Justifiable Risk (27 page)

“More coffee, Detective?” Janice Johnston stood behind Greer with a steaming pot at the ready. Greer wondered if she wanted to fill her cup or pour the scalding coffee in her lap. Janice wouldn’t be happy with her for keeping the secret about JJ’s infidelity.

“Yes, please.” Greer tried not to flinch as Janice filled her cup with the steaming liquid. “How are things?”

The look Janice gave her wasn’t the daggers-and-death stare she’d expected. Janice plopped into the booth across from her and rested the pot on the edge of the table. “They suck, if you want to know.” Her highlighted medium brown hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail, making her face seem more aged and severe. The smile Greer had associated with this woman for years was sadly absent. “I miss the lying, cheating bastard.”

Greer traced the mouth of her cup with her finger, unable to find a suitable response to the uncomplimentary but accurate description of JJ. “I’m sorry,” she finally said.

“It’s not your fault, so don’t feel bad about not telling me. I know how you cops are with your damn code-of-silence bullshit. This one’s on him.”

“He misses you, Jan. Is there a chance you could—”

“Well, if it isn’t my two favorite women.” JJ’s voice behind her accounted for Janice’s pained expression. “Mind if I have a seat?” He indicated the empty space next to Janice.

“Sit all you want. I have to get back to work.” Janice grabbed the coffeepot, swung it dangerously close to JJ’s crotch, and headed for the next table.

“Guess you don’t have to ask how that’s going.” JJ sat down but his stare followed Janice. “What are you doing here so early?”

Greer debated keeping her conversation with Carlton Williamson quiet. She wasn’t sure how JJ would take the fact that he’d missed something during his investigation. “I interviewed a witness in the Saldana case. He heard what sounded like a scuffle in the early morning hours.
And
he saw Baron Wallace outside Paul’s room shortly after that.”

“Damn.” For a second she thought that was all he had to say. But she could see the wheels turning. “I’ve learned a lot lately, Greer, mostly to be grateful for what you’ve got.” His gaze returned to Janice as she worked the room. “Another is to give one hundred percent, especially in a job like ours. Because the minute you take a shortcut or think you’ve got it nailed, something jumps up and bites you on the ass.”

The sadness in his voice told Greer these lessons hadn’t been easy. Losing someone you loved was one of the most difficult things in life. And loss of respect or integrity in a job as honorable and public as law enforcement was its own kind of hell. Her heart went out to him, but nothing she could say would mitigate his situation.

“I let the pressure of a caseload and clearance-rate stats push me into making a quick, and wrong, call. That guy deserved better than he got, and I’m glad you’re finally giving it to him.”

“I’m sorry, JJ. I wanted you to be right on this.”

“You did your job. I’m the one who fucked up, but I’ll help you fix it. I’ve got my informants looking for Baron. I’ll let you know the minute I get anything.” JJ scooted forward in his seat toward her. “But right now, we might have a bigger situation than finding a drug dealer.”

Greer experienced that tingling sense of foreboding that usually accompanied bad news or an operation gone wrong. “What?”

“Agent Long got the rest of the forensics results back from the state lab today. He left them on the desk in the sergeant’s office. One of the perks of being the second is that I have a key.” He lowered his voice as if everyone in the room had suddenly tuned into their conversation. “They found muzzle-blast residue on the sergeant’s shirt.”

His statement registered with a jolt. “
What?
Somebody in the lab screwed up. Because if that’s true, it means—” What it meant and she couldn’t bring herself to say was that whoever shot the sergeant was standing within three feet of him.
And
if
the residue pattern was roughly circular around the entrance, that person was also about his size and the weapon was pretty near perpendicular when fired.

They sat in silence for a few minutes and Greer let the information ferment in her mind until it formed an ugly ball of disbelief and confusion. If the shooter had been within three feet of Sergeant Fluharty, he had to have seen him. But if he saw the suspect, why wouldn’t he identify him? An equally far-fetched possibility came to mind. The sergeant
could
have shot himself. Greer dismissed the idea as totally ridiculous and surmised that the test results were simply wrong. “They need to retest.”

