by Tyler Dilts
“With what you know,” Catherine said, “he won’t stand a chance. You’ve got the evidence on your side. You can end—”
Sara shook her head and raised her hand to quiet her friend. “Not here. Can we go someplace else?”
Catherine nodded, and the camera panned quickly to the left, focusing on a red-and-black abstract painting that looked like a bleeding wound.
“So you just stood there and shot that?” I asked Oliver. “I thought you said Sara was your friend.”
“She was,” he said, lifting his chin to a defiant angle.
“She must have been if she let you record that,” Jen said. We were double-teaming him, pushing him off balance.
“Well, she—”
“How’d you get that footage?” I asked.
“She knew I was shooting the—”
“But she didn’t know you were shooting her.”
“No, but—”
“But you shot her anyway,” I said.
“I—”
“You what?”
“She didn’t know.”
“She didn’t know?”
“No.” He hung his head. His sense of shame filled the small room.
Jen softened her tone. “How’d you do it?”
“There’s a temporary wall in the middle of the room, paintings hanging on it. I shot around the corner of it. They didn’t know.”
I snorted with as much contempt as I could muster, and his shoulders slumped even more. What he brought us was genuinely useful. It was Sara adding even more confirmation to our suspicions about the state of the Bentons’ relationship in her voice.
Her own voice.
But I wasn’t going to let a douchebag like Oliver have the satisfaction of knowing that.
I left the room and let Jen and the lieutenant wrap things up.
“Remember what I said when we were at the crime scene? In the den, looking at the family pictures?”
“Yes,” Jen said.
“So far, he’s the only one with motive.”
“Could be his father, too.”
“Maybe. What do you want to do now?” I asked.
“See if we can find out who they were talking about in the video.”
Catherine Catanio wasn’t on campus that day, but when Jen called her, she agreed to come in to the squad and look at the video clip.
While we were waiting, I used my throwaway to call Patrick and see if he’d made any progress.
“I’ve got a source who can give us all of the congressman’s cell phone records. Kroll’s, too,” Patrick said. “Do we want to go that far?”
“Think we’ll get caught?”
“I don’t think so. But I can’t guarantee we won’t.”
“Let’s do it,” I said. “We’ve got some cover. If it goes bad, we’ve got enough ugly shit on Bradley to leak if it comes to that.”
“Mutually assured destruction?” he said.
“If it’s good enough for the Cold War—”
“You’re forgetting something.”
“I am? What?”
“For that to work, the other guys have to know about your missiles.”
I thought for a moment about how good it would feel to phone in a few anonymous tips to the Press Telegram, the LA Times, maybe even Channel 4. “They’ll know,” I said. “They’ll know soon enough.”
“Really?” Patrick sounded puzzled.
“Well, no, not really. I just thought it would be fun to say that.”
“That fucking creep,” Catherine said as soon as we began playing Oliver’s clip for her. “I can’t believe he did that.”
“Remember the other clips of Sara and the kids on the news?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Apparently, Oliver sold those to KNBC.”
“Really?”
“At least one of them.”
Jen said, “Thanks again for coming in. We just needed to show that to you and ask you a few questions about it.”
“What can I help you with?” she asked.
“Well, in the video, you say ‘not again,’” I said. “What exactly did you mean by that?”
“Sara had just told me that she found out Bradley had been involved with someone else.”
“Did she tell you who?” Jen asked.
“No,” Catherine said. “Just that it was someone he worked with.”
“Is there anything else she might have said about it?” I asked. “Any details at all? Anything could be helpful.”
“Nothing I can think of.”
“Bradley’s been working in Washington lately, hasn’t he?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Do you know if the woman he was involved with was here or back east?”
“Here, I think. Sara answered Bradley’s cell phone one day when he was in the shower. A woman was on the other end. Sara said she knew from the awkwardness of the caller’s voice what was going on.”
“What makes you think she was local?”
“Sara said the caller’s number was in the seven-one-four area code. ‘That figures,’ she said to me. That’s why I remember.” Catherine smiled sadly at the memory of the dig at the Orange County area code.
“Thank you. This is very helpful,” I said.
“Let me know if there’s anything else I can do,” Catherine said.
“We will.” Jen extended her hand.
Before she let go, Catherine said, “I want to help you nail that fuck to the wall.”
After she was gone, I said to Jen, “Do you think that’s some kind of an art thing?”
She smiled. “What do you make of the OC number?”
“I have an idea. Let me check my notes.”
Three
MOLLY FIELDS LIVED in Huntington Beach, about three miles from the congressman’s office. Her cell phone was a 714 number.
Patrick ran their phone records—illegally, of course—and found that, several months before the murders, Bradley had called Molly thirty-seven times over a three-week period. She’d called him only six times. The last call was nine days before Oliver had shot the video of Sara and Catherine at the art exhibit.
“That sounds like something,” Jen said.
