Close Case

by Alafair Burke

  “I’ll take you to the men’s room, Todd, that’s not a problem. I’ll walk you down there myself just as soon as you explain to me which of you used the bat. It’s only the one with the bat who faces the needle.”

  “OK, this is getting ridiculous,” I said. Chuck tried to reach for my hand as it reached toward the glass, but he was too late. The rap of my knuckles two times against the window made Corbett hop in his seat, but Calabrese only blinked.

  “Oh, boy, Todd, now you’ve really got a problem. You know what that means?” Without warning, Mike hit the switch that illuminated the observation area where Chuck and I stood. Just as quickly, he hit it again. In what had appeared to be the interrogation room’s mirror, Corbett would have seen a half-second flash of two strangers watching him through a clear pane of glass. “That knock means the lady in there just ID’d you to my partner. You better get up. It’s time to take you downtown.”

  I started to open the door to interrupt, but this time Chuck was faster. “Think, Sam. If you walk in that room right now, you give Corbett the upper hand. What’s done is done. Let’s just see what happens.”

  I pursed my lips and stared into his eyes and at his set jaw. He was right. I was over a barrel. The damage was already done. If I interrupted now to rein Mike in, Corbett would almost certainly invoke his rights, terminating any chance we had of getting an admission. “Fine, but Mike better be wrapping up.”

  “I’m sure he knows that too.”

  Corbett’s right foot tapped a staccato rhythm against the linoleum floor, his eyes squeezed shut tightly as his torso rocked front to back in time with his nervous beat. Mike looked at his watch. “I got to get going soon, Todd, so you need to decide what we’re doing here.”

  “Did that lady in there see Trevor too?”

  “Just his picture, but my partner knocked twice. That means she ID’d both of you. He’s probably being picked up right now as we speak.”

  Still handcuffed, Corbett was tapping his fingers now against the back edge of the chair, no doubt looking for the out that every defendant thinks he’ll find. The story the police will believe. The one that will end his trouble and take him home. The out is something that every defendant thinks he can conjure, but which every cop knows does not exist. It’s the belief in the out that convinces suspects to waive their rights and talk to police, locking themselves into an untenable defense from which they cannot escape at trial.

  Corbett had lasted longer than most before committing to his out. But what Corbett had displayed in tenacity, he lacked in creativity. He chose the out that Mike had been suggesting all along.

  “All right, man, I think we did it,” he said, squeezing his eyes shut again, struggling for the right words to convey the truth he was about to admit. “It was the meth. I felt—I don’t know, invincible.”

  “You think you did it?”

  “Fuck, what do you want from me? Fine, we did it.”

  “Why?”

  “I told you, we were fucked up.”

  “And the car?”

  “Yeah, we were just after the car. It got out of hand.”

  “When you hit him with the bat,” Mike added.

  Todd Corbett hesitated, coming to terms with what he was saying. “No. Trevor’s the one who hauled off on him with the bat. Check his jacket.” He paused again, assuring himself once more before he sank his friend for good. “He called me this morning. There was blood on his jean jacket. Check for yourself.”

  6

  Heidi Hatmaker worked until seven o’clock on Monday night. Nothing new in that.

  What made this evening different was that for once she was actually excited to be there. Thrilled, in fact, to hunker down in her tiny cubicle in the news pool offices. To an outside observer, the transformation would go unnoticed. Same room, same chair, same petite frame locked in its studying pose: right leg tucked beneath her, thumb-nail between chewing teeth, sandy-blond bangs concealing the direction of her gaze.

  But Heidi felt a surge of excitement. She used her forearms to block the source of that excitement from the view of passersby moving frantically, as usual, behind, in front, and beside her in the newsroom. She really needn’t have bothered; no one ever paid attention to what she was doing anyway.

  It was better, though, she reasoned, to avoid any possible notice of the plan she’d come up with this morning—a plan she thought Percy Crenshaw would approve of. This could be her chance to change the persona she’d been stuck with since she moved to Portland.

