Croaker: Grave Sins (Fey Croaker Book 2)

by Paul Bishop

  Fey had been both surprised and appreciative of the effort of the two detectives, and told them so. She wasn’t ready to completely reassess her judgment of Brindle, but it was a start. Alphabet had always been reliable, but his willingness to help Brindle – who was a difficult personality – raised him a notch in Fey’s estimation.

  Monk Lawson was running the scene underneath the lifeguard station with Alphabet working with him. Hammer and Nails were in Hammersmith’s van pounding out reports and playing with the computers.

  Fey and Groom walked over to the open side door of the van. Inside, Rhonda was crouched over a lap top computer that had a cellular phone hooked into the modem attachment. The whole system was plugged into a small generator.

  “I’ve got two addresses for Cullen,” Rhonda said when she saw Fey walk up. “One fairly close by – a townhouse in the Palisades – and the other is a house in San Diego.”

  “Can we get warrants immediately?” Fey asked Groom.

  “I’ll get telephonic approval from the on-call judge for the local one. The San Diego warrant may take a bit longer because of the jurisdictional difficulties, but by the time we get someone down there to execute the warrant we should have approval. Who’s going to type the warrants up?”

  Hammersmith, who was working on another lap top computer, scooped a sheaf of papers off of the laser printer sitting on the desk next to him. He handed the whole wad to Groom. “Done and done,” he said. Hammersmith had only been in West LA for a few months, but Fey had never known him not to have needed paperwork at his fingertips.

  Hammersmith explained. “Those are search warrants for both residence locations, Cullen’s Jeep, and one to get blood, hair, and pubic combings from Cullen himself.”

  “Why one for the Jeep?” Fey asked. “We can get anything we need from the Jeep during impound.”

  “Why take any chances?” Hammersmith stated.

  Groom grunted assent. “He’s probably right, Fey. Everyone is going to be second guessing us on this. How did you get the descriptions of the locations to be searched?” Groom asked.

  “I called down to San Diego PD and had one of their units do a drive by and call me back with a description.” Hammersmith told him. “The local address is about a mile from here, so I took a plain clothes unit and drove by it myself.”

  “You work fast,” Groom said as he looked through the pages of the warrants. “If you work too fast, you can make mistakes.”

  “If you don’t work fast enough, you can lose evidence, if not the whole case.” This came from Nails.

  Still reading, Groom asked, “Your only probable cause for the warrants is that Cullen was at this most recent crime scene?”

  “Not just at the crime scene, counselor,” Hammersmith said, “but caught in the act of burying the body.”

  “How do we know he wasn’t just out for a stroll on the beach and happened to stumble across the grave?”

  “Right,” said Rhonda. “And instead of being ecstatic to see the police arrive, he tries to kill both officers.”

  “Maybe he panicked. Maybe he thought he was going to be blamed,” Groom was playing devil’s advocate.

  “Maybe,” said Rhonda. “His defense attorney can come up with a whole courtroom full of maybes for a jury. Right now we’re only talking about establishing probable cause for a search warrant.” She held up her hand, her index finger extended. “One, Cullen is the only person on the beach. Two,” – a second digit popped up – “Morrison stated Cullen was burying the body, not digging it up. Morrison said that in the time it took him and Bassett to get out to the lifeguard station, Cullen could have had the body exhumed – if that’s what he was trying to do.” She popped up another finger. “Three, Cullen ran when he was discovered. Okay, maybe he panicked, but he also tried to run Bassett over, and then tries to get Morrison to kill him. And four,” – another digit – “Cullen makes a spontaneous statement that he’s guilty.”

  Groom nodded. “I think I can get a judge to buy it,” he said. He looked up from the warrants and stared into the interior of the van. It was filled with more gimmicks than a Japanese electronics store.

  “Where did you get all this stuff?” he asked. “It sure isn’t city issue.”

  “I have friends in low places,” Hammersmith told him.

