by Jenna Rae
Placing one of her cards on the end table, Brenda exited the apartment. As she closed the door behind her, she noted the locks were standard-issue apartment models, easily bypassed. She’d have replaced the knob and deadbolt with better-quality models and wondered briefly why Donnelly hadn’t done so. She hoped, useless as the locks were, Smith would engage them before too long.
Driving home in the nighttime chill, she thought about Donnelly and the way Smith talked about him. Was she deluding herself? Had the guy been putting on an act? If Smith was right he was only involved in extortion because someone threatened his girlfriend or her child. Of course, there was every possibility the young woman preferred thinking her dead boyfriend had been a good guy in a bad spot and that she was just kidding herself.
The tidbit about Dan Miller was interesting, though it seemed unrelated to the situation at hand. She didn’t think much of the guy, with his macho posturing and slick salesmanship. Her recent encounter with two of his uniformed thugs had made her think even less of their boss. She hadn’t realized he owned any strip clubs, and she wanted to find out more about that. He hired men for their brutish muscle and women for their willingness to become sex objects.
Staci Smith had hinted at distasteful aspects of his personality, and Brenda wanted to take a closer look at the man and his security company after she’d found Peterson, apprehended Donnelly’s killer and figured out who else, if anyone, should be held responsible for the murder of Tami Sheraton.
She grunted, irritated by the plethora of unknown aspects to this case. She’d always been more comfortable with the quantifiable and verified than with the nebulous world of perceptions and misperceptions, though she’d worked hard to develop skills with both.
Back at home, Brenda made herself a cup of tea and ate a frozen burrito. The house was eerily quiet, and she turned on the stereo. But when Aretha Franklin’s evocative mezzo tones came out of the speakers, she turned it off. The CD was one of Tori’s favorites, an early gift from Brenda. She’d bought two copies so Tori could keep one in her car.
“I should take that out and mail it to Tori right now.”
But she didn’t. She got on her laptop and looked at Donnelly’s social media profile again. His pages on each site were barely over a year old. She wondered if she was letting Smith convince her of a delusion. She’d have to ask Tori to pull Smith’s cell phone records, as well as those of the other girlfriend, Teresa Fortune. Brenda looked at Donnelly’s publicly posted pictures again.
All of the many women looked the same, and she had to peer at each blank-eyed smile to determine which buxom blondes were Smith and which were Fortune and which were other, unidentified women. They were tagged with stage names: Staci, Bambi, Champagne, Cinnamon, Amber, Chichi.
A club manager had posted a photo on Donnelly’s page and asked if Donnelly knew his history. In the photo were eight very young blondes in skimpy outfits. Brenda was reasonably sure the one on the end was a teenaged Teresa Fortune. She ran her hand through her hair, feeling the low thrumming that signaled the beginning of pain.
She was losing focus. Her headache coalesced until a vise squeezed her tender skull. Closing her eyes against the light, she recalled how Tori used to rub her temples and massage her neck when her head hurt.
She couldn’t resist picking at the emotional scabs tickled by Tori’s words. Was Tori right? Did Brenda always think of the worst options? Or was her disaster anticipation merely a natural result of two decades on the job?
She left another message for Peterson and again watched all of the video footage of Donnelly. She took notes remarkably like the notes she’d taken earlier that day. She kept hoping to run across something new, some clue to the identity of any person or persons who could’ve driven a cop to become a criminal and a killer. No matter how many times she watched, though, nothing new jumped out at her.
She spent a few hours doing background research on Chief Walton and on each of the commanders, treating Tori just like the rest, as a potential suspect. She found plenty of cronyism and infidelity and mutual back-scratching, but not a whiff of verifiable corruption of a significant nature. She found herself spending more time and energy examining Banks than his fellows. His lifestyle was more lavish than most, with his social life focused on the yacht club and the country-club golf course and a habit of dining out for most meals.
