By His Own Hand Read online

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  To the strong women I love, who continue to shape my life.

  My wife, Olga Diaz

  My mother, Grace Coggins Probasco

  My sisters, Meme and Ellen

  And my daughters: Shelby, Emma, and Julia

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I remain deeply indebted to a core group of supporters, friends, and colleagues at Team Forge, particularly Melissa, Kirsten, and Karen. And also, my agent and friend, Jill Marr, with the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency. Thanks to all of you for standing by me.

  To my friends in law enforcement (you know who you are) who gave me access to their specialized areas of expertise. Thank you and I hope I represented you well.

  When I was a young Marine back in the early 1980s I remember serving with a number of WM’s, which is the acceptable acronym for women Marines. Two in particular still stand out in my mind. Their names were Michelle and Heather. By the time I met them, they were both in their early twenties and had already established themselves as non-commissioned officers. They were consummate professionals. They were hard charging dedicated Marines. They never asked for or expected preferential treatment because of their gender. They were both very good at their jobs.

  The reason I remember Michelle and Heather so vividly is because of the abuse they endured in the workplace. Every day they came to work, Michelle and Heather had to overcome the disparaging comments, the sexist attitudes, and the gender bias that ran rampant in the armed services. And both of them did endure it and still got the job done. Not on occasion. Not once in a while. But every day.

  As a police officer, I also served with many women: Kathy, Lynn, Holly, Molly, Diana, Julie, Bry, Linda, Shannon, Therese, Janice, and so many more. Women who work in a challenging profession, overwhelmingly dominated by men. It takes a special breed of individual to survive a decades-long law enforcement career. The women who do it are nothing short of extraordinary.

  As the husband of an elected official who is the only woman on the council she serves, I see the duplicity and double standard that has been painstakingly designed to constrain the influence of women who enter politics at any and all levels of government. And yet my wife, and hundreds of women like her, still answer the call to fight the good fight and serve their communities and their country.

  This book is about strong women in difficult circumstances. Women who don’t give in. Working women who fight against sexism and bias by being better at what they do than the men around them. For that reason I’d like to acknowledge all of the women who I’ve had the honor to work with in my military and law enforcement careers.

  Semper Fi. Stay Safe.

  ONE

  Detective Tia Suarez drove the plain-wrapped Crown Vic down the rutted fire lane until its high beams lit the yellow tape that blocked the narrow wooded road. The sight struck her as odd, if not damn near comical. Cops and routine: inseparable partners. Three o’clock in the morning, surrounded by miles of heavy forest in a remote corner of Waukesha County, Wisconsin, there probably wasn’t much in the way of mopes and lookie-loos, but by God, the yellow tape had to go up.

  Considering the nature of the call, Tia figured it best to leave room for other vehicles to come and go. She steered her newly assigned squad off to the side of the road, but the car fought back. The power steering had crapped out a month ago just as the odometer hit 150K, and the lumbering sedan was granted a long-overdue retirement out of the patrol pool. That’s when some pencil-neck geek in the mayor’s office got the big idea to strip off the red-and-blues, slap on a coat of battleship-gray paint, and call it a detective car. When Tia complained to the city mechanic, he shrugged and said, “Get in line.” She maneuvered in behind the lone marked cruiser and killed the engine but the car refused to die, coughing and sputtering like a four-thousand-pound emphysema patient.

  Twenty minutes removed from a warm bed, Tia sat balanced on the greater Milwaukee yellow pages, listless and still waking up. The phone book provided the support missing from the seat springs, long since worn out by a decade of weighted-down patrol cops who pushed the sled twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Such was life in the Newberg PD, where the most recent round of politically driven budget cuts hadn’t been with pens and pencils, but hatchets and cleavers. A long sip of the hot coffee she’d brought from home provided an energetic lift, but she couldn’t help but think a shot of Patron would sure as hell liven the drink up a bit.

  “Thirty-seven days,” she said out loud, glancing at herself in the rearview mirror. With a quick shake of her head, she pushed off against the near-constant temptation and turned to the task at hand. Time to get to work.

  Tia gathered up her writing pad and pen, ignoring the department-issued computer tablet and body-cam recorder buried in the center console. Not for the first time, she wished the feds in Washington would fork over some grant money to replace her car, instead of handing out whiz-bang monitoring equipment that was just more Big Brother bullshit. She slammed the console shut and grabbed the five-cell flashlight from the charging dock between the seats, then tucked the twenty-inch metal tube under her armpit, preferring the substantial steel to the lighter and brighter Mini Mags most young cops carried nowadays.

  A pen, a spiral notepad, and a five-cell. Old school or just stubborn? Hard to say. The way she saw it, technology in law enforcement had gone too far. There were time-tested methods of police work that couldn’t be improved on by electronic gadgets or pre-populated drop-down forms. Methods that sure as hell included handwritten detective notes made at a crime scene. But Tia had to admit, even at the fairly young age of thirty-one, her way of doing police work was fast becoming eccentric.