  Groom smiled and went back to reviewing the warrants.

  “No sign of Cahill?” Hammersmith asked Fey.

  “Not yet.”

  “You going to call Captain Strachman?”

  “That’s Cahill’s job.”

  “They’re going to take the case away and give it to Robbery-Homicide,” Hammersmith said. “It’s inevitable.”

  “Maybe so,” Fey replied. “But if they do take it, I want to give it to them gift-wrapped.”

  “Okay, you’re the boss,” Hammersmith said. He turned to a chart, drawn on a whiteboard that was propped up on one side of the van. The chart had a listing of all aspects of the investigation and what personnel had been assigned to handle which assignments.

  “What about notifying somebody from the San Diego Sails?” Rhonda asked. “I checked the schedules. They played the Clippers in town last night, and they’re set to play the Lakers tomorrow night.”

  “Let’s not start complicating things yet,” Fey replied. “There’ll be plenty of time for everyone to start getting their fingers in the pie later. Right now we have enough on our plate.”

  A commotion from the entrance to the parking lot drew everyone’s attention. A white Ford Taurus had been let into the lot and a news van had tried to follow it through. Patrol officers had stopped the van and were arguing with the occupants.

  “How the hell do they always find out?” Fey asked nobody in particular in reference to the press. She turned back to Nails. “Make some calls, would you?” she asked. “I should have known better than to try and keep this low profile. I don’t want Strachman or downtown to find out about the crime scene over their breakfast Wheaties. Make whatever notifications you can, but hang up before they can start giving us directions.”

  Nails nodded and reached for the phone in the computer modem.

  Special Agent Ash parked the Taurus and levered himself out. A lumberjack flannel shirt and 501 Levis over hiking boots put him in complete contrast to Winston Groom. He spotted Fey standing by the van and walked over. Fey introduced him to Groom and brought him up to speed.

  “Who’s going to handle the warrants?” he asked.

  “When we’re clear from here,” Hammersmith volunteered, “Rhonda and I will head for San Diego, if that’s what you want. That will leave Monk and Alphabet to stay with the body and handle the scene.”

  “Brindle Jones is with Cullen at the hospital,” Fey informed Groom and Ash. “So, that would leave the three of us to take on the local search.”

  “It’s the most likely spot to yield evidence considering the location of the body,” Groom said.

  Ash looked out to the lifeguard station. “Do you mind if I take a closer look?” he asked Fey.

  “Be my guest,” she answered with a sweeping arm gesture.

  “I’ll go too,” Groom said, and the two men walked off together.

  “Boss?” Rhonda called gently for Fey’s attention.

  Fey turned back to the van and found both Hammer and Nails watching her.

  “What do you two have on your mind?”

  “Are you sure you want to run with this thing?” Hammersmith asked. His tone was neutral.

  “Why?”

  Hammersmith shrugged. “Don’t make out you don’t see the storm coming. This case could eat you alive. With JoJo Cullen as a suspect, every move made in this investigation is going to be second-guessed, and you personally are going to get dragged ass-backwards through the shredder.”

  Fey wanted a cigarette badly. “This department has been here before. We’ve survived high profile cases in the past, and we’ll survive them again in the future. This is just another in a long line of expl
osive situations. Would either of you walk away if you were running the show?”

  Rhonda and Hammersmith exchanged slightly twisted smiles.

  “No,” they said in unison.

  “Just make sure you don’t drop the ball with Darcy Wyatt,” Fey said, remembering that there was always more than one important case going on at a time.

  “We won’t,” Rhonda said.

  “As soon as you guys get back from San Diego, I want you back on the rape cases. And I’m going to need you now more than ever to keep the rest of the MAC cases flowing.”

  “No problem.”

  Fey started to walk away, but stopped and turned back.

  “One other thing,” she said.

  “What?” Rhonda asked.

  “Be there when I need you,” she said softly.

  Hammersmith gave her assurance in the same tone. “Count on it.”

