Backwater Key

by Steven Becker

  It was eight-thirty by the time I reached the county jail. I would have liked a few minutes with a cup of coffee and a notepad to start to figure things out, and worried that with everything that had happened I would forget something. Maybe Martinez was right, and I should do a report.

  Grace met me outside the interview room. Thankfully her partner was nowhere in sight. I apologized for being late. “It’s all good,” she said.

  “Has he talked yet?”

  “No.”

  “Why don’t you give it a go? He knows who you are.”

  I entered the stark room and sat on the only piece of furniture that wasn’t bolted down. Across from my seat was a table and single chair—this one didn’t move. The man sitting across from me was covered in ink. I figured I could probably eliminate half my questions by studying it: what gang he belonged to, who his girlfriend was, where he grew up…even his football team was represented by a happy-looking dolphin with a helmet that didn’t match anything else.

  The one question that I couldn’t answer was why me, so I asked it. “I’m special agent Hunter with the National Park Service.” This was one of the rare situations where the title didn’t sound lame. “What can I do for you?”

  “I know who you are, dude.”

  I knew who he was, too, but wasn’t ready to let him know. “Okay, and you are?”

  “Grinder.”

  That too was tattooed around his neck. “What can I do for you?” I remembered the name from the other night.

  He looked down at his hands. “I got some information, but I’m going to need a deal.”

  Of course he did, but I wasn’t about to call the DA. “Why don’t you answer my question first?”

  “You were at the bar the other night. I saw you with that other dude.”

  I stared straight through him, trying to buy some time. If I played this right, I might find out why I had been set up and how Martinez had gotten the picture.

  He was getting antsy. “I thought you guys had some code about ratting people out?” I asked. Maybe if I could figure out his motivation it would help.

  “I’m already dead, just don’t know by who yet.”

  “You still haven’t answered why you asked for me.” He looked at me like I was the dumbest guy in the room. Coming from a guy with an orange jumpsuit and shackles connecting all his moving parts, that wasn’t much of a compliment.

  “That dude you were with. I already told you. Now are you going to get the DA or what?”

  “You told me it was him, but why? Answer that and I’ll see what I can do.”

  He looked around like the walls had ears. They did of course, and eyes. With the threat of police brutality everywhere, it had become standard procedure to record these interviews. “He’s a two-timer. Playing both sides, if you know what I mean. Dude’s all tight with Doc and the board, but we all know he’s a Fed.”

  So Grinder wasn’t the only one walking on both sides of the street. “Give me a minute.” I got up, went to the door, and knocked. Grace opened it for me. I could tell by the curious look on her face that she had been listening in.

  “I can put him in protective custody for another twenty-four hours. That’ll buy us some time.”

  “Should we talk to the DA’s office?” I wasn’t sure what procedure was for this kind of thing. My involvement usually ended with the arrest.

  “Might as well get them in the loop, He’s looking at time for the guns and drugs in the car. We’ve got a twenty-year bargaining chip.”

  “He’s looking for a get out of jail free card.”

  “Aren’t they all. Let’s play it out,” Grace said.

  I went back inside the room. Grinder looked up at me with a cocky smile. He knew we’d play along—at least for a while. I’d been around criminals and interview rooms before. The contrast between the foolish actions that got them here and the craftiness to get out always amazed me. As dumb as he’d had to be to drive over the speed limit at four a.m. with the bass booming loud enough that the vibrations felt like an earthquake in the neighborhoods behind the twenty-foot-high concrete sound walls that lined the highway, and his back seat loaded with guns and drugs, Grinder was confident he would walk.

  “Protective custody for twenty-four hours. I’m going to need more information on the club. President down through the delivery boy. I want names and titles.” The last bit had come to me as I sat there. Tearing my pages of notes from the pad, I pushed the blank pages and pen toward him. Without another word, I got up and left.

  “Good thinking, but your buddy Agent Pierce can probably do that for you,” Grace said.

  “I’m thinking Pierce fits in there somewhere.” I wasn’t sure if I should tell her my suspicions about the missing drugs and decided to keep that close for now.

  “You’re not going to like this, but my partner used to work for the FBI. There was some kind of disciplinary action and he was let go. There’re all kinds of rumors, but he’s pretty tight-lipped. Just before 2008 when everything crashed, the county was growing so fast that the department had a shortage of officers to open sub-stations in the new neighborhoods. There weren’t a whole lot of questions asked, if you know what I mean.”

  That explained the chip on his shoulder. “You think he hates the Feds more than he hates me?”

  She shrugged and I guessed there was only one way to find out. My phone vibrated and I glanced down at it. As if he had been listening, Ron Pierce’s name flashed on the screen.

  14

  I let the call go to voicemail. There were some things I had to sort out before I talked to Pierce. He seemed to know more about my whereabouts than Martinez. His intel was most likely coming from Susan McLeash, but I had no proof. I didn’t know if I could get it, either. With our history, confronting her was not going to get any answers.

