Close Case (27 page)

I had big plans for Sunday. After a long run, I’d gorge myself on dim sum at Fong Chong over a leisurely read of the
New York Times,
then top it all off with a large bucket of balls at the Westmoreland driving range. Perfect.

It started well enough. I woke to kisses on my neck from the back half of my bed spoon. Before long, Vinnie had been evicted to the hallway, and Chuck, in his own special way, was loosening up my back for my golf swing.

The start of the optimistic day came to an end, however, when I walked into the house after my run, damp with drizzle and sweat. Chuck was at the dining room table with a Coffee People java, black, and Vinnie unusually content at his feet. Progress.

“Hey, what was the name of that woman you were telling me about?”

“Um, a little more specificity please?” I kicked my shoes off at the door and pulled off my shell, stripping down to my sports bra and tights.

“The one you met at that thing about the Tompkins shooting, who called Duncan saying how great you were?”

“Oh. Selma Gooding. Salt of the earth, that woman.”

“Then you need to see this.” He pushed the open Metro section of the
Oregonian
across the table toward me and pointed to a short side column. The headline—Drive-by Shooting Targets Activists—leaped out, along with two familiar faces. Late Saturday night, an unidentified gunman had fired multiple bullets through the window of Selma Gooding’s house, landing her and her houseguest, Buckeye Neighborhood Association president Janelle Rogers, in critical condition. Although the article was too brief to draw any conclusions, the mention of the women’s activism against the neighborhood gangs and street crime suggested the possibility of retribution.

“You haven’t heard anything?” I asked Chuck.

“Nothing. Pager’s been quiet.”

“Can you find out what’s up?”

“Yeah, sure, no problem.” He made a few phone calls from the kitchen as I eavesdropped, trying to ascertain from his
uh-huh
s and
yeah
s what was going on. A few minutes later, he told me that Selma was in serious but stable condition at Emanuel Legacy Hospital. He interrupted my sigh of relief with a second piece of news: Janelle Rogers was dead. An image of her offering me cookies and fruit salad flashed in my mind like a hologram.

Two detectives from the Gang Team had been assigned to the shooting. I pulled my DA call list from my briefcase and dialed Jessica Walters’s home number. “Jessica, it’s Sam Kincaid. Sorry to call you, but did the Gang Team happen to call you about a shooting last night? In Buckeye?”

“They paged me last night around one. Might not actually be a gang thing, but we’re handling it for now. What’s up?”

“I just wanted to make sure someone in our office had it. I’ve met both the victims, and—well, I guess I was shocked this morning when I read about the shooting.”

“The younger one didn’t make it, but the old lady’s fine.” Another shooting wasn’t much to Jessica.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, the detectives tell me she’s totally out of the woods. Don’t worry, we’ve got it under control. You done interrupting my weekend, Kincaid?”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“Not a problem. Go run a marathon now or whatever the hell you do on Sunday.” She hung up without saying goodbye.

I showered, dressed, and placed my fat bundle of a
New York Times
into a backpack, but I couldn’t quite ready myself for the drive to Chinatown for dumplings. Instead, I called the front desk at Emanuel Legacy. After a few requests, I was connected to the ICU. The doctors had cleared Selma for visitors. The hours were from two to four in the afternoon. My sports watch was approaching one o’clock when I hung up.

“Chuck, do you mind if we skip the dim sum today?”

I found a small crowd of people standing in the hall outside Selma’s hospital room. Among them was a familiar face—the young reporter from the
Oregonian,
the one with the nauseatingly sweet name.

“Holly?” I asked.

“Heidi, actually.” I peeked over the shoulder of a woman blocking the entrance to Room 328. Selma was sleeping, tubes running from a bandage over her left arm. Importantly, though, I saw a rise and fall in her chest, a slight smile on her restful face.

“You know Selma too?” I asked.

“I think I need to tell you more about that story I was talking about.”

An hour and a Jell-O pudding parfait later in the hospital cafeteria, I had heard Heidi Hatmaker’s story. Percy’s notes. The statistics. Officers Powell and Foster. The theory. Heidi’s conversation with Selma in the Kennedy School parking lot just hours before the shooting. And, most importantly, the article taped to Heidi’s front door that morning.

