The Friday Edition (A Samantha Church Mystery)

by Ferrendelli, Betta

  “How many civilians work in the department?”

  “It varies, but usually between ten and twelve.”

  They drove in silence for a moment.

  “Of course you know we have a pretty good drug task force unit. Your husband does a pretty good job of running that.”

  Sam nodded. “Ex,” she reminded him.

  “Are you from here?” she asked, changing the subject.

  “I was born here, but my father and grandfather are from the Dominican Republic.”

  “Were they police officers, too?” she asked.

  “Everyone in my family has been a police officer. Runs in our blood, I guess. That makes my grandfather, his two brothers and my dad and two of his brothers. Everyone except an uncle retired from the force.”

  Sam knew what was coming.

  “He was killed responding to an armed robbery. He was shot in the face and died instantly. He’d been on the force fifteen years, but I never really knew him. I was eight when he died, but I remember the funeral. There were so many cops there.”

  The radio interrupted their conversation with a report of another domestic disturbance.

  “That’s us this time,” he said and told the dispatcher he was en route.

  “We’ll go without all the bells and whistles,” Rey said and continued with his story. “My grandfather retired as the chief of police of a small town in the Dominican Republic, but my father remained a street cop all his life. He never wanted the administrative hassles.”

  “What about you?”

  He thought a moment before he answered.

  “Part of me wants to stay on the streets like my dad, because that’s where I feel most at home. It’s what I do best. Then there’s another part of me that likes the idea of running a department. Nothing too big, though. Maybe a mountain town.”

  “What are you, twenty-five?”

  “Twenty-nine in June.”

  “How long have you been married?” Sam asked, looking again to the gold band on his finger.

  “Six years.”

  Rey answered her next question before she could ask.

  “I’ve got two little girls, two and four.”

  Thoughts of April were on the edge of her mind, about to invade her thinking, but she did not allow them. They turned off Wadsworth to a residential street.

  Emergency lights from the other police cruisers lit up the street. She noticed that, despite a temperature that hovered around twenty degrees, the excitement and commotion had brought people out of their homes.

  Rey parked the squad car across the street. They got out of the car. Sam saw a tall, thin man standing in the yard wearing only a pair of jeans. His long stringy hair was unkempt and a full beard covered his face. His arms were crossed tightly over his chest in an attempt to shield against the cold. He bounced back and forth from one foot to the other to keep one from touching the frozen ground. It seemed uncomfortable, almost painful for him to stand still, and watching him made Sam shiver. He yelled obscenities, but slurred most of his words. He was drunk or high and Sam felt embarrassed for him.

  She watched from a distance how easily and quickly Rey assessed and handled the situation. When the officers first approached the man, he was belligerent and combative. He wouldn’t let them near him. But it only took Rey a few minutes to persuade the man to let him get closer. One of the other officers handed Rey a blanket and he encouraged the man to wrap it around him.

  By the time they arrested the man for chasing his wife through their house with a carving knife, he had allowed Rey to handcuff him. Rey persuaded him to get in another officer’s squad car and go to jail.

  Sam saw that Rey had an unusual way with people. He seemed to possess an innate courtesy, a delicate consideration for others. It didn’t appear to matter how hostile they were in return. It failed to deter or distract him from doing his job.

  When Rey returned to his police car Sam was leaning against the car door. Her arms were crossed tightly against her chest.

  “Let’s get back in the car where it’s warm,” he said.

  “You handled that very well,” she said as they drove away.

  “Thanks,” he said shrugging off her praise. “I hate domestics, though. You never know what you’re going to find when you get there. You never know how people are going to react.”

  They were on Wadsworth before Rey spoke again.

  “Are you hungry? I could sure use a bite to eat.”

  “Coffee would be great,” she said, rubbing the sides of her arms.

  They didn’t speak again until they were seated in an all-night diner. Rey had greeted the server and they gave their orders.

  “When we’re through, we’re going back to the department,” Rey said. “I want to show you something.”

  “What’s going on, Rey?”

  “You must know your sister was on to something big,” Rey said and reached for a container of cream to stir into his coffee.

  Sam nodded and thought of the materials she found in Robin’s office. “I do now.”

  “I think she probably figured out who was behind all this but ...”

  “They killed her before she had the chance to tell someone,” Sam said, finishing his sentence.

  “I was gone with my family for the holidays when she paged me. I think that’s why she paged me because she finally figured out something important.”

  “That’s how you communicated, wasn’t it? By pager?”

  Rey nodded and continued. “We knew it wouldn’t be safe for anyone to see us talking. When she wanted to talk to me or vice-versa we’d page each other.”

  “Why didn’t you return Robin’s page on Christmas Eve?”

  “I didn’t have my pager. I make it a point sometimes to be with my family. I didn’t see her message until it was too late.”

  Rey stopped and stared into his coffee cup. He absently traced the rim of the cup with his finger. “But by then it was too late, she was already gone.”

  Sam nodded slowly and wrapped her hands around her coffee cup, finally getting warm.

