Close Case

by Alafair Burke

  I shook my head. “I don’t get it, Lisa. How long have you known about this?”

  “You know I don’t have to tell you that.”

  “And you know that it affects whether I choose to trust you.”

  “I’ve known the whole time.” Her voice rose over my protests. “What was I going to do, Sam? Try to help my client by telling you he’s a gang rapist when he takes too much meth? Hanks and Corbett couldn’t give us a firm enough timeline to provide an alibi. If I’d mentioned it earlier, you would have tacked on a rape charge to the indictment and argued they did everything as one big crime spree. Tamara’s affidavit changes that.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know, Lisa. Maybe the girl’s messed up on the timing. Or who knows? Maybe Hanks called her at two in the morning and talked her into cooking this up as a worst-case defense.”

  “Oh, come on. Do either of these kids strike you as that smart?”

  No, they didn’t. But there was too much evidence: Peter Anderson’s eyewitness testimony, the baseball bat near Hanks’s house, the fibers from his Jeep. I wasn’t buying it, and I told her so.

  “That’s what’s been bothering me too,” she said. “From the first time I sat down with Todd, I was never really worried about the case. I had a get-out-of-jail-free card if the case really fell apart. But then you seemed to keep finding more evidence. I think you’ve got a serious problem on your hands.”

  “Like what, Lisa, a secret evidence maker? You know, you’re so quick to put the blame on everyone else instead of just coming to terms with the fact that your clients lie to you.”

  Still, in the back of my head and, more importantly, in my gut, I felt that Tamara Lyons was telling the truth. I remembered Annie’s secrecy and obvious discomfort at the arraignment. I thought about the look of shock and fear on Todd Corbett’s face when Calabrese had brought up Percy’s murder. It was an entirely different look than the nervous, defensive expression he bore when Mike initially accused him of the vandalisms.

  “Trust me,” she said, without the slightest irony, “I’ve looked at this from every angle. Don’t you think I went back to my client when new evidence kept trickling in? But I talked to Tamara myself. You should too. She’s the last one who would lie to help these guys; her hatred for them just oozes from her. So, yeah, I’ve been scrutinizing the evidence like crazy. Your eyewitness? I’m not saying he’s an outright liar. He could have seen the news report while he was shaving or something without even thinking about it. Then, when he saw the throw-downs, two of the guys looked familiar. He assumed it was from the parking lot.”

  “Even if I were to buy that, Lisa, there’s the bat.”

  “I know,” she said, nodding. “And I really have no way of knowing whether it’s the same bat they used for the vandalisms. They both say they got so high they must have lost it somewhere in the night. But how hard is it to buy a baseball bat and dump it in an alley near one of the suspects’ houses?”

  “And put Percy Crenshaw’s blood and your client’s car fibers on it?”

  “That’s why I said you might have a problem on your hands. Let me be real clear here: I think I can get a dismissal of the murder charges just on Tamara’s testimony. And, like I said, my guy’s fully prepared to admit the rape. This next part you can take for what it’s worth, because I know how you protect your cops.”

  “Attacking me’s not helping, Lisa.”

  “All right, fine. If this thing had gone to trial—which it’s not—I was going to go after the girlfriend’s husband.”

  “Matt York? He was on duty.”

  “Right. And I got the call-out records from Central Precinct for that night. He and someone named Ben Hayden both logged in as responding to a call of protesters blocking the entrances at the City Grill at nine-thirty that night. York didn’t clear until eleven.”

  I recalled my conversation with Chuck after our visit to Matt York’s house. The discussion itself had been lengthy as Chuck struggled to describe his friend’s pain and his own discomfort raising the questions that had to be asked. But as a briefing from a detective to a prosecutor, it had been quick; the alibi checked out. I had a vague memory of the printout Chuck had run of Matt’s calls that night. “So? Something like that could easily take a couple hours.”

