by Chris Culver
“If I could get everyone’s attention,” said Leonard, waving his arms. “I’d like to make a few announcements on behalf of the prosecutor’s office.”
The cameras switched from me to him. When all four television cameras and most of the assembled persons faced him, he smiled.
“Good morning. I’d appreciate if everyone came close so I don’t have to shout,” he said. He waited to speak again until everyone around him was watching. Then he smiled at each of them in turn. “When I got out of bed this morning, I got a very unwelcome surprise phone call from a staffer at the Office of Public Safety telling me about the shooting death of Dante Washington. I came here today to assure the public that the law enforcement community in Marion County is taking this incident very seriously and monitoring events closely. Already, I’ve received dozens of emails from irate community members demanding I arrest Detective Rashid for shooting an unarmed young man. I’m here to assure the public that justice will be done.
“This is a rapidly evolving situation, and we will not act without the facts. If, however, we discover that Mr. Rashid lured Mr. Washington to his home, as has been suggested, IMPD will react appropriately. If we discover that the weapon found on Mr. Washington’s body was, in fact, planted by Mr. Rashid—again, as has been suggested to me dozens of times already—we will react appropriately. I have already been in contact with Mr. Washington’s family.”
Leonard paused and took a deep breath. When he spoke again, his voice was softer. “Mr. Washington was a fine young man. His death was a tragedy all around.”
Leonard kept talking, but I had heard enough. I looked at Paul.
“What do you say we get out of here?”
“Yeah,” said Paul, nodding. “That’s a good idea.”
We walked to his car but not before the cameramen who had focused on Leonard started focusing on me. Their pictures wouldn’t help my reputation, but they did send a strong message: nobody’s above the law, not even a decorated police officer. Hopefully that would keep the press from pressuring the department’s investigation too much. Once we got in the car, Paul looked at me.
“Funny, I hadn’t heard any of those allegations Leonard mentioned.”
I pulled my seat belt over my shoulder and buckled up. “Now you’ll hear them over and over, though. He’s wanted to get me fired for a while. It was smart.”
“You really think he’s that devious?”
I didn’t hesitate. “Yes. In politics, perception is reality. He told me that once, right before he ambushed me and made it look like I endorsed him in his last election. He wanted to gain favor with the Islamic community.”
Paul put on his seat belt and started driving toward the City-County Building downtown. Leonard had good reason to want me fired, I supposed. A couple of months ago, I had discovered a bed and breakfast in one of the suburbs on the east side of town that offered the services of young women kidnapped overseas and forced to work as prostitutes. I also discovered that Leonard frequented the establishment. Unfortunately, the information came from a gangster who obtained it by murdering the establishment’s madam. That made it a little difficult to use in court.
As Paul drove, I looked out the window, watching the few cars around us. The sun hadn’t even risen, and yet these early-morning warriors—almost all men—had already begun their daily trek, drinking their coffee, their minds probably already thinking hours ahead to a meeting that morning or an email they needed to write. I wondered if any of them stopped to consider that they would miss their daughter’s first smile of the morning, their son’s pitter-patter footsteps down the hallway, that special look their wives reserved only for them. Since having children, mornings had become my favorite part of the day. I had missed too many of them for my taste.
We parked in a surface parking lot across the street from the City-County Building. Even though the Indianapolis metropolitan area has almost two million people, most of our government functions still occur in the utilitarian twenty-eight-story office building. The city could probably produce studies showing that a single government building made things more efficient, but I doubted they’d mention how cramped things could get.
As soon as we stepped out of the car, Paul removed my handcuffs. I could see the tiniest sliver of morning on the horizon. In another couple of hours the sun would burn off the nighttime chill, but for now the cold still lingered, sapping me of the heat of my anger. Paul lit a cigarette, and I stamped my feet on the concrete, both to stay warm and to give me something to do so I wouldn’t have to think about Dante. In time, Paul’s smoking addiction would kill him, but I could see the relief in his eyes as he exhaled. He flicked ash on the ground, and we started toward the building.
