Without Due Process jpb-10

by J. A. Jance

  Inside, Freeman’s digs are almost spacious, with an “art in public places” piece-one of the less-controversial ones-that covers most of one wall. The Scandinavian teak furnishings themselves may not qualify at the corporate executive level, but they’re a whole lot better than the Spartan green metal stuff down in Homicide.

  Once we stepped inside the room, the lock clicked home and Freeman paused long enough to flip on the switch to the red light. Evidently we were not to be disturbed. Then he hurried over to his desk and turned over the top page of the yellow pad that was lying there before straightening up and looking us in the eye. He proffered his hand.

  “Hello there, Detective Beaumont. Good to see you again.” He shook my hand and then turned to Sue. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”

  “Detective Danielson,” she said quickly, returning his handshake. “Sue.” He nodded back at her and sat down behind the desk.

  Captain Anthony Freeman is as straight a straight arrow as they come. As Seattle PD’s designated Eagle Scout, Freeman has the spit-and-polish look of the military about him. Prematurely bald but with a fringe of reddish hair and a matching bottle-brush mustache, he inarguably counts as one of the good guys. You don’t get to be Camp Fire’s Man of the Year two years in a row without making some contribution to the community at large, but he’s no pushover either. Despite twenty-two years on the force, he still manages to maintain some of his youthful illusions, but anyone who’s broken the rules will tell you that he’s hell on wheels when it comes to crooked cops.

  He motioned the two of us into chairs. “What can I do for you today?” he asked. “Connie said you wanted to talk to someone about Ben Weston.”

  Sue glanced briefly in my direction, as though appealing for help, but then she launched off into it on her own anyway. “We’ve just learned something very disturbing, Captain Freeman. Detective Beaumont and I both thought it necessary to bring it directly to your attention.”

  “The two of you are on the Weston Family Task Force, aren’t you?” Freeman asked. “I believe I remember seeing both your names in the set of reports I’ve been given.”

  Sue nodded. “Detective Beaumont is assigned to the Adam Jackson part of the investigation. Since my regular partner, Detective Kramer, is helping Sergeant Watkins run the entire operation, I’ve been pitching in wherever needed.”

  Freeman nodded. “Before you begin, let me ask you a question, Detective Danielson. Has whatever it is you’ve learned, whatever you’ve come here to tell me, been brought to the attention of either Sergeant Watkins or Detective Kramer or some other member of the task force?”

  “I mentioned some of it to Detective Kramer earlier today, but I haven’t written an official report yet. I haven’t had time. The other, the part we found out just a few minutes ago, we haven’t told anybody. As I said, we came directly here.”

  “Good,” Captain Freeman said, nodding thoughtfully. “Now, go on.”

  Sue hesitated. “Is Internal Investigations conducting its own Ben Weston inquiry?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say at the moment,” Anthony Freeman replied. “Considering everything that’s happened in the past few days, it would certainly be reasonable to assume that we were; and whether or not we are, I’d be most interested in hearing whatever it is you have to say.”

  I hadn’t warned Detective Danielson about that aggravating aspect of dealing with Tony Freeman. Talking to him is often like dropping so many pebbles into a deep, dark well-a lot may go in, but not much comes back out. Sue didn’t catch on to that right away.

  “Were you conducting one earlier, before Ben Weston died?”

  “Detective Danielson, I can tell you that as of now, Ben Weston is definitely a person of interest as far as this office is concerned. Not his murder, since that is already being handled by you down in Homicide, but certainly his other activities. We’re trying to understand what exactly went on, whether or not there was any criminal activity involved, and whether or not there were any other Seattle PD personnel involved as well. As you know, our usual procedure is to investigate allegations of wrongdoing on the part of departmental personnel. If we find evidence to back up those allegations, the inquiry is turned over to the proper squad for further investigation as well as for the filing of charges should that prove necessary.”

