“I had to leave because I’d gotten a text from Morgan. I’d met him a few weeks ago at a dinner hosted by a buddy I’d gone to college with. As soon as he found out that I owned a paper, he latched on to me. Kept asking questions all night, questions that boiled down to wanting to know if I paid informants for story leads.”
“Do you?” I nibbled on my blueberry muffin by pinching little segments off the top. Per Patty’s instructions, I’d dusted the tops of the muffins with large-crystal sugar. It made the top crust too delicious for words.
“Yes, we do, if a lead pans out. And as soon as Morgan found that out, he started negotiating what he could get for what he called “a really juicy lead.” He said it would rock Camden Falls at its core. He played it up big. Said he could provide solid proof… It was all teaser talk. He talked big, but said nothing of substance. But I gave him my contact info anyway, which he used. Again and again. But never for anything solid. His promises were always huge, “world changing,” but vague. Then when we were making the aglio e olio, he sent me a text saying that he was finally ready to tell me everything but that I had to come right then.”
I’d wanted to strangle Joel when he’d run out that day, leaving me to figure out how to make a pasta dish I’d never made before. But it was a hard lesson best learned early—Joel’s life as a newsman would always come first on his list of priorities. I’d be second, at best.
That thought made the charming, sweet, handsome man in front of me a little less attractive. A girl didn’t like to think of herself as second to anything when it came to a man’s affections.
“What happened when you met up with Morgan?” I asked.
“We bartered a bit, settled on a price range for the story lead, and then he told me what it was. One of Camden Falls’ cops was dirty.”
Panic flooded me and squeezed on my heart. Not Brad. Tell me it’s not Brad.
“Not Brad,” Joel said as if he’d read my mind.
I laughed half-heartedly. “Was I that obvious?”
“Yeah… But that’s okay. Brad’s a good guy. If I’ve got to be measured against somebody, I’m glad it’s him.” Joel’s affable charm was back at full wattage. The man had a way of making me melt.
“So the dirty cop…?” I prompted. “It wasn’t a lie? Wasn’t a fake lead?”
“Nope, not at all. The guy was dirty. Matt Dill. He was taking payoff money from a local drug dealer to warn him whenever the cops were getting too close. The guy would shut the whole operation down, change everything about his method of operations, and the cops would have to start all over again trying to figure out who this guy is.”
“Was he able to tell you the drug dealer’s name, too?”
“No, just the dirty cop.”
“What happened to him?”
“Last I heard he was suspended without pay pending an investigation, but it’s in the bag. The guy’s as good as gone and there might be some criminal charges added to his troubles, too.”
“All because of Morgan’s tip?”
“Yep, it was a good tip. A really good tip. I almost feel bad about following it up.”
“Why? Because Morgan got killed?”
“No, because the cop seems decent other than being dirty. It’s a sad situation. The guy is raising his little brother and his wife is pregnant and ready to pop. But what he was doing—allowing a drug dealer to continue a large, multi-pronged operation—was hurting a lot of people. It’s not just about him, his wife and kid and little brother. The life of somebody else’s wife and kid and little brother could be being ruined by this drug dealer.”
“Do you think that the drug dealer did it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I guess it could have been a get-even move. Maybe the dealer felt double-crossed,” Joel said.
“But if Morgan had had the name of the dealer, wouldn’t he have offered that to you, too? Would that kind of information have been useful to you?”
Joel blew a low whistle. “Yeah, breaking that kind of story could have put the paper on the map beyond just the boundaries of this town. A story like that probably would have gotten picked up for national syndication.”
“So it would have been worth something to you, you would have paid him for it?”
“Yeah, definitely.”
“That makes me think he didn’t know who the drug dealer was. If Morgan’s driving concern was getting paid for a ‘juicy’ lead and giving you the name of the local drug lord would have gotten him paid, he would have told you who the drug lord was if he’d known who it was.”