“My wife wants me to quit, but nothing in the world makes me feel as good as that first cigarette of the day,” he said. “Hard to say no to that.”
“Addiction is a pretty powerful motivator,” I said, nodding. “Of course, living to fifty has its perks, too.”
He looked at me, shook his head, and then tossed his cigarette to the ground. “Next thing I know, you’ll be telling me to exercise.” I started to say that exercise wouldn’t be a bad idea, but he cut me off. “I get enough of that at home. I don’t need my friends getting on me, too.”
“I wouldn’t dream of getting on you. Believe me.”
“Good…I think,” he said, grinding his cigarette with his heel. “I’ve got some calls to make, but I had somebody pull the evidence box from your investigation into Santino Ramirez. If you’re up for it, I’d still like to go over that.”
“That’d be fine.”
He nodded and looked left and right on North Alabama Street. Nothing stirred.
“I’ve been meaning to ask,” he said, walking forward. “How’d your disciplinary hearing go?”
“I’ve still got a badge for now.”
He grinned. “So you haven’t got the verdict yet?”
I stopped in the middle of the street. Supposedly, the review board kept their deliberations secret, but word still managed to get out more often than not ahead of time. “You’ve heard something?”
“No, I was making a joke. I didn’t mean anything. I’m sure it went well.”
“My lawyer said it went as he expected,” I said.
Which is to say, it went terribly. Three police captains had grilled me for over two hours, not only about the incident alleged in the original complaint, but also about my acrimonious relationship with Leonard Wilson and my working relationship with Konstantin Bukoholov, a very high-end distributor of narcotics. One day, I hope to put both men in prison for their crimes, but not yet. I’ve still got too much work to do, and they’re still too useful to me. Unfortunately, they probably think the same thing about me.
Upon reaching the building, we took the elevator to Paul’s floor. That early on a normal Saturday, Paul’s office would be relatively empty, but today five officers, including Captain Mike Bowers and Special Agent Kevin Havelock, the agent in charge of the local FBI field office, met us near the conference room. The last time I had seen Havelock, he tried to convince me to involve myself in a criminal conspiracy to murder a foreign national. He tried to make it seem as if I would be doing my country a service by eliminating a very dangerous man; in actuality, he wanted me on tape incriminating myself so he could arrest me. I put a hand on Paul’s shoulder to stop him. He looked back at me, so I nodded to Havelock.
“What are the feds doing here?”
Paul narrowed his eyes at Agent Havelock before turning to me. “I don’t know, but I’ll find out.”
“Be careful around Havelock,” I said. “He’s ambitious, and he doesn’t mind stepping on the little people to get what he wants.”
Paul hesitated but then nodded. “Point taken. You go to the conference room. I’ve got some calls to make. Somebody should bring in the evidence from the Ramirez case shortly.”
I thought quickly. If they brought in all the evidence from the Ramirez case, they�
�d have my original case notepad in it as well. “Give me a few extra minutes. I’m going to have Fajr.”
“Fajr?” asked Paul, furrowing his brow.
“Salat al-Fajr,” I said. “Dawn prayer. I just need the room and a little privacy.”
He nodded. “All right, then. You’ve got twenty minutes while I work.”
I nodded and began closing the conference room’s blinds. I didn’t actually require privacy for prayer—in fact, I had seen men praying by the roadside once on a trip to Egypt—but I didn’t like flaunting my faith, either. As a Muslim, I’m called to prayer five times a day, and perhaps it’s hokey and old-fashioned to say, but they’re among my favorite times of day. Those times allow me to center myself and refocus on what’s most important in my life.
