Close Case

by Alafair Burke

  She found herself making a mental scratch mark for each of Foster’s cases. By the eighth scratch, she realized that five had involved heroin, two speed, and one marijuana. No rocks of cocaine in a neighborhood that appeared from other officers’ reports to be plagued by crack. She flipped back through Foster’s reports. She’d been right. Plus, all the defendants were Latino and white. No African-Americans. She whizzed through the rest of Foster’s reports in the binder. Same pattern.

  Just then, a youngish-looking officer with dark brown wavy hair walked out of the card-protected door that separated the secured part of the precinct from the lobby. He seemed to glance at the binder as he passed. It was probably a natural curiosity, but Heidi found herself instinctively huddling over the pages, averting her eyes. After he left the building, she kept her eyes on the glass doors, checking to see if he looked back. He didn’t. She was being paranoid.

  She flipped the open pages of the binder together, ready to return it to the front window. She wrote Curt Foster on a notepad she pulled from her backpack. She’d have to figure out a way to find out more about him.

  As she was putting the pad back into her bag, she found herself looking at the officer’s last name more carefully. Foster. Where had she heard that recently?

  Then she remembered. She turned the pages of Percy’s original notes furiously until she found it. Powell/Foster, he’d written. She had assumed it was a reference to the intersection of Foster and Powell streets. Now, she wondered.

  She began flipping through the bound reports again. A third of the way through, she hit upon what she knew in her gut she would find—the name Powell, scrawled at the bottom of a report. This one was for a fight at Jay-J’s, an up-and-coming hangout for the too-cool-for-the-west-side types. She searched the bottoms of more pages and found more reports written by Officer Jamie Powell, including drug cases. Powell hadn’t been quite as active as Foster. But, like Foster, Powell had also managed to work Northeast Precinct for three weeks without crossing paths with a single rock of cocaine.

  When she returned the binder to the receptionist, she engaged her in small talk about her scarf, the pace of her job, and, finally, about the subject that truly interested Heidi. “I got the impression from the reports that most of the drug problem around here is from crack, but I know that’s only for the last three weeks.”

  “Yeah, but the last three weeks are like any other three weeks, you know? My guess is, like, maybe sixty percent crack and cocaine. East Precinct’s got more of the meth and heroin.”

  Heidi nodded, thanked the woman again, and left. As she walked to her BMW, she noticed the cop with the brown wavy hair standing against a squad car in the fleet parking lot, smoking a cigarette. She tried looking away quickly, but not before he removed his cigarette-free hand from his holster and waved.

  Before she even realized she was nervous, Heidi had ducked into her car, started the engine, and driven six blocks. Only when she stopped for a light did she register her quickened pulse, her rushed and shallow breathing.

  Forget nervous. She was actually scared. The officer was probably being friendly, but she couldn’t ignore the possibility that he wasn’t. Her imagination soared wildly as she navigated her way downtown. That Percy was killed while tracking this story was not helping matters. In the battle between her intellect and anxiety, Heidi reminded herself that the police had already solved Percy’s murder. Rubbing cops and drug dealers the wrong way was certainly not the safest activity, but so far there was no reason to believe she’d meet the same fate as Percy.

  So why was she afraid to turn around, return to the precinct, and ask for the name of the officer with the brown wavy hair? Because of her damn imagination, that’s why.

  She was convinced she was on to something, but she had no next step to confirming her suspicions about Powell and Foster. She needed help from someone inside the system, who could access more than just a few weeks of police reports, who might even know something about the officers’ reputations and who else might be involved. And she needed someone she could trust.

  She couldn’t go back to work. Tom thought she was out with a deadly case of cramps. Feeling emboldened by her research at the precinct, she decided it was time to talk to Samantha Kincaid, the woman prosecutor who used to be in the Drug and Vice Division.

  She started to dial information, then flipped her cell shut, remembering another rule of reporting: People are more likely to talk to the press when surprised in person. She hopped onto the Morrison Bridge, just a few blocks from the county courthouse.

  19

  Within thirty minutes of Lisa Lopez’s departure from my office, Lucas Braun called.

  “Lopez tells me the two of you are talking,” he said. I was surprised Lisa had bothered to give him a heads-up.

  “Yes, Lucas, we certainly are. Pretty fascinating stuff, as I’m sure you can imagine.” He deserved to be disbarred. The least I could do was let him know I was annoyed.

  “Do we still have our deal?”

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “Corbett’s got his story, but Hanks has his, and he’s still willing to testify. We had an agreement, regardless of Corbett’s defense strategy.”

  “Defense strategy? That’s what you’re calling this? According to Lisa, you were in on this little secret. She says you knew damn well this entire time that when Percy was killed, the defendants were committing a different crime on the opposite side of town. Are you telling me Lisa’s lying?”

  A couple of deputies chatting in the hall peered into my office. I used my toe to kick the door shut.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “The truth, Lucas. You can’t put Hanks on the stand if you know he’s lying.”

  “How do I know anything? I know what my clients tell me, and I know their stories go back and forth.”

