Page 21 of Protecting Silver
Agent Babcock looked up and said to Dr. Green, “If you don’t mind, I’d like to take these clothes with me and send them to our lab. Try to get the attacker’s DNA from them.”
“Go ahead.”
“Here,” Tamara said as she handed out her card. “I’ll go back upstairs and ask for the nurse on duty to call me when the patient is receiving visitors.”
“Good idea. I won’t ask if you have a name, or found out anything. I want to be ignorant if the bastard comes looking for her. I’ll spread the word that we are not allowed to give out any information, even if it’s the police asking.”
“Thank you, that would be great.” Tamara nodded and did as she said she would. On her way down to leave, she sent a text to her partner, who had stayed in the car to answer a call they had been expecting. Tamara exited the hospital, then only had to look up and her partner, Jackie Mann pulled up. After entering the Bureau-issued car, Tamara looked at Jackie and grinned.
“Want to break the law?”
“Excuse me? What the hell happened in there?”
“In a nutshell, it was a domestic. However, the woman who was severely beaten by her boyfriend said he was a local cop. I got her address, but I haven’t talked to her. She’s in surgery to repair a broken eye socket, and cheekbone.”
“Fucker. What else?”
“Lady went ape-shit crazy when the doctors said they’d call the locals, and one nurse thought she heard her say the person who beat her was a local. They had to sedate her in order to assess the damage. There are pictures, which I didn’t get a copy of, but her doctor said there are shoe impressions on her body where she was kicked. They thought she’d been raped, but turned out she’s in the middle of having a miscarriage.”
“Goddamn motherfucker!” Jackie yelled, and hit the steering wheel as hard as she could. “Did you at least get her name?”
“I went through her clothes and found this.” She held up the front of an envelope she’d stuffed in an evidence bag. “This is it, it’s almost like the lady was trying to hide the evidence or something.”
Jackie took the bag, and studied the return address. “So, best you can tell is that this Anita Green contacted a newspaper in Wisconsin for some reason, and then for whatever reason she was beaten to a pulp.”
“As best I can tell.”
“You know we’ll never get a search warrant until we have the name of the cop who did this to her. And who’s to say that he didn’t leave her for dead, and then will come back and clean up his mess later. “Yeah, I say we perform a little B&E. We can always ask for forgiveness later, rather than permission now.”
“Let’s go.” Tamara gave Jackie the address, and ten minutes later they stood outside the door. Because Jackie was faster, in less than five seconds, she had her hands gloved and the door unlocked. They slipped inside, shut and locked the door behind them. Tamara was donning her own set of gloves, and began to say, “Let’s look to see if there’s any evidence of a fight, then I want to see if there’s anything from that newspaper. Just to gather information.”
“I agree,” Jackie said, and looked around the foyer. They started toward what they assumed was the kitchen area, and both stopped in their tracks. “Sweet Baby Jesus!” Tamar said, and made the sign of the cross over her chest, then kissed her thumb. Both FBI agents pulled their phones and started snapping pictures. They wanted the evidence in case the attacker cleaned up the mess. Luckily their phones were programmed with time and date stamps on the photos. Without touching anything, they continued to snap pictures of the blood on the floor, and walls, and even made sure they got the spatter patterns on the ceiling.
When they realized the blood had dried, they also realized it had been hours since the attack. Without talking to Anita personally, they didn’t know if it happened that day, or even a day or two before. After taking the photos, they made their way down the hall, and Tamara pulled her gun. At Jackie’s frown, she only shook her head, and whispered, “Security.”
The next room they came to was a small office, and together they went inside and nodded at how neat and organized it was. For the hell of it, Tamara began looking at the spines of the books on the bookshelves, and when she noticed one, she frowned. Something about it didn’t seem right to her. She pulled it off the shelf, and when she opened it, she called her partner over.
“What is it?”
“There’s a shit-ton of newspapers here from all over the country. I don’t know if it’s a hobby, or for her job, but let’s take photos of the front page of each one.” They spent the next twenty minutes doing that, and then put the book back. In each photo they’d taken, they made sure the name of the paper, the date, and the edition number was in clear view. Later, when they got back to the office, they’d bring them up online and see if they couldn’t piece together what was going on.
At the end of the hall, they found the bedroom, and the bed hadn’t been made, and there was a man’s shirt lying in the middle of it. Jackie was the one to point to the blood stains on the cuff of one sleeve. Tamara immediately pulled an evidence bag from her suit jacket pocket, used her pen to pick up the shirt, and stuffed it inside.
“What are you doing?”
“If he beat her, then he would have sweated during the beat down. I’m taking this to get DNA evidence, to see if we can’t find out who it is.”
“Okay,” Jackie helped her, then stuffed the bag into her own jacket pocket. They continue to check out the rest of the apartment, but other than the bedroom, and the bloody hall, it seemed like the entire space was neat, and organized. Like everything in its place, and everything had a place. Shaking their heads, they quickly left the apartment. They waited until they were halfway down the second flight of stairs before they removed their gloves. Just as they hit the foyer on the first floor, the door opened, and a very handsome man entered. However, Tamara looked at him and though he was good looking with dark hair, and smoldering looks, his eyes made her cringe. They were dead, evil. Keeping her head down, she only gave a slight nod, and quickly passed him on her way out the door. She had left Jackie two flights up, because they didn’t want to be seen leaving the building together.
Ten minutes later, Jackie met her at the car, and Tamara took one look at her and knew she’d seen the same evil in the man’s eyes that she had. They didn’t say a word until they were inside the car. Jackie drove in the opposite direction they’d come, and made sure she didn’t go in front of the building. They had to take a lot of one-way streets, but they eventually made it out to the highway. Only then did they breathe easier.
“Damn,” Jackie said at one point. She pulled into a fast-food restaurant, and ordered something cold to drink. Tamara joined her. After drinking half of it, they both held out their hands and saw they were still shaking.
“I’m not one-hundred-percent sure, but I bet you that’s the guy.”
“I’d bet my next paycheck on it, but we both know we can’t do anything.”
“I know, but we can go back to the office, and start looking up those newspaper articles. See if there’s anything in them that pops up. You know, something to jump out at us.”
