“Truce?” John said.
“You ply me with water?”
That was one of the things John loved about her. When Melissa angered, she burned hot and didn’t pull her punches, but then it was over. Rarely a grudge or resentment held. He held the water out for her and pulled it away when she reached for it. “Truce?”
“Give me the water, and we’ll talk about it.”
“Jesus, more talk?”
She grabbed him by the shirt collar and pulled him down. “You really are an asshole.”
He handed over the water and propped up on a pillow beside her. “I think Kari is afraid of how we’ll react to her little friend.”
“She’s ashamed of us—what teenager isn’t?”
“Probably just you; I’m the cool parent,” he said.
Melissa slapped him on the thigh.
“How did you know she had a boyfriend?”
“My keen parental awareness.”
“Bullshit.”
“Paula told me her fight with Lanette was probably about a guy. Turns out she was right.”
John’s cell phone rang.
Melissa tried to grab it. “No.”
“Penley.”
He listened for a moment and then said, “Where?” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I’ll pick up Paula—” He shook his head and bit his lip. “All right, Lieutenant.”
John tossed the phone on the bed.
“What’s the matter?”
“Something turned up with a connection to a case we’re working. I’m flying solo until IA stops screwing over Paula.”
“Why would they do that?”
“They need a sacrificial lamb, and it looks like it’s gonna be her.”
NINETEEN
John pulled up to the midtown Victorian home a few seconds after Lieutenant Barnes.
“You sure we need to do this?” John asked.
“Better coming from you and me than one of the asshats in city hall,” Barnes said.
They walked up the sidewalk toward the front door and heard a noise come from the side of the building, the high-pitched whir of an electric drill. The pair went to the source of the sound, on the side of the detached garage, and found Paula repairing the door.
She drove three-inch screws into the doorframe around the strike plate for the dead bolt. A surprised look appeared when she noticed their approach, one that went from a smile to concern in seconds.
“Gentlemen? I know SPD doesn’t make home repair house calls . . .”
“I thought you were gonna do this in the morning,” John said.
She finished driving in the last screw and dropped the drill into a tool bag at her feet. “I was, but then I thought that leaving it unlocked overnight might invite problems.”
“Was anything taken?” the lieutenant asked.
“No, why?” she countered.
“Are you certain?” he asked.
“I mean, I didn’t take an inventory, if that’s what you’re asking, but some expensive power tools and my road bikes weren’t touched.”
Barnes had a brown paper bag at his side, one that Paula didn’t seem to notice until he started to open it.
“Does this look familiar?” Barnes said.
“It’s a hammer. I have one like that.”
“Where do you keep yours?” John asked.
She glanced at the door with the repaired lock, then to the tool bag at her feet. She kicked it toward her partner.
The zippered top was already open, and John snapped on a latex glove and parted the opening. Yellow-handled tools were strewn on the bottom of the bag under the drill. Four screwdrivers, a small yellow pry bar, and a set of matching wrenches, but no hammer. “Could it be on a workbench inside or something?” John asked.
“No, it was in there,” Paula said.
“This one,” the lieutenant hefted the bagged hammer, “has your prints on it. Could it be yours?”
She tucked a wayward strand of hair behind her ear and leaned closer to the bag. “It’s the same brand as mine.”
“Was your tool bag in the garage when the lock was broken?” John asked.
She nodded.
“You didn’t report it when you noticed it?” John asked.
“Why? Nothing was taken.” Then she glanced back at the hammer in the bag. “I didn’t think anything was. It would have been one of those pain-in-the-ass over-the-phone crime reports. There wasn’t a point.”
“When was the break-in?” John asked.
“Sometime in the last couple of days. I found it about an hour, hour and a half ago.”
“That’s in our window,” Barnes said.
“Window? What window? What’s this about?”
“This hammer, your hammer, was used in a homicide,” the lieutenant said.
The color drained from Paula’s face, and she leaned against the garage wall. “Well, shit. Who was killed?”
“Bobby Wing,” John answered.
“Another SSPNET connection. Son of a bitch. Lieutenant, you gotta know I didn’t have anything to do with this. I keep getting pulled into this river of shit. Sherman wants me to go down for these killings.”
Barnes placed the hammer back into the brown paper bag. “I know you didn’t—couldn’t—but someone is going through a hell of a lot of work to make you look really bad on this one.”
“I’ll nail down the timeline for both killings, and it will prove you had nothing to do with them,” John said.
“Not to sound like I’m paranoid, but why me?”
“You are the common denominator. Wing, Burger, and Sherman were all connected with your SSPNET investigation. If your credibility is undermined, what happens to the case?” Barnes said.
She nodded. “It goes down the toilet with me.”
“The DA made a point of saying either you or Sherman will burn for her case falling apart. We need to find another source to testify against Sherman, what with Burger out of the equation now.”
“Bobby Wing would’ve,” Paula said.
“Wingnut was Burger’s partner. You think that means he was ready to back Burger against Sherman?”
