Blood Passage (35 page)

He and Marla quietly divorced not long afterward.

He passed through the Academy with flying colors. After graduation he put in his eight weeks of field training and received his permanent assignment as a beat cop. Not long after finishing his probationary period he had the kind of break for which most law enforcement officers wait their entire career in vain, the break that transformed him into the Hero Cop, splashing his name and picture across front pages throughout the state.

At that time, city council was dominated by Adolphus Post, the African-American politician who was widely touted as the next mayor on the Democratic ticket. Less than a week before he was to toss his hat into the ring, his only child, fourteen-year-old Cedric, was kidnapped and held for ransom. Thirty-four hours into the crisis Hank was checking doors down by the river when he came upon a black unmarked van parked at the loading dock of an empty warehouse. Suddenly the back door of the warehouse opened and two men emerged, holding the Post boy between them. Hank took them without incident.

Thereafter the glow surrounding Hank’s career persisted. He earned a promotion to detective less than a year later, working in Auto Theft and Homicide, followed by another promotion to sergeant. He spent three years as a supervisory sergeant in Juvenile Crime before writing the next set of exams to earn a promotion to lieutenant. By this time Adolphus Post was Mayor and Gerald White was his hand-picked chief of police. Hank spent a year in the Chief’s office as media spokesperson, representing the Chief at special events and cleaning out the ashtrays, figuratively speaking, whenever they needed it. He stepped on a few toes and made a few enemies, including Myron Heidigger, who was at that time captain of Major Crimes. Heidigger was part of the old guard who believed they should be allowed to manage their own little fiefdoms as they saw fit without interference from above and away from the public eye. Chief White, on the other hand, was a new broom who was sweeping clean, and he firmly believed that the public would trust the police and be more cooperative if they better understood police methods and motives. To this end, he used press releases and statements to the media as tools to create a sense of increased openness. With his high media profile as the Hero Cop, Hank was one of his means toward this end. Unfortunately, Hank’s active support of Chief White’s agenda earned him the everlasting enmity of many senior cops, including Heidigger, who bitterly despised him.

Despite this animosity, Hank eventually requested and received a transfer back to Homicide as supervisory lieutenant. This move put him under Heidigger’s direct supervision, but as long as White occupied the Chief’s office there was an angel on Hank’s shoulder and Heidigger was forced to watch his step. However, when Mayor Post’s term ended and conservative candidate Darrius Watts was elected to replace him, Chief White was forced to step aside in favor of Orvell Jenkins. A ripple effect was felt throughout the department. Hank became the subject of several investigations by Internal Affairs, all groundless, but with the result that he was transferred out of Major Crimes to Public Affairs, where he spent the next few years writing responses to complaint letters from the public. The sudden death of Chief Jenkins from a heart attack, however, brought another new broom in the form of Wilson Bennett, who parachuted in from the FBI as the new Chief along with Douglas Barkley and several other senior people. Eventually Hank returned to Homicide for a third stint, although not as a supervisory lieutenant this time, as Bill Jarvis already occupied that position. Ann Martinez found a way to squeeze him into her budget and assigned him to work with whichever detective was currently without a partner. He worked with Joe Kalzowski, a detective named Beckert who moved on to Missing Persons, and then Karen Stainer.

As Hank and Anna watched an update on the stock market his cell phone vibrated. He took it out, checked the caller ID and answered it.

“
Donaghue.”

“
Lou, what’s your twenty?” Car horns honked in the background as Karen cursed under her breath.

Hank recited the address. “What’s going on?”

“
They found a stiff at the airport. Might be our Gary.”

“
Okay. Don’t run anyone down before you get here.”

“
Don’t tempt me.”

Hank disconnected and put the phone away. “I have to leave. Detective Stainer’s picking me up.”

“
I understand. Finish your drink first. You have a few minutes.”

Hank drained his glass, took a long draw on the cigar and reluctantly set it down in the ash tray to burn out.

“
How’s she doing?” Anna asked.

“
Karen? She’s doing well. Adjusting.”

“
Don’t forget she has a ceiling, given her history and personality. The best you can do is help her reach it.”

“
I know.” Hank frowned. “We’ve had this conversation before.”

“
Just the same.”

