“And I’m your boyfriend, Sam. Jesus, these things go both ways. For once, why can’t you be the one to have a little faith in me and make an adjustment?”
“I can’t believe you’re asking me to do that. Are you saying you’re going to leave me if I don’t ignore my job?”
“You really want me to put it in those terms, don’t you? It’s always about whether I’ll forgive you, whether we’re over. Fine, yes, that’s what I’m saying. I will see you differently if you won’t trust me on this.”
“I do trust you. But we have different jobs. I have to—”
“I can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry. If I stay here, we’re both going to say things we regret.”
He headed for the bedroom. “Chuck, please don’t leave.”
“Why not? You do it all the time.” He was throwing things haphazardly into a gym bag. “Maybe I’m the one who gets to have a temper tantrum for once and say we’ll work it out tomorrow.”
Following him down the stairs, I asked where he was going.
“Mike’s.” Then, before I could say anything else, he was slamming the front door. As I heard the Jag’s engine rev, I knew there was something wrong with me. The words I would have spoken if he had stayed a second longer? Are you going to tell Mike?
I made three back-to-back calls to his cell. No answer. I had never seen him this angry before. Then I realized there was something worse than anger. Maybe this time I had actually blown it. Maybe he was finally through putting up with my shit.
A knock at the door stole my attention. I wondered hopefully if perhaps Chuck had come home and forgotten his keys. I looked out the glass pane in the door. The pizza boy. Crap. I let him in, then went hunting for my purse. Where the hell was my purse?
I retraced my steps from the precinct. I must have left it in the car. And, of course I had parked my car in the street so as not to block Chuck in the driveway. If he ever did come back, I’d start blocking him.
I slipped my bare feet into a pair of Chuck’s tennies by the door, dashed to the car, and unlocked the passenger-side door. If my purse had been there, it was gone now. I checked the backseat. Not there either. As I was shutting the door, I looked up and saw that my driver’s-side window was open. No, it was broken. And my CDs were all gone. And there was glass everywhere.
Portland and property crime. This was the fourth time my car had been prowled since I moved back from New York. The pizza boy was eyeing me suspiciously from the door.
I ran inside, retrieved a new book of checks from my office, and finally convinced him with my DA badge and repeated gestures toward my smashed-in car window to accept it.
I did my best in the rain to clean the glass from my car and the street, move the Jetta into the driveway, and catch an old tarp in the door to block the open window. Back inside, I called the bureau’s nonemergency number to report the break-in. Then I called Grace, who immediately offered to stay with me. When I hung up, I sat at my dining room table with Vinnie in my lap, waiting, and stared at my large pizza going cold as I picked the artichokes off one by one.
The sound of Grace’s TT pulling into the driveway instantly comforted me. I met her at the door.
“How are you holding up?”
“Piss-poorly. I never should have let myself need another person like this. You know, people can say they won’t leave, and it doesn’t mean shit. He left and now I’m here, a complete and total wreck.”
I could tell from the expression on her face that I must have looked absolutely miserable. She hugged me. “You guys will be fine. You need an occasional shit day so you don’t stop appreciating all the good ones.”
I poured myself a glass of wine and asked her if she wanted to violate her purification by joining me in a soggy cold pizza.
“As appetizing as that sounds, I already ate. Half glass of wine, though. So where are the cops?”
“So that’s why you came over,” I said, trying to smile. “I called, but it’s a low priority.”
“Fuck that. You’re a DA, and your car gets broken into right in front of your house? They should at least take a report.”
True. Just as they had the three other times. I had wondered myself about the timing. Heidi talks to Selma. Selma talks to Janelle. Selma and Janelle get shot. Heidi talks to me. My car gets broken into. On the other hand, I was the one who’d been stupid enough to leave my purse in the front seat, the Portland equivalent of a BREAK ME sign on the car window.
