In Pursuit of Justice

by Radclyffe

  Which probably means someone in the department is covering their ass instead of supporting one of our own. If Mitchell has done anything even remotely prosecutable, they’d have suspended her, not just reassigned her. “Justifiable?”

  “I subdued a suspect with force. He’s complaining.”

  Well, that explains the bruise. Very smart answer, too. She isn’t excusing herself, and she isn’t admitting guilt. If she survives this inquiry, she’s got a future in the department. Rebecca sipped her coffee. “Okay. This assignment will probably be deadly boring, but it’s what you’ve drawn. For the moment, you’ll be based here. If Sloan and McBride need you to do anything for them, go ahead. You can run backgrounds at the one-eight if there’s something they can’t find out for themselves.”

  “I doubt they’ll need that,” Mitchell remarked. “They’re hackers.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I figured, too. But just the same, if they need something that could later be construed as chain of evidence, try to make it look official. Go through channels and keep some kind of log so we know what the hell we have to work with if we ever need to get a warrant.”

  “Roger.”

  “I’ll be in and out. Page me if something comes up.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” For the first time Mitchell looked uneasy. “I have to report for my psych eval three times a week until I’m cleared. I’ll advise you of—”

  “Just go, Mitchell,” Rebecca said brusquely. I know all about it. With any luck we won’t run into each other in Whitaker’s waiting room.

  Mitchell stiffened at the change in the detective’s tone. “Yes, ma’am. Understood.”

  “Hopefully, we’ll all be off this duty in a week or so. Be here at 0730 tomorrow.” She tossed her cup in the trash and walked out, leaving Mitchell to stare after her. She had three hours to kill before her appointment with the psychologist. It was too early in the day to find the people she wanted to talk to, and she admitted to herself as she rode down on the silent elevator that the only person she really wanted to see at the moment had nothing to do with the investigation.

  *

  Catherine Rawlings stepped away from the group of residents with whom she had been discussing the preferred management of acute schizophrenia and looked at the readout on her pager. Then she walked to a wall phone and dialed the number.

  “This is Doctor Rawlings.”

  “Any chance you’re free for lunch?”

  Smiling, she turned her back to the hallway and lowered her voice. “Where are you?”

  “In the lobby.”

  Her heart beat faster, and she was aware of a faint stirring within. The fact that the mere sound of Rebecca’s voice could do that to her was astounding. And a little frightening, too. The newness of anyone affecting her quite so much would take some getting used to. “Damn. I can’t. I scheduled an extra patient session right before I have to go to the outpatient clinic. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay. I was just in the neighborhood,” Rebecca replied quickly. She glanced around the lobby and rolled her shoulders, trying to shake out some of the tension.

  The frustration she’d felt upon awakening that morning on Catherine’s couch just as dawn had begun to cast the room in a gray pall lingered still. She’d opened her eyes, struggled to remember where she was and how she’d gotten there, and finally realized that yet again she had fallen asleep, leaving Catherine hanging. By the time she’d stumbled, still stiff and groggy, to the bedroom, Catherine’s alarm went off, and they’d barely had time to say good morning before rushing to shower, dress, and head off to work. She missed her, and worse than that, she had the uneasy feeling she was letting down her end of…things. Again. Fuck.

  “Dinner?” Catherine asked into the silence, wanting to ask if Rebecca was working, and what she was doing, and how she was feeling, but resisted, determined not to burden this spontaneous moment with her own uncertainty and unease.

  “Sure. Page me when you’re finished tonight.”

  “I have patients, and then an appointment. Is 9:00 too late?”

  “It’s fine.” The detective hesitated, then added, “About last night, I won’t make a habit of crashing before the appetizers—”

  “No, really,” Catherine interjected, glancing at her watch. “It’s all right. Hell, I have to go…”

  “Right. I’ll see you later then.”

  “Yes.”

  Five floors apart, they each stood still for a moment, holding a phone with only a dial tone, considering the things they had left unsaid.

