The Last Witness (Badge of Honor 11)

This time the flames were not quite as intense—and now she could see Krystal. She was lying on the kitchen’s hardwood floor. What looked like a beer bottle with a rag tied to it lay in a pool of blood beside her head. A second one was shattered on the marble countertop. The wooden cabinetry was burning rapidly.

The room reeked of gasoline.

“Oh my God!” she whimpered, her green eyes tearing.

I need to call nine-one-one!

No—I don’t. The alarm system does that.

She pulled her sweater over her head and ran to Krystal and knelt. Krystal’s face was coated in blood. Her eyes were glazed. Maggie touched her neck to feel for a pulse, found none, then grasped her shoulders and shook her.

“Krystal!”

There was no response.

When she had shaken her, her head had moved—and Maggie now noticed a small brass object, then a second one, in the blood pool. She immediately recognized them as spent bullet casings.

She looked back at Krystal—and now followed the trail of blood on her neck to the small round entrance wound the bullet had made behind her right earlobe.

You poor thing . . .

Maggie quickly looked around the kitchen, then down the hall that led to the front of the house. At the end, she could see that the front door was wide open.

Did she not lock the door?

Or did she let in whoever did this?

The flames on the cabinets suddenly grew stronger and hotter.

She ran back to the door to the garage, went through it, and slammed it shut. She slapped at the wall to the left of the door frame until her fingers found the control button that opened the garage door.

The light on the opener in the center of the ceiling came back on. The motor hummed as the big wooden door clunked upward.

She could hear the sound of sirens, faint but clear. They were coming from the direction of the firehouse not quite a half dozen blocks away at Sixth and South.

Maggie ran down the steps.

She pulled from the front passenger floorboard of the Land Cruiser a canvas sailing bag—its neat stitching read YELLOWROSE SPRING BAY RESORT & SPA, VIRGIN GORDA BVI—then took it behind the enclosed stairway. She opened the narrow door there. A single bulb above automatically came on, and she crouched as she entered the small enclosure.

A heavy rug covered most of the concrete floor. Tugging back the far corner, she uncovered a false floor that was a three-foot square of sheet metal.

She slid the square aside to reveal a fireproof safe that had been set in the concrete floor. Its door had a readout and a digital keypad for its combination, and she quickly punched in a string of numbers. The keypad beeped as each number was pushed.

Suddenly there was a rapid series of three beeps. A tiny bulb beside the readout lit up red. The screen flashed ERROR.

“Damn!” she said, breathing heavily.

She punched the CANCEL key, then held her breath and again rapidly keyed in the combination’s string of numbers. When she finished, she hit the pound symbol key.

Simultaneously there came a single beep, the tiny bulb glowed green, and the readout flashed OPENING. That was followed by the whirring sound of the door tumblers disengaging the insets of the door frame.

She exhaled heavily, then swung open the fireproof safe’s heavy door.

Maggie reached inside and pulled out a stack of folders and notebooks. She quickly stuffed them into her shoulder bag. She then reached back into the safe, found a bulging brass-zippered cloth bank pouch with the silk-screened logotype KEYSTONE FINANCIAL SERVICES, and a heavy black plastic bag imprinted in gold with LUCKY STARS CASINO & ENTERTAINMENT, and added them to the canvas bag.

Finally, she extracted a black molded plastic clamshell case. She flipped open its silver latches and swung back the top. She looked for a long moment at its contents—a Baby Glock Model 26 9mm semiautomatic pistol with two extra fully charged ten-round magazines—then grunted and shook her head. She racked the slide back and a shiny round ejected, landing inside the safe.

Damn it.