“You know the other possibility as well as I do, Greer.”

“What reason would the sergeant have for shooting Tom Merritt and himself? You know him better than I do. That doesn’t make any sense.”

“But that’s the fly in the ointment, isn’t it? We don’t have a motive for any of this—Paul Saldana’s murder, Tom’s death, or the attempts on Eva’s life, none of it. That’s the missing piece we have to find. And—”

“Jeez, there can’t be more to this nightmare.”

“Long asked the clerk of court for the officers’ sign-in sheet on the day of the shooting. Breeze told us he’d been called on a case and that’s why he couldn’t be on the stakeout. But he didn’t have a case on the docket.”

“This just gets worse. Let’s keep this information between ourselves for now.”

“Yeah, one more thing. We found the truck that ran Bessie and Eva off the road, reported stolen—no surprise there. But it had Baron Wallace’s fingerprints all over the inside. He’s not even trying to cover his tracks.”

“That means he’s more dangerous than ever,” Greer said.

“That’s what I was thinking. Want to split up and look for him?” She nodded. “I’ll take the east side. Check back with you in a couple of hours…and be careful.”

“Will do.”

“And don’t forget about Tom’s funeral tomorrow.”

As she picked up her folder and exited the diner, it was evident that JJ was as conflicted about this situation as she was. They’d both work night and day until they got to the bottom of it. Her head ached from considering all the unpleasant possibilities. She refused to believe that Fred Fluharty—the man she knew and trusted, the man who had mentored and supported her, the man who avenged her lover’s murder—had any nefarious connection to this convoluted case. And she’d never known Breeze to lie about anything. If she couldn’t trust these guys, what did that say about her instincts?

Greer searched drug flophouses in the warehouse district for Baron Wallace until after midnight. JJ had given up hours ago and tried to convince her to go home and get some rest. But she kept looking, certain she’d find another clue. With each hour that passed without a credible lead, her compulsion deepened. She rubbed the tense muscles in her shoulders and focused on the faded numbers on the side of the wood-frame house she faced.

Her eyes burned from lack of sleep and her stomach growled for nourishment. Black coffee had been her constant companion and the caffeine had become ineffective. No one she’d spoken with admitted any knowledge of Wallace’s whereabouts. Her frustration level made her grumpy and less than cordial with sources. She promised herself this would be the last stop.

She approached the dilapidated residence—an address where Wallace had lived ten years earlier with his mother. The chances of him being here were slim, but with no clues, she had to explore every possibility. She stepped to the side of the door and knocked. No answer. She tried again. After several minutes, something shuffled inside. Several more minutes passed before someone approached the door. Greer turned sideways and cocked her right hand on the grip of her weapon.

The door swung open and a very thin, balding woman who smelled of liniment appeared clutching a worn housecoat to her chest. “What in the name of sweet Jesus are you doing knocking on my door this hour of the night?
Excuse me
,
I meant to say
morning
.
Somebody better be dead.”

Greer produced her credentials. “I apologize for the hour, but I need to locate Baron Wallace. Does he still live here?”

The woman wiped her eyes and squinted at Greer’s badge. “Detective, huh? Well, if you
were
any kind of detective you’d know that boy hasn’t even been to visit me in over four months, much less lived here.”

“Then you’re his mother, Brenda Wallace?”

“I try not to spread that around since he’s turned out to be such an upstanding citizen and all, but I did give birth to him.”

Greer’s hope was fading as quickly as her patience. “Do you know where he’s living now, a girlfriend’s address, anything?”

“Nope, and I don’t want to. Sorry, lady.”

As Mrs. Wallace turned to go back into the house, Greer tried one last appeal. The timing was right and it certainly couldn’t hurt. “You said he came by about four months ago. Did he spend the night?”

“Yeah, said he was on his way out of town
on business
. I know about his business and I’m not mixed up in that. But he looked pretty tired and wrung out. So I guess my mothering instinct got the best of me. I let him stay the night in his old bedroom.”