  Chapter Seven

  CSI Chief Dee Flanagan didn’t look up at the sound of footsteps approaching across the tile floor of her lab. Carefully, she pipetted an aliquot of fluid containing an emulsion of the material scraped off the bottom of a murder suspect’s shoe into a centrifuge tube. If she was right, there’d be trace amounts of a very specific high-grade motor oil in the supernatant that would match the composition of the brand in the victim’s Ferrari. Footprints at the crime scene indicated that the murderer had stepped in the oil puddle when he’d crossed the garage on his way to crushing the back of the victim’s skull with a tire iron. Not a very inventive means of dispatching his neighbor—a fellow who was apparently spending the afternoons in bed with his wife—but then murder was so rarely clever. The gas chromatography analysis would confirm the match, placing the suspect at the scene. Not enough for an arrest in and of itself, but another link in the chain. Another piece in the puzzle fit neatly into place.

  Dropping the tube into the centrifuge cradle, still without turning toward the intruder, she said into the quiet room, “I don’t have anything for you yet, and I won’t for another two hours. If you keep bugging me, it’s going to be tomorrow. And don’t touch anything.”

  “I haven’t been gone that long,” Rebecca remarked dryly, standing as she always did when in Flanagan’s lab—with her hands safely in her pockets. “I know the drill.”

  Flanagan, the forty-year-old forensic chief, small, wiry, and a head shorter than Rebecca, known to be notoriously short-tempered, turned toward her visitor with undisguised delight. “I’ll be damned. Frye.” She held out her hand. “Maggie said she saw you at the gym. You’re really back, huh?”

  Rebecca took her hand, grinning. “Looks like.”

  “Good. Maybe those monkeys in your division will get some cases solved for a change.”

  “Thanks—I think.”

  “Come on into the office.” Flanagan gestured toward a small cubicle adjoining the sparkling, equipment-filled room. “I know you didn’t drop by just to be sociable.”

  Rebecca followed her. “I need to catch up on a few things. I figured you’d be the one to ask.”

  Flanagan gave her a wary glance as she settled behind her surprisingly messy desk. In sharp contrast to the rest of her domain, which was obsessively organized, her private office was apparent chaos. She knew, however, precisely where every piece of paper, dental model, and crime scene mock-up resided, and woe to the unwary cleaning person who dared move anything a micrometer.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “I never saw the final reports on Hogan and Cruz.”

  Flanagan grimaced. “You’re going to start poking around in things again, aren’t you?”

  “Just getting up to speed,” Rebecca replied neutrally. She eyed the one chair piled with copies of the Journal of Forensic Pathology and concluded it would be safest to remain standing.

  “Bullshit. In the two months you’ve been away, Frye, I haven’t gone senile.” She looked thoughtful for a moment, then continued, “It’s technically still an open case, but it’s been written off by pretty much everyone as a contract hit, and unsolvable. And more importantly, it’s a case I think someone, or several someones, would like to see forgotten.”

  “Two dead cops,” Rebecca said softly, her expression darkening. “Jimmy Hogan and Jeff Cruz. I have to ask myself, why hasn’t the department been turning the city upside down to find out
who killed them? Every day, while I lay up there in that hospital bed, I expected someone to come and talk to me about it. I got old waiting for one of the Homicide dicks to question me, to fill me in, or to ask me about Jeff’s cases. Nothing.”

  Flanagan nodded as she leaned back in her chair and regarded the tall cop steadily. “I know that Cruz was your partner, but maybe you didn’t know him as well as you think.”

  “Don’t play games with me, Flanagan. If you’ve got something to say, spit it out.” Rebecca’s tone was lethally cold. She respected the CSI chief, and over the years had grown to like her, but Jeff Cruz had been her partner. No one came before him in her allegiance—no one except Catherine.

  “I’m not the enemy here, Frye,” Flanagan pointed out in what was for her a reasonable tone. “You may not realize it, but those homicides are open cases on my books, too. Even if they weren’t cops, I’d want to find the perp.” When Rebecca didn’t reply, but merely regarded her with a flat opaque gaze, she exhaled slowly and continued. “There’s been some not so quiet speculation that Jimmy Hogan was dirty. He’d been working underground in the Zamora organization a long time. He had no family, no real friends, and even his bosses didn’t always know what he was doing. His files are so thin you can see through them.”