“You don’t like the guy,” she said. “You’re seeing what you want to see.”
Banks’s wife had family money, as she and everyone else knew. Banks had for some years referred to himself as a trophy husband, and no one laughed. His photographs from earlier years told the tale of a tall, muscular lad with dimples and a wide, toothy smile. His current decline notwithstanding, Banks had once been good-looking enough to be arm candy to a wealthy spinster eight years his senior. His upscale world was paid for by his wife’s inherited fortune. Grimacing, she put aside the subject of Commander Banks and his rich man’s life.
It occurred to Brenda that she might be too close to the situation to see the dynamics in her department clearly. She shot an email to her old partner, Darius Brown, asking for guidance in doing a forensic analysis of the financial and political profiles of the subjects. Brown shot right back, asking if her question had anything to do with the recent murder.
Snorting at her own transparency, she wrote back that recent events had made her cast a more cynical eye on everyone. When her phone rang, she laughed.
“Guess I don’t have to say, ‘Hope I didn’t wake you.’” Brown’s deep rumble sounded the same as it had twenty years earlier, and Brenda fought a wave of nostalgia.
“When did I ever get a good night’s sleep?”
“About the same time I did, twenty years ago. Nice to hear from you, Borelli.”
“I thought you moved to Oregon to get some rest?”
“Turns out, they have crime here too.”
“No, really? Bummer. How have you been? How’s Janelle?”
Brown sighed. “She just found her first gray hair, so now we have to go on a cruise.”
“Give her my love.”
“You decide you want a new start, and I’d be happy to have you on my team.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.”
“You reached out to me because you know I’m the best.” Brown laughed at himself. “And I have access you don’t have. I won’t break any laws, obviously, but I’ll see what I can find. I assume there’s a clock on this.”
“And it’s ticking loudly. Thanks, Brown.”
They made plans for Easter and rang off, and Brenda felt better than she had in a while. She had for the last seventeen years blamed Brown’s decampment on herself and on the poisonous Satan’s Lair case. They’d both run their lives into the ground and both nearly lost their badges over their shared obsession with shutting down the child-trafficking ring.
She still missed his sharp mind and quick humor. His move to Oregon had felt a little like abandonment at the time, but she had understood it too. Satan’s Lair left its stain on Briarwood and on the officers who investigated its heinous crimes.
Sheraton’s murder felt somehow like a full-circle event, bringing Briarwood back to its lowest point and exposing ugliness beneath the thin veneer of civility that kept the city functional.
She shut down the computer and sat in the dark for a few minutes. She sighed and rubbed her aching head. Without thinking, she called Tori.
“You call me a lot more now than you ever did when we were together,” Tori complained by way of greeting. “What’s your plan?”
“Follow the yellow brick roads, I guess. If someone was running Donnelly, I want to know who that someone is. They’re responsible for Sheraton’s death too.”
“You’re making a lot of assumptions, Bren.”
“No, I’m just looking at all the possibilities.”
Tori sighed again. “Let’s think on it and talk during a civilized hour.”
“Okay.”
“Try chamom
ile tea, take a nap.”
“Huh?”
“For your headache.” Tori snorted. “I can always tell by your voice, you know that.”
“I’d forgotten. Thanks, I will try the tea.” She took a deep breath. “Tori? One more thing. I—”
“Yeah?”
“Take care of yourself, okay?”
“You bet. Hey, Brenda?”
“Yeah?”
“You too.”
Chapter Five
“Captain Borelli?”
“Who is this?”
“Listen, I thought of something.”
Brenda opened one eye and looked at the clock. Was it really after seven ? She’d grabbed the phone off the nightstand without even really waking up, and she couldn’t remember falling asleep a couple of hours earlier. She smelled the chamomile tea Tori had recommended. Her headache was less excruciating.
