Powers of Arrest (17 page)

Chapter Twenty-eight

The bad thing about stakeouts in Indian Hill was that the wealthy enclave was built for privacy, with winding streets, cul-de-sacs and plenty of trees. The good thing about Kenneth Buchanan’s manse was its proximity to Indian Hill Middle School. Nobody could come or go from the dead-end street without passing the school. Will pulled into the parking lot and shut down the car, preparing himself for the dullest part of the job. In any event, he wasn’t going to sit and wait for the killer. He was going after him. Only Dodds knew he was here. Now, if only Buchanan was home, and if only nothing major happened that required the PIO. So far, the radio was quiet.

It was difficult to think of much beyond Cheryl Beth. He was worried about her going to Dayton for the dead girl’s funeral. Mostly, he kept reprising their night together. He had gotten and maintained an erection, no small accomplishment. That he had even kissed, much less made love with this woman seemed like an impossible fantasy. Yet it was real, and he had slept last night without dreaming. Now, he missed her intensely.

The dark Mercedes hurried past, going south, Buchanan’s distinctive head clearly visible.

“That didn’t take long.” He started the Crown Vic and sped out of the parking lot.

Buchanan turned onto Shawnee Run Road and Will gave him a quarter-mile distance as they passed more expensive real estate and made the green light at Miami Road. A car from St. Gertrude’s Church pulled between them. That was good, especially when the driver matched Buchanan’s speed. The three vehicles continued west to Camargo Road. Buchanan barely stopped and turned south again. Will did the same. Camargo cut through hills and thick trees. Traffic was light and Will gave him plenty of distance. A right on Madison and they were headed toward the city. Big cotton-ball clouds were floating in the sky.

“7140, check in.”

If it would have been anyone’s voice but Dodds’, his gut would have tightened.

“7140, all secure.”

Two clicks of the mic responded. Anybody listening thought Will was still at home.

By this time, they were crossing Red Bank Expressway and almost to the point where Madison juked southwest. Buchanan could have taken Red Bank north to hit the interstate. He didn’t. He was definitely headed into the city. Traffic was getting thicker and Will worked to close the gap, letting two cars stay between him and the Mercedes, but sticking close enough that he wouldn’t get caught at a light. As it was, they moved at a unit, making and stopping at the same intersections. As they passed through Oakley, Will thought of ice cream with Cheryl Beth. That hadn’t even been a week ago.

They stayed on Madison past the Rookwood shopping center, which was packed, past the edge of Hyde Park and the Cincinnati Country Club and the old mansions of Annwood Park and Scarborough Woods. The street changed as they approached the imposing St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church and touched East Walnut Hills. The traffic became thicker still, and Will had to gun it to make the light at Woodburn. Madison became Dr. Martin Luther King Drive and Buchanan turned south again on Gilbert, for the long dip into downtown past old factories that had been turned into offices. Buchanan was driving into his own downtown office on a Saturday. Oh, how Will wished he were going to the marina to get on his boat.

But he did neither. He crossed over Interstate 71, got on Reading Road, and then turned again on Liberty Street. The steeples, spires and towers of the old city spread out ahead. It was as if he were driving to Will’s house. Will was about to alert Dodds when Buchanan sped past the familiar turnoff and kept going. They were in the heart of the city now. People were on the sidewalks. It occurred to Will that all this time he had been following Buchanan, he had never checked to see if someone was following him. The rearview mirror looked benign, but would he really know?

They drove straight through Over-the-Rhine doing fifty, making every light. Buchanan slowed at Linn Street and turned left, barely missing a pedestrian. Will was right behind him. It couldn’t be helped if he was going to make the light. Now he backed off and gave the Mercedes plenty of room. Only an unmarked police car in the West End, where the old housing projects once stood—nothing suspicious, Mr. Buchanan, drive on. Enjoy the majestic half rotunda of Union Terminal off to your right. They were not far from the Laurel Homes, now demolished, where Will’s father had been gunned down on a domestic abuse call. It was a reality never far from his mind.

After several blocks more, Linn lifted up over the massive gash of Interstate 75. Buchanan turned west again on Eighth Street and they plunged into the warehouse district and under the railroad tracks. The main police channels remained on routine business.

