Deception

by Randy Alcorn

  “I was in the neighborhood. I think that’s what you said when you came out of the closet at my last murder, wasn’t it, Kimmy? Of course, I wasn’t hiding here when you arrived.”

  “Where are your gloves?” she asked. “Wouldn’t want you to contaminate the scene.”

  “What time was the murder?” I asked.

  “Gunshot heard at 2:36,” Doyle said, looking at Phillips. “No murder though.

  Offed himself.”

  Dr. Marsh was the ME on duty. Carlton Hatch treats the body like it’s the shroud of Turin. Marsh has the deft touch of an airport baggage handler. He flipped Phillips’s arms around like a rag doll.

  “Apparent suicide,” Marsh said.

  “Based on what?” I asked.

  “Gun in his hand and brains on the floor.”

  “Made to look like suicide,” I said.

  “Hence the word apparent.”

  “Where’s Sheila?”

  “Staying at her sister’s,” Doyle said. “Apparently she and Phillips had been having problems. If she needs an alibi, she’s got one. It’s a three-hour drive, and she was with her sister’s family all evening.”

  “I talked with Sheila,” Suda said. “She’s a mess. Who wouldn’t be? Wait. What’s this?” Suda pointed at a dark scrap of cloth four feet from the body, two feet to my right.

  Doyle bent over it. “Fabric,” he said. “Blood soaked. It’s been cut.”

  Suda gestured to one of the CSIs. “You drop this?”

  “No,” he said, staring at the cloth. “It wasn’t there.”

  “Had to be,” Doyle said.

  “We’ve been here two hours,” the criminalist said. “We have thirteen evidence bags, marked and ready for the lab. We picked up everything. You telling me we all missed this—including you?”

  Suda gave me the evil eye. She wrote on her pad, then took three pictures of the scrap. “Bag it,” she said. The criminalist picked it up with tweezers and put it in a plastic bag.

  I met Sarge outside his office when he arrived at 7:00 a.m.

  “I’m going to need the lab results from the Phillips investigation,” I said. “We have to assume he was killed because of what he knew about Palatine. It was no suicide.”

  “That’s a lot to assume.”

  “You think it’s a coincidence he had something to tell me, then suddenly he was killed?”

  Sarge shrugged.

  “I don’t trust Suda and Doyle on this investigation,” I said.

  “That’s funny. They don’t trust you on the Palatine investigation.”

  “Come on. Can you trust a woman hiding in a closet at a murder scene? She breaks into my house and plants illegal bugs. Abuses my dog. Now a detective dies, and she’s in charge of the investigation?”

  “Look, Suda’s in big trouble. After the investigation she’ll be suspended, at least. But that doesn’t make her the killer. And right now, we’re buried in murder cases. We need her. Anyway, remember, she planted the bugs under orders from the chief.”

  “Even he doesn’t have the authority to do that.”

  “My point is, she wasn’t winging it.” Sarge shook his head. “What’s happening to this department? One of our best has just died, and one of us might have killed him? It’s a nightmare.”

  “I need those lab results as soon as they’re done.”

  Sarge nodded. “I’ll give Doyle the lab results on the Palatine case. And I’ll tell him you’re getting the results on this one.”

  “But I don’t want—”

  “The universe isn’t about what you want, Chandler. Get used to it.”

  Phillips’s death was too late to make the morning paper, but the arrest at the seminary dominated the front page. Oddly, pictures at the scene didn’t include the faces of Berkley and Branch. If anyone else had been in the pictures, their mugs would be right there on page one, no matter how humiliating.

  I called Carp’s cell, which two days ago replaced Flyin’ Pie on my autodial.

  “I saw your pictures. Nice. But what happened to the ones with your publisher and the mayor?”

  “Don’t get me started,” she said. “I’ve been yelling at people all morning, and I’ve left two voice mails with Berkley. I chose two great photos with Branch and Berkley. They were going in, until Berkley called and nixed them.”

  “Sounds like censorship,” I said. “Funny how journalists don’t play by their own rules.”

