Never the Crime

by Colin Conway

  “Hi,” the girl said with a bright smile.

  “Well, you’re not in season,” Garrett said.

  “Huh?”

  “Volleyball. It’s a fall sport.”

  “Oh.” Her smile broadened. “I like the shorts.”

  “Is your dad home?”

  “Who should I say is here?”

  “Tyler Garrett.”

  “Be right back,” she said, keeping her eyes on him as she walked away.

  Garrett waved to her as she left. She giggled then and hurried away. He stepped back and looked into the living room. The television show went to commercial. A blurb for the eleven o’clock news came on highlighting an in-depth investigation into the accusations facing Councilman Patrick Armstrong.

  He turned his attention back to the front of the house as Dennis Hahn approached. “Officer Garrett,” he said as he pushed the screen door open. “It’s good to see you again.” Hahn smiled and stuck his hand out which Garrett shook. “Everything okay?”

  Garrett was in black slacks and a thin gray sweater. “Yeah, I’m off duty.”

  “Well, that’s a relief. What can I do for you, Ty?”

  “You have nice-looking family, Councilman.”

  Hahn’s smile faded slightly. “Thank you,” he said, a hint of suspicion in his voice.

  Garrett stepped back on the porch to watch Hahn’s wife and daughters through the window, laughing and dancing with each other. The other Hahn daughter wore yoga pants and a tight long-sleeve T-shirt.

  “Bad news about Armstrong and Buckner, huh?” Garrett asked.

  “Yes,” Hahn said, stepping next to Garrett to see what he was watching inside the house.

  “They say bad news travels in threes. What do you say to that, Denny?”

  Hahn glanced at Garrett, to the window, then back to Garrett. Hahn pulled the front door closed, muting most of the dance music. “I’ve already talked with Officer Stone.”

  “About what?” Garrett asked, still paying attention to the Hahn women as they laughed and played. “Your wife is very attractive. You did well, Denny. I can see where your daughters get their looks.”

  The councilman remained silent.

  “Say, how old are those girls?”

  Hahn pulled back from him. “What?”

  “They look about the same age as Betty Rabe. What do you think?” Garrett glanced at the councilman then. “Was she a surrogate for one of them? Maybe both?”

  Hahn’s eyes snapped to the window then back to Garrett. “No!” The councilman moved away from the window. “It’s not what you think.”

  “I know what it was. You were dicking a seventeen-year-old. Doesn’t have to be more complicated than that to bring you down. Betty probably reminded you of the one in the yoga pants, right? Although, I think I’m partial to the one in the shorts. That’s okay for me to say that, right, Denny? I mean, since you were hooking up with Betty and all.”

  Hahn’s face flushed and his left eye blinked repeatedly.

  “You know Betty killed herself, right?”

  His face fell. “What? Oh, my God.”

  Hahn’s wife came to the front door then. “Dennis, is everything all right?”

  The councilman stared at her. Not saying anything.

  Garrett smiled and stepped forward. “I’m Officer Garrett from the police department.”

  “Leah Hahn,” she said and stepped out on the porch. A light sheen of sweat covered her face. She wore faded blue jeans and a thin, light blue sweater. Her teeth were unnaturally white and her lips full. “It’s nice to meet you, Officer. Is everything okay?”

  “Oh, yes, ma’am, definitely. Everything’s fine. There was an issue at city hall earlier today and I’m just getting your husband up to speed on it.”

  Hahn and Garrett stood silently then, waiting for Leah to either ask another question or leave. She chose the latter.

  “Okay, boys, whatever you’re cooking up, I’ll leave you alone. Dennis, the girls and I are waiting for you to pick the next song.”

  Leah stepped inside and closed the door.

  Garrett glanced to the front window and Hahn’s daughters were now watching their interaction. He smiled at them and they giggled.

  The councilman turned to him and growled, “Knock it off.”

  “They’re the same age as her, aren’t they?”

