Vengeance Road (3 page)

S
ome thirty-six hours after it had been removed from its shallow grave, the body was autopsied at the Erie County Medical Center, on Grider Street off the Martin Luther King Expressway.

Death was classified a homicide.

Using fingerprints and dental records, the dead woman's identity was confirmed as being Bernice Tina Hogan, aged twenty-three, of Buffalo, New York. The facts of her death were summarized in a few sentences in a police news release.

Nothing about the pain of her life, Gannon thought as he worked on a long feature about her. After her name had been released, some of her former classmates had contacted him at the paper.

“Bernice had a hard life,” one friend told him.

Bernice never knew her real parents. She'd been told she had some Native American blood, maybe Seneca, and had been raised, for a time, on a reservation. Maybe Allegany, or Cattaraugus. She wasn't sure. Bernice had never been sure about much in her short life, her friends told him.

Some sent him photos.

She stood stiff and shy in obvious embarrassment; a heavyset girl with low self-esteem who'd been abused by her foster father, who also beat her foster mother.

At first she'd overcome it all. Bernice did well in school, going on to study nursing at Buffalo State, nearly graduating before she was drugged and raped at a party.

“After that happened she was so brokenhearted. It was like she just gave up. She began missing classes,” one friend said.

Bernice had grown addicted to crack. Few people knew that she'd slipped into prostitution as she descended down a path that ended in a makeshift grave under a thicket of twisted maple near Ellicott Creek.

Gannon wanted to talk to Bernice's family, but no one knew who her foster mom was, or where she lived. So he made a lot of calls over the next few days until he got a lead.

“You didn't get this from me, but her name is Catherine Field,” a source at the city's Social Services and Housing Department told him.

Catherine Field was a widowed fifty-nine-year-old diabetic who lived alone on welfare in an older section of the city west of Main. Gannon had gone to the address several times but in vain.

No one was home.

But he refused to give up trying to find her.

Maybe today would be different, he thought as once again he rolled by the home where Catherine had raised Bernice. It was a small two-story frame house built with the optimism that had blossomed when the Second World War ended. Now, with its blistering paint, missing shingles and sagging front porch, it looked more like a tomb for hope.

It sat among the boarded-up houses near a vacant lot where several old men leaned against an eviscerated Pinto and passed around a bottle wrapped in a paper bag.

Memories of his sister rushed at him before he turned
his attention back to the story and the house, eyeing it intensely as he drove by. His hopes lifted when he saw a woman in the backyard.

This time he parked out of sight down the block and approached the house from a different street, coming to the back first, where he saw a woman in her fifties, tending a flower garden near the rickety back porch.

“Catherine Field?”

She turned to him, the toll of a hard life evident in the lines that had woven despair on her face. Her red-rimmed eyes stared helplessly at him.

“You are Catherine Field, Bernice Hogan's foster mom?”

“Who are you?”

“Sorry,” Gannon fished for his photo ID. “Jack Gannon, a reporter for the
Buffalo Sentinel
.”

As if cued, breezes curled pages of the
News
and the
Sentinel
that were on a small table between two chairs. Also on the table: a glass and a bottle of whiskey that was half-empty.

“I've been trying to reach you,” he said.

“I was burying my daughter.”

“I'm sorry. My condolences. There was no notice of the arrangements.”

“We wanted to keep it private. My brother had a plot, a small cemetery on a hill overlooking an apple orchard.”

“Where is it?”

“I don't want to say.”

“I understand. May I talk to you about Bernice?”

“You can try, I'm not in good shape.”

She invited him to sit on the porch. Gannon declined a drink. Catherine poured one for herself, looked at her small garden and spoke softly. She told him that Bernice's mother was a child, fourteen years old, when she gave her up for adoption.

But Bernice was never adopted. Instead, she was bounced through the system. Catherine and her husband, Raife, a carpenter, became Bernice's foster parents when Bernice was eleven. By then Bernice was aware that she'd been given up for adoption.

“I loved her and always felt like her mom, but she chose to call me Catherine, never Mom. I think it was her way of emotionally protecting herself because she'd had so many ‘moms.' No one could ever really be her mother.”

Not long after they got Bernice, Raife started gambling, and drinking. He became violent and abused Bernice and Catherine before she left him.

“I'll spend my life regretting that I didn't do more to protect her.”

Catherine considered her glass then sipped from it.

“She was such a bright girl. Always reading. I was so pleased when she left home to get her own apartment and start college. So proud. She was on her way. She volunteered at a hospice in Niagara Falls. I just knew she was going to make it. Then the bad thing happened.”

“Her friends told me about the party.”

“They think someone slipped something in her drink. She never overcame it. She turned to drugs to deal with it. She wouldn't talk to me or anyone, but I heard that when she ran up drug debts, she turned to the street.”

Tears rolled down Catherine's face.

“When was the last time you saw, or talked, to her?”

Catherine wiped her tears and sipped from her glass.

“She called me about a month ago and said she was going to try to get clean, try to get off the street. Some friends were trying to help her.”

“Did she say who those friends were?”

Catherine shook her head.

“You can't print anything I've just told you.”

“But I'm researching your daughter's death for a news story. I have to.”

“No. You can't print anything.”

“Catherine, I identified myself as a reporter. I've been taking notes. This tragedy is already public. Now, did Bernice say anything about anyone possibly harming her?”

“I'm not supposed to say anything. They told me not to talk to the press.”

“Who?”

Catherine stood.

“Please, you can't print anything. You have to go.”

“Wait, who told you not to say anything?”

Several moments passed.

“At least tell me who told you not to speak to the press about your daughter's murder.”

She looked at him long and hard.

“The police.”

