Blueblood

by Matthew Iden

  “Are you telling me you’ve been doing this on your own?” I asked, incredulous.

  “You got it,” Bloch said. “Funny, huh? You and I can see it, plain as day. And maybe they can, too. But no one else wants to touch it.”

  “So, they’re all handling just their own department’s murder? But nothing else?”

  “While there’s a guy out there, offing cops,” Bloch said, nodding. “And he’s got his pick of ten or twelve different districts to do it in. None of which will cooperate with each other.”

  I blew out a breath. “I think I see where I come in.”

  Bloch gave me a weary smile. “I figured you would. Once I caught on I was being stonewalled everywhere, I started asking around, seeing if anyone would take this up as a hobby, do the leg work for me. I can’t do this thing by myself.”

  “Any takers?”

  “What do you think? But I got a couple of nods about you from some guys I know in Homicide. Great track record, a good cop. They said you retired, but still had a hand in.”

  “Ah,” I said. “That thing last year was kind of foisted on me, Bloch. I didn’t ask for it.”

  “I get that. I didn’t ask for this, either, you know? But sometimes things come looking for you. What am I supposed to do with this—walk away, act like everyone else? What happens next week or next month or next year when I hear about another cop getting shot? Send a memo? I owe Danny more than that. I owe these other cops more than that.”

  I looked at Bloch. I didn’t need the rah-rah, brothers-in-arms spiel. But he had a point. When you see something’s broken, you fix it. Just because it isn’t any of your business doesn’t mean it’s less wrong. Or any less your responsibility to do what you can to help. Even if I didn’t already have debts to pay in that regard, I knew about this now. And that meant I should do something about it.

  I held out a hand. “Let’s see those files.”

  Chapter Two

  If the Charles E. Smith auditorium seemed like a university basketball arena converted into a semi-respectable graduation hall, it’s because that’s exactly what it was. The George Washington University staff had made a valiant effort to make the place exude the kind of storied tradition that universities are supposed to have on graduation day. They’d draped flowing royal-blue sashes over everything and portraits of the Father of Our Country gazing serenely down on us, but I was still sitting in a fold-down bleacher seat with my knees touching the back of the row in front of me and bumping elbows with my neighbors on either side. At six-three, I’m not exactly NBA material but I would’ve had to saw my legs off mid-calf to fit. I wondered for maybe the thousandth time why makers of auditoriums gave each seat just one armrest, as if every person in the place only wanted to be comfortable half the time.

  “Which one is yours?” asked the woman to my left. Our elbows had been fencing over our shared armrest for the last twenty minutes. She was stout, about fifty years old, with short, burnt-orange hair the color of nothing found in nature. A chunky man I took to be her husband sat on her other side. He was scowling and his arms were crossed so tightly that his hands were jammed into his armpits. His suit strained over his chest and belly like he’d been blown up by a tire pump.

  “Uh, mine is the black speck in the…seventh row. In section H,” I said, trying not to squint.

  “Oh, she’s in Arts and Sciences?”

  “They’re all in Arts and Sciences, Marie,” the man said without looking at her. “That’s what this is, the graduate school of Arts and Sciences.”

  Marie smiled, undeterred by her husband’s scorn. “Our Kenny is graduating with a master’s degree in English.”

  “That’s swell,” I said.

  “He’ll be living at home until he’s forty,” the man groused.

  “And yours? Is she getting her master’s degree, too?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “In Gender Studies.”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful,” Marie said. “What will she do with that?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “What kind of job can she get with that? With a degree in Gender Studies?”

  I considered. “She’s leaning towards counseling, law, social work, I think. The world is her oyster.”

  The man snorted. “Kids pull their careers out of a hat, don’t even know what the hell they want to do.”

  I gazed out over the mass of black gowns. “Her mother was murdered by a stalker when she was a little girl. She was sleeping next door at the time. The same guy kidnapped and almost killed her twelve years later. That’s probably what prompted her decision to help other women.”