  Hahn leaned toward Garrett and lowered his voice. “Did she really kill herself?”

  “How do you think I found out about you?”

  The councilman’s eyes lowered as he thought. “A note? She left a note?”

  Garrett shrugged, but kept his eyes on the Hahn girls.

  Hahn spun around to look at his daughters in the window. He shooed them away, then turned back to Garrett. “Do we have to do this now?”

  “We can do this whenever you like. Betty will still be dead tomorrow.”

  Hahn winced. “Can we do it at my office?”

  “Fine, Denny, that’ll be fine,” Garrett said. “I’ll see you Monday. Enjoy the rest of the night with your family.”

  The councilman walked inside and closed the door. Garrett waited for the two girls to return to the window. When they did, he smiled and waved.

  He whistled softly to himself as he walked down the sidewalk.

  CHAPTER 34

  That son of a bitch.

  He lost me.

  Clint knew that tailing someone without being noticed was difficult enough under the best of circumstances. Those included a team of several cars, communicating by radio, and driving nondescript vehicles which blended into the surrounding traffic. Preferably in the daytime. With an unsuspecting target.

  Clint was driving his unmarked Crown Victoria, a beast of a police cruiser that was all but extinct. One glance was all it took to make it as police. He was following Garrett alone, at night, and he was pretty sure the slippery bastard knew Clint was there.

  While tailing him, they ran into Saturday evening traffic on Division Street. Garrett made the light at Cataldo Avenue, right before the bridge that crossed the Spokane River into downtown, and Clint didn’t. He watched Garrett’s taillights until they disappeared around the bend. He knew that Garrett had only two options once he made the bend. West on Spokane Falls Boulevard, or south on Browne. Both took him deeper into downtown, although Browne would be the quicker route if he was headed toward the South Hill.

  Clint accelerated when the light turned green. He weaved his way through traffic as best he could. When he made the bend, the lights for westbound and southbound traffic were both green. He saw no sign of Garrett’s personal vehicle.

  Time to choose.

  Where’s he going?

  Clint ran through people Garrett knew and had contacted before. The most likely one that popped up was the little number he’d started seeing recently. All it had taken to find the name of the woman he’d stopped earlier in the week was to check Garrett’s unit history Her name was Tiana Madison Kennedy. A quick cross-reference confirmed her address at a downtown condominium. He’d seen Garrett going into the building on more than one occasion, presumably for a booty call.

  And it was Saturday night, so…

  Clint made his decision, taking Spokane Falls Boulevard. He wended his way through traffic, watching for Garrett’s car somewhere ahead of him, but didn’t see it. When he reached the block where Miss Kennedy lived, he slowed and trolled along the nearby streets, searching for Garrett’s car.

  It was nowhere to be found.

  He kept looking for another twenty minutes, but after crisscrossing the three-block radius multiple times, he came up empty.

  Clint pulled into a vacant metered slot. He didn’t bother to put any coins in the meter. No one would ticket a police car, at least not with him sitting in it.

  He stared at the condo building up the street. Tiana Kennedy lived on the sixth floor. Clint counted upward and then tried to imagine the layout of the flo
or. Did she have a city view or a river view? He saw four sets of windows facing the city side. Two were darkened. One was dimly lit with a television. The fourth was bright. Was one of those hers? Or was he looking at the wrong side of the building? He’d have to pull up the building plans tomorrow when he was at his desk and find out.

  Then he realized tomorrow was Sunday.

  Monday, then.

  Down at the street level, the condo had a gated entry to a small parking lot. He wondered for a moment if the gate was accessed via code or a card. If it was a numbered code, it was possible she gave Garrett the code so he could park off-street.

  Clint fished out his binoculars and scanned the vehicles inside the condo lot through the lenses. None of them resembled Garrett’s.

  He lowered the binoculars, admitting the truth.

  He’d lost him.

  Clint rubbed his tired eyes in frustration.

