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Even as I put my hand on the gate, I knew I was way off the rails here. Tina Strichler’s murder was being worked by Inspectors Michaels and Wang of our department, but even though they were new, or maybe because of that, I didn’t feel comfortable asking them to look into a fairly baseless hunch conceived by Joe and me.
Still, a hunch was hard to put aside. And I had to check it out. I went through the gate and up the poured-cement path to the front door, upon which was taped another NO TRESPASSING AND THAT MEANS YOU notice.
I pressed the buzzer.
I heard a dog woofing deep inside the house, and a man’s voice said, “OK, Hauser. Let’s see who this damned son of a bitch is.”
There were sounds behind the door, a peephole sliding, a chain coming off a track, a bolt unracking. Given the modest means of residents of this neighborhood, either Wayne Broward was stashing gold bullion at home, or he was an officer in a one-man war.
Or maybe he had stabbed a woman to death on each of the past five May twelfths.
There was more barking, and then the door was pulled open. A brown-haired white man of average height and weight, in a denim shirt and jeans, holding a Winchester rifle, showed himself in the slice of open doorway.
“What the fuck do you want?” he asked.
“I’m Sergeant Lindsay Boxer,” I said, showing him my badge. “I’m looking for Wayne Lawrence Broward.”
The dog, a boxer as it turned out, lunged at the door, and the gent with the rifle used his leg to push the dog back from the doorway.
“I said, ‘What. The fuck. Do you want?’”
I pushed my badge forward. “I’m the police. Put the gun down.”
The man in the doorway scowled, but he lowered the muzzle.
I took a photo of Tina Strichler from my breast pocket. Her bloody death on a pedestrian crossing in front of about a hundred tourists was still vivid in my mind.
I said, “Do you know this woman?”
Broward peered at the photo, then opened the door wide and said, “Why didn’t you say so? Come in.”
CHAPTER 63
BROWARD HAD AS much as said he recognized Tina Strichler. But I wanted to hear him actually say it.
“You know this woman?” I asked.
“Come in,” he said. “I don’t bite. Even Hauser don’t bite.”
He yanked on the dog’s collar, shoved the dog into a bedroom, and closed the door.
I put my hand on my gun, cautiously entered the house, and looked around. The interior of the place looked like American Pickers meets Hoarding: Buried Alive.
There wasn’t one inch of clean or uncluttered surface. There were live chickens in a slatted box under a table, canned food stacked against the walls to the ceiling, boxes of ammo on countertops, and guns hanging from racks on the walls.
I scanned the room for trophies of dead women. I was looking for photos or newspaper clippings taped to the wall or signs of the abused wife. I also looked for a collection of assorted knives that might have been used to commit murder and then been taken away by the killer.
But mainly, I was so stunned by the chaos that I lost sight of Broward—until I felt a cold gun muzzle against the back of my neck.
Wayne Broward said, “Why don’t you take off your gun and stay awhile.”
“Love to,” I said, fear and shame flooding my body to my fingertips and out through my eyes. I was a jerk. I’d walked right into this, and I might die in this very room.
“I’m taking my gun out very slowly,” I said, my back to him. “Just using my fingertips.”
As I was trained to do, I spun around fast, knocked the barrel of Broward’s rifle away from me, grabbed the rifle with both hands, and wrenched it out of Broward’s grip, throwing him off balance. I flung the rifle far from where I stood. As it clattered against a wall hung with hubcaps, I pulled my Glock and leveled it at Broward’s nose.
From the chill at the back of my neck to the Glock in my hand took about ten seconds, but it felt like the last ten seconds of my life. Hauser was barking his head off, and I wondered at my luck, that Broward had underestimated me and had put the dog behind a door.