  The armrest was mine for the remainder of the afternoon.

  . . .

  I caught up with Amanda two hours later, after listening to the commencement speaker, the Big Cheese of some Big Corporation. He droned on about the Big Profits his company had earned and the Big Decisions he’d made before he remembered he was speaking at a commencement and should probably give the graduates some value. He wrapped up with ten tips for success. In my head, I named them the Ten Big Cheese Tips, which made me smile and got me through the rest of the ceremony with my sanity intact. We all clapped politely, suffered through five more speakers, and then the graduates crossed the stage. Some sleep-walked, others sprinted, but every one of their faces were split wide with smiles. We clapped some more and then all five thousand of us stood and tried to find each other on the basketball court at the same time.

  I’m a trained investigator, so it only took me the better part of an hour to find the object of my search in a corner of the auditorium. Amanda was chatting with a half-dozen other student-types. Two, like her, wore graduation gowns. The others were dressed in street clothes. One, Jay, I’d met before and waved as I walked up. Amanda turned around.

  “Marty!” she said and gave me a hug like she was trying to squeeze me in two. She was slim, but I’d seen her carry a backpack that would’ve bent me over double. In heels she could almost look me in the eye. I hugged back and smiled.

  “Congrats, kid. You made it.”

  Her face was radiant. “Thanks, Marty. Some days I didn’t think it was going to happen. And this is the easy one. Tack on five more years for a Ph.D.”

  “Then you teach for a year and you’re old enough to retire?” I asked.

  “Hey,” Jay said. “I’ll only be twenty-eight when I get my doctorate.”

  “You say that now,” Amanda said. “Wait until it’s just you and your dissertation staring you in the face. You’ll find all kinds of reasons to put it off.”

  “I’ll knock that sucka out in six months,” Jay said, doing a flabby one-two combination into the air. The group, almost as one, burst into laughter. He looked equal parts surprised and offended. “What?”

  “Jay,” a short girl with a butch hair cut said. “You haven’t finished a paper on time since grade school. You’ll probably be ABD until you die.”

  I quirked an eyebrow at Amanda. “ABD?”

  “All But Dissertation,” she said. “Your required classes are done and only the writing is left, but fewer than half finish. It’s the most dreaded acronym in higher education.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Kind of like DOA?”

  “Yes,” she said, then tilted her head. “Exactly like that, actually.”

  I nodded. “Say, I’ve been wondering. If a guy gets a Master of Arts degree does this make you a Mistress of Arts?”

  “God,” one of the girls in a graduation gown said, rolling her eyes.

  “It’s okay, Miranda,” Amanda said. “He’s just trying to get my goat. His macho male id reacts instinctively against the thought of someone getting an advanced degree in Gender Studies, so he pokes fun at it, trying to diminish the importance of the degree in order to bolster his own frail ego. Childish, really.”

  “Marty sees button, Marty pushes button,” I said. “What are you crazy kids up to now?”

  “There’s a lunch and reception, then a happy hour, then a party at
the dean’s house.”

  “Followed by parties at everyone else’s houses?”

  “Pretty much,” she said. “Are you up for it?”

  I shook my head. “I can’t. I’ve got some work to do for a friend. But pick a night sometime this week. I want to take you out to dinner. Bring Jay or whoever, too. If they’re not DOA.”

  “ABD.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “I want to celebrate. You deserve it. Hell, I deserve it.”

  Her eyes were shiny. “Thank you, Marty. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  I smiled and squeezed her arm. “No sweat, kid. I could say the same.”

  Chapter Three

  By four the next morning, the sleep thing wasn’t working. Pre-dawn hours weren’t anything new to me, of course; as a homicide cop, rising early was practically a job requirement. But most cops look forward to retirement as a chance to get some real sleep and learn how to wake up at more human hours. And I probably could’ve trained myself out of getting out of bed before the sun with a few months of late-night TV and beer. But last year I’d received news that would keep anyone awake at night.

