“Hey, that contact from the west just disappeared from the feed. I need a couple of you to go check it out. Is your scene secure enough for a few of you to step away?” Wilson’s voice came through comms.
“Roger that, Taco,” Burke replied. “Bringing our Tango in through the front, Jax. Then Moe and I can go check it out.”
“Come to the car. It’s too far to hike,” Wilson said.
Indigo
Donna Saxton and her daughter Jeriah ate lunch at the small kitchen table in their apartment. Donna had been waiting all morning for a call from school, as she’d sent Elijah, her oldest son who was in first grade, to school with a stomachache that morning. She thought for sure they’d call, tell her he was sick, and ask her to come get him by lunch. But here it was just after noon, and they still hadn’t called.
Jeriah had woken up very early that morning, and she was already crabby. Normally, she’d go down for a nap around one-thirty, but today, Donna was going to put her down right after lunch. She just hoped she didn’t get that call from school soon, as she’d then have to wake Jeriah up to go get him. She wanted to use the time to apply for a couple of jobs the community college’s program job site had advertised at an urgent care center and a Quest Labs location near her. She was excited to start the next chapter of her life.
Once Jeriah had finished eating, Donna wiped her hands and face with a wet towel. “Okay, baby. After you have a nice nap, we’ll have time to play with Playdough before the boys get home from school.” She loved the one-on-one time she had with her daughter and knew that once Jeriah turned three years old and was in the preschool program and Donna was working, that time would be drastically cut down.
She helped Jeriah out of her booster seat and then sat her on the potty. Jeriah had just recently been potty trained, a huge milestone for Donna to no longer have a child in diapers. Donna and her children lived in a two-bedroom unit. The boys had the smaller of the two bedrooms, and Jeriah had always slept in Donna’s room. When Donna began potty training Jeriah, she took the crib down and moved the toddler bed out of the boy’s room. She got a junior loft bed and slid the foot of the twin bed under it to save space.
Ultimately, she would get a taller loft bed when Elijah was old enough, and then she’d switch bedrooms with the kids and move Jeriah in with the boys. She’d seen a staggered three-bed setup with a loft bed, a junior loft bed, and a normal low bed that saved a lot of space in a room by tucking the bottom of each of the three beds under one of the other ones. But until then, Jeriah was in her bedroom.
Jeriah ran right to her bed, which was pushed up against the corner of the room. Donna tucked her daughter in and gave her a kiss. Then she turned around and took hold of the curtain panels, pulling them together to close them and darken the room as she gazed out into the yard behind the apartment building. She froze for a moment, unable to move because of what she sawoutside. Regaining her senses, she quickly closed them, hoping she hadn’t been seen.
There was no mistaking what she had just witnessed. She leaned against the wall and tried to catch her breath, which had left her lungs at the sight of one man killing another. And the worst part was that she recognized the man with his hands around the other man’s throat. It was a local police detective with a reputation for stepping outside of the law.
“Mommy?” Jeriah said, now sitting up and watching her closely.
“It’s okay, sweetie, take your nappy. I love you,” Donna said. She left the room and closed the door, but leaned against the wall in the hallway, steadying her breath, willing her heart to stop beating so hard. “Please, God, please make it that he didn’t see me,” she whispered.
After a few minutes, she returned to the kitchen and took a drink from her water bottle. She’d only been in the window for a split second; surely, he hadn’t seen her. And she didn’t see his eyes. If she hadn’t, he couldn’t have seen her, she said to herself to calm her panic.
Then she thought about what she should do. She had to report it to someone. Her mom would know what to do, as she’d been a psychologist who worked for the Richmond Police Department. She’d call her mom. Her gaze flickered to her laptop, knowing she needed to get on to search for a job while Jeriah was down for her nap. It had been a gift from Rich when she enrolled in school. Then the thought occurred to her that maybe Rich was who she should call.
Through the window, she saw the police detective. He was quickly walking towards her front door. She quickly turned her back, knowing that during the day, with the lights off in the house, he would see very little detail inside the kitchen, just her silhouette.
His fist, knocking on the door, startled her with a jolt. Oh, shit! Had he seen her? If not, why was he knocking?
She went to the door. “One minute,” she called through it. She grabbed her phone from her pocket and hit dial. It went to Rich’s voicemail. “Rich, I just saw something. Leo Davis, a policeman, strangled a man,” she whispered. “He’s at my door, knows I’m home. I’m answering and will leave the line open.” Then she summoned her courage and knew she had to act as if she hadn’t seen it. She held the phone in her hand. “Sorry, I’m on the phone,” she said, staring at the man on her doorstep, standing there calmly, as if he hadn’t just strangled a man. “Can I help you, officer?”
“Oh, you know who I am,” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” she said, forcing a smile. “I know on sight most of the police who regularly work the area. I fully support you guys. I’ve seen you around, like when the convenience store on the next block was robbed a few weeks ago.”
He nodded. “Your father was on the job, wasn’t he?” Davis asked.
His question surprised Donna. So he knew who she was. “Yes. He died doing it, killed by some gang-banger punk who shouldn’t have been walking the streets.”
“I’m sorry,” Davis said. “I was just out back with a robbery suspect, who got away, and I thought I saw your curtain move in the back of the house. Did you see anything? I could use a witness to help ID him.”
“Me, no. My two-year-old is down for a nap back there, or she’s supposed to be down for a nap.” Donna made a point of looking at her phone. “I guess she’s awake if the curtain moved. Damn. I was hoping for another half an hour before she got up.”
“Are you sure you didn’t see anything?” he pressed.
She shook her head. “No, I’ve been at the kitchen table for the last half hour working on the computer. I haven’t seen anything.
“Maybe a car drive through the lot? Or a person walking by the window?” he suggested.
“Sorry, no.”
“Okay, sorry to have disturbed you,” Davis said.
“No problem,” she said, and she stepped back, intending to close the door.