  “But Hayden’s report shows he cleared from the call before ten, and no one else was sent to that address after he left. So either York stayed alone at the site of a confrontation—which cops are always testifying on the stand that they don’t do—or we don’t know where York was after Hayden cleared. And the bat? I looked at the autopsy report. The ME never said the weapon was a bat, just a blunt instrument. My expert said it could have been anything, like maybe a police baton. And when word got out that Calabrese had a couple of bat-wielding suspects in custody, how hard would it have been for a cop to wipe some blood on a bat and get a few fibers from the Jeep in the impound lot?”

  I wasn’t buying it. I’d had dinner with Matt York. The man I lived with loved him like a brother. No way.

  Lisa must have sensed my resistance. “The other possibility is that whoever killed Crenshaw was smart enough to dump the bat near Hanks’s house after the news was out. Then, afterward, looking for something to shore up the case, one of your MCU detectives let a few fibers touch the bat.”

  I sighed loudly.

  “Come on, Sam. You know that kind of stuff happens. They get convinced they’ve got the right guy and want to make sure they seal the deal. Can you honestly tell me it’s not at least a possibility with a guy like Calabrese?”

  I took the affidavit back from her. “Is this all you’ve got?”

  She opened the file in her hand and began handing me more documents. “This is the printout from the call with York and Hayden, showing Hayden cleared more than an hour before York. These are my investigator’s notes from a phone interview with Annie Hunter at the Rape Crisis Center. And these are his notes from interviews with two of Tamara’s coworkers at Fred Meyer, confirming she said she was leaving with an ex-boyfriend and his friend.”

  “All right. I’ll get back to you.”

  “He didn’t do it, Sam. You need to do the right thing. Despite our history, I’m trusting you on this.”

  The second Lisa left, I began a furious review of the file, searching for something to contradict her version of the story. Instead, I found what in hindsight appeared to be obvious signs that Corbett’s so-called confession was indeed false. I read the statement that he signed. Every fact contained in it—the car, the bat, the carport—had been mentioned directly by Calabrese during the prolonged questioning. Corbett had offered absolutely no independent detail that could be corroborated. We should have insisted that he provide verifiable specifics. But we were stressed, exhausted, and relieved to get the statement. We got sloppy.

  Then there were the notes from my conversation with Jake Meltzer, the sheriff’s deputy who transported the defendants back to holding after arraignment. The mean one didn’t ask the stupid one why he told the police what happened. Rather, he asked him why he didn’t tell the police what really happened. At the time, I thought Hanks was angry that Corbett hadn’t taken more of the responsibility in his so-called confession. Now it sounded like he’d been referring to Tamara.

  I read everything about Peter Anderson’s identification again. His initial description appeared to match the defendants. On the other hand, it was vague enough to describe most young white men. As for the throw-downs, human memories are notoriously malleable. Anderson could very well have caught a glimpse of the defendants’ pictures on television during the fog of his hangover, without even realizing the distortion of his own recollections.

  I studied Tamara Lyons’s affidavit. The defendants showed up at Fred Meyer at a quarter to ten, rowdy and ready to party. She told them to get lost, having tired long ago of Hanks’s unreliability. When Hanks threw in the promise of meth, she changed her mind. Two hours later, she was bent over the backseat of Hanks’s Jeep,
the defendants taking turns on her from behind. An hour after that, she called her girlfriend; then it was on to Annie the counselor. I’d have one of the detectives verify it, but I could tell it would all check out.

  I turned to the physical evidence. The discrepancy between the amount of blood in Percy’s carport and the absence of blood on the defendants’ clothing was newly troubling. Whatever small amount of blood that had been on Hanks’s jean jacket was gone, and it could have been Tamara’s. No blood in the Jeep. That left just the bat.

  I called John Fredericks at the crime lab. “Tell me about carpet fibers.”

  “They’re these fibers, and they come off of carpets.”

  Sarcasm’s the price you pay in my business. “I’m serious. About that bat: I know fiber comparisons aren’t as reliable as DNA, but how good are they?”

