CHAPTER TWELVE
The autopsy took two hours, and most of what T-Bone’s body told me was exactly what I’d expected.
I recovered no bullets. Both rounds had entered at the base of the skull and traveled on a slight upward trajectory before exiting through the forehead, which meant the shooter had been shorter than T-Bone and had been standing directly behind him when he fired.
The wound tracks were consistent with a small-caliber handgun, almost certainly a .22 based on the diameter and damage pattern through the brain tissue. Close range. Contact, or near enough that it didn’t matter. Two shots fired by someone who was shorter than his victim.
There were no defensive wounds on his hands or forearms. No injection sites. His stomach contents showed a partially digested breakfast of eggs, turkey sausage, and oatmeal consumed roughly three to four hours before death. Clean fuel for a man who had a fight scheduled for tomorrow night and was taking care of his body. His blood was clean except for trace amounts of ibuprofen. No sedatives, no drugs of any kind. Unlike Dre, whoever killed T-Bone hadn’t bothered with restraints or days of interrogation. They’d simply walked up behind him and pulled the trigger while he stood there not knowing his life was about to end.
But his left sneaker told me something I hadn’t expected.
I almost missed it. I was pulling off his sneakers to bag them with the rest of his clothing when the insole of the left one shifted, and I felt the crinkle of paper beneath my fingertip. A small, folded piece of paper had been tucked inside the lining, pressed flat between the insole and the sole itself. I worked it out with tweezers, unfolded it under the magnifying light, and found a single set of GPS coordinates written in pencil in a cramped, careful hand, along with tomorrow’s date.
One location. The next fight.
T-Bone had been carrying it on his body the way a soldier carries mission coordinates.
I bagged the paper, sealed it, labeled it, and set it with the rest of the evidence. Then I pulled the sheet over T-Bone’s face, stripped off my gloves, and pushed him into the cooler.
And then I went upstairs to find Jack.
He was in Emmy Lu’s office with the security footage already pulled up on the desktop monitor and a cup of coffee going cold at his elbow. He’d been busy while I was downstairs. Martinez was briefed and up to speed on Cole’s caseload. Riley and Chen were finishing up the Towne Square scene. Plank was on his way to Richmond with evidence. The protection detail on Marco and Darnell had been doubled, and the deputy who’d lost T-Bone in traffic was writing a very detailed report about exactly how that had happened.
The office was small and warm, cluttered, but with an organized chaos of someone who ran a funeral home the way other people ran small countries. File cabinets and flower catalogs, a framed cross-stitch on the wall that said BLESS THIS MESS in lavender thread, and a potted fern in the corner that was somehow thriving despite getting no direct sunlight.
“Found something,” I said.
He looked up. I handed him the evidence bag with the paper inside, and I watched his face as he read the coordinates and the date. The shift was subtle, a tightening around his eyes, a slight forward lean, the stillness that came over him when a piece of the puzzle dropped into a slot he hadn’t known was empty.
“Where was this?”
“Inside the lining of his left shoe. Between the insole and the sole. He hid it there on purpose.” I sat down in the chair beside the desk. “Those coordinates are for a location, and that date is tomorrow.”
Jack set the evidence bag on the desk beside the keyboard and stared at it for a long moment. I could see him running the math the same way I had, the implications unfolding one after another like dominoes falling in a line. If those coordinates were accurate, and if the fight was still happening tomorrow night, then we had less than twenty-four hours to mobilize tactically before someone tipped them off and they scattered like rats.
“He was killed in a standing position,” I said, because Jack needed all of it and he needed it now. “Both rounds entered the base of the skull and exited through the forehead. I measured the wound track at approximately twelve degrees upward. T-Bone was six one. At that height, the base of his skull sits at roughly sixty-nine inches from the ground. You work the angle backward from a contact shot and the shooter was holding the weapon at approximately sixty-six inches.” I let that settle. “That puts the shooter somewhere between five eight and five ten, depending on arm position and stance.”
“Five eight to five ten,” Jack repeated. He filed that away in the mental cabinet that would open again later when the pieces started matching up.
“No defensive wounds. No drugs in his system. Clean breakfast, fighter’s food, eggs and turkey sausage and oatmeal. He was prepping for tomorrow night’s fight.”
Jack turned back to the monitor. “Come look at this.”
I pulled my chair closer and watched as he scrubbed the security footage timeline to 10:47 a.m. Doug had installed the system himself. The image was sharp, full color, high definition. It could pick up a license plate from fifty yards in full daylight.
A dark navy van pulled into the driveway at 10:47. It sat there for eleven seconds, and then the side door slid open and two figures got out. Both wore dark clothing and ball caps pulled low enough to shield their faces from the camera angle, and they moved with the efficient purpose of men who had done this kind of thing before. They went around to the back of the van, opened the rear doors, and pulled out our victim. They carried the body up the front steps between them, one at the shoulders and one at the feet, and tossed him against the front door with about as much ceremony as men unloading furniture. The whole thing took less than ninety seconds. They were back in the van and pulling away from the curb before the two-minute mark, and the street was empty again, quiet and ordinary, as if nothing had happened at all.
“Plates?” I asked.
“Covered. They taped something over them.” Jack paused the footage on the clearest frame of the van. “But the vehicle itself is distinctive. Ford Transit cargo van, 2018 or newer based on the body style. I’ve already sent the still to every body shop and rental agency in the county.”
“What about the other cameras? Different angles?”
“Nothing. They only came to the front.” He leaned back in the chair and pressed his thumb and forefinger against the bridge of his nose. “They knew exactly what they were doing. In and out in under two minutes, faces covered, plates covered. This wasn’t amateur hour.”
“Stavros doesn’t hire amateurs.”
“No. He doesn’t.”
