Close Case (30 page)

I found Alan Carson sitting quietly in one guest chair, reading the paper, and Tommy Garcia in the other, helping himself to my Stanford Law School alumni magazine, complete with acknowledgments of recent donations.

“Hundred-dollar donation to the alma mater, huh? You got some money for me too?”

“Last time I checked, Starvin’ Marvin, you made more than I did once you figure in OT.”

“So did you take care of whatever you needed to do last night?” Carson asked.

Did I? “No, not really. But we need to make a decision anyway, don’t we?”

Here was our problem. Usually we’re at an advantage when we’ve got multiple conspiring suspects. Bring them all in. Tell them whoever flips first gets the deal. Wonder Twin Powers, Activate. Form of: a cooperating witness. That wasn’t going to work here. Our suspects were cops, and we didn’t have enough evidence to hold them in the event they both called our bluff and held strong.

And, as it turned out, time was of the essence. “You saw this, didn’t you?” Carson held up the front page of the Metro section.

I hadn’t had a chance to bring in the newspapers, let alone read them. Dan Manning broke the story. Trevor Hanks’s father, the distinguished Henry Hanks, was bitching up a storm about the continued detention of his son, insisting that the police had verified his “alibi.” So much for keeping quiet. Mr. Hanks, of course, didn’t bother disclosing details about the so-called alibi, or the fact that it would still land his son in prison for the next eight and a half years.

“I can’t get a break. I was going to suggest setting up surveillance on Foster and Powell, but if they know we’re taking a new look at Crenshaw—”

“Way too risky,” Carson said.

Once again, I wondered if we’d been too bold barging through the precinct yesterday with Heidi. I had wanted to stir things up, but now I’d boxed us in. We had to act soon.

“What about a wiretap at Jay-J’s?” Carson suggested.

“Man, if we had probable cause, don’t you think we would’ve done that by now?” Tommy said. “No, we need to figure out which one of these dudes is likely to cooperate and bring him in. I pulled their drug stats from the last year. Foster’s by far the worst. Somehow this guy is managing to work the single largest crack market in the state, but keeps stumbling on pot, meth, acid, heroin, powder cocaine, Drano, whatever. He’s got some crack cases, but hardly any black kids. He manages to find the only Ecuadorans and Mexicans who’ve been bold enough to try to crack that market.”

“So to speak,” I added. “OK, so here’s the question: Do we have enough to confront them? And, if so, which one?”

“There’s a third way,” Carson offered. “We go to Brouse. Give him the deal to hand us the cops.”

“This guy’s kidding, right?” Tommy scoffed. “Brouse is a gangster. If anyone did a drive-by on Selma, it was one of his people, not a couple patrol officers.”

I didn’t have the energy for the debate they were having over who was worse: the organized criminals or the cops who turned a blind eye. Garcia finally won when he convinced Carson that, from everything he knew about Andre, he’d never cut a deal.

Then Carson made a suggestion that caught me off guard. “What if we go after Calabrese? He’s pretty much toast with the bureau over that Corbett confession, but if he’s still hanging on to hopes of staying in MCT, we could use that. He might be able to give us something to flip Foster.”

It was just as Chuck had warned. What had started as a temporary break for Mike from MCT had rapidly become part of the bureau’s institutional memory. Calabrese’s one mistake—the one Chuck and I were also a part of—had rendered him a bad apple, to be thrown out or traded on, however we saw fit. I wanted to defend Mike to Carson, to say there was no way he could possibly be involved in any of this. I heard Chuck’s words from last night:
You should have enough faith in him—and in my judgment about him—to know.
So why didn’t I know?

Instead, it was Tommy who held Carson back. “That’s not something I want any part of. Not until you show me something concrete against him.”

“Tommy’s right,” I said. “We’re stretching for evidence as it is, and what we’ve got points to Powell and Foster.”

In the end, we realized it was a draw. Both Powell and Foster had their names in Percy’s book. Both had been on duty when he was killed, but without any documented call-outs to provide an airtight alibi. Foster had the arrest pattern that most obviously needed explaining. He had been the one to eyeball Heidi at the precinct. But Powell had a direct connection to Brouse through Jay-J’s. The sad truth was, we had little against either one. Just a shared gut instinct.

Finally, it fell to Carson, with his experience convincing bad cops to do the right thing, to make the decision. “We go after Powell. He’s married with four kids. Foster’s a bachelor.”

The implications were immediate. You could threaten either one of them with an IA investigation. But you could threaten Powell with his family. No job means no benefits and no pension. It was cold, no doubt, but was it any worse than the games we play in every case to get cooperation?

“Fine, let’s do it. How long do you need?” I asked Carson.

“I need to run it by my lieutenant. We should aim for picking him up by two. His shift starts at four, and we want to catch him at home. It’s more unsettling, and if we’re lucky the family will be there. He won’t want to get too loud.”