  I reconsidered talking to Dick Tracy. It’s not a good thing for an investigator to allow his ego to dictate actions, and I knew this is what I was doing. “Maybe it would be a good idea to sit down with your partner.”

  “I think if you two could put your dicks away you might get somewhere.”

  She had pretty much nailed it. I offered to get Grace a cup of coffee while she called him. She declined and I remembered that she drank some concoction that required a barista. I wandered down the hall and got a cup of the local black.

  “He’s due in an hour.”

  At least he wasn’t rushing in on my account. I looked at my watch, wondering if I could get anything done. Sitting here in my park service uniform at the county jail was an unsettling experience. Perps and arresting officers streamed by and I caught glances from both. For different reasons, both groups thought I was inferior.

  I remembered Sid’s message. “I’m going to run by the ME’s office and see if the autopsy report is completed.” I could at least take care of this bit of housekeeping. Autopsies were not my favorite pastime, and this seemed a clear-cut murder. It was customary but not required for homicide investigators to observe the procedure. And until this morning, I had been working on my own time and I’d thought that a good enough excuse to miss it.

  “Okay. I’ve got some paperwork.” Grace walked out through the security doors with me. “He’s reaching out; don’t leave him hanging.”

  So was I, but she had set up the meeting and I would respect that. I squinted and noticed the humidity as soon as we were out the door. It was hot. Not summer hot yet, but you could tell it was coming. We agreed to meet back at the station in an hour. I went to the truck and typed the medical examiners’ office address into my phone. The map app calculated it was over a half hour drive from the metro-west detention center. There was not enough time; I put the visit on the back burner.

  Looking at the map on my phone, I saw there was still a dot on the paint shop where Pierce kept the bikes. With nothing better to do, I decided on a quick drive-by. The more I could learn about Agent Pierce, the better.

  When I pulled into the narrow street I noticed ther
e was a lot more activity than there had been here two nights ago. Although the units had rollup doors, I could see now that most were businesses. The street was lined with work vans and trucks. I parked where I had the other night, out of sight of most of the units, and was about to get out of the truck and have a look around when I realized that I was in uniform.

  A park service agent walking around and asking questions about an FBI agent wasn’t the brightest idea. In the back seat was the backpack I had packed and forgotten to bring into Justine’s last night. Reaching into it, I grabbed a T-shirt and swapped it out for my uniform shirt. The khaki shorts were nondescript and I got out feeling a little better about blending in.

  Locking the truck, I pocketed the keys and started walking toward the closed door of Pierce’s unit. The adjacent doors were open and I decided to have a look. The closer space looked like it belonged to a plumber. Racks of pipe and fittings cluttered the space. I heard a man inside talking gruffly on the phone to whom I guessed was a disgruntled customer. Turning away, I decided to try the unit on the other side. I guessed that if he treated his customers like this, I wasn’t going to get any information out of him.

  The space on the far side looked like a woodworker’s shop. I could hear the sound of either a planer or router coming through the open door, where a fan blew sawdust into the air. I’d played around as a carpenter during the Northern California winters, remodeling our old farmhouse that, thanks to the cartel, was no longer in existence. If there was something I’d learned about carpenters it was that they like to talk.

  I waited by the door until the machinery stopped and I called out a loud hello. A man came out carrying a stainless steel mug. He was ready to talk.

  “Hey, my name’s Kurt Hunter.”

  “Steve Brown.” He extended his hand.

  I looked at the man in front of me. His shaved head would have gleamed if not for the thin coating of sawdust. He had a goatee that stretched partly around his face. If he’d had tattoos, he would’ve looked more like a biker than Pierce.

  “You know your neighbor?” I motioned toward the closed door.

  “Sure. I know most of the guys on the block.”

  I listened as he talked. He tended to ramble and I had to refocus him several times. By the time he finished his coffee I had found out that there were two men that ran the paint shop next door. He was impressed with one and not so much with the other. I pegged Pierce for the other. They both seemed to be around more in the evening, not unusual for custom bike guys, as their clientele was mostly nocturnal. There was a woman that came by as well, and after his detailed description of her I thought it might be the one who had set me up for a picture in the club. After a long story about his wife not allowing him near the shop on weekends he realized he was out of coffee and said he had to get back to work.

  I walked up and down the block of units and found no one else willing to talk. At the same time, I checked for surveillance cameras. Most had none and I figured the tenants cared more about their privacy than their protection. There was one discreetly placed above the paint shop. If he checked it, Pierce would know I had been here. To cover my tracks, I knocked loudly on the door and waited. I hadn’t expected an answer and didn’t get one. The office had a closed sign in the window, and after peering through the glass door I could see it looked like it was seldom used. If his goal was to stay under the radar, Pierce had picked a good location. I went back to the truck and drove to the station hoping Tracy would shed some light on the mystery.