  It was the standard line that all defense lawyers recite when asked how they can justify defending a person they know is guilty. I never bought the rationalization, but it was particularly perverse when Braun was trying to plead his client out for a murder he didn’t commit, send another young man to prison for life, and leave whoever actually killed Percy Crenshaw walking the streets.

  “So you admit that Hanks initially said he was with Tamara Lyons?” There was a long pause. In person, I could have stared him down, but on the phone he needed some encouragement. “I’m not going forward with any deal until you tell me what’s going on.”

  “Whatever. Yeah, that was the first story he gave. Later, he said he made it up and was willing to give up Corbett on the Crenshaw case.”

  “And let me take a guess. He changed his story after you told him what the mandatory minimum sentence was for Rape One compared to what you could get him if he cooperated on the murder. I remember exactly what you told me, Lucas: absolutely no more than seven years: eighty-four months. That was the trade, wasn’t it? He’d rather accept the sure seven and lie than face a hundred months on the rape.”

  “Off the record?”

  Who the hell was this guy? “We’re not in court, Lucas. There is no record.”

  “I talked to him about the sentences. But that’s my job as his lawyer.”

  I read him the critical sentences from Lyons’s affidavit. “Is this girl telling the truth or not?”

  “Everyone sees the truth differently.”

  I had to end this call before my head exploded. “I’m hanging up, Lucas. And once I fix the cluster fuck you and Lisa have created, I’m writing a letter to the bar.”

  “Do we have a deal or not?”

  I resisted the temptation to slam the phone down and instead took a deep breath and began counting to ten, returning the handpiece gently to its cradle.

  I was up to twenty-five by the time I regained a cool enough head to deal with the outside world.

  My first call was to Annie Hunter, the rape crisis counselor. As offhandedly as a restaurant hostess confirming a reservation, she substantiated Lisa’s cla
ims about Tamara Lyons’s version of Sunday night’s events.

  “And you didn’t think to tell me when you were in court on Tuesday morning that I was charging two innocent men with aggravated murder?”

  “Innocent? Give me a break. Didn’t you hear what I just told you?”

  “Then the charge should have been rape.”

  “She was high on meth, she left with them from work voluntarily, one of the guys is her ex-boyfriend, and some of the initial contact was consensual. Are you telling me you would have taken the case? Please, I’ve been there with enough women while some cop or DA tells them why a jury won’t believe them.”

  As Annie spoke, I quietly typed her full name into a search of victims stored in the DA system. One result: a declined Rape Two, four years ago.

  “Cases can be hard to prove, even when we believe the victim’s telling the truth,” I said. “But making Corbett and Hanks pay for a different crime isn’t the answer. If they didn’t kill Percy Crenshaw, someone else did. I need the police to be out looking for the killer.”

  When Annie spoke again, her voice was lower. “I did talk to Tamara about that. At length. Before I went to court and after. But, come on, it was less than two days since she’d been raped by these guys, and she wakes up and finds out one of them has confessed to murder? It would take a saint to rush to their defense.”

  Regardless of whether I agreed with Tamara Lyons’s notion of rough justice, I could understand it. From the looks of things, she was telling the truth now. But, before I concluded that I had charged the wrong men with Percy’s murder, I wanted to be sure.

  “Do you think she’d be willing to take a polygraph?” Annie started to protest. “It would be very brief,” I insisted, “and it would make it much easier for us to convince a court to accept the defendants’ pleas on the rape case. It’s not exactly an everyday occurrence to dismiss murder charges.”

  She relented. “Fine. She’s actually holding up pretty well. I’ll explain it to her.”

  “Thanks. Tell her to expect to hear from a detective to set it up.”

  My next call was to Chuck. He sounded relieved when he realized I was calling him about the case instead of capital-U Us—until I filled him in on the details.

  “Hold up. You don’t really think they’re innocent, do you?”

  I remembered Annie’s outrage about the use of that word to describe the men who assailed Tamara Lyons’s body and trust. “Chuck, I don’t think they killed Percy. They couldn’t have, not if Tamara’s telling the truth. And she gave prompt reports to her best friend and to the Rape Crisis Center. That’s more than what we’ve got in most of the rape cases we prosecute. But we need a statement. The counselor’s talking to her now about doing a poly. Can you follow up on it? Hopefully today, if possible.”

  “Yeah, OK, I’ll do it, but have you really thought this through? The timing of it all seems fishy, and we’ve got a solid case against them on the murder.”

  “No, we really don’t.” I began to run through the evidence, explaining how no single piece was incontrovertible.

  “What about the fibers on the bat?” he challenged.

  Lisa’s words still nagged at me like a bumblebee in summer: I think you’ve got a serious problem on your hands. “Maybe it’s just a coincidence,” I offered tentatively. “Fibers aren’t DNA or fingerprints.”

  “A coincidence? You sound like a defense attorney. What are the odds that the so-called real killer just happened to place the weapon on a carpet whose fibers are microscopically indistinguishable from the carpet in Hanks’s Jeep? What did the lab say?”

  “That it was a pretty good match.”

  “OK, then. How does Lisa Lopez explain that?”

