by Colin Conway
“No, Detective.”
“You do know it is a crime to lie to the police officer engaged in an official investigation, right?”
“I am aware of that. Now, if you’ll excuse me, that has been four questions, and I believe I’ve answered them all.” She reached for the door and began to close it. “Good day, Detective.”
“One more question, if you don’t mind.”
Aurelia stopped and gave him a look that somehow expressed patience and exasperation all at once. “What is it?”
“What did you do, before you retired?”
“How is that relevant?”
“It’s not. I’m merely curious.”
“I can assure you it was nothing illegal.”
“I believe you. What did you do, though?”
She paused, as if gauging the value of answering him. Then she said, “I was a schoolteacher. I taught English, grades six, seven, and eight.”
“Here in Spokane?”
She nodded. “Shaw Middle.”
“Thank you. Have a nice day, Mrs. Ellis.” Clint turned and walked away. Behind him, he heard a pause, and then the door close.
He’d thought perhaps she was an English teacher from her use of language, and when she corrected him, it cemented his suspicions. It was a fact that didn’t really matter, but Clint still felt good about knowing it as he made his way back to his car. It may have felt like an interview inside his own head, but he was pretty sure it came out as small talk. Maybe he wasn’t so bad at it, after all.
Good thing, too, because that was a skill he sensed he was going to need in the days ahead.
Chapter 8
Tyler Garrett’s cell phone buzzed with another text message.
When he pulled to a stop at the intersection of Rowan and Alberta, he grabbed the phone. The message was from his friend, Bo Sherman. You hear? DOJ on premises.
He had heard, in fact. Bo’s text was the seventh—
Garrett’s phone buzzed again.
It was another text message. Eight now. This one came from another friend, Detective Marty Hill.
Dude! DOJ kickng tireS bcause of sTone? reeks of BullSht
For someone whose profession demanded attention to detail, Hill was all thumbs and spelling errors when he communicated via text. Normally, this made Garrett smile.
Today, though, he frowned.
He looked up at the rearview mirror and saw the impatient face of the driver behind him. Garrett checked left and right to see the cars at the other stop signs were patiently waiting for him to proceed. He accelerated through the intersection then let his thoughts return to the problem at hand.
The Department of Justice was on the SPD campus.
He slipped his phone into a pocket of the duty bag seat-belted onto the passenger seat.
Truth be told, he wasn’t quite sure what to make of their visit. Oh, he knew DOJ was the big, bad boogeyman from a hill back east, but just what they could do to him and his department, he didn’t know.
And was it anything he really needed to be concerned with?
There were plenty of things a patrolman had to worry about—those things usually had to do with guns and people with ill intentions—and there were things the brass had to worry about—those usually had to do with budgetary constraints and political ramifications. That’s why he never had had any career inclinations to go higher than patrol.
Climbing the career ladder meant less time in a prowl car and more time in the hallowed halls of SPD where he’d be on his knees kissing someone’s fat ass for his next opportunity. Out here, though, Garrett didn’t have to pucker up for anyone. Out here, he created his luck and he took what he wanted.
He turned onto Decatur Avenue and drove slowly through the northside neighborhood. A block in he stopped in front of a boarded-up house with a yellow notice stapled to its door. He scanned the neighborhood. It was made up of blue-collar residents and most them should be at work. Should be. There were still a lot of cars in driveways and along the curbs in front of neighboring houses.
This was the problem with his current day-shift assignment. If he wanted to do anything while in uniform, it had to be done in the light of day and in front of others. He never had that concern while he worked power shift—the assignment that overlapped both swing and graveyard shifts. He was slated to spend the rest of the year working days. Yet another unfortunate result of Captain Farrell’s ill-fated Anti-Crime Team.
Garrett’s lip curled slightly at the memory.
The four-officer Anti-Crime Team was created for two purposes. Its outward mission—the one Farrell sold to anyone listening—was to catch high-profile offenders. The actual mission, which Garrett learned later, was to entrap him.
In the end, the team flamed out after the gunning down of Officer Gary Stone. Garrett was there when it happened and was the only man who knew exactly what occurred. He was also the only person who knew why it happened, but he wasn’t going to devote any more thought to a man he knew to be a rat.
Rookie Jun Yang, the academy princess, was also on the team. After Stone’s death, she quit the department entirely. Word around the department was she returned to the military. Probably so she could feel safe again, Garrett mused.
And rounding out the team was the old man, Ray Zielinski. After the team broke up, he just happened to step into a pile of his own shit and got suspended for it. Classic Zielinski. The scuttlebutt was Ray might even get terminated. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
Garrett’s eyes returned to the boarded-up home—a so-called zombie house. They were becoming fewer as the Code Enforcement division worked with the city attorney to apply the nuisance ordinance. By doing so, the city could force the owners of record to clean up their properties. And if those owners failed to do so, the city would push the property to be sold.
These zombie houses had been a goldmine for Garrett.
