by Chris Culver
The picture shifted back to a live shot of Kristen staring directly into the camera, an impassioned look on her face.
“My own researchers uncovered this photo with little difficulty, so it’s unclear how the arresting officers missed it. Detective Keith Holliday, the primary detective on the case, gave his life while on duty, but his partner, Detective Sergeant Ashraf Rashid, continues to work with the department.”
The picture once again shifted to a still image, this time to a picture of an older African-American couple holding a candle. “This picture was taken two nights ago at a candlelight vigil to remember Dante and Michelle Washington. As viewers may recall, Detective Sergeant Rashid shot Dante Washington in cold blood. This morning, the prosecutor’s office released information pertinent to that case. Vials of blood taken from Detective Sergeant Rashid shortly after the incident show that he had an elevated blood alcohol level at the time of the shooting.”
Kristen paused. “In other words, he was drunk. The investigation into that shooting is still ongoing.”
I stood and turned around, running my hands through my hair.
“It’s time for the news media to stand up. In all my dealings with IMPD, I’ve met good men and women, individuals who come to work every day to do what’s right. As a journalist, I report facts and try to keep my opinion out of the story. I apologize for my demeanor this morning, but as the victim of police violence, I can’t stay quiet any longer. As a city, we have to say ‘no more.’ We deserve better than men like Detective Rashid, men who would think it nothing to point a gun at a reporter to scare her off a story.”
I balled my hands into fists and started pacing. The phone rang in the kitchen, but I barely registered it.
“Alone,” said Kristen, looking past the camera before focusing on it again, “perhaps I can’t do much. Detective Rashid is a powerful man with powerful benefactors. There are days I feel like a lone voice crying out in the wilderness.”
A humble voice, too. I didn’t know Christian theology beyond what I had studied in college, but she had just compared himself to John the Baptist, one of the preeminent figures of the New Testament. Kristen waved someone forward.
“But today, I don’t stand alone. I brought somebody into the studio today to amplify my voice.” She waved past the camera again. “Carla, if you don’t mind, could you step up here, please?”
I stopped pacing and stared at the TV, my hands on my hips. Hannah must have answered the phone; I could hear her speaking.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said, dreading what I expected to happen. I hadn’t seen Carla Ramirez in years, but little had changed. She wore a ruffled gray skirt and she stepped diffidently, almost awkwardly, in front of the camera.
“This is Carla Ramirez, Santino Ramirez’s wife,” said Kristen, standing to greet the new guest. “She has been without her husband for ten years because of Detective Rashid and those who enable him. Ms. Ramirez is a wonderful person, stronger than I can imagine, but she’s just a lone voice. I have heard her story, and I think it’s time the rest of the city did as well. It’s time for us to draw a line beyond which we will not budge. It’s time for men who would do our city harm for their own gain to leave.”
“Honey,” said Hannah, speaking from the hallway outside our living room. I glanced at her. She held the phone in her right hand. “Mike Bowers is on the phone. He said it’s important. Everything all right?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head and walking and grabbing the remote from the coffee table. Carla started to say something, but I muted the sound. “We just got our asses handed to us on live TV.”
Hannah raised her eyebrows and handed me the phone. “That’s bad, I take it?”
“Yeah, that’s bad,” I said, nodding. “And thank you for the phone.”
She gave me a faint smile and mouthed good luck. I put the phone to my ear. “Mike. Have you been watching TV?”
“Yeah. So has Sylvia Lombardo. She just called and wants to know if we should have a strategy meeting to discuss our response.”
That is what a politically savvy person would do.
“If you want to have a meeting, you have a meeting. We’ve got other things to worry about.”
“And that is?” asked Bowers.
I looked at the TV again. The camera had zeroed in on Carla’s face. Tears streamed down her cheeks, and even without hearing her voice, I knew how believable she would have sounded.
“Carla Ramirez is killing our witnesses.”
Chapter 23
Bowers didn’t respond for at least a five count. “Say that again?”