“
Not everything is about vertical movement, Mother. She won’t rise any higher than Detective but she has a chance to be a difference maker as a homicide investigator. She has a relentlessness you have to admire, and she’s fearless. Good qualities that the department needs.”

“
Sounds like someone I know.”

Silence fell as Anna exhaled a thick cloud of smoke. Did she still harbor disappointment over his ultimate career choice? If so, she kept it well hidden.

“
The department’s changed,” Anna mused, looking at the television screen. “It’s much softer than it was in my day. Back then a cop wasn’t afraid to break a few heads if it meant cracking a case.”

“
Society changes,” Hank said, “cops change, the world keeps turning.”

Anna smiled fondly at him. “My son, the philosopher.”

It took a while to piece together what had happened to Gary Thatcher. His body was found early Thursday evening in the tunnel connecting the short-term parking garage to the lower level of the airport terminal. Maryland Transportation Authority police on site cordoned off the area and called in Homeland Security and the FBI. Marie Louise Roubidoux and Will Martin from the local FBI field office caught the case and telephoned Captain Martinez as a courtesy. When Roubidoux mentioned the name Gary Thatcher Martinez beckoned to Karen, who was passing her office door.

“
There’s a body at the airport, Gary Thatcher. Might be your guy.”

Karen put her hands on her hips. “What happened?”

“
Knifed on his way to the lower parking garage.”

“
On his way out? Not on his way in?”

“
Go check it out. Get Donaghue.”

Hank was waiting for her outside the mansion gate when Karen pulled up to the curb. He barely got the door closed before she floored the accelerator, the resultant g-force slamming him back into his seat and creating a vacuum where his stomach used to be.

“
Sad,” she said, running a stop sign, “that you had to grow up in a log cabin with a dirt floor like that. Explains a few quirks in your personality, though.”

“
Quirks? Funny.”

At the airport Karen examined the body as Hank listened to an update from Roubidoux. A tiny middle-aged woman with short black hair and small, sharp features, she slipped on a pair of cheaters and frowned at her notebook.

“
We have a witness who was getting on this elevator when it happened,” she said, pointing with her pen. Hank looked at the middle of three elevators on this side of the tunnel. It was apparent that the victim had made an unsuccessful attempt to get on the elevator while the doors were closing. He’d been grabbed from behind, wrestled around, stabbed in the abdomen, then stabbed several more times while he lay on the floor in a pool of his own blood.

“
The witness saw him pull away from two men walking on each side of him,” Roubidoux went on. “He saw the one guy grab him before the doors closed. At that point he thought it was only a fight, and wasn’t going to bother reporting it until he saw an MDTA cop in the washroom upstairs and mentioned it. The cop called it in, they checked and here we all are.”

The victim was a short, stocky Caucasian in his early thirties. He was well-dressed and well-groomed. His driver’s license listed an address in Granger Park. In the inside pocket of his jacket was a one-way ticket to Miami. It went without saying that he’d missed his flight.

“
One-way ticket,” Karen remarked, joining them. “He must have been bugging out.”

“
What do you mean?” Roubidoux asked.

Hank explained their theory that the victim might have participated in the murder of Martin Liu four years ago. He went over their investigation of the ShonDale Gregg homicide, touched on the Shawn and Gary names provided by a “confidential informant” and speculated that Thatcher might have been using Miami as a staging area to switch identities and disappear into the Caribbean.

“
The guy who stabbed him was some mad,” Karen noted. “Looks like a whole mess of wounds. Any ideas on who did it?”

“
Will’s upstairs with Homeland and the MDTA people looking through the video. Are you going to want this one?”

Hank said, “If he’s connected to the Liu case, we’ll want it.”

“
We’ll have to see.” Roubidoux put away her notebook. “Will and I are swamped, so it won’t break my heart. Anyway, let’s go upstairs.”

Before long they were sitting on folding chairs in a crowded security office while an MDTA technician retrieved video footage from the tunnel during the time period when Thatcher was thought to have been killed. After some fast-forwarding they saw their witness, an elderly man, enter the tunnel from the parking garage. He was pulling a small suitcase on wheels. He pushed the button for the elevators and waited for a few moments before the middle elevator door opened. He disappeared inside just as the far door from the lower level of the terminal opened and three men appeared in the tunnel. Suddenly the man in the middle shoved the man on his right and bolted for the closing elevator door. The man he’d shoved recovered his balance and grabbed the victim before he made it into the elevator. The elevator door closed; the witness was now gone. The assailant wrestled the victim to the floor. They saw his right arm arc up and down. His accomplice grabbed at him and tried to pull him off the victim. The assailant shoved the other man away, turned back and stabbed the victim repeatedly. It was fast and brutal. The MDTA technician swore under his breath and closed his eyes as the two men left the body and strode out of the tunnel into the parking garage.