I washed up in the bathroom and then had dawn prayer in the conference room. A couple of minutes after I finished, a uniformed officer deposited a white cardboard banker’s box on the conference room table. In many cities, detectives keep “murder books,” which act as a written record of an investigation. Usually, they’re a three-ring binder that contains the paper trail of the investigation. In Indianapolis, we keep our paperwork and reports in file boxes. If Paul got the right box, I should have transcripts of every interview we conducted in our investigation of Santino Ramirez, the coroner’s autopsy summary and report, pictures of the initial crime scene, witness lists, reports from the crime lab—everything we had needed, in fact, to secure a conviction.
I popped the top off the box and felt a wave of nostalgia wash over me when I saw Keith Holliday’s handwriting on the case summary, the first document in the box. He had been dead almost nine years now, probably forty years before his time. We never had time to develop the sort of friendship many investigators develop with their partners, but I learned what it meant to be a detective by watching him, by seeing his tenaciousness, by shadowing him as he closed cases others said were hopeless. He was a good man who died too young.
Once my nostalgia passed, I pulled my old case notebook from the box. When we had worked the case, Keith made me do most of the grunt work, including tracking down Ramirez’s very uncooperative friends and family. At the time, I thought he was hazing me, giving me some sort of initiation into the homicide unit, but now I see how much utility the work possessed. I had a map of the entire gang, including its hierarchy.
While I certainly couldn’t forgive what happened to Michelle, I would have stayed out of the investigation in normal circumstances. Leonard Wilson and Dante changed things, though. Had I been a little slower or had I been out of the house, Dante could have killed my wife. If my kids had been home, a stray shot might have hit them and I’d be burying a child instead of preparing for a meeting. On top of that, Leonard Wilson had now stepped in. I didn’t see his game yet, but he’d hurt me if he could. Paul would do a fine job on his investigation, but he’d be slow. I had to end this before anyone else got hurt, and that meant I might have to get my hands a little dirty.
I jotted down as many names at the top of the gang’s hierarchy as I could. We had probably put a lot of those guys in prison, and other gangs had probably managed to put a few more of them beneath the dirt, but this was a start. With Paul coming back any moment, I didn’t want to push things, so I put my current notebook back in my jacket pocket and started organizing the documents from the box into piles—coroner’s report in one pile, interview notes in a second, procedural documents in a third. When Paul returned, he put a cup of coffee beside me on the table.
“Coffee’s black,” he said. “You want cream or sugar, you’re on your own.”
“Black is fine,” I said, looking up from my stack of documents. “I’ve tried to arrange things in a logical way. I can walk you through everything, or just those documents you want. What’s Havelock doing here?”
Paul sighed. “Just stepping on toes so far. The feds are interested in cartel connections to the local drug trade, so he’s going to sit in on our briefings and offer his expertise where he can.”
I looked at the door. “Last time I worked with him, he tried to entrap me. Don’t trust him. I’m warning you.”
“Forgive me for saying so, buddy,” said Paul, his lips forming a small smile. “But you rub a lot of people the wrong way. Ever considered that the common denominator in all your poor relationships is you?”
“That’s not funny.”
Paul tilted his head to the side and then clapped me on the shoulder. “I think it’s pretty funny. You keep reading for a few minutes. My team is on the way. You’ll brief them.”
I grunted and then read through my old case notebook. Over the next five minutes, three additional IMPD officers, as well as Agent Havelock, entered the room. Havelock arrived first. He shook my hand warmly as if we were old friends. The second arrival was Nancy Wharton, a fortyish auburn-haired woman. She had the stern countenance of a nun unhappy that her superiors had assigned her to teach second grade at the local Catholic school. She nodded to me but said nothing and instead sat down beside Paul. The second officer, Kent Graham, I knew relatively well, having attended the Academy with him many years earlier. He had gained a little weight since then, mostly around his midsection, and he wore a suit on shoulders so thin that it hung off him as if on a clothes hanger.
“Lousy circumstances, but good to see you, Ash,” he said, smiling and extending his hand toward me. I shook it.
“It’s good to see you, too,” I said. I glanced at Paul. “Is this everybody?”
“We’ve got one more,” he said, nodding toward the door. “And there she is.”
