“We need to learn as much about your mom as possible: who her friends were, any romantic relationships she may have had, what her state of mind was prior to yesterday. Things like that.”
The blank stares that I got back indicated the need for a simpler approach.
“Did you notice anything strange about her behavior over the past few days? Was she worried about anything? More quiet than usual?”
“It was just the opposite,” Dana offered as she dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. “She was really excited about her new job. All she could talk about was how nice the hotel was and how much more money she would be making. It was the happiest I’ve seen her in a long time.”
“Did she talk about anyone she worked with?”
“Not anyone specifically. She said she was part of a crew of four that was assigned to clean the bigger rooms.”
“Any problems with the crew?”
“No. Like I said, she seemed really happy.” Dana paused. “Much happier than the last place she worked.”
“And where was that?”
Dana and Christina exchanged a glance. Christina tightened her grip on her older sister’s arm.
“She was a housekeeper.”
“For whom?” I asked as I pulled out a notepad that desperately needed to be filled.
“A cop.”
I immediately stopped writing. “Say that again?”
“The man whose house our mom worked in. He was a cop in your department.”
I almost asked Dana to repeat herself again, but I knew her response wouldn’t be any different the third time around. So I swallowed hard and asked the question I knew I needed to ask.
“What’s his name?”
Dana looked at her sister as if she needed confirmation to answer the question. When Christina nodded her approval, Dana turned back to me. “Oliver Brandt.”
I nearly dropped my notepad. Thankfully, neither of the girls seemed to notice. “And how long was she employed by him?”
“Three years. And she mostly worked for his wife,” Dana clarified. “As far as we saw he wasn’t around very much.”
The distinction between Oliver Brandt and his wife Bethany made sense. The former is a commander of the DPD SWAT team and one of the higher-ups rumored to be at the center of the department’s brewing corruption scandal. The latter is a wealthy real estate developer whose family’s fingerprints are all over the downtown Denver skyline. Only one of them would have the financial resources to hire a full-time housekeeper, and it wasn’t the one who was still fifteen years away from collecting his meager pension. Still, any connection to Commander Brandt, no matter how loose, would bring scrutiny to the case that no one in the department wanted.
“Why did she leave?”
Dana’s face stiffened. “She was fired.”
“On what grounds?”
“On the grounds that Oliver Brandt is a sexist, racist piece of shit.”
Christina’s eyes grew wide with embarrassment as she pushed her sister’s arm. “Dana!”
“What? I’m sorry but it’s true.” She turned to me with eyes that were suddenly dark with anger. “He didn’t like my mom from minute one, like she had no business being in his house or something. She would always overhear conversations between him and Mrs. Brandt. He’d say stuff like ‘is she even legal?’ Mom just ignored it and did her job, the same as she always did. But it constantly bothered her.”
I nodded and allowed her to continue.
“Mrs. Brandt was nice though. She liked having these huge parties for all of her important friends. Mom always looked forward to those because she got paid extra. A couple of weeks before she was fired, she came home all excited because she was going to work some big to-do that Mrs. Brandt was having for the mayor. Mrs. Brandt took those parties pretty seriously. So did mom. She said she came away from them knowing more about political and business deals than they would ever tell you on the news. Everybody called her CNN because she loved to report back on everything.”
Dana smiled. It was a pretty smile and I wondered if she had inherited any parts of it from her mother. The thought made me sad and I pushed it aside as quickly as I could.
“So Oliver Brandt was the one responsible for firing your mother?”
“That’s right. She never told us the whole story of what happened, but she told us enough. He was a terrible person.”
The adrenaline spike I suddenly felt made it difficult to keep the pen in my hand steady and I had to put it down. “What did she tell you?”
“Mrs. Brandt was out of town the day mom was fired. Apparently, Mr. Brandt came home while she was there cleaning and something happened. There was a big fight and Mr. Brandt got angry. Mom got angry too, and he told her to leave and never come back. I’d never seen her more upset. She was shaking the entire night.” Dana paused. “She was scared too.”
I looked at Christina. It was clear the recollection was upsetting her.
“Did she tell you why?” I asked Dana.
“Even though I begged her to tell me what happened she wouldn’t. After a while, I finally stopped trying, but I knew that whatever happened between her and Mr. Brandt hadn’t stopped bothering her. Even with all the relief she felt at getting another job, she hadn’t been the same since that night. He did something to her. I don’t know what, but it was bad.”
A feeling of dread came over me as I picked up the pen and wrote Commander Brandt’s name in my notepad. I couldn’t bring myself to write anything more.
“Did he do this to her?” Christina suddenly asked.
“Do what?”
“Kill her?”
The question was startling, but I maintained my composure. “Commander Brandt didn’t kill your mom.”
“Would you tell us if you believed he did?” Dana countered with a stiff glare.
“I know him, Dana. He isn’t responsible for this.”
“How can you be so sure?”
I wasn’t, but I couldn’t tell her that. “Like I said before, I will find the person who actually did this. I promise.”
