I’ll be back.”

“Actually, I’m going to my parents’ house. I can’t stay here. I can’t. I wanted to follow Hazel to the station, but the cops said it’d be useless, she’d be separated from me and wouldn’t be processed until the morning.”

“Go. Be with family tonight. Hopefully I have some good updates to give you tomorrow.”

“Hope,” Sam said, huffing. “That’s funny.”

Sam, his shoulders dropped and his head down, left then. I didn’t want to let him go alone. I wanted to be at his side. I wanted to assure him that “hope” wasn’t funny; it was real.

But then again, did I even believe that?

I walked up the stairs, toward the apartment, where a flow of police was going in and out of.

“Detective Hudson.”

It was Officer Melissa Tate standing at the top of the stairs. She was a short, tight-lipped woman who meant business at all hours of the day, her dark hair up in a perfect bun. She smiled, hidden crinkles revealing themselves at the corners of her forest-green eyes. Officer Tate was one of the good ones. Hell, I’d go as far to say that she was one of the great ones. I worked with her before on a few different cases, and we managed to lock up three serial rapists and two big-time drug dealers in a matter of weeks.

She was one of the few people who’d been able to crack through me. Not all the way, but far enough to see a piece of the real me.

“Hey, Melissa.”

“It’s way past your bedtime. What are you doing up, hon?”

I arched my brow. “You know I don’t have a bedtime.”

“Mhmm. I’ve heard the stories.”

“What happened here?” I could see the living room behind her. Nothing seemed out of place from the quick look.

“Looks pretty cut-and-dry. We found the victim, stabbed to death inside his bedroom. The suspect was found with quite a lot of blood on her hands. The murder weapon was one of her kitchen knives, which seems to be missing now.”

“Anyone see anything?”

“Someone four apartments down said he saw the victim, Jesse, outside in the parking lot, and he appeared to be kissing a thin woman with long brown hair. He said it was quick, and if he had blinked he might have missed it. The two then moved so they were out of sight, most likely coming up to the apartment themselves. This happened four hours ago.”

I sucked my teeth. Could Hazel and Jesse have been in a secret relationship gone terribly wrong? From my initial searching, I hadn’t seen any suggestions that Jesse was seeing someone. And why would the kiss be kept so short if it weren’t a relationship that needed to be kept quiet?

“Can I see the crime scene?”

Melissa nodded and grabbed me a pair of sanitized blue slip-ons to put over my shoes. “There’s a lot of blood in there.”

I walked in, not immediately seeing the blood, but smelling it first. The drying blood had an acidic stench that twisted my stomach into knots, even from a room away. There were multiple crime scene investigators working in the apartment, taking photos and documenting everything they could find. I made sure to stay out of their way as I walked through the living room, toward the hallway and to Jesse’s room. I walked past Sam’s bedroom, the door open as someone dusted his nightstand for fingerprints.

Jesse’s bedroom was a bloody mess, the place looking like it had been trashed by a team of ten people. There were blood splatters on the wall and across the smashed mirror, along with blood all over the bed, soaking into the white sheets. Jesse’s body had already been taken, so I would need to examine him at some other point, but just from the scene alone, I knew I should be expecting a body that looked like a pincushion. He must have been stabbed at least ten times. There were even shreds in the bedsheets, where the stabs must have missed Jesse and cut through the sheets, down to the mattress. All around the floor were see-through bags of white and blue powders, adding another wrench in the bloody gears of this case.