In the Guise of Mercy (Maggie Macgowen Mysteries)

by Wendy Hornsby

"Where are we going?" I asked Nick.

  "Don't you need to pack a bag?" he asked.

  I glanced back at the follow car and saw that it was still right with us. "For how long do you expect I need to pack?"

  He held up his hands; he had no idea, either.

  From the car I called Lana and gave her the short version of developments. She had already been notified by the network that I was under police protection. Though Lana sounded genuinely concerned for me, she didn't even pretend that she did not understand the various potentialities my current situation offered the project in progress.

  As I slept at the hotel under the watch and care of LA's finest, my project grew in stature and sex appeal in the eyes of the network. The programming troika in New York was in a state of ecstasy about the "hook" and "platform" we would have for promoting the production in the weeks leading up to sweeps week.

  When news got out, the publicity department would be able to book me onto any talk show or news show in the nation. With perseverance they might get a magazine cover, but they were assured of at least cover banners, as well as lots of newsprint. "Maggie MacGowen, under police protection as she uncovered--"

  Actually, I still didn't know exactly what I had uncovered, or had given the perception of having uncovered. Whatever it was, when Lana threw in mention of Mike's suicide, she had her "boffo" to the nth degree.

  When I heard a helicopter overhead I craned to get a look at it, to make sure the network hadn't sent its news bird out to video my "convoy of protection," or whatever crap tag they might dream up. Fortunately the bird was only routine traffic patrol.

  The shave and quick wash had revived Nick. Mike could do that also, stay up all night, get a nap, a shave and clean shirt--the last of which Nick did not get--and he could function well all of the next day. Like combat troops and medical interns, police need to be able to function for excruciatingly long periods of time. Patrol cops often work all night long and then spend the entire following day in court, testifying or ferrying suspects, and then go straight back to work.

  Police patrol is a young man's job. Both Mike and Nick were too old for that schedule. After a thirty-six-hour stint on the job, they needed a full twelve in bed, followed by a meal and more sleep. I had Nick's full attention for the rest of the day. But I knew that tomorrow he would disappear.

  We became the lead car as we headed into the canyon. We made a quick stop to look at the divot I had taken out of the mountain and various bits of car I had left behind, and continued up.

  I asked Nick to take the back road so that I could see the road behind my house. At just about that place where the burglar most likely parked, I saw Crown Vic number four, as I expected. Number five was on the far side of my driveway, parked in the dirt off the side of the road just before that last horrific hairpin curve.

  Nick gave the car some juice to get it up my steep driveway, and parked in front of my garage. The other two cars peeled away, probably to set up watch posts somewhere below.

  "This is a lot of attention when law-enforcement budgets are tight," I said.

  "You were Mike Flint's girl," as if that were sufficient explanation.

  "I'm not entirely clear, Nick," I said. "Am I being protected or detained?"

  "Depends," he said, pocketing his keys as he grinned at me. "Just depends."

  A uniformed policeman sat on the horse corral rail, talking to the kids, quieting them. I thanked him, patted muzzles, gave the officer carrots to feed the horses, while Nick looked around as if he were assessing access and escape routes.

  Inside the house, at about the same instant that I smelled coffee, I noticed, with interest, that boxes that held copies of Mike's files and notes, boxes I had not been allowed by the sheriff's deputies at the Malibu substation to remove from the trunk of my car the night before, were stacked next to Mike's office door.

  As I came around the corner and into the kitchen, following Nick, I stopped dead, did a comic double take I'm sure. Eldon and Kenny were comfortably seated at the kitchen table, sharing my morning newspapers. The pot in the coffeemaker was half-full and they had steaming mugs in front of them. They also had eggs and toast and orange juice in front of them. My skillet was soaking in the sink.

  "Hello," I said, hesitant to approach closer.

  "Get a good night's sleep, Maggie?" Kenny rose and pulled out a chair for me, but I stood where I was, working through this odd tableau. "Cup of coffee? Hope you don't mind if we raided the fridge. I'll fry you a couple of eggs. Nick, can I get you anything to eat?"