“Can you think of anyone—
anyone
—who might have left that article for you, just to make sure you saw it?” I asked. “Someone at the paper who knew you were talking to Selma about the story?”

“No. I didn’t even know I would talk to Selma about the story until I went to the meeting yesterday. And as it turns out, she didn’t know anything.”

“You hadn’t met Selma at all before yesterday?”

“Met her? No. I called her once—”

“About the story?”

Heidi shook her head. “After you guys searched Percy’s office, Selma contacted the paper trying to get Percy’s belongings for the family. I packed them up and then called her.”

“And who knew about that?”

“Only the facilities manager. I think this has something to do with my talking to her yesterday about Percy’s story. I saw that patrol car swing around twice in—literally—like three minutes. Then, just like that, Selma and Janelle get shot, and someone wants to make sure I know about it.”

In a moment of frankness, Percy had told his parents that someone was following him. In hindsight, I should have taken the comment more seriously.

“Did you talk to Janelle about the story too?”

“No, just Selma.”

“Let’s try to find out what else Selma knows.”

The patient was awake by the time we walked back to her room. “Well, look at the two of you,” Selma said, brightening slightly with the addition of two new people to her get-well entourage. “How did I get so lucky to have all these visitors?”

She was doing her best to appear perky, but her friend’s death hung heavily over the room. Heidi and I smiled uncomfortably at the sea of faces staring at us through the doorway, wondering who the hell we were and why we were visiting their beloved survivor.

“We both heard what happened last night and just wanted to wish you well and tell you we’re so sorry about Janelle.”

“Sweet, sweet Janelle. Only one shot hit me and, wouldn’t you know it, my big old thigh came in handy for once. Poor little Janelle wasn’t so lucky.”

“Yes, well, I’m sorry for your loss. For all of you,” I said, nodding to the others in the room. “I know it’s not the best time, but when you’ve got a chance, Selma, I do want to ask you a few questions.” She knew I was from the DA’s office. I wouldn’t have to be any more specific for her to infer my questions were investigative.

Within a few minutes, Selma had emptied out her hospital room, explaining she was tired but just fine. Once we were alone, I told her that someone had left a copy of the newspaper article about the shooting on Heidi’s front door.

“Well, what in the world could that be about? Maybe one of your reporter friends making sure you saw the article?” she asked.

Heidi shook her head. “No one at the paper knows I talked to you yesterday.”

“After you saw Heidi, did you talk to anyone about what she told you? About the story Percy had been working on?”

Selma didn’t hesitate. “I talk to everyone about everything all the time. Heidi told me Percy was working on something having to do with Buckeye, so I called around when I got home to see if anyone knew those police officers she brought up. What were their names?”

“Jamie Powell and Curt Foster,” Heidi reminder her.

“Those are the ones. Funny how I knew those names yesterday right after we talked. Can’t remember either one of them today. But I didn’t find anything out for you. The downside of our little group is we tend to be pretty law-abiding. We see the community policing officers, and that’s about it.”

“Who did you talk to about them?” I asked.

“Just the group. You met a couple of them—Janelle, of course, and Reverend Byron. I called a couple more, but then, of course, they may have talked to people beyond that. We’re grassroots that way.”

I looked at Heidi. What was she thinking, disclosing the specific targets of her story with someone like Selma, plugged into the neighborhood network like an overloaded power strip?

“Why was Janelle over?”

“Oh, she was always just so intrigued by anything having to do with the neighborhood and the police. After I called her, she wanted to know if anyone else had heard anything, what Heidi was working on—just gossip, really.”

“And Percy never mentioned anything at all to you about this story?” I asked.

“Like I told Heidi the other day, Percy would talk to us about our problems and show us his stories when they were done, but we never really knew exactly what he was up to until we saw it right there in black-and-white. Why are you asking me all this?”

“Just trying to make sure it doesn’t have anything to do with what happened last night,” I explained.

“The police sent someone from a special gang team to see me. They thought maybe all my days of chasing people off the stoop might have finally caught up with me. I hope that wasn’t it. God help me if I did something to hurt Janelle.”

