The Strategist

by John Hardy Bell

  Until today.

  He couldn’t have begun to guess what Commander Brandt and Davies were meeting about, and he ultimately didn’t care. All he knew was that he had never been more professionally or personally disrespected. The fact that Brandt allowed it to happen was disappointing in more ways than he could express. But he would deal with that disappointment another time. Right now his sights were set on sending a message to the rising star who just made the biggest mistake of his young career.

  There was one more rule of police work that Graham lived by: always protect the shield, and those who wore it, no matter what. But Graham no longer had the luxury of living by outdated codes of honor and loyalty. Just like morality and justice, those concepts were relative at best. For better or worse, his loyalty had been to the man who could end his career and his life with one call to Internal Affairs if he didn’t do exactly what he was told. But with his actions today, Commander Brandt had proven that that loyalty only went one way. Graham had done what he was told, and after he collected the payout due him, he would have to seriously reconsider his role in the department, or if he would even have a role at all.

  But not before he dealt with Davies.

  Survival of the fittest.

  Graham pushed his nervousness aside as he got out of his car and walked toward Davies’ parked cruiser.

  Every man for himself and only himself.

  He had become so focused on his own thoughts that he didn’t realize Detective Sullivan had been walking behind him, shouting his name. When he finally did realize what he as seeing, he still didn’t believe it.

  CHAPTER 46

  “Walter? Will you please answer me? Why are you here?”

  Sullivan had taken down Camille’s address from the statement she had given last week. She took special note of it because she fully expected to make a trip here at some point in the near future, particularly after what happened with the disk.

  Even as she watched Graham get out of his car and walk toward the patrol car parked in front of her house, Sullivan still couldn’t believe that she was here now.

  “Hey!”

  At that, Graham finally turned around. His eyes were vacant, like her presence hadn’t fully registered with him.

  “What are you doing, Walter?”

  She initially allowed for the possibility that he was hit with the sudden realization that Camille’s story was worth another listen. Even though it didn’t make any sense that he would come alone, particularly after he had gone out of his way to completely discredit her and her story, she wanted to believe that he was still a good cop capable of doing good things.

  But when her question was met with silence, she allowed for another possibility: he wasn’t here to talk about the disk at all.

  “It doesn’t matter what you may be trying to do to me behind the scenes. As it stands right now I’m still your partner, and I deserve to know what’s going on.”

  “Don’t tell me what you deserve to know, Chloe,” Graham finally answered, his eyes no longer empty. “This doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

  “If you’re here because of Camille Grisham, then it most certainly does.”

  Graham put his hands on his wide hips. “You’ve got some goddamn nerve following me. Who do you think you are? Oh wait, I’ll tell you who you are, you’re the last person on the planet I have to answer to. What’s going on here is way above your pay-grade. So do yourself a favor and leave it alone. Okay?”

  He turned away from her and continued walking.

  Sullivan first had the feeling outside of Stephen Clemmons’ house that something wasn’t right with Graham. As she watched him now, she finally understood what that something was.

  “Why have you been so secretive throughout this whole thing? The phone calls that you tell me nothing about; the long stretches of time when you disappear and no one knows where you are; the fact that I followed you to Camille Grisham’s house and you won’t even so much as acknowledge that we’re here. Why don’t you stop treating me like I’m an idiot and just admit that you have another agenda here.”

  “Do you realize what you’re doing right now?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?”

  “Digging your grave as a homicide detective.”

  “I’m sorry, but from where I’ve been standing it might be the other way around.”

  Graham’s mouth curled up in a tight smile. “You have no idea how quickly I can end things for you.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “Threats are idle words made by people with no real power to back them up.”

  As she looked into Graham’s eyes she saw an apprehension, perhaps even a sadness, that completely betrayed the hard bite of his words, and she felt an inexplicable pang of sympathy. “What’s happened to make you act like this?”

  “Like I said before, it’s beyond your capacity to understand. Maybe after ten years of working this beat, you’ll get it.”

  “I need to understand now.”

  Graham shook his head. “Not possible.” Then he put his hands on his hips again, this time opening his suit jacket just wide enough to reveal the department-issued Glock Nine holstered under his arm.

  “So you’re going to shoot me now?” Sullivan roared, her sympathy instantly replaced with anger.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Chloe. You’re taking this entirely too far now.”

  But she wasn’t. “I feel like I don’t even know who you are anymore. How could I possibly know what you’re capable of?”

  Graham shrugged his shoulders. “I guess you don’t. So maybe you should leave me the hell alone,” he warned before continuing the walk toward the patrol car.

  Sullivan knew that this encounter would spell the end of a lot of things: her relationship with Graham, her work on the Leeds case, possibly her career as a detective. But she was determined not to let the encounter end with him winning.

  “What is he doing here?” Sullivan asked, pointing at the parked patrol car.

  Graham kept walking without saying a word.

  “If you even sniff Camille Grisham’s doorstep, I will go to Internal Affairs right this minute and do whatever I have to do to make sure you’re brought up on charges of evidence tampering, witness intimidation, racial profiling, wearing that same god-awful suit three days a week, and any other goddamn thing I can dream up. I may be committing career suicide in the process, but I guarantee you’ll be jumping off the bridge with me.”