  “When done well, they’re good. And we do them well. Between me and you, is it possible that the fibers came from somewhere other than the Jeep? Sure, because, like you said, carpet’s not unique, like DNA. But I can tell you that whatever carpet the fibers came from, it was the same kind and color as the carpet in the car. Why all the questions?”

  “I’ve got a defense attorney crying bullshit, that’s all.” There was no need to fill Fredericks in on the details yet. “So if she argues at trial that someone put the fibers on the bat after the fact to frame the defendant, is that even possible?”

  “Again? Between the two of us? Yeah, because the blood on the bat was in fact smeared, most likely against the victim’s own clothing, which was smooth microfiber and didn’t shed any fibers. So the bad guy could take the bat, rub it against the Jeep’s carpet, and there you go. The problem with that scenario is there’s no blood transfer to the Jeep. Not a problem for us, though, because of all the crap in the truck. The fibers were probably loose, and whatever garbage was beneath the bat got tossed at the same time.”

  “So could someone have rubbed loose fibers onto the bat?” I asked.

  “Maybe, but that raises the even bigger problem your defense lawyer’s going to have. How’d the bad guy get into the Jeep? No one was looking at your guy until right before he was arrested. The Jeep’s been in the impound lot ever since. So unless she’s saying we tampered with evidence after we seized the bat—”

  He let the idea dangle as inconceivable. I thanked him and hung up, keeping Lisa’s suspicions about Matt York and Mike Calabrese to myself. For now.

  18

  At work on Friday, Heidi hid in the research dungeon reading old newspaper articles online about drug arrests in Portland. Unfortunately, the coverage was sporadic at best. Every few months, a high-profile sweep or a major bust would make the paper. These occasional articles weren’t going to give Heidi the kind of expertise she needed. She wanted to know who the officers were who were making the arrests and why arrest patterns were screwy in Northeast Precinct.

  Then she found an article written by Percy a year earlier about a federal bust of a major Dominican heroin ring in East Portland. To place the arrests within a bigger picture, Percy had dissected the racial lines that tended to split the city’s drug trade. Black dealers controlled the crack and powder cocaine, Latinos dominated heroin, and whites handled the crystal meth and hallucinogens.

  Drugs manufactured in the States—like speed, acid, and Ecstasy—could be distributed by diverse, independent, relatively small-time dealers. But according to Percy’s story, police suspected that the control of cocaine and heroin was centralized. There might be hundreds of kids on the corners conducting hand-to-hand deals, but the police theorized that all the cocaine and heroin coming into the city was first received, cut, and distributed by two small, separate, competing cabals—one using black dealers for coke, the other using Latinos for heroin.

  Heidi thought again about Percy’s charts. She assumed he was looking into the possibility that police were discriminating on the basis of race by searching more black suspects than warranted, but there was an alternative explanation. Maybe a few cops had been recruited by whatever group controlled the crack trade in North Portland. These cops might be searching neighborhood dealers as required by the precinct sergeants, and filling out the cards to show they were doing their work. But if they weren’t actually arresting the dealers who were carrying crack, that would explain the trend in the numbers.

  Gut instinct told her she was on the right track. Now, if only she had the right contacts. She needed to learn more about the drug scene.

  It felt awkward to ask anything further of Jack Streeter after a first date. Who else did she know in law enforcement? She recalled the District Attorney who was handling Percy’s case. She had seemed pleasant enough in Percy’s office, and she had to be relatively nice to take the time to attend the funeral. The worst she could do was blow Heidi off.

  Heidi flipped through her Rolodex until she came to the prosecutor’s business card, then entered the name in the newspaper’s internal database. Soon, she found multiple stories about a shooting at Samantha Kincaid’s house earlier in the year. Heidi remembered it but hadn’t made the connection. She read with interest that Kincaid had been assigned at the time to the Drug and Vice Division of her office. She had apparently been so tenacious on a case that she was nearly killed. Maybe she’d admire Heidi’s quest for Percy’s truth.

