Close Case (31 page)

“What about Selma Gooding and Janelle Rogers?”

His body slumped as he exhaled, realizing we had tied in the Buckeye shooting.

“The clock’s ticking,” Carson prompted.

Powell looked to his delegate, who said nothing. We clearly had the power here. “On that one, I think Andre at least knows who did it. Foster saw that new female reporter talking to Selma on Saturday and told Andre about it. When the call came in about the drive-by, Foster called Andre, pissed off. Andre blamed it on some kid getting crazy, trying to gain favor with him. He said he was
going to take care of it,
in his words. Foster told him not to do anything stupid, but everything was obviously getting out of control.”

Just like Foster and Powell had convinced themselves they were just a little bit corrupt, Andre Brouse had probably allowed them to live that illusion, letting them in on the drug operation but leaving them out of the messy details.

“When do you wear the wire?” I asked. He didn’t respond to the question. “Do we need to talk to Foster or not?”

Powell had seen perps in a similar position and knew he had no choice. If he didn’t take the deal, Foster would. “I’m supposed to meet Brouse at the club at the start of shift. Four o’clock.”

Forty-five minutes. “Can we get him wired by then?” I asked Carson.

“We can do it right now.”

“Let’s do it,” Powell said. “Can I call my wife? Get her to take the kids to her mother’s?”

Alan nodded. “I’ll send an escort with them if you want.”

“Brouse doesn’t check you?” I asked.

“Not for a couple of years.”

Carson assured me that would be the case. “Are you kidding?” he said. “No one’s more trustworthy to a guy like Brouse than a guy like Powell. A dirty cop’s got more to lose.”

I checked for messages back at the office while Carson and a technician wired Powell for sound. With Frist out and me away for more than four hours, the unit could be falling apart. And maybe Chuck had called.

Only one new message. “Hi, this is Marcy Wellington. My husband—or I guess soon-to-be ex-husband—is Peter Anderson? A witness for you on the Percy Crenshaw case? Anyway, we’ve been having some problems, and”—I heard her sniffle into the phone—“anyway, I need to talk to someone. Can you please call me back?”

I’d heard plenty of complaints from DV deputies about these kinds of calls—domestic violence victims turning futilely to prosecutors to understand the confusing combination of fear, anger, betrayal, and sadness that came with being hit by someone you still loved.

I started to save the message for later, then stopped. Janelle Rogers had been killed the day after I blew off a request for help from Heidi Hatmaker. Shit. For all I knew, Anderson could be threatening his wife and claiming he’d get away with it because he knew a DA. I didn’t want to read about Marcy Wellington’s murder in the paper tomorrow morning, knowing I could’ve stopped it. I scribbled Marcy’s number on a legal pad.

“How are we looking?” I asked Carson.

“Just a minute. He’s putting on his uniform.”

I called the bureau switchboard and asked to be connected to the Domestic Violence Unit. The unit’s assistant told me no one was in; she’d have an officer call me back later. I explained I was out of the office and left my pager number.

“We’re about ready,” Tommy said.

As we were getting ready to walk out, Powell said, “What about my gun?”

“We can’t let you have that,” Carson explained. Powell’s union rep protested, but Carson held strong. “As far as we’re concerned, he’s not even a cop anymore.”

Powell spoke up for himself. “I can’t go in on duty, in uniform, without my gun. He’ll know immediately.”

Carson and I exchanged glances. We’d been moving so quickly we hadn’t thought all the details through. “Then we take the bullets out,” I said.

“No way,” the union rep said. “You can’t send him into a club full of gangbangers, with them thinking he’s armed, when he’s not.”

“And we can’t let him have a loaded gun,” Carson said.

The union rep started to ask for time to consult with Powell privately, but Powell waved him off. “That’s a deal killer,” he said. “My kids are better off with me on trial than me dead.”

For a guy who’d blown it all, today Jamie Powell had shown good judgment. When it came to cutting the deal, he needed us more than we needed him. But we needed him enough, and were moving quickly enough, to grant him this one. Carson made the call, and I approved it. We were ready to go.

Tailing Jamie Powell’s patrol vehicle to the club in a unmarked van with Tommy Garcia, Alan Carson, and the technician, I still hadn’t heard anything from the DV unit. Whether it was the adrenaline from what was about to happen, my anal-retentive desire to square away the loose end of Marcy Wellington’s phone call, or simply an excuse, I used Tommy’s cell to call Chuck.

“Hey, I can’t really talk right now.”

“Neither can I.”

Tommy Garcia was sitting next to me, and I had approximately three minutes before Powell walked into Jay-J’s. I wasn’t calling about our relationship.