  “You say ”as of now,“ Captain Freeman, but I was asking about earlier,” Sue insisted. “Were you or any of your people conducting an investigation of Ben Weston prior to his death?”

  “No, we were not.”

  “You’re sure no one from your office had Ben Weston under surveillance?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Somebody from Seattle PD did,” Sue Danielson said quietly.

  “Who?” Freeman demanded.

  “We were hoping you could tell us. Actually, we were hoping it might be someone from here.”

  “What kind of surveillance are you talking about?”

  Sue took a deep breath. “We have a witness who tells us that a Seattle PD blue-and-white with a single-occupant driver was seen cruising Ben Weston’s neighborhood regularly in the early-morning hours in the weeks preceding the murders.”

  “Always the same car and driver?” Freeman asked.

  “Maybe not the same car, but always the same driver, and always in close proximity to Ben Weston’s house.”

  Freeman picked up his pen and started making notes. “Who’s the witness?” he asked sharply.

  “A paperboy,” Sue answered.

  “Does he have something to gain by making the police department look bad?”

  “I can’t see how. He’s just a high school kid, and he was scared to death to come forward. His mother forced the issue. If he had been left to his own devices, I don’t think we would have heard from him.”

  “Have you checked with Patrol?” Freeman asked.

  Sue shook her head. “Not yet, but my understanding is that Patrol doesn’t send out single officers at that time of the night, and, to my knowledge, none of the other units told the task force about the existence of a prior surveillance. That’s why we thought it might be someone from here, one of your people.”

  “A single occupant in a patrol car on the graveyard shift,” Captain Freeman mused thoughtfully, as though speaking to himself. “That does narrow it down, doesn’t it?”

  “That’s not all,” Sue said grimly.

  “What else?”

  “A little while ago Detective Beaumont suggested to me that maybe we should look into the project Ben Weston had been working on for Coordinated Criminal Investigations.”

  “His gang-member profile?” Freeman asked.

  “You know about that?”

  The captain nodded. “I sure do. It’s a good piece of work. Once it’s finished, it’s going to be an invaluable crime-solving tool. Up to now we’ve had no systematic way of following all the strings and seeing how all the various street gangs are interrelated, of knowing who is connected to whom and why.”

  “Was he working on anything else?”

  “He may have been, but that’s all I know of. Why?”

  “Because the morning after his death, between one and three o’clock, someone got into Ben Weston’s secured computer file and opened and closed every single file.”

  Sue Danielson stated her case quietly and then shut up, allowing Tony Freeman to draw his own conclusions.

  The captain frowned. “It sounds to me like someone looking for something but they weren’t sure if it was there to begin with, and they had no idea what file name it might have been under. You say this was the morning after the murders?”

  Sue nodded.

  “I wonder if anything is missing,” Freeman mused.

  His comment seemed to annoy Sue. “It’s a little difficult to tell what’s missing from looking at the files,” she countered. “If a file had been deleted, it’s just not there.”

  Freeman nodded. “What about the floppy disk back-up copy? Everybody’s
supposed to keep one of those, and that would have been with Ben himself. Does Property show it on the inventory?”

  Sue looked questioningly at me. “I never saw one,” I said. “In fact, now that you mention it, I remember Ron saying something about Ben working on this gang project at home originally, but I don’t remember seeing a computer in his house, either.”

  “Ron?” Freeman asked.

  “Ron Peters, in Media Relations. He used to be my partner before he got hurt. He’s the one who brought the gang profile project to our attention in the first place.”

  Tony turned back to Sue. “All right. Go on.”

  “That’s all we have so far,” Sue answered. “It’s not much, but…”

  Abruptly, Freeman spun his chair around and sat for several long moments with his back to us, staring out through the still dripping rain at the moldy green-brown facade of the building across the street. Finally, he turned back toward us, reaching for the telephone at the same time.