“Okay, I’m following you,” Joel said, folding his arms on the table and leaning forward.
“If Morgan didn’t know who the drug lord was, it would seem like a bad choice for the drug lord to kill him.”
“How come?”
“Because now there’s a big investigation as the police try to sort out who killed Morgan. Drug dealers usually like to avoid drawing police attention to them. Killing Morgan would have risked doing just that.”
“That’s an excellent point! You’re really good at this, Kylie.”
“Thanks,” I said, smiling from the pleasure of his praise. When an investigative reporter told you that you were good at investigating, it really meant something!
“So what do you think about the police?” Joel asked.
“What about the police?”
“Do you think that one of them might have killed Morgan?”
“Oh wow…” That idea gave me a heavy pause for thought. The implications were terrifying. “You think that maybe there’s more than one dirty cop on Camden Falls’ police force?”
Joel shrugged. “Could be. Or maybe not. Police officers can be a clannish bunch.”
“How so?”
“These guys train together. They work together. And they face the risk of death together. There’s a strong loyalty within the police force. If you fail to have another officer’s back, it can put you in serious jeopardy because it means that when the chips are down, there’s a chance that the other officers won’t be there for you.”
“What’s that got to do with Morgan?”
“Like I said, officers are trained to have each other’s backs. Unfortunately, that ideology doesn’t always stop at the same place their job stops.”
“So you think that an officer might have killed Morgan… What? Out of retaliation?”
“Maybe. His tip did end the career of an officer who had been in good standing with the department and his fellow officers. Someone might have had something to say about that.”
“Could it have been Officer Dill himself? Could he have killed Morgan out of revenge?”
“I don’t think so. He’s got an alibi. His wife had labor pains Sunday night—the night Morgan was being killed—and they went to the hospital together. It’s well documented.”
My fingers itched. I felt a need to jot down Matt Dill’s name and cross him off the list. His wife could be crossed off as a suspect as well, since they’d been at the hospital together.
“How old is Matt’s younger brother?” I asked. Maybe it was the brother who had wanted to get even with the person who had ruined his brother’s career and put his freedom in jeopardy.
“Seven,” Joel said.
Morgan hadn’t been shot. He’d been dragged next to a car. While I supposed a seven year old could have driven a car, I thought it was more likely that the killer was an adult.
“Oh!” I said and snapped my fingers. “We’ve been overlooking a key point!”
“What?”
“Who knew that Morgan was your snitch?”
Joel sat back in his seat. “I only told Brad.”
I sat back as well. “Brad…” What a terrible turn of events. “Do we include Brad as one of our suspects?” I knew the answer before I asked, but I had to hear it from Joel.
“I think we have to,” he said, “at least until we can cross him the list because of an alibi or something else.”
I took a deep br
eath and blew it out. “Of course. It’s better not to make assumptions.” And then my gaze squared more firmly on Joel. “And what about you? Where do you come in on all this? Tell me more about why the police consider you a suspect.”
Joel shrugged. “Unfortunately, I’ve told you about all there is to tell. I got a text from Morgan Sunday morning. He said he had a new lead for me, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was or anything about it. We had to meet in person if I wanted to know more.”
“Did you go?”
“I did. We met in the back of the strip mall. Almost no one goes back there, and it tends to be pretty private. Morgan was already there, waiting for me, when I got there. He was smoking a cigarette and looking like he was feeling pretty proud of himself. He didn’t waste any time. He got right to it. He told me that I had to pay him off or he’d go to you and claim that I’d paid him for sex.”
“That was a good way to put pressure on you. He was threatening your reputation with a claim that would be super hard to disprove. Sew that seed of doubt—sew enough of them—and it takes its toll on a person.”
Joel grimaced. “I guess you’d know something about that. Dorothy Hibbert has done everything she could think of to ruin your reputation. She even wanted to take out a full-page ad in the paper claiming you were a killer and that you’d given numerous people lethal food poisoning.”