  "I'll do my own, thanks." Nick put a couple of pieces of bread into the toaster, rinsed and dried the skillet, put it on a stove burner, turned on the gas, dropped in some butter, broke in three eggs from the open carton on the sink and scrambled them with my spatula. "Maggie, how do you like your eggs?"

  "No thanks," I said. I took a mug out of the cupboard and poured myself coffee. "Make yourselves at home. Mi casa es su casa."

  "Sorry, Maggie," Kenny said, grinning sheepishly. "Didn't mean to help ourselves. But we been waiting here a whole lot longer than we thought we would have to. We had a long night, and oh hell, being here together like this is like old times, isn't it?"

  "Not exactly," I said; Mike wasn't there.

  Eldon said, "So Nick, what kept you?"

  "Fucking PCH," Nick said, deadpan, licking butter from his thumb after he buttered his toast. "Never know about traffic on PCH."

  I laughed. No mention of the long, hot shower I took, or his nap. Or that traffic on Pacific Coast Highway had flowed at a steady fifty. Nick winked at me and smiled.

  Kenny was right, though, it did feel like old times. When Mike was still working and the two kids, his son, Michael, my daughter, Casey, were still at home, Kenny and Nick and various other co-workers, his and mine, as well as friends of our kids, often stopped by the house in the morning as the family was getting ready for the day, stayed to eat breakfast while we packed lunches and filled Thermoses with coffee or juice and sorted out rides into work and to school. Finding friends and sometimes the barest of acquaintances in my kitchen helping themselves to the refrigerator seemed normal, part of the life I shared with Mike.

  After Mike got sick, a lot of the same people were in the house, but it was different then. No hustle or energy about that time. A quiet death watch, Mike had said one day about the parade of friends who came to help care for him. I said it was a life watch, and he said, "Bullshit."

  "So." I pulled out the chair next to Kenny and sat. "I hear you had quite a night."

  "We did. Learned a few things."

  Nick set his plate on the table, fluffy scrambled eggs and almost over-done toast. The smell was wonderful. I said, "That looks good. I think I'll make myself something after all."

  He put the plate in front of me. "You have these. I'll make some more."

  I thanked him, poured some milk into my mug of coffee, and looked around the table. They were all watching me. I ate a forkful of scrambled eggs, complimented Nick, and they were all still watching me.

  "All right," I said, putting the fork on the edge of my plate. "What's up?"

  Eldon reached under his chair, scrabbled around under there, and then pulled up the sheaf of my notes I had left with the copies of Mike's files that were in the other room. Among my notes was a county map that I had festooned with sticky notes, based on Mike's collection of clippings, to designate certain types of crimes and their locations, looking for event clusters. Someone, maybe Eldon? had reduced the map to an irregular bundle. Many of the sticky notes had fallen off or gotten stuck together randomly, out of place, or now adhered to the floor under Eldon's chair. One clung to the side of his shoe.

  I looked at the bundle, made eye contact with all three of them in turn, and then gave my full attention to Nick's very good scrambled eggs, without saying anything.

  Eldon was the first to speak.

  "You've come damn close, Maggie," he said. "We never imagined you'd get this close."
<
br />   "To what?" I said.

  "The key guy," Kenny said.

  "Who is it?" I asked.

  "You don't know?"

  "Eeny, meeny, miney." I pointed a finger at each of them in turn. "Am I warm yet?"

  They laughed, if nervously. Kenny shook his head. "You're cold. Very cold."

  Nick set his plate on the table and sat down opposite me, tucked a paper napkin into his collar to protect his tie and, with fork poised, asked, "It's the million-dollar question, isn't it? Do you know who was in charge in this string of crimes, Maggie?"

  "I can profile him," I said.

  "Go ahead," Nick said as he began to eat.

  "He is or was a policeman, a street cop, probably worked gang or drug detail; they overlap. He's paternalistic, manipulative, loves to mess with people on the street, has an inflated notion of his own power, and thinks that he is above the law--oh!--he is the law."

  I sat back and took a breath; all three of them were still watching me.

  After a moment, Eldon said, "You done?"

