by Lisa Harris
“Yes. That’s fine,” Camryn said.
Detective Lexington gave her an encouraging smile. “Just start at the beginning.”
Camryn took a fortifying sip of coffee and then told them how she’d left work and been on her way to the bus stop. Once she started to speak, the words seemed to gush out of her and the detectives listened closely, jotting notes once in a while. They held their silence until she got to the end.
“…then you drove me here.” She studied the detective, still wondering about the way he’d commandeered the situation with the other officer who’d been about to drive her away from the scene of the…she couldn’t quite bring herself to call it an accident. “Why did you step in and insist on driving me back here yourself?”
Detective Packard looked up from consulting his notes. “You’re certain you were alone on the street?”
Camryn didn’t miss that he hadn’t given his partner time to answer, but she decided to let it pass. She considered. “I didn’t see anyone, but…”
“Yes?”
“In the garage. I saw an orange glow. Like someone might have been smoking a cigarette. They might have seen something.”
Detective Lexington jotted some notes.
Detective Packard gave her a nod. “We’ll check that out. Now, let’s talk about the car. What color was it?”
She shook her head. “It was dark. The headlights were pointing right at me for most of the time it was in view. I’m not sure I can say for sure.”
His lips pressed together. “Are there any other details you can give us?”
Camryn closed her eyes. She didn’t want to revisit the memories yet again, but she forced herself to focus on what she’d seen. The car skidding around the corner. Headlights blinding her. The crash. The pause. A tremor zipped through her as she once more saw the car bearing down on her and then at the last moment turning away.
“Gray?” She pressed her hands together and opened her eyes. “I think the car was dark gray or dark blue. I’m not good with types of cars, but it was an older car. One of those kinds that is wider at the front end than the back. And it was raised up…like, taller than a normal car. Maybe a little higher in the front than the back.” Another memory surfaced. “And I think it has a taillight out. When it drove away, it only had one red light at the back.”
Detective Packard nodded encouragingly. “All this is very helpful.” He consulted his notes. “You said you gave the man’s phone to an officer. But you didn’t say his name. Do you know who it was?”
“He said his name was Officer Skelly.”
The two detectives looked at each other.
This time it was Detective Lexington who spoke. “When was the last time you saw Officer Skelly?”
“He escorted me to the car. I gave him the phone. A few minutes later a different officer—I never got his name, but the one you took over from—got in the car and said he was going to bring me here. You know the rest.” She recalled the man’s cold eyes staring at her in the rearview mirror and shivered. “He wasn’t going to bring me here, was he?”
“Did Officer Skelly say anything to you? After you gave him the phone?”
Again, he’d ignored her question. It was starting to irritate her. “He did say something. But I didn’t catch it. Someone started talking over one of the bullhorns and drowned out his words. But I got the impression that he was going to give the phone to someone.”
Neither man looked happy about that news. They exchanged a glance.
“Why? What’s the matter?”
Detective Packard leaned toward her. “Did you see him speaking to anyone? It’s important.”
“Pack.” Detective Lexington’s voice held a note that indicated his partner should back off.
Camryn felt the blood drain from her face. “Wait. What did you just say?”
The detectives looked at her blankly.
“You called him Pack.”
Detective Lexington nodded.
Camryn squeezed her temples between thumb and fingers. “That must have been what he meant.”
“What who meant?”
“The man. The undercover officer who was hit by the car. He kept saying, ‘Pack police.’ But I didn’t understand what that meant.” Her eyes widened and she lifted her gaze to Detective Packard. “I think he wanted me to give you the phone.”
The two men exchanged another grim look.
Detective Packard drummed his thumbs on the tabletop, deep in thought. After a moment he said, “You couldn’t have known. Did you tell that to officer Skelly, though? About him saying ‘Pack police?’”
She nodded her head. “Yes. But he didn’t seem to know what it meant.”
“And back to my earlier question. Did you see who Skelly spoke with after he left you with the phone?”
“No. I’m sorry. I’d just worked a twelve-hour shift. I think I shut my eyes until that other officer got in.”
Detective Packard sank against the back of his chair with a sigh.
Camryn searched their faces for what she might be missing.
Detective Lexington drew a hand over his forehead and back through his hair—a gesture that revealed his weariness.
She wondered how many hours he’d worked in a row.
He gave her a resigned shrug. “Officer Skelly has been killed. We only got the word a few minutes ago. You were the last one to speak to him, other than— Well, we were hoping you might have some information for us.”
Camryn felt the words as though a pail of ice water had been tossed in her face. He’d seemed like such a kind and caring man.
Without another word, Detective Packard pushed from the table and left the room.
Detective Lexington stood, but hesitated. “I’m sorry to ask this, but we need you to stay here for a little longer.”
She felt her brow pinch. “I have to be to work at eight.” She hated it when they made her work back to back shifts at the opposite ends of a workday, but she couldn’t afford to take any time off.