I was not surprised at all. “I take it you didn’t run it? I figure it would have ended up plastered all over the front of the café if you had.”
“Nope, didn’t run it. And I called up Andy over at the Tribune”—Camden Falls’ other paper—“and asked him not to run it either if Dorothy showed up on his doorstep. Andy is head of their ad division. He owed me a favor.”
I chuckled to myself. “You have this way of taking care of me from out of sight, the guy behind the curtains making sure things go right for me.”
It was Joel’s turn to smile with an oh-so-charming touch of bashfulness. “Guilty,” he said.
I let my smile grow, and I kept my gaze on him. “It’s a wonderful thing to be guilty of. Thank you.” But then I shook my head to chase away the warm fog brought on by Joel’s affections. I had to think clearly. “You and Morgan. You met. He tried to blackmail you. Then what?”
“I told him where he could stick it and then laughed at him. It was when I laughed at him that he got mad. Totally lost it. His face went blood red, and he changed from looking smug to someone who wanted to kill me. I started to leave, but he threw a rock at me. I shielded myself from it with my arm.” He rolled up his sleeve and showed me a black and purple bruise that size of a silver dollar. It was a new bruise. It had only the barest halo of greens and yellow at its edges.
The state of the bruise matched the timeline that Joel had laid out. Today was only Tuesday morning. I’d found Morgan’s hand yesterday morning.
“What time was your meeting with Morgan?”
“We met at a little after ten AM. He chose the time, and it was a good choice for someone who wanted privacy. Most of the church crowd, which of course is most the town, would have still been in church.”
If Joel’s version of events were to be believed, that meant that Morgan had died sometime between ten o’clock Sunday morning and nine-thirty Monday morning. That’s when Zoey and I had arrived in the field where we’d found Morgan’s hand. Morgan would have already been dead when we arrived.
Of course, I was sure that the coroner would be able to come up with a much tighter time frame for Morgan’s death, but I was not currently privy to that report. I knew that I could ask Brad for the information, but it wasn’t fair of me to ask him to put his career at risk that way… not that he would. He’d tell me in no uncertain terms to stay out of the investigation and wouldn’t share the coroner’s report even if he could.
“What happened after he threw the rock at you?” I asked.
“I was still planning on just walking away. I managed to take two more steps to my car, but then he rushed me with a pipe, rage yelling the whole time. I managed to pop him in the nose before he got a swing in on me. He went down, dropped the pipe, and I picked it up and threw it. Then he got up and tackled me. We scuffled but I was able to throw him off. He fell on his butt, cursing up a storm, and I got in my car and left. I didn’t even notice the rip on my shirt until I got home.”
“Okay… So Morgan had a rage problem. He liked money. And he was unscrupulous in what he did to get money. He didn’t care if he ruined a cop’s career. He also didn’t fear the drug dealer who the cop was tipping off,” I said.
“That sums it up.”
“So where do we even start?”
“I think we start by walking it backward. Morgan sold me a tip on a dirty cop.”
I snapped my fingers, catching on to what Joel was saying. “So we have to figure out how Morgan knew that Officer Dill was dirty!”
“Yep, that’s where we should start.” Joel sat back and popped the last of his muffin in his mouth, his charm once again shining at megawatt volume. “This is going to be such a great story.”
Chapter 9
“Hey, what’s up?” Brad’s voice sounded over Joel’s cell phone. Joel had it lying flat on the table between us, and the speaker function was on so that we could both hear what was said during the call. “You don’t have another hot tip for me, do you? That last one didn’t work out for you so well.” He chuckled.
“Hey, Brad. No, no hot tip. I just needed to clarify something,” Joel said.
What Joel didn’t say was that I was with him, listening to the conversation. We’d talked about it beforehand. If Brad thought that I was getting involved in another murder investigation, he’d clam up and wouldn’t tell Joel a thing.