“Carla Ramirez is killing our witnesses,” I said. “I think she killed Angel Hererra, too.”
And the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became. Aside from the eyewitness testimony, we had had solid evidence against Santino Ramirez. We found the murder weapon in his house with his prints all over it. Not only that, we found gunshot residue on his hands and clothes. That wasn’t just his house, though. Carla lived there, too. And we hadn’t found just Santino’s prints on the gun. We found hers as well. And Santino’s weren’t the only clothes with gunshot residue on them. We assumed Carla had gotten her prints on the gun simply by handling it while it was in the house, and we assumed the GSR on her clothes was the result of physical contact with her husband, but I had a whole different picture now.
Bowers paused. “She looks like a woman grieving her husband’s wrongful incarceration to me.”
“That’s what she wants you to think,” I said, shaking my head. “Carla is not who she lets on to be. She’s got a pretty heavy record. Look it up.”
Bowers had been a cop for a long time, so he should have understood what I meant. He paused.
“If you’re right and she killed Angel Hererra, we put an innocent man on death row.”
I shook my head and began pacing. “Santino Ramirez is far from innocent, but I know he didn’t kill Angel. He was in Mexico at the time of the shooting.”
“You couldn’t even see the pictures on TV. For all we know, they’re selfies somebody took with his camera phone and printed out at CVS.”
Wishful thinking wouldn’t get us anywhere. Kristen Tanaka might use unscrupulous methods to gain information, but she wouldn’t risk herself by going on TV and shouting nonsense.
“I’m not basing this on the pictures. Just trust me. I know he was in Mexico.”
I counted to three before Bowers spoke. “How do you know?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Tell me you didn’t beat it out of a suspect.”
“No,” I said. “I can’t tell you because if I told you, I would violate a non-disclosure agreement I recently signed, committing treason in the process. My source is impeccable. Trust me. This is way above both our pay grades. I stumbled on it, and I wish I hadn’t.”
Bowers started to say something, but then he lowered his voice. “You’re serious about this?”
“Yes. Don’t ask me to talk about this. All I can say is that Santino Ramirez didn’t kill Angel Hererra. He’s a murderer, and he deserves to be in prison, but not for the crime we convicted him of.”
“What do we do, then?”
I shrugged. “Let the system work. His lawyers will file an appeal, and the attorney general’s office will do their job. That’s irrelevant for us because Ramirez isn’t killing our witnesses. We should pick Carla up before she kills somebody else.”
“Do you have classified information on her, too?”
“No,” I said, my mind already moving several steps ahead of me. “But I know her.”
Bowers paused, and I could hear him muttering something. “Kristen Tanaka really put us up against the wall. If we pick Carla up now, it’ll look like we’re harassing a grieving widow. I’ll put her under surveillance, but I’m not going to bring her in without something solid.” He paused again. “And you need to stick around your phone today. You’ll have some news coming in about your disciplin
ary hearing.”
Meaning we had a verdict, so I shouldn’t get too involved considering I was about to lose my job. “I wasn’t drunk when I shot Dante. You should know that, at least, before you shut me out of everything.”
Bowers’ voice softened. “I know you weren’t drunk. You had a BAC of .03. It’s like having a beer. And I’m not going to shut you out of anything,” he said, quickly. “Just stay by your phone this morning. We’ll watch Carla. If you’re right, she’s not going to hurt anybody. You’ll get news shortly. Okay? Just stay by the phone.”
He didn’t wait for me to say no before he hung up. I stayed still and rubbed my eyes. I didn’t need this right now, not with everything else I had to do. I glanced at the clock on our TV. Half after seven. We had had six witnesses testify that they saw Santino Ramirez murder Angel Hererra. That meant we had six people swear to God to tell the truth and then lie. One of those witnesses was a Baptist minister, and I doubted he made a habit out of lying. I had a lot of questions, and I intended to get some answers while I still could.
