Sam Kincaid 01 - The Commission (16 page)

Chapter Thirty-six

I turned to the task of identifying current inmates who might have been responsible for creating the forged suicide note. So far, nobody had come forward seeking protection, although the likelihood of that happening was always a long shot.

Using the Department’s automated offender database, I searched for inmates currently serving sentences on forgery charges or with prior felony convictions for forgery. I ended up with a sizable group of one hundred eighty inmates. Knowing that it would be extremely time-consuming to interview all of them, I narrowed the search by removing those not currently serving sentences for forgery. That reduced the size of the list by more than half. I then scanned the remaining prisoners, focusing on prior criminal history. I was searching for inmates who appeared to be skilled forgers and those for whom forgery was their primary criminal occupation. This allowed me to further narrow the list so we could begin by interviewing the most promising suspects.

The task looked daunting. It was conceivable that we might have to interview all of them. If that were the case, I’d have to call in reinforcements. At least by starting with the most likely candidates, we might get lucky.

Patti informed me that Kate had just cleared security and was on her way to my office. I used the brief interlude and called Aunt June to explain that I wouldn’t be home in time for dinner. I talked briefly with Sara, and told her that reading a bedtime story would have to wait until another evening. She wasn’t happy. I glanced up just as Kate entered my office, closing the door behind her.

She looked tired, like maybe she hadn’t slept much the night before. No surprise.

“Hi, Kate. How are you?”

“I’ve had better days. How about you?”

“Okay, I guess. Look, I know I’ve said this before, but I had no business dropping by your place unannounced yesterday.”

“No big deal. Well, on second thought, it was a big deal. But I didn’t come out here so you would have to apologize again. After you left, I leveled with Tom. I told him that our relationship had become personal and that I thought there might be some chemistry between us.”

“Ah, shit,” I said. “How’d he take it?”

“Pretty hard, I’m afraid. We agreed to break things off for a while until we both have a chance to think things over. I take full responsibility for what happened.”

“I’m sorry for the problem this has caused you and Tom, but I don’t have any regrets about what happened between us. I wanted to be there. It felt right to me. And I haven’t felt that way about anybody since my divorce. I hope I didn’t ruin it. I’d like to believe that when things finally settle down, we can see each other. I know you and Tom have issues, and I’ll stay out of the way. And God knows, in the meantime, we’ve got plenty of work to do. And speaking of work, do I have news for you.”

I filled her in on the news regarding Allred. It piqued her interest sufficiently to offer additional personnel for the surveillance. Burnham would be happy to hear this, I thought.

“Since you’re here, I might as well put you to work.” I showed her the list of forgery inmates requiring interviews. “Any ideas about how we approach the people on this list?”

She considered this. “Well, we need their cooperation, and since time is of the essence, how about using an electric cattle prod?”

I laughed. “I can see you haven’t lost your sense of humor. That approach would make you the instant poster girl for every jailhouse lawyer we have in the system, not to mention the American Civil Liberties Union. Next idea?”

“Seriously, I think we need to stress the possible danger the forger is in, and offer protection in exchange for their cooperation.”

“I think that’s the right approach, but I think we need to consider offering an additional carrot,” I said. “I’m afraid that appealing to their sense of potential danger by itself won’t provide sufficient motivation for them to cooperate. These guys live in a dangerous environment to begin with, and they’re smart enough to understand that if the word gets out that they snitched somebody off, they’re as good as dead.”

“So what do you propose?”

“I think we should offer to make a positive recommendation to the parole board—something that might shorten their prison sentence. We could also arrange a transfer out of this prison to a different facility. And what about offering immunity from prosecution?”

“I’m okay with all of it except the immunity offer. We’ll have to get the approval of the D.A.’s office on that one. I’ll speak with Tom about it.”

***

A prison inmate turned snitch almost always made a lousy witness in court. Defense attorneys love to get them on cross because it’s easy to destroy their credibility. By the time an experienced defense attorney reveals the inmate’s prior criminal record to the jury and exposes the rewards offered to secure the inmate’s testimony, the prosecution’s star witness ends up looking like a dolt. But given our present situation, right now a dolt looked pretty good.

Chapter Thirty-seven

Milo Sorensen had been working in the prison’s furniture assembly and upholstery plant for a little over a month. He worked afternoons from one to five. For the first time in a lengthy prison career, he’d finally gotten a job with decent pay and the opportunity to learn a vocational skill that might do him some good on the outside.

As the newest inmate hire, Sorensen’s lack of seniority made it his responsibility to perform routine janitorial duties at the close of each work day. He had to sweep the plant floor, empty the trash in the adjoining small office, and clean the head. Most days, Milo began the evening cleanup by four-thirty to ensure he would be finished by five o’clock or a few minutes after. On this day, he’d been so busy attaching legs to new office chairs that he hadn’t begun cleaning until almost five, when a civilian employee noticed and told him to get busy. At a few minutes past five, Sorensen was alone in the plant.

