Third Chances Read online

  Third Chances

  A Luca Mystery Book 4

  by Dan Petrosini

  Copyright © 2018 Dan Petrosini

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, contact [email protected]

  Available in Print and Ebook

  First edition 2018

  Table of Content

  Other Books by Dan

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Other Books by Dan

  Luca Mystery Series

  Am I the Killer—Book 1

  Vanished—Book 2

  The Serenity Murder— Book 3

  Third Chances—Book 4

  A Cold, Hard Case —Book 5

  Coming Soon – Book 6 A Luca Mystery

  Other works by Dan Petrosini

  The Final Enemy

  Complicit Witness

  Push Back

  Ambition Cliff

  Acknowledgements

  Writing would not be possible without the love and support of my wife, Julie, and daughters Stephanie and Jennifer.

  A shout out to Squad Sergeant, Craig Perrelli, for his counsel on making sure I keep it aligned with the real world of law enforcement.

  Chapter 1

  It was 8:07 when I pulled up to Joey Chapman’s apartment off Goodlette. A light drizzle intensified as Joey trotted to my car. The timing was perfect. The Dark Sky app said heavy rain would hit around 8:22. God was truly in control.

  Joey jumped in, brushing the rain out of his hair. “It’s gonna come down.”

  I pulled away. “You can set your watch to the summer rain.”

  “Whaddaya need help with?”

  “You’ll see when we get there.”

  “What are you, all full of mysterious shit?”

  “A friend from church is down-and-out. That’s all.”

  Joey reached for the radio. “What the hell you listening to? It’s like elevator shit.”

  Passing under 75, heading east as Chapman hunted for a country music station, I kept thinking, who’s going to eliminate evil sinners, if not me? They’ve had opportunities for redemption and blown them all. They’re irredeemable.

  I snaked off and on Collier Boulevard, back to Golden Gate, making small talk. Approaching Wilson Boulevard, I said, “The devil has a hold on you, Joey.”

  “What the fuck you talking about?”

  “When The Spirit of Fellowship took you in, you promised you’d get right with God. But it’s one thing after another with you.”

  “Hey, I’m trying to change. It ain’t so easy.”

  “You’re hopeless, you’re not interested in changing.”

  “Bullshit. I’m making progress.”

  The windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with the volume of water, so I slowed down.

  “We’ve got different definitions of progress, Joey. You robbed that convenience store in Bonita and put that poor man into a coma.”

  “No way. I had nothing to do with that.”

  I shook my head. “Lying only compounds your sin, Joseph.”

  “I swear to God, it wasn’t me.”

  “Look at you. Now you’re taking the name of God in vain.”

  “I’m just saying it wasn’t me.”

  “Larry told me you asked him to commit the crime with him.”

  “He’s a fucking rat.”

  I checked the rearview mirror—not a car in sight—and pulled over.

  “Why you stopping here for?”

  “You’re getting out.”

  “What, are you kidding me? in this rain?”

  Hand trembling, I reached under my thigh. Ignoring my back pain, I pulled a Colt .45 automatic out. “Get out. Now!”

  “You fucking kidding me? You grow balls or something?”

  “Out!”

  As Chapman got out, he said, “You’re fucking crazy, you know that?”

  Sliding into the passenger seat, I opened the window. “Step away from the car.”

  He took two steps back, and I fired two bullets into the heathen’s chest. Chapman collapsed into the gully, sending a splash into the air. I looked left and right—was he dead? It was tough to see if he was breathing, with all the rain. Opening the door, I hung on to the steering wheel and leaned out. Chapman was facedown, water covering his ears. He couldn’t be breathing.

  A smile erupted on my face. Pride coursed through my body. It felt unbelievable being God’s avenger, exactly as Romans 13:4 said, ‘I was God’s servant, an avenger carrying out God’s wrath on wrongdoers.’

  We were in a battle with evil to the end, and I was finally a warrior for the Lord.

  I was tired of all the talking, begging people to change. It was the same worthless plea made for centuries. History proved people don’t change when the devil gets a hold of them. Once Satan corrupts them, they’re beyond saving.

  I knew God would protect me as I carried out his work, but I had to be smart about it, lest I be taken off the battlefield.

  Chapter 2

  Grayness battled the sun for supremacy on the morning of June twenty-fifth. It was only 8:10. By nine, the sun would prevail, as it always did. Pulling behind three police cars with blazing lights, I took a long look around. It was as close to desolate as you could get fifteen minutes from Golden Gate. Was time an issue for whoever did this?

  The responding officers had restricted traffic to a single lane on the opposite side of the road from where the body lay. It wasn’t enough. I shouted an order to have the road completely closed. Who knew what we’d find combing both sides of the roadway?