Hank stood up and moved close to the monitor. “Stop it there and run it again.”

The technician didn’t move until Will Martin tapped him on the shoulder. “Dave? We need to see it again.”

Reluctantly the technician complied. Hank watched until the man who’d been on the victim’s left glanced briefly in the direction of the camera before running through the door. “There,” Hank said. “Stop it for a moment.”

Hank looked at the face and then turned to Karen. “It’s Billy Fung. The other guy, the killer, I don’t know his name for sure, but it seems to me Mikki Lung said his name’s Tang, something like that.”

“
You know them?” Roubidoux asked.

“
Yeah. They’re wanted for assault on a young guy connected to the Liu case,” Hank said. “We also want to talk to them about the Gregg homicide. They work for Peter Mah.”

“
Ah ha.” Will Martin raised his eyebrows.

“
I’m getting mighty sick of cleaning up after that goddamned guy,” Karen said.

“
He finds Gary and takes him out within a day.” Hank rubbed his forehead. “Gregg must have told him who he was and how to find him.”

“
Yeah, somewhere between the pummeling and the double tap to the skull.”

Hank turned to Roubidoux. “We need to run with this. It fits with the other two we’re working. It’ll give us additional leverage when we pick up those two damned punks and start squeezing them dry.”

Roubidoux nodded. “Then we’d better start making our phone calls.”

They lost Friday trying to convince a judge to approve warrants to search the Bright Spot restaurant, to arrest Peter Mah on a charge of conspiracy to commit murder, and to seize the Mercedes limousine that entered the short-term parking garage at the airport shortly before Gary Thatcher was murdered. Assistant State’s Attorney Leanne DiOrio fumed and foamed as Karen wrote and rewrote the applications, but in the end the judge was unconvinced. True, Peter Mah was found on video at the airport after a long and exhaustive search, but he turned up only in the international arrivals area, where he apparently waited in vain to meet someone disembarking from a flight from San Francisco. In the absence of evidence demonstrating that Peter had ordered his employees to find Gary Thatcher and bring him down to the parking garage, a warrant to arrest Peter was denied, as were the warrants to search his restaurant and limo. The limo proved particularly frustrating. Although the camera at the parking garage entrance caught it arriving and departing, the limo parked in a blind spot inside the garage and there was no way to see who actually got in and out of it.

The video did, however, ultimately show them everything they needed to see connecting Billy Fung and Tang Lei to Thatcher’s murder. The pair first appeared in the tunnel from the parking garage, walking alone. Billy Fung was seen passing something to Tang that looked like a photograph. Tang studied the photograph as they reached the far end of the tunnel and went through the door into the lower level. Surveillance cameras inside the terminal picked them up as they crossed the lower level, skirting the food court, weaving their way through the crowd. Tang gave the photograph back to Billy, who put it in his pocket. They rode the escalator up to the upper level and turned right, heading for Concourse B. When they reached the security barriers to enter Concourse B, Billy turned and said something to Tang, who wandered off to buy a magazine from a nearby vendor as Billy took an airline ticket from his jacket pocket and passed through security. He wandered around the concourse, obviously in search of Thatcher, and disappeared from view for several minutes as he checked the men’s’ washroom. Finally he left the area and headed off toward Concourse A, Tang falling in behind him, where the same routine was repeated with a different airline ticket. This time Billy had better luck. He emerged from the washroom with Gary Thatcher. The two left the concourse, joined by Tang, and rode the escalator back down to the lower level. Thatcher balked near the food court, stopping short and engaging Billy in a brief argument. However, the camera showed Tang stepping very close to Thatcher, who looked down, presumably at something in Tang’s hand. Billy grabbed Thatcher’s elbow, pulling him, and the three walked the rest of the way across the level to the door leading through the tunnel to the parking garage, where Tang knifed Thatcher and they left him to bleed to death as they hurried back into the parking garage.