He moved methodically from task to task. First he took a broom to the plant floor. Then he emptied the trash and tidied up the small office adjacent to the production line. At first, the only sounds he heard came from the four large ceiling fans scattered around the plant and the constant drone of the old natural gas furnace. The old furnace had long since failed to provide adequate heat to an equally old building. For just an instant as he shuffled with mop in hand toward the restroom, Sorensen heard what he thought sounded like the rustle of clothing and the soft foot-fall of a tennis shoe on the concrete floor. He looked around but saw nothing.

Minutes later, as he came out of the restroom on to the plant floor, for a fleeting second, he saw a blur of motion. It was the last thing he would ever see. The three-foot-long metal pipe crushed his skull on the first blow. Before he hit the concrete floor, a second assailant had stabbed him several times in the lower back with a sharp plastic shank. The blows rained down. By the time it was over, Milo had been stabbed more than a dozen times. His head looked like a crushed melon. For good measure, one of the attackers bent over the prone figure, lifted his head by the hair, and ran the shank across his throat from ear to ear, leaving a deep, jagged wound, amid a river of blood and tissue.

The assailants dropped the weapons next to the body and quickly left the shop. Almost an hour later, a corrections officer, on routine patrol, entered the plant and discovered Sorensen’s body.

***

It was a little past six p.m. Kate and I were reviewing the list of incarcerated forgery inmates when Patti interrupted. She told me I had a call on the red phone. The red phone was a direct telephone line into the Special Investigations Branch from anywhere inside the penitentiary. It couldn’t be accessed from outside the prison and was never used for routine business calls. Calls on the red line meant only one thing: somewhere in the prison, a critical incident had occurred that required an immediate response from me or a member of my staff.

I picked up immediately. “SIB, Kincaid.”

“Sam, Steve Schumway. We’ve got a dead inmate here at North Point, and I can tell you, he didn’t fall off a ladder. Somebody slit his throat, bashed his head in, and cut him up for good measure.”

“Where’d it happen?”

“One of my COs found him lying on the floor in the furniture factory. He had a job in there. He hasn’t been dead for long.”

“Any witnesses?” I asked.

“None so far.”

“Okay. Secure the scene. We’ll be right over. Oh, what’s the name of the victim?”

“The inmate’s name is Milo Raymond Sorensen, U.S.P. number 167841.”

“Be right over,” I said, and hung up.

Kate hadn’t been paying attention to the call. She’d been engrossed in our list of forgery inmates. When I asked Captain Schumway who the victim was, her head came right up.

“Guess what? I think I’ve just located our man. His name’s Milo Sorensen, and you’ll find his name on the short list you’re holding. Unfortunately, Milo is no longer with us. Somebody just killed him.”

“Christ. How did it happen?”

“Beaten and stabbed to death.”

“How would you like to take a look at your first prison homicide?”

“Can hardly wait,” she said, as we headed out the door.

Chapter Thirty-eight

In cases involving serious injury or the death of an inmate or prison staff member, my responsibilities included the immediate notification of the department director, followed by the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Department and the state medical examiner, when necessary. Since the prison was located in an unincorporated part of south Salt Lake County, the sheriff retained primary jurisdiction. To avoid creating the appearance of a conflict of interest, our role was to assist the Sheriff’s Department with the investigation.

By the time Kate and I arrived at North Point, the usual procedures were well under way. The entire prison was locked down. That means nobody gets in or out—not visitors, vendors, or staff. All inmates were returned to their cells and locked in. In order to prevent outside communication, the phone system was rendered inoperative.

The Sheriff’s Office had dispatched two homicide detectives as well as their mobile crime scene unit. I had known Detective Sergeant John Webb and Detective Harvey Gill for several years. Kate knew them as well. Both were veteran homicide investigators who had worked major crime cases inside the penitentiary in the past. They were both top-notch.

A large area inside the furniture plant had been cordoned off around Sorensen’s body. He lay face down on the concrete floor in a large pool of blood. We saw a metal pipe and a sharpened prison-made shank, about ten inches long, lying next to the body. The back of his white prison-issue jumpsuit was dotted with spots of blood, and several small tears in the fabric were indicative of the numerous stab wounds caused by the shank. A jagged cut was visible running almost from ear to ear across the front of his neck. The battered condition of his head and face provided ample evidence of the damage inflicted by the metal pipe. Near the body was a floor drain. A pool of blood and tissue flowed several feet from Sorensen’s head and wound toward the drain.

Speaking to no one in particular, I muttered, “What a mess.”

“So, this is how it happens in prison,” replied Kate. “I think I prefer a nice, clean gunshot wound. It’s usually a lot less messy.”

