The Murderers (Badge of Honor 6)

“Anything?”

“No. When I got here—”

“What brought you here?” Pekach interrupted.

“He wasn’t answering his phone, sir. Somebody from Narcotics asked us to check on him.” Pekach nodded. “When I got here, the back door was open, and I looked in and saw him.”

“You check the premises?” the Sergeant asked.

“Yeah. Nobody was inside.”

“You should have asked for backup,” the Sergeant said, in mild reprimand.

“I’m going to have a look,” Pekach announced.

Pekach went through the open front door. He found the body, lying on its face, between the kitchen and the “dining area,” which was the rear portion of the living room.

Kellog was on his stomach, sprawled out. His head was in a large pool of blood, now dried nearly black. Pekach recognized him from his chin and mustache. The rest of his head was pretty well shattered.

Somebody shot him, maybe more than once, in the back of his head. Probably more than once.

What the hell happened here? Was Narcotics involved? Christ, it has to be.

“Well,” Sergeant Manning said, coming up behind Pekach, “he didn’t do that to himself. I’m going to call it in to Homicide.”

“I’ve got to get to a phone myself,” Pekach said, thinking out loud.

“Sir?”

No, I don’t. You’re not going to call Bob Talley and volunteer to go with him to tell Helene that Jerry’s dead.

“I’m going to get out of everybody’s way. If Homicide wants a statement from me, they know where to find me.”

“Yes, sir,” Sergeant Manning said.

Dave Pekach turned and walked out of the house and got back in his car.

TWO

When the call came into the Homicide Unit of the Philadelphia Police Department from Police Radio that Officer Jerome H. Kellog had been found shot to death in his home in the Twenty-fifth District, Detective Joseph P. D’Amata was holding down the desk.

D’Amata took down the information quickly, hung up, and then called, “We’ve got a job.”When there was no response, D’Amata looked around the room, which is on the second floor of the Roundhouse, its windows opening to the south and overlooking the parking lot behind the building. It was just about empty.

“Where the hell is everybody?” D’Amata, a slightly built, natty, olive-skinned thirty-eight-year-old, wondered aloud.

D’Amata walked across the room and stuck his head in the open door of Lieutenant Louis Natali’s office. Natali, who was also olive-skinned, dapper, and in his mid-thirties, looked something like D’Amata. He was with Sergeant Zachary Hobbs, a stocky, ruddy-faced forty-four-year-old. Both looked up from whatever they were doing on Natali’s desk.

“We’ve got a job. In the Twenty-fifth. A cop. A plainclothes narc by the name of Kellog.”

“What happened to him?”

“Shot in the back of his head in his kitchen.”

“And?” Natali asked, a hint of impatience in his voice.

“Joe said his name was Kellog, Lieutenant,” Hobbs said delicately.

“Kellog?” Natali asked. And then his memory made the connection. “Jesus Christ! Is there more?”