Deviations

by Mike Markel

  “I went back to the university. I took Jorge, and we went into his email.”

  “You went to the chief to get permission again?”

  “No, I just went to the university attorney, and since she okayed the search on Allan Friedman’s request she interpreted my search as part of the same thing.”

  “Okay, you got back to his email at the university. And?”

  “He had a bunch of emails to Andrew. I went to Andrew’s service provider and got his information.”

  “All right, so how does that say Howell was telling the truth about how there wasn’t a BC?”

  “When Jorge and I were in Willson Fredericks’ account, I had my copies of the BC emails in my hand.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The BC emails were phony. They didn’t exist.”

  “What?”

  “I’m saying Allan Friedman made them up.”

  Which explained why Jorge had told me he hadn’t gone out to the university with Allan Friedman—when he was Nick Corelli—to look at the emails. Allan Friedman custom ordered the incriminating emails from Washington. “Okay, and why do you think he did that?”

  “I think he did that so he could hang the Weston murder on Willson Fredericks.”

  I thought about that a second. “I don’t know. That could buy him some strokes in Washington—at least for a while. But if it gets back to his bosses that he framed a professor who was innocent? That can’t help your career.”

  “How would the FBI know Fredericks was innocent? Look at what we’ve got now. Friedman can report that he’s got Weston’s killer.”

  “Ryan, do you know what happened out at Lake Hollow?”

  “Just that you got roughed up.”

  I was feeling too wrung out to go into the whole story now, and Ryan was looking upset enough as it was. “Allan Friedman did get Weston’s killer. He was a lone wolf named Leonard Woolsey.”

  “I didn’t see anything about that.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “You didn’t. It wasn’t reported. I got roughed up by Woolsey. The FBI team came in and took him out.”

  “What you’re saying is that Friedman framed Willson Fredericks for the Weston murder, then got the real killer: Leonard Woolsey.”

  “I don’t think that’s it, Ryan. I think Friedman made up the emails just so we could put some pressure on Willson Fredericks to see if he would lead us to Weston’s killer. Fredericks just reacted wrong.”

  “So the suicide was collateral damage?” Ryan said.

  “That’s how I’d like to think of it.”

  We sat there for a while. Ryan was looking miserable.

  I said, “What is it?”

  “I should have told the chief about Andrew Howell. Maybe I could have prevented tonight.”

  “Why didn’t you tell the chief?”

  “The way Friedman gave me the suicide note—rather than giving it to the chief—I just had a hunch he was telling me to look into this on my own time, quietly.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe Friedman and the chief had an arrangement: the chief would be silent about the phony emails. In exchange, Friedman would help the chief out by alerting him to a threat to one of his detectives. I really have no idea what happened.”

  I didn’t, either. “I don’t see how anyone could’ve prevented Howell coming at me tonight.”

  “If we’d had him on a round-the-clock surveillance, we could have.”

  “Ryan, you know we don’t have the resources for that. There’d have to be solid intel this guy is coming after me before any chief would authorize that.”

  We sat there, lights coming on in the houses up and down the street.

  “Another way to look at what’s happened,” Ryan said. “Two civilians knew the emails were phony, right?”

  “Willson Fredericks and Andrew Howell.”

  “Fredericks took himself out,” Ryan said. “And you just took out Howell.”

  “Friedman told you to check out Howell. You do it. If Howell goes into a fetal position because his boyfriend is dead, or leaves town, end of story. You stop looking at him. No harm done. If Howell goes batshit, like he did, busts into my house, he’s holding a gun, starts coming at me, what am I supposed to do?”

  “You’re supposed to incapacitate him.”

  “Which I did.”

  “I understand that,” Ryan said. “I just don’t like the thought that we’re mopping up for Friedman after he manufactured evidence against Willson Fredericks.”

  We were silent for a little while. It was a nice night, people coming out to walk around after dinner. About twenty people were gathered outside my house. A gunshot, six squad cars with sirens, an ambulance, some yellow tape: people get curious.

  Ryan said, “I noticed Howell’s trigger finger was broken.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “You remembered the Krav Maga training.”

  “Apparently,” I said. “Don’t really remember what happened.”

  “That’s good,” Ryan said. “If it’s not instinct, you’ll go too slow. Get yourself killed.”

  “I don’t mind dying.” I turned to him. “But I do know one thing: I’m not gonna let myself get attacked again. Not by anyone. Ever.” I looked down at my beat-up hands.

  “Karen,” Ryan said, gently. I turned to him. “What happened at Lake Hollow?”

  “I told you. Friedman and the other FBI guys took out Weston’s killer, and Christopher Barry’s simpleton son.”

  “What happened to you at Lake Hollow?”

  I shook my head. “Some stuff,” I said, dabbing at a tear. “Nothing, really.” I turned my head to look out the side window of Ryan’s blue Mitsubishi.

  “I’m so sorry, Karen,” he said, his hand touching my fingers. “Come here,” he said, putting his arms around me. Then I lost it. Completely.

  “I should have been there with you.”

  It was a minute before I was able to talk. “No, Ryan. It was my bright idea. All my idea.”