“I need to run it by Duncan too, but let’s assume it’s a go.”

I checked my voice mail once they left. A bunch of junk that could wait, a message from Lisa Lopez emphasizing that it wasn’t her client who’d blabbed, and one from Duncan scolding me for “letting the story get out.” Apparently I was supposed to tape the defendants’ mouths shut.

I didn’t hear the voice I was hoping for. I dialed into the voice mail of my stolen cell phone. Nothing. While I was in the system, I changed my outgoing message:
Hey, it’s me. If you get this message, you’ve dialed a cell that now belongs to whatever desperate lowlife broke into my car last night. I’ll try to check messages, but you might want to try my other numbers instead. Have a better day than I’m having. ’Bye.

When I hung up, I felt myself start to cry. But then I did what I always do when that happens at the office. I pushed the pain down as far as I could, forcing myself to focus on work. Healthy, I know.

Once I gave the requisite mea culpa to the boss about the newspaper article and got his permission to go forward with the plan to confront Jamie Powell, I turned to the rest of my regular duties, starting with screening. When that was done, I handled my grand juries, then a sentencing hearing. I was fine as long as I was running around the courthouse. But back in the office, I couldn’t help it. I stared at the silent phone on my desk, wondering when Chuck would call.

I considered calling Alison York to apologize for phoning her at home the day before to ask about Percy. No, better to leave well enough alone. She and Matt were trying to salvage their marriage, and every call from me was just a reminder of what had compromised it in the first place.

That thought brought me squarely back to the problems in my own home life. I called my cell phone one more time, checking for a message I knew was not there.

Desperately seeking a distraction, I turned to the Crenshaw file, reviewing once again his notes on the Northeast Precinct story. Looking at everything we knew now, Heidi’s theory added up, but how in the world had Percy pieced it together from just these numbers and a few comments at neighborhood association meetings? He must have had a source who fed him information on the side, someone we hadn’t found yet—maybe one of these people whose first names Percy scrawled randomly in his margins. Whoever they were, I hoped they were watching their backs.

Or maybe Percy didn’t have a source. Maybe he hadn’t yet made sense of these numbers himself. I flipped through the pages, saddened by the thought of Percy being killed for information he didn’t even have.

Then I stopped at a name in the margin: a first name, or at least it had seemed, in all-capital print letters. Nothing special, just another small detail in this vast collection of minutiae. But this time, those three letters took on new significance: AMY.

There was nothing wrong with the York marriage after all.

I dialed their home number, but there was no answer. I tracked down Matt’s cell phone with the bureau and tried it instead. He sounded unnerved when he answered.

“Matt, it’s Sam Kincaid. We need to talk.”

I heard static in the heavy pause, then Alison’s faint voice in the background. “We were actually thinking about calling you. We’ve been driving around for hours.”

“No more thinking,” I said. “I’ve got officers in place ready to pick up Powell and Foster this afternoon. The lies end now.” It was tough talk from a friend, but it came with the implicit threat and power of the District Attorney’s Office.

“Can you give us any assurances?”

“Matt, you know how this works. I need the cooperation first.” My tone softened slightly. “But, as your friend, I promise you: A couple of hours from now, your help won’t mean as much.”

I heard a muffled exchange between them as I prayed silently that I wouldn’t need to have them picked up by force.

“Yeah, OK. But, please, not at the courthouse. Can you meet us somewhere?” He directed me to a hole-in-the-wall diner on the far west end of downtown. “And make sure no one follows you.”

Alison and Matt sat side by side in the back booth of Jake’s Diner, sharing a chocolate malt like two high school kids in letter jackets.

I dropped Percy’s open notebook on the table in front of them. “That’s you: Alison Madison-York.” I pointed for emphasis at each of the three initials that had tipped me off. “You two apparently spent enough time with Percy for him to pick up on the joke.”

Alison turned anxiously to her husband.

“You weren’t sleeping with Percy. You were his source. You were at his apartment to give him information.”

Matt looked nervously around the diner, calmed not in the least by its limited and geriatric customer base. “Can you please just sit for a second,” he said in a hushed tone.

I took a seat across from them in the booth.

“How much do you have without us?” Matt asked.

“Unh-unh. If you want my help, you tell me everything.” I glanced at my watch. “And I meant it about being pressed for time. That shooting in Buckeye Saturday night? A coworker of Percy’s had contacted those women earlier in the day, trying to track the story.”

Alison nudged Matt with her elbow. “I told you it could be related,” she said to her husband. “I’ve been on edge since you called last night. When I saw the story this morning about Percy’s case being reopened, I was too scared to stay in the house. We’ve been driving around for hours.”