“Staci Smith?” Brenda sat up, startled by the brightness creeping in around the blinds and curtains. “Is Jessica okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, thanks for asking.” There was a silence, and Smith coughed. “Still sick, but she’ll be fine. I caught her cold, I guess. I was up with her all night, and I was thinking about what you said. Crap! Hold on a minute.”
“Everything okay?” Brenda ran her fingertips over the rough edge of the gray blanket pooling in her lap. Why had she bought such an unappealing bedcover?
“Yeah, it’s Jess. She threw up again. If you don’t mind the germs, can you come by? I think I have some information, if you really, actually want to find out who mighta wanted to hurt Mark—”
“Sure, what time?”
“Ten?”
“Perfect. Need anything from the store?”
“Gawd, you’re so sweet. No, we’re good.”
She rushed through her shower so she could get a few things done before ten o’clock. First, she went to Peterson’s house. There was still no sign of her former partner, so she picked up a leaflet that had been placed on his porch and left him another voice mail.
She checked her email while trying to decide what she wanted to do about Peterson. Darius Brown had already written her a message with Chief Walton’s name in the subject line. She skimmed the attachment, a breakdown of Walton’s life as prepared by a federal contractor with nearly unfettered access to a multitude of databases. Brown’s note also promised more later.
She skimmed the topics: Walton’s conservatively managed finances, his unremarkable Internet usage patterns, his educational and professional record and his personal relationships. Brown had also written a series of questions and conjectures that focused on Walton’s willingness to glad-hand whoever could be useful to him politically.
The man apparently had ambitions that led to the governor’s mansion but no farther. While Brown thought Walton lacked intellectual rigor and was too fond of the camera, he concluded Walton was unlikely to be involved in something as potentially high-risk as extortion or murder.
She made a face. Did she want Walton to be fishy? Was that why she resisted her most trusted old partner’s conclusions? He’d put this report together in a relatively short time, and she wondered if he made a habit of keeping tabs on the folks in his old department and therefore had already compiled a dossier on Walton and the commanders.
It would be comforting to blame Briarwood’s ills on the new guy from out of town. He’d been chief for a year, but he would be the new guy in the Briarwood Police Department for a long time. Yes, she concluded, she was biased against Walton because she preferred to think it wasn’t someone she’d known for years who’d put Donnelly on the path of corruption and ultimately to murder.
So, if it wasn’t Walton, it had to be someone near the top of the department, with the freedom of movement and lack of accountability to run a criminal enterprise without being detected. No one under the rank of captain, she thought. She closed her eyes for a moment. She was assuming there was one man, one big boss who’d run Donnelly. What if it was a whole network? What if half the department was in on the extortion and untold other crimes? Was she picking the lock on Pandora’s box?
They’d broken Satan’s Lair open, she and Darius Brown, and she would never forget he was the person willing to listen to her. Together, they discerned the obscure behavioral patterns that suggested her theory about the human traffickers might just be the truth. Nothing had been the same after that, and she believed Brown moved away because Briarwood was forever tainted by the stench of complacency that had allowed a nightmare to flourish undetected in their little burg. Yes, she could believe he kept tabs on the leadership of his old department.
She and Brown had lost something they’d never discussed missing. In hindsight, she thought maybe she’d lost her faith in the basic decency of humanity. Night after night, the two officers had sat in Dave Morgan’s living room spying on the child traffickers across the street. Night after night, they’d skipped sleep and sat silent, grim and desperate, accepting cups of coffee and sandwiches from Dave and Michael.
She remembered the first time she and Brown had approached Dave Morgan. A handsome, thirtysomething former surfer with a bad knee, he’d invited them into his sparsely furnished front room to hear them out. Michael had brought coffee and had sat next to Dave, stiff and uncomfortable, and painfully polite.
“What is it you’re investigating, Officers?”
She had heard the fear in Dave’s question. Being gay in a small town was a delicate balance, especially back then. For all the men knew, they themselves could be the subjects of a witch hunt.