I walked him through the situation with Marcy Wellington. “I tried calling DV, but they’re not getting back to me. Can you call them for me? Just stay on them until they go out there.”

“Sure. Are you all right? You sound frantic.”

Now wasn’t the time. “It’s that thing I was working on yesterday. A lot has happened today, though. We should talk.”

“Yeah, OK,” he said, sounding rushed. “Can I call you later?”

Music to my ears. “Yeah, or just come home.”

“I’ll call you.”

So much for the music. “Um, OK. You’ll probably get voice mail, but I’ve been checking them all day. Someone stole my purse last night, so I don’t have my cell—”

“Last night? Someone broke into the house?”

“No, my car. And then no one from fucking Northeast Precinct would come to the house to take a report. They said it was policy, but I got the whole cold-shoulder gist, if that’s what they were aiming for.”

Chuck was clearly annoyed at the police response—or lack thereof—and, for once, I actually appreciated his protectiveness.

Unfortunately, his irritation wasn’t limited to the precinct. “Why didn’t you call me? Were you trying to make me feel even worse about leaving?”

“How did I do anything to make you feel bad?” In the driver’s seat, Tommy looked out his window when we stopped at a light. “Look, I’m in the middle of a million things right now. Can you please just call DV for me? I don’t have anyone else to call.” My voice broke slightly as I realized the truth carried in that single sentence.

“Yeah, fine. I’ll talk to you later.”

He hung up just as Powell’s patrol car pulled into the Jay-J’s parking lot.

“Here we go,” Garcia said, cutting the engine.

As planned, we monitored electronically from the parking lot of an Italian restaurant across the street from the club. In the back of the van, Carson and the technician hit a button to feed Powell’s audio to our speaker.

“Getting out now,” Powell said, just as his car door opened. We were clear.

We watched him enter Jay-J’s, and soon the van was filled with the thumping beat of a rap artist who’d survived multiple gunshots to the face. “At four in the afternoon?” I asked.

“Consider that Muzak, Kincaid,” Tommy said. “Twelve hours from now, you can’t hear yourself think in that place.”

The sound of the bass line dulled as we heard a door shut. Powell had walked into the back office. According to Powell, he had demanded this meeting with Brouse last week. With Percy’s prying and then his murder, it was all becoming too much for him. Powell’s plan, if you believed what he said, was to pull out, to tell Andre he was going to do his job right from now on. As we listened, what he did instead—and what I suspected he planned to do all along—was demand additional money. He wouldn’t get to keep the cash, but we’d get the corroboration we needed to nail Brouse.

“I’m paying y’all enough.” It was Andre. “Shit, dealing with the po-po’s worse than the mob. That’s what it is. You’re shaking me down for security money.”

“Well, for the kind of security you’re getting, it’s not enough. We go out of our way to take the calls about your guys on the corners, then they get to walk away.”

Andre laughed. “You know what’s cracking me up? You really are acting like this is a bunch of mafia shit. Foster, now, he’s easy—he could be any one of them, so let’s make him Michael Corleone, how about? Now you? You’d have to be Tom Hagen with that light hair of yours. Before Bobby D went bald, obviously. But now here’s the funny part: Don’t no one in those movies look like me. You know what I’m saying?”

It really was true. All men loved
The Godfather
.

“Don’t give me that movie bullshit, Andre. You’re getting a piece of every rock that’s sold in this city—”

“Not
every
rock—” Andre interrupted.

“Well, pretty fucking close. And now you’ve dragged me into something I never signed on for. People are getting hurt—”

“You rather they figured out the shit you’ve been doing?”

“We never talked about witnesses getting killed.”

“Now if that ain’t some hypocritical shit, I don’t know what the fuck is. If you want to talk about fucked up—”

“Shooting an old lady’s fucked up.”

“And I told Foster I’d take care of it. You think I want some dumb-ass kid popping ladies from the neighborhood? Talk to your boy—”

“You know you wouldn’t have this club and all the other shit you have if we hadn’t been watching your back.”

“You’re less valuable than you think,” Andre said.

“Who else is going to do this crap for you?”

They went back and forth like that, arguing about whether Powell had been paid fairly. Tommy even managed to find some humor in the situation. “Sounds like every workplace in America.”

What happened next was over so fast, it took the many replays of the audio later to help me understand what we had heard.

“Stop!” It was Powell’s voice, and it was panicked. “Don’t do it! Don’t!”

Two distinct pops followed. Before I could even process what was happening, the other occupants of the van reacted on pure police instinct. Tommy Garcia and Alan Carson jumped from the back doors, drawing their weapons and yelling commands into the radios on their chests. Backup teams in two separate cars on the street poured out as well, descending on Jay-J’s. Just a few minutes later, Tommy Garcia radioed the audio technician to give the clear.

