by A. E. Howe
Why was Nichols meeting with Matt? Who had contacted who? Were they both moles within the department? Eddie had said that there was more than one. Of course, they might have just run into each other. My mind spun with all the possibilities, few of them good.
Mel Conway was standing in his driveway, staring at the ground, when we drove up. He didn’t say a word as I unlocked the gate and we all walked up to the house.
“If you can keep from making too big of a mess, I’d appreciate it,” he said without rancor, once we were inside.
“We aren’t going to tear your house apart. We’re mostly interested in David’s room.” I didn’t tell him that if we had wanted to do a full search and leave the place a shambles, we’d have brought in more people.
Pete and I went our separate ways, searching the downstairs fairly quickly. We found several beer bottles and glasses that we thought might contain DNA from other people who had visited the house before David died, or who might be involved in his death. Finding nothing else obviously relevant, we headed upstairs.
We’d agreed to search David’s room together. Conway led the way. David’s room was large, bright and surprisingly neat, though I’d learned over the years that a person’s occupation or lifestyle was not necessarily an indicator of their housekeeping skills. I’d been in homes of well-dressed professionals that were absolutely filthy.
“He was always neat,” Conway said, echoing my thoughts.
Pete and I searched the room methodically. He went clockwise from the door while I went counterclockwise. Most of the items in the room were things from David’s childhood. Even though I knew the sort of person he had grown up to be, it was poignant seeing toys, pictures and trophies from an apparently happy childhood.
Conway sat on the bed and put his head in his hands.
I reached the closet and started pulling things out and searching through them. Finally all that was left was a high shelf above the clothes hangers. I tried to get a look, but I wasn’t quite tall enough.
“Mind if I stand on this chair?” I asked Mel Conway. He looked up. I was holding a wooden desk chair. I didn’t want to be solely to blame if it broke.
“No, that’s fine.”
Pete had finished with the rest of the room, so I handed him boxes, games and a suitcase as I took them off the shelf. The suitcase wasn’t empty.
Pete went through the boxes and I opened the suitcase. Inside was an odd collection of items: a Coke bottle, a small blue-and-white metal sign that said “$500 Fine,” a pen, a newspaper from 2010, a rock and a dozen other equally odd bits and pieces.
“Does any of this mean anything to you?” I asked Conway, who seemed as puzzled as I was.
“No. I don’t think I’ve seen any of it before.”
“Is this David’s suitcase?”
“One of his. We keep most of our suitcases in the loft above the laundry room.”
I glanced at Pete, who gave me a knowing look. Neither of us wanted to say what we were thinking in front of Mel Conway.
“You think they were trophies?” I asked Pete, once we were back in the car. The suitcase was wrapped in plastic, covered in evidence tags and stored in the trunk.
“Oh, yeah. Trick’s going to be proving it.”
We drove the suitcase to the station. Matt was coming out as we were walking in. What do you say to someone you suspect of treachery?
“Working on a Sunday?” was the only thing I could think of. Pete was lucky since the two of them never exchanged pleasantries anyway.
“Larry,” Matt said noncommittally. Good, no small talk, I thought. Then he seemed to notice the bagged suitcase for the first time. “Evidence?”
“Yep,” I said, copying his laconic style. He didn’t press it, but I thought I could feel him staring at our backs as we went into the office.
“You didn’t ask him about his meeting with Nichols,” Pete said.
“That day’s coming.”
Pete gave me a strange look. I’d said it a bit more ominously than I should have.
Chapter Seventeen
I stopped by Cara’s place a couple hours later. Alvin greeted me with a happy, panting face. Cara didn’t seem quite so overjoyed.
“Hey,” I said, giving her a light kiss which she accepted. “I’m sorry about last night.”
“I know. It’s not about being sorry. Can we sit down?” She took my hand and guided me to the couch.
“I know that my job is an issue, but—” I started to say, but she stopped me, shaking her head.
“I came to terms with your job. I wouldn’t have said I had if I hadn’t. What I can’t take is being cut off. Everyone has a hard day. I just want you to give me the opportunity to understand what’s going on with you.”
“I know and I’m sorry. But sometimes when I’ve had a bad day, I’m going to need to decompress. You’ve got to remember that my bad day can mean decomposing bodies or someone trying to kill me.”
I was feeling pretty confused at this point. On one hand, what she said made sense. Nothing is more irritating than a person who won’t tell you what they’re upset about. But on the other hand, sometimes not talking about it was a way for me to handle a particularly traumatizing experience.
“I want to be a part of your life. I’m willing to be a part of those experiences.”
“But I want you to be spared that. I don’t want to associate my life with you with the crap I have to deal with on the job in the real world.” I was trying to understand her point of view, but I felt like she wasn’t grasping my side of the argument.
“We can’t separate it into our world and the real world. I’m out there too. Bad things happen at my job,” she argued.
“Not the same level of bad.”
“That’s not fair,” she said, frowning slightly.
“I don’t know how to explain it. I want to look at you and not think about what happens on the job,” I argued, frustrated.