  Chapter 27

  At the station, Morrison and Bassett sat in the small interrogation room where Fey had questioned Darcy Wyatt the morning before.

  “You all right, kid?” Morrison asked his young partner.

  Bassett nodded, but didn’t say anything. He was sitting hunched forward on the hard chair. His elbows were on his knees, his hand together as if he were praying, his head resting on the tips of his steepled fingers. He was rocking slightly.

  Morrison had told the story of the night’s events several times already. Once to Terry Gillette, again to Fey, and another time to the other detectives arriving at the station. He knew at some point he would have to go over the story several more times, probably innumerable times. The next interview would be with detectives from the OIS – Officer Involved Shooting team.

  Morrison had started penciling out his statement on a continuation sheet. Because shots had been fired, somebody else would be detailed to take care of booking Cullen and handle most of the paperwork. Still, Morrison knew he would have to get his statement down on paper to be included in the arrest report.

  He wanted Bassett to write out a statement as well. It was important they got their stories straight, and that they didn’t contradict one another. They had done nothing wrong out there in the field. Sure, things had gone to hell on them, but that was the nature of police work.

  Bassett hadn’t done as well as a more experienced officer might have, but he’d still done okay. Morrison had to find a way to get that across to Bassett because it looked like the kid was getting real shaky on him.

  “This was your first shooting, right, kid?”

  “Yeah.” Bassett started to rock a little harder in his seat.

  “I’ve been through five of them,” Morrison said. He scraped his chair clear, leaned it back on two legs, and propped his feet up on a corner of the scarred table. “It’s never easy.” He took out a cigarette and set it alight. “After it’s over with, you always ask yourself if you could ever go through it again.”

  Morrison watched Bassett’s body language change. The rocking stopped, and the younger officer turned his face toward his mentor.

  “You thought that?”

  Morrison puffed on his cigarette. “Of course. Do you think you’re the first officer to ever get the shakes after a shooting? It happens to everyone. Hell, my first two shootings I had brown stains in my shorts, and I couldn’t even remember crapping.”

  “I don’t know, man.”

  “Why’d you come on this job?” Morrison asked taking a different tack. “And don’t be giving me no bull about public service.”

  Bassett shrugged.

  “I’ll tell you why you came on this job,” Morrison said. “You came on for nights just like tonight. Nights when you’re pushed to the limit of your abilities. When you have the piss scared out of you and you live to tell about it.”

  Morrison took a hard drag on his cigarette. He dropped his feet off the table and brought his chair back to an even keel. “You did all right out there, kid. You survived. I survived. The bad guy got captured. Tomorrow night, you’ll be telling drunken Paul Bunyan tales about our exploits and I’ll be backing you up. We’ll have our fifteen minutes of fame, and then some other poor bastards will get into a shooting situation, or a knock-down-drag-out bar fight, and it will be their turn to tell war stories.”

  “But, I felt like I froze out there. I felt like I let you down. I don’t know if I could go through something like that again.”

  Morrison let some silence settle. He took a couple of slow drags on his cigarette and crushed it out before speaking again. “You’re lucky that you’re young enough to have missed Viet Nam,” he told Bassett. “But one thing I did learn over there is that with every fire-fight you respond quicker and with more cool. Every fire-fight is a panic, but if you survive, then you stand a better chance of surviving the next one. If you survived that one, you got better again. They called it seeing the elephant.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Morrison was pleased Bassett was asking questions. It meant he was listening and maybe Morrison’s line of bull was getting through.

  “Before the Civil War, the circus coming to town was about the biggest deal around. It was a rite of childhood to go to a circus and see the elephant. When the Civil War broke out, seeing the elephant became a term to indicate you’d been through a battle – another rite of passage. Every time you ‘saw the elephant’, a little of the luster wore off, it became a little more commonplace, you weren’t in as much awe as that first time you saw a pachyderm.”

  “You’re saying I’ll do better next time?”