  "One more thing," I said. "In his mind, he is a missionary of sorts. It is his obligation, his calling, to protect the righteous by converting society's miscreants and slackers to the right and the true, to put them firmly on the path toward salvation, or to remove them altogether. I'm not talking about religious salvation here but behavioral salvation. Toe the line or pay the consequences."

  "That's pretty good, Maggie," Kenny said with a chuckle. "You've just described about ninety percent of all the beat cops in the country."

  "That's the point," I said.

  "I didn't hear you say sociopath, lowlife greedy murderous bastard," Eldon said.

  "Someone like Boni?" I said after swallowing the last of the eggs. "Not necessarily."

  Eldon narrowed his eyes. "What?"

  "I wasn't looking for Boni," I said. "To use Eldon's word, Boni's own hubris brought him down."

  Both Kenny and Nick snapped quick glances at Eldon. Nick said, "Hubris, Eldon?"

  Eldon blushed.

  "As far as the 'key' guy in the suburban war on drugs?" I said. "There isn't one. But you were all very clever with your phrasing. Who wrote your script? I would have used 'missing link' for its contextual punch but 'key guy' suffices."

  Kenny shook his head, but he was smiling in a self-deprecatory way. Eldon guffawed. Nick put his head in his hands as if it hurt; after the night he had, it probably did.

  "What was all that stuff you mapped out?" Eldon asked.

  "Mike thought Boni wasn't alone in seeing some possibilities when Higgins was gone, but possibilities with more pure intentions than moving in on the Higgins turf," I said. "Did maybe some cops on drug and gang detail in various towns take advantage of the drug supply vacuum immediately after Higgins was gone to try to sweep their communities clean, to finally get ahead of the drug problem in their neighborhoods before a big operation like the one Higgins worked for moved back in?"

  "Vigilante cops?" Kenny said. "An underground task force?"

  "Nothing so organized as a task force," I said. "But there was a lot of similar thinking. I'm certain that from time to time cops covered for each other when one of them crossed the line and trampled on due process. And that they felt righteous when, for instance, a match got thrown into a meth lab operating out of the kitchen of a suburban house and the business shut down. The proprietors, if they survived, most likely would go to prison on a plea deal without a trial and the neighborhood would feel safe again."

  I continued, as they studied me. "If the guy who was cooking meth cried 'arson,' who would listen, or even care? And if that someone said cops did it? Who are you going to believe, some scum who was ruining the quality of life in town or Officer Joe who coaches youth league basketball?"

  I sipped my coffee. "If the bodies of, say, three notorious and persistent crack dealers were found shot dead in the trunk of a car parked up behind Puddingstone Dam, how large a priority would an investigation be?"

  "That's fantastical, Maggie," Kenny said. "You're saying all those events Mike was looking at were the work of sworn peace officers? Bull."

  "Some, not all, I don't know the percentages," I said. "I believe there were opportunities taken. I think there were liberties taken."

  There was another round of exchanged glances that conveyed neither joy nor enlightenment. Nick started to speak, but Kenny took over.

  "So you're saying that there was a six-month frenzy of police vigilantism after Rogelio Higgins was taken out?" Kenny said. "Then what? Spontaneously they all settled down again?"

  I shook my head. "Mike was looking at events of a particular variety that happened six months before Higgins, six months after Higgins, two years after Higgins. I went online yesterday and did a search for last year. You know what?"

  "I'm afraid you're going to tell us," Eldon said.

  "There was no six-month frenzy of police vigilantism," I said. "It preceded Higgins and it continues, ten years later. Vigilantism isn't the word Mike would use. Neighborhood housecleaning, maybe. Handing out just deserts, maybe. Local anti-terrorism, perhaps. Pro-active police work?"

  "Can you prove any of this?" Kenny asked.

  "Depends on what you mean by 'prove.' " I rose and took my plate to the sink, rinsed it under the tap. "I can show patterns, the patterns Mike found, but that's all."

  I put my plate into the dishwasher, dried my hands, and looked back at their three closed faces.

