The People's House

by David Pepper

  “Mr. Kreutzer. I am a reporter looking into Joanie Simpson’s death. Look up the Youngstown Vindicator to confirm. I am their political reporter. I understand you have concerns. I will keep confidential. Please call me.” I added my cell number and pushed send.

  In three minutes, my computer sounded the distinct ping of a returned message.

  “I know who you are. Read your story. When can we talk?” Kreutzer wrote. A quick answer. Good. No time to waste.

  “Whenever is good for you. I’m free now.”

  Ten minutes later, the phone rang.

  “Mr. Sharpe?”

  “Is this Peter?”

  “Yes, sir. I probably shouldn’t be calling you. You are the most hated man in Washington right now, at least among those I associate with.”

  “It’s important that you called.” Tried to appeal to the young man’s sense of duty. “Can you speak now?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know it was almost two years ago, but I am so sorry about Joanie’s death. I can’t imagine what you went through.”

  “Thank you,” the young voice replied. My leading question, and Kreutzer’s heartfelt response, instantly confirmed that Brown had accurately sized up their relationship.

  “I won’t reveal my sources, but I understand you have real concerns about Joanie’s cause of death. I have questions as well, and I was hoping you could share your concerns with me. Everything you say is completely confidential.”

  “I actually told a lot of people my doubts, including the police. So I’m not surprised you heard about them. I stopped bringing it up because people treated me like I was crazy. Worried it would affect my job. But I’m telling you, she was not killed by that Rutherford guy!”

  His confidence impressed me.

  “Who do you think killed her?”

  “I have no idea. But it wasn’t a mugging, and it wasn’t that guy.”

  “What makes you think that? Walk me through it.”

  “So much. First, Joanie had been spending a ton of time working on something she wouldn’t talk to me about. Some research project. She was so intense about it for weeks. And nervous too. Not nervous about her safety, but stressed, consumed. It was a big deal, more than any issue she had ever looked into. It didn’t feel like just politics.”

  Clearly the Abacus memo.

  “And?”

  “And then finally, the day before she died—that Friday—she finally relaxed. We had lunch that day, and it was clear she must have completed the project and turned it in. She seemed so relieved about it, like a burden had been lifted. Then she’s killed the next day. I always figured it was related to that research.”

  Simpson likely finished the memo late in the week. Stanton must have seen it on Thursday or Friday, and she was dead in less than forty-eight hours.

  “Was she relieved Thursday too?” I asked, trying to narrow the window.

  “She was a basket case most of Thursday at the office. We talked a few times, took an afternoon break like we always did. She was tense. I didn’t talk to her at all Thursday evening. She always insisted we do our own things Thursdays. Then Friday, all good. She lived it up that night, as happy as I’d seen her.”

  “This is helpful. Thank you.”

  “There’s more. The day she died, I stopped in her apartment about four that afternoon.”

  Holy shit.

  “You did?”

  “Yes. She gave me a key a few months before, in case I stopped by when she was already asleep. I’d tiptoe in and crawl into bed. So when she didn’t answer calls all Saturday, I decided to stop by.”

  He paused for a few seconds.

  “Mr. Sharpe, I swear someone had been in her apartment.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Well, there weren’t any obvious signs. Nothing was broken. No footprints. Nothing moved. But you have to understand Joanie. She was meticulous about order and cleanliness. To the point of being obsessive compulsive. I always told her that in everything she did, she was like a Marine making a bed. Had to be perfect. We would always laugh about it, but it was true.”

  “So?”

  “So anyone sneaking into her place, no matter how careful, would leave an obvious trail of disorder versus how she would have left it. For example, she had a little desk in her bedroom. When I stopped by that afternoon, a few papers on the desk were not straight. They were out of place, laying a little crooked. No one would ever think anything of it, but compared to how Joanie would leave her desk, it looked sloppy. I noticed it right away. I think someone had been looking through those papers.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yep. Same thing happened in her kitchen. When you opened the cabinet doors below the sink in Joanie’s kitchen, two bags were mounted on the door. They looked the same, but the one on the left was for recycled paper, the one on the right was for garbage. They weren’t marked or anything, so you’d have to know Joanie’s system. And she was religious about recycling every shred of paper, so she let you know if you did it wrong!

  “When I stopped by, I opened that cabinet door. I honestly thought maybe there’d be some sign of when the last time she had been at her place. Maybe she had had breakfast or lunch and thrown it out. I didn’t find anything new, but what I did find were a number of pieces of paper in the bag for garbage, and they were on top. Joanie would never have put them there. I think someone was digging through her recycled papers and put them back in the wrong bag.”

  This kid was good.

  “So you think someone searched her apartment?”

  “Definitely. Whoever it was was a true professional. But they obviously were looking for some type of papers or documents on her desk and in her garbage.”

  “Can I ask you a strange question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Would Joanie ever work from home, possibly over a glass of wine?”