  As unglamorous as the Portland Oregonian might seem, most of the reporters who worked there had paid their dues. They’d slaved for years at community newspapers or as freelance writers. They’d gone into debt, hocked heir-looms, and slept on the same futon for a decade straight.

  And they resented the Yale graduate who pulled up in her parents’ BMW for an assignment handed to her by their new editor-in-chief. About six months into the job, her father had interfered, and she’d suddenly been offered a regular position on the crime beat. Knowing where the assignment came from, Heidi turned it down and forced her father to promise that his college buddy would never again disrupt her natural career path at the paper.

  Since then, she had regularly sat through semiannual job reviews that all delivered the same verdict: She was one of the smartest, most thorough, hardest-working staff members they had. But she had neither spark nor flair. She didn’t have the spark that convinced the nonreporters of the world to share secrets she could turn into news. And she didn’t have the flair that enabled reporters to take information that was readily available to other news outlets and humanize it in a way that made it Pulitzer Prize–worthy.

  Percy Crenshaw had had both. In the months and months she had been relegated to fact-checking and line editing, she had watched him carefully. Once, he’d pulled her aside and told her he had noticed she was hungry. She tried to brush it off with humor, responding, “Thanks, but actually I just had an apple.” But because he had the spark, Percy got her talking—and kept her talking—about what it was like to be the only staff member who knew the editor’s college friends called him Thor, let alone why. It didn’t take him long to realize that she was sick of hearing how dependable and detail-oriented she was, while no one ever let her do anything that came close to reporting the news.

  To her surprise, Percy had been kind—almost paternal—but in a manner she had never experienced. He had told her she needed to adopt a new persona, to think of it as acting. He had even teased her about her name, something she usually minded. “You need to act like a Wolf Blitzer or a Hannah Storm, not a Heidi Hatmaker. Heidi Hatmaker’s a girl who skips down cobblestone streets and gives presents to children. You need to be ruthless. You need to push those children out of the way to get to your story.”

  In other words, she needed to act like an ambitious reporter even if she still felt like a spoiled-rotten college kid who drove her mother’s old car and needed a haircut she refused to let her parents pay for. For the past four months, she’d been trying. But no one seemed to notice.

  Then today, after she’d been standing guard outside Percy’s office for more than two hours, her editor Tom Runyon finally delivered the instructions he’d received from the newspaper’s lawyer. It was yet another task that required a detail-oriented, smart, thorough, hardworking kid to see through—no drive, instinct, or charisma required. The police were going to search Percy’s office, and her job was to screen every single file and scrap of paper. She was to make certain nothing revealed a confidential source.

  She knew immediately that the stint would be easy. Percy had said it was a mistake—at least for him—to put too much on paper before he knew for sure what his take was. He preferred to store the facts in his head and let them stew until he envisioned his final spin. He only jotted down minutiae that might elude his steel-trap memory. The big-picture stuff stayed upstairs.

  In retrospect, Percy Crenshaw had been the yang to her yin. This strong magnetic African-A
merican man had possessed every raw talent that she coveted, while lacking at least some of the learned skills she had mastered. She knew the police wouldn’t find much in Percy’s office.

  But she knew where the minutiae were. She had watched him. She had read every article he had ever written. When the female District Attorney and the good-looking cop were done in Crenshaw’s office, she left it just as she’d found it. But first—before she locked the door behind her and returned the key to Lon Hubbard—she and Percy’s pocket-sized notebooks made a pit stop at the photocopier.

  Now she had pages filled with an intense, nearly illegible scrawl. Heidi might be young, but she knew her strengths and weaknesses. She was patient, and she was smart. She might not have spark or flair, but she had photocopies of Percy Crenshaw’s light-blue notebooks. If anyone could reconstruct the reporter’s knowledge that Percy had taken with him in death, it would be Heidi. That’s cool, Percy would have said.

