Walk in Darkness - A Thriller (Jon Stanton Mysteries) (2 page)

4

Stanton drove Childs’ car to his house and then called a cab. Childs didn’t just drink to have a good time or to lubricate conversation or relieve stress, he drank to get obliterated. Sometimes he would be so drunk he would strike out at Stanton, unable to recognize him, and blurt out drunken slurs before passing out at the bar or on the dance floor or at someone’s house during a poker game. Stanton wished desperately to speak with him about it but Childs knew he held a Ph.D. in psychology and refused to talk about personal matters around him.

The cab arrived and Stanton climbed in. The cabbie was soft spoken and the interior smelled like sweet yogurt and hummus.

“Where you from?” Stanton asked after some brief conversation about the wonderful smell.

“Palestine.”

“I’ve always wanted to go to the Middle East, but, things keep coming up. I have two sons and I just have a hard time leaving them for long.”

“There is nothing be
tter though than going home to family.”

“That’s true. But they live with their mother.”

“Divorced?”

“Yeah.”

“It is strange here, everybody divorce. People married twenty, thirty years and they divorce. In Palestine when you promise to be married you married, no divorce.”

“We expect to be happy here. Most people in other countries don’t expect that.”

They talked about the cabbie’s life in Palestine and he spoke of the death of two of his brothers. They’d been attending a wedding and as was the custom they began firing pistols and rifles into the air after the ceremony in celebration. Israeli soldiers were patrolling nearby. No one knows who fired first, but a fight ensued, leaving twenty-one Palestinians dead along with three Israeli soldiers.

Stanton sat quietly and listened because he felt the man needed to talk. He wanted someone to discuss this with and for whatever reason he felt that Stanton was a good choice.

When he came to a stop in front of Stanton’s apartment high-rise, Stanton attempted to pay him but the man refused.

“N
ext time,” he would say.

Stanton eventually gave up and kept the money. He would remember that cabbie and if ever he rode in his cab again, he would remember to pay him double.

The apartment was sparsely decorated, little more than some furniture, clothes, toiletries, a television, and some art deco on the walls. The paintings and framed photos were colorful and placed anywhere they would fit. There were also paintings of the Mormon Salt Lake Temple and one black and white painting that looked like a photo of Jesus Christ. Stanton glanced at it as he threw his keys on the table and walked out on the balcony.

The
apartment was eleven floors up and he looked to the busy intersection below and past that to the Pacific. The ocean appeared dark blue, like melted sapphire, and was choppy. The apartment was really a condo that belonged to an old man that had used it as a winter home. He lived in New Hampshire and wanted to rent to someone single. And when he found out Stanton was a co
p, he dropped his price by fifteen percent and faxed over the lease right away.

Stanton watched the water a long time and then glanced to the pavement eleven floors down.
The sidewalks were swarming with people but they seemed not to notice each other.

He went to the second bedroom that he had turned into an office and pulled out the thick file he had on Darrell Putnam.

Though everything was paperless now and files were uploaded onto a shared database, Stanton made hardcopies of everything. There was just something to holding paper in your hands that a computer screen could never match. Something personal. When reading reports of monsters that had invaded people’s lives, he felt at times like an intruder, and somehow the soft paper in between his fingers assured him that he had permission.

Darrell Putnam had never had a chance at life. The psychological evaluation done by the parole board was
three pages. Three to explain a life.

He had been molested by a priest
at his local parish at the age of ten. The abuse had continued for over three years until he developed such bad anxiety and depression that he was sent to the school counselor where he opened up about what had occurred. The counselor had notified the police. When they arrived at the church offices to interview the priest, he pulled a gun out of a drawer and placed it in between his lips before pulling the trigger.

Darrell
had been disruptive in school but not violent. It wasn’t until he was nineteen that he got his first criminal charge for driving while intoxicated. At twenty-three, he was arrested for sexually abusing his neighbor’s son. The boy was ten years old.

He was released from prison after six years, and within three months had committed another abuse in a shopping mall bathroom stall. He was put away this time for fourteen years before he voluntarily underwent chemical castration and
was allowed to be paroled early.

He had been out for eleven years without incident when he
’d became the prime suspect in Stanton’s investigation.

The doorbell rang and startled him out of his thoughts. He closed the file and walked out of the bedroom with it, placing it down on the kitchen counter before answering the door.

Danielle Porter stood there, leaning against the frame with one arm, her badge clipped to her belt. She held a six-pack of Diet Coke in her other hand.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey.”

“Thought you could use some company after today.”

