Corruption of Power

by Brenda English

  “You found the body?” he asked as other police got out of the newly arrived cars.

  “Yes, in the living room. I went in because he called me to come over, and then I couldn’t get him to answer the door.”

  “Any sign of anyone else in the house?”

  “Not that I saw, but I didn’t go through the whole house.”

  “Okay, we’d better search it. Would you go over and sit in one of the other cars while we go through the house, please?” As I walked toward the rear police car he called out instructions to the other officers, who quickly and expertly began a search of the yards, front and back, the garage, and then inside the house. The ambulance crew, a man and a woman, waited patiently until they could go inside and confirm that the victim was beyond their help. I watched as more lights inside the house came on one by one, first in the hallway and then throughout the second floor. By the time three of the four cops who had gone into the house came back out, two more cars were pulling in behind the one in which I sat. Both cars were unmarked, and when I turned around to look out the rear window, I saw Bill Russell getting out of the first one and Noah Lansing walking up from the second.

  Well, I thought, my luck is holding. Snake eyes, start to finish. Lansing already had me at the top of his list of people not to trust. If he didn’t like anything about the scene or my explanation, the night was going to be very long indeed.

  Lansing said something to Bill, and they stopped to talk to each other for a moment by Bill’s car. I heard Lansing say, “Shit!” I guessed that Bill had told him I was involved. They turned to come up to the house, and I got out of the cruiser in front of them.

  “McPhee,” Bill said, sounding as if he were trying to decide whether to be mystified or exasperated, “what the hell is this? How come you called this in?”

  “I found the body,” I replied simply, my eyes going of their own accord not to Bill but to Lansing. Unlike Bill, there wasn’t much question of his mood. He looked pretty aggravated.

  “Can you be trusted to stay here while we go inside for a few minutes?” Lansing asked, his voice rife with irritation.

  “Sure,” I said, trying not to get defensive in return. He was going to be even angrier with me before the night was over. I didn’t want to push any more of his buttons any sooner than necessary. I sat back down in the car. Lansing turned and started toward the house.

  Bill put his left arm on the top of the open door and his right on the roof, bending down to look inside.

  “This had better be good,” he said. “I can bail you out with him only so many times.” Apparently Bill had decided he wasn’t entirely happy with me either. But him I could needle.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I told him sarcastically, “but I’ll make a good and honest confession.”

  “Yeah, right!” He shook his head, straightened up, and walked up to the house, where Lansing was talking with the cops who had driven up in the first car. When Bill got to them, they went into the house as a group.

  As for me, well, for all my bravado with Bill, I was trying to get my legs to stop trembling. What had happened was just beginning to hit me. Finding Morris dead was bad enough, but it finally occurred to me that he might be dead because of what I had said to Ed Lloyd at the cemetery this morning. I was beginning to worry that I might have dangerously underestimated Senator Lloyd’s deductive abilities. The shock of finding Morris’s body, the strain of dealing with the police, and the growing fear that I somehow had gotten Morris killed were unnerving me. As I leaned back against the seat and closed my eyes to do some yoga breathing, I realized my teeth were clamped together and chattering as well.

  * * * *

  Some fifteen minutes later I had managed to calm my mind and body back to a manageable point, and neighbors, several sporting dogs in the current fashionable breeds, had gathered along the street to find out what was going on. Two of the policemen had cordoned off the yard with yellow crime-scene tape and were keeping the neighbors back from the property and responding to their worried questions with vague answers to the effect that there wasn’t anything anyone could tell them yet.

  I stood up next to the cruiser to test my legs—much steadier now—and saw Bill and Lansing coming down the front steps. Coming, unfortunately, right in my direction.

  “Okay,” Lansing said once they reached me, “you’ve got a lot to talk about. Get in.”

  Once more I sat down in the backseat of the cruiser, this time scooting over to the passenger’s side when Lansing made a move to climb in beside me. Bill opened the driver’s door and got into the front seat, where he closed the door and turned sideways to listen to whatever it was I was going to tell them.