  Heidi picked up the phone, then remembered the rule that her editor in Vermont had always emphasized: Don’t start interviewing until you’ve learned as much as you possibly can on your own. She remembered the press binders of police reports that Jack Streeter had mentioned. The least she could do was get a feel for them—to learn the names of the officers working Northeast Precinct, to see who was making crack arrests and who wasn’t—before turning empty-handed to her one potential source.

  She found her editor, Tom Runyon, in his office.

  “Hey, Tom. I’m feeling major-league crummy. I think I need to go home for the rest of the day.”

  “Are you really sick? Because I was just about to look for you. They’re opening the new wing of the airport. I thought you could interview some travelers, see how they like it.”

  “Tom, I’m really not up to walking around the airport right now.” Tom looked put out. “You know, it’s sort of a female thing,” she whispered.

  The trump card did the trick. Without further questioning, Heidi was out the door and on her way to Northeast Precinct. As she detoured through the residential streets adjacent to MLK Boulevard, she couldn’t help but notice the gradual deterioration of the housing. Just north of the trendy restaurants and shops on Broadway, young couples enjoyed their restored bungalows, decorating their porches with hanging flower baskets. Farther north, the grass was longer, the walks unedged, the paint jobs less consistent. Still farther on, cars were abandoned on the streets, fences and stop signs were laced with graffiti, and the occasionally well-kept house carried bars on its first-floor windows.

  Even though she was parked in the precinct lot, Heidi tucked all her CDs beneath the passenger seat before locking up. She approached a middle-aged woman sitting behind a glass window at the reception desk.

  “Hi. My name’s Heidi Hatmaker. I’m from the Oregonian. Jack Streeter told me there were police reports here that the press can look at?”

  “Here you go,” the receptionist said, reaching beneath the counter and producing a six-inch stack of reports held together on a clipboard containing two huge metal binder rings. “So you’re the new Percy Crenshaw?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “We just got word this morning.” She handed Heidi a memorandum. “Someone’s certainly fond of you.”

  The PPB header declared that it was a note to all precinct officers from the Office of Public Information. “As most of you know, good media relationships can be part of good police work. Many of you, like me, trusted, worked with, and genuinely liked our lost friend Percy Crenshaw. For those looking to reach out to the media, Heidi Hatmaker at the Oregonian is trustworthy and interested in pursuing any j
oint efforts you had with Crenshaw.” It ended with Heidi’s telephone number.

  “This went out to every single police officer this morning?” Heidi asked.

  “No, but it’s posted in the report writing room. Oh, and it’s also on the roll-call board so the sergeants read it to everyone when shift starts.”

  Apparently this was Jack Streeter’s version of sending flowers the morning after a good date. She’d call him later to reprimand him for sending word out, despite her objection. And to thank him.

  “Well, I definitely can’t fill Percy’s shoes,” Heidi said to the receptionist, “but, yeah, I’m picking up a couple of things he was working on.”

  She thanked the woman again, took a seat at a round table in the public area of the precinct, and flipped through the pages of the press binder. Reports as recent as last night’s were on top. She jumped ahead to the page at the bottom of the stack. Three weeks ago. Not a long-term picture but certainly a lot of incidents.

  She gave special attention to drug cases, dwelling on every detail of the first few reports: the events leading the police to stop the person, the justification for conducting the search for drugs, the description of the substance seized, the defendant’s statements once he was arrested—it was all fascinating.

  Halfway through the binder, she was skimming quickly. Seen one drug case, seen them all. Cop initiates contact, either on the street or in a traffic stop. Cop finds drugs, usually because the person agrees to be searched or while the cop is frisking for weapons. Cop makes an arrest. Arrested person admits he had drugs, sometimes claiming they belonged to a friend.

  She did notice the trend Percy had highlighted in his article about last year’s Dominican heroin bust. Crack cases tended to involve black suspects; heroin cases involved Latinos. It also became clear that some cops worked harder than others. Most officers’ names had appeared only once so far at the bottom of the reports. But a few seemed to be real go-getters, making the traffic stops and pounding the corners. One officer was so active that she began to recognize the block capital-letter print in his reports: Curt Foster.