Close Case

by Alafair Burke

  “Right. It’s all about giving him a psychological break. You get him away from the body; you shield him from the investigation and the media attention.”

  “Is that why IA waited until Monday morning to question him?”

  “That’s a little more complicated,” he said. “You’ve basically got two investigations going on after an officer-involved shooting: a criminal investigation into whether charges should be brought and an administrative investigation into whether disciplinary or other actions are warranted. The officer’s got his Fifth Amendment rights in the criminal investigation but not in the administrative one.”

  “Right, but if you force a statement out of him during the administrative process, you can’t use it in a criminal trial.”

  “Plus, you can’t use any evidence that the statement leads you to,” he added. “And you know how hard it is to prove that evidence isn’t tainted by an immunized statement. So we tell the bureau not to compel any statements until the criminal investigation is officially completed. Instead, the officer is notified that he has a right to remain silent. Almost as a matter of course, the union reps advise the officers to give only the briefest of statements—claiming self-defense or whatever—until it’s clear what’s going on in the criminal process. Here, Hamilton asked for a twenty-four-hour break late Saturday night. By the time IA got to him on Monday morning, it was obvious that he might have some problems in the grand jury, so he clammed up. If he winds up clearing the criminal charges, he’ll have to give his side to the bureau if he wants to avoid employment sanctions.”

  “What do you mean if he clears the charges? I thought you told me to think plea negotiations.” I had a criminally negligent homicide charge in mind, less serious than the manslaughter charge I’d request from the grand jury.

  “Yeah, well, that was before I checked my voice mails this afternoon. I got one from Jerome Black.” Black was a former deputy in our office turned high-priced defense lawyer. “He’s representing Hamilton, and Hamilton wants to testify before the grand jury.”

  I processed the information and decided that the news called for a bigger slab of strudel. “He’s got to feel pretty confident,” I said, shoveling a big cherry-dripping bite of pastry into my mouth.

  “He probably figures he’d wind up testifying at trial anyway. May as well do his best to win the grand jury over and nip the whole thing in the bud. Are you going to let him try?”

  Because suspects don’t have a right to testify before their grand juries in Oregon, I was the one who got to make the call. “Sure.”

  I sounded confident, but I fed myself an even bulkier chunk of strudel, hoping to find calm in the right combination of fat, sugar, and carbs.

  “It’s a no-brainer.” I used my fingers to tick off the advantages to letting Hamilton testify. “I get to lock in—on the record—his account of the facts before trial. I get a free chance to cross-examine him without his attorney being present. I get the transcript of his testimony if he tries to change his story down the road—”

  “And the downside?” Russ interrupted.

  I shrugged my shoulders. “So the grand jury gets to hear his side. So what? If I can’t get an indictment out of the grand jury, there’s no way we’d ever win at trial. May as well get the loss out of the way without the pain of a full trial.”

  Russ nodded, pleased. “Very good, young padawan.”

  “You fancy yourself the Yoda of prosecution now? Very modest of you.” He had been testing my judgment, apparently.

  “You got a Star Wars reference? Now I really am impressed.”

  Blame Chuck again. A few more months with him and my IQ points would drop into the double digits.

  “Good, because I’ve got to get out of here,” I said, looking at my watch again. “I’ll call Black tomorrow to tell him Hamilton can talk to the grand jurors. Anything else?”

  “Stop eating my strudel. You’re worse than Walters.”

  It was just past seven by the time I got home. To my surprise, Chuck met me at the door, leather bomber jacket in hand.

  “You feel like going out?” he asked. “A burger would hit the spot.”

  I walked past him, set my briefcase in the hall, and shrugged out of my raincoat. “Are we going to talk about last night?”

  “Do we need to?”

  “Chuck, you left the house, slept somewhere else, and wouldn’t talk to me all day.”

  “No, you left the house because you wanted time to think. I felt like I was smothering you, so I crashed with Mike to give you some room.”