  Stage two colorectal cancer.

  I’d like to say I handled the news well, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t rock me. I thought my life was over. There was the basic issue of staying alive, of course, but then all the things that made life worth living seemed like they were being taken away, too. Like being a cop. Doctors told me I didn’t have to retire, that plenty of people worked through their disease, but it wasn’t like I answered phones for a living. I was a cop. I couldn’t afford to fall down—literally—on the job. So I quit rather than let anyone down.

  Doing the right thing didn’t make it more palatable, though. It was a retirement that I hadn’t wanted or planned for. I was angry and scared and sick. A few things kept me distracted—like helping keep Amanda alive while she was being stalked by her mother’s killer, for instance—but a poor night’s sleep became a constant. When the disease didn’t have me up, pacing the floor, anxiety did.

  Hopefully, though, it wouldn’t be long before I had some news. Round one of chemo was over and I was due to go to my oncologist’s for a checkup soon. I had no idea if the news would be good or bad. Amanda had been a rock through the months of chemo, coaching me to think positive, look for silver linings.

  But silver linings and wishes weren’t always enough to keep the fear and the anxiety and tension away.

  So it was still dark out when I grabbed a bowl of plain oatmeal, sat at my kitchen table with the overhead light on, and put Bloch’s files in front of me. I started to read. And read. And read some more. By the time the sun peeked over the trees in my backyard, I’d already been through his files twice and was going back to re-check some of the facts. I’d made my own notes, a list of questions, and a rough timeline. The question was how to proceed.

  Terrence Witherspoon was a twenty-six-year veteran of the MPDC, never making it past Master Patrol Officer. In the Army, he would’ve been a corporal. Some guys are just cut out for the beat. They don’t want or can’t do anything else. Which is fine, we need all the cops we can get and there were plenty of times when a patrol officer coming through with a tip was better than what the guys on my own Homicide squad could do.

  Witherspoon had worked the First District, which put him solidly in Southeast, the roughest part of DC and where the city’s most spectacular violent crime went down. That alone was a feather in Witherspoon’s cap, but adding to that was the fact that he worked Police Service Area 106, which had a reputation for violence and drugs even in Southeast. The demographic was solidly black. Hispanic and Asian gangs generally stayed out or sourced drugs, guns, or prostitutes to the black gangs. What surprised me the most, though, was that Witherspoon actually lived in his PSA. It’s something the chief always wanted his troops to do—it made for good press, our DC cops are vigilant and caring enough to live in the place where they worked, yadda yadda, but most cops wouldn’t even consider it. There were bennies, like having 90% of your rent knocked off if you parked your cruiser in front of the apartment building, but you weren’t going to get any love if you took a run at the local crack dealer…and he happened to be your landlady’s nephew. Or supplier.

  Witherspoon had been killed in early March. He was the first victim in what Bloch was lumping together as a serial murder, but I refrained from thinking of him as “the first” of anything. I had to keep an open mind. There might not be a serial killer, or Witherspoon might be the third and we didn’t know about the first two yet.

  I flipped open a new file. Brady Torres lived a completely different life from Witherspoon. Young, just six years out of the Academy, already off the beat, working the gang detail. It was a dangerous specialty, but fast-track stuff that would get him noticed and promoted to Detective inside of three years if he didn’t get shot or start to love the work so much that he never left. Gangs were serious business in the whole Metro area, but they seemed to really gravitate to Arlington, where Torres had worked. Maybe it was the easy access to highways, or the strip malls, or the cheap housing. Whatever the reason, Torres had made a number of good busts against the white supremacists and had just started making inroads into the Latino gangs when he was killed in his own apartment on Columbia Pike. He’d been single, with a reputation for partying off-duty, so no one paid much attention to the noises coming from his two-bedroom pad on a Friday night. A buddy coming over for a Sunday afternoon hockey game had found the body. It had been in March, too. In fact—I flipped back to Witherspoon’s file—it had been four days after the DC beat cop had been killed.

