Close Case

by Alafair Burke

  I pretended to knock on the door as I peered cautiously through its glass panes. I could see a front hallway and the door of what was probably a coat closet. I tried to get a peripheral view, but could only make out some beige carpet and the arm of a blue sofa.

  Walking to the side of the house, I found a window where the vinyl blinds hadn’t dropped completely. Through the three-inch gap, I saw Peter Anderson standing behind a woman I assumed was Marcy Wellington. His left arm was wrapped around her waist, almost intimately. His right clenched the handle of a knife, pressing its six-inch stainless steel blade against his wife’s throat. From her disheveled appearance and flushed face, I suspected that she had been slapped recently, or worse. Her eyes were wide with fear, and her entire body seemed tucked against her husband’s, as if trying to shrink from the cool metal of the blade.

  Chuck stood fifteen feet away, his arms held palms out in front of him. I could tell that he and Anderson were both talking, at and over each other. It was obviously intense, but I couldn’t make out the words. I thought through what must have occurred to bring the four of us here.

  It would have all started with the article that morning starring Henry Hanks and his claim that the police had cleared his son and Corbett in the Percy Crenshaw case. The article mentioned that the building superintendent had identified the defendants. With Hanks and Corbett cleared, the article must have raised new questions for Marcy Wellington about her violent husband and his reaction to the kindness shown to her by a neighbor, a former PI who knew about things like restraining orders. She called me to make sure I knew that Anderson had a beef with Percy. For Peter Anderson, the article had created an incentive to confirm his wife wasn’t a problem. He came here to make sure she knew he could still get to her.

  And Chuck had walked into the middle of it. I knew Chuck still had his Glock in his holster. He would never give up his weapon. He knew better. But I’d heard enough about murder-suicides in the DV unit to know he and Marcy were in trouble. Chuck was good, but Peter Anderson was not going to drop that knife voluntarily.

  I removed the .45 from my waistband and cocked the hammer, sliding an active round into the chamber. I had no idea what to do next. I could shoot through the glass, but the thought of randomly ricocheted bullets seemed unwise. I couldn’t pull this off alone.

  I held the gun in my right hand and fished my keys from my pocket with my left. Carefully, at the bottom of the window, I flashed the souvenir Grace had bought me in Hawaii, my little parrot with its pulsing purple beak. Please let this work. Chuck had made fun of my parrot enough times to recognize the light, if he would just notice it in the window.

  After about a minute, his eyes darted briefly to his periphery. Then I caught it. A blink. Just a flicker of recognition, a hint of relief. He knew I was out here.

  Chuck’s voice became louder, even more urgent. Yes! I could make out the words. “Think about it, Peter. You don’t want to do this. Not to Marcy. Percy was an act of rage; the law calls it heat of passion. But this is premeditated. And it’s Marcy. You still love her, don’t you?”

  Peter was speaking more heatedly now, and Marcy was sobbing hysterically. With emotions escalating in both the victim and perpetrator, there was no status quo to preserve. This needed to end soon.

  “Then let’s all three of us walk through that front door. Right now, Peter. Just put the knife down, and we walk right out the front door.”

  Chuck was telling me what to do. He was telling me Anderson had left the front door unlocked. I moved to the porch and reached for the knob. I turned it as slowly as I could until I felt the latch give way. I pressed gently, opening the door just a crack. Chuck’s voice continued to boom, loud enough to cover any squeaking. Quickly, I pushed the door ajar and stepped inside the hallway, flattening my back against the closet door.

  I envisioned the layout of the living room. Once I went in, Anderson would be standing twenty-five feet away, facing me at a 45-degree angle. His head would be higher than Marcy’s, but it was a risky shot, and Chuck would probably be in the way of a clear hit.

  “Where the fuck are you going? Stop moving, stop moving.” It was Peter Anderson. He was freaking out, and apparently Chuck had read my mind.

  “Don’t panic,” Chuck reassured him. “I just want to get a better look at Marcy. You’re scaring her, Peter. You OK there?” he asked in a gentle voice.

  I heard a frightened whimper.

  “I’m OK too,” Chuck said. “We’re all OK.”

  He was telling me it was clear. I had to go now. I remembered what it felt like to fire the .45 at the range. I had been good with it, better than Chuck.

  I took a deep breath and rotated my body around the corner, pulling my arms in front of me as I turned. I kept a firm grip on the gun, preparing for the strength of the recoil.

  The scene lasted no longer than the shooting at Jay-J’s, but it felt like an eternity. Marcy saw me first and panicked. She pulled the weight of her small frame down and away from her husband. Anderson’s body convulsed with hers as he struggled to maintain his firm embrace of her waist. A perplexed look of recognition, surprise, and fear registered in his eyes as the bullet I had aimed at his head sailed over them, penetrating a china cabinet against the back wall.

  A confusing succession of sounds filled my head: the blast of the gun; shattering glass and china; the terrified scream of Marcy Wellington, piercing at first, then muffled by her husband’s body against her mouth as he turned her to face him as they fell forward. I followed the arc of their movement with the .45, impotently searching for a shot that would not catch Marcy. Peter pulled his right elbow beside him, and I foresaw the momentum of the knife thrust planned for his wife’s abdomen.