I turned and looked over my shoulder. She was Officer Emilia Rios, the Santa Muerta expert from the crime scene on Fall Creek Road. Having changed from her uniform into a pair of jeans, a brown leather jacket, and a striped polo shirt, she could have passed for a college student.
“For those who don’t know her, this is Officer Emilia Rios. She’s here as our subject-matter expert in case we run into more Santa Muerte stuff,” said Paul, by way of introduction. He then turned to Agent Havelock. “And this is Special Agent Kevin Havelock. He’s the agent in charge of the local FBI field office, and he’s here to provide support in case we run into any cartel issues. Everybody’s going to get a chance to talk, but I want Ash to go first because his report will affect all of us. Then I’m kicking him out. Cool?”
It was more a demand for an acknowledgement that I understood how things would go than a question. Paul had settled into his supervisory role well.
“Yeah, it’s cool,” I said.
“Good,” said Paul, barely acknowledging me as he addressed his team. “Our victims, Dante and Michelle Washington, testified in a case Ash worked ten years ago. The perp in Ash’s case was Santino Ramirez, the same Santino Ramirez you’ve heard about on the news. Barring divine intervention, Ramirez is dead in a few days. My working theory—and I’m open to hearing others—is that his gang, Barrio Sureño, is killing our witnesses in revenge. Ash is going to tell us about that case, and then he’s going home.”
All eyes in the room turned to me. I waited for questions first, but no one spoke.
“Well, like Paul said, I worked the Ramirez investigation, but Keith Holliday, my partner at the time, was the lead detective. Unfortunately, he died a couple of years ago, so you’re stuck with me.”
I thought they might snicker at the comment, but nothing. Tough room. I cleared my throat.
“The case was open and shut. The victim was a man named Angel Herrera, and his shooter was Santino Ramirez. Ramirez ran a local gang called Barrio Sureño. They ran their rivals out of disputed territories by murdering their leaders and their entire families. If I recall, our gang unit thought they had some connections to Eme, but we couldn’t verify them.” I glanced at Agent Havelock. “They boasted of ties to Los Zetas, as well, but we never substantiated those.”
Paul coughed, clearing his throat and getting my attention. He put a pencil behind his ear. “Just to clarify, by Eme, you
mean the Mexican Mafia, and by Los Zetas, you mean the cartel?”
Primarily, Eme was a prison gang, but gang culture being what it was, that gave them a lot of power over a lot of people.
“That’s them. Barrio Sureño considered themselves real badasses,” I said, nodding and looking at Havelock. “But again, we found little to no evidence of ties to national or transnational organizations. They are a local street gang.”
“In your investigation,” said Havelock, speaking for the first time during the briefing. “Did the name Miguel Navarra come up?”
I closed my eyes and shook my head. “The name’s not familiar, but it’s been quite a while since I investigated this case. Why?”
The special agent shrugged. “Just curious. Tell us about the murder.”
He knew something. I wanted to blow him off and look through my original notebook to make sure we hadn’t come across the name, but I cleared my throat instead and focused again on my case.
“Angel Hererra, the victim, was a homeless man. Ramirez shot him as he had a late lunch in the soup kitchen beneath the homeless shelter a couple of blocks east of here. From what we discovered, Santino Ramirez believed Angel stole marijuana from a young Barrio Sureño member. According to our witnesses, Ramirez walked directly to Angel, pressed a firearm against his forehead, and demanded his marijuana back. Angel said he had already smoked the dope, so Ramirez shot him twice in the chest and then once in the leg, severing his femoral artery.”
Paul leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head. “Tell us about the witnesses.”
“Originally, nobody came forward. But then, two days later, we got six people. Five of them volunteered in the kitchen. Dante and Michelle Washington—both of whom are dead now—Brian and Jasmine Alexander, and Valerie Perez. The sixth witness was a homeless man named Xavier Jackson.” I glanced at Paul. “You should consider putting the survivors in protective custody as a precaution.”