“I think so. Bobby was willing to look the other way on a lot of things, but he didn’t think much of Sherman and his cowboy attitude.”
“Who else in the SSPNET would back Burger’s original testimony regarding Sherman?” Barnes asked.
Paula tipped her head back and shut her eyes tight. “Burger was the focus. Once we turned him, everything fell into place against Sherman and the others. I’d have to go over my notes, but there could be one or two who might testify in exchange for a reduced sentence.”
“So we aren’t talking about upstanding citizens, are we?” Barnes said.
“Not so much. It’s bad when character witnesses are all dirty cops moonlighting as meth dealers. Shit, what am I gonna do?”
John rolled a pebble under his shoe, and his sole kept catching on it—it wouldn’t go away. A spark of a lingering thought ignited. “Where was Stark when the SSPNET stuff was going down?”
“Stark’s been on patrol his entire career. There’s no way he’d get picked for a task force assignment,” Barnes said.
“Wait.” Paula stood taller. “Stark went to the academy with Carson—”
“The cop who got busted selling dope out of the evidence room?” John asked. “What does he have to do with—?”
“—and Carson and Stark were patrol partners when I started,” she finished.
“They were. I remember that,” Barnes said.
“You think Carson told his old partner what was going on in the SSPNET?” John asked.
“Maybe?” she responded. “You think Carson and the SSPNET guys had a deal for a cut of whatever they confiscated? A piece of the action for Carson on what he was able to move out of the evidence room?”
“Holy shit. Not this again. That evidence room bust was a disaster. Cases dismissed because the evidence went missing, our investigations questioned by ev
ery defense attorney. When the chief gets wind of this, he’ll have a stroke,” Barnes said.
“Wait a sec,” Penley said. “Let’s not jump headfirst here. Stark is a waste of space. I think we can all agree on that. I can’t see him as a great mastermind, pulling all this elaborate setup together to make Paula look guilty. He doesn’t have it in him. But he knows something.”
“IA won’t let you investigate another cop,” Barnes said. He turned to the street, where a van pulled up. “I asked for a crime scene tech to come and see if we can pull prints or fiber from your break-in.”
“Great,” Paula said.
John recognized the small silhouette in the street. “Karen will handle this quietly.”
“The old lock and strike plate are in the garbage can. It’s gonna have my prints all over it.”
“We’re covering all the bases here, Paula,” Lieutenant Barnes said.
“I know. I don’t have to like it though.”
“I think I can get Stark talking,” John said.
“How’s that?” Barnes asked.
“You’ve already put her on desk duty. Now reassign or suspend her.”
“Wait? What? Do I get a say in this?” Paula said.
“I think I see where you’re going with this.” Then to Paula, Barnes said, “Detective Newberry, report to the armory at zero eight hundred tomorrow morning.”
TWENTY
“Well, well, well, what do we have here?” Stark said. His throaty voice carried in the small confines of the armory.
Paula ignored the question and marked off shotgun serial numbers on a clipboard. She was in uniform, a clear signal to her peers that her time in the limelight as a detective had come to an abrupt end.
“Hey, Princess, I can’t tell you how much this warms my heart.”
“Don’t you have someplace to be?” Paula said without taking her eyes off the inventory on her clipboard.
Stark leaned against the gun cage where the department’s weapons were stored and repaired. “It was only a matter of time until your lies bit you on your pretty little ass.”
“Thank you. I didn’t think you noticed.”
He slapped the metal of the gun cage with an open hand, the loud sound finally drawing Paula’s eye up to him.
“They put you in a cage for a reason. Get used to the view, or do us all a favor and kiss the end of one of those shotguns.”
Paula stiffened and tossed the clipboard on a nearby desk.
“That’s enough, Stark,” John’s voice sounded from the hallway.
Stark turned and nodded at John. “Me and your old partner were catching up. Happy to see you didn’t get dragged down with her. Like I told you before, she’s ruined careers of good cops with her bullshit.”
“You’re running late for shift briefing. I’ll walk with you.” Stark and John turned away, and John glanced over a shoulder at Paula. He couldn’t hide a smile as he said, “She’s gonna have to live with what she’s done.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Stark said.
Paula narrowed her eyes and flipped John off.
Once out of earshot, John leaned to Stark. “What are they saying about Paula? About her getting the boot? Any scuttlebutt about me getting pulled into her mess?”
Stark loved being the center of the station gossip universe. If there were a departmental equivalent to the National Inquirer, Stark would be it, always digging up who’s sleeping with whom and which cops were lazy. Somehow, though, Stark never put himself on his own list.
“It’s great. I knew you shouldn’t have been saddled with that baggage, and she finally got hers. Far as everyone goes, you’re golden.”
“You really think she had something to do with getting Burger killed?”
Stark’s jawline tensed for a split second. “She paid him to lie about what went on in the task force. That was enough to get him killed.”
“How do you know she paid him?”
“Burger told me.”
The watch sergeant’s voice sounded from the briefing room.
“Hey, I gotta go,” Stark said and headed into the briefing.