At that moment, I looked up to see that the rest of the eyes in the room were looking at me. Some of the stares were angry like Dana’s, some were desperate like her sister’s; all were demanding an immediate response to a problem they now thought I was helping to perpetuate. I hadn’t told Dana the truth when I claimed to know Oliver Brandt. The truth was that I hadn’t spoken a single word to the commander in my nine years on the force, but I refused to give in to the notion that a member of my department was capable of something as heinous as what happened to Marisol Alvarez, corruption scandal or no corruption scandal. It was apparent that Dana had already made up her mind, and her conviction was enough to sway her family. Soon, the rest of the community would be swayed too, and in their minds I would be reduced to nothing more than another crooked cop trying to cover it all up.
As I looked at the faces surrounding me, it was clear that I’d lost the room, and it would only get worse the longer I stayed. So I gave Dana my card, along with the requisite instructions to call should she need to.
After assurances from her aunt and uncle that the girls would be properly looked after, I left; much further away from square one than when I’d arrived.
I sat in the car for a long time, staring at the only five words that I’d managed to write down during the brief interview: Marisol Alvarez/ Commander Oliver Brandt. But it wasn’t the words I’d written that filled me with the angst that currently rendered me immobile, it was the thought of the words I needed to write next: connection… lead… potential suspect. Due diligence required that I write those words, even if I didn’t want to believe them. Due diligence would also require me to follow up with appropriate action.
Hence the angst.
My current state did not allow for a rational plan through which to carry out that action. Kimball would obviously be the first person I would involve, but Kimball is former SWAT, meaning that his history with Brandt is ex
tensive. I would have to tread carefully when I presented the news, and trust that whatever his personal reaction was, he would fully be on board with the depth of investigation that would be required. With the way this day was going so far, I wasn’t sure if I could trust anything.
Add one more screwed up thing to this already royally screwed up day.
When I looked up from my notepad and out the car window, I quickly realized that another item was about to be added to that ever-growing list.
CHAPTER 4
I had just taken a long pull from a bottle of water that had been baking in the car for at least a week when I saw someone attempting to enter the apartment building I had just left. A double take confirmed the identity of the person I was seeing, though my disbelief at seeing her refused to subside.
I jumped out of the car without thinking as Kyle McKenna stood impatiently at the front stoop. She was pressing apartment buzzers indiscriminately in the hopes that someone would let her in. Typical of her bottom-feeder tabloid journalist methodology.
I held my badge out in front of me as I approached, wishing she would give me an actual reason to arrest her. Unfortunately there was nothing in the Colorado Penal Code that outlawed her lack of professional integrity.
Her already bright face lit up even more when she saw me coming. Not exactly the reaction I was hoping to inspire.
“Well, if it isn’t Scott Priest and his waving-the-badge routine. It’s time to up your game, my friend. That stopped scaring people a long time ago.”
“I saw you trolling through here and figured you’d obviously gotten lost. I decided to be a nice guy and offer you an official police escort back to wherever it was you came from. This isn’t the safest neighborhood for pretty young vultures.”
“What a charmer. You must have been the stud of your alternative high school.”
“Believe me, when it comes to you none of the charm is genuine.”
“Of course it isn’t,” she said with a broad smile that communicated her disbelief.
Kyle was attractive even when she wasn’t trying to be – which by my estimation was most of the time. Her curly auburn hair was usually pinned back in some haphazard ponytail, a messy chic that she probably saw in some magazine. Her wannabe hippie vibe was normally completed with a pair of faded blue jeans, a tee shirt from her 1990’s concert-going days, and a pair of open-toed sandals that never took a season off, including the dead of winter. Her sharp green eyes were always probing, and if you allowed her the opportunity, they would look deeper into you than you would ever want a pair of eyes to look. It was a trait that most good journalists seemed to have. And Kyle McKenna was a good journalist. Unfortunately, she chose to align her skills with one of the worst tabloid rags in the country, a rag that devoted most of its ink to skewering the Denver police department and the men and women who served in it. That made her the enemy.
“If you’ve finished putting the moves on me could you please put the badge away? I would hate for the neighbors to think that I’m being harassed.”
I smirked as I hung the shield around my neck. “Seems to me you have the market cornered on harassment, Ms. McKenna. The fact that you leaked Marisol’s name this morning…”
“That wasn’t me.”
“Really? And I suppose it’s pure coincidence that you’re stalking her children right now. Do you think I’m that stupid?”
“Your lack of intelligence, though well-documented, has nothing to do with the current situation, detective. Marisol has been formally identified, which now makes this a full-fledged news story. It also makes Dana and Christina fair game.”
“There’s nothing fair about your game, Kyle. They just lost their mother for Christ’s sake.”
“And I’m very curious to know why. I thought you would be too.”
“Our motivations are very different.”
When an elderly woman emerged from the apartment building, Kyle took it upon herself to hold the door open for her. I would have thought it a nice gesture had I not known what she planned to do after the woman cleared the doorway.
