Behind the Badge

by J. D. Cunegan

  Jill sat up a little straighter. Her detective instincts took over at this point, even though she could no longer officially claim that title. “And knowing the reputation Carter and his friends had, Paulson decided to exact a little vigilante justice of his own.”

  Watson picked up the thread. “Not expecting them to actually kill him.”

  Stevens nodded once. “And once Paulson realizes the kid took one to the temple, he freaks. Worried it’ll all link back to him, Paulson calls up his buddy and they hatch a scheme.”

  “Voila, one dead preacher,” Watson added.

  The light bulb went off in Jill’s head. “And then Paulson requests one of ours to the scene, pulling him away from Devin’s case and wasting his time.”

  “But that still doesn’t explain why both Paulson and Brady killed themselves.” Watson scratched the back of his head before removing his glasses and pinching the bridge of his nose.

  “Brady was remorseful before he pulled the trigger,” Jill explained, averting her gaze.

  “Paulson wasn’t.” Stevens shook his head. “Fuckwad was defiant as ever.”

  A knock at the door interrupted the three. When Watson unlocked the door and opened it, Officer Greg Sorenson stuck his head in. “Those phone records you wanted for Brady came in.”

  “Thanks, Greg.” Taking the manila folder, Watson shut the door before returning to his seat. He studied the first sheet in the pile, his brow furrowing the deeper into the page he got. The first several calls had been made to Paulson, which they already knew, but one call in particular caught Watson’s eye.

  Jill cocked her head to the side. “What is it, Hi?”

  “A week ago, Brady received a call from David Gregor.”

  As it always did, Jill’s stomach dropped when she heard the name. Her pulse quickened and her mouth went dry. It was all Jill could do to keep her hands from balling into fists. As it was, she clenched her jaw, nearly biting her tongue in the process.

  Stevens, meanwhile, reached for his phone and pressed it to his ear. “J, it’s Earl. Brady still on your slab?” He locked eyes with Jill, a knowing smile creeping onto his face. “He wouldn’t happen to have his phone on him, would he?”

  ◊◊◊

  As luck would have it, Brady’s phone was still on him. Even better, there were five voicemails on the device. Four of them were of no consequence, but the fifth one was the one that told Watson, Stevens, and Jill everything they needed to know as to why David Gregor would get involved.

  “First of all, you’ve got a lot of nerve showing your face in this city again.” This was as angry as Jill had ever heard the billionaire, and the edge to his voice made her visibly uncomfortable. “Secondly… I know all about you and Paulson. What you did to Carlos Grainger all those years ago. I was content to let it all slide, but now that you’ve led Officer Carter into this mess… well, we can’t have that, now can we? You better clean up this mess, and clean it up fast… otherwise, I go public with what I know.”

  Watson glanced between the other two in the room. “What do you think he meant by clean up this mess?”

  Stevens huffed a frustrated breath. “You don’t think he ordered the hit on the DA, do you?”

  No… no way. Gregor wasn’t that stupid. Was he? Based on the evidence presented to her former crew, Jill had every reason to believe Ramona Parish’s assassination was the act of a lone wolf. Someone with a superiority complex and the arsenal to match. Gregor was a lot of things, but dim enough to hire a self-important hothead to assassinate an elected official in broad daylight and on national television?

  Hardly.

  Still, the fact that Gregor was behind the scenes of all this, pulling his own strings… it wasn’t necessarily surprising, but the fact that he had put forth such effort in making Jill realize he was on her side for all of this reaffirmed her earlier suspicions. Jill knew there had been an ulterior motive somewhere, and the voicemail he had left for Sam Brady all but confirmed it.

  But Jill still had questions to answer. Even as Watson and Stevens kept bouncing theories off of each other, knee-deep in the minutia of their official investigation, one question kept bouncing around in Jill’s head:

  What was Gregor’s connection to Officer Carter?