John backtracked to the armory, where Paula sat at one of the desks inside the gun cage, not going over weapon repair orders as noted on the binder in front of her, but the SSPNET internal affairs files she had tucked away inside.
“He knows something. I asked him straight-up if he thought you had something to do with Burger and his response was weird.”
“Consider the source,” she said.
“True, but he thinks you paid Burger to lie about the task force and that was enough to get him killed. Not that you killed him or a drug deal went bad. Ratting out the task force is what ended him.”
“Snitches get stitches.”
“Something like that. I didn’t get to press him about Wing or Sherman.”
Paula tore off a scrap of paper and slid it through the wire mesh.
John took it and unfolded it. “What’s this?”
“Those are three more cops who went down because of the Sherman case. They stand to gain if the DA tosses the case. One is still inside, doing time at a fire camp down south, the other two are back out on the streets, both local.”
He tucked the note into his shirt pocket. “I’ll check it out. I’ve got a name for you to run down. Cameron Meadows.”
Paula jotted the name down. “How’s he figure in?”
“He doesn’t. That’s Kari’s new friend.”
“I knew it.”
“She’s afraid to let Mel and I meet him.”
“Smart girl.”
“Just see if he has a juvenile record, would you?” John said.
Paula opened another IA file. “I will. And I’ll keep at this. I know there’s something in here that will keep Sherman in prison for the rest of his term.”
“I’ll get back to you on what I find out about these.” John tapped his shirt pocket.
At his desk in the detective bureau, John started to look up the names Paula had supplied when a loud voice from one of the other detectives said, “Turn that up.”
A television breaking news alert came across the screen of the TV set tucked on top of a file cabinet. The banner at the bottom of the screen said, “Accused Cop May Get New Trial.”
A news anchor with thin shoulders and a receding gray hairline announced, “Sources within the district attorney’s office revealed that the court will rule today on the appeal of former cop Charles Sherman. Sherman was found guilty of multiple accounts of fraud, corruption, and possession of controlled substances, all stemming from his participation in a multiagency drug task force. The ex-cop appealed on the grounds that his conviction was secured by means of coerced testimony and prosecutorial misconduct. If the court grants Sherman’s appeal, he could be re-tried on the charges. District Attorney Linda Clarke will provide a statement after the court issues its ruling.”
The talking head went onto another story dealing with water restrictions during the drought before someone in the squad room turned the volume back down. “Sherman’s guardian angels must be looking out for him,” a voice said from one of the desks.
“Guardian angel, my ass,” John muttered.
He unfolded the note Paula gave him with the names of two ex-cops who threw their careers and pensions away for Sherman. Both were former sheriff’s deputies from adjoining counties but listed residences in Natomas, on the northern edge of the city.
John typed in their information in LEADS—the Law Enforcement Automated Data System designed for local law enforcement to manage parolees in the community. The first name, George McDaniel, wasn’t under parole supervision. He had been discharged without parole because of the nonviolent offense that brought him to prison. A prison mugshot showed the ex-cop looked more like a skinhead gang member now: shaved head, defiant glare at the camera, and a recent prison-issue white pride tattoo on the side of his neck. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, John figured.
The second man
was Joseph Ronland. The system reported he did his time in county jail and never made it to state prison. Ronland was African American and sentenced to three years’ probation, which meant John could search the man’s residence without a warrant. John printed his mugshot.
Ronland worked at a car wash downtown, a place popular with ex-cons. The car wash wasn’t far from the office, so John decided he’d drive by and see if Ronland was working. Ronland had gotten himself tagged on a possession-for-sales charge, and his place of employment put him in the mix with addicts, hustlers, and dope runners. Time to see how reformed the ex-cop had become.
TWENTY-ONE
Bob’s Car Wash took up an entire corner on L Street in midtown. Faded art deco–era signs from when motoring was a pastime rather than a necessity gave the business a lost-in-time feel. It might have seemed a bit desperate if not for the six cars in line for a handwash.
John pulled in front of the combination office and waiting room, where customers could get out of the elements and watch their cars get a going-over—or a going through, based on the proclivities and drug withdrawals of the workers at the time.
The owner, Bob Sunshine, tipped back a Mountain Dew and watched an SUV being attended to on the line through the window. Sunshine wasn’t his real name, but people called him that because he blew sunshine and rainbows up the skirt of any parole or probation officer who checked on his employees. His expression faltered when John entered. The man’s ruddy complexion darkened, and his shoulders tensed—that what-did-they-do-now? look.
“Detective, finally get tired of the inmates doing a half-assed job on your car?”
“Business looks decent, Bob.”
He tipped his soda can to the heavens. “Thank God for the drought and dust.”
John handed him the printout with Joseph Ronland’s mug shot. “He working today?”
“Yeah; what’d he do?”
“Nothing. I just want to talk to him.”
“That’s what all you guys say before you Taser them and have them carted away. He’s been a good worker. Joe shows up on time, doesn’t cause drama with the other guys, and keeps his mouth shut. You sure you have to do this here?”
Bury the Past Page 9