“I’m not finished talking to you,” I declared before she could take her first step inside.
“You mean you’re not finished insulting my character.”
“Don’t you need to actually have character before I can insult it?”
She sighed as she held on to the door. “Don’t you have a murder to solve?”
When she attempted to walk through the door, I pushed it closed in front of her.
“That was totally unnecessary, Scott. You could’ve crushed my damn fingers.”
“You published Marisol’s name before her family could be notified. Did you even care if her kids saw it?”
Kyle’s smooth pale face suddenly hardened. “I told you I didn’t have anything to do with that.”
“It doesn’t matter. I can’t let them be exploited any more than they already have been.”
“Look, I know the Denver PD is in this cute little totalitarian-rule phase right now, but this is still a free country with a free press. I don’t need your permission to do anything.” With that, she began pushing apartment buzzers again.
“They might be too busy grieving to answer the door.”
“No shit they’re grieving. I’m not a total goon.”
“You’re trying to interview them for a newspaper article in the midst of the worst time of their lives. I’d say that makes you a goon.”
Kyle rolled her eyes. “You just interviewed them. What does that make you?”
“A homicide detective doing my job.”
“I’m doing my job too.”
“I’ve seen first-hand what can happen when you do your job.”
“What’s with all this hostility? It’s not like I’ve ever written about you. Sure you’re a butthole, but you’re also a solid cop. As far as I’m concerned that’s all my readers need to know.”
I was less than overwhelmed by her flattery. “What about all the other good cops in the department? Why not expose your readers to them?”
“Because the dirty ones sell papers. And from what I’m starting to learn, there are a lot more of them than there are of you.”
“The mud-slinging has officially begun,” I responded through clenched teeth. “How have you not been sued for libel by now?”
“Because in spite of all their self-serving press conferences and hollow proclamations to the public, your bosses know that everything I write about is true.”
Despite my lack of tolerance for Kyle and the newspaper she wrote for, there were plenty of people within the department who were afraid of her, and after this morning’s meeting with Hitchcock, I was finally beginning to understand why.
Her first investigative piece on the DPD came on the heels of Mayor Sonya Richmond’s U.S. Senate campaign and subsequent victory last November. A few weeks before the election, Mayor Richmond’s husband and campaign manager Elliott had become the target of a series of searing accusations made by a former FBI agent. She not only claimed that he had attempted to rig the election, but that he also arranged for the murder of a colleague and lawyer named Julia Leeds when she threatened to expose him. According to former Special Agent Camille Grisham, Elliott’s extramarital affair with Julia also played into his motivation.
Even though the story was as convoluted as any the city had ever seen, among members of the department it would have added up to little more than another sordid sex scandal involving power and politics – two things the average cop cares nothing about. But when two homicide detectives were shot in the midst of working the Leeds murder, the story took on an entirely new dimension.
The man believed to be responsible for those shootings was a rookie patrol officer. Shortly after he confessed to killing Detective Walter Graham and seriously injuring his partner Chloe Sullivan, he also hinted at playing a role in Julia Leeds’ death, though he refused to say what that role was. What he did say was that he didn’t act alone, claiming that his c
o-conspirators were high-level officials. After more than two and a half months in jail awaiting trial, he has yet to reveal anything more.
Many in the media assumed that these high-level officials were somehow associated with the department. Once Kyle McKenna began her daily in-depth reporting on the story, assumption became fact in the minds of the public, and as more layers were stripped away, including the possibility that the officer may have had a direct connection to Elliott Richmond and possibly the mayor, the figureheads within the department began to panic. The result was an informal code of silence that precluded them from addressing the story in public. The code of silence extended into the squad room as well, much to the dismay of the rank and file. This practice allowed members of the media – the Mile High Dispatch especially – to run wild. Every article written by Kyle featured the latest report of police brutality, racial profiling and every other transgression that a cop could be accused of. And she rode the wave of negativity all the way to record circulation. She did her share of good reporting along the way, but she also succeeded in throwing a lot of good men and women under the bus.
I’d managed to evade the wrath of her pen up to this point, despite being quoted by her more than a dozen times over the past two years, but I figured it would only be a matter of time before I made the honor roll. Perhaps the task that Hitchcock charged me with would finally be enough to clinch my spot.
“If there are so many dirty cops flooding the street, why aren’t you out there chasing them down?”
“Because the story I need to cover exists right here,” Kyle answered as she impatiently pressed another apartment buzzer.
“The only thing that exists here are two very vulnerable, very frightened teenage girls who miss their mother. Considering the fact that you wouldn’t recognize a human-interest story if it punched you in the face, I don’t see what angle you could possibly be working.”
“I’m working the Marisol Alvarez is connected to Oliver Brandt angle.”
My poker face must not have been strong enough, as Kyle seemed to sense my surprise immediately.
The Rogue Element (Scott Priest Book 1) Page 4
