Kill Zone: A Lucy Guardino FBI Thriller Read online

  The address Burroughs had given them was on a quiet street in Point Breeze North, not far from the Allegheny County Police Headquarters where the 911 Communications Center was housed. Lucy tended to navigate by law enforcement landmarks since part of her job as leader of the FBI's Sexual Assault Felony Enforcement Taskforce was coordinating the efforts of over two hundred municipal, county, state, and federal law enforcement agencies.

  Unlike the narrow streets north and south of it, the Raziqs lived on a wide boulevard off the major thoroughfares. It was a few blocks west of Westinghouse Park and another couple of blocks south of the ravine that carried the railroad tracks and municipal Busway. The street felt isolated in both time and space. A safe haven.

  Until tonight.

  They pulled up to the modest white frame Colonial and parked in front of the ME’s van. Walden went to gather witness statements and get the lay of the land from the city detectives. Lucy paused beside the Tahoe to take in the scene.

  The houses on this block were uniformly old, most a century at least. Some looked newly renovated, others in various stages of disrepair. Scattered across lawns and front porches were holiday decorations in an international festival of light celebrating Christmas, Kwanza, and Chanukah.

  Except this house. No decorations here. Not even a pink flamingo on the neatly mowed lawn. The shrubs were carefully bundled beneath burlap to shield them from the Pittsburgh winter, although it looked like they weren’t going to have a white Christmas, not this year. The only color came from the flashing amber lights on top an SUV parked haphazardly across the driveway, one tire trespassing onto the grass. Diamond Security, the logo read. Their reporting witness.

  Burroughs’ unmarked white Impala was a few doors down the street along with two marked radio cars, one on each side of the street.

  She felt stares from the surrounding houses, but no one was bold enough to come out and see for themselves what disaster had landed at their neighbor’s doorstep. Interesting. She wasn’t sure if it said more about the Raziqs or their neighbors.

  “How’s Kim?” Lucy asked Burroughs as he approached the Tahoe from the house.

  “Good. I think we’re going to make it this time.” He and his ex-wife had reconciled a few months ago. It suited him. He’d added a few pounds to his six-foot frame, filled in the hollows beneath his eyes. Even his wardrobe had undergone a face lift: instead of a variety of suits and shoes all in shades of brown matching his hair and eyes, today he wore a navy blue suit and black shoes. And his wedding ring, a definite good sign.

  “The boys?”

  His eyes lit up. “They’re great. Kevin made the traveling hockey team.”

  “Thought we were trying for a low profile?” She nodded to the lights on the SUV sitting across the drive.

  “Security guy saw the youngest, and ran back for his car, thought maybe he could get her to the ER.” Burroughs shook his head at the guard’s naiveté. “He’s over there,” he jerked a thumb over his shoulder to the shrubs shielding the driveway from the neighboring house, “puking his guts out, you want to talk to him.”

  “When did the father arrive?” Raziq, the gentleman insisting on making life difficult for the investigators trying to work his daughters’ murders. She couldn’t wait to hear what the story behind that was.

  “He got here right after I did. Screaming and cussing when we wouldn’t let him inside. Literally ripping his shirt. Threatened us in three different languages then demanded we call the Feds. Guess us local yokels weren’t good enough for him.”

  “Where’s he now?”

  Burroughs nodded to a patrol car across the street. “Back of a squad with a patrolman. Only way to shut him up and keep him out of our hair. Still haven’t heard back from the DEA.”

  Lucy sighed, hoped this didn’t turn into some kind of pissing contest with the cowboys over at Drug Enforcement.

  Burroughs read her expression effortlessly. “This one’s a ball buster. And I have a feeling it’s only going to get nuttier.”

  <><><>

  Text message received 16:24

  Tres: Police took bait. Have Raziq.

  Z: Maintain contact. Intercept on signal.

  Tres: Police?

  Z: Kill them all.

  Chapter 2

  “Run it down for me,” Lucy told Burroughs.

  “Rather you see it for yourself.”