  “Yeah. He was a perfect undercover agent. For that he gets this from us in return?” Rebecca commented bitterly, expecting no reply. Where is the famous solidarity of the Thin Blue Line now? Bastards.

  “But he did call Jeff Cruz. More than once.”

  “Hogan was Jeff’s training partner for a while when Jeff got out of the Academy. Then Jimmy transferred to Narco and Jeff to Vice. But they had history. It makes sense that Hogan would contact Jeff with intel if he found something that was in our territory.”

  “That may be it, Frye. I’m just telling you what I’ve heard.”

  “So what’s the theory?” Rebecca asked tiredly. “That Jimmy went bad, enticed Jeff with—what? Money? Jeff and Shelly lived in a starter home, for Christ’s sake. He drove a ten-year-old Mustang.”

  “Did you ever get anything solid from Hogan’s intel?” Flanagan asked, ignoring the questions no one could answer.

  “Not much,” Rebecca admitted. “Supposedly, he had gotten on to something involving the chicken trade. He was going to feed us some names. He never got the chance.”

  “Or there wasn’t anything there to report, and Jeff’s meetings with him were a front.”

  “If that were the case, why would Jeff have even bothered to tell me he was meeting Hogan?” Rebecca countered. “He could have done it all under the table.”

  “Maybe Jeff was hedging his bets and covering all the bases. Maybe he figured if things went south with Hogan, he could always claim he was working Hogan for information and just pretended to be rolling over.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Yeah. I agree with you.” Flanagan had the uneasy feeling that Frye was about to fold. Her face was unusually pale, even considering her normally light Nordic coloring; there were faint beads of sweat on her forehead, and her breathing was a bit jerky. In fact, she looked like hell. The criminalist got up and moved around to the front of her desk where she might have a prayer of catching the detective if she dropped. Suggesting that the cop sit down wasn’t an option. You didn’t tell Frye to take it easy.

  “Look, Frye. All I’m saying is that there’s a lot going on around their deaths that none of us understand. As far as I can tell, Homicide has backed way off it, and the brass aren’t going to be real happy about anyone stirring it up. So—be careful who you talk to, and don’t trust anyone.”

  Rebecca leaned a shoulder against the doorframe, wondering if it had suddenly gotten warmer in the small space. A river of sweat ran between her shoulder blades, and she had to blink several times to clear her vision. “I want to see the autopsy reports and your crime scene files.”

  “I can’t give them to you.”

  “Damn it, Dee.” She pushed away from the wall so quickly, Flanagan actually held out a hand to ward off a blow.

  “Jesus, take it easy,” Flanagan breathed when Rebecca halted a few inches from her. “I don’t have them. The whole file was pulled.”

  “Who has it?”

  Flanagan shrugged. “It says Homicide on my log-out sheets, for all that’s worth. I suspect it’s IAD. You know they’d be looking into any officer-related death. That’s SOP.”

  “You gave them your file?” Her tone was incredulous. No one got a hand on Flanagan’s files. Impatiently, she swiped moisture from her forehead and considered taking off her jacket. She moved back a step, putting distance between them, searching for some air.

  “Fuck, no,” Flanagan said, her composure cracking at last. “The bastards raided my files. I don’t know how, but the whole folder is gone.”

  “Don’t you…keep copies, or something?”

  “My reports are all computerized, Frye. Supposedly, the system backs up automatically. Except it didn’t, or someone is lying to me. All I know is that I can’t find them, and the idiots in the technical division who are supposed to know something about this can’t tell me jack shit.”

  Rebecca looked around the office. Motioning with her head toward a computer nearly buried by stacks of folders and reports, she asked, “Is that where you input all your final data?”

  “Not only there; also substations in the various lab divisions. Serology, Toxicology, Prints—they all enter their findings under the case file number and it gets stored that way.”

