by Lauren Carr
“What would be her motive to kill her only sister?” David said.
“I truly don’t believe Kassandra did it,” Mac said. “But they got into a huge fight shortly before the wedding—something Kassandra told me herself—I heard it from no one else. Rod, their father, knew about it, and he never mentioned it to me. To this day, he doesn’t know I know.”
“What was the fight about?”
Mac rested his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his hands. “Kassandra was five years older than Brie. She was the responsible one. Always did the right thing. She married her high school sweetheart right out of college. He was an army officer. She moved up in the ranks with the DC police crime scene investigation.”
“I sense a ‘but’ coming,” Bogie said.
“Brie got pregnant her senior year of high school. She was extremely bright but lacked self-discipline. At that time, Kassandra had been told that she could never have children. She and her husband wanted kids. So, she offered to adopt Brie’s baby. After Brie had Gina, she handed her over to Kassandra and, without a look back, signed up for the Marines and took off. After putting in her time, she went to the police academy. She wanted to be a detective and Rod called in some chips to get her assigned to homicide after she passed the detective’s exam. She was my protégé for a short time.”
“Meanwhile, Kassandra and her husband are raising Brie’s daughter as their own,” David said.
“According to Kassandra, Brie was supposed to sign over parental rights to her and her husband. They never hid the fact that Brie was her birth mother. They just wanted full rights and custody to her, but Brie never got around to signing the papers. Then, thirteen years later, Kassandra is raising two children on her own—”
“I thought she couldn’t have children,” David said.
“She did, too,” Mac said. “The doctor ended up being wrong. She had Morgan. After 9/11, Brie announced that she and Trevor were getting married and buying a beautiful home and, as a favor to Kassandra, they wanted Gina to go live with them. Kassandra went to a lawyer who said that since Brie never signed over parental rights, there was nothing she could do.”
“First, she loses her husband and now Brie was taking away her daughter?” Bogie asked.
“The murders solved all of Kassandra’s problems.”
“I know you say you believe Kassandra didn’t do it,” David said, “but what if you were in her shoes? You’ve raised a child from a baby, and then thirteen years later, you’ve lost your spouse in a horrific fashion. Suddenly, your spoiled sister wants to take your daughter away and there’s nothing you can do?”
“Except maybe murder,” Bogie said. “She’s a crime scene investigator. She’d know how to get away with it.”
“My gut, and it’s only my gut, is telling me that it’s something more.”
“Is your gut telling you where to look for that ‘something more?’” David asked.
“It was a double homicide,” Mac said. “The other victim was also a detective. Trevor Polk had been with vice since making detective. His partner, Sergeant Bruno Gordon had been shot down only six months before Polk was killed. That homicide is another one of my cold cases.”
“Any evidence of there being a connection?” Bogie asked.
“On the outside,” Mac said, “it looked like a straight-up police shooting. Gordon and Polk had been assigned to assist another couple of detectives on a drug dealing case. They were staking out a suspected meth lab being run by a dangerous drug gang called the Scorpions. According to Polk’s statement, during the night, Gordon thought he saw something suspicious and got out of the car to check it out. As soon as he stepped out, he was gunned down. They were ambushed. Polk called for backup. He was lucky to get out of there alive.”
“Was Polk testifying against the Scorpions?” David asked. “Maybe they killed him to keep him quiet.”
Mac shook his head. “We never identified the shooter. The more I looked at the evidence, the more I was convinced someone other than a Scorpion shot Gordon.”
“Were you looking at Trevor Polk?” Bogie said.
“No, not Trevor. The Scorpions stated that they thought it was a rival gang when they heard the shot. They shot back out of self-defense. They had no idea they were firing at the police until backup arrived.”
“And you’re taking the word of a street gang about that?” David said.
“No, I’m taking the weight of the evidence,” Mac said. “It started with the angle of the shot that went through Gordon’s body. It was fired at a downward angle. His team in vice argued that he probably ducked when he heard the shot.”
“In which case the downward angle would have been because he was bent over,” David said.
“With his back to the shooter?” Mac said. “There were bullets all over that alley. Forensics managed to collect what they thought were all of them. Well, I became anal about it and kept going back to that alley. We knew where Gordon had fallen—where he had been when he was shot. We found a fresh ricochet in the concrete in front of him that had a speck of blood in it. A crime scene investigator and I used a computer program to estimate where the bullet would have gone if it had gone through Gordon and ricocheted off the ground in front of him.”
“With him standing, not bent over,” Bogie said.
“I kept going back to the gang members and Polk saying they didn’t know anything was going down until they heard the shot. If Gordon didn’t know either, then why would he duck?”
“And if he was standing up and the bullet when through him at a downward angle,” David said, “Then the shot came from—”
“A rooftop,” Mac said. “When we put that into the computer program—the shot coming down at a steep angle, then we found the bullet. It had gone through Gordon, bounced off the pavement, and planted itself into a wall across the alley—twelve feet off the ground. It was a nine-millimeter fired from a high-powered rifle. All of the gang members were carrying forty-five caliber handguns.”
“Then Gordon was targeted,” Bogie said. “Any idea why?”