Now Will was growing curious. Despite what many east-siders thought, there were some lovely neighborhoods west of I-75, the Sauerkraut Curtain—although old-timers applied that term to Vine Street—but Buchanan was not driving into one. When the sunlight found them again on the other side of the railroad underpass, they were in Lower Price Hill. He could keep going and follow Glenway’s rightward arch around the tree-covered bluff ahead of them and keep going uphill. But he was slowing down.

They weren’t on a hill. The real Price Hill was directly ahead, and it, too, had once been connected with an incline railway, but Will couldn’t say exactly where. Lower Price Hill was in the basin above a broad swoop of the Ohio River, and although the city had designated it a historic district that couldn’t make up for the blight and crime. He had been on a shooting call here a week ago Wednesday, on Neave Street. Many of the rowhouses held the classic Italianate features found in Over-the-Rhine, but few people were trying to gentrify the properties. Vacant lots and junk cars proliferated. It was slowly falling apart.

If Kenneth Buchanan “spoke Cincinnati,” he would know that he was among the briars, the local term for poor Appalachian whites. This had long been a closed, clannish part of town. Once the briars had migrated down the river, then on the railroads, finding decent jobs in the factories around the rail yards of Mill Creek. It was their way out of the coalmines. Now most of those manufacturing jobs were gone. The factories were being gutted, their scrap sold to China. Some of the junkyards were in this neighborhood. Poverty was high. The place was also growing more African-American, and that made for racially charged confrontations. Like most of the older, poorer parts of the city, it was losing population.

And here was Kenneth Buchanan, white-shoe downtown lawyer.

He turned down two-lane State Avenue, going twenty-five. Will waited for the red light and sat, watching him slow. Then a truck passed, obscuring the view, and when it was gone so was Buchanan’s Mercedes.

Will turned left and cruised slowly down the street. Some large old multi-story brick apartments were on the left, and a few forlorn rowhouses stood on the right.

“Hello,” he said to himself.

Buchanan had parked in an empty lot next to a two-story brick rowhouse that had lost both its siblings. The front windows were boarded up with old wood and the paintless door looked barely on its hinges. Buchanan’s car was empty. Will picked up speed, went to the next intersection, turned around, and found a place behind a rusty pickup truck. He called Dodds.

“Guess where I am?”

“Hope it’s more interesting than my life, sitting outside a cop’s house.”

“Lower Price Hill. Buchanan drove over here. He parked and went inside a house.”

“No shit?” Dodds thought about it. “Maybe he’s a secret meth head.”

“Maybe.” Will watched a young man with mussed light-brown hair, hard-muscled in a wife-beater shirt, walk past giving him the eye. He ignored him. “It’s about the last place I’d expect him. You see anything around my place?”

“Nope,” Dodds said. “I’m encouraging my hemorrhoids.”

Will made a note of the address and waited. It took nearly half an hour before Buchanan stepped down on the crumbling sidewalk and walked purposefully to his car. He was wearing a light-blue shirt, tan slacks, and expensive tasseled shoes. His face was set in a hard look, and he didn’t even turn his head in Will’s direction. Then the expensive car’s backup lights flared and it was on the street. Will decided to stay.

***

It was another half hour before Will saw movement at the door. First a bicycle tire, then the whole bike being pushed by a woman. She wore blue jeans and a Bengals T-shirt, but what you first noticed was her hair, vivid red and flowing down over her shoulders. She swung a leg over the bicycle seat and pedaled north. Will let her go for a moment, then started the car and followed slowly. Her hair caught the sun and wind, making a lovely orange sail.

“7140, 7140.”

He muttered a profanity and picked up the mic.

The dispatcher came back: “Meet the officers, signal nine, Queensgate Playfield. We have a sixteen at large. Respond Code three.”

“7140 responding.”

It was a shooting with a suspect at large. He gripped the steering wheel tighter but stayed on the girl.

She stopped at Meisner’s market and went inside, bike and all. Will parked in front.

No more than two minutes later, she came back out, stuffing a red-and-white carton of Marlboroughs in her purse. She started to swing over the bike, when he tapped the horn. She looked him over and ignored him. He hit the emergency lights and she paid attention.