  “I saw you at the funeral,” Rey said. “Robin talked about you all the time.”

  “I bet that was interesting,” Sam said and hoped he had not witnessed Brady’s tantrum.

  She watched him for a response. But he only looked at her with soft, dark eyes. A look that wounded her.

  “How did you and Robin hook up?” Sam said, directing queries away from herself.

  “We attended a seminar and sat next to each other. I knew she was about to go to trial with a drug case I was part of, so I asked her how it was going.”

  The waitress brought their food, setting eggs, toast, hash browns and bacon in front of Sam and oatmeal and a large stack of pancakes before Rey. The fresh smell of breakfast food suddenly made Sam hungry.

  “Why did you ask her that?” Sam asked as she put jelly on a slice of toast.

  “We arrested a group of Mexican nationals at one of the motels along the I-70 corridor west of Denver. They were carrying drugs in their van. The hotel clerk became suspicious when they checked in and called us. We responded and brought Max.”

  “Max?”

  “Our drug dog. When we took him out to the van, he went crazy. We asked for consent to search the vehicle.”

  “What did you find?” Sam asked.

  “Six kilos of cocaine.”

  “What happened?”

  “We arrested them. They were deported, but not before they turned us onto a bigger fish that turned out to be a pretty good catch.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “That’s what I want to show you at the department. But we have to wait until after two a.m. Shari, one of the 911 dispatchers, will cover for us while we’re in records.”

  Rey’s words made the color drain from Sam’s face. For the first time she could understand the importance of what Robin was delving into and Rey’s initial reluctance to help. She took a deep breath, unsure of how to respond.<
br />
  “Are you all right?” Rey asked.

  She nodded. “I hate to think of the kind of people we’re dealing with, these drug dealers.”

  Rey studied her intently. “They’d pull your heart out through your throat and not break a sweat,” he said.

  She felt fear begin to crawl slowly up her spine.

  “Do you want to go on?” he asked evenly.

  “Absolutely,” she said without hesitation.

  “There was more than drugs in that van,” he said. “There was cash, too.”

  “How much?”

  “Fifty-seven thousand dollars.”

  Rey had finished his oatmeal and was covering his pancakes in syrup.

  “Just sitting on the seat?” Sam asked.

  “No,” Rey said, taking a bite of pancake. “In a secret compartment hidden beneath the van, which had been built specially into it. They come like that, you know.”

  Sam laughed in surprise.

  “Sounds like something out of James Bond,” she said.

  “That’s not unusual. Those vehicles and planes too, for that matter are designed especially for smuggling drugs. Drug dealers are a very elite group, Sam, and they don’t like to mess around. Like I said they’d rip your fingernails off…”

  Sam cut him off, “Or push you off your balcony.”

  Her comment sent them into a long silence.

  “That day at the seminar,” Rey said slowly. “I don’t know why, but something about that case was bothering me. I felt I could trust Robin. So I told her.”

  Sam could not help but smile. “Your instincts were right, Rey.”

  Rey smiled too and Sam saw it was sincere.

  “What did you tell her?” Sam asked.

  Rey had finished eating, pushed his plate away, and folded his arms over the table.

  “The money in the van, remember?”

  Sam nodded.

  “It turned up missing, but Robin didn’t know until I told her. Then she dropped a little bomb of her own.”

  Sam’s eyes widened. “What did she tell you?”

  “She had gone to property and evidence to sign out the kilos of the cocaine taken from the bust …”

  Rey’s voice trailed off and he looked around the restaurant as if to make sure no one was listening. He turned to Sam and studied her.

  “There were only four bags of cocaine cataloged into evidence, not six.”

  “How do you know the money was missing?” Sam asked.

  “Let’s just say I know.”

  Rey smiled and thanked the waitress when she set their check on the table and cleared their plates. He studied the check a moment before looking at Sam.

  “There was one thing my grandfather always tried to instill in me. He used to tell me, ‘You’re not above the law. You are the law, but you’re not above it, and don’t ever think you are, because it’ll always come back to haunt you.’”

  They didn’t speak again until they were in the squad car and heading toward the police department.

  “What changed your mind, Rey? Why help me now?”

  He slid a sideways glance in her direction.

  “I guess that fear of what would happen to her if she continued to go forward wasn’t enough to make her stop. I admire Robin for her courage to continue. She knew she could end up dead.

  “I told her often that they’d kill her without batting an eye. She’d look at me with those big blue eyes and I’d feel them reaching right to the core of me.”

  Rey drove in silence. It surprised Sam when she looked at him and saw him wipe a tear from his cheek.

  “Your sister was murdered, Sam.”

  Her face felt hot and she could hardly manage her own tears.

  “Since Robin’s death, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what my grandfather told me,” Rey said in a soft, reflective voice. “The law is black and white to me and I go by the book. You break the law, you go to jail. It’s all cut and dried. It was that way for my grandfather and my father and it’s that way for me. When I heard about Robin I didn’t know what to do. I’ve hated myself for not being there to help her.”