  “Hold up,” Jill said. “Those pictures we found on Carter’s computer. The money laundering. As long as Carter was just taking money on the down low and letting product into West Baltimore, Gregor didn’t give two shits.”

  Watson nodded. “But once Carter connected to a dead body…”

  “He becomes a liability.” Stevens shook his head and cocked his head to the side, cringing when something in his neck popped. “Which explains why Richy Rich came out so strongly in defense of our victim.”

  Jill gritted her teeth together. “Playing me in the process.”

  Chapter 57

  None of the detectives Jill used to call colleagues would ever get a warrant to search David Gregor’s penthouse. Not simply because they had insufficient cause for one (though that could be argued now that they had that voicemail on Brady’s phone), but because Gregor’s clout and influence shielded him from such things. But it didn’t protect him from Jill breaking into his fancy abode as her alter ego, a practice she had undergone once before with decidedly mixed results.

  But as she eased her way through the door, Jill scanned the suite and felt comfortable in the knowledge that she was alone. With any luck, this trip wouldn’t end with her bursting through the window overlooking the skyline. This time, her forty-story drop would be via the stairs -- not gravity.

  This penthouse was where Jill learned almost a year ago that David Gregor had bankrolled Project Fusion, the secretive experiment that gave Jill her cybernetic enhancements. Unbeknownst to her, Gregor was partially responsible for who she now was. The eyeplate, the infrared vision, the titanium-reinforced skeleton… Jill may have asked for it, Dr. Roberts might have provided it, but Gregor’s signature on those checks were what ultimately made it all possible. Whether Jill liked it or not, she was forever linked with him.

  Once she found the row of file cabinets pressed up against the far wall, behind the fully stocked bar, Jill slipped her way to the nearest one to pull open the drawer. None of the cabinets were labeled, and if the first drawer was any indication, neither were any of the folders. Granted, that would make it hard for anyone snooping around to find what they were after, but it had to be a pain in the ass for him too, right? Unless Gregor hired someone whose only job was to file and maintain everything.

  A quick scan of the first drawer didn’t show Jill what she was after. Neither did the second drawer, or the third. She slammed it shut with a sigh before moving on to the next cabinet, reaching for the middle drawer and yanking it open. She yanked so hard, in fact, that the drawer came out completely and several of the folders flopped onto the floor.

  One folder, in particular, caught Jill’s eye. The official BPD insignia was emblazoned on the top of each page, the bottom of the cover page scrawled with Commissioner Saunders’ signature. Jill’s intuition screamed at her, and Jill sat with her legs tucked underneath herself as she began reading through page after page after page.

  These documents went back to the days when her father was a cop. Many of the names in question were foreign to Jill, but every once in a while, she would stumble across a name she had heard Captain Richards mention. She read over a file on Detective McIntyre, whom Jill remembered having dinner with the family one night. He had seemed like a nice man… until Gregor had gotten a hold of him.

  Name after name after name… this manifesto read more like a Who’s Who of the Baltimore Police Department. It seemed like anyone who was worth a damn in Narcotics had fallen under Gregor’s wing at one point -- including a captain or two. It was enough to make her stomach clench.

  Once Jill reached the end of the stack of papers, the name she was looking for all along jumped out at her. Nolan Carter, out of the Fourth Precinct, had long been one of
Gregor’s most trusted informants within the BPD. From what Jill could tell, the other three weren’t in on it, but she figured their loyalty to Carter was where they came in. Carter had been latched to Gregor’s hip for almost the entirety of his career, and there was a record of monthly $100,000 payments -- no doubt in exchange for steering investigations, making sure incoming shipments reached their destinations, and the like.

  According to the records, the payments came to a stop three months ago. Racking her brain, Jill remembered that three months ago, she had disrupted a shipment of cocaine coming in from Venezuela. All that product, dumped into the Chesapeake Bay. Carter hadn’t been there that night -- Jill would have remembered if they had crossed paths -- but she wondered if he had been responsible for making sure that shipment got there.