In retrospect, we were lucky. Only a few employees were in the bar with Brouse. Two of the men were armed, but the stereo’s pounding rhythms had drowned out the sound of Powell’s shots. The scene was secured without incident.

That would have been little consolation to Andre Brouse, who was declared DOA. Two bullets—one in the head, one in the chest.

We followed the protocol for an officer-involved shooting. Powell was transported to the precinct with his union rep. He told us that he fired when Andre reached for a gun in his top drawer. He said he intended to keep his end of our deal, but he wouldn’t be discussing the incident further until he spoke with an attorney. We found a Glock in the open desk drawer, but we also knew the discovery would never be enough to resolve what happened in that office. Powell had been around Brouse enough to know where he kept his gun.

When the crime scene was secured and the evidence-gathering process under way, I took a breather to call Duncan, who at least appeared to be understanding. “We’re just the lawyers,” he said. “This was a decision about the implementation of an undercover operation, and the bureau made a reasonable call. We’ve got enough to show the guy was dirty, right?” I accepted his support with one eye open, realizing that if the debacle came with political damage, he’d sacrifice Carson and Garcia in a heartbeat—then me, if necessary.

He did explain that he was going to send Jessica Walters to handle the shooting, since I was technically a witness. I tried to argue, emphasizing the entanglement of the shooting with the Crenshaw investigation.

“And if Walters comes across anything on Crenshaw, I’m sure she’ll fill you in. What I need right now is a deputy who’s going to deal with the immediate issue—a cop shot a suspect—and you’re not going to be that lawyer. Consider it a lucky break. After the day you’ve had, I’d think you’d be grateful for the rest.”

I should have been, of course, but I wasn’t. As much as I usually hate a sports analogy, when Jessica showed up, I felt like a pitcher getting pulled in the middle of an important game. I didn’t care if it was a morass of confusion. It was my morass, and I wanted to be in the middle of it.

Jessica finally gave me a choice: I could leave on my own, or she would have me forcibly evicted. I didn’t think she’d actually go through with it, but I got the point. “Can I take a copy of the tape with me?” I asked, as a final negotiating point.

“Jesus, Kincaid, why the hell do you want to do that to yourself?”

Because I feel guilty,
I thought.
Because I sat in a van and listened while the person who could have answered all my questions was killed, possibly executed. Because if I listen to the tape, I might be able to convince myself there was nothing else I could do.

“I should add it to my Crenshaw file,” I said, “just in case.”

“Yeah, whatever. Have the tech dupe it for you, then get the hell out of here.”

A patrol officer gave me a ride home as instructed, speaking not a single word once he had my address. As we turned onto my block, I eyed the street eagerly, hoping to spot Chuck’s car. My disappointment was complete when the officer pulled into my driveway. Nothing other than my Jetta, the tarp I’d used to cover the window loose now, blowing in the wind.

In one tiny bow to normalcy, Vinnie was eagerly waiting for me when I opened the door. I scooped him up and cuddled him on my way to the kitchen. My message light was blinking.

Well, good evening, Samantha Kincaid. Or I guess it’s afternoon out there in Oregon. Ed Devlin here, NYPD. It wasn’t easy, but I did finally find a friend of mine who’s a friend of Patrick Gallagher.
Gallagher was the IA officer who’d vouched for Mike when PPB hired him.
I couldn’t get the full story, but apparently a couple of officers thumped up a suspect pretty good. Everyone was supposed to give the same story—you know how it goes—but Calabrese went his own way. He told it like it was and—well, it didn’t go over so good. The bureau transferred him around a couple times, but a story like that follows a guy. He wanted out, and I guess Gallagher helped him. Give me a call if you need more. Hell, you’re a beautiful young lady. Give an old guy a break and call me anyway.

As the machine moved on to the next message, I smiled, thinking back to the many times Ed had encouraged me to dump my then-husband and run away with him instead.

Hey, it’s me.
I noticed the absence of Chuck’s usual
hey, babe
at the start of the message.
I can’t get anyone in DV either, so I finally called this Marcy Wellington chick myself. She was freaking out, so I’ll head over myself to take a report. I’ll call you when I’m done. You owe me one.

I tried to keep occupied with TV, but my mind kept returning to the scene in the van. Tommy Garcia, making a joke about the banter between Andre and Powell. Then panic in Powell’s voice. Two shots. The van doors spilling open. It was so damn fast.