  “Always,” Kreutzer said. “For big projects, she liked to edit her work on printed pages. Thought it gave her a fresh perspective. She’d curl up on her couch, read it over with her red pen, often with a glass a wine next to her. Then she’d type her edits into her computer and bring it to the office the next day. Why do you ask?”

  As Kreutzer explained this, I looked at Simpson’s Abacus memo sitting right in front of me, folded in half, boasting that wine stain. This is clearly what the intruder was looking for, and found, probably in the recycling bag.

  But I never liked to give away too much.

  “I wanted to confirm something I had found. Peter, tell me about Rutherford. Did you look into him?”

  “Of course. It just never added up. The guy was a career criminal, but his crimes were always pretty minor—usually drug-related, trespassing, disorderly conduct, stuff like that, in his own neighborhood. He had no profile of mugging anyone or committing worse violence. And had never ventured into the yuppie part of town to commit a crime.”

  Kreutzer got himself worked up as he spoke about this.

  “And why the hell would anyone leave a baseball bat, laden with prints, at the scene of the crime? But then miraculously that same person takes great care to leave no trace whatsoever of his visit to her apartment, clearly having used the keys taken from her dead body? Then he stupidly dumps her keys and other items in a trash bin outside his apartment complex for the entire world to find? Give me a break!”

  He was right. None of it added up. Someone set up Rutherford.

  “Why did they pick Rutherford?”

  “I could never figure that one out,” Kreutzer said, sounding embarrassed to not have an answer.

  “Not sure how you could,” I said. “You’ve been a huge help. I’ll keep you posted on what I find.”

  I meant it. This was a breakthrough.

  Someone killed Simpson within forty-eight hours of her handing in her
memo. Someone, likely the killer or an accomplice, marched into her apartment within hours of the killing, using her own keys to enter, rifled through her papers, and found her Abacus memo. And while carefully hiding his own tracks, the person who committed the crime left a trail of evidence—actually, created and disseminated a trail of evidence—that pinned the crime on a man who had nothing to do with any of it.

  * * *

  Before looking into the Rutherford angle, I jumped back on Facebook to see if Simpson’s page verified Kreutzer’s story.

  It did.

  And while there, I discovered a pattern that had eluded me earlier.

  When she was not at work, Simpson posted all the time. Where she was, what she was thinking, what she was doing. And usually, she was jogging, working out, grabbing a drink, hanging with friends, and the like. She’d even post actively from home. These personal snippets, tracing her every move and thought, would routinely go on until about 11:30 or midnight every night.

  What’s more, her friends and followers would react to every post. Her page was a real-time group diary of every day’s and evening’s activity. Must be a generational thing. If I had been so open about my comings and goings in high school and college, I would have been expelled from both.

  But on close examination, something new stuck out. An absence.

  The Thursday night before she died, unlike most evenings, her Facebook page went atypically dark. For most young people, Thursdays are the beginning of the weekend. And if she went out, Simpson would have certainly posted about it.

  But that night, she reported nothing. Based on Kreutzer’s account, this must’ve been when she finalized the memo and handed it to Stanton. And based on the rumors Brown described, she probably did so in the privacy of the congressman’s townhouse.

  To confirm this, I looked at both the Wednesday and Friday posts. Wednesday described a laid-back evening—gym after work, early casual dinner with a friend, home from about 9:00 p.m. on. And Friday was a big night out, culminating in the last post of her life.

  But Thursday? Nothing. Clearly delivering the research that got her killed.

  Before logging out, I scrutinized her page for a few more minutes. I was haunted by Brown’s theory that Stanton brought Simpson and others back to his townhome regularly. If her online silence announced her visit that Thursday evening, how about prior weeks?

  Sure enough, the same pattern occurred month after month. Dozens of posts reflecting constant activity six days a week, particularly concentrated in the evening hours.

  But silence every Thursday. The same night that Simpson insisted to Kreutzer that they “do their own thing.”

  I had to scroll back almost a year, during the heart of the presidential election, to find any post on a Thursday evening after about 9:30. And some others scattered in the months prior. On those nights, Stanton would’ve hit the road campaigning, liberating Simpson every few weeks from an otherwise horrible routine.

  As much as Simpson celebrated the president’s re-election, she must have known that the campaign’s end also meant the end of her escape from Stanton.

  * * *

  Over the years, I had come to know policing as well as anyone short of a cop, judge, or criminal. Chief Santini and I talked all the time, and I was friends with the revolving door of crime reporters we’d had over the years. Plus, from embezzlement to drug dealing, not a few of the politicians I covered ended up on the wrong side of the law, and, consequently, of prison bars.

  From all this, I discovered what few Americans ever figure out. Something that the officers and the criminals realize but of which the average citizen is clueless: Outside of a small percentage of cases and crimes, the entire system is a treadmill.

  All the players in the system are running in place, week after week, rarely moving forward. Whenever cops don that uniform, they’re on that treadmill—they just happen to be risking their life in the process. And unless criminals commit a truly heinous crime, they too are running in place.

