“Lieutenant Castellano?” he said into his office phone, “This is Lieutenant Ed Howard of the Athens-Clarke County Police Department… Yeah, they’re here in my office.” He smiled. “Yeah, they brought donuts. Okay, stand by.” He punched a button on the base of his phone and set the handset in the cradle. “I have you on speaker, Lieutenant.”
Jorge’s voice squawked from the small speaker. “Call me Jorge. Look, Ed, we’re working another case in Port City involving James Ponder. Our investigation has not progressed to the point where my captain will approve the expense of me sending two detectives to Athens on what might be a wild goose chase, what with our budget pressures. You follow me?”
Howard laughed. “Yeah, I got a captain like that too, Jorge. He’s as tight as a pair of two dollar shoes.”
Jorge chuckled. “Budgets are the same the world over. Fortunately, Chuck McCrary has a case that involves Ponder. Chuck owes me a favor and his client has deep pockets. I asked Chuck to check out Ponder’s prior case in Athens, providing you approve. It would be a big help to me and our departmental budget if you would extend Chuck and Snoop the same professional courtesy you would me if I visited Athens.”
Howard glanced at Snoop then at me. “Sure, why not?”
“Thanks, Ed. I owe you one.”
Howard punched off the phone. “That file is in the East Precinct office; that’s where the fire was, and that’s where Jake Andrews is stationed. I’ll call Jake and tell him you’re coming.”
As we left his office, he added, “And it wouldn’t hurt if you picked up another box of donuts for the East Precinct.”
Detective Jake Andrews pushed the file folder across the table toward me. “I remember that case.” He looked in the box, selected a chocolate-covered. “That investigation was a monumental screw-up from the get-go.”
“How so?” Snoop asked as he grabbed a glazed donut.
I opened the Hillside Pines Apartments folder and began to review the file. Snoop continued the interview.
“We don’t normally discuss our cases with civilians—even civilians that used to be cops. What’s your interest in this case?”
“Jake, you look like you’re pretty close to retirement.”
“Yeah, twenty-eight years in, two to go. So?”
“I retired with thirty years on the job. I had a pretty good closing percentage.”
“Yeah, so?”
Snoop lowered his voice. “So, a couple of evildoers got away. Perps who I knew were guilty as sin, but cases I couldn’t close because of a technicality, or because someone else in another department screwed something up. There were a few cases where I’d have given my left nut to find a way to get the perps. You ever have one like that?”
Andrews narrowed his eyes and looked at the wall behind Snoop without seeing it. “Every cop has cases like that, and the Ponder case comes mighty close.”
Snoop said, “Right. This yo-yo shouldn’t get away with murder. You told me last week that your department found proof of Ponder’s guilt, but the judge threw out the evidence because of an improper warrant.”
I thumbed through the file and listened with half a mind.
Andrews rapped the table with his knuckles. “The warrant was not improper; it was non-existent.” He shook his head. “We’re pretty peaceable around here for a city our size. Academic atmosphere, university town, and so on, y’know?” He bit off a quarter of the donut.
Snoop got on well with Andrews, so I let him continue the interview.
Andrews waved the donut. “Most of our homicides are pretty ordinary. Drunken bar fight, abusive spouse, jealous ex-boyfriend. Heck, most of our fires are pretty ordinary, y’know? It was the arson investigator what screwed up the case.”
I looked up from the file and waited for him to go on.
Andrews looked from Snoop to me. “At first everyone thought the fire was an accident. The night watchman died from smoke inhalation in the construction trailer where he was stationed.” He bit off another precise quarter of his donut, chewed twice, and talked around the wad of dough. “I thought the poor guy was maybe taking a nap when he shoulda been patrolling, y’know?”
Snoop nodded. “Been there, done that.”
“Winston Taylor was his name, retired civil servant, married to the same woman for forty-seven years. He left behind a widow, four children, three grandchildren.” Andrews picked up his cup again. “My department, we don’t investigate fires unless the fire department determines that there’s been a crime. Oh, sure, we send a patrol car to every fire call to help with traffic control, but we don’t get involved in the investigation. The fire department has trained people who investigate the causes of fires, y’see?”