  “Did he tell you the nasty thing he said to me today?”

  “He mentioned you’d be pissed but didn’t give me the specifics.”

  “He basically used the fact that you ‘walked out on me,’ in his words, as evidence that I’m a complete bitch.”

  “If you want me to say something to him, I will, not that things have been particularly great for me at work lately. I hope you realize Mike’s got nothing to do with us.”

  “So why didn’t you call me all day?”

  “You think I didn’t want to? It was killing me. I literally had to put my cell in my desk drawer.”

  “Is that why you didn’t answer when I called?”

  “Yeah. By the time I got the message, I figured you were with Russ already. When you pulled up, I thought it would be good for us to get out of the house and eat something.”

  “So we’re OK? You’re not moving out?”

  “Of course not, babe. You thought that?”

  I nodded and felt my eyes start to water.

  “Come here, you nut.” He held me tightly, cupping one hand behind my head. “We both got a little out of control last night, that’s all. We’re good, OK?”

  When he finally felt me loosen my grip, he looked into my eyes and pushed a loose strand of hair behind my right ear. “Hamburgers now? Please?”

  I started to raise all the subjects that had divided us lately, but realized it was not the right time to talk about Matt York, Mike Calabrese, or the jobs that too often defined us. I didn’t want to fight anymore. I just wanted to feel like we were OK.

  “Promise not to go away again?” I asked.

  “Never.”

  “Then a burger sounds good.”

  Telling him about my assignment on the Geoff Hamilton case would have to wait.

  14

  Heidi sat at her desk, reviewing once again the percentages she had compiled from Percy’s tables:

  If she was right, NEP referred to Northeast Precinct, and EP referred to East Precinct. For East Precinct, the numbers for the B, L, W, and A columns were roughly the same in both rows. Northeast Precinct’s numbers varied more when it came to B’s and L’s. Percy was keeping track of these numbers to show a screwy pattern in Northeast Precinct that didn’t exist in East.

  Heidi stared at the notes for a full twenty minutes, jotting down and then scratching out possible explanations for Percy’s other abbreviations. Maybe Percy had been keeping track of different kinds of crimes: Burglaries, Loitering, Assaults? But then what did the W stand for?

  Heidi had even perused a law enforcement dictionary for that one. As far as she could tell, there were no crimes beginning with the letter W.

  So maybe the W stood for something else, Heidi thought. A proper name, perhaps. A cop’s name. She wondered how she could get her hands on a complete list of officers, then scratched that possibility from her notepad too. What were the odds that Percy was keeping track of officers with names beginning with the same letters in two separate precincts?

  Frustrated, she turned her attention to the mail in her in-box. She threw out three invitations for preapproved credit cards. No, thank you, she thought. One more of those, and she’d have to cave in and ask her parents for money. She recycled catalogs from J. Crew and Land’s End. Again, no thank you. Those were the very things that had led to the maxed-out cards.

  She set aside a birth announcement from one of her high school girlfr
iends back east as a reminder to send a gift. Shopping for baby toys was always fun. The final piece of mail was from her alma mater, gloating about the entering freshman class and, of course, closing with a request for money. Apparently this group of wonder kids included a former National Spelling Bee champion, a silver-medal-winning Olympic gymnast, a fourteen-year-old brainiac, and the lead singer of a pop group with a major recording contract. Fifty-two percent of the entering class was female, and 30 percent identified themselves as part of a racial minority group. To prove their diversity-embracing goodness, the school had gone so far as to list the specific numbers of African-Americans, Latino-Americans, Asian-Americans, and other minorities in the class.

  Heidi started to toss the letter but thought again about the racial breakdown. African, Latino, and Asian-Americans. Non-whites. Why hadn’t she seen it before? When it came to his own racial identity, Percy shunned the language of the academic elite. But in his B, L, W, and A columns, he had been tracking the same statistics.

  Now all she had to do was figure out the rows.