  Lansing closed his door as well, sealing us off from the murmuring voices of the neighbors and the chatter of the rest of the police radios. Bill reached down to turn off the radio in the car we occupied and to turn on the dome light over our heads. He looked at Lansing. Lansing looked at him. They both looked at me.

  “Okay, McPhee,” Lansing said, “I want the whole story, and you’re the one who had better not bullshit me. I’ve got a dead doctor in there who appears to have killed himself, and I don’t have time for any crap about reporters’ rights. You can start with why you’re here in the first place.” Bill, I noticed, wasn’t jumping to my defense.

  “He called and asked me to come over,” I said, thinking to myself, Keep it simple, keep it simple.

  “You knew him?”

  “Yes.”

  “How well?”

  “Not very.”

  “So you didn’t know him very well,” Lansing echoed, the disbelief evident in his voice, “but when he decided to kill himself, he called you? He didn’t call a close friend. He didn’t call his family. He called you.”

  I shrugged, the picture of innocence.

  “Okay,” Lansing continued, incredulity written all over his face, “go on. So he called and asked you to come over. What happened when you got here?”

  “The garage door was open and the dining-room light was on, but I couldn’t get him to answer the door. Finally, I got worried. When I checked the side door from the garage, it was unlocked, so I went in through it. I… I found him in the living room. He was already dead.”

  “Yeah, we could see that much,” Lansing responded sarcastically. “He also has what looks like a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the temple, and there’s a pistol in his hand. What did you do when you found him? Did you touch him, move him at all? Touch anything in the room?”

  “I went over and looked to see if he was alive, but I couldn’t see any signs of it. I felt his wrist for a pulse.”

  “What else did you touch besides the body?”

  I rethought my movements. “Just doorknobs and light switches. In the garage, the kitchen, and the living room. And the front door. I called nine-one-one from my car.”

  Up until this moment Bill had been quiet, just watching us. Now he decided to stir the pot and show me I wasn’t fooling him.

  “McPhee,” he said, “were you doing some kind of story with this guy?”

  Well, here it was. Did I tell him or not? It would have been easy just to spill everything I knew or guessed and let the police handle it. Especially given what had happened to Peter Morris. But when the moment came, I couldn’t do it. Like Morris, I knew that telling the cops everything meant I would lose any control over how this thing played out, any chance at exclusivity. I wanted this story badly, wanted to nail it myself. Especially after finding Morris’s body. If Ed Lloyd had anything to do with Morris being dead because of what I had said, there was now a personal score to settle between us. I wanted more than ever to find a way to lay Ann Kane’s death—and now Morris’s, too—at Lloyd’s doorstep.

  “I can’t tell you that,” I answered flatly.

  “Sutton, be sensible,” Bill cautioned. “You have to tell us what you know.”

  “He’s right,” Lansing said. I could see he was making an effort not to
start yelling. “If you know more about this than you’re saying, it could help explain why he killed himself.”

  “That’s just it,” I told him. “I don’t know anything. Morris had a theory about something I was interested in. But it was supposition on his part and guesswork on my part. I don’t have anything concrete.”

  “Morris is dead. Isn’t that concrete enough for you?” Lansing asked nastily, his temper beginning to fray. “Nothing you tell us can hurt him anymore, that’s for sure.”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” I said. I knew that the angrier he got, the calmer I would have to stay, or we could be here all night.

  Bill was still thinking, trying to read between my lines.

  “Do you think it was a suicide, Sutton?” he asked quietly.

  Lansing turned to look at Bill. Immediately, I could see the night getting longer as Bill’s question sent a whole new train of thought along the track of Lansing’s mind.

  “It certainly looks like one,” I told Bill. Well, that much was true. It did look like a suicide.

  “Forget what it looks like,” Lansing interjected. “Tell us what you know. It won’t help your friend in there, but it might help you.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked in irritation, getting a little tired of being bullied.