  “What if someone else killed Crenshaw, read about the defendants’ arrest, and then dumped a bat in their neighborhood to help the case along? Is it possible that fibers from the Jeep could have gotten mixed up with the bat during the processing of the evidence?”

  “Sam, we know how to preserve evidence. So unless you’re saying that one of us did something intentionally—”

  “No, I’m just telling you what Lisa said.”

  “Then tell me what the alternative is. I know you. You wouldn’t have me setting up a poly for this girl if you didn’t have a theory about those fibers.”

  “I’m setting up the polygraph, Chuck, precisely because I don’t want to believe any of Lisa’s explanations about the fibers, all right? Please, let’s get the poly done first, then figure out the rest of it.”

  “What other explanations did she have?”

  “I told you. She thinks someone tampered with the evidence after the bat and the Jeep were seized.”

  “That’s one explanation. What else is there?”

  When it came to hammering out the inconsistencies in a statement, no one—lawyers, detectives, angry pit bulls—was more persistent than my boyfriend. I chose my next words carefully, trying to get the job done without starting another fight.

  “Apparently Lisa found a problem with Matt’s alibi.”

  “I checked it myself, Sam.”

  “I know. But apparently the officer who was covering that call with Matt was clear half an hour later. Matt—at least according to the reports—was checked out to the call for an additional hour by himself.”

  “So what? Cops forget to enter their status in their terminals all the time. She’s going to jump from that to Matt killing Crenshaw in a jealous rage, sneaking into the impound lot, and framing her client? That’s classic.”

  “I didn’t say I believed her.”

  “You’re kidding me, right? That’s the most you can say? Did you tell her you didn’t believe her?”

  “Stop yelling at me. Do you know how stressful this is, how hard it is for me?”

  “For you? Does everything always have to be about you? Matt’s our friend. He’s one of my best friends. This isn’t just some defense maneuver in one of your cases, this is personal. He’s having a hard enough time with his marriage right now. He doesn’t need some attorney making him out to be a murderer. You should have kicked that crazy bitch out of your office. Instead, you’re telling me that you’re keeping an open mind?”

  “I don’t believe it, Chuck, OK? But we need to find out what the hell’s going on. If Tamara Lyons passes that polygraph, we’ve got the wrong guys for the Crenshaw case and we have to look at everything again. I don’t like what that means for Matt either, but we’ll deal with it. Chances are, he’ll explain the discrepancy about the call.”

  “Chances are?”

  “You know, it’s like there’s nothing I can say right now that would be good enough for you.”

  “You can promise me you’re on Matt’s side on this. If this girl passes the poly, you and I both know there will be pressure to look at him. When that happens, are you willing to tell Griffith and Frist to go to hell?”

  I thought about it. “Yes, if Matt can explain where he was during that call, I will go back to my days of being the boat rocker around here.”

  “What if he can’t, Sam? Do you know how chaotic patrol must have been Sunday night?”

  “Chuck, I can’t see into the future. Can you please just call Tamara Lyons, and we’ll take things from there? I called you because I trust your judgment. I need you to tell me whether this girl’s telling the truth.”

  “Fine, we’ll do it your way. What else is new, right?”

  Chuck usually has a unique ability to return us to a state of relative normalcy in the simplest ways. He was trying to be light, but I sensed the resentment—resentment that only worsened when I updated my request.

  “I need you to go without Mike.”

  A long silent pause followed, about ten beats. Chuck, after all, had been the one who taught me the anger-management technique of counting silently.

  “Are you going to explain that?” he asked finally.

  “I don’t want him on the case anymore. He went ape shit in that interrogation room.”


  “And what am I supposed to say to Mike?”

  “You don’t have to say anything. I’m calling your lieutenant. He can’t keep working MCT cases until we’re sure.”

  “You’re having him pulled? You can’t do that, Sam. You’ll totally fuck him over.”

  “His credibility is sunk since Lesh tossed the confession, and if there was evidence contamination you can bet he’ll be suspected.”

  “Suspected by you or by Lisa Lopez?”

  “By anyone looking at the case, Chuck.”

  “Jesus, first Matt, now Mike. Do you trust anyone?”

  “I told you I didn’t think Matt had anything to do with this, and I’m not saying Mike tampered with evidence. I’m saying it’s better to avoid any problems by keeping him away from the investigation until we know what’s up. If anyone knows how this works, it’s you.”

  It hadn’t been long since the bureau tried to suspend Chuck during an investigation into the viability of one of his own confessions. As a compromise, he worked patrol until he was cleared back into MCT, but he knew the process.

  “It’s funny. When it happened to me, you thought it was bullshit.”

  “That was different,” I said, knowing in my heart that it wasn’t. “I don’t have a choice. Please, I called you because I trust you. I need you to interview Tamara.”

  As soon as I hung up, I heard a tap against my closed office door. Terrific. Whoever was waiting for me on the other side had undoubtedly heard at least part of the exchange with Chuck.

  “Yeah, come on in.”

  Alice peered tentatively through the door. “I’m very sorry to disturb you again, but there’s a woman named Heidi Hatmaker here to see you. She’s from the Oregonian.”