My thoughts were stopped by a realization. Up until this point, we hadn’t known if the dog had been taken to stop him from sniffing out drugs or a corpse. Now we had a corpse, but had we really ruled out drugs? “Could you check the trunk for drugs too? I was just wondering if the scent of the drugs would be overwhelmed by the stench of the corpse? I know that dogs can break smells down by their different scents, but does the dog have different manners of telling you when it’s found one or the other?” I asked the officer who had, up until this point, been asking all the questions.
The man looked at me. He didn’t speak for nearly a minute before answering, a time where I wondered if I was going to be locked up. “I honestly don’t know. You have a point though. If the dog barks, we look. I don’t know that he’s got a drug bark and a body bark.” He picked up the phone and dialed.
He spoke for a few minutes on the phone. I assumed that he was talking to the officer who was questioning Brate about the crime, though I was guessing that Brate was getting more professional courtesies than I was – like coffee. I needed some caffeine in the worst way. I’d rushed up here at the crack of dawn to meet Brate, thinking I could get some coffee soon after. Now it was close to 10am, and I’d only had one cup so far. It was not starting off to be a good day.
When he hung up, he nodded. “Good call. The dog doesn’t really distinguish by bark. He’s just trained to bark at certain smells. The Captain is calling the crime scene team to have them test the trunk carpet for different types of drugs.”
I nodded. I didn’t ask to be notified about the results. I knew that I’d have to rely on Brate for that information. However, the thought of the crime being drug-related made the officer ease up on my questioning. I was out of the station within another 45 minutes.
On the way home, I drove by the house in Onyx to see if their dog was there. I thought perhaps they’d switched the dogs back, and that the fake Barkley might be in their yard. However, the yard was empty. From the looks of it, so was the house. The drapes and window treatments had been pulled down and the vacant windows told the story. A variety of trash cans sat by the curb, looking like they’d dumped all the furnishings quickly before leaving. The people who had kept Barkley here were long gone.
More than any line of questioning I might have had, this told me that I’d been right. The people at this house had been involved with the dognapping and presumably the murder of the man in the Corolla. Sometime between yesterday afternoon and this morning, they’d left the house and returned the dog. The timing could not be a coincidence.
My cell phone began to chirp as I got closer to home. I mainly relied on wi-fi for service rather than paying for 3G. Just another part of my staying under the radar. I tried to keep my digital footprint as small as possible. So as I moved toward Toledo, I was able to pick up signals and retrieve messages. Apparently, I’d gotten a number of texts from Detective Green who wanted to know what the hell was going on with me.
I waited until I returned home to call her back. I didn’t particularly want to be yelled at while I was driving.
She opened with “I thought you said you weren’t involved with Port Clinton? What the hell?”
“I didn’t say that, but I didn’t want to give away why the officer there hired me. It was vital to him that I didn’t acknowledge him as a client.”
She snorted. “Right. What’s the matter? Is his goldfish depressed?”
I hadn’t been expecting that type of response. While Sheila had made her share of sarcastic comments about my career choice, she had eased up since we’d started dating. While she was by no means supportive of what I did, the mocking had ceased.
“No, actually he had an issue with his K-9 partner.” I felt my cheeks flush as I tried to explain myself. I wasn’t used to such sarcasm from her.
“Apparently the dog is working well enough now to spot a body in the trunk of a Corolla. So whatever you did seems to have worked. Do you know what you’ve gotten yourself into here?”
I breathed a sigh of relief and felt myself go back to a more normal heartbeat and face color. Apparently her rudeness was a mask for concern. I made a note to stay out of ICU if this was the way she showed that she cared. “This doesn’t really affect me.”
She laughed, but it wasn’t a funny type of chuckle. It was cynical and hard. “The one thing that I never want to get involved with at any station is a police corruption case. It’s dangerous, because everyone involved has a gun except for you. It’s vindictive, because someone is going to jail and a few officers aren’t really concerned with who does as long as it isn’t them. And it’s messy, because the papers love a good corruption story. That’s not the type of publicity that you want associated with your name.”
“Okay.” I stretched the word out, not sure what she was getting at here. She’d rarely talked about the conditions or politics of her work like she was now. I was surprised at the openness she was sharing at the moment.
“Griff, you don’t get it. You’re not watching a corruption scandal. You put your foot right in the cow pie of a corruption scandal.”
I hadn’t thought of it that way, but the truth was that a police officer had to be involved in some way. The most likely place for the switch had been the police station, and almost assuredly the return had taken place there. That meant that a cop was involved, because civilians were not allowed to wander the station with a dog and not be noticed. A bad cop was somewhere at that station. I hadn’t thought of the implications of that. He could deny everything and push the blame on to me. Despite my relationship to Sheila, there were a number of people who were willing to believe the worst of someone who made a living like I did.