  “Stop taking shots at journalists. I’m a journalist. Berkley’s an aristocrat.”

  “Sorry. I heard Berkley yell at you to stop taking pictures. I thought it was pretty cool you didn’t stop.”

  “Of course I didn’t stop. I do my job no matter who tells me not to.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  “Got to go. Couple of heads here I haven’t bitten off yet.” I looked at the newspaper again.

  The front page featured two pictures of police officers, one of them with a big old guy leaning on a cane in the background. The article quoted Police Chief Lennox, who said a full investigation was being conducted to get to the bottom of the false intelligence that had been given to the police, who had acted in good faith, having every reason to believe a felony was in process in the seminary parking lot. He apologized to his “dear friend,” seventy-three-year-old Raylon Berkley, and to his “close friend” Mayor Branch, and vowed that such a thing would never happen again in our great city … blah blah blah.

  The article said it was a private meeting between the two. “When asked why they would meet in a seminary parking lot at midnight, both men declined to answer.”

  It would have been a perfect morning.

  If only Brandon Phillips wasn’t dead.

  And my T-shirt wasn’t bloodstained.

  THURSDAY, JANUARY 9, 1:30 P.M.

  They got a thirty-hour rush on the bloodstains in the Phillips case because the victim was a detective. By crime lab standards this was a jet on afterburners.

  “Evidence is in,” Sarge said. “I told the lab you’d be there along with Suda.”

  The criminalist, Kathy Strade, handed Suda and me identical pages at the same time. It gave the results of fourteen pieces of evidence. Suda scanned them one at a time, but I turned immediately to number fourteen, then went back to the top.

  “That last little scrap we found on the floor?” Suda asked the criminalist.

  “It was a freshly cut swatch of white fabric. Soaked with Phillips’s blood, like everything else,” said the criminalist.

  “How do you suppose it got there, Chandler?”

  I shrugged.

  “Looked like a part of somebody’s T-shirt,” Strade said. “It’s like it was cut out and left there deliberately. But that’d be crazy.”

  “Unless somebody found evidence elsewhere they didn’t want to turn in,” Suda said. “By dropping it at the crime scene they’d get the state to test and see whose blood was on it.”

  “Who’d do such a thing?” I asked.

  “Maybe the person who arrived on the crime scene when there were only thirteen pieces of evidence and suddenly there were fourteen.” Considering she’d bugged my house and drugged my Mulch, her morally superior look wasn’t convincing.

  I assumed that classic “I’m just a man, so I’m stupid” pose, which usually works. Kathy Strade seemed to buy it.

  I walked out thinking that either somebody was going all-out to frame me, or I’d done something so unthinkable I’d blocked it out. I’d need to burn my bloodstained T-shirt, with the hole in it, when I got home.

  I was knocked out in that car, I told myself. Obviously I hadn’t killed Phillips. If someone was trying to frame me, they’d have left something from me at the scene. The evidence report showed they hadn’t. They were playing with me, showing me they had control.

  By the time Clarence and I arrived at the morgue, on Knott Street, the forensic pathologist, Dr. Robert Jones, had finished undressing, weighing, photographing, and fingerprinting Brandon Philli
ps … or what was once Brandon Phillips. The body had been pulled from the cooler.

  I reassured Jones that Clarence was there under authority of the chief, and there was an e-mail attachment, for heaven’s sake. Once Clarence asked him to spell his name and he sensed his fifteen minutes of fame, all was well. I nodded my approval to Clarence, who’d asked a man named Robert Jones how he spelled it.

  Homicide autopsies are done in a special room, designed to limit access and protect evidence. Organs are removed and weighed, injuries photographed, measured, probed, and numbered. I figured this would be a long one, two hours, because when the victim’s one of our own, we have to get it right. And when the killer’s one of our own, well …

  The doctor’s phone rang. He pushed his Bluetooth earpiece and chatted with his son in Boston while cutting up a dead man in Portland.