“But if you keep me out, how can we really be together?” I heard the frustration in her voice too and instead of making me sympathetic, it just irritated me.
“You can’t ask me to justify how I feel. I don’t want my whole life colored by the stuff I have to deal with at work.”
“If you can’t integrate your job into your life, then maybe you do have the wrong job,” she said with finality in her tone.
I stood up. “We’ve been over that already. You know why I do what I do, and why I’m not going to give it up right now.”
Anger had boiled to the surface. I could see it in her reaction as much as I felt it in mine. “Look, I think I should go. We both need to think this out.”
“Okay,” she said, staring down at the carpet as I walked over to the door with Alvin at my heels. The little guy seemed to wonder how the evening had gone so wrong. I reached down and gave him a pet before opening the door.
“Call me,” I said, but didn’t receive an answer.
The next morning the rain was coming down in waves, perfect weather for my mood. I shook off the rain and waved to the deputy sitting at the front desk. What was his name? He’d only been with us for a couple of months and had gotten sucker-punched by a drunk the week before, receiving a few broken ribs. The front desk was a pretty common assignment for light-duty work. Bruce? Ricky? I had no idea.
I went straight back to the evidence room. Shantel and Marcus were eating pastries and drinking coffee.
“If it ain’t Mr. Brighteyes,” Shantel said when she saw me. “You look baaaad. Guess I don’t have to ask what you did Sunday. Your partner’s been burning up our phones telling us how you all spent your time finding work for us. And him with a wife and children and you with a girlfriend. You can’t come up with something better to do?” She shook her head sadly.
“Hey, at least we didn’t find another body and ruin Sunday too,” I said, trying to get in the spirit of the banter.
“Ugggh, you had to remind me of that body. That was worse than anything I’ve ever seen,�
�� Marcus said, looking at his half-eaten pastry and frowning at it before dropping it in the trashcan. That was saying something, since Marcus had spent several years with NYPD before taking early retirement and moving south.
Pete joined us later as I was helping Marcus and Shantel take pictures and samples from all the items in the suitcase, as well as the case itself.
“I’d like you all to keep this quiet,” I told them.
“Quiet from who?” Shantel asked.
“From anyone except me, Pete or the sheriff.”
“If this is Conway’s suitcase and these are souvenirs of his assaults then—” Marcus began.
“Then why the hell would Ayers be hanging over a body behind the store and get shot by Nichols?” Shantel asked.
“We just don’t want any rumors going around right now.” Pete looked at Marcus and Shantel, who both understood all the implications of the suitcase.
“In fact, if you all could run the samples over to the FDLE lab yourselves, that would probably be best.”
“Road trip! No problem,” Shantel said, though FDLE was only thirty miles away in Tallahassee.
“Yeah, it’d be awful if you all had to eat lunch over there.”
“Strong possibility of that,” Marcus said, “since you ruined my breakfast.”
Back at our desks, Pete and I printed out pictures of all the objects. We took them to the conference room where we would have some privacy, and divided them up between us. We wanted to try to match each of them to one of the different rape cases.
“This is like trying to put a jigsaw puzzle together without the picture on the box,” Pete grumbled.
“We have twenty-two items and five rapes. Even if we had just five objects and five rapes, we wouldn’t necessarily know which object was collected at which rape scene, since all the items are pretty generic. A rock could have come from any place.” I was feeling Pete’s frustration.
“Some of them probably come from earlier cases that we don’t even know about,” Pete admitted. “He didn’t just start assaulting women.”
We both knew that serial rapists, like serial murderers, have careers that start early in life. They begin with lesser crimes and move up to the big leagues. These objects could have represented a decade of assaults.
“And then when we’re done, we’re going to have to talk to the women again. I’m telling you, it’s horrible. I should have taken the suspects. Whenever I talk to women who’ve been victimized, I think of my wife and girls.” Pete was flipping through pictures of the crime scenes as he spoke. “The odds that they’ll be assaulted are frighteningly high. And how the hell do you warn them without terrifying them?” he asked.
I thought it must be particularly hard for a cop to see all the dreadful harm that can befall people and then have to watch his children go out in that same world every day. I tried to change the subject.
“The rapes all occurred at different locations: the back of a van; behind a local bar; in a store restroom; another van; and in the bushes by the victim’s house. We know that the souvenirs would have reminded him of the rapes, but did they come from the location of the rape, or maybe someplace close by? Hell, they might even have come from something else connected to the victim, like the first place he saw her.” What had seemed like a great discovery was turning out to be a Rubik’s Cube.
“That’s why we’re going to have to go back to the victims. Maybe they’ll recognize one of the items, or maybe one of them will spark a memory,” Pete said.
“All we have to do is prove that these objects,” I tapped the photos we’d printed out, “even just one of them, are connected to the rapes, then we will have established Conway as the perp.”
“And once we’ve done that we can focus on Nichols.” Pete was about as even-tempered a man as I’d ever met, so what he said next surprised me. “I want to take him down.”
“You sound like a movie cop,” I told him.