  “Just what it sounded like,” he answered. “If you know why Morris is dead and you’re withholding that information, you could be making big problems for yourself. For all we know, you could have killed him and made it look like a suicide.”

  He had done it again. He had pulled the big-bad-cop routine and pissed me off.

  “Detective,” I snapped, “don’t be an ass. And let’s get something straight here once and for all. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and you’re not the first cop to threaten me. But you don’t scare me any more than they did. So unless you’ve got something you can make stick, drop the idle threats of bringing charges against me!”

  “Believe me, I’d like nothing more right now!” he said angrily. “A night in a holding cell could do you a world of good!”

  “Noah…” Bill started to warn him. A horn blew loudly beside us. It was a group of crime-scene investigators who needed to talk with Lansing. He got out of the car and walked around to speak briefly with them through the driver’s open window.

  Looking out at him and then out the windshield in front of us, I realized that while we had been having our little chat the crowd had grown in size by several reporters, including Will Anderson, my coworker at the News who covered the police on the weekends. If they hadn’t recognized my car already or heard that I somehow was involved in this, they would know it as soon as I got out and tried to drive away.

  Lansing came back around, opened the door, and looked at me.

  “You can go,” he said. “Go get your car and get the hell out of here. We’ll let you know when we need to talk with you again. And don’t worry, we will be talking about this a lot more!”

  “So what are you going to say to the rest of the press about my finding the body?”

  “I don’t see that you’ve left us very much to tell them,” said Bill, showing his own displeasure with me. “Morris is dead. It looks like he killed himself. You knew him. He called you to come over. When you got here, he was dead. You called the police. Is that about right?”

  Lansing and I both thought it over. No self-respecting reporter would be satisfied with that, but they sure as hell weren’t going to get anything more from me, and the police didn’t know any more.

  “It’ll do for now,” I told Bill.

  “Like hell,” Lansing gruffed. He gave me another hard look and then slammed the car door and walked up to the house.

  Bill and I exited the car together.

  “You know a lot more than you’re saying, don’t you, Sutton?” he asked me as we stood out in the cool night air once again.

  “I have suspicions, Bill, but I don’t know anything.”

  “Well, I know you, Sutton. If there’s a chance this is more than what it looks like, you had better think hard about keeping Lansing in the dark.”

  “Come on, Bill. What’s he going to do to me? Charge me with failing to do his job for him?”

  “Sutton, be careful.”

  “Oh, for… He doesn’t scare me, Bill.”

  “I didn’t mean Lansing,” he answered, and started walking toward the house.

  I walked in his wake to the driveway. As I got into my car I heard the reporters’ exclamations as they recognized me and realized I was behind the police tape, where they couldn’t go. I started the car, and as I waited for one of the cops to move the cruiser parked behind me so I could get out, I saw Bill going over to soothe their fears of my getting preferential treatment and to answer their questions. I decided there was no point in hanging around.

  * * * *

  What I would have to do was to warn Rob Perry. If I let him get hit with this without an advisory from me, shit creek would look like a resort. It would be bad enough if he heard from Will Anderson first that I had found the body. It would be even worse if he started getting calls from angry cops without hearing my side of it. It was 11:30 on Friday night. I knew Rob still would be at the paper for at least another hour, until the presses were running without any problems.

  As soon as I got out of the subdivision where Dr. Morris had lived and into traffic, I called the city room. For once, I was too tired to care whether someone could listen in to my call.

  “Perry,” Rob answered, rarely standing on ceremonies such as “hello.”

  “Rob, it’s Sutton.”

  “McPhee, what’s up?”

  “I’ve got a little problem, Rob, and I think it’s about to be your problem as well, so I thought I had better warn you.”

  “Who’s mad at you now?” he asked.

  “Most of the Fairfax County police, for starters.”

  “So tell me something surprising. Okay, let’s hear it.”