He climbed out of his car. For the past several years, he’d hidden money and drugs around the city in houses just like this. At first, it was to secrete cash and dope he’d stolen from a dealer or a crime scene. Hiding stuff in a zombie home was a cheap and effective way to keep his then wife from finding anything suspicious. If he rented a storage unit, she might find that. Plus, it’d be in his name. If he kept a girlfriend, she could find her. But how the hell would his wife ever know about a zombie house?
The money or drugs never stayed in the abandoned homes for long. They were only temporary storage places, especially when he learned to play the game. Then the money and drugs were put into circulation. Round and round they went, building newer and bigger piles. Now, most of his cash and dope were no longer hidden but kept in plain sight. It was entrusted to a handler—Earl Ellis being the latest—and a network of dealers.
Using the houses didn’t come without some risk, though, but even the stock market tanked occasionally, and banks were only insured to a certain limit.
Once, he lost some drugs when an enterprising bum broke into a house and discovered what he had hidden. There was another house that burned. He’d hidden about five thousand dollars in that one. He chalked those losses up to the costs of doing business.
There was even a house in the Hillyard neighborhood where he killed a former associate and let him rot for a few days. He eventually controlled the outcome of that situation by reporting the body by way of a concerned, yet never verified, citizen.
In a neighborhood like this, however, Garrett only entered an abandoned home while in uniform. The silver shield on his chest was a ticket to places others couldn’t go without arousing suspicions. If he walked into this boarded-up house in plainclothes, a neighbor would most assuredly be alarmed and immediately call 911.
Hello? Police? he imagined the caller saying. There’s a black man entering the vacant house next to me. In the predominately white city of Spokane, a call like that was sure to get a response from the police department.
Instead, since he was in uniform, he would appear to be a cop performi
ng a standard security check. Feel free to go about your business. There’s nothing to worry about. The neighbors might actually be thankful a uniform was in the neighborhood, even if that officer was a man of color.
Garrett walked up to the front door and made a big show of checking its security. When he was done, he descended the stairs as he continued to scan the neighborhood. He casually strolled around the house, opened the low gate, and stepped into the backyard.
“They was just here.”
It was a frail woman’s voice. He turned and searched for its origin. She stood in the shade of an apple tree near the three-foot high chain-link fence. The handle to an oxygen tank was in her left hand. Tubes ran from it to her nose. Her silver and gray hair looked wiry and unwashed. Age spots covered her sallow skin. The purple housecoat she wore was caught up on the oxygen tank and revealed more leg than Garrett cared to see.
“Excuse me?” he said.
“The maintenance peoples,” the woman said. She pointed toward the rear of the house he was at. “They put some new wood up. Made a big racket about it, you ask me.”
Garrett stepped to where there should have been a back door. Instead, a large piece of plywood had been hastily screwed into the frame. An unnecessarily large amount of screws were used to attach the board.
He slipped his hand into his pocket and grasped the thick wad of bills that he had planned to add to the secret cache that he had already hidden inside this house.
“Looks like they did a good job,” the woman said.
“Looks like,” Garrett muttered.
He didn’t like holding onto this much cash—he now had a couple thousand in his pocket—and he didn’t like keeping it at his apartment. Cash led people to ask questions. And cops with too much cash led people to watch them closely and suspect the worst.
Besides hiding his cash in zombie houses, he kept some with his girlfriend, Tiana. He didn’t want her too involved with his business activities, though. If push came to shove, he didn’t know how well she would stand up under pressure. She was already holding ten grand of his. Giving her more would be exposing too much.
When the oxygen tank hissed, Garrett glanced to the woman. She reached up for a yellowish-green apple and pulled it from the tree. As she pretended to examine the fruit, her eyes slid over to him.
He’d stood here for too long now. Garrett nodded toward the woman and she waved the apple at him.
While he walked back to his car, his fingers fiddled with the bills in his pocket.
Both the change to day shift and the disappearance of Earl Ellis were putting a crimp in his business dealings. A dip in earnings wasn’t a big deal. Money was just a way to score the game. Some days you’re up and others you’re down. It happens.
And he knew could he deal with the shift change. All he had to do was make it to the end of the year then he would rotate back to power shift.
But the loss of Earl? That was a bigger pain in the ass than anything. He needed to know what happened to the man, then he could take appropriate action. If Earl was hiding to avoid the police, Garrett could set up a safe method for them to keep in contact. Easy-peasy and life moves on. If the man bailed on the whole operation, Garrett could find a replacement. A fucking pain, but he’d done it before. Again, life moves on. But if he turned against him…
No. Not Earl. He wouldn’t rat. Garrett knew that much.
Which left him right back where he started. Not knowing anything. He felt like he was chasing his tail trying to find the man and that was pissing him off.
Garrett dropped into his car and turned to his Mobile Data Computer to check the list of calls waiting for an officer response. There was a report of a garage burglary, a non-injury collision, a shoplifter, and something that read like a neighborhood dispute. All of them could wait. They could wait forever as far as he was concerned.
He tightly wrapped his fingers around the steering wheel as if he were choking the life out of a man. His lips pulled back from his teeth before he uttered, “So where the fuck are you, Earl?”