  Sam interjected and there was pain in her voice when she spoke. “How do you think I feel, Rey? At least you knew what was going on.”

  “Don’t be angry with Robin for not including you, Sam. She knew it was dangerous and she didn’t want to involve you.”

  Sam snorted. “What kind of talk is that? I’m her sister, goddammit. There wouldn’t be a choice. I’d been there with her from the beginning.”

  “Robin wanted to tell you, but she loved you, Sam. She said you had done so much for her all her life. She said she could never repay you for what you did.”

  Sam bit her bottom lip, but it did nothing to stop her tears.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Robin didn’t want you to get hurt.”

  Sam pursed her lips into a thin line. She could only nod.

  They reached the police department parking lot. Rey checked his watch: 2:15 a.m.

  “Let’s go,” he said and was about to open the door.

  “Wait,” she said and grabbed his arm.

  He looked at her.

  “Does the name Roy Rogers mean anything to you?”

  Rey didn’t answer immediately. The blank look on his face convinced Sam that the name did not register with him.

  “Never mind,” she said. “It’s not important.”

  Seventeen

  Inside the police department, Rey and Sam headed for the communications area. The room was cast in semi-darkness. Most of the light in the room came from the area around the dispatcher’s terminals.

  There was a woman in the room when they entered, who Sam guessed was Shari. She was a petite woman who Sam figured was fresh out of college. Shari nodded at Rey as if to tell him the coast was clear. Rey and Sam disappeared behind a door that led to the records room. When they reached the room, Rey stood at the door with his hands straddling his holster. The room was dark, but the light from the hallway gave enough brightness to the room for her to see that the entire area was lined wall-to-wall with files.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  As she followed him she was surprised that she felt little fear of getting caught. She guessed it was the calming effect Rey seemed to have on people that put her at ease.

  Rey pulled a penlight from his shirt pocket and she followed the light along the files he scanned. The penlight stopped on a group of files near the end of the back wall. She watched as he studied the batch of case numbers, before pulling one of the files from the shelf. He used one of his business cards to mark his place.

  Rey handed Sam the penlight. She directed the beam of light over the open file.

  “This is the file I told you about,” he whispered.

  Sam studied the document with Rey. He pointed to the section where it listed the amount of cocaine taken.

  “Amount seized,” he whispered. “Four kilos. That’s bullshit. I was there. I counted each bag as I handed it to another officer.”

  Rey went back to the file. “That’s wrong,” he said, tapping it hard with the tip of his index finger.

  Before they left the room, Rey showed Sam a dozen examples of similar discrepancies in other police reports relating to arrests for drug possession.

  “The only pattern to these reports is that there is no pattern,” he whispered.

  “What do you mean?” Sam asked, her brow drawn in a tight knot.

  “All the drugs confiscated aren’t listed accurately in these reports. All drug arrests happened on different days. Different officers handled all the cases. All amounts of the drugs seized vary. There just doesn’t seem to be a connection.”

  “Unless Robin figured it out,” Sam whispered.

  Rey nodded. “I have no doubt she did.”

  He returned the file to the shelf. They left the police department and were back on the streets within the hour.

  “My grandfather also always told me that the
re are three things that could bring a police chief down just like that,” Rey said and snapped his fingers.

  She looked at him, her eyes wanting to know.

  “His secretary, his departmental budget and a sloppy property and evidence vault. My grandfather had an officer working for him who was tops when it came to his property and evidence vault. He used to say, ‘If someone comes here and they want somethin’ and I can’t produce it for ’em in ten minutes or less, then we got us a real problem.’”

  Rey frowned.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “I’m worried.”

  “About what?”

  “About Chief Gilmore. He’s a great guy.”

  Brady Gilmore popped into her mind and she replayed the unpleasant scene at Robin’s funeral over in her mind.

  “I know how much Chief Gilmore cares about his officers,” Rey went on. “He’d do anything for us and I’d hate to see anything happen to him because of what’s going on here.”

  Rey brought Sam back to the police department by 7 a.m., as the eastern horizon was turning pink with the anticipation of the rising sun. He stopped his squad car in front of her Mustang. When he saw it, he was impressed.

  “Nice,” he said. “Did you have it restored?”

  Sam nodded and welcomed the chance to show it off.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she said, beaming.

  Rey nodded. “I have an old jeep in my garage I want to restore some day.”

  “Rey, have you ever heard of Tim’s Place?”

  “Sure, it’s a bar on 44th Avenue. Why?”

  “Robin’s AA sponsor said that Robin had been going there a lot the last few months. Did she ever say anything to you?”

  “It never came up,” he said.

  “What’s the bar like?” Sam asked.

  “It’s a hole in the wall, but quiet. We’ve never had any trouble there.”

  “I need to see for myself,” Sam said as she rummaged in her purse for her keys.

  “There’s more,” Rey said.

  “Yes, I know, you said.”

  “We’ll have to wait for the right night.”

  “When?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Don’t know. It’s up to them, but when they’re ready, you’ll hear from me. And like I said, you’ve got to be ready to go the moment I call.”