  The next morning, Thursday, the Oregonian temporarily closed its offices at ten o’clock so employees could say goodbye one last time to Percy Crenshaw. Heidi accepted an invitation from Dan Manning to ride up to First Baptist with him. She almost declined but then reminded herself that it wasn’t Dan’s fault that their editor treated him as up-and-coming crime reporter extraordinaire, and her as a cite-checking peon.

  When they walked into the church, she was struck by the enormity of the crowd. As far as she could tell, fewer than half of the attendees were from the paper.

  “I wonder who all these people are,” she whispered to Dan. Other than her coworkers, Heidi recognized only one person, the woman Deputy District Attorney who had come to search Percy’s office.

  “Are you kidding? I thought there’d be people lined up around the block. Percy was the man. From every walk of life, he could win you over. How do you think he got so much information out of people?” Dan caught the eye of a tall bulky man entering the church in front of them. The two men exchanged friendly handshakes. “Thanks for coming, man.”

  “No problem.” The stranger offered his hand to Heidi. “Jack Streeter.”

  “Heidi Hatmaker,” she said, trying not to stare. Jack Streeter had dark brown hair, piercing blue eyes, and a jawline straight from superhero central casting. “I work at the paper with Dan.”

  “Hatmaker?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Let the jokes begin.”

  “No, it’s a cute name. Really cute.”

  Heidi returned his smile shyly, realizing she had reached a new low: flirting at a funeral. “Your name sounds familiar, actually.” And cool. Really cool.

  “Probably from my job. I’m the PIO for Portland Police.”

  “Aah. I probably should have known that, being a reporter and all.” The Public Information Officer’s name and phone number were printed at the bottom of all bureau press releases.

  “Well, now you know. You’ve even got my number, so to speak.”

  Dan Manning cleared his throat. “We should probably get seated.”

  “Of course,” Jack said. “See you soon, man. And you too, Heidi. Call me if you need anything.”

  Once Jack was out of earshot, Dan teased Heidi about the encounter. “If I’m not mistaken, my biggest news source was hitting on you.”

  “He was just being nice.”

  “Not like I’ve ever seen him. Count yourself lucky, Hatmaker—you’ve got at least one advantage over me.”

  “I’m tempted to be insulted by that.”

  “I’m kidding. Seriously, though, if you’re interested in reporting on crime stuff, you should get to know him. Officially, he’s the PIO, but let’s just say he forges mutually advantageous relationships with the press. If he wants something out there, he’ll give it to the person who’ll spin it his way. He’s been a great source for me, and I know he did the same for Percy.”

  “Let’s just find seats for now,” Heidi said, filing away her colleague’s suggestion.

  Even after the funeral, Heidi could not stop thinking about Percy’s project. Given the neighborhood demographics, it made sense that the numbers under the label B—for black—were higher for Northeast Precinct than they were for East Precinct, while the numbers for L—Latinos—were higher out East than up North. But if she understood Percy’s notes, there were some serious anomalies in Northeast Precinct.

  In East Precinct, the racial makeup of S’s and A’s were roughly consistent. But in Northeast Precinct, Blacks made up more than half of the S’s but only 40 percent of the A’s. And Latinos were only about a third of the S’s but more than their share of A’s.

  Whatever those letters stood for, Percy had been able to compile these statistics on a monthly basis. Heidi couldn’t imagine Percy counting thousands of individual occurrences himself each month. He must have been tracking numbers already available through the police department.

  The computer in the corner of the research dungeon was free. She logged on to the Internet and pulled up the Portland Police Web site. Before long, she was scrolling through monthly arrest statistics, by offense, for each precinct, through August. The postings must run a couple of months behind. She compared the total number of A’s tracked in Percy’s charts with the arrest statistics on the Web site. One crime lined up with Percy’s numbers to the digit: drug offenses.