I walked into the kitchen, where I found Hannah eating breakfast at the coffee table and reading the news on her laptop. As soon as I saw her, some of the anger I had felt earlier disappeared.
“I need to get to work. If somebody calls, tell them I went out and that you don’t know where I am.”
She looked up from her laptop. “That’s an odd request.”
“It’s an odd kind of day.”
She shrugged and looked back to her computer. “If that’s what you want me to do, that’s what I’ll do.”
“I love you.”
She looked up and smiled again. “I love you, too. Now go catch some bad guys.”
Brian Alexander ran a shelter and soup kitchen for homeless persons just a couple of blocks from the City-County Building, and while I hadn’t been there for a while, I had a general idea of its location. I drove downtown and parked in the surface lot beside my building, and then took Market Street east until I came to a gray building with a cross embossed on its side.
When I see homeless people on TV, nine times out of ten, they’re drug users who haven’t seen a washcloth in years and who simply exist moment to moment, waiting for their next fix. The reality is much more complicated than that. The city has its fair share of drug users, but most of the men and women who visited that shelter had never touched illegal drugs in their lives. They had simply taken a wrong turn somewhere. Maybe they lost a job, maybe their spouse had left them, maybe they had mental health issues. No matter what had happened, they needed help, and Brian Alexander and his wife spent their lives providing it. That made my job that morning even harder.
When I reached the shelter, I found the front doors locked, but someone had propped open the back door, the one that led down into the dining room. I heard a low murmur of conversation wafting out from inside, and I could smell chili, probably that afternoon’s lunch. Despite providing services for those down on their luck, the shelter and the area around it appeared clean and well tended. None of the walls had graffiti, someone had freshly swept the concrete steps, and the linoleum floors inside practically gleamed. Someone took justifiable pride in this operation. Our city was lucky to have it.
Since I didn’t know the proper protocol for entering at off hours, I put my badge in the front pocket of my jacket and stepped inside. Black-and-white linoleum tile led into the dining room with the kitchen just beyond that. I counted eight people inside, sitting around a white Formica table. Two of them turned and smiled when I walked in. Both were men, and both wore the white collar of a Christian clergyman. The one nearest, an older black man with flecks of white coloring his goatee, waved me forward.
“Come on in. You’ve got a couple of hours before lunch, but something tells me you’re not here to eat.”
“I’m not,” I said, taking a quick look around the room. It looked just as it had ten years ago. “I’m Ash Rashid, and I’m looking for Brian Alexander.”
“Brian’s doing the dishes right now,” said the minister who had spoken before. “Why don’t you have a seat, Officer Rashid? You’ve had a rough morning. You deserve a break.”
Evidently, even clergymen watched TV. The others around the table tittered, but not in a malicious way. I walked forward, and one of the men immediately offered me his seat. It was only as he stood up that I saw his collar as well.
“Are you all ministers?” I asked, looking at the men and women assembled around me. They laughed, as if I had walked into the room in the middle of a joke.
“Most of us are,” said the man who had spoken earlier. “I’m Martin.” He held his hand out to the woman beside him. “This is my wife, Connie. We tend a church on Capital Avenue. Just so you know, I baptized Dante and Michelle Washington. Their parents are members of my congregation.”
I felt the hackles at the back of my neck rise. I took a step back. “I didn’t realize. I’m just here to talk to Brian Alexander.”
“Doesn’t matter who you came to see. You’re here,” said Martin, gesturing to the lone empty seat at the table. “Have a seat. We should talk.”
I really didn’t know what to say, honestly. The ministers around town were doing their best to keep the protests against Dante’s death from spiraling out of control, but they were standing over a tinderbox ready to ignite at any moment. I sat. Martin started to say something, but I held up a hand to stop him.
“I know what you’re going to say, and I’m sorry. I know you don’t believe that, but I am. I liked Dante. He was a nice man. If I thought I had a choice, I wouldn’t have shot him.”