“Sure,” Snoop said. “The Port City PD is the same way.”
“That case was a major screw-up,” Andrews said. “When that Chicago shyster got Ponder’s case booted, we reorganized how we handle fire investigations.”
“What happened?” Snoop asked.
“The ME’s autopsy determined that the watchman was unconscious before the fire started. He died from smoke inhalation after being whacked on the head with a blunt object, maybe a tire iron. Blood from the wound had congealed a little—maybe fifteen or twenty minutes’ worth of scabbing. Murder, plain as the nose on your face.” He shoved the box of donuts my way.
I grabbed another to be sociable. I didn’t want a third donut, even a Krispy Kreme. “Sounds like it. What happened to screw the case?”
“The arson investigator—Wallace Covey was his name. He was suspicious about the fire. He reviewed security footage around the construction site and found a clear shot of Ponder walking away with something in his hand that looked like a tire iron. This was at the time the fire started.”
“How’d Covey identify him?” Snoop asked.
“From Ponder’s car. Security video showed one car other than the watchman’s parked near the site. Video showed a partial license plate and a bumper sticker that said ‘There is no Planet B.’ Actually it was kinda clever.” He leaned over the donut box. “Y’all gonna have another donut?”
“I’m good with this one.” Snoop pushed the box across the table.
Andrews selected a powdered sugar and waved it as he spoke. “So Covey, he’s hanging around the autopsy suite like a kid waiting for the candy store to open, when the ME discovers the skull fracture. Boom, the ME mentions the fracture to him—unofficially, of course.” Powdered sugar floated in the air and settled on the table. Andrews bit off a quarter of his donut, licked the sugar off his lips. “Covey was new with the fire department, right out of training school. Not much experience, but full of piss and vinegar like all these young studs. He calls my department, tells us to get a warrant, and runs over to Ponder’s apartment like his pants was on fire—which, I guess, they sorta were.”
Snoop swallowed his donut. “Let me guess—Covey went in before you got there with the warrant.”
Andrews smacked the table with the flat of his hand, sending a mist of powdered sugar into the air. “Nope. Covey talks to the wrong guy in my department. He talks to the desk sergeant and he says, ‘We’ve got to get a warrant to the hippie’s car and house.’ We record all calls to the desk sergeant, so I remember that that’s exactly what he said.” He looked back to Snoop. “The sergeant, he ain’t sure what Covey wants. I mean, who does we refer to? We’ve got to get a warrant. What kind of message is that? And who’s the hippie? So the sergeant sticks a message in the box for Charlie Thomas to sort it out. Charlie handled crowd control while the firemen fought the fire.”
Snoop said, “So I’ll bet that Charlie didn’t get the message until he came off patrol and looks in the box at the end of his shift.”
Andrews took another bite. A few crumbs fell off the donut onto the table. He shoved the remainder of the donut in his mouth, swiped the crumbs into his other hand, and popped them into his mouth. He washed the donut down with coffee. “Right. Charlie had been a patrolman for fifteen years at that time, but he don’t a
ct like he’d had fifteen years of experience; he acts like he’s had one year of experience fifteen times. He ain’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.” He raised an eyebrow at me.
I nodded.
“That’s why he’s still a patrolman,” Andrews said. “Hell, it’s five years later, and Charlie has had his one year of experience twenty times.” Andrews smiled at his own cleverness. “Charlie don’t know what to do with the message so he stuffs it in his pocket. Figures he’ll bring it up with the sergeant at the next morning’s muster.”
“So what happened the next morning?” I finished the last of my coffee.
“Nothing. Not a damned thing.” Andrews winced. “Charlie leaves the note in his uniform pocket and puts the shirt in the dirty clothes hamper when he gets home.” Andrews pounded the table again. “We never got a warrant—never. And every bit of evidence that the idiot Covey grabbed— Ponder’s cellphone, computer, his clothes with the guard’s blood spatter on them—even the tire iron he found in the perp’s trunk—every piece of evidence was ruled inadmissible.” His shoulders slumped. “With no evidence, the case couldn’t proceed.”