  “Connie,” he said. “Call upstairs and see if the chief’s still here. If he is, ask him to come down. Tell him to use the stairs. I don’t want anyone to see him punching the button for this floor in the elevator. And see if you can reach Larry Powell down in Homicide and Captain Nichols in CCI. I need to see the three of them and Kyle Lehman too. On the double.”

  Freeman paused. “Yes, I know damn good and well that Kyle sleeps all day and works all night. Wake him up and tell him it’s urgent. Oh, and bring in some more chairs from the conference room, would you?”

  I had expected someone from Internal Investigations to be interested in what we had to say, but Freeman’s prompt calling of a top-level meeting was beyond my wildest expectations. Assuming Sue and I were being dismissed in favor of a roomful of brass, I got up and headed for the door.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Freeman demanded. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Back downstairs. We’ve got work to do.”

  He shook his head and motioned me back toward the chair. “No way. We’re having a little meeting here in just a few minutes. You and Detective Danielson constitute exhibits one and two. Sit down. Would either of you like some coffee?”

  To be polite, I dutifully accepted a cup of coffee from an acrid-smelling pot on a table in the corner of the room. Sue Danielson remained in her chair.

  “Is all this really necessary?” she asked. “Do we really need to be here for the meeting? We’ve already told you everything we know.”

  Freeman smiled at her. “You don’t like all this very much, do you, Detective Danielson? Remember, we’re only Internal Investigations, not the Spanish Inquisition.”

  Sue kept her cool verbally, but two angry splotches of color appeared on her cheekbones. “Don’t make fun of me, Captain Freeman. I’m new at this job. I still have lots to learn.”

  “Sorry,” he apologized quickly. “No offense. It’s just that people often label IIS in their minds and turn it into something it isn’t. All the detectives in the department get cycled through here eventually, including you once you’ve been around long enough. That keeps the unit from becoming a real power structure which, considering what we do, could be dangerous. Our job is to keep good cops from going bad and to find bad cops and get them off the force. It’s that simple.

  “I run a tight ship, Detective Danielson,” Tony Freeman continued, “and I run it on the basis of the golden rule-Do unto others and all that jazz. That may sound corny at first, but with detectives rotating in and out of here, it really is a matter of what goes around comes around. Somebody who acts like a jerk when he’s on the delivery end of IIS may very well end up being on the receiving end a few months down the line. That knowledge helps keep everybody honest.”

  There was a light tapping on the door. Freeman pressed a button to disable the security lock. The door opened and Kyle Lehman entered the room.

  If Captain Freeman is Seattle PD’s straight arrow, Kyle Lehman is its ghostly computer guru. A scrawny, sallow-faced, bespectacled nerd who’s probably thirty but looks nineteen or twenty, Kyle came to Seattle PD years ago to install our computer system and get it up and running. Afterward, he never left. Legend has it that Lehman is listed as a resident in an apartment over on Eastlake somewhere, but he spends most of his time baby-sitting the department’s sometimes temperamental computer system. He sleeps on a cot in his office, showers in the change room, survives on a diet of readily available neighborhood fast food, and spends his spare time playing fantasy quest games on his personal desktop computer.

  Not surprisingly, Lehman was the first to show. He arrived dressed all in black-an aging rendition of what teenagers currently call a “bat caver.” He wore a single earring, and his reddish hair flopped crookedly over one eye.

  “Morning, Tony,” he said casually to Freeman, although it was well after four in the afternoon.

  “I trust this isn’t too early for you,” Freeman returned.

  Kyle grinned ingratiatingly. “Naw. Somebody from CCI already woke me up. Mind if I have some breakfast?”

  “Be my guest,” Tony Freeman told him.

  Lehman took a seat in the corner. At the same time he bit into a mustard-slathered corn dog. An unopened can of diet Pepsi hung out of the pocket of his frayed hounds-tooth jacket.