I called the nonemergency number again. “I entered it in the queue, ma’am,” the dispatcher explained, “but I can’t guarantee when they’ll get to it. If the calls are busy tonight—”
“I understand.”
When I called an hour later and got the same response, I took matters into my own hands. I left a message for the shift lieutenant at the precinct asking him to at least have a desk officer call me so I could file a report over the phone.
By the time I finally hit the sheets around one, I still hadn’t heard a peep. Apparently Friday morning’s traffic ticket was just the beginning of the fuck-you I was getting from PPB. Throughout the night, as I woke up to each quiet house shift and tree branch squeak, I questioned the wisdom of conducting my little meeting at Northeast Precinct.
At eight-thirty-five the next morning, Alice Gerstein informed me that two detectives were waiting in my office. “I told them to go to the lobby, but one of them insisted you wouldn’t mind.”
I found Alan Carson sitting quietly in one guest chair, reading the paper, and Tommy Garcia in the other, helping himself to my Stanford Law School alumni magazine, complete with acknowledgments of recent donations.
“Hundred-dollar donation to the alma mater, huh? You got some money for me too?”
“Last time I checked, Starvin’ Marvin, you made more than I did once you figure in OT.”
“So did you take care of whatever you needed to do last night?” Carson asked.
Did I? “No, not really. But we need to make a decision anyway, don’t we?”
Here was our problem. Usually we’re at an advantage when we’ve got multiple conspiring suspects. Bring them all in. Tell them whoever flips first gets the deal. Wonder Twin Powers, Activate. Form of: a cooperating witness. That wasn’t going to work here. Our suspects were cops, and we didn’t have enough evidence to hold them in the event they both called our bluff and held strong.
And, as it turned out, time was of the essence. “You saw this, didn’t you?” Carson held up the front page of the Metro section.
I hadn’t had a chance to bring in the newspapers, let alone read them. Dan Manning broke the story. Trevor Hanks’s father, the distinguished Henry Hanks, was bitching up a storm about the continued detention of his son, insisting that the police had verified his “alibi.” So much for keeping quiet. Mr. Hanks, of course, didn’t bother disclosing details about the so-called alibi, or the fact that it would still land his son in prison for the next eight and a half years.
“I can’t get a break. I was going to suggest setting up surveillance on Foster and Powell, but if they know we’re taking a new look at Crenshaw—”
“Way too risky,” Carson said.
Once again, I wondered if we’d been too bold barging through the precinct yesterday with Heidi. I had wanted to stir things up, but now I’d boxed us in. We had to act soon.
“What about a wiretap at Jay-J’s?” Carson suggested.
“Man, if we had probable cause, don’t you think we would’ve done that by now?” Tommy said. “No, we need to figure out which one of these dudes is likely to cooperate and bring him in. I pulled their drug stats from the last year. Foster’s by far the worst. Somehow this guy is managing to work the single largest crack market in the state, but keeps stumbling on pot, meth, acid, heroin, powder cocaine, Drano, whatever. He’s got some crack cases, but hardly any black kids. He manages to find the only Ecuadorans and Mexicans who’ve been bold enough to try to crack that market.”
“So to speak,” I added. “OK, so her
e’s the question: Do we have enough to confront them? And, if so, which one?”
“There’s a third way,” Carson offered. “We go to Brouse. Give him the deal to hand us the cops.”
“This guy’s kidding, right?” Tommy scoffed. “Brouse is a gangster. If anyone did a drive-by on Selma, it was one of his people, not a couple patrol officers.”
I didn’t have the energy for the debate they were having over who was worse: the organized criminals or the cops who turned a blind eye. Garcia finally won when he convinced Carson that, from everything he knew about Andre, he’d never cut a deal.
Then Carson made a suggestion that caught me off guard. “What if we go after Calabrese? He’s pretty much toast with the bureau over that Corbett confession, but if he’s still hanging on to hopes of staying in MCT, we could use that. He might be able to give us something to flip Foster.”