“If we have a deputy who’s dirty enough that he shot an innocent man, and possibly killed a woman to frame him, I take that very personally. Besides, we can’t let your dad down.”
It was funny. Pete always seemed like one of those guys for whom the job was just a job. He lived and breathed for his wife and girls. He almost never went out drinking with the guys, sat around telling war stories or collected sheriff patches. There were only two things about the work that he really seemed to enjoy—talking to people and shooting at the range. He’d told me once that he’d always thought he’d be a teacher when he was growing up. But now, in this moment, I realized how deeply he felt about the department.
“I’m going to start with this,” I said, holding up a picture of the handicap parking sign. “If it was stolen from somewhere in Adams County within the last six months, I ought to be able to find out where. Plus, Marcus was able to pull fingerprints off of it.”
“Makes sense.” Pete nodded. “I’m going to start with the pen.” He held up the picture of a Bic pen that read “Have a nice day!”
“Marcus got a partial off of it, and it’s a bit distinctive. Also, I’ll take this.” Pete held up a picture of a screwdriver.
“How many should we tackle?” I added.
“Maybe we should work on all of them at once.”
“What’s the point in wasting time on a rock or a nail? They’re too common. If we run into dead ends with these, we’ll come back to them.”
“And we won’t talk to the victims until we have something we’re confident is related to their case, or until we’re at a dead end.” His empathy for victims was one of the many reasons I liked being partnered with Pete.
“Agreed.”
I heard my phone’s text tone go off and looked down to see a message from Dad. Meet me for lunch at the house. I knew that he wanted a briefing on the autopsy and the search of Conway’s house.
I’d no sooner confirmed that I’d meet Dad when another text came through. This one was from Eddie, my snitch. Can you meet me at the usual place? I just had time before heading over to Dad’s.
Chapter Eighteen
I drove to the back of Rose Hill Cemetery and parked next to Caroline Thorne 1878 – 1918. Eddie was sitting down, leaning against the cemetery’s wall and waiting for me. Whenever he saw me, he looked like he was about to run. He stood up as I walked over to him and for a moment I thought he really would rabbit this time.
“You look more nervous than usual,” I told him.
“I’ve got good reason. I want you to destroy everything with my name on it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“If they find out about me, I’m dead. And they’ve got more than one deputy on the inside.”
“You told me that from the beginning. What’s changed?”
“They’ve killed someone. Before it was just drugs and women and stuff. But now I know they’ve killed someone, and not just a drug guy either. You got to destroy anything that might have my name on—”
I held up my hand to stop the words pouring out of his mouth. “Don’t worry. I don’t have a file with ‘Eddie the Informer’ written across the top.”
“What about your phone?”
“I keep it with me all the time. Is this why you wanted to meet?”
“Yes. No. I wanted you to know that my dad and all of them are going crazy. I’ve never seen them like this.”
“Is that an angora sweater?” His jacket had blown open and I could just see something pink and fuzzy around his neckline.
“It’s cashmere. And it makes me feel a little better, okay? I’m telling you, things aren’t good!”
“Okay, slow down and tell me what you know.”
“Dad’s, like, gone into hiding. When I see him or any of the big guys, they’re giving everyone this look. It’s that look the Secret Service gives everyone. You know, like anyone could be guilty.”
“That’s fascinating,” I said sarcastically, “but how does that help me?”
“I’ve heard things too. D
ad’s sure that your father is running some kind of sting on him.”
“That’s crazy. My dad’s been after him for years. He’s never made a secret of it. Besides, it doesn’t even make sense. If your father has these moles in our department, wouldn’t he know if we were running a special operation against him?”
“I think that’s what’s making him go berserk. He hasn’t been too worried about your father’s efforts in the past because he knew what was going on from the inside. But now he thinks your father is onto him and has found a way to target him without him knowing.” Eddie was talking a mile a minute.
“I need you to give me the names of the deputies on the inside,” I said, trying to get him to focus.
“I don’t know who they are!” he yelled. “If I did, I’d tell you and get out of town. I thought I had a chance to find out, but now Dad’s gone into, like, lockdown. I see him once in a while at the house. He eats and leaves.”
“I thought you got on his good side when I helped you by taking out some of his competition.”
“Yeah, but now he even finds that suspicious. For all I know, he’s using. Wouldn’t that be a laugh? He asked me the other day why I’d suddenly got interested in the business. He knows I’m up to something. I saw it in his cold-ass eyes. Last time I saw him, Chief was trying to calm him down, but he wasn’t having any of it.”
“Chief?”
“My grandfather. We’ve always called him Chief,” Eddie explained.
I’d met Daniel Thompson several times over the years while he was the fire chief in Calhoun. But unlike most first responders in the county, Dad never seemed on great terms with him. When I joined the department I learned why. As patriarch of the Thompson clan, Daniel managed to appear respectable as head of the fire department, but it was common knowledge that he oversaw the Thompson empire of drugs and other illicit activities in the county. But no one had ever even been able to charge Daniel Thompson with anything. Word was that he was a lot smarter than his son, Justin.