  “I’m not saying you did bad this time. You hung in there. You took your shots at the Jeep. You did what you had to do –”

  “But if it hadn’t have been for you, I’d have been run over! I couldn’t get out of the way.”

  “And if it had been me doing the shooting, I’d have been run over,” Morrison figured if you were going to tell a lie you might as well tell a big one. The kid had made some mistakes, but he wasn’t a bad copper, and Morrison knew he was the only one who could build up his confidence again. A little humility on Morrison’s part could go a long way toward accomplishing that goal. “But you’d have been there to knock me out of the way, just like I was there for you. It’s what partners are for.”

  “You ain’t lying to me?”

  “Next time you see the elephant, you’ll do just fine. Trust me.” Morrison held up three fingers in the scout sign. “Scout’s honor.”

  A goofy grin slowly spread across Bassett’s face. “Cullen’s a big mutha, isn’t he?”

  Morrison kicked back in his chair again and lighted another cigarette. He was pleased with himself.

  “He sure is, kid,” he replied. “He sure is.”

  Chapter 28

  The room’s four poster bed was a genuine Victorian antique. The wide-screen television built into the wall facing the foot of the bed, however, was an intrusive modernistic monster. When the television was turned off, a large damask tapestry rolled immediately across the screen and returned the room to its elegant atmosphere.

  Devon Wyatt was a man who appreciated elegance in all things. This was especially true of the women he chose as bed mates, although he treated them with the same regard he reserved for the other items of beauty with which he surrounded himself.

  The young lady with the warm and able mouth, who was currently ministering to Wyatt’s early morning sexual demands, was no exception. She was long of limb and lean of hip, with flawless skin the color of eggplant. Her hair was lengthy and full-bodied, covering her face as she buried it in Wyatt’s crotch. She made soft noises as she worked, as if to emphasize her performance.

  Wyatt sat propped up against the bed’s headboard with three goose-down pillows behind him. It was only eight a.m., but he’d already finished his thirty minute routine of stretches, isometrics, and Stair Master exercise that kept him in reasonable shape. He’d drunk his juice, scanned the paper, made several phone calls to the East Coast, and set out his clothes for the day. All tha
t remained before showering was his daily head job.

  Wyatt wasn’t exactly sure where his wife was today – Aspen or somewhere equally as banal – and he didn’t much care. Anyway, the last time he’d gotten a head job from her was before they were married. He’d made her his bride for reasons of money, not sex.

  Going back to his bedroom, all moss greens and salmon pinks, he’d roused his latest concubine into action. He wasn’t exactly sure what her name was – Shirley, Shirell, Sheila, or something close – but he had found her to be reasonably competent. Maybe she couldn’t suck a tennis ball down a garden hose, but she was enthusiastic.

  While Shirley, Shirell, Sheila, or something close worked her magic, Wyatt reached out a hand and picked up the television remote control. He pushed the power button and the damask tapestry rolled to one side to reveal the wide screen.

  Images flickered past his eyes as he grazed the channels. CNN held his interest for a few moments, but he quickly surfed by looking for a more local report.

  Briefly, he turned his thoughts back to the woman between his legs. He could feel his sap rising and knew her work for the day would be done soon, or at least until he returned home later in the evening.

  He put his hands on the woman’s head and began to move his hips in time to her efforts and felt a quickening of his pulse. His eyes glanced up to the television screen for the briefest second and caught Fey Croaker’s flickering video image. He immediately picked up the remote control again and turned up the volume.

  Sensing she was about to lose Wyatt’s concentration, the woman between his legs began to increase her efforts – bouncing up and down on the mattress and raising the volume of her moaning.

  “Get off of me, you stupid bitch,” Wyatt said. He roughly pushed her mouth off of him. When she tried to reengage her mouth and his manhood, misunderstanding Wyatt’s intentions, he threw her right off the bed.

  “Hey!” she said, landing in a tangle of limbs. “What are you doing?”