“This is pretty typical of a prison homicide. Since inmates rarely get their hands on guns, it’s always a beating, strangulation, or stabbing. This one just happens to be a beating and a stabbing.”

“Two weapons,” said Kate curiously. “You thinking one perp, or two?”

“Can’t say for sure, but I’d bet two. It’s unlikely that one perp would use two different murder weapons. Not unheard of, but unusual.”

“Right. Tell you what, Sam. With all the blood loss, there’s a fair chance you’ll find trace amounts of the victim’s blood on the perp’s clothing—shoes, socks, and pants in particular.”

“Exactly what I was thinking,” I replied.

As Kate and I waited for the Sheriff’s Department team to arrive, we were joined by Duty Captain Steve Schumway and Deputy Warden Bob Fuller. I introduced Kate and asked to speak with the officer who discovered the body. We were introduced to Officer Alice Warner, who reiterated what Schumway had told me earlier when he reported the incident.

Warner had been making a routine sweep of the closed prison industries programs and had entered the furniture plant at approximately five-fifty, when she discovered the victim’s body. She immediately sounded the alarm and secured the area until help arrived. Warner hadn’t seen anyone in or around the furniture plant as she’d made her rounds.

I turned to Fuller and Schumway. “While we’re waiting, we might as well start rounding up any of Sorensen’s inmate friends, including those he worked with in the plant. The Sheriff’s Office will also want to interview our employees who worked with him. Let’s start with his cell mate. Minus any witnesses, Webb and Gill are going to want to talk to anybody who knew him. They’ll want to find out whether Sorensen was being threatened, strong-armed, or if he was in debt to anyone. If he was being pressured, maybe he said something to somebody.”

***

Burnham spent the afternoon checking on the whereabouts of William Allred. He called an acquaintance who worked for the Board of Pardons as a victim coordinator. That person told him that the board members were conducting administrative hearings all day at board headquarters in South Salt Lake and wouldn’t finish until late in the afternoon. That gave him sufficient time to set up surveillance. He planned to follow Allred from work and stay with him until he was home for the night.

Burnham was afraid that asking too many questions about Allred’s future parole hearing schedule would arouse suspicion. He had managed to learn that Allred was scheduled to conduct hearings at the prison the next morning from eight-thirty until noon. He arranged for Marcy Everest to cover Allred’s home early the next morning when he left for work. Burnham planned to cover the afternoon and evening shifts himself.

Terry had also managed to contact a representative from the phone company who was busy pulling a record of Allred’s home telephone calls for the past several months. The phone records would be ready the next day. The cell phone presented a different problem. He hadn’t been able to determine which service provider held the contract for the Board of Pardons. If Allred was involved in something illegal, as Sam suspected, the cell phone records might prove to be important.

Allred left the Board of Pardons a little before six o’clock and drove directly to a sports bar not more than ten minutes from where he lived. Burnham observed him sitting by himself at the bar, engaged in small talk with one of the bartenders. Allred emerged from the bar about an hour later and drove home, making one brief stop at a convenience store. where he purchased a newspaper and a half gallon of milk.

From what Burnham had learned, Allred was divorced with grown children. He lived alone in a small, older home, in an affluent neighborhood in southeast Salt Lake County. Burnham circled the block twice before parking several houses up the street, hoping none of the neighbors had spotted him and called the cops. He would remain until satisfied Allred was in for the night.

***

The Sheriff’s Department crime scene crew was busy processing the area around the victim’s body while Webb and Gill began the laborious task of interviewing inmates and prison staff. The prison employees who worked in the plant with Sorensen had all clocked out and gone home prior to the discovery of the body. Webb asked me to call each of them at home and learn whatever I could. I borrowed the tiny office adjacent to the furniture production area, secured an outside telephone line, and had just begun dialing my first number when Kate walked in and closed the door. She looked concerned. I set the phone down.

“So, when are you going to tell Webb and Gill?” she asked.

“Tell ’em what?”

Sounding genuinely annoyed, she said, “Cut the crap, Sam. You know what. You’ve worked with Webb and Gill before. You know you can trust them. They’re going to figure this out. They know we’re looking for the guy who forged the suicide note. It made it into the newspapers, for Christ’s sake.”

“What if I’m wrong? It might be premature to say anything,” I said. It sounded lame to me even as I said it. After almost a full minute of awkward silence, with Kate looking at me like I was a couple of cards short of a full deck, I asked the obvious question.

“Tell me what it is you think I think?”

Exasperated, she said, “You believe the hit on Sorensen is part of a broader conspiracy in which somebody paid Slick Watts to murder Levi Vogue, and then killed Watts, arranging his death to look like a suicide. They’d planned to kill Watts all along. The same people who killed Watts also killed Sorensen, who forged the suicide note. Watts and Sorensen had to go because they provided a direct link to the conspirators. And the part you can’t stand to say to anyone but yourself is that the conspirators are a group of dirty employees working for the Department of Corrections. And that’s why you’re putting round-the-clock surveillance on William Allred. You think he’s involved too. So, how’d I do?”