The body had been discovered in the police station parking lot. It seemed like an odd choice for hiding a body, given that investigators went in and out of the building all day long, but if the killer was an officer, the location would make more sense. The body could have been hidden there because the officer involved didn’t have a way to leave and properly hide the body. If we’d been able to get the body out of the trunk so easily, then someone could just as easily have put him in the trunk.
On top of that, I hadn’t been able to investigate Adam McNabb, the officer from the Erie police who had shown up at the scene and outperformed the fake Barkley. Brate had said that the officer wouldn’t tell him why he’d been there at that time in that place. It seemed like too much for it to be coincidence. There had to be a pattern somewhere, and it seemed like the pattern was that the police, or at least one officer, were involved in whatever was going on. Sheila was right. I didn’t want to be involved in a matter where everyone else was an officer of the law.
The situation was well beyond my abilities. I had no idea of how to investigate the police. In most cases, I was able to make a connection to witnesses and victims through animals, but in this case, all the animals were police officers in a sense. So I had no leverage and no way to get people to talk. My choices were limited, and I had nothing that I could investigate without bumping up against an open police investigation.
Sheila was still talking when I came out of my thoughts. “My question to you is how are you going to wipe off your shoe and get the hell out of there as fast as you can?”
I furrowed my brow. I had focused so much on finding a lost dog and helping to interpret what the dog was feeling in order to perpetrate my talking to Barkley that I hadn’t seen the larger picture. I’d totally neglected to lift my head and look at the chaos around me. One and possibly two police departments were now involved in a scandal that involved murder and possibly drugs.
I swallowed hard. “What should I be doing to get out of this?” I asked finally. This was an area where she knew the score,and I didn’t even have an idea of how to play the game.
She eyed me for a second. I had a history of not doing what she suggested, so perhaps the look was warranted. If anything was a barrier to our relationship, perhaps the conflict between what she wanted me to do and what I
was willing to do was our largest hurdle. She’d wanted a more outgoing and risk-taking boyfriend, and through no desire of mine, I was becoming that person. She’d given me advice multiple times to stay out of a murder investigation, but I rarely listened to this. I thought I knew best. However, now I realized that I had no experience in police politics, and I was willing to defer to her judgment on the matter.
“First, we need to see how tied up to the police this case is.” She looked at me like I should add something, but I had no ideas.
“I don’t know,” I admitted to her.
She sighed. “At the very least, there was a dead body in a car that either belonged to a member of the police force or had been impounded by a member of the police force. In the first instance, there was a corpse in a policeman’s car, which almost definitely means that a policeman or policemen were involved in the murder. That’s the worst case scenario.”
“Because of the implications?”
“Because it means that there’s a dirty cop on the force in Port Clinton. You don’t want to be seen as crooked, especially when there are lots of drugs involved. If that’s the case, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if they’d try to pin the killing on you. You were on-site and you found the body. It would not be pretty at all.”
I was beginning to see her point. I had been a useful tool while I’d been helping Brate, but now that they had unwanted publicity, I would be fair game for them.
“What if the corpse was in a car that was impounded?” I asked, hoping for a rosier answer than before.
“It’s hard to say. If the body was there for a while, then it’s a relatively minor mark against the officer who brought it in. He really should have checked everything, but you could always chalk it up to being overworked or some such thing. However, if the body was put there by someone, chances are that it was a police officer doing the putting. It would be safe and convenient for them. No one else would have the balls to drag a body to the police station and stash it in a car.”
“So I want to hope for the body being in the car for a while?”
“That’s definitely your best bet. If it’s one of the other scenarios, you’ll have to tell everything you know to the police, no matter how much it embarrasses your new buddy there.”
She had a point. I would have to share my story publicly if the corpse had been put there by someone on the Port Clinton police department. I thought I needed the practice, so I shared it with her now. She listened carefully and took some notes while I talked. I wasn’t used to her these days in a professional mode, so it came as a surprise to see the way she followed my words.
When I was done, she looked at me and smiled. “It’s not as bad as I thought. You’re pretty tangential to the case at hand. It will be harder to frame you than I thought. That’s all good.”
I smiled at her in return. I had no desire to draw that much attention to myself. Even though I now knew that Susan had not been kidnapped all those years ago, my primary instinct was still to hide under the radar. Being a major suspect in a police-related homicide would be about as far from under the radar as I could get. I still had the desire to keep myself safe by being inconspicuous. I felt a bit antsy about it, even though I logically knew that my worldview was entirely wrong. It had become habit, and I knew it would be one that was very hard to break.
“So where do we go from here?” I asked after a long pause. “What should I do?”
She looked over her notes again. “The first thing we do is wait. There should be an autopsy done today if it’s not done already. That should tell us more about the body, when it was put in the car and we’ll also learn about the car the body was found in. We might even get a name for the vic.”
“And after that?” I looked at her, and her silver eyes met mine.
“I need more data before we proceed in any direction. So just wait.”
I nodded.