  Chapter 24

  “Police Detective Second Grade Karen Seagate arrived home last night at around 8:45 pm, when she was attacked, in her own house, by a man later identified as Andrew Howell. Mr. Howell was armed with both a knife and a pistol. When Mr. Howell advanced on Detective Seagate in a threatening manner with the pistol, she used appropriate means of self-defense, breaking his nose. In addition, she wrested control of his pistol. When he continued to approach her in a threatening manner, Detective Seagate discharged the pistol, the single bullet lodging in his chest. He expired at the scene.

  “All officer-involved shootings are automatically subject to a thorough investigation, but I can say that the preliminary evidence indicates that Detective Seagate acted in an exemplary manner, first by attempting to stop the attacker using non-lethal force and disarming him, and then by using appropriate force to defend herself in what was clearly a life-threatening situation. If there are any questions, I’ll take them now.”

  A young reporter from Channel 5 spoke up. “Chief, do you have any motive in the Howell attack?”

  “Unfortunately, not at this time,” the chief said. “We suspect it was a burglary gone wrong. Detective Seagate had just returned home from grocery shopping, and we believe she caught Mr. Howell in the act.”

  “Chief,” said a reporter from the paper, “you’re saying this Mr. Howell decided to burgle the home of a detective? He did not know Detective Seagate?”

  “We believe that Mr. Howell did not know Detective Seagate. Mr. Howell had some misdemeanors a number of years ago, as well as several traffic violations, but he had had no official contact with Detective Seagate. He is not a suspect in any current investigation, nor has he been questioned by the Rawlings Police Department in relation to any current or past investigations.”

  “Chief Murtaugh,” another TV report said, “can you give us an update on the Senator Weston investigation?”

  “That investigation is open and remains the highest prio
rity for the Rawlings Police Department. We are pursuing all leads aggressively, and I will issue a statement if we have any news to announce.”

  “But you have nothing to report now?” the TV reporter said.

  “Unfortunately, no,” the chief said.

  I turned off the TV. The chief was pretty cool. Everything he said about my relationship with Andrew Howell—my lack of a relationship—was technically true, but really a big-assed lie. There was nothing to connect Howell to anyone in the department, including the chief. Special Agent Allan Friedman had never even officially set foot in Montana, of course, and I wasn’t counting on him to suffer an attack of conscience and show up all blubbering on TV about how he pushed this professor too far so he killed himself and his boyfriend flipped out and attacked a cop and got killed.

  I’ll never know exactly what Andrew Howell was planning to do that night in my house. “Planning to do” was maybe the wrong phrase. I think he was just real busted up about losing his boyfriend—and thinking we killed him. Maybe he was going to kill me, then kill himself. His knife was sharp, his pistol loaded. He might have done it. Too bad he never got a chance to think about what Willson Fredericks did to protect him. Whether that would have made any difference, you never know. But you don’t often see that kind of selfless love. I don’t, anyway.

  I’d discharged my weapon only once before, in a Domestic Disturbance, when I had to stop a guy who was going to kill Ryan. I think I’ll be okay with the investigation of the Howell shooting. Like the chief said, I used appropriate force. A guy comes at you with deadly intent, you fire at him. And if you fire, you aim to incapacitate him. That means you go for the torso. Maybe I could have aimed for a limb, but I didn’t know how many rounds were in his pistol, and if you go for a limb and you miss, or he keeps coming at you, and you’re out of rounds—well, you’re shit out of luck. Maybe I could have aimed a little lower, at his guts, so he maybe could have survived. And strapping on a new colostomy bag couple times a day might have helped him remember why he shouldn’t have come after me. But I didn’t see that as a chance I needed to take.

  I’ve got nothing against the guy personally. But he was in my damn kitchen, holding a knife to my throat, threatening to kill me, waving a pistol around. Like I told Ryan, I’m not going to let anyone attack me. Next person who tries, I kill him—or die trying.

  I know that’s not the right way to think about things. Every situation is different. Not every attack is going to kill me, and so I should be concentrating on making an appropriate response. I know I should. But at this point, I’m going to keep it simple: I kill him. Does that make sense?

  Maybe my thinking will change when I get farther away from this. But my hunch is you never really get past some things. The things that people did to you, the things you did to yourself. They get into you and become part of you. If you’re lucky, scar tissue grows around them and you can keep going, the way some veterans carry around slugs or shrapnel. They limp a little or can’t do some things they used to do. But they keep going. That’s the important thing.

  The bad things change you, but they don’t become you. At least, I hope they don’t. You should try not to let them become you. You should work real hard at it. What I’ve learned, you have to work real hard at almost everything.

  Leonard Woolsey was gone, and so was Ricky Sidoway. Willson Fredericks and Andrew Howell were gone. Dolores Weston was gone, and her three kids were never going to know why she was killed. I hoped the three of them had their own people who could help them get through it. Maybe the three of them were their own people.

  The other stuff, though—the unanswered questions about what Friedman and the chief did or didn’t do, what they knew or didn’t know—all of that would take me and Ryan a little while to work through. The line between right and wrong can get a little blurry on this job, and sometimes innocent people die because of it. And that’s even if everyone is trying to do the right thing—which you can never be certain they are.

