by DL Barbur
“We’re going to be allowed access to the scene,” he said. “No photographs and no collecting of evidence.”
“Well that’s something,” I said.
The Portland Hilton wasn’t the fanciest hotel in town, but it apparently rated a discreet police response to three dead guys. There were two marked cars, two unmarked and a crime scene van all crammed into the loading dock. We squeezed in behind them while Casey and the crew in the van kept driving. They were going to circle the area discretely for a while.
A uniform met us and led us up to a suite door guarded by another officer. I didn’t recognize either of them, and they didn’t seem to recognize me. They both looked too young to buy beer, much less tear around town with a fast car and a gun. It was hell getting old.
They were competent though. They had us sign in and don white Tyvek coveralls, hats, and booties.
It was a nice suite. Mack must have been doing well in his retirement, other than the being dead part. The ambiance was ruined somewhat by the smell of loose bowels. Dead bodies tended to do that after a while, and there were three of them in the space of a modest apartment.
Tanner Reese was over by the mini-bar, typing on a tablet with his hands still in nitrile gloves. Apparently notebooks were a thing of the past. He looked up at me, gave a little smirk, then went back to what he was doing. Punk. I’d been investigating homicides when he was still nervous about asking girls out to the prom.
I saw Mack first, he was sitting up in a chair, staring at a TV with a slack expression on his face. His dead eyes were still open. He looked older in death. The remote control was on the floor in front of him, and he almost looked like he might snap out of it at any moment and bend over and pick it up. Bolle walked over to Reese. I followed Alex over to Mack.
She whipped an old-fashioned magnifying glass out of her shoulder bag, the kind you’d expect to see in a black and white Sherlock Holmes movie. As Tanner typed on his tablet, and the two crime scene techs set up their digital cameras and LED lights, it seemed incongruous.
She bent over and studied Mack’s arm.
“Very small puncture wound,” she said. “Consistent with a needle.”
“Huh,” I said.
“The smack is over on the table,” Reese said from across the room.
I managed not to say the words “fuck you very much” as he turned back to Bolle.
There was a baggie of crystalline white powder, some syringes, spoons, cotton, a lighter and a bottle of water sitting on a little side table. It was a big baggie. I was guessing there was most of an ounce left. I hadn’t been keeping track of the street prices of drugs lately, but I guessed we were looking at a couple grand worth of the drug. Maybe more if it was especially pure, as I was betting this was. I’d pulled my fair share of heroin off suspects in the past, and mostly it ranged from black and tarry looking, to a kind of dirty brown powder. Usually, by the time it was stepped on and diluted down, it looked pretty rough. This stuff looked like it could have come from a laboratory.
“One guy is in the bedroom. The second is in the bathroom,” one of the evidence techs said.
I followed Alex into the bedroom. “John,” the former ISA guy was laying on the bed, fully clothed except for his shoes. His glasses were folded on his chest and a paperback mystery novel was on the comforter beside him. The only clue that he wasn’t asleep was the thin trickle of vomit running out of his mouth.
Alex grabbed his arm and gave it the same treatment with her magnifying glass.
“Same. A small puncture. No needle tracks or marks on his arms. A lot of junkies shoot up between their toes or on their thighs because they want to be discreet though.”
I looked over my shoulder out the door of the bedroom and saw Reese had shifted his position so he could still talk to Bolle and watch us. That was a shame because I really wanted to go through “John’s” pockets. I would bet a long dollar his name wasn’t John. Any documents I would find would likely be a fake as well, but it would be a start.
“Block his view for ten seconds,” Alex murmured under her breath. She put the magnifying glass back in her bag and pulled out a mobile biometric scanner. I bent over and pretended to look at something and she swiped John’s right index finger across the screen. A green LED lit up and she nodded.
“Good capture,” she said.
She slipped the scanner back into her bag like she’d practiced it. Reese was on the phone. I looked around the room, looking for anything else of interest, but I didn’t want to push my luck.
Alex walked into the bathroom. The younger guy was fully clothed, but was slumped over soaking wet in the shower. A cell phone sat on the sink.
“The 911 call came from that phone,” Reese said from behind us. “The tape has nothing but some mumbles and the sound of water running. We figure they all scored a little horse that was purer than they were used to. This guy tried to wake himself up with a cold shower.”
If we’d been looking at typical junkies, I would have accepted that story without a second thought. This stank. Afghanistan was awash in opium and heroin, and the Army had been keeping addiction among soldiers quiet for years. But these guys just didn’t seem to fit the mold. I’d been pouring over Mack’s financial transactions, and they didn’t smell like a junkie’s to me. The guy liked to party, but there wasn’t the constant drain that I would have expected from somebody with a heroin problem.
“They don’t look like junkies,” I said.
Reese shrugged. “Not everybody does. We’ve got upper-class suburban housewives with a smack habit these days. Maybe they aren’t regular users and just wanted to have a party.”