  Through the windshield she saw the beam of a flashlight bobbing in the darkness, twenty or so yards into the woods. Still balancing the hot coffee, Tia used her shoulder to push hard on the door, but the tilt of the road made for a tough angle. She got her boot into it, kicked the door all the way open, and pulled herself to her feet. Scalding liquid sloshed over her notepad, windbreaker, and jeans, just before the door swung back and knocked the cup out of her hand. The coffee pooled on the soiled remnant of floorboard carpet, the latest addition to the car’s long list of deviant odors.

  Tia looked down at her soiled jacket and blue jeans, mumbling obscenities that would have her well-meaning but pious Catholic mother lighting candles for a month. She tore off a chunk of soggy pages from her pad and dropped the wet, shriveled sheets onto the pool of coffee. Good as new, she thought, looking at the now fresh writing surface.

  “Try doing that with an iPad,” she said as she finally dragged herself out of the car.

  A cool breeze whipped through the trees and b
lew across her face, signaling rain might be on the way. A chorus of a million or so cicadas and the steady snore of nearly as many northern leopard frogs filled the night air, accompanied by an obnoxious, all-too-familiar voice from somewhere up ahead.

  “Ah, shit.” Tia rolled her eyes.

  Him.

  Again her number ran through her head, but with noticeably less conviction.

  Tia slammed the car door, along with the door in her mind that led to a dangerous way of thinking. If she got through the day, her number would be thirty-eight. All things considered, pretty impressive. No reason to think back further than that. Bygones. History. Bury that shit. But now, she had to suck it up and spend a little one-on-one time with the most relentless prick on the Newberg Police Department. Times like these left her feeling that sober living was highly overrated.

  Standing at the tape line, she whistled loudly and gave two quick bursts from her flashlight, but the deep voice droned on without pause. She whistled again and called out, “Yo, Jimmy.”

  The talking stopped.

  She yelled out, “Am I okay to walk in from here?”

  “Yeah,” the voice came back. “You’re good.”

  Tia ducked low to pass under the tape. As she stood up on the other side, a stunning white light swept across her eyes. Turning her head away, she raised an arm to block the beam.

  “Damn, man. Watch it.”

  The beam dropped to the ground and Tia tried to blink away the thousand points of light, knowing she’d be seeing spots for the next hour. A young trainee she’d passed a few times in the hallway at the PD walked toward her. She squinted hard and jammed at her eyes with a thumb and forefinger, making no effort to disguise her irritation.

  “You’re that new hire?” His name came to her. “Puller, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m Officer Puller. Sorry about that.” He stood awkwardly in a uniform that even in the low light appeared a bit baggy, but pressed and new. He was rail thin—Tia put him at about a buck-fifty, including the stiff leather gun belt that cinched a waist so narrow there were no empty spaces between the items of issued gear. A light dusting of acne covered his pale, fuzzy cheeks and Tia figured he probably shaved every other week, whether he needed to or not. Perfect, she thought. We’re recruiting from Newberg High School.

  “Show some light discipline, all right? Guys can get pretty pissy when you sweep up like that. Point it at your feet. That’ll give you all the light you need.” Tia looked deeper into the woods. “You riding with Youngblood?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Last phase of field training. One more week.”

  “Knock off the ‘ma’am’ shit.”

  “Uh, yes, ma’am,” he said nervously. She really had him flustered. “I mean, right. Okay.”

  Vision clearing, Tia managed eye contact. Cowed like a puppy that had shit the carpet, the kid didn’t show much in the way of command presence. More like a crisis of confidence. No surprise, considering who was training him. “Dispatch called me out. So where’s this dead body at?”

  Puller looked back over his shoulder and pointed with his flashlight, orienting the beam toward the ground. “Right over there, next to where Officer Youngblood is standing.”

  “Really? Next to where he’s standing?” Tia didn’t try to hide a growing sense of frustration. “So tell me, has he trained you in the concept of an inner perimeter?”

  Puller stared back, slack-jawed, as if trying to answer a trick question. Tia pushed past, done with the clueless trainee. She walked up to Youngblood, who was talking on his cell phone. She hung back ten feet and he gave just the barest jut of his chin in acknowledgment. She put her left hand on her hip and her right on the back strap of her Glock 23. A bell rang in her head, signaling the beginning of round one.

  Officer James “Jimmy” Youngblood had recently been named the department field training officer, after the previous FTO had left to join the force up in Green Bay, where cops were paid much better and the overtime policy was all-you-can-eat. Youngblood got the FTO job after being turned down a third time for a detective’s shield. Most cops, Tia included, figured his appointment had been some kind of consolation prize.

  “Gotta go, Stan. She’s here. Wait for me at the station. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” He paused, then laughed and said, “Yeah, no shit.”

  Youngblood looked Tia up and down in a way that signaled his last comment had something to do with her. She tried to let it go but her effort was halfhearted, and when he ended the phone conversation and turned to her, the challenge in her voice was obvious.