“You
should
be scared.” I immediately regretted the harshness of the words. “We figured it out. Powell and Foster have been going through the motions on searches, then cutting Andre Brouse’s people loose if they’re carrying. Obviously, someone doesn’t want that information out, and they may have killed Percy over it.”

Alison looked confused. “Then you know more than we do. I’ve never even heard of that person.”

“Start by telling me what you do know.” Mentally, I kicked myself. I had been thinking of Alison solely as Matt’s wife and Percy’s lover, not as a potentially valuable source in the records department of Northeast Precinct, which processes search-and-seizure cards.

“I swear to you, I didn’t know what was going on at first. A few months ago, I noticed they had plenty of searches going into the system, but their arrests were down. I said something to them about slacking off. I was only joking around, but they totally freaked out and told me to stick to data entry and mind my own business. A couple days later, Powell came to me all nice and apologetic, and asked if I’d disregard a few of their searches of black males every once in a while.”

They must have realized that if Alison could spot the discrepancy between the numbers of searches shown on their stop-and-search cards and the number of arrests they were making, so could anyone who might actually look.

“And so you did it?”

“No, of course not. I said I didn’t want to get involved in anything like that. But Powell said they were just worried after my comment that some left-wing liberal might make them out to be racist cops using searches to harass people in Buckeye. He said they were only doing their job in a neighborhood that happens to be mostly black. My husband’s a cop, too, and I didn’t see the harm in ignoring a few of the searches when I was doing data entry.”

“When was this? When did you start cutting back on their numbers?” I asked.

“Around the end of August.” The bureau had only published the statistics through August on its Web site. Apparently the numbers would be less skewed in the months since, thanks to Alison’s assistance.

“Is that everything?”

Alison looked at her husband. “No. A couple of weeks later, the sergeants started to get on the officers for letting low-level dealers off with warnings instead of taking them in. Right after that, Powell asked me to destroy actual arrest records for him and Foster—always on drug cases. They’d bring people in and make it look like they were processing them for arrests, paper work and all. But then instead of transporting them to the jail, they’d cut them loose in the neighborhood. They wanted me to make sure the arrest reports didn’t get processed.” The practice explained the complaints from residents that dealers who were arrested would magically reappear on the same corner within the hour.

“You had to have known something was up, Alison.”

“I figured it out eventually.”

“And you did this for them out of—what? Friendship? Loyalty?” I asked.

“No. I told them I wouldn’t throw out arrest records. But they didn’t seem to want to accept that answer and then—well, then they offered to pay me.” I started to ask why she needed the money, then remembered a frustrated conversation during the summer about infertility treatment. “We already took a second mortgage on the house for shots that weren’t working. We need in vitro.”

“Alison,” I said, shaking my head sadly at her desperation.

“I know, it was stupid. So incredibly stupid.”

“How long have you known?” I asked Matt. He said nothing.

“I told him about a month ago. It’s not his fault. He was—well, angry, to say the least.”

“Why didn’t you come forward?”

This time Matt answered. “I couldn’t think of a safe way to get her out of it. Think about it: I didn’t know who else was involved or how things would play out with her word against theirs.” He paused, struggling for the right words to convey the complexity of their dilemma. “Have you ever heard of
slow cover
?”

My blank expression told him I hadn’t.

“Cops who make enemies of other cops don’t necessarily get help when they push their panic buttons.”

I thought about the red button I had nearly triggered the night Chuck arrested Trevor Hanks, and Chuck’s unwillingness to see my side of the police–district attorney divide. If scorned cops will imperil one of their own, could Chuck have worried—consciously or not—about living with a prosecutor who wasn’t part of the code?

“How’d you get involved with Percy?”

“Powell and Foster told me that Percy Crenshaw was asking questions. We needed to be even more careful about the records. I had to make sure their numbers looked normal. Instead, I called Percy and started giving him information.”

“You never heard either of them mention Andre Brouse?”

She shook her head.

“Can you help her?” Matt asked.

“It’s not just her, Matt. You withheld information in a murder investigation.”

“I know. I’ll handle whatever needs to be done, but I want you to do what you can for Alison.”

Alison started to argue, and I immediately understood what they must have been discussing during the daylong car ride.

“Is there something else I need to know, Matt? Chuck says you were more than a little sensitive about your whereabouts on Sunday night.”

“I still feel like shit for the way I talked to him. I really did forget to log back in after the call at City Grill. But the more he pushed, the more I started to think he actually suspected me of killing Percy. I lost it.”

“I’ll let you explain that to him yourself,” I said. I didn’t mention that Chuck apparently wasn’t speaking to me directly anymore.

“If it makes any difference, we really were close to calling Chuck—and you—on our own before.”

I nodded, realizing none of us could know what they would have done if I hadn’t made the connection first.

“It was because of Chuck’s partner, actually,” Matt added. “I guess Chuck told him how I acted Friday. Lo and behold, Calabrese was waiting for me later at the precinct. Said he figured I wasn’t being straight with my buddy, and I’d only do that to Chuck if I was worried about diming someone else up.”