I could tell he’d already reached a conclusion in his mind, even without the benefit of an autopsy or a review of the crime scene evidence. I’d always thought the best way to get away with murder would be to make everyone think it wasn’t a murder in the first place. In Portland, dozens of people died of accidents, suicides, overdoses and sudden health problems every week. Cops were supposed to make a perfunctory investigation of any medically unattended death, and the vast majority of them were not found to be suspicious.
Still, I didn’t see a way for someone to overpower the three of them and administer a lethal dose of drugs without signs of a fight. The guy in the shower’s t-shirt was hiked up and I could see a holster inside his waistband.
“All three were packing?” I asked.
“Yup,” Reese said as he typed on his tablet. “All three had a pistol, an extra magazine, and at least one folding knife on them. The guns had full magazines and a round in the chamber.”
So the guns hadn’t been fired. There was no sign of a fight. Maybe this really was a giant coincidence.
Alex was examining the dead guy with her magnifying glass. Reese looked at her with an irritated expression.
“The ME is here. He’s bringing up his crew right now.”
“Well that’s that then,” I said, and followed Reese out the door, with Alex behind me.
“Whoops, forgot my bag. I set it on the toilet,” she turned around and headed back in the bathroom. I figured she was up to something so I tried to distract Reese.
“So what’s next?” I asked.
Reese gave me a funny look. That was a stupid question. I’d been investigating homicides back when Reese was still playing with action figures.
“We wait for the ME’s report.”
He looked back towards the bedroom and frowned just as Alex stepped out. She gave him a high wattage smile and walked past me to Bolle, who was looking at his phone with a nonplussed expression on his face.
“I think I’ve done everything I can do here,” she said.
Bolle nodded and turned to go without a word. We followed him out into the hall, where the deputy ME was pulling his gurney out of the elevator. I didn’t recognize her, and Alex apparently didn’t either, because she didn’t say anything in greeting, and she didn’t appear to recognize us.
Alex was silent until
the elevator doors shut behind us.
“The guy in the shower has what I believe to be a puncture wound behind his right ear. I took a picture of it, and I’ll blow it up when we get back. I really need to access the autopsy to be sure though.”
“Behind his ear? Junkies shoot up there?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Dunno. I think I really want to get my hands on those dead guys though.”
Those were really weird words to hear come out of the mouth of the woman I loved.
“Dent, you there?” It was Casey’s voice in my radio’s earpiece.
I keyed the radio attached to my belt.
“Go for Dent.”
“Remember the woman who was sitting outside Charlie Mike’s? She’s outside, across the street from the hotel. Different car, but the same MO. She’s sitting in the passenger seat.”
“I think we should talk to her,” Bolle said. “But we need some kind of PC.”
PC stood for “probable cause,” the legal standard we would have to meet to arrest somebody for questioning. Sitting around in a car in a public place didn’t count.
“I have an idea,” I said and explained. Bolle bought off on it, and we climbed into the Charger we’d used to drive over. The others in the surveillance van were still circling downtown. They avoided driving by the hotel too frequently, but they made one more pass to make sure the woman was still there.
I saw her car up ahead, parked on the right side of the one way street. There was a parking space behind her with just barely enough room to squeeze the Charger in with some careful maneuvering.
I didn’t maneuver carefully. Instead, I carefully inched forward and tapped her rear bumper with the front end of the Charger. I got out of the car and walked up to her car. It was one of those little low slung, hyper fuel efficient jobs so I had to bend way over to be seen. There was a bar code sticker on the window. A rental.
“M’am, I apologize. I seem to have struck your car. Would you mind stepping out so we can exchange information?”
She had a deer in headlights look. Up close, I could tell she was younger than I thought at first, certainly in her mid-thirties at the oldest, maybe not even that. She had red hair pulled back in a pony tail, wore muted colored clothing, and there was a camera with a long lens on the floorboards between her feet.
“Uhh... I’m sure it’s fine, don’t worry about it.” I could barely hear her through the rolled up window.
I pulled my credentials and slapped them against the window.
“M’am, Oregon law requires that drivers exchange information after an accident. Failing to perform the duties of a driver is a Class A Misdemeanor, and you can be arrested.”
All of that was technically true. What I was leaving out was since I only held a Federal commission, I couldn’t actually arrest her for breaking an Oregon state law. I figured we’d burn that bridge if we came to it.
She rolled her eyes and got out of the car. She looked at me across the roof.
“This is bullshit, Miller. You can arrest me if you want, but I’m not going to talk to you until you talk to my boss.”
Chapter 8
Her ID said her name was Diana Hunt, thirty-one years old. She had a valid Oregon Driver’s License, a couple of social media accounts with infrequent, innocuous posts and business cards for Hunt Photography, specializing in Wildlife Photography. She even had a valid Oregon Concealed Handgun license for the Glock 19 she’d been carrying in an appendix holster under her sweatshirt.
According to Casey, the camera gear was all top notch. Hunt Photography had a business website and was even registered as a corporation in Wyoming, but there was no mention of it on photography forums or social media. If she was making enough money to afford thirty grand worth of camera gear, she was doing it quietly.