“I know you’re sorry,” said Martin. “The Washingtons know, too. They’re hurt beyond anything I can imagine, and they are both having a real hard time not hating you, but they don’t blame you. They know Dante broke into your house with a gun. They want to know why.”
I had expected him to come at me guns blazing, so I hesitated before speaking.
“If I could take that night back, I would.”
Martin leaned back from the table. “Would you switch places with him?”
I considered lying, but then shook my head. “No.”
Martin took a deep breath and then ran a hand across his face. “Thank you for your honesty and courtesy. I’ll do my best to extend the same courtesy.”
As Martin finished speaking, the other men and women gathered around the table introduced themselves, but I couldn’t keep track of everyone’s name. In addition to two ministers and their spouses, I met one Catholic priest, two monks from the Order of St. Benedict, and a Jesuit priest. I didn’t know what distinguished a Jesuit priest from a run-of-the-mill Catholic priest, but from his serious demeanor, I didn’t think he wanted me to know, either.
“So why are you here?” asked Martin. “Unless, of course, you want to help with the lunch service. We can always use volunteers.”
“Some other time,” I said, shaking my head. “I need to talk to Brian Alexander.”
Martin nodded his head and closed his eyes. “And why do you need to talk to our illustrious dishwasher?”
“You know about my morning, so you’ve been watching the news,” I said.
Martin, once again, nodded. “I did see the news.” He looked at his fellow ministers. “For those who like to sleep in, Detective Rashid had a few choice words for Kristen Tanaka very early this morning, and in return, she pilloried him on the morning show.” He looked back at me. “Anyone with a brain in his head would understand that it was tit for tat.”
Several of the men and women around the table grunted their assent, and one, the Jesuit, looked as if he had to stop himself from spitting on the floor.
“I take it you guys don’t care for Ms. Tanaka,” I said.
“She’s a cancer,” said the Jesuit. “I hope she gets hit by a truck.”
The comment obviously made some of them look uncomfortable, but nobody disagreed.
“Gabriel may have a touch for the melodramatic,” said Martin.
“And I think he’d be the first to say he doesn’t actually wish harm on anyone, but Ms. Tanaka’s reporting has occasionally made things difficult in our neighborhoods. She has a tendency to inflame some of our more hotheaded residents.”
That summed up my experience with her as well. A couple of months back I had worked a very tough, very high-profile case that required a team I led to sweep a neighborhood for men and women with outstanding warrants. For the most part, the sweep worked out fine and we managed to bring in a number of suspected felons. Unfortunately, we ran into a problem with one house in which the homeowner came at my team members and tried to pick a fight with them. To protect them, my team leader shot the homeowner with a Taser. When Tanaka reported it, she failed to mention that the man our officer Tased had recently beaten his parole officer—a very nice, middle-aged woman—with a lead pipe or that he had come after my team and tried to hurt them. I guess the context got in the way of her story.
“If it makes you feel better, she’s not been well received by the department, either.”
“I’m afraid that doesn’t make me feel better,” said Martin. “I, for one, will continue praying for her and hoping for a change of heart.” He straightened. “Tell me why, again, you need to talk to Brian.”
“For one,” I said, tilting my head to the side, “I wanted to make sure he was okay. We’ve lost some men and women who testified in Santino Ramirez’s trial.”
“Brian’s a tough man,” said Martin, smiling. “I wouldn’t worry about him too much.”
“Do you have the opportunity to minister to gang members?” I asked.
“We all know gang members,” said Gabriel, the Jesuit. He crossed his arms above the table. “But I cannot and will not tell you anything we speak about. The private conversations we conduct with our parishioners are our own.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to violate anyone’s privacy,” I said, speaking in what I hoped was a calm, commanding voice. “If you see members of a gang called Barrio Sureño, could you give them my card and ask them to call me? I want this violence to end, and I want Santino Ramirez to receive the justice he deserves. No one else has to get hurt.”
