Corruption of Justice

by Brenda English

  “When can we have dinner again?” Lansing asked when I answered the phone.

  “We can discuss it later,” I told him. “But right now, I’m calling about the Magruder shooting, and you’ll probably be mad at me again by the time we’re finished with that.”

  I heard Lansing sigh.

  “You’re never going to make this easy, are you?” he asked.

  “Probably not,” I agreed, remembering how my relationship with the assistant principal in Albany had ended. I was the education reporter at the Albany paper, and things had turned very ugly when I had to interview my lover for an investigative piece on financial irregularities at the school where he worked. I had ended up with no relationship, an angry and bitter ex-boyfriend, and a stern lecture from my city editor about the folly of mixing work with pleasure.

  And apparently you still didn’t learn anything, did you? a little voice whispered in my ear. I swatted it away with my free hand.

  Lansing sighed again. I didn’t think I liked whatever that sigh meant.

  “What do you want to know?” he asked, back now in his role as police detective.

  “I need to know if it was Dan Magruder who got those two cops fired in McLean last year. And if it was, are they still in the area, and do they have alibis for the time when Magruder was shot?”

  “If you know that much, then you know that was an Internal Affairs matter, and I can’t comment on what happened then. As for now, all I can say is that we are checking out anyone who might have had a reason to try to harm Magruder.”

  Clearly, I was going to have to play dentist and start pulling teeth.

  “All right,” I told Lansing, “let’s try it this way.” I looked at the story clipping in my hand. “Have you questioned Ed Monk and Terry Porter in the death of Dan Magruder?’ ‘

  “Yes, we’ve interviewed them, among other people.”

  “Do they still live in the area?”

  “Monk does. Porter lives in Austin, Texas, now.”

  “Is either of them a suspect in Magruder’s murder, or have you ruled either of them out as a suspect?”

  “Monk has provided us with reliable witnesses that he was in New Hampshire attending a family wedding during that time. He says he also can give us photos and videotape if necessary.”

  “What about Porter?”

  “All I can say is that Porter has told us he was at home in Austin, having called in sick at his job with a security firm that day.”

  “So, you’re telling me he hasn’t given you a convincing alibi yet, no eyewitness to place him at home instead of catching a plane to D.C.?”

  “I’m telling you that we’re still looking into Porter’s whereabouts.”

  “You’re being coy again, Lansing.”

  “It comes with the job, McPhee,” he replied. He sounded frustrated, and I sure as hell was.

  “Okay, can we go off the record here for a minute?” I asked, trying to get at what I needed some other way.

  “Ask your question, and then I’ll decide,” Lansing said.

  Now it was my turn to sigh loudly.

  “If I can also get it from someone else, will you confirm all this off the record for me? That it was Magruder who turned Monk and Porter in. That he received death threats afterward and transferred to the Mount Vernon station at that time. That Porter is still a suspect in the shooting.”

  “Okay, get it from a second source, but yes to all of it but the last thing. At this point, let’s just say we’re still talking to Porter, that we haven’t ruled him out as a possible suspect.”

  Well, that was progress, at least.

  “Thank you,” I told him, trying to sound appreciative. Giving birth probably would have been easier, but at least he had confirmed that I was looking in the right direction.

  “Hey, McPhee,” someone shouted. I looked up to see Curt Driver, one of the assistant metro editors, holding his telephone receiver and pointing it at me. “Rob says to get off your damned phone and go upstairs.”

  “I’ll be right there,” I called back to Curt. Then I told Lansing I had to go.

  “Think about dinner,” he said.

  “Okay,” I agreed, finding myself hoping that our situation wasn’t completely impossible after all.

  * * * *

  Upstairs, Sy was making a last-minute pitch to separate our stories, to have one about the discovery of Coleman’s body, under my byline, and a much longer one about the federal investigation under his. Rob Perry wasn’t buying it, and for once Mark Lester was agreeing with him.

  “I don’t want to hear it, Sy,” Lester was saying to him. “There’s no reason to make it two stories, especially if there’s any reason to think it was the investigation that might have gotten Coleman killed.”

  Rob gave me another stay-quiet look. If Lester was doing our job for us, there was no reason for me to put in my two cents’ worth, it said. I obeyed.

  “But Mark, how am I supposed to—” Sy started in again.

  “Enough,” Lester said, cutting him off abruptly. “We’re going with what we have.”

  Sy’s face colored, turning a sort of strangled red and purple, but he shut up. Then he announced he needed a cup of coffee and walked out of the newsroom without asking if we’d like some, too.

  Better call the Post and report him to Miss Manners.

  Even she couldn’t salvage him, I thought back as I followed Rob back down to the metro floor, using the time to tell him that I also would be giving him a follow-up on the Magruder story as soon as I could make a couple more phone calls.

  “It’s six o’clock,” he said, looking at his watch. “You’ve got half an hour.” Our first deadline was at seven.