“What? You cooking up another story? I don’t want my name attached to anything.”
“I’ll name you as ‘sources’ only. Promise.”
“Fine,” Brad said, sounding resigned. “I’ll answer your question if it’s something I can. You know the rules. It’s got to be something that’s not wrong for me to answer.”
“Got it,” Joel reassured. “What I need to know is, did anybody besides you know about Officer Dill being dirty?”
“Yeah, I can answer that.” Brad’s voice lacked the usual animosity that I heard when the subject of Joel came up. Without me in the mix, it seemed that Brad didn’t have an issue with Joel, and that gave me a twinge of concern that I was a threat to whatever camaraderie they had with each other. “As far as I know, the only people on the job who knew that Dill was dirty were me, the Police Chief, and IA.”
Joel mouthed the words “Internal Affairs” to me, letting me know what IA stood for.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Any chance your captain is dirty?”
“Man, don’t ask me that,” Brad responded, sounding pained.
Joel’s brows shot up, and he leaned forward, closer to the phone. When he spoke, there was a new quality to his voice, one that made me think of a dog who was completely engrossed in the moment right before someone threw its favorite toy. His anticipation was palpable. “Do you think he could be dirty?”
“This call is ending right now.”
“Okay, okay,” Joel said hurriedly. “Just one more thing I need to know.”
“What?”
“Who knew that Morgan was my snitch?”
“Me.”
“Not the captain, not IA?”
“No. Me. That’s it. I passed on the info that he was dirty, that he was tipping off a local drug dealer, and that’s the last I heard anything about it until I heard that Dill had been suspended pending an investigation.”
Gears in my head started to turn. I opened my mouth to speak, but Joel’s quick glance at me reminded me that I was the silent observer, nothing more. But I had a question, too. I grabbed a napkin and Joel’s pen and scribbled a note on the napkin. I then turned the napkin around so that Joel could read it.
Joel nodded, an
d I took that to mean that he understood what it was I was asking.
“Did they do any kind of investigation prior to suspending Officer Dill?”
“Yeah… They wouldn’t have suspended him if they didn’t already have something on him. They would have started the investigation prior to suspending him. Now they’re just working through the part of the investigation that they couldn’t do on the downlow.”
“So is this drug dealer Dill was tipping off, a known person now?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. But that’s above my pay grade. Sometimes they keep that kind of information on a need-to-know basis so they can decide what type of a sting operation they want to run to flush the perp out.”
“Thanks, Brad. This was a big help.”
“Yeah, don’t mention it, by which I mean, don’t mention it.”
“Gotcha.”
The call ended, and I had Joel’s undivided attention once more.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“Well, we have three people. We have Officer Dill. We have the drug dealer. And we have Morgan. Morgan had knowledge about Officer Dill tipping off a drug dealer, but how? Did Morgan know because Officer Dill knew he was dirty or did he know because the drug dealer knew the officer was dirty?”
“We’ve already surmised that Morgan probably didn’t know who the drug dealer was since he could have sold that to me as a story lead but didn’t,” Joel said.
“And that means that he must have found out that Officer Dill was dirty through somebody else, either through Officer Dill himself or someone Officer Dill had confided in.”
“You think we should try to get Officer Dill to talk to us?” I asked.
Joel’s gaze became distant as he thought, then refocused. “I think we should bark up some other trees first.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, Dill’s got an alibi for the time of Morgan’s death. So does his wife, and we’re not even considering his seven-year-old brother. Dill’s got no incentive to talk to us. Nobody’s looking at him or anyone he cares about for Morgan’s murder. On top of that, there’s nothing positive that talking to us could do for him. It can’t clear his name as a dirty cop. According to Brad, that investigation has already advanced to a point that IA actually has evidence against Dill. And if there’s nothing good that can come out of him talking to us, then—”
A Berry Cunning Conman_A Laugh-Out-Loud Cozy Mystery Page 5