“He had called me a couple of days before the shooting to talk about another case I was working on. One of his collars, a pimp, had gotten sprung after being arrested for abducting a young girl. He had beaten and raped her into working for him. After he was let out on bail, he coerced her into refusing to testify and the charges were dropped. Ten days later, the guy got thrown off a roof top. Since Gordon went ballistic about him getting cut loose, he was the first one I questioned. He swore he didn’t do it. As a matter of fact, he had an alibi—another suspect on our list, Detective Derringer. She’s a captain now. Well, Gordon said he’d ask around. I almost gave up on him being any help, when he called to say he had some information for me.”
“What type of information?” Bogie said.
“All he told me was that it was going to blow my mind,” Mac said. “We agreed to meet for breakfast, but he was shot hours before it could happen.”
“From a rooftop with a high-powered rifle,” David said.
“The bullet had been put into the national database and to date, there has been no match for it.”
“Did you ask this Derringer, who seemed to know him, what he meant when he said that it was going to blow your mind?”
“She fingered the pimp’s girls,” Mac said. “According to what Bruno told her, the girls had gotten together and took him out.”
“Do you believe that?”
“Not for a minute,” Mac said. “Those girls needed their pimp for protection. Maybe one or two of them would have wanted to, but surely one of them would have squealed and they all would have ended up dead.”
“To go back to the original case,” David said, “were Brie’s and Trevor’s murders connected to the shooting of his partner six months earlier?”
“And was that connected to the pimp’s murder before?” Bog
ie asked.
“Or was the intended victim Brie?” David asked.
“What about the witness that Kassandra mentioned in her statement?” Bogie brought up an arrest report, complete with a mug shot of a young, barely dressed, woman.
“Kelly Hughes. She was in the suite across the hall,” Mac said. “We found the master key card among her things when we found her body in her apartment the morning after the murders. We traced her by fingerprints left in the suite where she had been entertaining a businessman from China. Our investigation uncovered an assistant manager organizing events at the hotel off the record. For a very high price, movers and shakers could arrange for an evening of entertainment for prospective clients—complete with food, drink, drugs, and sex. This assistant manager gave his girls master keycards in case they needed to get in and out while he was tied up with his real job, which he got fired from right after we busted him for running a sex ring.”
“But your witness, Kelly, ended up dead,” David read from the report. “She had died of a heroin overdose.”
“She had a bruise on her jaw,” Mac said. “I suspect the killer caught up with her, knocked her out with a choke hold, and then shot her up. Her apartment showed signs that she was packing up fast to get out of there.”
“She had been arrested more than once for drug possession,” Bogie said.
“Maybe she saw someone there that night that she recognized from the police department,” David said.
“Of course, she did,” Mac said. “The place was crawling with police.”
“Once she found out that a couple of detectives in the next suite had been killed, she realized who did it and tried to run,” David said, “but the perp caught up with her. Who knew about the witness?”
“Everyone,” Mac said with a heavy sigh.
David and Bogie cringed. Every detective knew the importance of keeping any information, especially about witnesses, close to their vest.
“I was the last to find out about her.” Mac grit his teeth. “As a matter of fact, I found out about Hughes from the crime scene investigator who overheard a couple of detectives talking.”
“If you were the lead investigator on the case, why weren’t you told right away?” David asked.
Mac shrugged his shoulders. “My guess, to give the killer time to hunt her down and make sure she couldn’t tell me anything.”
“That makes it sound like a conspiracy,” Bogie said. “Do you think your whole team—”
“Brie’s partner, who she did not get along with, contained the crime scene,” Mac said. “She shouldn’t have even been permitted on the floor where the bodies had been found. She used to work with vice and Kelly Hughes was known to most of them.”
“That doesn’t sound good, Mac,” Bogie said with a frown.
“Homicide was not made up of a bunch of dirty cops,” Mac said with a sharp edge in his voice. “But I have come to accept that it was someone on the inside who has been able to keep just enough ahead of me to throw me off the trail.”
“I think you’re smart to go back to the beginning,” David said. “Maybe if we can figure out the motive we can get out ahead of the murderer. You said Brie had been your protégé for only a short time. What happened between you two?”
“Her father, Rod, asked me to take her under my wing,” Mac said. “I was honored. Rod was the man in homicide. Kind of like Will Harrington was a legend in vice. That guy worked undercover all throughout the city. He had some of the biggest busts. As a matter of fact, he offered me a slot in vice at about the same time I got offered a slot in homicide.”
“And you picked homicide.”
“It was my first choice,” Mac said. “I was tempted. Going undercover and playing a role. But I looked at Harrington. The man is now in his seventies. Never married. No family. He’s always played someone else. It’s like he lost his soul somewhere along the line.”
Filled with sympathy for the legendary undercover cop, they sat in silence to contemplate their individual circumstances.
“And Brie?” David jarred Mac out of his thoughts.