  I tried calling Todd White, the guy who heads up the Internal Affairs section for the Fairfax County Police, but he was nowhere to be found. So I called Bill Russell again. I knew that he knew the full story on Porter and Monk. Maybe I could pry something out of him. We did the same little dance that I had gone through with Lansing, but eventually I got him to confirm, also anonymously, what Lansing had told me off the record.

  “And although I don’t have time to get into a discussion about it at the moment,” I told Bill when he finished, “don’t think that you’re getting off so easy here.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  “Just because I missed it the first time around doesn’t mean I haven’t now figured out that you kept the real story about the firings to yourself when they happened,” I said. “Now, I look bad. There will be a day of reckoning.”

  “I don’t doubt it for a minute,” Bill said, laughing. “I think I should go on vacation just about now.”

  Okay, I said to myself when I got off the phone with Bill and cleared my computer screen to write the story, I can’t attribute it to anybody by name, but at least he and Lansing both are saying that what Reider told me is right. So now I’ve got it from three different people. I can call them reliable police sources, at least.

  I decided I would have to be content with that for the time being. I turned to my computer and opened a new file to write the Magruder follow-up for the next morning’s paper.

  Tuesday

  Eight

  I was deep into that dreamless state of sleep in which even identity is lost when the roar of the explosion ripped into the predawn stillness outside my apartment building. In one instinctive motion of self-preservation, I went from lying on my bed to standing beside it, trembling from the fright my heart had received from the as-yet-unidentified noise. But I still needed a couple of seconds to access the corner of my brain that knew who and where I was.

  Finally oriented but with my heart still pounding, I looked around my bedroom to try to locate the source of the horrific sound that had awakened me. The clock beside my bed said 4:12 A.M. Seeing nothing, I went across the hall into the spare bedroom and looked out the window that faced onto the building’s parking lot. Below me, a fire burned furiously in the far corner of the lot wh
ere I had parked the Beetle the night before. The fear came back in full force and started squeezing everything in my chest.

  “Oh God,” I breathed out loud. “Oh my God!” The fear told me what it was I was looking at.

  I turned and ran back into my bedroom to slip on a pair of loafers. There was no need, and no time, to worry about putting anything over the gray sweat clothes that I used for pajamas. Nor did I take the time to do anything else about the way I looked. With my hair falling loose around my face, I literally ran out of the apartment, pausing only to scoop up my keys from the small ebony Chinese chest that sat just inside my front door.

  Other residents already were standing at the elevators ahead of me, a couple in their nightclothes and a third man in a pair of jeans and flip-flops but with no shirt, waiting in agitated conversation for one of the four elevator cars to arrive. Guessing that every floor in the building now had a similar group of passengers pressing the Down buttons, I headed for the fire stairs instead. The fourteen floors of landings and 180-degree turns in the stairs seemed endless as I pounded steadily down, but finally I reached the fire door at the bottom that opened out onto the parking lot itself. I threw open the door, letting in the night air and the sound of sirens on the fire trucks that were already coming this way from the fire station two blocks up Paxton Street.

  As the exit door crashed closed behind me, I hurried out to join the other residents who already had managed to make it outside to find out what had happened. They instinctively stopped at a point that was close enough to see but not close enough to worry about being injured. I pushed my way through to the front of the rapidly growing crowd, their questions and exclamations to each other filling the air around me. But I consciously heard none of them.

  Some fifty feet away, in the last parking space near the tall, gray-painted metal fence that marked the western edge of the lot, was the already skeletal outline of the Beetle, flames still leaping from its body, smelling of gasoline and burnt synthetic fabric, mixed with whiffs of another, even less pleasant smell, all drifting toward me on a ribbon of smoke. A second car, which had been parked next to the Beetle, had burning seat covers, shattered windows and windshields. The warped and blackened hood of the VW sat on top of the second car’s own hood. On the driver’s side of that car was an empty parking space. In the adjacent space to that one, an obviously frightened but quick-thinking owner was backing his car—sans windows—out of its space and out of the reach of the fire.

  I had thought I knew what I was going to see. What I wasn’t prepared for, however, was the body I saw, lying crumpled at the bottom of the fence against which it had been thrown, its shredded clothes still smoking, one leg folded underneath at an unnatural angle, the other leg nowhere in sight. A man in a navy blue bathrobe, apparently another resident of the building, was rising to a standing position and shaking his head, having knelt down to check the body for a pulse or any other sign of life. Clearly, there was none. As the fire trucks—three of them at least—and two ambulances roared up to the end of the parking lot where we all stood, I turned my back on the scene in front of me and grabbed the side of a nearby car while I threw up the remains of my dinner from the night before.

  * * * *

  The sun was fully up and promising a beautiful day ahead. Numbly, I sat in the backseat of an Alexandria police cruiser and looked at the remains of the chaos that had erupted almost three hours before. All the cars near mine—or, I should say, what was left of mine—had been moved, giving me a clear view of the carnage the explosion had wrought. The body—a male, the police had said—was now covered by a tarp. A few feet away, a second tarp covered the missing leg that someone had located. All but one of the fire trucks had left on other calls, the remaining one staying behind to make certain there was no further danger from the fire.