  The phone tucked away in Jill’s boot rang, and she swiped to answer it after the first ring. She didn’t care for such a loud ringtone in the silence of Gregor’s penthouse. “Yeah.”

  “Tech scrubbed through Carter’s emails,” Watson explained. “Whatever he had been doing for Gregor, he fucked it up.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Three months ago, Gregor threatened to end their partnership after Carter failed to ensure a drug shipment came in.”

  “It wasn’t just a threat,” Jill said. “Gregor’s payments to Carter stopped three months ago.”

  “Okay, but here’s the part you’re really gonna like.” Jill could hear the shuffling of papers on the other end. “The day after Carter wound up on our radar, Gregor reached out to him again. Said that the rumors better not be true, and if they were, then the cops would be the least of Carter’s problems.”

  Which fit with Gregor’s outspoken stance against police brutality. Whatever he had been paying Carter for, badge-sanctioned violence had clearly not been an option.

  “Please tell me we’re not talking Carter’s BPD email.”

  “We wish he had been that stupid,” Watson lamented. “These are all from his personal.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Not that we’ve found. These two didn’t communicate much.”

  “Thanks, Hi.”

  Stuffing the phone back into her boot, Jill gathered up the papers as best she could to slide them back into the folder. She worked as quickly as she could to return the drawer to order before sliding it back into the cabinet. Looking over her shoulder, and comfortable the silence was genuine and not cause for concern, Jill slipped back out of the penthouse and made a beeline for the stairwell.

  Nolan Carter had been a useful, dependable lieutenant for David Gregor’s drug operations… until he wasn’t. Then he dipped his toes into the waters of police brutality, and that made him expendable. Jill descended the stairs, taking them two at a time, and the entire time she had one question:

  Did Gregor connect to the other vigilante?

  Chapter 58

  The exhaustion of the day threatened to catch up to Jill as she wandered from Gregor’s penthouse back to her apartment, with only a stop at the precinct so she could change out of her black leather bodysuit. Crammed into her backpack, Jill had paused upon closing her locker, knowing this was the last time she would be in this building – at least, the last time wearing anything other than a visitor’s pass. She had briefly wondered again if resigning was the wrong move, but then she remembered the sheer volume of names in those files in Gregor’s penthouse.

  If there was one thing this case had shown her, it was that she was apparently swimming upstream. There were a lot of crooked cops in this city -- which she already knew -- but now that she knew downtown was aware of and even in cahoots with most of them…

  Her father’s downfall allegedly began because he had seen the seedy underbelly of police work in the city and he let it swallow him whole. Jill wasn’t going to make that mistake -- even if it meant giving up on the one dream she’d had since childhood.

  When she finally reached her floor at her downtown apartment complex, Jill had to suppress a grin when she saw Ramon sitting by her door, a six-pack to his right missing a bottle. He lifted his gaze and his face lit up, but not the way it normally did. There was a sadness to his excitement in seeing Jill… and even before he spoke, she knew why he was here.

  “So is it true?” he asked as he scrambled back to his feet, watching Jill reach for the drinks on the floor. “You really turn in your badge?”

  Jill pushed the key into the lock before slipping into her apartment, kicking the door open far enough for Ramon to follow. He was jumping right in, wasting no time with pleasantries… which meant he was equal parts nervous and skeptical. Scuttlebutt in the precinct was nonsense more often than not, but word of Jill’s resignation was true and spread quicker than she had expected.

  A miscalculation on her part.

  “Yep.” She placed the six-pack-minus-one onto the counter before pulling a bottle from its cardboard nest and cracking it open. “I’m done. Just plain ol’ Jill Andersen now.”

  “With a titanium skeleton and an infrared eye.”

  “Point taken.” Jill downed half the bottle and shrugged.

  Ramon polished off what was left of his bottle before cradling it in both hands. His thumb brushed over the edge of the label before he reached out to try peeling it off. “I wish you’d told me beforehand.”

  “Why, so you could talk me out of it?” Jill finished her bottle.