“Brie.” Mac wet his lips. “She would have done well working undercover in vice. I don’t think anyone knew the real Brie. We started out well. We worked a couple of cases. They were easy ones. She was a fast learner and very observant. We had this rough case, where the wife of a murder victim claimed she had been coloring her hair and was locked in the bathroom during the half hour that someone came in and killed her husband. Now, the coloring stuff was in the waste paper basket with the gloves. Her hair was wet. I believed her. It was Brie who noticed that her roots were still dark. The wife murdered her husband during a fight. She had the box of hair color. She mixed up the solution, squirted some on the gloves and in her hair, then rinsed it out before it had time to work to give the appearance of an alibi.”
“And Brie noticed that her roots were still dark?” David asked. “Not you?”
“I think it’s a guy thing,” Mac said. “We went out to the local pub, a cop bar, for a couple of beers to celebrate her cracking her first case and—” He shrugged his shoulders. “She kissed me.”
David stared at him in silence.
“I pushed her away and told her that I was going to pretend that didn’t happen,” Mac said. “I was married. I had two kids. I had a reputation in the police department. I wasn’t going to have it all shot to hell by a cutie who looked good in tight pants.”
“Maybe it was just a friend—”
“I was prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt until she said that she always wanted to do that. Then she went on to say that she loved me, that she could see that I understood her, and that she could understand how I didn’t want to jeopardize things with a full fledge relationship. But there didn’t need to be any strings attached.”
“Wow,” Bogie said.
“The next day, I requested a change of partners. When my chief asked why, I told him. Rod was devastated that I had requested a new partner. I didn’t tell him why, but I think he guessed it. Brie was reassigned to another detective immediately. That was Detective Lou Gannon.”
David flipped through the photos in the file.
“Gannon was thrilled until Brie requested a change a month later,” Mac said. “She accused him of groping her. She didn’t want to press formal charges. They then assigned her to Detective Dani Derringer.”
“She’s now chief of homicide,” David said.
“After Gannon was forced into retirement,” Mac said. “Internal Affairs swooped in after Brie’s and Trevor’s murders. There was a lot of dirty laundry that had nothing to do with my case. Since I had worked there before being promoted to major crimes, I knew about it and tried to keep it out of the hands of Internal Affairs. It was all stuff that was none of their business. One of those things was that their captain, Sheldon Jeffries, was on prescribed anti-depressants. At that time, if it’d gotten out, he would have been demoted. He was on the medication because his wife was terminally ill. Well, the unit’s deputy chief, Lou Gannon found out and blew the whistle. Jeffries was forced into retirement and IA was so grateful to Gannon for his loyalty that he was promoted to running the unit. Every half decent detective they had, requested a transfer out. No one would work with a rat like Gannon.”
“This is the same Gannon who Brie accused of groping her,” David said.
“It was a different time back then,” Mac said. “Nowadays, he’d have been fired. Back then, they slapped his wrist. But Gannon did get his. He ended up in jail.”
“I read about that in his file,” Bogie said. “Derringer nailed him.”
“At the time of the murders, Derringer didn’t have the experience to transfer out. She was forced to work with that worm. Three years later, a young man at a college campus was murdered. Derringer was working the case until she discovered that the victim was a DEA agent worki
ng undercover. Then, the feds took over. But, she had worked the case long enough to uncover evidence pointing to a college student who many on the streets knew was a drug dealer. The kid’s name was Sid Gannon.”
David chuckled.
“Lou’s son,” Mac said. “Now, while I was still in homicide, Lou had confided to me that Sid was a mess and he had no idea what to do with him. He was stealing and into drugs. Derringer came to me with her findings. I had been mentoring her since I felt sorry for her being stuck working under Gannon. I told her to bury him and bury him deep. I’ll admit it. It was personal after what he’d done to Jeffries. As soon as Sid’s name came up in the case, evidence started disappearing and being tampered with. Derringer was right on Lou’s heels. When Lou pointed to one of Harrington’s people in vice for the murder, she had everything she needed to burn him. Sid got arrested for capital murder and Lou for accessory. The only thing that kept Sid off death row was that he flipped on his suppliers. After four years in prison, he was murdered.”
“And Lou?”
“He went down for fifteen years for accessory to federal murder, tampering with evidence, and obstruction of justice. He’s out now. Only served ten years and got out for good behavior.”
“Will he be here this weekend?” Bogie asked.
“Kassandra invited him,” Mac said.
“Are you telling Kassandra what you’re planning to do this weekend?” David asked.
“Rod is dying,” Mac said. “He wants to know who killed his little girl.”
“I don’t think you should take Kassandra off the suspect list,” David said with a firm shake of his head. “She had motive, means, and opportunity. How do you know she didn’t kill them when she went up to the suite to conveniently find their bodies?”
“My gut tells me she didn’t do it.”
“Did Brie know about Lou’s son?” Bogie asked. “Could she have threatened to blow the whistle on his drug dealing son to her husband-to-be in vice?”
“That is a possibility,” Mac said. “Like I said, Brie was undisciplined. But Derringer got her in line fast, at least while on duty. During her time in homicide, Brie had slept with three detectives that I know of. She was like a tornado. I saw her break up a marriage, an engagement, and get a rival detective demoted and assigned to desk duty.” He sighed. “It was all a game to Brie.”