“It is.”
“Where should we interview her?”
She had a good question. Did we want to be friendly or intimidating? Which would get us better results?
“Look at the numbers,” I said. “Think she didn’t want to talk to him? Maybe he was harassing her?”
“That’s a possibility,” Jen said. “But it could have just been a practical thing; he told her not to call him at home, when he was with Sara. Could be he just likes to be in charge, to control things.”
We decided to bring her in. It would give us more options. She’d never be as relaxed as she would be at her home, but if Jen was right and she was enthusiastically involved with Bradley, we’d have a better shot with her in the interview room. We could pursue a harsher interview strategy if we needed to.
Jen thought I should make the call because I’d had the chance to build a bit of rapport with her.
“Hi, Molly,” I said when she answered her cell. “This is Danny Beckett. How are you doing?”
“I’m well,” she said. I could hear both surprise and curiosity in her voice. “How are you?”
Good, I thought. She was treating the call like a conversation and not an interrogation. “I’m good, thanks. How’s the congressman holding up?”
“Better than I would have believed. I don’t know how anyone could take that kind of loss.”
“It’s amazing what people are able to withstand,” I said. “I never cease to be surprised.”
“You must see a lot of it.”
“I do. I do.” I let the weight of that thought play for a moment and then went on. “Molly, I was hoping you might be able to help us out with something.”
“Of course, Detective Beckett.”
“Call me Danny, please.” She was quiet, and I won
dered if I’d gone too far with that familiarity.
But she broke the silence. “What can I do, Danny?”
“Do you think you could answer a few more questions for us?”
“Yes.”
“Would you mind coming into the station? We’d like you to look at a few video clips and get your take on them.”
“Video clips?” she said. Was it still curiosity in her voice, or something else?
“Yes,” I said, trying to sound as mundane as possible. “Just a few public events. We wanted to get a staffer’s opinion on a few things. We know how busy Mr. Kroll is.” Technically, none of that was untrue. Only misleading. I wondered why I was hesitant to tell Molly outright lies. I think I wanted to trust her. To believe that she’d help us close the case.
“Oh, okay. When do you want me to come in?”
“The sooner we can get these questions cleared up, the better. What’s your schedule like today?”
Virtually no one is at ease in a police interview room. Molly certainly wasn’t. But we went out of our way to make her feel as comfortable as we could. We got her a fresh cup of coffee. Chatted with her, making small talk. Our aim was to create a sense of cognitive dissonance. For her to feel nothing but friendliness and support from us, while at the same time letting her feel the distress and anxiety that the harsh fluorescent lighting and cold metal brought out in her.
After we tossed ten minutes’ worth of questions to her about the congressman and his work and her work and their work and her relationship with the rest of the Benton family, I had a very strong sense of how she behaved in normal conversation and of how she sounded and acted when she told the truth. Then I asked, “How well do you know the congressman’s son, Bradley?”
She hesitated for a brief instant and almost blinked. “Fairly well,” she said, apparently not recognizing the hairline crack in her composure. “He works with his father a lot.”
“Is it true he’s going to be running for congress himself?”
“We’re not supposed to say anything about it, but I guess at this point, there’s nothing to hide, right?”
I held her eyes and gave her a sad half smile. “Right.”
“Yes. He was going to run for the thirty-seventh district next year.”
“Was?”
“Well, I don’t know for sure. I guess it’s way too early to know for sure.”
“You said that when we spoke before. Has anything changed?”
“Not that I know of. But Bradley now...” She didn’t finish the thought, and it was a few seconds before she went on. “With what happened to Sara and the kids...”
“Of course. Did you like Sara?”
The half blink again.
“Yes,” she said. “Everybody did. She was the nicest person in the whole family.” She cast her eyes down. I couldn’t tell if the action was caused by grief or guilt or something else.
“Did you know her well?”
“I guess so.”
“How often did you talk to her?”
“Every two or three weeks. She’d bring the kids to see their grandpa, or at an event or something. The family’s very friendly with the staff.”
Jen and I had talked about how to present the video, about whether to confront her first and then show it to her or to show her the clip first and hit her with the accusation. We’d decided to play it by ear.
“Would you take a look at something?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said.
I flipped open the MacBook on the table and played Oliver’s recording.
I watched Molly watch the screen.
As Sara and Catherine spoke, the color slowly faded from Molly’s face. By the end of the clip, her eyes were wet.
I offered her a tissue and said, “Tell me about Bradley.”
She did.
“He didn’t rape her?” the lieutenant asked.
“No, but she has a slam dunk sexual harassment lawsuit,” Jen said.
“She slept with him once because she was afraid of losing her job, then he wouldn’t leave her alone?”
“That’s right,” I said. “She was about to quit working for the congressman when Sara found out.”
“But there weren’t any repercussions from that?”
“Not according to Molly,” I said. “She kept waiting for something to happen, but it never did.”