I pushed my empty cup aside. “You might’ve discovered that evidence with your normal police investigation. Didn’t the DA argue for the inevitable discovery exception to the exclusionary rule?”
Andrews eyed my cup. “I’m outta coffee too. Let’s get some more. Wash down the rest of those donuts.” He fetched the coffee pot and poured the three of us some more.
For a guy who didn’t discuss cases with civilians, Andrews was talking a lot. I decided not to ask for creamer for the coffee.
Snoop said, “We were talking about y’all arguing for inevitable discovery.”
Andrew grabbed the folder back from me and opened it. He flipped toward the back until he found what he was looking for. He stabbed a sheet of paper with a stiff forefinger. “Eliazar—yeah that was his name, Walter Eliazer. I couldn’t remember the shyster’s name—had to look it up. Fancy-pants high-powered Chicago lawyer comes in here, and our DA is outmatched. I remember this sleazy shyster, this Walter Eliazar guy. Me and the DA called him ‘Wally the weasel’. He shows up less than twenty-four hours after we arrest Ponder.”
I hadn’t gotten far enough back in reviewing the folder to see the lawyer’s name. “That’s unusual, a Chicago attorney representing a college student in Athens, Georgia. How did Ponder come to be represented by a Chicago lawyer? Was there any previous connection between him and Eliazar?”
“Beats me. The hippie must have had this jerk on speed-dial. The Weasel swoops in here with a whole stack of motions already printed out. He files them with the court within an hour of meeting with the hippie the first time.”
Snoop asked, “So what happened next?”
Andrews squinted one eye at me. “The Weasel gets the evidence tossed, gets the evidence returned to Ponder, and gets the charges dropped.” He shoved the file back across the table. “By the time we get another warrant to search Ponder’s car and house, the evidence is gone. Poof. Ponder reports his car stolen; when we found it, it had been set on fire. Whatever evidence might have been in the trunk went up in smoke. His apartment had been cleaned like a hospital operating room. The tire iron is probably at the bottom of a lake somewhere. We never found one shred of evidence. Case is still open but inactive. We got nothing to work.”
I opened the folder and turned to another page I had noticed earlier. “Jake, is this the inventory of what was missing from the construction site?”
He glanced at the upside-down page. “Yeah, why?”
“Two twenty-five kilo cases of Tovex water gel explosive.”
Chapter 33
Snoop drove on the way to the Atlanta airport so I could call my researcher. “Flamer, I got more info on Ponder.” I told him about the Chicago attorney. “Check him out.”
“I will as soon as I email my report on Katherine Shamanski and family. I have a few things to tidy up. Check your email in ten minutes.” The line went dead.
“Snoop, Flamer is emailing me a report on the Shamanski family. Can you come to my office first thing tomorrow to go over it with me?”
Snoop shook his head as he drove. “I’m working another case for an attorney. I put him off to go on this road trip with you. I can’t put him off any longer. And it’ll take all day. See if you can figure out something by yourself, without my years of experience and sagacity.”
“Sagacity?”
“Yeah, an eight-letter word meaning ‘keen perception.’”
“Then I shall persevere without you,” I said.
“Persevere?”
“If you can be sagacious, I can persevere.”
I slid a copy of Flamer’s Shamanski report across the table to Snoop. “Read this while I get another coffee. It’s pretty disturbing.”
I got my coffee and came back. “What do you think?”
Snoop set the report on my desk. “Give me your take on it first.”
I leaned back in my chair. “Here’s how this thing works: Morris Shamanski is a personal injury attorney. So is his wife, Virginia McAllister, although they’re not partners. He makes a ton of money and invests it in various companies, some of which the corporate department of his firm does the legal work for. So the firm makes money that way too. Most of the companies he invests in are involved in green businesses.”
Snoop said, “The solar energy and environmental stuff.”