  Back in her studio apartment, Heidi sat Indian-style on the bed, the television turned down low, documents spread around her on the quilt, a larger circle on the floor beneath her.

  She had reread several of Percy’s older, more notable investigative articles. Now she was searching for any entries in the photocopied notebooks that might line up with the ultimate published work. Scooping carryout chow mein into her mouth as she read, she felt herself recognizing the rhythm of Percy’s style.

  Heidi was a student of work habits. From what she’d seen, writers were typically funnelers, jotting down their biggest themes and concepts first, filling in the skeleton outline with increasingly specific details down the road. Percy Crenshaw’s approach was comparatively spigot-like; first he amassed pages and pages of minutiae; then he decided on the theme that would tie it all together. Percy’s earliest notes stuck to basics: numbers, dates, and other specifics he might otherwise forget.

  Right now, she was looking at a perfect example of the Crenshaw method. His big magazine article for the L.A. Times—the one that got him the movie deal—involved a murdered judge who was blackmailed over an affair she had with an elected official. The earliest notes Heidi had been able to identify on the story didn’t include the judge’s name or any mention of corruption, murder, or blackmail. Instead, Percy had scrawled VMI-Van above a list of dates. Because the published article was long on details about the affair, Heidi eventually realized the note reflected the dates of the couple’s liaisons at the Village Motor Inn in Vancouver, Washington. Only later did he begin to fill out the story.

  Trying to work Percy’s system to her advantage, Heidi had begun compiling a list of cryptic entries from his recent notes. Every time she saw a date, number, or initials, she added them to her list. The problem was, the list was getting longer and longer, and she was no closer to any big ideas.

  Most intriguing—and confusing—was Percy’s seeming fascination with a set of numbers he had been tracking. Initially, he recorded them in a list-type format. In the first such entry she had found, he had written:

  NEP 80 S (50 B) 25 A (10 B)

  The next few entries were similarly headed by the caption NEP but contained different numbers next to the letters S, A, and B. Then the entries became more complicated, throwing in additional numbers marked by the letters L and W.

  Heidi had no idea what any of it meant, but she knew Percy had been interested in it. More recently, he had come up with charts, two for each month, from January to August. For each month, Percy had written NEP on top of one chart, and EP on top of the other. On the horizontal axis of the charts were columns titled B, L, W, A, and TOTAL. On the vertical axis, he kept track of rows marked S and A. The numbers on the charts differed, but the labels were always the same.

  Heidi stared at the first charts, for the month of January:

  There was definitely a pattern. In the numbers rows, S’s always outnumbered A’s. In the columns, the TOTALS were always the sum of the figures under B, L, W, and A, indicating that those letters marked a breakdown of the larger whole of whatever Percy was tracking. And the NEP charts always had more B’s and fewer L’s, W’s, and A’s than the EP charts.

  Now, if only she knew what the letters stood for.

  Heidi stretched her cramped legs and looked at the hopeless piles of articles and notes around her. Percy may have taken his current big ideas with him, but Heidi kept telling herself that she had the important details right here somewhere. She could come up with the rest, including the significance of all these numbers and letters.

  She needed to remain methodical. She wasn’t in a race. She was the only one with Percy’s notes. First she needed some sleep. On the television, she was surprised to see Conan wrapping up, a definite sign that she needed to turn in.

  7

  When Mike finally emerged from the interrogation room with Corbett’s signed confession, he raised the palm of his hand for a high-five from his partner. I could have kicked Chuck in the shin for obliging him.

  “What the hell was that stunt you pulled in there with the lights?” I demanded, interrupting the celebration.

  “What is she talking about?” Calabrese said to Chuck. Then he laughed and held up the confession. “This here’s what we call a good thing, Sam. I got you your slam dunk and your co-defendant. That’s what I’m saying.”

  “There’s nothing cute about this, Mike. You had to have known that I knocked on the window for a reason.” I could tell he was thinking about denying it, which pissed me off even more. “You were teetering dangerously close to the line even then. You pretty much told the guy he’d die if he didn’t confess.”