  It turned out he had a bigger grudge against Pierce than he had with me. Making me feel like we were almost allies, he told me about the task force he and Pierce had been on. For three years, between 2005 and 2008, they had worked together. It wasn’t surprising that it had been disbanded due to missing drugs. That seemed to be a theme here. Somehow Pierce had avoided scrutiny while the rest of the group had been fired. He finished with a bitter rant about the Feds having better pay and benefits than the county. Maybe that was his grudge against me. After my personal experience with the shutdown I wanted to differ but held my tongue. Slowly the façade disappeared and he was back to normal.

  I had enough on Pierce to place him high on my list of suspects; he was actually the only one with a name. The bikers were guilty by association, and I tried to figure out where the smoking gun was. Pierce might have been involved with the missing drugs and his behavior was certainly suspicious, but the timeline I had constructed didn’t have him near the scene when the man had been killed at the lighthouse—unless my timeline was wrong.

  “Did you see the autopsy report on the guy at the lighthouse?”

  “That was your baby. We got the drugs.”

  I should have known better than to blow off the autopsy. Homicide was the cause of death, but what I had missed were the details that wouldn’t throw up a red flag with the coroner. Sid had obviously seen something.

  I thanked Grace and her partner and we agreed to leave Grinder on ice. Then we would have to make a decision. That gave me the rest of the day to figure things out. My first step was to fill in the blanks in the coroner’s report. Leaving the station, I went to the truck and headed over to the building behind Jackson Memorial Hospital that housed the medical examiner’s office. I was more comfortable around Sid, the Jersey-bred, almost-retired, night-time coroner, but he worked the night shift. Instead I got his protégé, Vance.

  After quickly changing back into my uniform shirt, I went inside. I shivered as I walked downstairs to the lab, thinking this was the coldest building in the city. The new crime lab looked futuristic compared to the more old-school décor of these examination rooms. The walls were covered with white subway tile, and the stainless steel had long ago lost its luster. The lighting was bright and white, making me almost squint when I entered.

  Vance was off to the side, working at his standup desk. I cleared my throat to let him know I was here and he looked up. Though only a handful of years younger than me, he was from a different generation. The greased up hair and carefully groomed beard and mustache were all held in place with some kind of semi-lustrous gel not made to hide the fact that it was there. His lab coat showed a plaid shirt underneath and I would have bet his jeans were tighter than I would have deemed comfortable. I resisted the urge to look down at his socks that I could guess had some kind of design. Allie had accused me of wearing dad jeans, so maybe it was having kids that had separated us beyond our ages.

  “Thought you’d be out fishing with the shutdown and all,” he said.

  “Back on the clock. The bosses up in the Ivory Tower declared this was life safety and put us back to work. Did you do the autopsy?”

  “I stayed and worked on it with Sid last night. It appeared to be what you’d expect from what we saw at the scene.”

  I thought there might be a but coming that would justify my trip here. “Nothing unusual?”

  “When they look this easy, they never are. Sid’s from Sopranos country and he’s seen it all. He found a few anomalies that I don’t know if I would have caught. It turns out that the man wasn’t killed at the lighthouse and the cause of death wasn’t the knife wound.”

  I appreciated his honesty. That was the clue I’d been looking for, only it felt like it put me further from the truth. “How’s that?”

  “We sent some samples over to Justine and I want to wait for Sid to have another look before saying anything official.”

  Vance was the head medical examiner mostly because Sid had turned it down. The older man had more years of experience than Vance had been alive. Vance often deferred to him. “What time does he come in?”

  “Should be here around three or four.”

  “Mind if I come back then?”

  “That’d be good. I think he said something about a mafia killing several years ago in Jersey that was similar to this.”

  I thought it too bad that there wasn’t a reference guide on gang-related killings. They were usually creative, but not original. An i
nternet search might be in order and I thought about swinging by the crime lab, but the days of using the computer in the privacy of Justine’s old lab were over. For once the clock was moving too slowly.

  15

  At first it had looked like a clear-cut gang retribution killing. With the information that Vance had just shared, that the murder had been committed earlier and possibly at another location, the water was quite a bit muddier. I decided to revisit the scene of the crime. Sid and Justine were not due in to work for another few hours and I was still in “avoid Pierce” mode. We had originally assumed that the murder had been committed on the balcony where the body had been found. It was so well staged there seemed to have been no reason to look further, but now I wondered if there might be evidence we had overlooked. For once the shutdown might be working in my favor, as the lighthouse had probably been locked up since the crime scene techs had left the other day. Ordinarily, it was open whenever park personnel were on the island.

  I left Justine a message and headed to Homestead. The midday ride back to headquarters was uneventful. I pulled into my parking space and when I saw both Martinez and Susan’s vehicles there I tried to make an end-around the building and get to the dock before they noticed me. Martinez was ahead of me as usual and had made a rare trip from his desk to the dock. Susan McLeash was of course right behind him.

  “Going somewhere, Hunter? What about those reports?” Martinez asked.

  A boat blew by the entrance to the small park service marina at about twice the posted speed. I had noticed boaters flaunting the rules since Monday, when the shutdown began, and expected it to only get worse. The presence of the park service boats on the water was often enough to keep things under control. I don’t think I’d written a speeding ticket since my first month in the park.