  As two patrol cars maneuvered into blocking positions, I approached the body. A Caucasian male, medium build with dark hair, lay sprawled headfirst in a drainage gully. A thin, black jacket was scrunched up, revealing a white tee shirt and a hint of a tattoo. Plant particles and dirt were scattered on his shoulders and hair, unfortunate evidence that water had rushed over him.

 
; Pulling on gloves and booties, I stepped into the muddy gully. The corpse’s face lay on its right cheek, and his left eye looked hazed over. Bending over, a chill shot up my spine as a red ant crawled out of his nose. I took note of a thin scar on his forehead before reaching into the back pockets of his worn jeans.

  A cheap wallet, which I bagged, was in the left pocket and a phone in the right. The phone wouldn’t turn on. I couldn’t tell if it was the battery or if it had shorted from getting wet and dropped it into another bag. Either way, the lab would get me the contacts and usage information.

  It took two of us to roll the body over. He looked to be in his mid-thirties. Caked with mud, the victim’s right eye was open, no doubt dead when he collapsed. His white tee shirt was reddish brown, partially masking two entrance wounds, one in the left pectoral area and the other, dead center, below the rib cage. I wanted to check the front pockets, but they were caked with dirt. I wouldn’t risk losing any forensic evidence. We eased the body back to its original position as the CSI van pulled up.

  A pair of crime scene investigators I’d worked with, more than I cared to recall, approached. I told them how I handled the body, and left, hoping they’d give me something to work with. As four of the uniformed officers began a grid search for evidence, including bullet shells, I took out the wallet.

  According to the driver’s license, the victim was Joseph L. Chapman. Residing on 104th Street, the thirty-six-year-old was five eight and a hundred and fifty-five pounds. The wallet was stuffed with twenty-dollar bills and contained a Visa debit card and two pictures that were impossible to decipher. After bagging it, I called Vargas, asking her to look into Chapman.

  ***

  Vargas gave me a warm smile when I got to the office.

  “Looks like you need some coffee, Frank. I’ll get you a cup.”

  “It’s okay, I’ll get my own. What’d you get on Chapman?”

  “You'd better grab a coffee. This guy has a long history, and none of it’s good.”

  Moving close to Vargas’s desk, I caught a whiff of her candy-like perfume. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Chapman spent half his life behind bars. Break-ins, a handful of armed robberies, and two nasty assaults are the highlights. He wasn’t on the outside long. Chapman just got out of Immokalee seven months ago.”

  “Parole?”

  Vargas nodded. “Shiler was his parole officer. Third time he had him.”

  I slumped into a chair. “We’ve got to waste time chasing this down? Whoever killed him did us a favor.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m just saying, this Chapman was a punk, and we’ve got to waste resources on finding who finally stopped him?”

  “So, you’d rather do nothing and let some vigilante mete out justice?”

  I frowned. “I was hoping we could bury this somehow. You know I need to take some time off to find a place to live.”

  “I told you, the cabana is all yours.”

  It was perfect, but Vargas and I had just started dating. We’d had three dates, and things were going well. Even though the cabana was separate, we’d know each other’s comings and goings, and it didn’t feel right.

  “Believe me, it’d make things a helluva a lot easier and take the pressure off, but I don’t want to, you know, screw things up between us.”

  “Come on, Frank, we’re adults.”

  Maybe one of us was. I lowered my voice. “But I really want this to work with us.”

  “That’s sweet, Frank. I understand. Whatever you’re comfortable with is good by me.”

  Chapter 3

  After reading the title of an email, I said, “Hey, Vargas, the autopsy on Chapman came in.”

  “Anything?” Vargas came around my desk. Her honeysuckle perfume sure smelled good. It was the same one Kayla used to wear. She was something, someone who I thought would work out for me. I wondered if she was with anybody and whether I should risk calling her when Vargas said,

  “Hello? You there, Frank?”

  “Yeah, yeah. The bullets were hollow points. Whoever it was wasn’t taking any chances Chapman would survive. Maybe there was something, a secret of some kind, the killer wanted to die with Chapman.”

  “They never found any shells at the scene, right?”

  “Nothing. The killer picked them up.”

  “Maybe, but I was thinking, what if he or she shot this guy from a car or truck. The shells could’ve ended up in the car.”

  I really liked Vargas, she was a good detective, but I was getting tired of her coming up with scenarios that I used to spit out. Losing my bladder to cancer wasn’t enough? The chemo had to take my memory?

  “I was thinking the same thing. When we track this down, we’ll have to look for any burn markings the casings might have left.”

  “Besides the hollow point info, there’s nothing but a time of death of around nine p.m.”