  Garrett must have taken Browne southbound instead of heading east like Clint thought. He’d guessed wrong and Garrett could be anywhere on the South Hill. Or maybe he jumped on the freeway and headed east or west, out of town.

  So what now?

  He thought for a while, running through all the people Garrett might go visit on a Saturday night. Maybe he was keeping up the good son image and was seeing his mother. But he’d been driving an odd route if that were his destination. Where else? His mentor and friend Oakley was dead and gone. Garrett didn’t seem to have any close friends. Clint had only seen him attend group settings, and those were a rarity. Despite being mister popular, outside of his assignations with the occasional woman, Garrett’s social life wasn’t much more robust than Clint’s own.

  Maybe that’s where he should start. Garrett had a side piece or two around town. He could be with one of them instead of Miss Kennedy, despite her being the current favorite.

  Again, though, none of those residences seemed to have been in his flight path.

  So where did he go?

  After a few minutes, Clint realized his best bet was to try to reacquire Garrett at his home. It was either that or go home himself.

  Clint pulled out of the metered slot and headed toward Garrett’s residence. He detoured along the way to check the small house that belong to one of Garrett’s older chips, but the house was dark and there was no sign of Garrett’s car out front.

  Once he reached Garrett’s street, he slid into the familiar spot behind the big Ford F-150 up the block. The rig partially hid Clint’s unmarked cruiser, and it was at the opposite end of the block from Garrett’s usual ingress to his home.

  He waited.

  Dozens of simultaneous trains of thought whirred through his mind while he sat. It was always that way for him. His brain never tired of zipping around, chasing ideas and questions. Clint was able to somehow hover above the maelstrom, like an observer, monitoring the progress of all the different streams of speculation. Only when he purposefully focused did his concentration narrow to just one topic, and then it was laser-like.

  At the moment, he tried to relax and hear all the different thoughts.

  The loudest thought was a question—what was taking the lab so long on the Ocampo ballistics results? When he’d gone into Major Crimes that morning, he found the place was empty—detectives didn’t work the weekend unless called out for an active crime scene.

  Marty Hill’s file cabinet was locked, but the desk was old. It didn’t take much work for him to jimmy the lock and get a look at the Ocampo file. The status in the computer system when he checked had been Susp-PF, which meant suspended pending further. In this case, the further included a return on the ballistics from the state lab. Considering that the lab was currently over four hundred days behind on requests, Clint wasn’t surprised to find that the tests were not yet completed. He would have thought a quadruple homicide merited jumping to the front of the line but figured that Hill’s lack of an identified suspect or a murder weapon probably negated that advantage.

  Speaking of Garrett, why was Ray Zielinski suddenly so interested in him?

  And how long was this old Crown Vic going to last? His was the last of the road-worthy Crown Victorias in the fleet. How many more miles did it have in it before it gave up the ghost and he was forced to accept one of the new Impalas that all the other detectives drove? He was sure those cars had GPS in them, and maybe other surveillance devices so that the brass could check up on him in real time. He figured this old girl had another six or seven months before the garage manager put his foot down on the expenses to keep it on the road. She already burned a little too much oil.

  The boyfriend in the Ainsley case was definitely lying about the two black males forcing their way into the house. Now that Clint had the man’s story locked in, he needed to figure out the right piece of evidence to use as a lever to pry the truth out of him. Wrapping that one up would make Lieutenant Flowers happy.

  No way was he going to notify any next of kin on the Nylander suicide, though. Let the chaplain earn his pay.

  Where the hell was Garrett?

  Farrell was wavering and had been for a while. Clint had known this, but the Baumgartner suggestion was the proof he needed. Was he going to end up flying solo on this? Could he still trust the captain?

  What was the one dollar forty-seven cent deduction from his latest paycheck to some vague bullshit called VSF? He suspected it was a sneaky way to siphon funds for some sort of off book operation, but was it local or federal? No one ever thought to check on such a small amount, which was how they got away with things like that. He made a note to stop by payroll at work tomorrow.