Heidi and I exchanged a look across Selma’s bed. No, this definitely had something to do with Percy’s story.

I stepped into the lobby and used my cell phone to call Jessica again.

“My God, Kincaid. If you haven’t noticed, I’m trying to enjoy my last few weekends of childless freedom here.”

“Well, how about I help you out a little? Do you mind if I take the Buckeye shooting from you?”

“Let’s see…do I mind if you do my work for me? Am I missing something?”

“I don’t think it’s a gang case.” I told her about Heidi’s theory of a conspiracy between Northeast Portland drug dealers and officers at the precinct. “Do you know anything about Jamie Powell or Curt Foster? Percy had their names down in his notes.”

“Vaguely, but just as the initial responders to some gang cases. From there the detectives take over. You don’t know them from DVD?”

“The names sound vaguely familiar, but nothing stands out. Anyway, the reporter talked to Selma about the story, mentioned Powell and Foster, and then Selma made a bunch of phone calls asking around about them, including one to Janelle Rogers. A few hours later, her house gets shot up, and Janelle’s dead.”

“Oh, come on, you think a cop would shoot some old women for poking around?”

“Maybe, or a freaked-out dealer. Maybe they meant to miss; I don’t know.”

“Or your Percy Crenshaw story could be totally unrelated. From what my detectives told me, there are some people in the ’hood who wouldn’t mind losing the assistance of people like Ms. Gooding.”

“I haven’t mentioned the best part.” I told her about the newspaper article on Heidi’s door.

“OK, now that
is
a little weird.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You really don’t mind taking the case?”

“It makes sense that I should.” Briefly, I told her about the disintegration of my case against Corbett and Hanks. “MCT’s going to have to look at Percy’s murder again anyway, and this could be part of the big picture.” Lisa Lopez had suggested Matt York as a suspect because he had motive, access to Hanks’s Jeep in the impound lot, and the kind of knowledge suggested by an evidence-laden bat planted in a suspect’s neighborhood. The same could be said of Powell and Foster.

“Fine with me,” Jessica said. “I’m warning you, though. We haven’t found a single witness yet. It’s starting to look like just another Buckeye misdemeanor.”

I had heard the term before around the Gang Unit. When one gangbanger shoots another, the only witnesses tend to be still other gangbangers who have their own ideas about the right way to identify and punish wrongdoers. As a result, deputies in the Gang Unit get used to pleading out their cases, big-time.

“Hopefully, if I follow the trail on Percy’s story, we’ll find our shooter.”

“And maybe Percy’s killer. You’ll leave a message for the boss?”

“No problem.”

I called Duncan’s frequently checked voice mail immediately to make sure I didn’t forget. Only the unit supervisors are entrusted with Duncan’s pager number, and they know better than to use it except for a catastrophic emergency.

My next call was a little tougher. As I dialed the home number for the Yorks, I wondered if there was a tactful way to question a woman whose marriage was falling apart and whose husband had been treated as a possible murder suspect. Just my luck; the betrayed husband answered.

“Matt? It’s Samantha Kincaid.” I felt like I had to say something before asking for Alison. “I can’t imagine what the last week has been like for you. I hope you understand—”

“Jealous husband’s always a possibility,” he observed bluntly.

“Well, never a real possibility in this case.” I was struggling for some other consolation, but Matt apparently didn’t want to hear it.

“What’s up, Sam?”

“I was actually calling for Alison.”

“May I ask what it’s about?”

“Something has come up on the case. I wanted to see if she might know anything about it. You know, from talking to Percy.” Yikes, this was worse than I imagined.

“I see. Um, I guess it’s up to her.” He must have hit the mute button. A full minute went by before Alison picked up.

“Hello?”

“Hey. Matt told you why I was calling?”

“Sort of.”

“I’m tracking down a story Percy was working on. Did Percy ever say anything to you about suspecting police officers of being involved in drug traffic?”

“No. Doesn’t sound familiar.”

“He never mentioned it to you?”

“No. It wasn’t that kind of a thing. Not a lot of talking, you know?”