  “But one way or another, it’s all generated down here in your section?”

  “Yes.” Flanagan could see the wheels turning. “Why? You any good with this kind of thing? I tried but nothing worked.”

  “Not me,” Rebecca said with a short mirthless laugh. “But I might know someone. I’ll let you know.”

  “There wasn’t much in the file anyhow. There was precious little evidence from the scene. I’ve got a few of my handwritten notes from the first walk-through. You’re welcome to see them, and I’ll tell you anything I can.”

  “Why get involved?” Rebecca asked, her tone not critical, merely curious.

  “Because it’s my job.”

  Their eyes met in a moment of perfect understanding, and for the first time, Rebecca smiled. “Thanks, Flanagan.”

  “Don’t mention it. Oh, and Frye?”

  Rebecca raised an eyebrow. “Yeah?”

  “Watch your back.”

  “Yeah. I’ll do that.”

  *

  Catherine unlocked the door that opened into her office from a hallway off the main corridor and crossed the room to her desk. Normally, her patients exited through this door so they did not have to go out through the waiting room and run into other patients who were scheduled to follow. It also allowed her to come and go without seeing her patients before or after the session. She glanced at the clock on the opposite wall and saw that it was 5:28 p.m. With a tired sigh, she settled into the high-backed leather chair behind her desk and picked up the phone. After dialing the extension for her secretary, she closed her eyes briefly.

  “Yes?” Joyce responded.

  “Is my 5:30 here yet?”

  “Yes.” Right on time and looking like she’s about to face a firing squad. Joyce smiled faintly at the serious-faced young woman sitting across from her and was rewarded by a brief lift of her surprisingly full lips in return.

  “Good. Give me a minute, and then tell her to come in.”

  “Anything I can get you? I put fresh coffee on.”

  “No, thanks. I’ll grab a cup between this one and the last one.”

  “Very well.”

  A moment later, Catherine’s door from her waiting room opened, and her 5:30 appointment walked in. “Good evening, Officer.”

  “Hi.” Mitchell settled into her customary spot, the right-hand leather chair of the pair that faced the psychiatrist’s desk. As she sat, she plucked at the thighs of her sharply creased trouse
rs to minimize the wrinkling. Her back did not touch the upright portion of the chair.

  “I see you’re in uniform, so you’re still working, I take it?”

  “More or less,” Mitchell acknowledged. “I’m getting paid. No street duty though. It’s a desk job, more or less.”

  “And I assume you find that frustrating?”

  “Well, until this morning, I would have said so, yes.”

  “Really?” Catherine raised a surprised eyebrow. “I had the impression you considered anything other than a street assignment almost a disciplinary action.”

  Mitchell smiled. “Most cops like to think of themselves as street cops. After all, that’s where the action is. That’s where you make your stripes. The only ones who don’t want street duty are the ones who come to law enforcement with the intent to be administrators. They’re the MBAs who want to be commissioner someday and the lawyers who can’t find jobs and hope that a year or two of police work will give them a step up into the prosecutor’s office. They only put in enough street time to fulfill their basic requirements before angling for something that will get them an administrative position.”

  “So most officers would find your present duty undesirable?”

  “Well…” She still wasn’t entirely certain how much she should reveal to the psychiatrist. She felt a lot safer talking to her then she would have to the regular departmental shrink, but there was no telling how much of what they discussed would make its way back to her division commander or into her personnel file. Still, it felt good to be able to talk to someone.

  Carefully, she continued. “The duty sergeant gave me an assignment that I’m sure he thought would just take me off the streets and put me somewhere where everyone could forget about me. Usually when they want to bury someone, they move them to the property room, which is an assignment that most people get when they’ve been disciplined but can’t be fired or where older uniformed officers who are approaching retirement and want something easy to do get posted. He probably figured if he stuck me in property, it would have been a little obvious. Then if I complained to my union rep, it would have made things touchy. So he posted me to what he thought would be a dead-end duty, but I think he figured wrong.”