  “Everything I did in there was about getting you the confession. How many times have I had a case rejected by your office, or dealt down to nothing, because a DA’s afraid to try a close case? So, yeah, maybe I walked the line in there, but I didn’t cross it.”

  “You’re wrong, Mike, you may very well have crossed it. The defense is going to jump all over that stunt you pulled. But you know what? In court, I’ll stick up for you. I’ll try to get the confession in. But I don’t appreciate what you did. You not only ignored my warning to back off, you used me as a prop to go further.”

  I had seen Mike get pissy at times when he didn’t agree with a call, but I had apparently never seen him angry. Or mean. “Gee, what a surprise: A DA sits on the sideline watching the action, then wants to second-guess every move. Maybe you should sit down with your boy Frist and see if you can prosecute me for something.” When I didn’t respond, he pushed his stack of papers to his partner and stormed away.

  “What the hell?” I said to Chuck, once Mike was gone.

  “Leave it alone for now,” he warned.

  “Your partner’s totally out of control. Why didn’t you say something?”

  “Do you realize he’s about to ask me the same exact thing about you in a couple of minutes?”

  “Maybe, but I’m right, and he’s wrong.”

  “And that’s also exactly what he’ll say. Look, Sam,” he said, touching my shoulder gently with his free hand, “I know you don’t want to hear this, but you don’t understand the position you just put him in. He’s still pumped from getting Corbett to flip. You have no idea what that’s like. And to walk out of the box and be told you fucked up—well, now’s not a good time. Give him some space.”

  By two in the morning, we had everything we needed to enter the piece-o’-crap house that Trevor Hanks shared with his father on East 123rd. Officers Craig Todd and Jeff Walls from East Precinct had been perched outside for nearly two hours, watching. According to them, two male heads—one young, one old—were last seen through a gap in the stained sheets that served as living room curtains, watching Howard Stern. The glow of the television faded around one o’clock. Since then, the torn screen doors had remained undisturbed. By all appearances, father and son were quietly tucked away within their home’s peeling exterior.

  Based on Corbett’s statements, we obtained a telephonic arrest warrant for Trevor Hanks. We al
so secured a no-knock search warrant for the house, authorizing police to force their way in without first announcing their presence. We’d be looking for the bat and any other evidence related to the murder, including the jean jacket and other clothing Hanks was wearing Sunday night.

  So far, all I knew about Trevor Hanks had come from his pal Corbett and from reading his PPDS record. That said, I suspected that at some point Corbett’s mother, if he had one, must have said to her son, “That Trevor Hanks is a bad influence.” While Corbett’s only previous run-in with the law was for underage drinking, Trevor had quite the sheet for a twenty-two-year-old.

  Although juvie convictions don’t show up in the computer, I noted stops for theft, assault, marijuana possession, and—bingo!—unauthorized use of a motor vehicle. Since becoming a grown-up, Hanks had convictions for burglary, forgery, assault, and menacing. Thanks to pleas in exchange for county jail time, Hanks had so far avoided any visits to state prison.

  What makes a kid go bad so early? Maybe in Hanks’s case there was something in the genes. Daddy Hanks, legally known as—I kid you not—Henry Hanks, had his fair share of troubles too: possession of stolen property, menacing, disorderly conduct, bad checks, and a couple of domestic violence pops—dropped, of course, when the victims refused to testify. Needless to say, we don’t have a three-strikes-and-you’re-out law in Oregon, and for that the Hanks men should be grateful.

  Calabrese had taken Corbett to MCDC—his citation for vandalism in hand—on charges of aggravated murder. Given the tension between us, I was relieved to see him go. The patrol officers outside Hanks’s house were ready to help Chuck make the arrest. For good measure, Johnson had paged Walker for the action, and the two partners were on their way there to meet Chuck.

  As Chuck was strapping a bulletproof vest over his civilian clothing, he asked if I was coming with him.