  She glanced toward the squad car parked beneath a street lamp across the street. Shadows from a barren sycamore scratched the roof of the car like a skeleton’s fingers. Thankfully the vehicle pointed away from the house. The father sat in the back, alone. As far as she could make out in the faint light, the man sat facing front, away from the crime scene activity. “You made notification?”

  “Told him as little as I could. Enough to let him know his girls were gone.”

  “How’d he take it?” Death notifications were the worst part of a policeman’s job, but they also provided an opportunity to observe subjects at their most vulnerable. There was a damn good reason why cops were cynical: they had to be in order to separate true reactions from superb performances.

  Burroughs shrugged one shoulder, glancing over his shoulder towards the patrol car. “After his initial hissy fit, after it sank in, he choked up, tore the top button off his shirt trying to get air. A few tears, lots more shouts, then… nothing. Just shut down. Could be cultural, I don’t know.”

  She wished she knew more about Raziq, and why his name had popped up with a DEA flag attached. “They’re from Afghanistan?”

  “Right. The dad speaks English. British accent, kinda.”

  “Been here long?”

  “A little more than a year.”

  “We brought them here. Any idea why?” she asked, trying to get a handle on the politics and the DEA involvement.

  “Not sure. Once a Taliban, now a Yankee Doodle Dandy, or something like that. Here to help the good ole US of A with its war on drugs, I guess.”

  She thought about that. DEA, Afghanistan… the two together meant drug violence. Could that violence have traveled halfway around the world to Pittsburgh, targeting two little girls?

  “No signs of drugs in the house?” It wouldn’t be the first time the DEA had allied with a dealer. One of the problems working drugs: often you were forced to choose the lesser of two evils.

  “Nope. Clean as a nun’s habit. A few weapons, but they’re mainly antiques. Showpieces.”

  They walked past the SUV blocking the driveway, Burroughs pausing to reach inside and turn the flashing lights off, and continued up the path to a uniformed officer standing guard at the front door. Lucy showed him her credentials, which he duly noted on a clipboard. There was a cardboard box of surgical booties, hair caps, and gloves waiting at the threshold.

  “It’s bad, Lucy,” Burroughs murmured as they stood side by side, awkwardly donning the protective gear. “I mean, what those girls—” He gulped, looked away.

  “Are you thinking the father, Raziq, is our guy?” Lucy bent to slip shoe covers over her Reeboks. It wasn’t a court day for her, so she’d dressed in khakis and a fleece sweater—the Federal Building was always cold, no matter the time of year. The lightweight hair cap fought with her thick, long hair, but she managed to get it all tucked inside. She straightened, putting an extra pair of the Nitrile gloves into her parka pocket. Never hurt to be prepared.

  “I’m not thinking anything until I get forensic data and finish all the witness statements.” Good man. The more emotional a crime was, the easier it was to jump to conclusions too soon and close off avenues of investigation.

  She opened the door.

  Gasoline and burnt flesh mixed with metallic scent of fresh blood. Primitive reflexes made her gag and swallow. The smell of feces and urine wove their way into the olfactory mix. Burroughs waved a tube of menthol cream her way, but she declined. She’d experienced much worse; knew in a few minutes she’d cease to notice it.

  There was a living room to their rig
ht, dining room on the other side of the foyer, staircase leading up, and a narrow hallway leading to a kitchen at the rear of the house; a layout almost exactly like Lucy’s own home across the river.

  She pushed the thought aside and focused on reading the scene. Men and women worked throughout the house. Camera flashes going off upstairs, the medical examiner’s team in the living room waiting for the crime scene techs to finish documenting evidence. It was strangely hushed compared to most scenes. No banter, no gallows humor. Professionals concentrating on getting the job done as best as they could.

  The first bloody handprint was on the cream-colored wall of the staircase in front of them. It was low on the wall, below the banister. Tiny, smaller than Lucy’s. A child’s.

  “We think the girl interrupted our actor.” Pittsburgh slang for unknown subject, or Unsub in FBI parlance. No one called them perpetrators outside the movies and TV. “The little one, I mean. The older girl, she was the real target. He started with her—” Burroughs gestured for Lucy to enter the living room.

