Bad Girls Read Online Free Page B

that frequently.
     
     
    Randy Hunter and several other MWPD officers, who arrived on the scene to back him up, weren’t in the house all that long. When Hunter and the other police officers emerged, Rick Cruz heard additional sirens—other cops and an ambulance. Now it all seemed real to the Cruzes. Something had happened—something terrible, something sinister, and maybe even deadly.
    Officer Hunter must have found something inside the house, Rick Cruz surmised, looking on.
    Hunter came out and walked over to Rick and Kathy as additional cops and the emergency medical technician (EMT) van pulled up. “I’ll need that gun, Mr. Cruz.”
    Rick handed it over. “What’s going on?”
    The officer didn’t say anything.
    “What is it?” Rick asked.
    The cop said nothing.
    Then again, he didn’t have to. The look on his face, the arriving officers and EMTs, said it all. What had started hours earlier as a “maybe” was now something much more serious. Someone had been shot. No doubt about it. And by the look of it, Rick and Kathy Cruz knew while standing there in Bob’s driveway, sizing up the scene as it unfolded in front of them, that the cop was in no hurry to help the victim out. And that could mean only one thing.
     
     
    By now, the MWPD believed there were possibly two victims inside what was an absolute garbage dump of a house on Twentieth Street. Police found a male and a female. Or a mother and her son, as it turned out. That first responding officer, Randy Hunter, knew the man was dead. But the woman, she was alive—just barely. The MWPD had no idea what happened: how, why, when, or by whom. They only inferred that a gun was somehow involved. Hunter and his team of responding officers did a cursory search of the house, where they had found the one man, presumably Bob—unresponsive, lying on a bed, cold to the touch, dead as road kill.
    As Hunter walked into that second bedroom and the arm fell off the bed, he heard a groan. And it scared him.
    What in the hell? Hunter thought.
    Not another DB .
    There was an elderly woman awake in her bed in that adjacent room, buried under a mound of covers. The room was a complete mess, “junked out,” said one law enforcement source. There were empty Happy Meal boxes all over the place. The old woman had been watching television, actually. And when Hunter approached, weapon drawn, ready and expecting to find her dead, too, she looked at him quizzically and wondered what in the world was going on. It was obvious that she had been underfed and was perhaps suffering from malnutrition and some form of dementia.
    “Out of it,” one cop told me later. She was totally oblivious to the fact that the man—her son—in the room next to her was dead. “Once she got some fluids in her, though, she bounced back quickly and was, she let us know, totally surprised that the cops were in her house.”
    One report had her sitting up in bed at one point, saying, “Is there anything wrong, Officer?” Meanwhile, Hunter was digging her out of the covers she was buried under when he realized she was alive.
    The responding officers were smart not to touch or meddle with the crime scene. It’s amazing how many first responders muck up what can be a slippery slope when walking into a crime scene involving a potential homicide victim. It’s those first responders, most forensic scientists will agree, that can make or break a case depending on how they go about closing off and securing a scene. In this case, the MWPD had trained its officers properly—apparently. There was a protocol and it had seemed to be followed.

    Thirty-five-year-old MWPD Detective Brian Boetz was at home, already done for the day, enjoying his life outside work, when the call came.
    “We have what appears to be a double homicide . . . out on Twentieth Street,” dispatch said.
    “Got it. On my way.”
    One murder in Mineral Wells on a Wednesday evening was beyond rare. But two ? That got Boetz’s attention