  The sounds of the room seemed impossibly loud as I struggled to ignore a popping noise I couldn’t make sense of—a ricochet from the cabinet, perhaps, or an imagined echo of my first shot. I felt my finger stiffen against the trigger, willing to take the risk of another.

  Then Marcy screamed again as her husband collapsed in a heap on top of her, slowly releasing the knife. Blood and brain matter burst from an exit wound in the left side of his skull. To my right, Chuck stood staring at the scene, his Glock trembling in front of him.

  I quickly surveyed the three people in the room, weighing who needed me first. I ran straight to Chuck.

  25

  Two Sundays later, a little bit of luck and a tremendous amount of follow-up work had helped fill the gaps in what we knew. Selma Gooding had confirmed that Percy Crenshaw knew Delores Tompkins. “Of course he did,” she had told Raymond Johnson and me from her hospital bed, as if we should have made the connection long ago. “I introduced them—why, not quite two months ago. Delores came to me one day and said she wanted to talk to a reporter. Her mother had bragged about Delores turning over a new leaf, so I figured she had a new career in mind. It wasn’t for me to tell her she needed to go to college first, but I figured Percy would set her straight.”

  It had never dawned on Selma that Delores had gone to Percy about her ex-boyfriend, Andre Brouse. When Alison Madison-York came forward as well, Percy would have had the second source he needed. But before he even started putting pen to paper—or fingers to keyboard—Delores Tompkins was killed. According to the Yorks, even Percy had been nervous.

  IA reopened the case against Geoff Hamilton. An assistant to Andre Brouse was willing to testify that Hamilton was in on the Northeast Precinct scam, and other witnesses placed him as a frequent visitor to Jay-J’s. According to the assistant, Hamilton told Brouse that he pulled Delores over, intending to scare her into silence. Instead, she had punched the engine, and the rest had happened pretty much as he’d claimed at grand jury, but without all the remorse. If the story was true, he was guilty of felony murder. I didn’t know yet whether I’d be able to prove my case, but I knew one thing: He wasn’t getting a deal.

  Peter Anderson, needless to say, did not recover from his injuries. My father chuckled at that one.
>
  “Stop laughing,” I protested. “I told you I wanted to read this to you.” We sat at my dining room table with Helen Bernhard sticky buns and the morning’s paper, featuring a front-page story by Heidi Hatmaker about Delores Tompkins, Percy Crenshaw, and the two back-to-back officer-involved shootings nearly two weeks earlier, one at Jay-J’s and one at a home in southeast Portland.

  “Did you really say that to her?” my father asked. “He didn’t recover from his injuries? You mean the hole Chuck shot through his head?”

  My father’s law-enforcement days were long behind him, but he still had the sick sense of humor that comes with the job. All that mattered to him was that Peter Anderson was a murderer. He had admitted it to Marcy and Chuck before the shooting. Jack Walker even found Anderson’s name on a list of customers who recently test-drove a Jeep Liberty from a dealer out in Beaverton. The way we figured, Anderson had helped himself to a few carpet fibers before dumping the baseball bat at the Red Raccoon. The bar owner is now rethinking his decision to publicize his Dumpster diving habits.

  The last time I saw Chuck, he was dealing with the aftermath of Anderson’s shooting with humor as well. I used the same kinds of reassuring words that had comforted me when I was once in his position—he could never have convinced Anderson to drop the knife; there were no nondeadly options; Anderson gave him no choice. Chuck’s response? “When you sit down for that interview, just don’t tell her I’m a punk-ass bitch who had to be rescued by his woman.”

  “What does the story say about the women from the neighborhood association?” Dad asked.

  “Just that the investigation remains open.” Jessica Walters had tried to console me by explaining that sometimes years pass before a suspect in custody offers to clear up an old gang shooting in exchange for leniency. Maybe, but, absent such fortuity, the murder of Janelle Rogers and the attempted murder of Selma Gooding were starting to look like yet another unsolved Buckeye drive-by.

  “Good,” I said, reading further, “she didn’t name Matt and Alison. I was worried about that.” It took a fight to persuade Duncan not to pursue charges against either of them—him for obstruction of justice, her for far worse. In exchange, Alison gladly resigned her position at the bureau, and Matt accepted a six-month suspension without pay. Russ Frist, who was over the worst of his Lyme disease, frowned upon the deal, but I did it anyway. So far, I still had my job.

  “It looks like she talked to Tommy Garcia too:

  A sergeant in the bureau’s Drug and Vice Division believes that the business records from Jay-J’s will lead to some of the largest drug busts in his unit’s history.”

  Perhaps, but he was going to have to do the work with the acting senior deputy in the Gang Unit. Jessica Walters’s water had broken yesterday. Last night, I’d received an e-mail from her partner about a baby girl named Bridget.

  When I got to the part about seizing Jay-J’s as a state forfeiture asset, Dad interrupted my enthusiastic monologue. “Put the paper down, Sammie.”

