Chapter 2 - The Porch Light at 1427
The cruisers didn't run their sirens south of South Grand Avenue.
Daniel Harris turned the Crown Victoria’s spotlight turret four inches to the left, letting the narrow beam skim the concrete curb where the grass grew out of the expansion joints. The street was quiet in the way working-class streets are quiet on a Tuesday: three-year-old pickups in the gravel drives, blue glow from basement televisions coming through the clerestory windows, and the smell of cut rye grass that had dried in the afternoon heat and was now taking on the damp from the lake.
"House on the right," María López said from the passenger seat. She already had her tactical notebook tucked into the front of her carrier, her right hand resting on the retention hood of her Glock 17. "The split-level with the silver Dodge in the drive."
The Dodge had a ladder rack made of unpainted three-inch angle iron bolted to the bed rails. A magnetic sign on the door read: MILLER GENERAL CONTRACTING — REMODELING & REPAIR.
Daniel killed the headlights twenty yards short of the apron. The cruiser rolled to a halt on the asphalt with a soft, hydraulic hiss from the front calipers.
"Dispatch had the line open two minutes ago," Daniel said, not looking at her as he hooked his thumb under the lapel mic. "Unit 12 on scene. No visible movement. House dark on the ground floor; light on the second-story north corner."
They walked up the concrete path in single file. The path had cracked where a silver maple root had heaved the second slab three inches high; Daniel stepped over it by muscle memory, his size-eleven Danner boots making no sound on the aggregate.
The porch was small—four by six, poured concrete with an iron railing that had rusted out where the posts entered the core-drilled holes. A yellow bug light burned inside an aluminum housing above the bell.
María didn't use the bell. She used the heel of her hand against the storm door frame, three rapid, flat raps that made the aluminum vibrate in its tracks.
"Police Department."
Inside, thirty feet away, a light flicked on in the hallway. It was that soft, forty-watt yellow of a ceiling globe with two of the three sockets burned out.
Footsteps came down the split-level stairs—five risers down to the entry landing. They had the heavy, heel-first cadence of a man who spent his days in double-soled work boots and hadn't quite adjusted his gait to his socks.
The interior door opened.
Thomas Miller was forty-one, with the square, muscular neck of an ironworker who had moved into drywall and framing after his rotator cuffs started clicking in the cold. He was wearing a grey heather pocket-T with two grease spots near the hem and faded denim shorts that hung below his knees. His hair was cropped short, wet at the temples as if he had just ducked his head under the bathtub faucet, and his eyes had that slightly glassy, unblinking focus of a man who had been pulled out of an adrenaline spike and was trying to force his pupils to dilate normally.
"Officers," he said. His voice was lower than it had been on the telephone wire—thick, pleasant, with the flat, round vowels of the Illinois corn country. "Something happen on the block?"
Daniel didn't look at his eyes. Daniel looked at the three inches of clearance between Miller’s left hip and the door jamb.
"Got a call from this address, sir," Daniel said.
"From here?" Miller gave a dry, rhythmic snort through his nostrils, his mouth pulling up at the left corner. "Couldn't have been. I’ve been down in the basement running the table saw until ten minutes ago. Just came up to wash off the sawdust."
"Anyone else in the house, Mr. Miller?" María asked. She had moved six inches to the left, off the porch landing and onto the turf, her angle clearing the frame so she could see through the narrow sidelight window that ran parallel to the lock stile.
"Just my daughter," Miller said. His left hand came up to the jamb, his fingers curling over the casing. The nails were short, blackened at the margins by wood stain or dry grease. "She’s been down since eight. She’s got the summer school reading program over at Dubois tomorrow morning."
"We need to see her," Daniel said.
Miller’s smile didn't vanish; it simply ceased to have any blood behind it.
"Look, Officer... Harris, right? I know you guys have a job to do, but she’s eight years old. Her mother passed three years ago this August. She gets night terrors. If I wake her up with two uniforms on the landing, she’s going to be off the wall until daylight."
From the top of the seven risers that led to the upper bedrooms, a stair tread let out a thin, dry creak.
Daniel shifted his weight to the balls of his boots.
A pair of small feet—bare, the skin pale against the dark brown indoor-outdoor carpet that covered the stairs—appeared on the landing between the second and third baluster.
Emily Miller was small for eight. She was wearing a pair of flannel pajamas with small red strawberries printed on the legs, though the fabric had been washed until the berries were the color of faded brick. Her left hand was knotted into the throat of a grey stuffed hare that had lost its glass eyes and had been mended at the shoulder with black button thread.
Her right arm was behind her back.
"Daddy?" she whispered.
Miller didn't turn around immediately. He kept his shoulder pressed against the storm door, his head tilting back just far enough to address the ceiling above the risers.
"Emily," he said, and his voice was very soft, sweet as corn syrup that had sat in an open tin until the bees found it. "Go back into your room, baby. Daddy’s talking to the city men."
The girl didn't move.
She didn't look at her father’s back. She looked through the two-inch gap between the door and the jamb, directly into the reflective center of Daniel Harris’s badge.
Her lower jaw was shaking—not the quick chatter of a child who has stayed in the municipal pool until her lips turn blue, but the slow, muscular tremor of an animal whose windpipe has been pinched until the oxygen in the blood drops below eighty percent.
María López took one step forward, her boot crossing the aluminum threshold into the six-by-six linoleum entryway.
"Emily," María said, her voice dropping into that warm, conversational register she used with her own nieces when they came off the bus with skinned shins. "Come down here for a second, sweetie. I like your rabbit."
Miller’s left elbow twitched backward, his arm dropping across the entry like an oak two-by-four falling into a gate latch.
"Officer," Miller said, and the syrup was entirely gone from the words now; they were just flat, unplaned pine. "I told you. She’s fine. You’re trespassing on private property without an exigent warrant."
Daniel Harris didn't reach for his baton. He didn't unholster his sidearm.
May you like
He set the palm of his left hand flat against the center of Thomas Miller’s chest, right over the grease spot on the pocket-T, and drove his heel back into the concrete of the porch with ninety pounds of leveraged hip behind it.
"Step back, Thomas," Daniel said into the man’s teeth. "Step back right now."