  "Oh, please," I said. "I know how it is out there. You arrest someone and the next day he's right back out on the street doing his thing again. I know how that makes you feel. Especially since the consent decree. I would be with Mike and he'd see some obvious punk, a troublemaker, and he'd say, 'In the old days, we'd just shoot a guy like that.' "

  "He was trying to get a rise out of you," Nick said.

  "Sure, but there was always a kernel of something pretty angry there. And superior. And more than a little frustrated." I picked up Kenny's empty plate, Eldon picked up his own and Nick's, and we took them to the sink. He rinsed, I filled the dishwasher.

  "Mike never told me stories about you, Eldon," I said. "But about Nick and Kenny, he had plenty of them. None of you can persuade me that everything you did, that you do, out there is strictly according to the police procedure manual."

  "I certainly never torched a meth lab," Nick protested.

  "Maybe not," I said. "But you did crowd control once while Mike gave a rape victim instructions on beating her attacker with a nightstick so it wouldn't leave marks, and then you stood there and cheered her on as she beat the shit out of her assailant while he was handcuffed and helpless."

  Nick grinned, remembering. "God, seeing her whack that guy was better than a month of therapy for the whole neighborhood. That guy had been terrorizing those folks...."

  "Exactly my point," I said. "And when said rapist tried to tell the judge that you sanctioned his beating, the judge wouldn't listen."

  "Yeah, but that was because of Mike," Nick said, still grinning. "So the judge asks Mike if he gave the woman his stick, and Mike makes this innocent face--you know how Mike did--and he says, 'Your Honor, does that sound reasonable to you?' "

  "You prove my point," I said.

  "If what you're saying is correct," Kenny said, "and I'm not saying it is, then what is the point?"

  "There was one big fish that Mike was looking at, Rogelio Higgins," I said, "He, too, was cleansed."

  "By a cop?" Kenny said, trying to seem incredulous and dismissive, but failing.

  "Plural, I think," I said. "One shooter maybe, but others who knew, others who covered."

  "Who?" they bellowed, like a chorus trying to reach the top balcony.

  "I only know three of them," I said quietly. "And they're all dead, Rod Pearson, Art Collings, and Tom Medina. I'd feel a lot safer if I knew who the survivors are, especially because they've broken into my house twice now looking for something. And sliced my brake lines."

  "For chrissak
e, Maggie." Kenny's face was a dangerous shade of red. "Isn't that enough for you? Honey, you gotta stop."

  I picked up the coffeepot. "Anyone want more coffee?"

  We all looked up when there was a knock at the patio door. I turned around to see who it was. A plainclothes officer stood on the other side of the glass with Early beside him.

  "You know Early," I said. "My neighbor, my co-worker."

  Kenny gestured for him to come in.

  "You okay, Maggie?" Early asked. "Sorry your mishap got so much air time."

  "Part of the cost of doing business," I said. "Have you eaten?"

  "I'm good," he said. "I've been delegated to talk to you about the funeral at Evergreen today. Guido says you can't reschedule, because there won't be another burial in potter's field for a few months. He can go ahead and video it. I know you wanted to be there."

  I glanced at the kitchen clock. "I want very much to be there, but I don't have a car. Triple A delivered a rental to the Malibu substation, but I was swept away by the police so it's probably still there. I don't want to feed the news beast by arriving at the studio chauffeured by armed security."

  "I'll be happy to drive you in. Let me know when you're ready to go," Early said. "I'll be next door."

  I thanked him and saw him out. Then I turned to the gray suits, knights at my round kitchen table. "Gentlemen, if you'll excuse me, I need to get ready for work."

  Kenny gathered up the bundled map and asked me, "Where are Mike's files?"

  "You've already found the copies I made you." I flipped the edge of the map they had taken out of one of the boxes of copies. "Take them with you, with my blessing."

  "I need the originals. All of them."

  "You keep forgetting," I said. "I'm a bona fide, dues-paying member of the Fourth Estate. I've cooperated with you so far, and you've been helpful to the extent that it worked for your interests. But I get to choose what I tell you about my sources, and you'll need a warrant before I'll think about handing over my own notes, or anything further of Mike's that I, as his executor, believe to be off limits to you."

  "Maggie," he said, exasperated. "In the wrong hands--"