Bingo. She’d gotten it all correct except for a couple of things even I was unsure about. If the Watts suicide-fabrication story had held together, the conspirators might have left Sorensen alone. Once the suicide story fell apart, it became necessary to move against Sorensen quickly, before he got scared and turned himself in, or before we found him. The second point I found even more troubling. Assuming Sorensen had forged the suicide note, how had he gotten it out of the prison? There were three possibilities. He could have mailed it out; however, that seemed unlikely considering how carefully prison staff monitor incoming and outgoing mail. The note might have been smuggled out during a contact visit. We needed to review Sorensen’s visitation log to determine who and when prior visits had occurred. The last possibility was the safest and would have provided the least likelihood of detection—an employee carried it out.

“You got it about right,” I said, a note of obvious resignation in my voice.

“Look. I don’t know if it will make you feel any better, but for a while there, I thought you were chasing your own tail. Now I’ve come around to thinking your instincts may have been right about this all along,” Kate said. “We still don’t have any proof, mind you, but when you string it all together, it’s plausible. In its own twisted way, it even makes sense. Of course, we still have no idea who these conspirators are or why they’re doing what they’re doing. One thing is certain: somebody has taken a great deal of time and gone to a lot of effort to hide whatever it is they’re up to.”

We laid it out for Webb and Gill just as Kate and I had discussed it. They listened intently, without interruption. Webb and Gill had been partners for more years than I could remember. Webb eventually ended up with the sergeant stripes, but that hadn’t seemed to alter their relationship.

Gill was a grizzled old veteran, who’d joined the Sheriff’s Department more than thirty-five years ago. He had to be nearing sixty. Gill had mentored a much younger Webb, when Webb was promoted from the uniform division to detective. They looked like Mutt and Jeff. Webb was effusive and well-spoken, Gill reserved and blunt. Webb dressed in conservative wool suits, with never a hair out of place. Gill, on the other hand, had days when the gray stubble of his beard confirmed that he hadn’t touched a razor in days. He wore cheap polyester suits, with ties that almost never matched and socks that clashed with everything else.

That said, I wouldn’t care to have either one of them after me. Together, they had cleared more murder cases than probably any team of homicide dicks in Utah—Kate McConnell included. Of course, they were older than Kate, and had been at it a lot longer.

“That’s some story. Too bad you can’t prove it. So you think this Sorensen may have forged the suicide note, and that’s what got him whacked?” asked Gill.

“Yup.”

“Any idea who did it?” asked Webb.

“Nope.”

“One hitter or two?” asked Gill.

“Could be either, but I’d bet two.”

“It might help us out if you’d give us a profile of the victim,” said Gill.

“Happy to. Sorensen had a long history of nonviolent criminal behavior—his entire criminal record consisted of property offenses with the exception of a couple of DUIs. During his late teens to early twenties, he focused on retail shoplifting, theft, and, eventually, receiving stolen property. It appears that he had a reasonably profitable career as a fence. As he got older, the offense history shifted to multiple counts of check and credit card forgery. He was forty-two years old and had spent almost half his adult life in jail or prison. This current sentence represented his third commitment. He had already served more than six years on five felony counts of forgery. He’d been to the board and was scheduled for parole release in exactly eleven months.

“His personal life isn’t pretty either,” I continued. “It looks like three marriages all ending in divorce. He fathered three children, one from each marriage. He seemed to have some support from friends and family, given a pretty regular pattern of prison visits. That about sums it up.”

“Thanks, Sam. Assuming for the moment that we are dealing with two perps, are we looking for inmates or employees?” asked Webb.

“That’s a hard one. I’d like to believe that he was killed by inmates, but my hunch is that the killers will turn out to be staff. At first glance, the murder has all the markings of an inmate hit. However, employees could stage that rather easily. If staff hired inmates to do it, they’d still have loose ends to tidy up. If my theory is correct, these guys are about eliminating loose ends, not creating more.”

“So far, we haven’t had anybody tell us that Mr. Sorensen was in debt or being pressured by anyone. We’ve got more individuals to talk with, including members of his family, but if everything checks out, we’ll turn our attention to prison staff. The CO found the vic’s body at five-fifty. Aside from the perp, we need to determine who last saw him alive and when. Assuming it was five o’clock or a few minutes after, it was probably a civilian employee or one of his inmate co-workers. That’s a pretty narrow window. I wonder how many staff won’t be able to account for their whereabouts during that forty-five to fifty-minute period?” asked Webb. “We’re sure as hell gonna find out.”