Jen said, “She thought Sara protected her.”
“Really?” Ruiz asked.
We both nodded.
“Anything really new, or does it just reinforce what we already know?” he asked.
“Nothing completely fresh,” I said, “but we’ve got serious leverage. If Bradley’s got any political aspirations left, we can end his hopes with one phone call.”
“But you’re right,” Jen said. “Everything is still circumstantial.”
“We know Shevchuk, Turchenko, and Tropov were contractors, and we know Bradley had a serious motive. But we can’t connect them yet.”
“Keep working it till you can.” Ruiz picked up his pen and turned his attention to the paperwork on his desk.
We knew that was our exit cue.
Dave Zepeda was in the squad wrapping things up for the day. He was involved in the case, but not as deeply as the rest of us. We thought his relative distance might give him some perspective that we couldn’t find. I gave him a summary of what I thought he knew and ran down what little new information we had.
“I’m completely fuckin’ lost,” Dave said.
“What part don’t you get?” I asked.
“What part? The whole damn thing. Russians, politicians, Ukrainians, special ops, Jolly Green Giants. Come on. You think anybody could follow this?”
He wasn’t just being difficult. One of the most important aspects of any homicide investigation is shaping the evidence into a cohesive narrative. People—lieutenants, captains, district attorneys, juries—need a story, and it has to be clear and easy to follow. We knew laying it out for him would be our first stab at selling the story to an audience.
I rolled our large dry-erase board to a good angle for Dave to see from his desk. Across the top edge, I wrote the names of the first victims—Sara, Bailey, and Jacob—in blue ink.
“Okay,” I said, “here’s where it starts. Three victims.” Along the right edge of the board, I made a tight column in black that read, top to bottom, The Congressman, Bradley, Kroll, Campos, et al. “They were related to some very powerful people. At this point, we don’t have any evidence linking any of the names on the right to the crimes. There is a motive, though.”
Jen picked up the ball. “There are rumors that Bradley Benton the Third had been considering a run for congress, either succeeding his father or running in an adjacent district. We know Sara was planning to divorce Bradley because of infidelity and possibly even some criminal behavior. There was a floor safe stolen from the crime scene that contained hard evidence that would have been very damaging to Bradley both in the divorce and in his campaign.”
“So anyone in the column on the right had a reason to want the contents of the safe,” Dave said.
“Exactly.” I picked up a red marker, and underneath the first set of names, I wrote Turchenko and Shevchuk. “Here’s what we know. These two, the Ukrainians, committed the actual murders. They’ve got records. Mostly petty Eastern European organized crime stuff, but some violence. Not hard to buy this escalation. And we’ve got conclusive physical evidence and a confession. Rock solid.”
Dave said, “So you could close it there.”
“We could.” I still had the red marker in my hand. Below Turchenko and Shevchuk, I scrawled another name. “But these two didn’t act alone. Turchenko claims they were hired by another guy. A Russian smuggler named Anton Tropov.”
“That’s the guy who Danny almost took his head off with the shotgun, right?”
“Not quite,” Jen said. “That was Yevgeny. This is Anton. They’re cousins.”
“Cousins?”
“Yeah, but Yevgeny’s not in this,” I said. “Not as far as we know.”
“All right,” he said. “So Anton, the Russian, hires the two Ukrainians to take out the Benton family.”
“Right.”
“But he doesn’t have a motive.”
“No,” Jen said.
“Maybe he wanted the safe. Blackmail the Bentons.”
“Could be. But how would he know about it?”
“Good question,” Dave said. “You sweat him about it?”
“No, Anton’s gone. We can’t find him. And now there are new players in the game.” In green, the only color I had left, I wrote Shooter and Driver on the left edge of the board. Then I drew a red line through Driver.
“Damn,” Dave said.
Jen agreed. “Yeah.”
“The shooter killed Shevchuk; then when the driver botched the getaway, he killed him, too.”
Dave thought about it. “Maybe Anton hired a couple of button men so the Ukrainians couldn’t roll on him. Now he’s trying to stay out of the heat.”
“Possibly.” Careful not to write over any of the names, I drew a line connecting the column on the left to the column on the right. “But maybe not. This is entirely circumstantial, but the congressman and Kroll, his chief of staff, both served in the air force special ops unit.”
“Pararescue,” Jen added.
“The green footprints,” Dave said. “So you think someone in the column on the right hired all these goons to make the evidence in the safe disappear?”
Jen and I looked at each other and then back at him.
He made a little whistling noise and said, “That’s a real clusterfuck. You should pin it on Anton and the Ukrainians and call it a day.” He stood up and put on his coat. “I’m going home. You two have fun with that.”
After work that evening, I had an appointment with my physical therapist.
During our session, Brookes made approving noises and nodded every now and then. When we finished, she said, “What have you been doing? You seem looser. There’s less tightness in your neck and shoulder.”