  Most of the building’s residents had left the parking lot in ones and twos and now were returning the same way to go to their own cars or to the bus stop down the street to leave for work. Police officers posted at each of the building’s exits checked the residents’ names off master lists provided by the rental office in an effort to identify the body or at least to say who it wasn’t.

  The crowd now in the parking lot was made up of Alexandria police, both uniformed officers and detectives, as well as a couple of guys who had introduced themselves as investigators from the fire department and several men in street clothes and dark blue jackets that said ATF in capital letters across the back. The latter were from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. An Alexandria detective had explained that, without its own bomb squad, the police department relied on the ATF to handle the forensics—the collection and analysis of physical evidence—any time Alexandria had a case that involved a bomb or some other type of explosive.

  There also was the usual contingent of reporters from every news medium, some of whom I recognized, some of whom I didn’t. And to none of whom I was talking, except for a very brief conversation with Penny James, the News reporter who covered the Alexandria police. She had been dispatched to the scene by Rob Perry when I had called him at home, once I had finished throwing up in the parking lot and before the police had gotten organized enough to find out who owned the demolished car. Even with the shock of seeing the body lying next to my poor car, I still had had the presence of mind not to allow Rob to be uninformed any longer than necessary or to let my own paper get beaten out by the competition.

  I had identified myself to the cops as the owner of the VW once I got off the phone with Rob. Which meant that, when Penny got there half an hour later, I had to argue with the police, who already were grilling me, to have a few minutes alone with her. Since then, investigators from each of the law enforcement groups had been back and forth several times to ask me questions. The raised eyebrows when they learned what I do for a living and the looks that passed between the police detectives and the ATF agents just confirmed what I had known instantly in my gut when I looked out my window and saw my car on fire: that it was my car and not the one next to it that had exploded and that it had not exploded on its own. Someone had caused it to blow up, someone who really, really wanted me dead.

  The question at the moment was whether it was that someone whose body lay under the tarp, literally a victim of his own device, or whether the body belonged instead to some unwitting passerby who had been caught in the explosion somehow. A stranger whose charred face, which the police had asked me to look at in an unproductive effort at identification, was now a permanent image in my still-reeling brain.

  “Ms. McPhee?” I groaned as I opened my eyes and raised my head from the back of the cruiser’s seat. One of the police detectives, whose last name I now knew was Moore but whose first name had escaped me, was standing beside my open door. No more questions, I thought. Give me some answers.

  “Yes?”

  “We don’t think there’s anything more you can do here,” Detective Moore said. “If you have no objection, I’m going to take you down to headquarters to get an official statement from you.”

  In spite of his polite words and tone of voice, I knew that it was more than a request.

  “Fine,” I said. “Whatever you need.” Putting it off wasn’t going to make it any easier or more appealing later.

  “We appreciate your cooperation,” Moore told me. He closed my door and opened the driver’s door. “Hey, Perez! Let’s go,” he called out to someone across the parking lot, and then sat down in the car and started the engine.

  Within a few seconds, a woman in a dark brown suit, who I had noticed in the parking lot but who I hadn’t met, walked up to the passenger’s side of the car and opened the front door. She slid in, closed the door behind her, and turned to look at me in the backseat.

  “Hi,” she said as Moore put the car in gear, her smile seemingly genuine and lighting up her dark brown eyes. Her jet black hair was cut short, its glossy strands tucked behind her ears. “I’m Detective Reya Perez.”

  I acknowl
edged her introduction with one of my own, but I was too tired to offer much in the way of a smile in return. Her eyes said she understood, and then she turned to look at Moore as he pulled out of the parking lot and took a right onto Holmes Run Parkway.

  “I thought we’d go ahead and get her statement down for the record while these guys finish up here,” Moore said. “One of the ATF guys is going to meet us there to stay abreast of things as well.” Perez nodded in agreement.

  The rest of the trip to Mill Road, where the Alexandria Police Department headquarters is located, took place in silence.

  * * * *

  “But I can’t do my job if I’ve got a cop tagging along everywhere I go,” I protested, looking back and forth from Perez to Moore, who sat across from me at the end of a small conference table.

  My statement, such as it was, was now an official part of the case file. I had told Moore and Perez, truthfully, that I wasn’t working on anything that should have put me at such tremendous personal risk. True, two of the stories I was following were murders, but I had no personal connection to either of those cases. There was nothing about them that should have represented any sort of danger to me. I also had gone over my activities and schedule from the previous day and had reiterated my inability to identify the body that lay, burned and torn, a few feet from my car. I was waiting to sign the written statement that was being typed somewhere down the hall and of which Gary Phillips, the ATF agent, had gone to wait for copies, when Moore had broached the subject of putting an officer with me for a few days as a safeguard. To say the least, the idea didn’t set well with me.