Detective Lexington was already shaking his head. “For your own safety, I don’t think you should go to work today.”
Camryn’s heartrate ratcheted up a couple notches. “Listen, I have bills to pay. I can’t afford—” Realization of what he’d just said penetrated. “My own safety?”
“I’ll explain more in a few minutes. For now, stay here. We’ll be back.” With that, he left the room.
For her own safety? Camryn gripped the edge of the table, willing herself to remain calm. So much for thinking that God might finally be answering her prayers.
How had her life changed so drastically in the space of one day?
Chapter Seven
Damien planted his fists on his desk and leaned into them, head hanging.
Lexington was sure making a racket over at his desk.
He lifted his head. His partner was madly gathering papers and statements and stuffing them into an unmarked three-ring binder. He stabbed a finger in Damien’s direction and spoke low. “Gather the interviews you filled out and print out the pictures you took at the scene. Then copy those interview recordings onto a thumb-drive and give it here. Do it now. I’ll record the 911 call onto a thumb-drive.”
Damien frowned. Maybe it was the fact that they were going on hour twenty-four without any sleep, but had Case gone out of his mind? “What are you talking about?” All he could think about was what might have been on that phone, meant for him, and bad enough that it had likely gotten not only Treyvon killed, but Skelly as well.
Case stepped close and gripped him by one arm, giving him a little shake. When he spoke, his words were so soft Damien could barely hear them. But what they lacked in volume, they certainly made up for in intensity. “Wake up, Damien! There are dirty cops in our precinct. Ones that weren’t afraid to go so far as to kill a fellow officer. I have a family to think about now. We have to play this smart, not hard. Our only chance of outsmarting these guys is to—”
“Get copies of
this evidence into a safe place that only you and I know about.”
Case looked relieved to finally have him back on board. “Yes. After that, then we can try to figure out what Treyvon might have been trying to send you on that phone.”
A new surge of energy swept in to fill the void that his brief wallow in grief had created. “We have to get that girl into protective custody too. Especially if Miller was trying to take her from the scene.”
Case nodded gravely. “He was. And I know just the guy to help us with her.” Case leveled him with a pointed look. “He’s on his way here with Skelly’s remains.”
Damien snapped his fingers. “Yes. He’s perfect.”
“First, we copy all the evidence. Meet me back there in five minutes.” Case stabbed a finger toward the room where the witness still waited.
As Case stepped to his desk and plugged in a thumb drive, Damien tapped steepled fingers against his lips. Miller had been at the top of their suspect list for months. They’d had strong suspicions that he was a dirty cop. But with the way the union worked, the captain said they didn’t have enough evidence to be actionable.
Six months ago, he and Lexington were handed a case where an elderly woman had been beaten and raped in her home. Miller, new to the force at the time, had been the first on the scene. He claimed he’d arrived after the 911 call, which had been placed by the victim’s husband, a man with the beginnings of dementia from what they could tell when they interviewed him. Miller had claimed that a man wearing a black ski mask had been fleeing the premises. But by the time Damien and Lexington had concluded their investigation, they’d both been convinced that Miller had taken part in the crime—or at the very least had looked the other way and helped the crook escape. But they’d never been able to get proof. With the husband’s mental decline, he’d given multiple versions of the incident that were just different enough not to be trustworthy. Their hopes had been on getting a statement from the victim herself, but she’d been in a coma. For three days, they hoped she’d be able to tell them more when she came around, but she’d passed away without waking.
Damien loosed a breath and got to work copying pages. It grated on him that such a man was still on the force, but if the tables were turned, he’d want due process in his own favor. Besides, it seemed pretty clear that Miller was not working alone. Key evidence against him had turned up missing on two further occasions. He obviously had some help on the inside, but they had no idea who it might be.
What they did know was that things had been haywire around here for months. Besides the evidence going missing, CI’s had been outed on two occasions in the past three months, with deadly results. And now in the span of an hour, two police officers had been killed—one undercover and one investigating his murder.
Treyvon had obviously stumbled onto something big. Something that had made him come out from his cover. But if Trey hadn’t had time to tell anyone what he’d learned, why had Skelly been killed? Was there something he knew that he shouldn’t have known? Or was there some connection between the two men that Damien wasn’t aware of? And why had Trey wanted him to have his phone? Other than training him that very first day, he’d hardly known the kid.
Damien snatched up the notes from the interview with the waitress.
The phone. That had to be it. The waitress had given it to Skelly and he’d obviously taken it to someone. But the waitress said she hadn’t heard what he said. Whoever he’d taken that phone to… Had that been what cost him his life? But why? The phone had been smashed, she’d said. So presumably Skelly hadn’t been able to listen to or view anything on it. But if that were true, it made no sense that he’d been killed.
It was all such a puzzle.
“Heard you two are working Treyvon Johnson’s case?”
Damien glanced up to see a lab-tech standing next to his desk with a small sheaf of papers.
“Yeah. What’s up?”