“Would you mind if I took a look in his room? He might’ve left something behind.”

“What’s this all about? I don’t think you said.” She blocked the doorway and waited for Greer to answer.

“It’s a homicide investigation.”

Brenda Wallace grabbed the fabric at her throat and twisted. “Oh, sweet Jesus. You think Baron killed somebody?”

The woman looked truly shocked. It seemed easy enough to accept that her son dealt drugs to schoolkids. Was it such a stretch to imagine it ending in someone’s death? But Greer had sympathy for the woman’s dilemma. How difficult it must be to raise children in today’s society with all the temptations and peer pressure. “I’m not sure, Mrs. Wallace, but I have to eliminate him as a suspect. May I look in the room?”

She stepped back and allowed Greer to enter. “I want no part of this. If he’s done something like that, he’s got to answer for it. It’s in the back, on the right.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” Greer opened the door of the musty-smelling room and did a visual examination. The space was empty except for a single bed and a dresser that desperately needed repair. Starting at the entry, Greer worked methodically in a clockwise manner checking for possible evidence. She cleared the entire room before she approached the closet.

She opened the door and looked in. The only piece of clothing hanging on the rod was a blue windbreaker. A crumpled grocery bag lay on the floor, but nothing else. Greer carefully unfolded the top of the bag and shined her flashlight inside. Then she knelt for a closer look to confirm what she saw—a Nikon Coolpix camera.

Mrs. Wallace denied it was hers or that she’d ever seen it before. Greer left the bag in place and called for a lab tech. It had to be Paul’s missing camera. If so, she’d added one more piece of circumstantial evidence in the case against Baron Wallace.

Greer waited hours for a crime-scene tech to respond to her location. The only two in the department were tied up on an early-morning fatality. But Mrs. Wallace seemed grateful for the company and made a pot of coffee. Greer shared it with her while listening to the challenges of parenting an ungrateful child. By the time the lab folks arrived and she got a couple of identifying digital photos of Paul’s initials on the battery door of the camera, it was mid-afternoon. She barely had time to go home, change clothes, and make it to Tom’s service. But she still had one more thing to do.

Forty-five minutes later Greer parked at the back of the New Hope cemetery, hoping to avoid the people gathering for Tom’s burial. She removed the carefully wrapped bundle of lilies from the seat beside her and took the long way around to Clare’s grave. It had been only a week since her last visit, but the cooler temperatures had already destroyed the petals of the flowers she’d left. Clare deserved fresh, live flowers, so the town florist kept a stock of lilies on hand year-round. Clare loved lilies.

Greer knelt, removed the wilted flowers, and put the fresh ones in their place on top of the headstone. She ran her hand along Clare’s name engraved in the granite and shivered at the cold that penetrated her fingertips. It was impossible to equate a barren plot of land or a frigid block of rock to her once loving and vibrant partner. She’d experienced only warmth and vitality from Clare from the moment they met. But this was the final resting place for her body and sometimes the only place Greer felt close to her. She came here frequently after Clare died, slept on top of the grave, and prayed to join her.

But today she had another purpose. Today she sought permission to live again. She needed to say aloud some of the things she’d been thinking and feeling lately. If they sounded right, they had to be true. Tears blurred her vision. Emotion gathered in her chest as the words came together in her mind and she began to speak.

“Hi, honey, it’s me. I—I miss you and I love you so much it hurts.” Greer stared at Clare’s name as if she’d find the guidance Clare could no longer provide etched in the letters. “I have something to tell you.” She took a deep breath and forced the next sentence out. “I’ve met someone who matters to me.”

The sentiment wasn’t exactly right and the words didn’t ring true. She wondered if the sky would open up and rain down Clare’s disapproval. Instead she experienced a sense of peace, as if Clare was challenging Greer in that calm, patient manner of hers to dig deeper. “You’re right. She doesn’t just
matter
to me. I think I’m falling in love with her.” Greer buried her face in her hands and sobbed. “And I don’t know what to do. I’m afraid that if I love her, I’ll lose you.”