  She stood with her hands on both hips. “‘No shit,’ what?”

  “Huh?” Youngblood tucked his cell phone into a cargo pocket of his trousers.

  “You said ‘no shit’ just now. ‘No shit,’ what?”

  “Just talking to Hansen.” Youngblood gave a dismissive shrug and Tia picked up on his satisfaction at so effortlessly getting under her skin. He did his best to convey confused innocence. “We’re blowing out of town tomorrow. Coupla days in Vegas.”

  Knowing she’d given his juvenile nonsense more acknowledgment than it deserved, Tia decided to push back from a different direction. Her gaze shifted to the dark outline on the ground, less than two feet from where Youngblood stood.

  “What? We don’t train inner perimeters anymore?” Tia looked to the ground and picked up on the trampled leaves and boot prints in the dirt. “In kind of close for a DB, aren’t you?”

  Youngblood launched a gob of tobacco spit over his shoulder. He shoved his hands under his external load-bearing vest, making his arms resemble chicken wings. Like most senior officers, Youngblood wore black, military-style gear instead of the traditional blue uniform required for trainees and probies. He turned back to Tia, dark flecks clinging to his thick mustache.

  “Yeah, it’s a dead-body call. But for a crime scene perimeter, you need a crime.” His face displayed a well-practiced look of deadpan disinterest. “Last I checked, when it comes to suck-starting a shotgun, it’s still a free country. Anyway, here’s your stiff.”

  His flashlight clicked on and the intense beam lit a ten-foot circle on the ground. Tia studied the body, starting at an ordinary pair of high-top tennis shoes, traveling up past jeans and shirt to neck and throat. After that, there was a violent departure from the expected. A mass of red, chunky gel, the size and roundness of a small truck tire, replaced what had once been a human face. A shotgun alongside the body served as the scene’s exclamation point.

  Tia drew a breath through clenched teeth and turned away. “Ah, Jesus.”

  “Sorry, Suarez.” Youngblood laughed. “Didn’t figure on you being squeamish. You need a minute? A tissue, maybe?”

  Tia ignored the apology, knowing the shock treatment had been intentional. She’d seen more than enough dead bodies, mostly during her three years in Afghanistan. But this one, fresh, violently violated, and obviously youthful, made a strong impression. Youngblood went right on yucking it up.

  “I wish you could’ve seen your face just now. Fucking priceless.” He feigned a high-pitched squeal, waving his hands in the air. “Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus.”

  She stared back, determined to match his disdain. “You done dicking around? Can we get on with it?”

  “Take it easy, Suarez. Calling you was just routine.” His voice carried the same attitude she’d seen since her first day in the department, almost eight years ago. The guy couldn’t accept the idea of women cops. It didn’t help that even though he had four years seniority on her, Tia had transferred to the Investigations Bureau while Youngblood still pushed a patrol sled. Most of the patrol dogs had convinced themselves that she only made detective because of her brown skin and female gender, but Tia knew better. The career kick-start for a double minority might play in the city, but in a small town like Newberg, it didn’t count for shit.

  “Your buddy Sawyer wants one of you to come out on all unattended deaths involving a weapon. I’d say this qualifies.”
/>   “‘One of you’?” Tia was determined to make him say it.

  “Detectives.” He sniffed, his voice resentful. “One of you detectives.”

  Tia let it fester. That’s right, dipshit. Detective.

  Looking him over, Tia was reminded how the upside-down life of graveyard patrol played hell on the body. The black watch cap pulled down to just above Youngblood’s eyebrows couldn’t hide his pasty complexion or the meaty sag of his jowls. The Glock forty-caliber was strapped low against his thigh, the tactical nylon belt mostly buried under the hang of his ample gut. Too many midnight drive-through burgers followed by beer and eggs for breakfast. Then a fitful two or three hours of daytime sleep before heading back to work loaded up on Red Bull. Yeah, Youngblood was looking rough. Ten more pounds, she thought, and he could carry an extra pair of handcuffs under one of his sagging man boobs, along with a backup thirty-eight in the crack of his fat ass.

  She pulled out her pen and notepad, shook off her shock and sorrow, and saw the scene for what it was: the unexplained death of a human being, in need of investigation.

  “Give me what you’ve got.”

  “Time of call was zero-two-eleven. We got to the scene at zero-two-thirty-eight. By then, the RP had split. We—”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Tia cut him off, looking at her watch. “Twenty-seven minutes? On a dead-body call? Damn, Jimmy, I got here faster than that and I was sound asleep. Where were you coming from?”

  The trainee looked at his feet but Youngblood avoided the question, saying only, “Busy night.”

  “All right, but what do you mean the RP split?”

  Youngblood spoke as if every question was a personal inconvenience. “I mean he split, Suarez. He’s gone. Guy called Dispatch, ID’ed himself as Henry. We show up and there ain’t no Henry. Just the stiff.”

  “No RP? On a DB?” Usually the reporting party on something as significant as a dead body would stick around. Losing the RP was a lousy way to start the investigation.