  The charts were beginning to make sense. There were always more S’s than A’s. In order to make a drug arrest, the police usually had to search the person first. S’s and A’s: searches and arrests. Percy was keeping track of the number of drug searches and arrests in each precinct, broken down by the race of the suspect.

  Heidi could not find the number of drug searches on the bureau’s Web site, let alone by race, but she did have a vague recollection that police officers were required to keep track of that information. She pulled up the Oregonian’s Web page and searched for articles on racial profiling. Two years ago, a liberal lawmaker had tried to restrict the ability of police officers to search for drugs, arguing that police were targeting minorities disproportionately. Instead of changing the rules, the legislature voted to study the problem further. As part of the study, police departments were required to keep records of all searches, including the race of the person searched. With a simple request, Percy could have gotten his hands on those numbers.

  If Heidi was right, the police in Northeast Precinct were searching black suspects for drugs, but then arresting them at a lower rate than other suspects, particularly Latinos. Heidi thought through the implications. Maybe police were simply less accurate when they decided to search black suspects, finding drugs less frequently than with other racial groups. But why would that occur only in Northeast Precinct and not East Precinct?

  Another possibility was that the officers in Northeast Precinct were not arresting black defendants even when they found drugs on them. Now that was interesting.

  First, though, Heidi needed to make sure she was on the right track. She needed to get the bureau’s search statistics and make sure they matched Percy’s numbers. She walked back to her cubicle, picked up the phone, and dialed the number at the bottom of a bureau press release, the number for Public Information Officer Jack Streeter.

  “Um, I’m not sure if you remember, but we met this morning at First Baptist.”

  “Of course I remember you. Cute name. Cute reporter, if you don’t mind me saying.”

  “Well, honestly, I’m a reporter in name only. Dan and Percy do most of the crime stuff here at the paper—well, did, I guess—”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “So anyway, you know, I try every once in a while to get my own stories. Otherwise, it’s just neighborhood garden parties and stuff.”

  “Reminds me of patrol days. I was always keeping my eye out for something other than car alarms and bar fights.”

  “Exactly. Anyway, I’ve been thinking of doing a follow-u
p story on that law a couple of years ago that requires the police to keep track of all their stops and searches by race. At the time, when racial profiling was such a hot topic, it seemed like someone was going to keep track of all that information and go back to the legislature with proposed legal changes. But then nothing happened. I thought it might be interesting to look at the numbers. I suspect there’s nothing there, and maybe that’s interesting in its own right. You know, sort of a ‘Why’d the state make police do this just to prove there aren’t any problems’ kind of story.”

  “So is that why you were calling me? You need something for the story?”

  “Um, yeah, if that’s OK.”

  “I was sort of hoping you were calling me for dinner.”

  Heidi laughed nervously. “Um, I don’t really call people for dinner. But I do accept invitations from nice public information officers who help me with stories.”

  “Is that right?”

  “For the most part.”

  “How about a monthly breakdown of our stop-and-search numbers by precinct? And dinner tonight at Papa Haydn?”

  “Perfect.”

  “The reports will be ready for you in an hour at the reception desk at Central Precinct. And I’ll be ready for you at the restaurant at seven.”

  15

  Percy Crenshaw’s funeral was, to my mind, all you could want if you had to have your own. Flowers, ceremony, and framed portraits—these were easy enough to procure with the right price and planning. But the morning had been at once commemorative, respectful, solemn, and celebratory. It was an intensely personal ending to Percy’s life and the beginning of a community’s remembrance of it.

  Sitting in my Jetta afterward, I actually had to dig a dusty pack of Kleenex from the bottom of the glove box. It’s not often that I well up. I had called Percy’s parents at their hotel the night before to make sure they knew that Todd Corbett’s motion was being heard. I could not bear the thought of having to report, just hours after the burial of their son, that a jury would not hear the confession of Percy’s killer. It was not an option. Once I was done sniffling, I returned to my office more resolved than ever to make sure I didn’t blow the case.