  When Graham turned to her, he was biting hard on his lower lip, but it didn’t stop the quivering. “You don’t have the balls to do it.”

  Sullivan looked him dead in the eye. “They’re a lot bigger than you think.”

  CHAPTER 47

  Joseph Solomon, or the man otherwise known as Officer Patrick Davies, almost laughed as he watched the two homicide detectives arguing in the middle of the street. They looked like an old married couple who had finally had enough of each other’s bullshit and decided to hash it out one last time for the entire neighborhood to see. But they weren’t a married couple and this wasn’t their neighborhood. In this neighborhood, they stuck out like the clueless morons they were.

  The moment he saw Graham’s Crown Victoria come around the corner, Solomon knew he had been followed. The arrival of the second detective, however, had completely thrown him for a loop. From what he knew of Graham and Sullivan, they always rode together, so the fact that they arrived separately was puzzling. But the confrontational scene that played out as they exited their cars was downright bizarre.

  Solomon’s patrol car was parked too far away to hear their words, but the looks on their contorted faces more than told the story. Graham looked more irritated than upset, while Detective Sullivan argued as if her very existence depended on the outcome.

  The spectacle was so distracting that Solomon hadn’t even stopped to consider the potential danger to himself. But as Graham made a bee-line for his car, with Detective Sullivan trailing close behind, So
lomon suddenly understood the danger all too well.

  Resisting the urge to start the car, he sat upright in his seat and moved his eyes to his dashboard computer. When the pair got close enough, Sullivan’s voice was the first one he heard. She was babbling something about internal affairs and witness tampering and sounded very serious about it.

  “You don’t have the balls to do it,” was Graham’s only response.

  “They’re a lot bigger than you think,” was Sullivan’s. Despite her obvious femininity, Solomon didn’t doubt her declaration for a second. And based on the frown lines creasing Graham’s face, neither did he. The detective was in serious trouble, and he knew it.

  But now so was Solomon.

  When he looked in his rear view mirror again, the pair stood directly behind his car.

  “I’d like to see you try it, Chloe. I really would,” he cried. Then he walked up to Solomon’s window. “I need to talk to you, officer.”

  Solomon’s first instinct was to reach for his gun, but he kept his hands steady. “Yes sir?” he asked in a voice that wasn’t naturally his.

  “Is there a reason you’re parked in front of Camille Grisham’s house.”

  “I wasn’t aware I was in front of Camille Grisham’s house, sir.” Solomon managed to keep himself perfectly still despite every muscle in his body screaming in protest. “A call came in about potential shots fired in the area.”

  Sullivan seemed confused as she scanned the block. “And you were the only unit to respond?”

  “When I got here I saw three teenagers on the corner back there. Turns out they were only shooting off firecrackers. I radioed it in to dispatch and they must have called off the other units before they could get here.”

  Sullivan’s nod communicated her satisfaction with Solomon’s story, while Graham’s steely glare communicated a desire to fight.

  “So why are you still here?” Graham asked accusingly.

  “When I saw you and Detective Sullivan pull up, I thought maybe something else had happened and I wanted to stick around in case you needed backup.”

  Graham obviously knew that was a lie. The only thing left for Solomon to wonder was whether or not the detective would call him out on that lie; even though he would be exposing his own reasons for being here by doing so. Solomon had realized after the fact that it probably wasn’t the smartest of moves to antagonize Graham the way he had, and Brandt gave him an earful about it before sending him to Camille Grisham’s house to carry out his final directive. But the arrogant asshole had it coming. Graham thought that he could dismiss him because he assumed Solomon to be nothing more than another rookie patrol officer. The truth was that Graham knew absolutely nothing about him, nor did anyone else aside from Brandt and Elliott Richmond. Had Graham known just who it was he was trying push around with the weight of his thirty meaningless years of seniority, he would have walked away just as quickly as he came. But he didn’t know, and because of that, he trailed the young Officer Davies with the intention of issuing some John Wayne-style retribution. What he also didn’t know was that because of that decision, he was a few moments away from losing his life.

  “Is that really what you thought, Officer Davies? Because if that were the case, if you were so concerned about our well being, why haven’t you moved your ass so much as a millimeter since we got here?”

  “Seriously Walter?” Sullivan snapped.

  Graham continued as if he didn’t hear her. “Did Brandt send you out here? Is that why he didn’t want to include me in your little meeting? Is that why you slammed Brandt’s office door in my goddamned face?”

  Sullivan grabbed Graham’s shoulder in an attempt to push him away, but he held his ground.

  “I’m right here, officer. Slam the door in my face now. Can you do it now that Brandt isn’t here to step in front of you? Why don’t you get out of the car and finish what you started. I’m right here.”

  “That’s enough Walter! I mean it!” Detective Sullivan fumed with rage as she stared her partner down.

  Graham looked at her with weary eyes. “Go fuck yourself, Chloe.” Then he turned to Solomon. “You be sure to do the same.”