  Dr. Jones hit a point of disagreement with his son and paced twenty feet away. Clarence was looking green and miserable. I examined Phillips’s right hand, gently moving each finger. I stopped with the index finger. The trigger finger. I wiggled it as Clarence watched.

  “Please,” Dr. Jones said, abandoning his son in Boston. “Hands off.”

  “Any suggestion this wasn’t a suicide?” I asked.

  “Not that I can see.”

  “Take a close look at that right index finger.”

  “It seems … unusually angled.”

  “Like it was broken?” I asked.

  “Yes. But … it couldn’t be.”

  “Why not?” Clarence asked.

  “Because there’s no swelling,” I said. I asked the doctor, “But what if it was broken after he was already dead?”

  “Then.” Robert Jones, spelled J-o-n-e-s, looked at me, then at Clarence, and said, “there wouldn’t be any swelling.”

  Clarence wrote it down.

  “Nice catch,” I said to Jones. “Most guys would’ve missed that.”

  Jones wrapped it up in Boston, then turned to the microphone suspended over the body. He started speaking, looking at Clarence out of the corner of his eye.

  “White male measuring 71 inches in length, weighing 189 pounds. Overall appearance consistent with stated age of 49, though unusually fit. Body cold with complete rigor mortis. No lacerations. All physical damage is to skull and brain. Appears to have been penetrated by a single high-velocity bullet shot from a handgun at close range. Though the bullet passed through and wasn’t recovered, the wound is consistent with that of a 9 mm revolver of the sort recovered on the scene next to the body. No other abnormalities … with the exception of—” he looked at Clarence sideways “—an apparently broken index finger.” He flipped a switch, shutting off the recorder.

  “Apparently broken?” I asked.

  He reversed the recorder and played “exception of” then stopped and said, “a broken index finger. I surmise, due to lack of swelling, the finger may have been broken postmortem.”

  “May have been?”

  He rewound again and said, “The finger was probably broken postmortem.” He stopped it.

  “Probably? Why not certainly? Any other explanation?”

  He wasn’t going to change his report again, not while I was there.

  Heading out the door, I turned and said, “Dr. Jones, if you find a case where a freshly broken finger of a live person doesn’t swell, would you send it to me? Put it in an e-mail attachment. I’d love to see it.”

  Clarence and I walked around Lawndale and Chapman parks, beautiful even in winter, especially in the light snowfall. We stopped for coffee near the steps of the Multnomah County Courthouse. We walked an extra thirty feet to escape the pocket of air that smelled of wet cigarette fumes, where jury duty candidates had surfaced to smoke.

  “I’ve been asking myself again what I would do if I were a homicide detective planning a murder in Portland to minimize the chances of me being caught. The answer came to me. Know what it is?”

  He didn’t.

  “Think about it,” I said. “The answer has the potential of landing this investigation on the runway.”

  “I’m still on Brandon Phillips,” Clarence said. “If what you said is true, how could his finger break after he was dead?”

  “If he were alone, it couldn’t. But suppose somebody was trying to wrap his finger around the trigger, and it kept popping out. So he squeezed it in there real tight. Still popped out. So he squeezed it harder. If he was strong and angry or scared enough, adrenaline flowing, he could’ve snapped the finger. By the way, guns don’t normally stay in the hand in a suicide. They drop to the floor, a couple of feet from the body.”

  I hated myself for not meeting with Phillips in the middle of the night. If I hadn’t been drinking my life away at Rosie’s, maybe he’d still be alive.

  Clarence and I drove the I-205 bridge to Vancouver, Washington, and arrived at Ray Eagle’s at 4:00 p.m. I found that red chair that didn’t look comfortable but was, and my legs reacquainted themselves with his ottoman.

  “I never heard your answer to something you asked me earlier,” Clarence said, sinking into Ray’s couch. “If you were a homicide detective and were going to kill somebody, how would you make sure you’d get away with it?”

  “You answer first,” I said to Ray.

  “I’d take into account every procedure followed by the other detectives and myself and make sure I didn’t do a single thing to give myself away. Obviously, I’d wear gloves and cover my face. I’d have a backup plan in which I could justify my presence even if found at the scene.”