  Not knowing Ryan all that well, I wasn’t sure if he knew how complicated things can get. I knew, of course, because I’m older and I’ve seen some things. I didn’t want him thinking he could have prevented what happened to me. I was the one decided to go out to Lake Hollow on my own.

  I’ll be on the lookout for any signs he blames himself. I’ll be there to help him, any way I can, over the next weeks and months. However long he needs. I want to. He’s my partner.

  * * * *

  “Karen? Robin.”

  “Hey, Robin, what’s up?” Her call surprised me.

  “Just wanted to let you know that I put the blood panels for Dolores Weston in her file. We got the results when you were on leave. She was clean.”

  It was my first day back from the fourteen-day medical leave. “Yeah, good, thanks. I sorta figured she’d be.” With the blood panels in, we had completed the forensics. The Weston case would now stay open forever, since the murderer officially died in a DUI and would never be connected to the case.

  “There’s something else I wanted to mention, Karen.”

  “Yeah?” I was curious about how she was talking, because Robin never tiptoed around. When she had something to say, she just said it.

  “I got this friend over at the hospital—she’s a lab tech? She told me something weird happened over there couple weeks ago, maybe you should know about it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, she didn’t want to go into all the details, but something about how one day the head of her department tells her to delete some shit from the system.”

  “What kind of shit, Robin?”

  “I don’t know. Just that she’d spent a few hours doing some procedure, then her boss tells her to destroy the data.”

  “Your friend, is she the kind of person who does what she’d told?”

  “Please, Karen. You know I don’t have any friends like that.”

  “She say she might want to get together with me for a cup of coffee?”

  “As a matter of fact, she did. Says she has an envelope for you.” Robin paused. “You have any idea what she’s talking about?”

  “I think I might.”

  “You want her number?”

  “Yeah, give me her number.”

  ###

  About the Author

  Mike Markel is the author of the Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery series:

  Big Sick Heart

  Deviations

  The Broken Saint

  Three-Ways

  Fractures

  He lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife.

  Thank you for taking time to read Deviations: A Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery. If you enjoyed it, please consider telling your friends or posting a short review. Word of mouth is an author’s best friend.

  Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mikemarkel

  Friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Mike-Markel-mystery-writer/111910452241789

  MikeMarkel.com

  The Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery Series

  To sample or buy any of these titles, visit Mike Markel’s page on Amazon.

  Visit MikeMarkel.com.

  BIG SICK HEART

  Bad decisions have finally caught up with police detective Karen Seagate. Her drinking has destroyed her marriage and hurt her job performance, and the chief is looking for any excuse to fire her. Still, she and her new partner, a young Mormon guy who seems to have arrived from another century or another planet, intend to track down whoever killed Arlen Hagerty, the corrupt leader of Soul Savers. Clawing his way to the top, Hagerty created plenty of enemies, including his wife, his mistress, his debate partner, the organization’s founder, and the politician he was blackmailing. When Seagate causes a car crash that sends a young girl to Intensive Care, the chief thinks he finally has his opportunity. But even the chief can’t believe what Seagate does when she finally catches the killer.

  DEVIATIONS

  Former police detective
Karen Seagate is drinking herself to oblivion and having dangerous sex with losers from the bar when the new police chief tracks her down. The brutal rape and murder of a state senator by a lone-wolf extremist gives Seagate a chance to return to the department, but the new chief has set down some rules, and Seagate is not good with rules. At this point, she is just trying to stay alive. With nothing left to lose and nobody left to trust—not even her partner, Ryan—Seagate goes off the grid to find the killer. She doesn’t care that she will be fired again. She has much bigger problems, now that she has been captured inside the neo-Nazi compound.

  THE BROKEN SAINT

  Seagate and Miner investigate the murder of Maricel Salizar, a young Filipino exchange student at Central Montana State. The most obvious suspect is the boyfriend, who happens to have gang connections. And then there’s Amber, a fellow student who’s obviously incensed at Maricel for a sexual indiscretion involving Amber’s boyfriend. But the evidence keeps leading Seagate and Miner back to the professor, an LDS bishop who hosted her in his dysfunctional home. Seagate takes it in stride that the professor can’t seem to tell the truth about his relationship with the victim, but her devout partner, Ryan Miner, believes that a high-ranking fellow Mormon who violates a sacred trust deserves special punishment.

  THREE-WAYS

  When grad student Austin Sulenka is found strangled, nude on his bed, the first question for Seagate and Miner is whether it was an auto-asphyxiation episode gone wrong. Evidence strewn around his small apartment suggests that he spent his last night with a number of different women. One was Tiffany, a former student who still resented the injustice of getting a C in the course when he promised her a B if she slept with him. Another was Austin’s beautiful girlfriend, May, who had never before encountered a man she could not totally beguile. Then there was his thesis adviser, Suzannah Montgomery, who might have inadvertently revealed to Austin some information about her past that could ruin her own career. These three women and their other partners had motives to kill the philandering graduate student. As Seagate and her partner try to unravel the complicated couplings, she finds herself in a three-way relationship that threatens to destroy her own fragile sobriety.