“I could. Thanks.”

She walked in and sat on
the couch, picking up the Rubik’s cube on the coffee table and playing with it. “You couldn’t have stopped him if he really wanted to die. You should just be grateful that he didn’t want suicide by cop.”

“Maybe.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t give me that nothing, Jon. We’ve been dating for six months and every little secret about you still needs to be dragged out like rotting teeth. What’s going on?”

“He did something strange before he jumped that hasn’t been sitting right with me.”

“What?”

“He told me he’s innocent.”

“Everyone says that.”

“I know, I know. It sounds crazy and I have no reason to back it up, but I think he might’ve been telling the truth.”

“Well, you got two options: you can choose not to believe him and close the case with a win and some slaps on the back. I heard Chief Rodriguez is thinking about giving you some sort of commendation for it.”

“What’s the other option?”

“You can believe him, which means you still got one sick son of a bitch out there killing children.”

5

Gary P. Coop sat at his desk inside the Emerald Plaza building in downtown San Diego. His office was near the top floor; white carpets with deep cherry wood paneling and furniture to match. The couches and chairs were imported leather and the secretaries and paralegals at his law firm were the most beautiful he could find. He had always believed you could train an employee to be good at their job, but someone either had beauty or didn’t.

He was reading through a document on his i
Pad when he set it down on the desk and leaned back, absently playing with his Rolex Yacht-Master. He caught a glimpse of its reflection in the window and smiled. Less than twenty years ago they hadn’t wanted to rent office space to him here because he was black. Now, his law firm owned two entire floors.

Coop pressed a button on his phone.

“Yeah, boss?”

“Jeremy
, come in here will you please.”

A young man of twenty-eight stepped into the office. He was wearing a pin stripe Armani suit, not unlike the one Coop was wearing, and sat down across from him.

“What’s up?”

“Take a look at this.” He handed him his i
Pad. “It’s the case of that pedophile that jumped off the roof over at the American.”

He flipped through the document quietly a few moments. “
Hm, interesting. What about it?”

“You don’t see anything there?”

Jeremy shook his head. “Guy jumped. Cop didn’t throw him off.”

“No, but he may as well have. He had a gun pointed at his head. Look at the profile on the detective.
History of depression. He quit the force for a long time and came back because Michael Harlow asked him to.”

“Holy shit. That’s where I know his
name from. He’s the cop that testified against Harlow.”

“Biggest police corruption scandal in the city’s history, Jeremy. I would’ve given my left nut to
have defended Harlow. Thing was on the news damn near every night.”

“I know what you’re thinking boss, but I don’t think that’s going to work with this.”

“Why not?”

“The guy was a pedophile. What jury is
gonna feel sorry enough for him to take taxpayer money and give it to us cause he jumped off a building?”

Coop smiled. “You’re still young and don’t realize what juries are, Jeremy. They’re emotional animals. They’ll reach a conclusion during opening statements based on how everyone looks and
talks and then find any reason they can during the trial to justify that stance. We don’t have to win the whole trial, we just gotta win the first few hours.”

“If you say it’s a good case, it’s a good case. I’m on board.”

“Find out the next of kin on the pedophile and get me their number. And this is the first and last time we call him ‘the pedophile.’ Even just between us. His name’s Mr. Putnam. Send out an email to everyone saying that too.”

“You got it.”

As Jeremy left, Coop put his feet up on the desk and stared out the windows at the open blue sky. Jeremy was too inexperienced to realize what they had: a cop with mental illness and a victim that flew off a building with no other witnesses around to say what happened. Even if he was a pedophile, all Coop needed was a handful of jurors, maybe two or three, that hated cops. They would do his work for him and convince the rest that even pedophiles had rights that shouldn’t be violated.

Coop couldn’t help but smile; he had been waiting for a case like this for a long time.

6

Stanton walked into the San Diego County Police Northern Division precinct on Monday morning and headed to his office near the back of the building.
The office was cramped and filled with too many files but quiet, away from the commotions that took place at the front of the building, the drunks and wife-beaters and gangsters that were hauled in and locked into the holding tank.

The entire back section had been devoted to the Sex Crimes Strike Force.
The Strike Force had been the brainchild of the new chief of police: Antonio “Bulldog” Rodriguez. Bulldog had had a reputation for being aggressive on sex cases long before he made chief. He thought they were special, and unlike other cases police dealt with. As head of the sex crimes unit in the Central Division, he had started the briefings with a prayer, asking the Lord for strength to catch Satan’s demons loose on the earth. Stanton had briefly been under him before being transferred to Northern and he remembered Bulldog telling him once that the sex crimes detectives were God’s chosen people. Even more than homicide or missing persons, they were the ones that were responsible for punishing the monsters that preyed on the helpless.