  The body of Danny Garcia had been found in the back of an abandoned auto repair shop in Southeast. Not Witherspoon’s beat, but not far away, either. Date of death was a shot in the dark. A small-time chop-shop crook had broken in looking for something to rip off, found a whole different set of “parts” than he’d bargained for, and called it in. Garcia’s body had been there for some time, which made pinning down a time of death problematic. The coroner had put it somewhere in the last week of March, but in the notes had allowed himself a lot of leeway.

  Isaac Okonjo had been with the Montgomery County Sheriff’s department just seven months when he’d been killed, off-duty, in the parking lot of a bar in Rockville, Maryland, just steps away from his cruiser. Like Witherspoon, he was a patrolman, but assigned to Bethesda and Chevy Chase; more affluent areas than Witherspoon had ever seen. Okonjo was the son of Nigerian immigrants, had attended high school in Rockville and had graduated from the Maryland Police Academy, finishing unspectacularly in the middle of his class. He’d been killed mid-April, several weeks after Witherspoon, though potentially only ten days after Garcia.

  Since Okonjo’s body hadn’t been beaten, his case was obviously different from the others. The fact that he’d been killed in the parking lot of a bar suggested a rushed or botched attempt. Either something had gone wrong and the murderer had been kept from going through with his gruesome routine…or Okonjo’s murder simply wasn’t connected. The discrepancies bothered me. Only the damning fact that he’d been shot with a small caliber bullet, like the others—and so close in time—kept me from pulling out all the references to his murder and putting it in a “not the same” box.

  I squinted at the clock on my microwave, then at the golden rays filtering in my kitchen window. It was just before seven. I picked up my cell phone and called Bloch, betting that he was an early bird. He picked up on the second ring.

  “Bloch.”

  “It’s Singer. You told me to give you a ring when I was ready.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, so I’m going to have to interview some people,” I said. “I saw some next of kin stuff in some of the files, but I wanted to get your thoughts on who else I should approach.”

  “Got something to write with?”

  “Yep. Shoot.”

  I heard him drum his fingers on something hard and hollow. “Witherspoon left
a widow, Florence. They got one kid. They still live in Southeast. Same one as his beat, by the way.”

  “I saw that,” I said.

  “Torres, there’s not much to go on. Single, hot-shot guy in his twenties. There’s the friend who found the body. I’ll have to get back to you on a name. Maybe some guys in his squad. But Gangs is a tight group. They might get uppity that a civilian is poking around.”

  “Something you could smooth out for me?”

  “I can try,” he said, but his voice wasn’t brimming with confidence.

  “While we’re on the subject,” I said. “What exactly is my status on this? Interested bystander? Concerned tax-payer? Nosy s.o.b.?”

  “I can get you put on the HIDTA payroll as a ‘valued informant.’ Doesn’t give you much status, but at least people can call me if they want some kind of official confirmation.”

  “Great. I’m in the same class as your snitches?” I asked.

  “More like an expert witness. Anybody gives you a hard time, steer them my way,” he said, then cleared his throat. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but try not to, ah, stick your nose in too far, get me? If you piss off a half-dozen chiefs around the Metro area, our case’ll get shit-canned for sure. It’ll be over before it’s started.”

  “I smell what you’re cooking,” I said. “Now, what about the others?”

  “Danny’s got a wife and son. Libney and Paul Garcia. Paul was just about to start up at the Academy when Danny went missing. He’s put it off indefinitely. I don’t know anything about the wife.”

  I scribbled down the address and a phone number that Bloch gave me. “Garcia was found in Southeast. I know the neighborhood, but not the exact address. Anything you can tell me?”

  “The auto shop turned out to be a sometime crack house. It was cleared out before anything went down. Junkies aren’t talking.”