“Right. And Flamer says that Virginia McAllister donates buckets of money to politicians. The government in turn gives lots of loan guarantees and subsidies to the companies that Morris Shamanski invests in. One hand washes the other. Lots of people don’t make the connection between McAllister’s political contributions and Morris Shamanski’s subsidies because they have different last names.”
“You do remember that Flamer’s a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian. He’s opposed to all government programs, right?”
“Yeah, so?”
“So maybe he shaded this report a little.” Snoop tapped on the report. “Everything in here made legal sense to somebody or the feds wouldn’t have handed over the money. And I didn’t read in here where anybody went to jail. So there’s nothing criminal here.”
“Hmm. Maybe.”
“And even if it’s true, what’s it got to do with the price of eggs?”
“Michelle thought Katherine’s father was an entrepreneur, but that’s an outgrowth of his personal injury law practice. They’re from Chicago and the lawyer that got Ponder off on that Athens arson and murder is from Chicago. See if there’s any connection.”
Chapter 34
I called Flamer.
“If you’re calling about the rest of the report on Katherine Shamanski, it’s ready. I’m emailing it now.”
“I called to talk to you about your report on Morris Shamanski and Virginia McAllister.”
“So talk.”
“You made it sound like what they did was criminal. I did my own research on this. No one’s gone to jail over any of her political contributions or his investment subsidies. The New York Times even called one scandal that you included a ‘phony scandal.’”
“Everything in that report is a verifiable fact which I teased out of dozens of reports filed with the Federal Election Commission and other federal government open-record websites. You can interpret the cause and effect yourself. I stand by my report. Who you gonna believe, me or the idiot media New York Times?”
“Good point.”
Flamer hung up without a word.
I set the cellphone down. “Flamer is sending the rest of his report on Katherine Shamanski. We need a wall map of the Southeast United States. Trot over to a book store and pick one up, will you?”
“How about I drive over to the book store? I don’t trot unless someone is shooting at me. Then I run like hell.”
Flamer’s email report arrived a few seconds after Snoop left the office. Just as I suspected, Shamanski had not visited her parents i
n Chicago every weekend. Credit card charges confirmed that she’d flown to Chicago about once a month. The other weekends for each of the last three months, she made credit card charges for gasoline and motels several places around north Florida and in Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.
Snoop walked in with a cup of coffee in one hand and a map tucked under his arm. “Where you want the map, Chuck?”
“Tape it on the corkboard. There’s masking tape in the supply closet.” I finished my first reading of Flamer’s report.
When Snoop finished mounting the map, I grabbed a yellow highlighter from the desk drawer.
“Snoop, look up how much a bag of ammonium nitrate fertilizer goes for.”
Snoop set down his coffee and tapped on the keyboard. “About a hundred bucks online, plus or minus, for a fifty-pound bag, more at a small town garden store. Say a hundred ten plus tax—a hundred twenty to be safe.”
“So if she picked up, say, four bags, she’d need almost five hundred dollars cash before she left town. I don’t think she’d withdraw five hundred dollars at one time. That would be pretty rich for a college student, even one with wealthy parents.”
“Unless she was stupid and used ATMs along the way, maybe in some of the towns where she bought fertilizer. Then she could make more frequent, but smaller withdrawals.”
“Stupid or careless. Either one would help.” I read Katherine’s travel charges. “First out-of-town charge is Ocala, Florida on Friday, January 13 at a Cumberland Farms. From the amount, it has to be for gas. Ocala is about a tank full from Port City. She rented a room at a Holiday Inn Express.” I marked a line from Port City to Ocala. “Then she charged lunch in Quakerville, Georgia at a local café and drove through Valdosta. Quakerville’s twenty miles from Valdosta.” I drew the line to Valdosta and Quakerville. “She made a larger charge, maybe dinner, in Cairo, Georgia. Then another Holiday Inn Express charge in Thomasville.” I drew the line to Cairo, back to Thomasville. “Okay, Snoop what’s the distance from Quakerville to Cairo?”
Dangerous Friends (A Carlos McCrary novel Book 4) Page 14