  Here the smell of burnt flesh was worse. There was more furniture than the room could comfortably accommodate: two couches, a coffee table, several smaller tables that appeared to be antiques, three boxy chairs with intricately carved teak backs and brightly upholstered cushions. Blood spatter fanned out in all directions from the center of the room where the brass coffee table had been knocked off its wooden base. The thick wool rug had a dark gold and burgundy print with the brighter scarlet of fresh blood sprayed across it like unholy confetti.

  Crime scene techs had unrolled plastic sheeting in a two-foot wide ribbon, skirting the evidence they had flagged, giving Lucy and Burroughs a safe path to walk across. She glimpsed the body behind Burroughs, but forced herself to stop and focus on the rest of the scene. One step at a time.

  Burroughs said, “ME said at least a dozen stab wounds, and from the arterial spray, hands cut off while she was still alive.”

  Lucy blinked away the thought of how much the girl must have suffered. Focus. “Restraints?”

  “Hard to tell, but none at the scene and no obvious ones left on the body.” He turned toward the large stone fireplace that took up the entire outside wall. It was tall enough that if Lucy ducked her head she could have stood inside it. The girl didn’t have that choice. She was curled up in a ball surrounded by partially burnt logs. Her flesh was black in some areas, angry red in others, in a few spots the skin had split from the heat. Lucy couldn’t tell if she wore clothing or not—if she had, it had fused to her flesh.

  “He shoved her inside, doused her with gasoline, lit her up.”

  “Still alive?” Lucy asked. Somehow her voice emerged in a neutral tone, as if the answer to that question didn't matter.

  Burroughs swallowed hard, pivoted to face away from the fireplace as the ME’s team prepared to move the body. “Preliminary exam says yes." He cleared his throat, obviously working hard to maintain his own neutrality. Working cases like this you learned to distance yourself. You had to, both to ensure that the investigation remained unbiased and to protect your sanity. "ME hopes he’s wrong. The autopsy will tell for sure.”

  Lucy forced herself to look. Her daughter Megan was thirteen, not much younger than their victim.

  Framed photos stood across the mantle, arranged with military precision. Most were of men carrying rifles or Kalshnikovs, a mountain range in the background like a serrated knife speared into hard-packed earth. Everything was muted grays and browns, the only color the men’s red embroidered caps. The buildings were mud-slab huts, the men dressed in long tunics and pants. Afghanistan, the Raziqs’ home country. Other photos featured men in sky-blue fatigues, American soldiers in camouflage, and bearded men in khaki uniforms. They were grinning, raising their weapons in triumph.

  The centerpiece was a larger photo, a family shot in an expensive silver-plated frame. In the background was the Washington Monument and people in shorts and t-shirts. In the foreground was a man, mid-forties, a woman a decade younger, two daughters ranging from waist-high to shoulder high, and an infant held in the mother’s arms. They smiled for the camera but looked stiff, posed, their bodies angled towards the father as if he were the center of their universe. The mother and daughters all wore long dresses with long sleeves, bright scarves over their heads, faces uncovered for the camera. Similar family photos—all of the entire family, none of individual members—crowded the end tables as well.

  “Raziq, wife Fatima, the two girls, and baby’s name is Ali,” Burroughs told her.

  “Any problems since they’ve been here?” Lucy asked.

  “Nothing major, far as we know. Neighbors report a few domestic squabbles between him and his oldest.” He nodded to the girl in the fireplace. He hadn’t said her name out loud since his initial call asking for her help.

  “Mina.” Lucy was a firm believer in personalizing victims. Resurrecting their humanity. “What were they arguing about?”

  “Typical teenager stuff. She met a guy.”

  “American?”

  “Jewish kid from Squirrel Hill. Mom and Dad disapproved.”

  “So, possible honor killing.” Now she understood why Raziq was sitting in the back of a squad car. Definitely a person of interest in addition to being the grieving father. Plus an official guest of the US government. Any statement he made needed to be recorded three ways from Sunday, free of any coercion. “And the other victim?”