T
wo days after her corpse had been identified, Bernice Hogan's shy smile haunted Gannon from the
Sentinel
's front page.

Her picture ran under the headline:

Here was a troubled young woman whose life held promise. A woman who, despite the cruelty she'd endured, had been striving to devote herself to comforting others. His compassionate profile was longer than his earlier news stories and contained information unknown to most people, including his competition.

Not bad, he thought, sitting at his desk, rereading his feature in that morning's print and online editions.

Tim Derrick swung by, drinking coffee from a mug bearing the paper's logo.

“Nate likes what you did,” Derrick indicated the corner office of Nate Fowler, the paper's managing editor, the man who controlled the lives of seventy-five people in editorial. Invoking his name gave currency to any instructions as quickly as it made people uneasy.

Fowler was not a journalist. He was a Machiavellian bu
reaucrat and Gannon did not mesh with him as well as he did with the other editors.

“Did he say anything else?” Gannon asked.

“He wants you to stay exclusively on the murder story, do whatever you can to make sure we own it. He said we need hits like this to boost circulation and stay alive.” Derrick pointed his finger gunlike at Gannon's old Pulitzer-nominated clips and winked. “And if anyone's going to take it to the end zone, it's you.”

Gannon was not so optimistic.

He needed a strong follow-up today but faced a problem.

The New York State Police led the Hogan investigation and he didn't know the lead detectives. He looked at their names on the last news release, Investigators Michael Brent and Roxanne Esko.

He'd put in calls to them but none were returned. He could go around them, but it meant asking sources to go out on a limb by leaking information to him.

He had sources everywhere: the Buffalo homicide squad, Erie County, Amherst, Cheektowaga, the FBI, Customs and Border Protection, the DEA, the U.S. Marshals Service, pretty much every agency in the region.

But nobody was saying much.

Maybe it went back to what Catherine Field had said about the police telling her not to speak to the press. At first he hadn't been concerned because detectives often asked relatives of victims not to speak to reporters, especially during the early days of an investigation.

But now, as he sat at his computer searching for a new angle, he wondered if it was a factor here. He couldn't shake the feeling he was missing something.

“That Hogan case is sealed, man,” one source had told him. “But I heard that some of the people close to it were
rattled by what the guy had done to her. I heard that it pushes the limits of comprehension.”

Another source said that a number of law enforcement agencies were called in to help, possibly because of the area where she was found, and possibly because of other complications.

“I'll tell you something nobody in the press knows,” the source said. “There's a closed-door case-status meeting with a lot of cops from a lot of jurisdictions. It's been going on all morning out at Clarence Barracks.”

Gannon grabbed his jacket.

He'd go out there and see if anyone would talk to him.

 

The New York State Police patrol east and northeast Erie County from the drowsy suburb of Clarence, east of Buffalo. Clarence Barracks was on Main Street, housed in a plain one-story building.

When Gannon arrived, the woman at the reception desk was twirling her pen and talking on the phone.

“I've been temping all week, just when they get this big case…meeting after meeting, people coming, people going—one second, Charlene.” She clamped her hand over the phone. “May I help you?”

“I'd like to see Michael Brent or Roxanne Esko. I'm with the
Buffalo
—”

“They're all in the meeting, third door on the right.” She pointed down the hall with her pen. “I'm supposed to send everybody there.” She went back to her conversation. “What's that? She's pregnant! OH MY GOD! How many is that now?”

“But I'm with the
Buffalo Sentinel
.”

Ignoring what he'd said, the receptionist pointed him down the hall.

“Go,” she told Gannon. “It's all right. Everybody's in the meeting.”

He hesitated for as long as it took the receptionist to buzz him through the security door. As he went down the hall he could almost hear the floor cracking under him for he was treading on thin ethical ice. Through innocent circumstance he'd gained entrance to the inner sanctum of the investigation of Bernice Hogan's murder. The door to the meeting was half-open. He could hear loud voices.

How should he play this?

He'd knock on the door, identify himself then request to speak to Brent or Esko. They'd likely shoo him away, have him wait at reception.

At that instant the door opened and a man he didn't recognize exited, talking on his cell phone. Gannon turned and bent over a water fountain as the man, his tie loosened, shirtsleeves rolled up, whisked by him to the opposite end of the hall talking loudly on his cell.

“Tell Walt this Hogan thing is going to be a ballbuster,” he said into the phone. “No one will believe where they're going with it. Yeah, they're keeping a tight lid on this. Yeah, I got to get back.”

The man returned to the room and Gannon inched closer to the door.

It remained partially opened. Voices of people arguing spilled from it.

“I don't buy it.”

“Look at what we know so far.”

“What you have so far is hearsay, Mike!”

Gannon's breathing quickened. As he inched closer he got a limited view of a large whiteboard. He glimpsed a patch of handwritten times, dates, streets, arrows, then a clear view of initials written in blue marker under the heading
“Suspect.” The initials on the board were blocked by an open hand slapping it to stress the point someone was making.

“Given all that we've got so far, all that we're following up with, this guy is our suspect and the focus of our investigation.”

The hand vanished.

Gannon's heart beat faster as he glanced around to be sure no one could see him. He stepped closer and saw the initials of the suspect.

K.S.

Who was that?

“It's bullshit, Mike, I'm telling you!”

For an instant Gannon caught sight of someone he knew.

“How can you be so sure? We just don't buy it.”

“It's not a done deal. Listen, we've got a lot of hard work ahead of us, but based on what we've got, everything points to him. He's the key.”

“Let's see if I have this right. Based on the things a couple of crack hoes on Niagara told you, you're telling us that a cop, a decorated detective, is your suspect for Hogan?”

A cop?

Gannon froze.

Then he felt a hand on his shoulder.