Chapter 9
With his arms crossed, Chief Robert Baumgartner sat at the head of the conference table. To his immediate right sat Tom Farrell. To the chief’s left, but a seat away, was Dana Hatcher.
The three of them were silent, each lost in their own thoughts, as they awaited the arrival of their guests.
Guests, Baumgartner thought sarcastically.
That’s like saying a swarm of locusts was just an annoyance.
The Department of Justice team was in the lobby of the Public Safety Building working their way through the metal detectors. Maybe he should have sent someone up to greet them and escort them back. Perhaps show them some deferential treatment.
Screw that.
They should jump through the same hoops as anyone else, especially given what they were about to put him and his team through.
If he hadn’t gotten a heads-up call from his friend Lou, this DOJ detachment would have caught everyone off guard. As it was, they were scrambling to notify the entire department, from commissioned officers to civilian employees. Fat lot of good it would do.
Who knew what these feds wanted to see or who they might want to interview. Or what phantom wrongdoing they would think they uncovered in the process.
A fluorescent tube flickered above him—an annoying warning that the bulb was about to die. His eyes went to it and he growled, “You’re fucking kidding me.”
Both Farrell and Hatcher stared at him with the ineffectiveness of people used to dealing with stubborn cops, not failing lights.
“Chief?” Marilyn said. His assistant was in the doorway to the conference room. Her wide eyes indicated that she had heard his expletive. “Justice is here.”
Behind her were three people in expensive-looking suits.
Baumgartner stood and forced a smile. Farrell and Hatcher joined him in standing, but their faces remained impassive.
A dark-skinned woman in her late forties stepped forward. Her brown eyes seemed to be filled with not only wisdom, but a weariness reserved for someone many years her senior. Using her left hand, she flipped open a black leather wallet to reveal a Department of Justice seal and an identification card. A diamond wedding ring was on the appropriate finger.
“Édelie Durand,” she said. “Deputy Chief. Special Litigation Section.”
Baumgartner blinked. “Special Litigation?”
Durand motioned to the two people with her. “Steve Curado and Dani Watson.”
When introduced, they both presented their wallet credentials. Their ID cards showed them with the same title—Attorney.
Great. Just what he needed—lawyers poking around his department.
The chief waggled his thumb between his subordinates. “Captains Tom Farrell and Dana Hatcher. Investigations and Patrol.”
Everyone politely nodded at each other, but no one bothered to shake hands.
Baumgartner cleared his throat before asking, “So what’s the deputy chief of the Special Litigation Section doing here?”
“As you may know, I work for—” Durand squinted and glanced up at the flickering fluorescent light. When she returned her gaze to the chief, she continued, “I work for an assistant attorney general who works for the attorney general.”
The chief nodded. He understood the organizational structure of the Justice Department.
“The attorney general,” Durand continued, “serves at the pleasure of the president who has taken a recent interest in local law enforcement agencies that have shown, shall we say, a propensity for violating the civil rights of the citizens they are sworn to protect.”
The chief’s face warmed. “And you think we’ve done that?”
Durand paused for several moments as if considering an appropriate response. She kept eye contact with Baumgartner during that time. Eventually, she shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Baumgartner glanced to Farrell then Hatcher before returning his attention back to Durand. “
Then why are you—”
“Over the past couple of years,” Durand said, as if the chief hadn’t been speaking, “the Spokane Police Department has had several high-profile events—negative events. One of those even involved you, Chief.”
He kept his mouth shut now. She was referring to the reluctant assistance he gave the mayor in hiding a relationship between a councilman and a seventeen-year-old girl. If he could go back in time, he would punch the mayor in the mouth just for asking him to help. An arrest for assault would be easier to own up to than what he actually did.
Next to him, Dana Hatcher seemed to struggle with holding back a smile. Baumgartner’s eyes narrowed, but Durand continued.
“In this same time period, two officers have been killed in the line of duty.”
“That is an anomaly,” Baumgartner blurted.
“We realize that,” Durand said confidently. “Before these two officers, it was more than forty years since the last officer was killed on duty.”
“Which means—”
“Four decades,” Durand said and held up as many fingers.
Baumgartner ground his teeth together. She was grandstanding. This woman from Washington, D.C. was letting him know that she had done her homework. Big deal. He didn’t have to open his mouth any further and let her smack him around. This wasn’t his first rodeo.
Édelie Durand looked to her female associate when she asked, “By the way, Chief, we watched with profound interest the events surrounding Officer Tyler Garrett.”
Next to him, Farrell straightened.
“His shooting,” Baumgartner said, “was reviewed by an outside agency and deemed justified and within all policies and procedures of our department. Officer Garrett did nothing wrong.”
Farrell seemed to bristle further.
“It was deemed justifiable,” Durand said, “yet the city still paid out three quarters of a million for an improper search of Officer Garrett’s house that led to a questionable arrest on drug charges. Those charges were quickly dropped, weren’t they?”
Baumgartner glanced at his captain’s but neither looked in his direction.