Chapter 5
Waiting was definitely not what I do best. I took the dogs for a long walk to tire both animals and me. We came back to an empty answering machine. I put on a pot of coffee to take the edge off the cold outside.
I still had the phone log from my sister’s phone to deal with. I opted to call the bus station and see what they had to say. I got a lot of run around. The records I sought were on file and in the computer system, but they wanted a court order to release the records.
I pointed out that an underage girl had gone missing, that they’d sold a ticket to an unaccompanied minor, and might have aided in the commission of a crime. I told them that the FBI was involved, which was the truth since interstate flight had been suspected. By the time I got done threatening them with litigation, they agreed to look up the records and call me back.
So I was stuck with waiting some more. I still wasn’t sure what I would do with the information from the bus company. If Susan had left by herself, then likely she’d wanted to leave and not be found. Did I really have the right to bother her after all these years? I wasn’t sure. However, I argued that knowing where she was did not constitute bothering her. Having her address was not an imposition on her life.
Since I knew that my mother had to know all of this through Sergeant Siever, I wondered what her decision had been. Had she opted to leave things as they were, or had she talked to Susan while leaving me in the dark about her whereabouts? I wasn’t sure what the answer to that question would do to our relationship.
The news came on at 5pm, and I sat between the two dogs waiting for stories about Port Clinton. None came. News turned to weather and then sports, but nothing on a dead guy in a Corolla. I turned on the desktop and did several searches for information on the body in the car, but I didn’t find any there either. I knew that I hadn’t imagined the body or the wave of nausea that had come over me. So what was going on with the body? Was the press being shut out, or had they chosen not to report the results of the autopsy?
After the 11pm news, there was still no discussion of what the police had learned about the dead man in the trunk. I wasn’t sure what to do about the situation. I took a long shower and went to bed.
The next morning the Toledo Blade had a story on the corpse in the trunk. I felt the relief wash across my body as I read that the man had been shot elsewhere and put in the car after death. The coroner stated the man had been dead for nearly four days. That meant he’d been killed prior to my contact with Officer Brate. I’d had no chance to go up to police station before my first meeting with him. I had no reason to be involved until Brate had brought Barkley to my house.
He’d not been able to find an identification of the man through fingerprints, so DNA would have to be tested, which would take much longer to process. They ran a likeness of the dead man, but the face was generic enough that it could have been anyone. I wondered if anyone would be able to recognize that face.
I called Sheila Green, but she wasn’t available. I left a message on her voicemail that I seemed to be in the clear as far as the murder went. I took the dogs on another long walk, and they probably both wondered what was going on.
The phone was ringing when I got back to the house. I picked it up on the fourth and final ring. “Hello,” I answered cheerfully.
“Griff, it’s Sheila. I wanted to let you know what’s going on. They’re currently looking for the actual crime scene. Since they know he was moved to the car from somewhere else, they are looking for that somewhere else as we speak.”
“Do you remember what I said regarding Barkley and the place I found him? Has anyone checked that out yet?” I thought of the curtain-less windows and the empty look of the place. It would be easy to kill someone undetected when the home was vacant.
“I have no idea, but I’ll give the Port Clinton people a heads up on that.” She paused for a second. “Were you ever inside that house?”
“No,” I replied. “I was at the back fence and I looked in the front windows, but I was never inside the place. Why?”
“If I’m telling them where the
murder occurred, they’ll likely want to know how you knew about this place. Guilty knowledge because you actually committed the crime is one way of thinking about it. So if you were in the house and your prints or DNA is there, it would look bad.”
“I understand, but I never went into the house. It’s all good.”
She promised to tell the officers about the house. Given that it was in Onyx and not in Port Clinton, I had no idea if someone from the TPD would check it out or if they could get jurisdiction to continue their own investigation. I’d have to ask about that later.
The phone rang again, and I picked it up without checking the caller id. It was a risky move, given that three quarters of my calls were the equivalent of junk mail.
“Hey, it’s Brate. I can’t talk long, so just listen. The house you located for Barkley is being looked at. Someone called in that perhaps this could be the location of the killing. A TPD cop, I think. Anyway, if the police ask you anything about it, what are you going to say?”
I honestly hadn’t thought of my testimony. In my feelings of relief that I would be exonerated of any part in the murder, I had given no thought to how this evidence would affect others. Brate had asked me to find a dog that he hadn’t reported as missing. At best, he’d get a slap on the wrist, but he could be fired for improperly losing police property.
“I’m – not sure,” I replied honestly.
“Look, at this point, I need you to come clean. Just tell them what happened. Tell them everything you know. I’m a little worried that this is going to blow up in my face.” I thought back to Sheila’s comments about police corruption and thought of Brate. It would be terrible for him to get caught up in a high profile case like this. The thought of a slap on the wrist must have seemed like the lesser of two evils in the matter.
Nothing To Sniff At (Animal Instincts Book 5) Page 4