  “Good answer,” I said. “But I’ve got an even better one. It hit me the other day. If I were going to kill someone in Portland, I’d just wait until my partner and I were the up team. Then I’d commit the murder.”

  “So you’d be called to the scene,” Ray said. “To investigate the same murder you just committed?”

  “Right. So now, even if I left a strand of hair or a fingerprint at the murder scene, it’s okay, because everybody knows I was there—legitimately. I could even confiscate evidence.”

  “Like you confiscated the Black Jack wrapper,” Clarence said.

  “Right. Except I didn’t leave that, because I didn’t kill the guy. It was planted.”

  “But if your theory’s correct,” Clarence said, “doesn’t that mean that either you or Manny are the murderers? You were the up team.”

  “We were on call when the professor was found. But murders aren’t investigated in the order they’re committed.”

  “They’re not?”

  “They’re investigated in the order they’re discovered. By a fluke, another murder was discovered just before the professor’s, the one near Lloyd Center, where the guy shot his wife’s boyfriend. The up team got called to that murder instead.”

  “Jack and Noel,” Clarence said. He clenched both my shoulders in his big mitts. “You’re saying Jack or Noel killed the professor?”

  51

  “There is a master hand here. It is no case of sawed-off shotguns and clumsy six-shooters. You can tell an old master by the sweep of his brush. I can tell a Moriarty when I see one. This crime is from London, not from America.”

  SHERLOCK HOLMES, THE VALLEY OF FEAR

  FRIDAY, JANUARY 10, 11:30 A.M.

  AS I STOOD JAWING with a Fourth Street vendor who cooks the best hot dogs in Portland, Ray Eagle called.

  “You know that seventh phone number I told you was a convenience store?”

  “The one in the back of the Bertrand Russell book?” I said. “What about it?”

  “Turns out that number’s been the store’s for nine years. Before that it was out of commission for a year. But for a fifteen-year period ending ten years ago, guess whose home number it was.”

  “Too tired to guess.”

  “Jack and Linda Glissan’s.”

  No wonder that number rang a bell. Working on the assumption that the professor didn’t consider Jack a great dating prospect, that narrowed the field to his wife, Linda, and his
daughter, Melissa, who’d been alive when the Glissans still had that number.

  I hoofed it back to the precinct and entered Sergeant Seymour’s office, closing the door. I told him about the phone number in the professor’s book.

  “We need to take a closer look at Jack,” I said.

  He nodded reluctantly.

  “He’s my friend,” I said. “But I have to check him out.”

  Two hours later I was summoned to Chief Lennox’s office.

  I hadn’t seen the chief since he’d set up the sting that took down those two notorious felons, Raylon Berkley and Mayor Branch. He’d probably avoided me so I wouldn’t be able to gloat. I had, however, done a great deal of private gloating.

  The chief couldn’t accuse me of anything without revealing that he’d ordered illegal bugs in a public establishment. I’d removed them the day after the sting. Till then, who knows how many private conversations had been recorded at Lou’s. He couldn’t expose me without incriminating himself. So he found something else to jump on me about.

  “I’m told you’re going after Jack Glissan now.”

  Two hours and word had already reached him? Sheesh.

  “First, Glissan’s innocent,” he said. “Second, if we had concerns about him, we could retire him early. Or if absolutely necessary, demote him. Put him back on the street.”

  “Yeah, that would encourage the community,” I said. “Assign killers to drive our streets and protect our people.”

  “We wouldn’t tell them. Jack would volunteer. But he’s not guilty. Remember innocent until proven guilty? Doesn’t that include cops? Jack is supposed to be your friend. If you had evidence, it’d be different.”

  “There’s evidence. I’m continuing to gather it.”

  “Captain Swiridoff tells me you suspect Palatine was involved with Jack’s daughter.”

  “Possibly. Plus there’s the—”

  “How could that account for a murder ten years later?”

  “Revenge is a dish best served cold.”

  “That’s a cliché,” the chief said.

  “Now that’s the pot calling the kettle black.”