  “But I’m reading—”

  “No, you’re avoiding conversation. It’s an easily identifiable Kincaid trait.”

  I lowered the paper slightly and eyed him warily over its pages.

  “Are you getting through this OK?” he asked quietly.

  “Yeah, Dad, I’m fine.” I took another bite from my sticky bun.

  “Fine, huh?”

  No one ever believes me when I use that word, but I suppose my father had particularly good reasons for scrutinizing it now. Some of the events of the past week didn’t make their way into the article. The wall that traditionally divides prosecutors from cops had formally been erected between me and MCT. Walker and Johnson were polite, but they spoke to me only on an as-needed basis.

  For Mike Calabrese, speaking to me on an as-needed basis meant not speaking to me at all, other than a terse e-mail conceding he’d been wrong about Geoff Hamilton. He was still suspended, and the bureau was trying to demote him to patrol because of the faulty confession from Corbett. The union was backing Mike up, but, from what I heard, Mike was talking to a department near Bend about a transfer. Even if he could force his way back into MCT, he wasn’t interested in a career—and the resulting cross-examinations—defined by his prior suspension, union grievance, and Todd Corbett. He wasn’t taking my calls, and two e-mail messages had so far gone unacknowledged: one, a thank-you for talking to Matt York about coming forward; the other, a clumsy and apparently insufficient apology.

  “Obviously things aren’t perfect,” I said finally, softening to my father’s concerned face, my voice cracking.

  “He’s going to come back, Sam. You guys will be fine.”

  I hadn’t given Dad the play-by-play of Chuck’s departure, but I remembered every minute of it. His self-deprecating request that I not dime him up to Heidi as a wussy boy had been the one last joke. Then his tone changed.

  “Well, I think I’ve got everything.”

  He held the final box, packed from our bedroom. A mini U-Haul was waiting out front, full of the belongings he had moved in only a month earlier. They were presumably going into the apartment he had rented in his old neighborhood, along with the furniture we had placed in storage just before Halloween.

  “You don’t have to do this, Chuck.”

  “I know, but I need to.”

  When I replayed the scene each night in bed alone, I could still feel the shortness of breath and the pain in my stomach. I had fought my hardest, but in the end I broke down. It was heartbreak, and it was happening. I really was losing him.

  “No, you don’t need to,” I had argued. Begged, really. “You need to be here with me. In our house.”

  “Not ours, Sam. Yours. It was always yours. We finally tried it, and now we know—it’s not enough. We just didn’t work.” He kissed me on the head one last time. Then, just like that, he left.

  I swallowed now against the lump forming in my throat. “No, Dad. He’s not coming back.” I blotted my eyes with the end of my shirt sleeve, absorbing the dampness before tears could form. I had cried every day for a week. I needed to make it through one dry day.

  “Maybe—”

  I shook my head adamantly. Privately, though, I was also keeping a small window of hope open for the maybes. Maybe if I stopped trying to fit in at MCU at the expense of my own instincts about the officers in MCT. Maybe if I earned Mike’s forgiveness, even if I couldn’t repair the harm I’d done to his reputation—and feelings. Maybe if I promised to sign the piece of paper with the rings and the death-do-you-part stuff. Maybe if I swore to quit MCU, if that’s what it took.

  A lot of maybes. I had no idea where to start, but I knew I’d give it a shot. I had to.

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks Titles by Alafair Burke

  Judgment Calls

  Missing Justice

  Acknowledgments

  To my delight, I have been fortunate enough now to have written three novels about Samantha Kincaid, the police officers she works with, and the cases she prosecutes in my favorite city, Portland, Oregon. I could fill another book trying to express my gratitude to those to whom it is owed, but I’ll use this one small publishable page instead.

  Thank you to the many wonderful, diverse, hospitable bookstore folks who have hosted me for readings and helped personally move the books from boxes to shelves to curious fingers that turn pages. Thank you to those who have welcomed me as a friend along the way, even if our meetings were through your web browser. Most important, thank you—whoever you are—for reading this. I am forever grateful for the opportunity I have been given to write fiction, and I know it comes directly from readers.

  As always, I thank my tireless agent, Philip Spitzer, and the incredible team at Henry Holt: John Sterling, Jennifer Barth, Maggie Richards, Annsley Rosner, Sam Douglas, Donna Holstein, and Richard Rhorer. Thank you, Jane Wood, Gaby Young, and company at Orion Books, and Matthew Shear, Marc Resnick, and Jennifer Enderlin at St. Martin’s Press for taking Samantha overseas a
nd to paperback. I am also thankful to my students and colleagues at Hofstra Law School.

  Thank you, Danielle Holley and Maggie Griffin. Any remaining typos are entirely your fault.

  Finally, thank you, Sean Simpson. You’re the best.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  First published in the United States by Henry Holt and Company

  CLOSE CASE

  Copyright © 2005 by Alafair Burke.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Henry Holt and Company, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2004060903

  ISBN: 978-1-4299-0247-2

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.