  No. Monday.

  He rubbed his head, feeling the afro shift under his fingers. Damn, maybe Farrell was right. His cut was getting long. He needed to see the barber tomorrow. Fighting the Sunday church crowd was less than ideal, but he couldn’t spare the time on Monday.

  The minutes slid past, reaching close to an hour. Every time a pair of headlights appeared on the residential street, Clint focused on the vehicle. Finally, one of them slowed and turned into Garrett’s driveway. He could see from the outline that it was Garrett’s car. The garage door went up and the vehicle slid inside.

  Clint waited, watching the different lights go on throughout Garrett’s house. Living room. Bathroom on, then off. Bedroom on, then off. Finally, he saw the telltale flicker of the television behind the blinds of the living room window.

  He checked his watch. If Garrett was in now, he was likely in for the night. And Clint needed sleep.

  He glanced back up at the living room window, imagining Garrett lounging on his couch, a beer in his hand, watching a movie or some sports. Probably baseball, this time of year.

  Where did you go?

  Clint let the question sit for a few moments. He knew there’d be no answer, at least not tonight.

  He pulled out of his half-hidden spot and cruised up the street, giving Garrett’s house one last look as he passed by, then headed home.

  CHAPTER 35

  Gary Stone thought it was only supposed to be dinner, something they did often as friends. Rarely had it ever rolled into a night of drinking. That wasn’t the type of thing they normally did when alone nor would they seek to do when together. Going to clubs was what they did in college while in the company of other people.

  They were at The Hot Box, the latest in a series of nightclubs that would open for a couple years, garner a lot of attention, then flame out.

  The beat pulsating from the large, hanging speakers above the dance floor was loud and fast. The dim club was lit by neon lights and flashing bulbs. The dance floor was full of bodies, jumping, jiggling, and jerking, both in and out of rhythm to the beat.

  Jean Carter leaned over to Stone. “Check her out,” she said and nodded to a blonde girl dancing with a brunette. The two women were obviously enjoying the company of each other.

  Stone watched the blonde, his hand wrapped around his drink.

  “I thin
k she’s Eastern European,” Jean said. “Probably Russian, just the way you like them.”

  Stone said, “You can’t tell that from here.” He squinted, though, and tried harder to see the girl in the dim light of the club.

  “Sure I can,” she answered, confident as ever.

  Jean Carter and he had been friends since college, when he was dating her best friend and she was dating his brother. Neither of those relationships worked out, but they learned they liked each other as friends. They shared mutual interests such as books and music, although the genres in those categories were wildly apart. He preferred nonfiction and jazz, while she enjoyed science fiction and electronica. Both were open to reading or listening to the other’s recommendation. They shared other interests such as baseball and exotic coffee.

  The club tonight was Jean’s idea and the choice of music was definitely her style. He would have chosen some place quieter. She seemed to be upset and wanted to go out for a late dinner and a drink.

  As the two girls danced with each other, Stone realized how much he also needed a night out to blow off some steam. The two girls rubbed against each other as they danced. They’re pretty, Stone thought.

  I wonder if she’s really Russian?

  “Let’s go,” Jean said, tapping his shoulder.

  “What? Where to?”

  “Outside. You’re getting that goofy stare. You know the one I’m talking about. Let’s get some air.”

  He lifted his drink, but Jean covered it with her hand. “After we go outside.”

  “All right,” he said and let Jean pull him out the front door and past the bouncers.

  When Stone was offered the assignment at city hall, he jumped at it partly because of the opportunity it presented, but also the proximity it would put him to his friend. Jean had worked as an assistant for years. At times, he’d encouraged her to move on, to take something more challenging, but Jean liked where she was. It suited both her ambitions and her personality. She had no desire to climb a ladder but wanted to be where interesting things happened. Now that he was stationed within the building, he no longer suggested she look for something else.