When he was made chief after Harlow’s arrest, within 72 hours the San Diego County Police had a new sex crimes unit: the strike force.

It consisted of seventeen detectives, more than all the other strike forces in the department. He had hired a PR firm on the government dime to spin it to the public, as they’d needed to add several detectives to get it where he wanted. They had played up a recent case of a young girl’s rape and kidnapping as she walked home from school. She had been raped by two men on the sidewalk, at least half a dozen people driving by and not taking any action. Finally a family in a minivan called the police.

They had raised enough outrage that the county would have funded another seventeen detectives had he asked for it. But his demands were modest: transfer ten more sex crimes detectives from around the county
to bring it up to seventeen and replace them with promotions from within and replace the promotions with new hires. He got his ten within two months.

Stanton sat down at his desk and looked at his calendar. He saw that he had a unit meeting in ten minutes. He turned to a filing cabinet behind his desk and pulled out three files. They were red file folders, indicating they involved children.

The first one was a nine year old girl named Yvette Reynolds. Then a ten year old named Sarah Henroid. The third and most recent case was another ten year old named Beth Szleky.

All three had disappeared and were never found.

Technically, these cases belonged to Missing Persons or Child Abuse. But the units consisted of a handful of detectives handling seventy to ninety cases per week. They were overwhelmed and underfunded. Rodriguez had spent all he could setting up his new strike force, and instead of cutting back he began assigning cases from MP to the strike force. Missing children that didn’t involve family kidnappings were all assumed to be sex crimes cases anyway.

The three girls lived within five miles of each other, though they went to different schools. If you were to pull out a map of the area, Darrell Putnam lived right in the center, in between Yvette and Beth and a mile and a half from Sarah.

“Jon,” Childs said, poking his head in, “meeting, nerdalinger, let’s go.”

He closed the files and stood up, following Childs out.

“What were you lookin’ at?” Childs said as they walked down the hallway.

“Putnam’s cases.”

“Still thinkin’ about that?”

Stanton knew from experience that Childs was thinking about it to
o. Downplaying it and treating it like no big deal was his coping mechanism and he wasn’t going to take that away from him.

“Yeah, it just isn’t sitting right.”

“Just cause he said so?”

“No, if that’s all it was I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. I had doubts the entire time we were after him. Putnam nev
er left his house. Surveillances’ reports show that he would stay locked up in there for weeks at a time, sometimes months. When would he have a chance to pick up three girls?”

“We weren’t on him twenty-four seven. Don’t underestimate these sick fucks.”

“It wasn’t just going out and getting them. He would’ve needed to stalk them and learn their routines, learn things about them. There was no way he’d have the time by sneaking out at midnight for a few hours.”

“Well
, why didn’t you say anything before?”

That, Stanton knew, was the question. When they had been after Putnam and named him
as their primary suspect, why didn’t he speak up? He engaged in the chase as much as anyone and didn’t remember a single time he went to his CO and said he was having doubts that Putnam was their guy.

They walked into the conference room and took seats. Sergeant Walters stood at the head of the table, his muscles bulging out of his shirt. He was the second biggest guy in the room next to Childs
, and Stanton could tell he felt inadequate around him.

“All right ladies and gentlemen, let’s chat.” He opened a file and scanned it. “First off
, there’s a new policy in place regarding OT. All requests for OT must now be approved by Assistant Chief Ho. I know, I know, but you guys submitted over a hundred combined hours of OT last month. That’s unacceptable. We need to stick with our budget or they’re gonna cut us back, so let’s all make sure the overtime’s in good order. Best way to do that is to run it by me or Detective Childs before sending in an approval sheet.

“Next we got Stanton and his flying chi-mo. Good job
, Detective Stanton, for closing the Sandman cases.”

A few cheers went up in the room and Childs clapped. The Sandman was the nickname the unit had given to Putnam as all the girls had been kidnapped during the night in their bedrooms.

“Cleared it with the chief, Jon, there’s not going to be any administrative leave. IAD already looked at it and determined it doesn’t qualify as an officer-involved shooting since the fucker jumped off himself, so you’re good to go. Okay, next item of business . . .”

Childs leaned over to Stanton and whispered, “IAD already cleared you? Since when does that happen so fast?”

“Since never.”

“That’s what I’m saying. What you think’s going on?”

“I have no idea.”