  “The other daughter. Badria.” He beckoned to her to follow and led her into the kitchen. “She was four.”

  More blood here in the kitchen, but instead of being sprayed all over, it was concentrated in one area. Around a little girl’s body, her skin unnaturally pale in contrast to the blood. She lay on her side on the white tile floor, hands curled up in fists as if fighting off Death. Her throat was slit.

  Lucy crouched low, avoiding the blood. “No hesitation marks.” She looked around. The furniture, a large oak table with six chairs, one of them with a colorful high chair strapped to it, appeared undisturbed. “And no struggle.”

  “Such a tiny thing, it wouldn’t have mattered.”

  “Yeah, but he hadn’t planned on killing her, was caught off guard. Was she even supposed to be at home?”

  “No. Mom took Ali to visit a family friend in Cranberry who’d just had a baby. I sent a squad for them, should be there soon, give or take with rush hour traffic. The little girl was supposed to go with them but had a cold, so mom left her with the oldest girl at the last minute.”

  “And the dad?”

  “Supposedly at his office. We’ll confirm with receptionist and assistant.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Shipping company near the Mon wharf. They handle barge traffic, tugboats, that kind of stuff.”

  “Must pay okay,” she murmured, thinking about the antiques and hand-crafted Middle Eastern heirlooms that cluttered the living room. A desert dweller in the shipping industry. Maybe Raziq had wanted a fresh start here in the States, leaving his desert roots behind. Cut all ties to his former life.

  “Used to be some big shot with the Afghan National Drug Police. Lots of those positions are bought rather than earned, so maybe he brought his money with him from the old country.” Burroughs sounded like he already resented the guy. Lucy forced herself to keep an open mind until she had more facts.

  “No forced entry?” She looked across the kitchen to the back door. No signs of any obvious damage.

  “No evidence of it. New security system but it was off during the action.”

  “Wait, I thought it was tripped—wasn’t that how the guard got here?”

  “Tripped, yes. But as they left. They went out the back door, left it unlocked. Only thing caught by the cameras was the back of one guy running through the trees. Worthless.”

  “They were smart enough to disable it or talk one of the victims into turning it off, yet stupid enough to trip it on the way out?” Made no sense. “Unless they wanted us to find the
bodies. Didn’t want to wait for the parents to get home.”

  Burroughs shrugged one shoulder. Lucy filed the thought away for further consideration once they had more to go on.

  She stood and pivoted back towards the living room. “If Mina was the primary target, there was a lot of screaming, a struggle. Blood… Badria heard it, came in, got blood on her hand—”

  “And her feet,” Burroughs pointed out. “You can see her trail if you angle the light against the carpet.”

  They used the protective plastic sheeting the crime scene techs had put down as a path and crossed through the living room. Burroughs squatted and used his high-intensity pocket light to show her the tiny footprints.

  “She runs," Lucy continued. "He stops what he’s doing, grabs her, subdues her, and slashes her throat with one swipe of his blade. Why doesn’t the older girl, Mina, run out, get help?”

  “Maybe she can’t. Too weak from blood loss. He cut her hands off while she was still alive, she would have collapsed, been in shock.”

  “Did we find the hands?”

  Burroughs took a second, his gaze moving beyond her, before answering. “No. Actor must have taken them with him.”

  Lucy paced the distance back and forth between the two rooms. “How about the accelerant he used on the fire?”

  “Gone.” Burroughs watched her from the foyer. “The knife, too.”

  Lucy stopped in the middle of the living room, realized what was wrong. “The coffee table is the only piece of furniture knocked out of place.”

  “So?”

  “So, you’re one man subduing a teenaged girl, holding her down as she fights for her life, stabbing her, slicing off her hands, then chasing after her little sister—don’t you think there’d be more signs of disruption?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “We have more than one Unsub here. At least two.”

  Burroughs frowned. “Doesn’t mean Raziq can’t be one of them.”

  “If it wasn’t him, do we have a motive?”