  Quickly, I told him that I had gone to visit a source and had found him dead, apparently a suicide, that it was a doctor in McLean, that I had called the police, that Will had been there to cover it.

  “Is this about Janet Taylor?”

  “No, but it’s just as big, if not bigger.”

  “You mind telling me what, exactly?”

  “Listen, Rob,” I said, “don’t ask. I’m on my cellular phone. And besides, it would be just like this detective to try to muscle you into making me talk to them about what I’m working on. What you don’t know, you can’t be forced to tell. You know I know what I’m doing. Just trust me for a little while, won’t you?”

  “McPhee, if you don’t—”

  I interrupted. “I just need a little time, Rob. A few days. If the cops call, help me stall them until I can nail this thing down. Okay?”

  “But what about the Taylor murder? Who’s gonna be covering that with Ken if you’re off on whatever wild hair this is?”

  “I will. I will,” I tried to reassure him. “Don’t worry, I’m not letting that one slide. Help me out here, Rob. Please.”

  “Okay, okay, stop. You know I hate it when you beg. But, Sutton…”

  “Yes?”

  “You had better make this worth it.”

  “ ’Bye, Rob… and thanks,” I said. I hung up. I knew he would back me up.

  As traffic flowed around me I decided the best thing to do at this point was to go home and get some sleep. I would turn off my phone so anyone trying to call me would get the answering machine. It was almost midnight, so I probably could avoid any potential visitors until tomorrow morning. By then I already would be gone.

  I was planning to show up at Hub Taylor’s house first thing, in hopes of finding him at home. I not only needed to grill him about his wife’s death—a story that I knew better than to neglect just because I had another big one going on—but he was also a crony and protégé of Ed Lloyd. Maybe I could get a better reading of Ed Lloyd and his potential as a s
leazeball killer from Taylor.

  That was when it occurred to me. What I should have seen from the beginning when Peter Morris told me he thought Lloyd might be connected to Ann Kane’s death. What I hadn’t seen because I had been looking at the two things as separate. Before Ann Kane died, she had had sex with—or had been raped by—two men, not one. One man had AB-negative blood, like Ed Lloyd. The other had O-positive. It was possible that the two men had sex with Ann at two separate times, but the medical examiner had said that the condition of the sperm made him think all of it had been deposited at approximately the same time. If that were true and if Ed Lloyd was Mr. AB-negative, who was his partner? Who did Ed Lloyd trust enough to initiate into his nasty little game, enough to let that person know such a damaging secret about him?

  I didn’t know all Ed Lloyd’s friends, but I could have smacked myself for not seeing, until now, one very obvious candidate for Mr. O-positive—Hub Taylor. Jesus!

  The honk of a horn to my left brought me back to my driving, and I saw that I was drifting over into the next lane. I also saw that my exit onto Duke Street was coming up quickly. I put on my turn signal and moved onto the exit ramp. As I merged into the Duke Street traffic my conscious brain noted what my subconscious had been recording ever since I left Morris’s McLean neighborhood—a set of distinctive headlights on a large dark sedan that had stayed one to two cars behind me through McLean, onto the Beltway, and again onto I-395. Now it was directly behind me, about three car lengths back. As Duke Street went past Landmark Center and curved down to Reynolds Street, I gradually moved across the traffic to the left lane. So did the sedan. At Paxton Street, I moved into the left-turn lane, to go the last block to my building. So did the sedan. But just as I pulled into the building’s front parking lot and decided I was being followed, the sedan glided past, on up Holmes Run Parkway, toward Van Dorn.

  You’re getting paranoid, McPhee, I told myself. It’s just a coincidence. There are four other high-rises between my building and Van Dorn Street. If the sedan were going from McLean to any of those buildings or to several other nearby town-house and apartment complexes, the driver might easily have chosen the same route I took, to get there. I put it out of my mind and circled my building looking for a parking space, finally finding one at the far end.