14th Deadly Sin (Women's Murder Club 14)

“Bitch,” Broward spat at me. “I shoulda shot you. I coulda done anything to you. No one would ever know what happened to you.”

“Turn around. Put your hands on your head,” I said.

He did it.

“I coulda given you a real good ride first,” he said mournfully. “I haven’t had a blond in a while.”

“Shut the hell up,” I said.

I holstered my gun, wrenched Broward’s arms down, and cuffed him behind his back.

“You’re under arrest for assault on a police officer,” I said. And then I read him his rights.

CHAPTER 64

I HAD BROWARD in the back of my vehicle, behind the Plexiglas and in cuffs.

As for me, I was still twitching with adrenaline because he could have killed me. That would have been my fault entirely for having made such a dumb-ass, rookie mistake.

I couldn’t stop flicking my eyes to the rearview mirror to look at him. He was wild-eyed crazy, for sure, but whatever kind of psycho he was, he didn’t seem to know or care that he was on his way to jail.

Broward said loudly, “Remember when we were living with my mama?”

“Yep. It was a trip, Wayne.”

“You used to call me Honey-boy. I just loved when you did that.”

“That was then, Wayne,” I said, playing along. “I’m over you now.”

Wayne Broward began to sing “Jesus Loves Me.”

I turned up the squawk box and kept my eyes on the road. I didn’t like what I was going to have to say to a judge about why I had been inside the house of a man who hadn’t been under suspicion of anything; my probable cause was a hunch. Thank God Broward had invited me to come in. Perhaps that and his history of threatening a judge would help me sound a little less stupid.

Twenty minutes later, I parked in the all-day lot on Bryant and tossed the keys to the guy who worked days in the shed. Broward gave me no trouble as I escorted him across the street and into the building in cuffs. I walked him through the metal detector and up the stairs to the desk sergeant on the third floor.

I said, “Sergeant, we need to book Mr. Broward for assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer. Make sure he gets a psych eval.”

Sergeant Brooks asked questions and filled out a form, and a uniformed cop came up and took Broward to booking. My rifle-wielding collar would be kept busy for the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours while being processed: There would be a body search, fingerprints, a shower, and examinations by a nurse and a shrink. Then he’d be given a jumpsuit and locked in a holding cell until I could get back to him.

After leaving the front desk, I went down th

e hall and through the door to Homicide. I found Conklin in the bullpen with files on drug dealers fanned out all over his desktop.

“Rich. I’m very sorry. I got hung up.” I fully planned to tell my partner about Wayne Broward, but he cut in with a news flash.

“Ralph Valdeen was hit.”

Ralph Valdeen, aka Rascal, was one of the two former stockroom boys at Wicker House. Valdeen had been charged with assault on a police officer for that punch he’d thrown at Conklin at the ballpark. But he’d been released on bail. Unlike Donnie Wolfe, who had stolen a car, we had had nothing else on Valdeen. There was no evidence that he knew the Wicker House shooters or that he knew what happened to the drugs that had been stolen from that lab.

“What happened?” I asked my partner.

“His mom went over to his place and found him dead in the bedroom,” Conklin said. “Two shots to the chest, one to the head. Makes me think someone was cleaning up after themselves. Maybe he could’ve ID’d the Wicker House shooters.”

“Another dead witness,” I said.

“And he’s all ours,” said Conklin.

CHAPTER 65