He flashed his badge when she came to the driver’s side. “Climb in.”

“What about my bike?”

“Lean it against the front of the car where we can watch it.” For all he knew, it was one of the few things she owned in the world. As she did so, he tossed his cane in the back seat.

Once she was in the car, he could see her more clearly. She was younger than he had first assumed, and her fiery hair framed a lovely face, the home to startlingly blue eyes. Her features were uniformly delicate and her skin was as flawless as Kristen Gruber’s. Put her in different circumstances on the east side and she would have worlds offered to her.

“I didn’t do anything.”

“I didn’t say you did,” Will said. Time was running against him, even if the call location was close. If Fassbinder knew what he was really doing, all his dreams of revenge could be quickly visited on Will’s head. He kept the agitation out of his voice. “You had a visitor a few minutes ago, well-dressed man, middle-aged.”

“So?”

“So, are you a pro?”

“No! I don’t turn tricks, don’t do drugs.” She pointed out the window at a passing man. “Why don’t you people do something about the niggers overrunning our neighborhood, instead of hassling me?”

East side, west side, race was never far below the surface in Cincinnati.

“What’s your name?”

“Jill.”

He asked her to show him her driver’s license and wrote down the information: Jill Evangeline Bailey and the addressed matched the shabby place she had come from. She was nineteen.

“You ever been in trouble, Jill?”

“No.”

“Not even a DUI?”

She shook her head.

“You have a job?”

“I’m a waitress at Tucker’s. I ride the bus.”

“So how do you know Kenneth Buchanan?”

She hesitated and ran her hands though her hair.

“Is that his name?”

“That’s his name and you didn’t answer my question. This is a homicide investigation.”

Her small frame went rigid. “I don’t know anything about any homicide.” Her voice became small and trailed off into silence. Finally, “He gave me some money.”

Will waited a few beats. “Why would he do that?”

“I didn’t do anything!” The blue eyes filled with tears. “I was raped last fall by one of these niggers and you people didn’t do anything about it. He dragged me right behind that church one night and raped me three damned times. Right there behind a house of God. This used to be a safe neighborhood. Now the white people can’t even go out at night. You people never caught him. You never even tried…”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t think I wouldn’t be gone from this shithole in a heartbeat, but after my momma died that house is all I have. I don’t even have a car.”

“Now you have some money from Mister Buchanan.”

She stared out the window.

“He wants me to get an abortion.”

“How many months along are you?” She wasn’t showing.

“Six weeks.”

“And it’s his baby?”

Again, her silence, and the clock tormenting him. He had to be an asshole cop. “Jill! Talk to me, right here, right now, or downtown and as long as it takes. I don’t care. You’ll only mean more overtime pay for me. Maybe your bike will be here when we get back, probably not. I guarantee you one thing: we’ll take as much time as we need to find out why you were screwing a big-time lawyer.”

“It’s his son, okay? His son and I had sex. One time. I got pregnant. How insane is that? One time and I’m pregnant. Now he wants me to go away.”

If it was the same son, Will thought of the foul-mouthed young man in the ball cap he had encountered at Music Hall.

“You didn’t ask for money?”

“No! I want to have this baby!” she yelled. “I won’t kill it.”

“Sounds like a case of blackmail to me. That’s against the law. You won’t look so pretty after ten years in prison, Jill.”

“His dad gave the money to me! I didn’t ask for anything! I didn’t want anything. I’m sorry I ever told Mike I was pregnant. After he found out, he never took my calls again. Then I started getting calls from his father. He threatened to sue me and take my house. He said I’d taken advantage of his son. As if! I was afraid.”

Yes, he was an asshole cop. He had never seen a human being look more helpless. And here was Kenneth Buchanan cleaning up his son’s casual disaster. He thought about John and his own cleaning up, the knife that he had stashed in his dresser drawer.

“How much did he pay you?”

She stared into her small lap. “Ten thousand dollars.”

He let her get the bike and ride off, then lit up his unmarked cruiser, turned east on Eighth, and accelerated to sixty, the big twin-turbocharged Interceptor engine sounding like a fighter jet closing in on its target.