  Solomon said nothing as he suppressed a smile. Then he watched through his rear-view mirror as Graham turned around and walked back toward his car.

  “I apologize, Officer Davies,” Sullivan offered. “I promise he didn’t mean any of that.”

  Solomon looked up at her and smiled. “No need to apologize for him, Detective Sullivan. Besides, I understand the stress he’s feeling. The entire department has been under the gun with that Leeds case, but you and Graham have had it especially rough. Hopefully arresting Clemmons will finally put everyone’s mind at ease. Congratulations on snagging him, by the way.”

  “Thank you,” Sullivan answered with a nod, though her eyes seemed weighed down with doubt. She looked back at Graham who was continuing toward his car. Then she looked at Camille Grisham’s house. “Carry on with what you were doing, officer. And stay safe out here.” She tapped the roof of his car and walked away.

  “You as well, detective,” he muttered, doubtful that she heard it.

  As Sullivan approached Camille’s front door, Solomon knew he had a major problem. His window for retrieving the disk was getting smaller by the moment, and with him now being placed in front of Camille’s house, the cover of anonymity he hoped to remain hidden under had been blown wide open.

  Given everything that had just happened, he began to wonder if it wouldn’t be best to cut his losses and bow out of the operation while he still could. The decision, should he opt to make it, would prove to be a life-changing one.

  But that decision would ultimately have to wait.

  For now there was a more pressing matter to attend to. As the Crown Victoria carrying Graham slowly drove past, Solomon craned his neck to look at him. Graham returned the look with a scowl that was meant to intimidate him. It didn’t.

  Solomon waited until the detective turned the corner before pulling away from the curb to give chase.

  After what was no doubt a long, lonely, unfulfilled life, Walter Graham was finally going to be put out of his misery.

  CHAPTER 48

  Camille sat in her father’s office, completely unaware of the situation unfolding less than two hundred feet from her front door.

  Paul had excused himself to the restroom ten minutes earlier and had yet to return. He was undoubtedly still emotional from their confrontation about the disk, but Camille suspected that he was just as upset at displaying that emotion in the first place.

  Before now, she had given no real thought to what all of this was doing to him. Camille had completely let her emotions take over, with little regard for how reckless it was making her, or how terrified that reckless behavior would make her father. Everyone has their limit was what he had told her the first night she was home. And it seemed that between Julia’s murder, Camille’s crippling grief, the existence of the disk, and her intentions for it, Paul Grisham had finally met his. She suddenly worried for him. But she also knew that she had to keep moving forward, and that meant going through with her intention of visiting Mayor Richmond with disk in hand.

  The more Camille thought about the idea, however, the more she questioned it. Even if she did get close enough to the mayor to physically give her the disk, and she actually took the time to look at it, her first and only instinct would be to cover up the information on it. Despite the personal betrayal Sonya Richmond would feel, that betrayal would be incidental compared to the loss she would suffer should the public ever learn of the disk. She would do everything she could to ensure that such a loss never occurred. And she would most likely succeed.

  Still, Camille knew she had to try.

  Before her father left, he gave back the disk that he had taken away from her. He didn’t say a word as he did so. After Camille finished copying the movie file onto it, she put it in her pocket along with the first one. She then sealed the original in an
envelope and took it upstairs to her bedroom, where she hid it under a pile of socks in her nightstand drawer.

  When Camille came back downstairs, her father was standing in the foyer. She paused as she reached the bottom step, unsure of what to say to him.

  “So I take it you’ve got all of your copies made?” he asked

  Camille nodded.

  He cast his eyes downward and put a hand in his pocket. When he pulled it out he was holding his car keys.

  Camille resisted the urge to reach for them. She quietly held her ground instead.

  Paul looked up, forced a smile, and set the keys on the table. “All I can say is I trust you to do the right thing.”

  When Camille took a step toward him, he walked away.

  “Dad?”

  He was silent as he walked into the kitchen.

  Instead of going after him, Camille reached for the keys. But she hesitated to pick them up. Paul may have trusted her to do the right thing, but she suddenly didn’t know what the right thing was. The plan was to show Sonya Richmond the disk with the intention of blackmailing her husband into a confession. But people like Sonya and Elliott Richmond weren’t easily blackmailed, particularly when the blackmailer is little more than a has-been federal agent with no real power to do anything other than talk. They had the means to not only cover up the disk, but to bury Camille right along with it. And they wouldn’t hesitate to do so. Her father knew that. That was why he did everything he could to stop her. But he now knew that he couldn’t. Setting those car keys on the table wasn’t his way of giving his blessing; it was his way of admitting that he had given up.

  As much as she wanted to say that it didn’t matter whether or not he was in her corner, it did matter. And now that she was faced with the realization that he wasn’t, she wondered if she should give up too. She picked up the car keys and held them tightly in her hand, hopeful that the answer would come to her. Instead she was frozen with indecision. She turned toward the front door, then the kitchen, then back again. With one breath she wanted to tell her father he was right, with the next she wanted to tell him she was leaving.