“We can’t say much,” she’d told him. “But it would be a great service to the community. We’re not playing a game, I promise you.”
Then Michael had sucked in his breath. “She’s family.”
The men had exchanged a look, and Brown had said something about child abuse.
And that had been that. The couple had opened their home to the two strangers after a glance at their badges and a five-minute conversation. Dave had gone to the kitchen and come back with a pair of house keys.
“In case we go out of town.”
When the case broke open, she and Brown were sucked into the maelstrom of interviews, paperwork, and trial preparation. They effused to their superiors about the generosity of their vigil hosts, but no one was interested in publicly honoring the gay civilians whose accommodation had made the investigation possible. And certainly neither Dave nor Michael had sought attention or accolades.
No keys to the city were issued to Dave or Michael. Still, when a prime piece of real estate was about to become available at the waterfront, someone in the mayor’s office called Dave to tell him about it. And someone mentioned to Bill Halloran at Briarwood Credit Union that Dave Morgan was a good guy who wanted to expand his food shack into a full-service restaurant, one the city’s leaders would be interested in patronizing.
Without much fuss, Dave’s Bistro became the centerpiece of the upper end of the waterfront commercial district, and everyone essential to the city’s administrative and enforcement agencies ate there regularly. The food was good, the location magnificent and the service top-drawer. She still believed Dave’s Bistro was the city’s thank-you gift to the men who’d quietly facilitated the salvation of so many of the town’s children.
Now she couldn’t think of Brown without recalling that time and the overwhelming emotional toll it had taken. She and Brown couldn’t talk, email, or text without her feeling the rage, frustration, hope, despair, and exhaustion of that time. Nor could she think of it without feeling immense gratitude to the Morgans and grief over Dave’s passing.
She sent Brown a reply effusive with thanks and a few follow-up questions on Walton. If Brown believed, as he so clearly did, that Walton was clean in this matter, she should move forward on the assumption that was probably accurate.
The final request—a workup on Dan Miller—she had mixed feelings about. She definitely had concerns about violating the privacy of a private citizen, but she kept
running into his name. If Briarwood had, as it seemed, outgrown its folksy days when everyone knew everyone, how was it she kept finding Miller under every rock? She typed his name slowly, erased it and typed it in again, asking Brown to see if there was anything of interest about Miller’s background or financials.
At some point she’d scanned one of the many business cards Miller had given her. She pulled up his information and left him a voice mail and emailed him. She’d figure out what she wanted to ask him once she’d set up the meeting. She was more than willing to bait him with the possibility she was retiring and looking for a second career in the private sector.
While she had her phone out, she called the station and spoke with Lieutenants Johnson and Miller, who gave her brief updates on several cases and a few minor administrative matters. While neither expressed irritation or impatience, she didn’t want them to feel she was hovering, so she didn’t press either for too many details.
She emailed Maggie a few requests on behalf of the lieutenants and inquired after the progress of some items that had been delayed due to Sheraton’s murder. She felt adrift from her station and more maudlin about being absent than she thought she should, given it had only been a few days.
She also emailed Peterson, in case he was ignoring his phone and was checking email. She also left messages for a couple of his old buddies from the force. She called Peterson’s cell phone again before she went to Joe’s Place, his favorite diner, for breakfast.
Chiefly, she was hoping her old partner would be there. If not, he might have some buddies there who knew where he was or might be. There was another, more nebulous thought behind this. She hoped somehow going to his favorite place might help her feel more connected to him. This was pretty crunchy-granola for her, but she still headed for the diner with that thought in mind.
The outside of the stolidly square restaurant was decorated with giant aluminum circus animals in faded primary colors, and the windows wore looming neon ads promising five-dollar steaks and three-dollar biscuits with gravy. A narrow strip of dirt between the bright barn and its parking lot was replete with the town’s namesake rosebushes and was dotted every ten feet or so with a Briarwood Watchdogs sign.
