Jack Davis Mystery - 01 - Shakedown Read Online Free PDF Page B

weapon, take a deep breath, get it over with, and get out, no survivors, no loose ends. If Jalise had been the target, I saw someone filled with rage, the kind of fury that propelled the killer to empty his weapon into a defenseless woman trying to save her child. I could imagine what the killer thought and felt but not what he looked like. I had learned a long time ago not to trust the face.
    I stared through the open front door, preferring to study the scene while the rest of my squad started with the neighbors. I knew that the good people outnumbered the bad on these streets, but that didn’t mean they trusted the cops enough to tell us what they’d seen.
    Even if someone came forward, I knew it wouldn’t be enough. Eyewitnesses were among the least reliable sources of evidence about a crime. People never experience an event the same way. Fear, anger and excitement distort recollection as much as differences in eyesight and hearing. Psychological factors load eyewitness testimony with bias and unreliability.
    For me, that was the beauty of the crime scene. It didn’t have a face that hid the truth. It had no hidden agenda. It hadn’t just had a fight at home or too many drinks after work. It didn’t want to be interviewed on Court TV and it wasn’t trying to cover up. It wasn’t afraid of the cops, it wasn’t out to screw us over, and it wasn’t smarter than us. It was what it was and it never lied.

Chapter Seven
     
    When I was assigned to the Dallas office, we lived in a new subdivision that must have been landscaped with a steamroller, it was so ?at. Half the families that lived on our block were with the Bureau, some of the agents buying their houses from the agent they were replacing, knowing they would sell it to their replacement a few years down the road. We knew each other’s spouses, kids, and dogs. Everyone looked out for everyone else, watching each other’s houses when someone was away for the weekend. The level terrain and the absence of trees more than eight feet tall made it easy to see everything.
    We were watchers, noticers, detail people. Something strange, someone new, something that didn’t look or feel right, we picked up on it. It was what we were trained to do.
    Frank Tyler lived three houses down from us. He was a computer programmer, worked out of his house, jogged every morning, waved to me when I drove Kevin and Wendy to school. Every year he dragged his Weber grill to the end of the street for the Fourth of July block party, grilling hot dogs and making balloon animals for the kids.
    I must have seen his face a thousand times. Brown, welcoming eyes pinched at the corners; they always seemed to me to be from laughter and sun. A once-broken nose, crooked enough to make his face slightly off-kilter in an interesting sort of way. His mouth was full, his smile quick and easy. He wore his dark hair in a casual cut, angling across his forehead. That’s all I saw. It wasn’t enough.
    Joy always picked the kids up from school. One day, she had car trouble. Frank worked at home and she asked if she could borrow his car. He told her that he had some errands to run and would be happy to swing by the school and pick up the kids. Wendy had Girl Scouts that afternoon. Kevin was the only one who would be coming home. She called the school to let them know that Frank would pick him up.
    When Frank didn’t come back, Joy called the school. They told her that Frank had been there, shown identification, and signed the form confirming that he was taking Kevin as she had authorized. One of the teachers remembered seeing Kevin get in the car with Frank.
    Worried, Joy went to Frank’s house, knocked, and went in when she found the door unlocked. She walked through the house, stopping in the den, where she found stacks of child pornography on a coffee table. That’s when she called me.
    Today it’s called an Amber Alert. Back then we didn’t have a name for it. We didn’t need one. All agents