I retrieved my Walkman from my gym bag and inserted the tape of the shooting. I hit
STOP
and
REWIND
over and over again, trying to calculate the time that passed between the argument about money and the end of Andre Brouse’s life. Somewhere between two or three seconds, by my watch. Not enough to stop Powell. Not even enough for Andre Brouse to speak.

The tape did at least corroborate the evidence we’d gotten from Powell and the Yorks. Jay-J’s would most likely be seized by the state in a drug forfeiture action. Hopefully, Jessica would find evidence identifying Brouse’s source and key distributors.

Still, I kept fiddling with the buttons of the tape player, searching for some clue about the murders of Percy Crenshaw and Janelle Rogers.

“We never talked about witnesses getting killed,” Powell had said.
Now if that ain’t some hypocritical shit, I don’t know what the fuck is. If you want to talk about fucked up—
“Shooting an old lady’s fucked up,” Powell interrupted.
And I told Foster I’d take care of it. You think I want some dumb-ass kid popping ladies from the neighborhood? Talk to your boy—

I listened to Brouse’s words again and again, knowing I was missing something. Snippets of the tape started to come together.
Now if that ain’t some hypocritical shit…talk about fucked up…talk to your boy—

I had figured out what was bothering me. Brouse had something on Powell, or at least on someone close to him. Powell was supposed to cajole Brouse into talking about Percy and the drive-by at Selma’s, but Brouse kept turning the tables on him. And each time, Powell had interrupted. There was only one explanation: Brouse was mad at Powell’s
boy
for something serious, and Powell didn’t want us to know about it.

I plucked off my headphones.
Talk to your boy. Talk to your boy.
Why did that seem so familiar? I was close to making sense of Brouse’s words. Something about the sentence echoing in my head would pull the pieces together.

Then it came to me: Mike’s hostile reaction when we had first talked about the Hamilton shooting.
Your buddy Frist’s looking to shine by going after our boy Hamilton.
Geoff Hamilton worked out of Northeast Precinct with Powell and Foster.

I logged on to the District Attorney data system from my computer, pulled up the Hamilton case, and dialed the phone number for Marla Mavens, Delores Tompkins’s mother. She assumed I was calling to see how she was faring in the aftermath of the grand jury’s decision, but I got straight to the point.

“You mentioned during the grand jury that Delores had been dating a man who was involved with drugs.”

“Well, she didn’t know that at first. And, like I said, she was trying to get a fresh start.”

“I remember. She had the new home improvement job and something she was working on that made her feel special.” Marla clearly found comfort in the fact that her daughter seemed finally to find the right track before her death.

“That’s right,” she said proudly.

“Do you remember the name of the boyfriend?”

“Oh, shoot. I should, but—”

“Was it Andre Brouse?” I prompted.

“Yes, that was it. She called him Dre sometimes for short.”

“Did she know a man named Percy Crenshaw?”

“The reporter?”

“That’s the one. Did your daughter know him? The special thing she was doing—could she have been helping Percy with a story?”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. I didn’t keep track of all her friends, but she never mentioned him. Does this have anything to do with the grand jury?”

I knew in my gut that I was right about this. I just needed to prove the connection. “No, I’m sorry,” I said, not wanting to get her hopes up about reopening the case. “I’m just tying up some loose ends before I can put the file away.”

“I guess you could say I’ve been doing the same thing,” she said.

“Would you mind if I asked what phone numbers someone might have used if they were talking to your daughter?”

“Not at all. I still remember them. Probably always will, I suspect.” She rattled off the digits for Delores’s home and cell phones, and I jotted them down on a legal pad from my briefcase.

My next call was to Heidi Hatmaker.

“How have you been holding up?” I asked when she answered her cell. We hadn’t spoken since she left the precinct the day before.

“Honestly? I lasted about five minutes in my apartment by myself before I packed a bag. I went on a date, haven’t been home since, and couldn’t feel any safer.” I heard a man say something in the background, and Heidi shushed him. “What have I missed?”

Where could I even begin? I told her briefly that we’d flipped Powell and about the shooting at Jay-J’s. “And you didn’t call me?” she protested. “You swore you weren’t going to leave me out of the story.”

“And I didn’t. Only the sanitized version gets released today: An officer returned fire when a suspect reached for a weapon. We’re still putting the rest of it together. On that note, do you happen to have Percy’s cell phone records?” The ones we seized were in the police evidence room.

“Are you kidding? After this weekend, I wasn’t about to leave anything having to do with Percy in my unoccupied apartment.”

I thought about asking her to check for Delores’s numbers, but I wasn’t ready to give Heidi all of the pieces to the puzzle yet. Not before I’d put them together. “Do you mind if I come by and get them?”