  The treadmill exists because states and cities have created a laundry list of laws that require arrest for all sorts of behavior. And lawmakers at all levels are always adding to that list. You don’t score any points by subtracting.

  The list is so long that it generates an unsolvable math problem: Far more people commit crimes than local jails have space available to hold them. So police officers make constant arrests for this vast array of offenses, bring the offenders in, and, short of a homicide or excessively violent crime, those offenders are back out within days. Over and over and over again.

  The repeat transactions create an odd familiarity among those involved. The same officers see the same offenders all the time. Get to know them by name. Recognize them by sight on the street. Even build friendly relationships with many of them when they are not violating the law. Some of those offenders become their best sources, telling them when other offenders are violating the law.

  But when any of them re-violate one of those many laws, the officers arrest them again, book them, go to court to testify against them, and watch them as they walk back out. And with every arrest, the arresting officer dutifully fills out a form at booking, naming the criminal, checking off the appropriate boxes, writing in his badge number, describing in a few words the circumstances of the arrest. And then he signs his name at the bottom.

  It’s all part of the treadmill.

  After talking to Kreutzer, I called the D.C. Police Department looking for such records for Johnny Rutherford.

  It turns out Johnny Rutherford was a treadmill champion.

  “Rutherford? That guy was our top frequent flyer until he killed that girl,” the clerk volunteered when I mentioned the name I was looking for. “I mean, we’re talkin’ seven, eight times a year.”

  “Can you send me over his record?”

  “Sure thing. Be sure your fax machine is full of paper!”

  The seventy-eight pages that he faxed thirty minutes later showed he wasn’t exaggerating.

  Rutherford lived on Atlantic Avenue in Southeast, a tough part of town. And rarely a month went by without Rutherford committing some type of crime. Usually serious enough to require arrest, sometimes jail time. But never serious enough to require more than a brief sentence. Much of his jail time came from his inability to make even minimal bail.

  The first page of the pile was typical, documenting a trespassing charge and arrest. Rutherford spent a few days sitting in jail because he couldn’t make bail. Run of the mill stuff, and the property on which he trespassed was in his own neighborhood, just as Kreutzer described. So after he pled guilty, the judge sentenced him to time already served.

  The rest of Rutherford’s arrest record followed suit. Breaking and entering. Trespassing. Drug paraphernalia. Drug dealing. Resisting arrest. A couple assaults, but none too violent—street fights, bumps and bruises. Absolutely no behavior consistent with a brutal slaying of a young woman on the opposite side of town.

  Career criminal. Not a murderer. Exactly as Kreutzer had said.

  Having leafed through the records once, I took a closer look at the first arrest. Beyond the crime itself, studied the whole arrest form.

  And a new detail, one far more important than the crime itself, jumped off the page. The bottom of the page.

  While the arresting officer’s name wasn’t typed, the signature appeared in large, round cursive letters. Highly legible.

  And the name was familiar.

  James Dennison.

  Dennison?

  I immediately grabbed my notes from a few days before. Yep, it was the same name Chief Santini had identified as Stanton’s security chief. The one he thought was following me. The former D.C. police officer.

  Dennison had arrested this guy. He knew him!

  I quickly scanned all seventy-eight pages again.

  Twenty-one times in
five years, Dennison’s distinct signature emblazoned the bottom of Rutherford’s arrest forms. For more than half Rutherford’s arrests, Congressman Stanton’s current security chief signed as the arresting officer.

  I shook my head in disgust.

  Ruthless.

  When looking to frame someone for Simpson’s hit, Stanton and his security apparatus did not just find their man. They already knew their man. And given his extensive record, they knew he was the perfect man. Everyone would believe he was the culprit.

  One reality about the treadmill—when a criminal’s been on it his whole life, he doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt.

  Chapter 45

  PHILADELPHIA: 13 months before the election

  Back at her kitchen table, Irene Stanton paged through the arrest record one page at a time.

  This was the sixth package the private investigator, a former Philly cop, had sent her. One every few weeks. The prior files had confirmed that her husband had harassed young female employees for years. There also appeared to be some mild corruption in her husband’s office.

  But this latest batch of information was far more startling. Johnny Rutherford’s arrest record was inconsistent with the brutal murder of Joanie Simpson. But Jim Dennison’s name appeared as the arresting officer dozens of times. She immediately recognized the name as her husband’s security chief.

  She buried her head in her hand. What had her husband become?

  PART FOUR

  DEADLINE

  Chapter 46

  GENEVA-ON-THE-LAKE: 157 days after the election

  I sat back in my dad’s chair and took it all in. The cool lake breeze flowing through the screen windows. The soothing aroma of the cedar walls and floors. The choppy, white-tipped waves so typical of shallow Lake Erie.

  This was my escape, and I needed one. Brown and Kreutzer had provided important new information, and the Dennison find was a true breakthrough. But my narrative remained scattered. Many loose ends. Knowing I only had a few days left, I went to the place where I could best focus.