  “Forensics discover anything?”

  “Nada. Said the rain could’ve washed away any fibers or hairs,” Vargas replied, adding, “Let’s start with the victim’s mother.”

  I had zero interest wasting time on a small-time thug, but I wasn’t gonna say anything and be labeled insensitive.

  ***

  Chapman’s mother lived in one of a series of yellow cinder-block units off Terry Street in Bonita. Vargas and I were greeted by loud Mexican music that was spilling out of the open windows in the next apartment. No air-conditioning? In late June?

  Anita Chapman, a bird of a woman, showed us in. There was a galley kitchen and a bedroom beyond the living room. It was tiny but clean and it had a window AC unit humming away. There was a smell of something that’d been baked. If nothing else, maybe we’d get a cookie out of the visit.

  Vargas said, “Please accept our condolences, ma’am. We know how difficult this must be, but we need your help and have some questions for you.”

  “It’s a parent’s worst nightmare to have your child die before you do.”

  I swallowed hard, pulling out my notebook.

  Vargas said, “We’re sorry.”

  “Joseph wasn’t an easy child, but I can tell you, it doesn’t make it any easier.”

  Her lips quivered, and Vargas rubbed her back.

  “Why don’t we sit down?”

  My stomach reacted to a plate of cookies on the counter. Eyes on the dish, I pulled a chair away from the kitchen table, and Chapman’s mother sat.

  “Mrs. Chapman, we need your help with some background on your son.”

  Vargas glared at me and said, “If you’re ready to talk. Can I get you a drink of water?”

  She nodded. “Thanks. I’m okay, what do you want to know?”

  Vargas asked, “When was the last time you saw your son?”

  “Day before yesterday. He came to see me, said he was doing good, even paid back some money he’d borrowed.”

  I said, “Mind if we ask how much?”

  “Five hundred dollars.”

  I said, “That’s a lot of money. You know where he got it?”

  “I stopped asking a long time ago. Look, my son was no angel, but he seemed to be doing good.” Her voice took on a vibrato quality. “He had a tough time growing up.”

  “He was bullied?”

  She nodded. “Joey was different, and everybody knows that kids can be mean.”

  Amen to that. Even this detective gets embarrassed when he recalls the taunting he took part in.

  I said, “What about his friends? Anything you can tell us? Was there anyone new?”

  “He was mostly a loner. I mean he had some friends and all, but he kinda bounced around.”

  I said, “Joseph had been in a lot of trouble with the law over the years. Most people like him tend to hang around with the same crowd.”

  “I never liked the people he ran around with, and I told him so. But I was talking to myself. I don’t know. what he really needed was a father around to str
aighten him out.”

  Vargas reached across the table and patted her hand. “I’m sure you did the best you could.”

  “But you know, it’s funny, maybe he was listening after all, because the other day he said he was leaving to meet a friend from church.”

  I felt bad for this lady. Who knew if she was a good mother or not? End of the day, her kid was lying on a stainless-steel tray in the county morgue.

  Vargas asked, “Is there anyone you could think of that could do something like this to Joseph?”

  She shook her head. “No, I can’t imagine anything like that. Maybe you should check with Paulie Lenin. Joseph and he used to be close.”

  We asked a few more questions, said our goodbyes, and headed for the car without a cookie.

  Pulling away from the curb, I said, “That was a complete waste of time, time I don’t have.”

  “We know he was flush with cash.”

  “You ask me, Chapman pulled a job, and whoever he did it with offed him.”

  “Maybe he stole from the wrong people. A narcotics dealer or something.”

  Another angle I should have thought of. “Could be, but they did us a favor.”

  Phone in hand, Vargas exhaled. “You know, Frank, sometimes you can be an ass.”

  “Just sometimes?”

  Vargas, phone to ear, shook her head as she tracked down where Paul Lenin lived.

  ***

  Appropriately named, Moss Wood Road had a collection of wood-framed houses, horseshoed around a gravel driveway. The homes were checkered with plywood patches and blue tarps on the roofs. These places would be destroyed in the next hurricane, if the big bad wolf didn’t come by first.

  Pulling up, a flash of red caught my eye. A guy in a tee shirt was walking away from Lenin’s place carrying two red bottles of Tide.

  “There he is.” Vargas pointed to a covered car park framed by a pair of spindly palm trees.

  Loud rap music, now that’s an oxymoron. rap and music in the same sentence, assaulted us as we approached. A tall man with a shaved head and a beard was on a stool next to a folding table.

  “Paul Lenin?”

  “Yeah, you cops?”

  I hadn’t yet pulled my badge, but the criminal element had a sixth sense when it came to law enforcement. Their problem was it didn’t extend past recognition.