  Ramon huffed something resembling a laugh and shook his head. “One thing I know I could never do is change your mind. No, I just… it shocked me, but I guess it shouldn’t have. I mean, last time we talked, you were pretty uncertain about things.”

  “I should’ve known I wouldn’t be able to do this forever,” Jill said as she reached for two more bottles, cracking them both open and sliding one toward her former partner. “This… double life thing. It was bound to catch up to me at some point.”

  Ramon took a long swig. “Bet you didn’t expect the cop thing to be the part that crumbled first.”

  “I really didn’t.”

  It still floored Jill that the Sun’s investigative reporter knew her secret -- the very thing journalists statewide and nationwide had been clamoring for since the rumors of a costumed vigilante began to surface -- yet refused to go public with it. She almost couldn’t abide by such a professional oversight, even if splashing her identity on the front page would truly mean the end of her.

  Then again, wasn’t she near the end of her rope anyway? All she ever wanted to be was a cop, and she had just thrown that away. What was she now, aside from unemployed and a law-breaker? Ever since she had left the precinct, David Gregor’s words from the week prior stuck with her.

  You do more good in that leather suit than you do with a badge.

  But that couldn’t be right, could it? Gregor was the closest thing Jill had to an arch nemesis; the thought of him having that kind of insight on her made Jill’s stomach churn. But it was becoming clear that there might be some truth to that little nugget, because for all the cases Jill had solved in her almost four years on the force, Jill seemed to be turning to the leather and the stealth more and more often.

  Dr. Roberts’ murderer would’ve gotten away if not for Bounty. The vigilante’s presence was likely the only reason the Order crumbled and Vernon Delaney’s killer saw any semblance of justice. And now that Jill had found herself standing toe-to-toe against her own department…

  “So what now?” Ramon asked before finishing his second beer.

  “There’s this matter of the other vigilante, for starters.” Jill shook her head and polished off her own drink before reaching for another. “I wanna know who it is, where they came from, and what possessed them to send our murderers into the bay in broad daylight.”

  “I saw the news footage of that earlier,” Ramon said. “How does the guy leap out of a van moving that quickly without injuring himself?”

  “I could do it.”

  Ramon’s expression darkened. “Exactly.”

 
“What are you saying?”

  “Are you sure you’re the only one?” Ramon grabbed the last beer from the six-pack, twisting the top. “The only Project Fusion success story?”

  “Yes.” The answer was a little more adamant than Jill intended. “No one before me, and no one after those Russian soldiers Nelson Blake killed.”

  “Maybe Project Fusion wasn’t the failure we all thought it was.” Ramon shook his head and downed almost half of his beer in one swig. Jill caught the bags under his eyes, and she felt sorry for him. He was so close to marrying the love of his life, yet his loyalty to his former partner made him carry a burden he shouldn’t have to carry.

  And Jill shuddered at the thought of Project Fusion having churned out someone like her. She didn’t quite believe it, but if there was some costumed being running around Charm City being a special brand of heroic, she had to at least consider the possibility.

  “You know,” she mused, “this whole time, I wondered why Gregor was siding with me on this. Helping me behind the scenes when the rest of the BPD was getting in my way.”

  “You think it’s the other vigilante?”

  Before Jill could answer, her phone buzzed against the counter. Snatching it up, and seeing the same number she saw the night Stanley Erikson called to let her know he knew her secret, Jill swallowed thickly before swiping to answer.

  “Andersen.”

  “I really hope you’re sitting down, Jill.”

  “What is it?”

  “I figured out who my anonymous tip was… and I don’t think you’re gonna like it.”

  The first name -- really, the only name -- that flashed in Jill’s mind was so seemingly obvious, it was a wonder she hadn’t made the connection sooner. It was the exact thing she had feared since the Roberts case, and now it seemed Gregor had made his move -- after lulling Jill into thinking she didn’t have to worry about him for once. Gregor had played her for a damn fool, and then he tried to ruin her.