Free Silent Thunder by Loren D. Estleman Page A

Sitting there sweating in the sun with all four windows open, I read it.
Police have linked the armed invasion of a house in the 1600 block of Pembroke last night with four previous robberies conducted in the Detroit metropolitan area over the past two weeks.
    Shortly after 8:00 p.m. yesterday, police said, four men in ski masks and armed with light automatic rifles burst through the front door of a house occupied by Dr. Anton Juracik and his wife Marian and threatened to kill the couple if they did not surrender all the cash and drugs in the house. When Dr. Juracik resisted, one of the intruders struck him in the face with the butt of his weapon, knocking him unconscious, police said.
    According to police, Mrs. Juracik then turned over an undisclosed amount of cash, whereupon she was struck on the side of the head with a blunt instrument which police believe to have been either the barrel or the butt of an automatic rifle. Police said the bandits then ransacked the house and left with a videocassette recorder, two color television sets, a number of stereo components, and jewelry valued at $18,500.
    Dr. Juracik was treated for a broken nose at Detroit General Hospital and released later in the evening. Mrs. Juracik remains in critical condition there with a fractured skull and a severe concussion.
    “This robbery is definitely connected with similar actions which occurred in Detroit, Grosse Point, Iroquois Heights, and Flatrock within the last two weeks,” reported Inspector John Alderdyce of the Detroit Police Department, who has been placed in charge of the investigation. “The police of all four communities are cooperating in this effort and we have a number of definite leads.”
    The article, which continued inside the first section, recapped the four previous robberies, including a casualty count of six injured homeowners and an estimated take totaling $110,000.
    Alderdyce’s statement was half lie and half sin of omission. The police of four neighboring communities couldn’t cooperate in the same life raft, and the “definite leads” would number around ten thousand. I read the article again, then put the paper back together and tossed it into the back seat.
    Despite her taste in clothes, make-up, furniture, and personnel, Ma Chaney was fastidious. She wouldn’t save an article just because it caught her eye, but she’d be the type to keep a record. The targets of the five home invasions, all located in high-income neighborhoods and belonging to professional people approaching middle age, hadn’t been chosen at random. The careful planning extended to the choice of weapons, full automatic rifles instead of the usual run of cheap revolvers and pump shotguns. You don’t buy military assault weapons behind a diner on Sherman. For that you go to Macomb County.
    I was weighing the pluses and minuses of going back there myself when the door on the passenger’s side opened and a man climbed in beside me. He was slender, in an unlined powder-blue jacket and white duck pants that made him look cool despite the heat, and a cocoa straw hat with a narrow brim turned down in front. He had a thin, café au lait face with a mealy complexion and one of those pencil moustaches that would have looked more at home, like the man himself, with an all-white drill suit and a pitcher of margaritas on a verandah overlooking a firing squad.
    “Amos Walker, I think.” He had a slight, almost too slight, Latin accent. It had been worked on, then allowed to slip back, possibly in a fit of ethnic pride.
    “Is that a question?”
    “I’m Lieutenant Philip Romero. My chief would like to speak with you.”
    “Which chief would that be?”
    He unbuttoned his jacket, exposing a bone-handled .38 in a holster with a gold shield pinned to it bearing the elaborate old-fashioned Iroquois Heights city seal.
    “Oh,” I said. “That chief.”

11
    L IEUTENANT R OMERO indicated a man in uniform standing next to the car on the driver’s side.