It was just as Chuck had warned. What had started as a temporary break for Mike from MCT had rapidly become part of the bureau’s institutional memory. Calabrese’s one mistake—the one Chuck and I were also a part of—had rendered him a bad apple, to be thrown out or traded on, however we saw fit. I wanted to defend Mike to Carson, to say there was no way he could possibly be involved in any of this. I heard Chuck’s words from last night: You should have enough faith in him—and in my judgment about him—to know. So why didn’t I know?
Instead, it was Tommy who held Carson back. “That’s not something I want any part of. Not until you show me something concrete against him.”
“Tommy’s right,” I said. “We’re stretching for evidence as it is, and what we’ve got points to Powell and Foster.”
In the end, we realized it was a draw. Both Powell and Foster had their names in Percy’s book. Both had been on duty when he was killed, but without any documented call-outs to provide an airtight alibi. Foster had the arrest pattern that most obviously needed explaining. He had been the one to eyeball Heidi at the precinct. But Powell had a direct connection to Brouse through Jay-J’s. The sad truth was, we had little against either one. Just a shared gut instinct.
Finally, it fell to Carson, with his experience convincing bad cops to do the right thing, to make the decision. “We go after Powell. He’s married with four kids. Foster’s a bachelor.”
The implications were immediate. You could threaten either one of them with an IA investigation. But you could threaten Powell with his family. No job means no benefits and no pension. It was cold, no doubt, but was it any worse than the games we play in every case to get cooperation?
“Fine, let’s do it. How long do you need?” I asked Carson.
“I need to run it by my lieutenant. We should aim for picking him up by two. His shift starts at four, and we want to catch him at home. It’s more unsettling, and if we’re lucky the family will be there. He won’t want to get too loud.”
“I need to run it by Duncan too, but let’s assume it’s a go.”
I checked my voice mail once they left. A bunch of junk that could wait, a message from Lisa Lopez emphasizing that it wasn’t her client who’d blabbed, and one from Duncan scolding me for “letting the story get out.” Apparently I was supposed to tape the defendants’ mouths shut.
I didn’t hear the voice I was hoping for. I dialed into the voice mail of my stolen cell phone. Nothing. While I was in the system, I changed my outgoing message: Hey, it’s me. If you get this message, you’ve dialed a cell that now belongs to whatever desperate lowlife broke into my car last night. I’ll try to check messages, but you might want to try my other numbers instead. Have a better day than I’m having. ’Bye.
When I hung up, I felt myself start to cry. But then I did what I always do when that happens at the office. I pushed the pain down as far as I could, forcing myself to focus on work. Healthy, I know.
Once I gave the requisite mea culpa to the boss about the newspaper article and got his permission to go forward with the plan to confront Jamie Powell, I turned to the rest of my regular duties, starting with screening. When that was done, I handled my grand juries, then a sentencing hearing. I was fine as long as I was running around the courthouse. But back in the office, I couldn’t help it. I stared at the silent phone on my desk, wondering when Chuck would call.
I considered calling Alison York to apologize for phoning her at home the day before to ask about Percy. No, better to leave well enough alone. She and Matt were trying to salvage their marriage, and every call from me was just a reminder of what had compromised it in the first place.
That thought brought me squarely back to the problems in my own home life. I called my cell phone one more time, checking for a message I knew was not there.
Desperately seeking a distraction, I turned to the Crenshaw file, reviewing once again his notes on the Northeast Precinct story. Looking at everything we knew now, Heidi’s theory added up, but how in the world had Percy pieced it together from just these numbers and a few comments at neighborhood association meetings? He must have had a source who fed him information on the side, someone we hadn’t found yet—maybe one of these people whose first names Percy scrawled randomly in his margins. Whoever they were, I hoped they were watching their backs.
Or maybe Percy didn’t have a source. Maybe he hadn’t yet made sense of these numbers himself. I flipped through the pages, saddened by the thought of Percy being killed for information he didn’t even have.