  Up to that point, I had never exchanged a word with Kyle Lehman, but that didn’t keep me from having an immediate, none-too-favorable opinion of the man. I had seen him skulking around the halls on occasion. The only thing that really pissed me off more than his looks was the common departmental knowledge that Lehman made more money than almost any detective on the force. For that kind of money, it seemed to me we could have hired someone who looked a little more like a regular human being and less like something that had just oozed out from under a hard disk drive.

  Next, Connie ushered Captain Powell into the room. Larry glanced at Sue and me, nodded curtly, and kept on walking. He greeted Freeman and sat down on one of the three extra chairs that had been crowded in next to the wall on either side of Tony Freeman’s desk.

  He exchanged polite greetings with Lehman and then turned to us. “What are you two doing here?” he asked.

  Freeman answered before either Sue or I could open our mouths. “Waiting for the rest of our party to show up. Want some coffee, Larry?”

  Connie, who evidently was capable of taking a hint once her nails were filed, grabbed the pot along with the rest of its evil-smelling dregs and disappeared into the outer office.

  Norman Nichols showed up next. He nodded to Sue as he took a seat next to Captain Powell. Having just helped Sue break into Ben Weston’s computer files, Nichols probably more than anyone had a fairly good idea of why we were there.

  Time passed. Tony Freeman sat gazing serenely at the artwork on the wall behind us as though he didn’t have a care in the world. Kyle munched thoughtfully on his corn dog and sipped his soda while the rest of us waited in uneasy silence. There was no joking or lighthearted banter. The new coffee was halfway through dripping into the pot and Connie had left for the day when the third tap finally sounded on the door. Freeman pressed the button and in walked Chief of Police Kenneth Rankin, flushed and puffing and out of breath.

  “Why did you insist I use the stairs for God’s sake, Tony?” Chief Rankin growled. “I was all the way down in the Crime Lab. It’s a helluva long hike up from the third floor to the eleventh, you know. And what’s so damned important that it couldn’t wait until tomorrow morning?”

  “Have a seat, Chief,” Freeman said quietly. “We’ll get to it as quickly as we can. Thank you all for coming. Does everyone know everyone else?”

  We all did. “Good,” Freeman continued. “I’ve called you here this afternoon to ask for your help and cooperation. It looks as though we have a serious problem on our hands-a rogue cop problem.”

  Rankin paled. “Don’t tell me we’ve got another one,” he groaned. “The business with Benjamin Weston is bad enough.”

  Lehman, w
ho doesn’t regard himself as a cop and finds no horror in the words “rogue cop,” chose that moment to noisily open a bag of potato chips. Larry Powell looked stricken but sat up straight, paying absolute attention.

  “It’s possible,” Captain Freeman said softly, “that this one is far worse.”

  “Worse!” Rankin exploded. “How could it possibly be worse?”

  “Unless I’m sadly mistaken, Ben Weston may have been nothing but the tip of the iceberg.”

  His words grabbed my gut and shook it. Tip of the iceberg? In other words, Tony Freeman was convinced Ben Weston was part of whatever dirty crap was going on. That hurt. It hurt real bad.

  “This has something to do with the murders then?” Larry Powell asked after a moment.

  Freeman nodded. “Probably. What I’m about to tell you is not to be discussed with anyone outside this room. I’ve just had a very disturbing visit from someone who’s working undercover for Narcotics. Word is out on the streets that the Bloods, Crips, and BGD want to have a summit meeting with someone from Seattle PD. Preferably Chief Rankin here himself.”

  That caught me completely flat-footed. After all I thought we were going to discuss something else entirely. And I wasn’t the only one who was surprised. Chief Rankin’s eyes bulged. “With me? All of them at once? What about?”

  “About Ben Weston,” Freeman answered. “They say they aren’t responsible for killing Ben Weston and his family. They want to help us find the cops who did.”

  You could have heard a pin drop in that room. Sue and I had been gradually collecting our own set of suspicions, but to hear them come ricocheting back at us, uttered with Captain Freeman’s unsmiling, dead certainty, made the hair prickle on the back of my neck.