The most unusual thing about her had been the hearing aid in her left ear. We’d removed it, assuming it was some piece of surveillance gear, but according to Henry, it was a real hearing aid and nothing more.
“I don’t think she’s real,” Casey said.
“I don’t either,” I said as I stared at her on the video screen. We’d stuck her in an interview room at Wapato, where she sat with a preternatural stillness, breathing slowly and staring at the wall. I wondered if she was meditating.
Casey was clicking through screens on the computer so fast I couldn’t follow.
“All her Facebook friends have pages just like hers. The pictures could come from a clip art collection. Really bland stuff. I mean, this day and age who doesn’t post the occasional political rant on Facebook?”
I didn’t, but then again the only social media presence I had was a MySpace page I’d set up after a couple too many snorts of Johnny Walker and then promptly abandoned.
“You know those pictures they put in a wallet when you buy it? It’s almost like she’s one of those people come to life,” Casey said. “Plus, I can’t get into her phone.”
That was interesting. Casey had access to dozens of tools she could use to crack just about any cell phone.
The most damning thing of all was when she called me by name. Since then she’d been silent, except for repeated requests to call her boss.
“Well, I guess I’ll try again,” I said. I picked up the tablet that had been on the desk in front of me and walked into the interrogation room.
I sat down across from her and turned on the tablet. I cued up a picture of a bird I’d downloaded off the internet.
“You’re a wildlife photographer, right? What kind of bird is this?”
She cocked her head at me.
“Cedar Waxwing. You really need to let me talk to my boss.”
I scrolled to another picture. I really didn’t like these tablet things. I preferred the visceral reality of photographs in a manilla folder.
I put a photo of Mack in front of her.
“How about this, recognize him?”
“I really need to talk to my boss.”
Next, I flipped to a picture of John, dead on the hotel room bed, and turned the tablet so she could see it.
I had spent many hours sitting across a table from suspects in interrogation rooms. I’d read dozens of books, and attended a handful of courses on how to question people and how to tell when they were lying. There was the Reid Method of Interviewing and Interrogation, which had its uses but had the potential for false confessions. Neuro-Linguistic Programming had been all the rage for the while, but ultimately turned out to be bullshit. Then there was the PEACE method developed by British cops, which I’d begrudgingly accepted as effective, despite its somewhat touchy-feely nature.
The one thing I’d found to be reliable were micro-expressions. Most people thought they had a poker face, and could control their body language and facial expressions through force of will. To a certain extent that was true, but research had shown the amygdala, that primitive, reactionary part of our brain, fed information to our facial muscles faster than our conscious mind could control them.
I’d been watching Diana when I showed her the picture of John, and for a half second, maybe less, a look of fear and sadness went across her face. It was subtle, and if I hadn’t been watching for it, I would have missed it. Later, I’d look at a video recording and make sure I hadn’t been making it up, but I was pretty sure I’d struck a nerve.
I held the picture up.
“Who was he to you? A friend? Lover? Enemy?”
Her eyes kept going away from the picture, then going back again as if they were pulled there. She had extremely fair skin, and I saw the beginnings of a flush start. Against her now red skin, I could see the faint white lines of a network of fine scars on her temple, cheek, and jawline.
“Gotcha,” I said.
She took a deep breath, getting control of herself.
“You should really talk to my boss.”
With that, the flush faded, and she started deep, even breathing. Her eyes unfocused. I was tempted to snap my fingers in front of her nose to s
ee if she reacted.
It was kind of spooky.
I left the tablet on the table, with the picture of John still on the screen. There was nothing sensitive on it, so she couldn’t cause any mischief with it, although I was halfway hoping she would try to pick it up and send out a message or visit a website or something. Anything would give us some insight. I figured she was too much of a pro for that though.
Bolle was staring at the screen, tapping a finger on the desktop when I walked back into the command center.
“Now what?” I asked.
“She knows John,” he said.
“You saw it too.”
“Yes. I’m guessing she’s a three letter.”
“Three letter” was a euphemism for an intelligence officer from one of the big agencies, Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, etc. I had a feeling Bolle was probably right. The question was what to do about it. It wasn’t like we could call up the local CIA safe house and ask them to come vouch for their case officer.
“I thought they weren’t supposed to operate inside the US,” Alex said.
Technically, she was correct, but in reality, it was much murkier than that. I’d just started in Major Crimes after 9/11 and we’d all been going nuts trying to keep track of various extremist groups, along with the FBI and a bunch of other agencies. The CIA had been an acknowledged, and often unseen presence in all of it.
“There’s somebody at the front gate,” Casey said. She panned a video camera to zoom in on a car sitting at our front gate. The driver shut off the headlights, and we could see a single male occupant. He held a cell phone up where the camera could see it, dialed and held it up to his face.
On the desk, Diana’s phone started ringing.
“Let’s let her answer it,” Bolle said. He was squinting at the grainy picture on the screen.
I carried the ringing phone down the hall and set it down in front of Diana. She was so still I was tempted to check her for a pulse.
“It’s for you,” I said.