Then I stopped at a name in the margin: a first name, or at least it had seemed, in all-capital print letters. Nothing special, just another small detail in this vast collection of minutiae. But this time, those three letters took on new significance: AMY.
There was nothing wrong with the York marriage after all.
23
I dialed their home number, but there was no answer. I tracked down Matt’s cell phone with the bureau and tried it instead. He sounded unnerved when he answered.
“Matt, it’s Sam Kincaid. We need to talk.”
I heard static in the heavy pause, then Alison’s faint voice in the background. “We were actually thinking about calling you. We’ve been driving around for hours.”
“No more thinking,” I said. “I’ve got officers in place ready to pick up Powell and Foster this afternoon. The lies end now.” It was tough talk from a friend, but it came with the implicit threat and power of the District Attorney’s Office.
“Can you give us any assurances?”
“Matt, you know how this works. I need the cooperation first.” My tone softened slightly. “But, as your friend, I promise you: A couple of hours from now, your help won’t mean as much.”
I heard a muffled exchange between them as I prayed silently that I wouldn’t need to have them picked up by force.
“Yeah, OK. But, please, not at the courthouse. Can you meet us somewhere?” He directed me to a hole-in-the-wall diner on the far west end of downtown. “And make sure no one follows you.”
Alison and Matt sat side by side in the back booth of Jake’s Diner, sharing a chocolate malt like two high school kids in letter jackets.
I dropped Percy’s open notebook on the table in front of them. “That’s you: Alison Madison-York.” I pointed for emphasis at each of the three initials that had tipped me off. “You two apparently spent enough time with Percy for him to pick up on the joke.”
Alison turned anxiously to her husband.
“You weren’t sleeping with Percy. You were his source. You were at his apartment to give him information.”
Matt looked nervously around the diner, calmed not in the least by its limited and geriatric customer base. “Can you please just sit for a second,” he said in a hushed tone.
I took a seat across from them in the booth.
“How much do you have without us?” Matt asked.
“Unh-unh. If you want my help, you tell me everything.” I glanced at my watch. “And I meant it about being pressed for time. That shooting in Buckeye Saturday night? A coworker of Percy’s had contacted those wome
n earlier in the day, trying to track the story.”
Alison nudged Matt with her elbow. “I told you it could be related,” she said to her husband. “I’ve been on edge since you called last night. When I saw the story this morning about Percy’s case being reopened, I was too scared to stay in the house. We’ve been driving around for hours.”
“You should be scared.” I immediately regretted the harshness of the words. “We figured it out. Powell and Foster have been going through the motions on searches, then cutting Andre Brouse’s people loose if they’re carrying. Obviously, someone doesn’t want that information out, and they may have killed Percy over it.”
Alison looked confused. “Then you know more than we do. I’ve never even heard of that person.”
“Start by telling me what you do know.” Mentally, I kicked myself. I had been thinking of Alison solely as Matt’s wife and Percy’s lover, not as a potentially valuable source in the records department of Northeast Precinct, which processes search-and-seizure cards.
“I swear to you, I didn’t know what was going on at first. A few months ago, I noticed they had plenty of searches going into the system, but their arrests were down. I said something to them about slacking off. I was only joking around, but they totally freaked out and told me to stick to data entry and mind my own business. A couple days later, Powell came to me all nice and apologetic, and asked if I’d disregard a few of their searches of black males every once in a while.”
They must have realized that if Alison could spot the discrepancy between the numbers of searches shown on their stop-and-search cards and the number of arrests they were making, so could anyone who might actually look.
“And so you did it?”
“No, of course not. I said I didn’t want to get involved in anything like that. But Powell said they were just worried after my comment that some left-wing liberal might make them out to be racist cops using searches to harass people in Buckeye. He said they were only doing their job in a neighborhood that happens to be mostly black. My husband’s a cop, too, and I didn’t see the harm in ignoring a few of the searches when I was doing data entry.”
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