“You think he knew about this?”

“No, not like that. I got the feeling he thought it was minor, like I was off having a drink with another cop or something. But everything he said about it hit me right inside—that one lie would start another, that it was better just to be honest and take the consequences, that I was putting Chuck in a bind. I don’t know; it just got to me. Then when we saw the story this morning about the investigation into Percy’s murder being reopened, we knew we had to say something.”

With that one story from Matt York, I finally had the confidence in my gut that Chuck had implored me to feel earlier. Mike Calabrese might be rough around the edges, but at his core he was one of the good ones. And Chuck had been right. By going to his lieutenant, I had screwed them both over.

By the time I met Tommy Garcia and Alan Carson at the Internal Affairs Division offices in Central Precinct as scheduled, I had an arrest warrant in hand for Powell based on information provided by two confidential and reliable informants.

“I know you’re capable of great things, Kincaid, but you’ve got a
what
?” Garcia apparently wasn’t certain he’d heard me right.

“An arrest warrant, signed by one Judge David Lesh after reviewing the fastest affidavit I’ve ever drafted.”

“I can’t imagine any judge signing off for an arrest on what we’ve got.”

I backed up and told them about the Yorks.

“They could be in deeper than they’re admitting,” Carson suggested.

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Alison was desperate for money and didn’t realize how bad it would get. By the time she was in, they couldn’t think of a way out.”

“They could have come to us,” Carson protested.

“Yeah, well, according to what I heard from Matt today, they didn’t think that was realistic. Something about
slow cover
?”

“Urban legend,” Carson said.

Tommy scoffed, and I couldn’t help but think of my recent ticket and the ignored attempts to report the car prowl at my house.

“Anyway, that’s part of what they were afraid of. Then Alison hears Powell and Foster saying that Percy’s on to the connection between them and Brouse.”

“Wait,” Tommy said. “Alison York can give us Brouse? She heard them use his name?”

“No, sorry, that was me filling in the blanks. She heard them say Percy had figured
it
out. She and Matt talked it through and saw Percy as a way of getting the problem to end without her having to come forward.”

“The plan didn’t exactly work,” Garcia said dryly.

“And now they’re truly contrite, appealing for lenience from the DA?” Carson asked sarcastically.

“I didn’t make any deals other than to say I’d go to bat for them.”

“You done good, Sammie,” Garcia said. “Let’s pick up Jamie Powell.”

Powell wasn’t exactly calling attention to whatever money he received for his complicity. We arrived in two separate detective vehicles at a modest ranch house in the suburb of Beaverton. The open garage door revealed a Dodge Caravan and a Chevy Malibu.

The idea of a corrupt cop with four kids brings to mind a certain age, but I knew from his file that he was younger than I was. Still, the boyish face that answered the door came as a surprise.

Carson introduced the three of us, including respective titles. Internal Affairs, the Drug Unit, and the DA’s Major Crimes Unit. The implication was clear. “Do you want to come with us, or do you want to talk here?”

Powell initially feigned confusion, but his expression quickly changed when a woman inside asked who was at the door. The moment he’d dreaded had finally come. “Can I tell my wife I’m going?”

“I can’t leave you by yourself,” Carson said. Too many cops end the problem on their own with their service weapon.

“Yeah, all right. Come on in.” Alan stepped inside while we waited on the porch. “Hon, this is Alan, my buddy from work. Something’s come up. I got to go in early…. No, everything’s fine.”

Thirty minutes later, the four of us were back at IAD with a union delegate for Powell. Carson was laying out the case against him, along with Powell’s options. Even the union rep conceded that Powell had an incentive to cooperate. We were offering an extraordinary deal under the circumstances: full immunity from prosecution. He would leave the force, keep his pension, and stay insured for a year. Not a single day as a former cop behind bars. In exchange, he would corroborate the case against Foster and, most importantly, wear a wire to give us Brouse. The deal was good for half an hour. After that, we were booking him and trying our luck with Foster.

“Give you Andre for what?” he asked.

“Everything.” The scope of the drug activity alone could land Brouse in prison for life if we convinced the Feds to remand him. I wanted him in state prison, though. “What do you know about Percy Crenshaw?”

“Andre didn’t do that.”

“That’s not what I asked you. I asked you what you knew about it.”

“Andre heard Crenshaw had been asking about him. He obviously wasn’t pleased. When I found out he’d been killed, I confronted Andre at Jay-J’s. Regardless of what you might think of me, no way was I willing to look the other way on a murder.”

Tommy and Alan exchanged skeptical glances.

“He didn’t even know about it. Don’t get me wrong—he was happy when I told him, like he couldn’t believe his own stupid luck—but he was obviously surprised. He didn’t do it.”