The man held out the pages. “Thought you should know that Ryan Skelly’s computer in his vehicle was wiped clean.”
Damien grunted. That was odd. “Nothing?”
The tech shook his head. “Totally wiped. Zeroed out every last sector.”
Damien sighed.
The tech started away but then paused. “There is one anomaly that might be pertinent to your case.”
“Oh?”
The man nudged his glasses up his nose. “I noticed a glitch on the station servers this morning. The audit logs show a deletion outside of business hours that was flagged by anomaly detection due to the source IP being unrecognized. The operation succeeded despite detection, and unfortunately the differential and daily backups are also missing.”
Damien reached for his cup. “What?” He slugged down another shot of caffeine. He was going to need it to follow this conversation.
“It looks like it was an outsider with inside knowledge, or we may be dealing with an otherwise undetected APT.”
“I need this in plain English.”
The tech grumbled something under his breath, then said, “Something that was sent to the station servers was deleted sometime in the night, most likely by someone with inside knowledge.”
“Can you tell what it was?”
The tech shook his head. “Sorry. Unrecoverable.”
“So what you’re telling me is that Skelly may have sent something to the station servers from his vehicle, but that both his vehicle computer and the information on the servers have been deleted?”
The tech pondered. “I suppose they could be related. But…” He shrugged. “Unprovable.”
Unprovable.
So far that summed up almost everything about this case. Except of course for the two dead bodies.
The helicopter banked toward the city of Everett as it approached from the westerly San Juan Islands. From his position in the back seat, Holden adjusted the noise cancelling headset and took in the coral wash of the sunrise to the east. With the dark mounds of green islands dotting the dawn-blue waters of the Puget Sound and the first rays of the golden sun reflecting off the windows of the downtown hospital, he could have almost felt like he was on a pleasure cruise were it not for his grim task.
They had bagged the bucket containing the officer’s remains and then put it on ice in a sealed cooler. It was strapped in beside him. A grim reminder that this wasn’t a sightseeing jaunt.
The large H on top of the police headquarters building beckoned them ever nearer. The fact that Jay had his chopper license was one of the reasons that Holden had liked his resume so much and had been the deciding factor in hiring the young deputy—despite rumors that pervaded the island about Holden only hiring him due to the connection between their relatives.
As the chopper landed, Holden reached for a pair of latex gloves and tugged them on. “Just wait for me. I won’t be long.”
Jay nodded.
Cooler in hand, Holden ducked to avoid the wind of the decelerating propeller blades as he hurried toward the officer holding the door open for him across the roof. The man didn’t look like he should be much past milk-drinking, much less a cop. Were they deputizing teenagers these days? Holden pressed his lips together. Maybe he was just getting older.
“You Parker?” the officer hollered above the noise.
Holden nodded.
The kid’s gaze dipped to the cooler and his face paled visibly. “This way!”
Holden followed through several empty hallways until they stepped into the main part of the police office. He frowned. Normally an office like this would be filled with the clack of keyboards, the clanking of handcuffs, and the chatter of conversation, but except for a few people the place was nearly empty.
The young officer turned to face him. “Lexington and Packard are there at their desks.” He pointed. “I can take…that down to the ME’s office, if you want.”
He could have dressed the kid down, but decided against it. This was a rough day for everyone. The kid was probably doing good simply to keep his wits
together, much less consider nuances like the fact that the fewer steps in a chain of evidence there were, the better. “I’ll take it down myself. I just want to let them know I’ve arrived.”
The kid shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
Packard and Lexington were already striding toward him.
“You made it.” Case gave him a friendly thump on one shoulder.
Packard simply gave him a nod.
Holden quirked a brow. “Kind of quiet around here?”
Lexington nodded. “There’s been an escape over at SCJ.”
Damien slashed a hand of dismissal that cut further questions short. “We need to talk before you leave.”
“I’ll be back up as soon as I drop this off.”
“Meet us in the interrogation room off the deputy chief’s office.” Damien pointed across the way. “And”—he leaned closer and lowered his voice—“keep the witness in there as out of sight as possible.”
Holden’s brows lifted at that. He glanced again toward the interrogation room and noted that the blinds on the room’s only window were closed from the inside and there was no door to that room from out here. A person could only enter if they were in the deputy chief’s office. He knew better than to ask questions out here in the main room, but if they were trying to keep a witness out of sight, it could only mean that they didn’t trust some of their fellow officers.
“Go right in when you get back.” Case pointed out the sign to the ME’s office. “We’re finalizing a few things and will be in as soon as we can.”
Camryn made circles with the paper cup that was now a quarter full of stone-cold coffee. She had her speech all planned for when they came back and told her once more that she couldn’t go to work. Surely, they would understand that she was trying to dig her way out from under the mound of bills. And she hadn’t seen anything other than what she’d told them. The little that she’d seen couldn’t be grounds for someone to wish her harm, could it? She’d simply been minding her own business on her way home from work. That was what she wanted to get back to—minding her own business.
