Code Four

by Colin Conway

  Durand straightened suddenly and Dale Thomas spun around in his chair to face Ragland. “Kelly! What is wrong with you?”

  “What? What did I say?”

  “By noble cause corruption,” Durand clarified, “I assume you are referring to the slippery slope of officers believing that the ends justify the means when it comes to putting criminals in jail?”

  “Yeah, that. I mean, that’s how it starts—cops bending the rules or lying a little to make sure the case on some piece of crap dirtball is solid. Then pretty soon they’re stealing money from drug dealers and shoving pokers up people’s asses or whatever.”

  Thomas whispered, “For the love of God” to Ragland but the sergeant waved him off.

  Durand asked, “You saw behavior on the Anti-Crime Team that you believe was corrupt?”

  Ragland’s face pinched. “I never said that.”

  “But you mentioned noble cause corruption.”

  The sergeant wagged a finger. “I said I could see the team formation leading to it. The potential was there. I even talked to Captain Farrell about it.”

  “You talked to Captain Farrell about noble cause corruption?”

  “I brought my concerns to him, yes.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He agreed. He said that’s why they wanted a sergeant on the team. To make sure corruption didn’t happen.”

  Durand made several notes before moving on to her next question. “Did you see one side of the team leaning more toward corruption than the other?”

  Ragland chuckled. “You must be referring to Zielinski’s troubles.”

  Thomas slapped the table. “Will you stop?”

  “Which troubles would those be?” Durand asked.

  Thomas grasped Ragland’s arm and glared at him.

  The sergeant glanced down to the trembling grip and sighed. When he looked back to Durand, he said, “You should probably ask Ray Zielinski about that.”

  The union president exhaled audibly then patted Ragland’s arm. He left his hand in place, however.

  Durand studied Sergeant Ragland for a moment then referred to her notes. After a time, she asked, “As the administrative sergeant, do you think you had the apparent authority to lead a team like ACT? Especially with a couple operators you just described as Tango and Cash and an officer like Ray Zielinski who you described as having a propensity for getting himself into trouble?”

  Dale Thomas’s hand tightened again around Kelly Ragland’s arm, but the sergeant tugged himself free.

  “Apparent authority? Who needs that when I have actual authority?” Kelly Ragland smiled and tapped three fingers repeatedly next to the stripes on his sleeve. “I’m a sergeant. They did what I told them.”

  Dale Thomas put his head in hands and groaned.

  Édelie Durand stood and said, “Thank you for your time, Sergeant Ragland. You’ve been very helpful.”

  Chapter 25

  Detective Wardell Clint heard Lieutenant Dan Flowers say his goodbyes to Detective Marty Hill on his way out of the Major Crimes bullpen. That reminded him that he needed to check his mail. He headed toward the bank of mailboxes located near the lieutenant’s now unoccupied office.

  Along the way, he passed Marty Hill, who was leaning back in his chair with an open file on his lap. When Hill noticed Clint, he gave him a nod. “How’s it going, Wardell?”

  “Fine,” Clint said, because he knew that was what people wanted to hear when they asked that question. It seemed like a waste of time and energy to him, but so did most social niceties. He kept walking, then he remembered what else was expected of him. “How about you?”

  Hill lifted his foot off the ground and flexed his knee. Despite the audible crack on the first flex, he didn’t seem to have any difficulty with the movement.

  “Healing up,” Hill said. “Finally almost human again.”

  “Let me know how that feels,” Clint said, and continued around the corner. Behind, he heard a sound from Hill, but couldn’t decide if it was a chuckle or a sigh.

  His mailbox contained a stack of papers of various sizes, including a couple of interoffice envelopes. He leafed through the notes, discarding several unimportant ones in the nearby trash can. When he saw that one of the envelopes was from the lab, he opened it Inside, he found what Jody had told him to expect soon—the results from the Sonya Meyer case.

  Reading as he walked, Clint reviewed the findings. Most were what he had expected. Meyer’s blood work was clean except for a trace of THC. That didn’t surprise him, given that marijuana was now legal in Washington State. The fact Meyer was not of legal age to imbibe was also not a surprise. The dissonance of eighteen being the legal age to be an adult but not to indulge in adult beverages or cannabis was something Clint had long ago accepted.

  He reached his desk and sat down, flipping through the paperwork until he reached the one piece of evidence that he had hoped would bear results. Meyer had been brutally—and clumsily, Clint noticed—murdered in her home. In the struggle, she had managed to scratch her attacker, as indicated by the skin that Jody discovered beneath Meyer’s fingernails when she did the scrapings on scene. Clint had requested DNA analysis, knowing that if he got a match, this was powerful evidence against the suspect.

  He also knew it was unlikely to be a match for Tyler Garrett, though Garrett was the man he believed was possibly behind Sonya Meyer’s murder. Garrett had even come to the crime scene, supposedly at the behest of the councilman who’d been involved with the young woman. Garrett’s presence contaminated the scene and would negate the value of most physical evidence that placed him there. Skin beneath the victim’s nails would be difficult to explain, however.

  Clint read the lab results.

  DNA Extraction from sample 13B, 13C, and 13D: Successful.

  DNA Analysis: Complete

  CODIS Database Search: Match Successful

  Subject Identified: Ezekiel Hetzel

  “Ezekiel Hetzel,” Clint murmured. The name sounded familiar, but at the moment he couldn’t place it. It didn’t matter, though. The lab report included his basic information, so Clint entered his criminal identification number into the local computer system. His disappointment that the match hadn’t miraculously been to Tyler Garrett was tempered by the fact that there was a match. While it didn’t give him a silver bullet for his case against Garrett, the match was a huge development for the Meyer case itself.

  He found Hetzel in the computer system. The man’s alias of “Skunk” was listed along with his birthdate, last known address, and physical descriptors. His most recent arrests also appeared on the first page of the record. But Clint was drawn to the field he habitually checked first: status. Often, he discovered people he was interested in were currently incarcerated or wanted on outstanding warrants. When he saw the status of Ezekiel Hetzel, he frowned.

  Status: Deceased

  Hetzel was dead.

  Clint noted the date of the entry and saw that it was only a couple of weeks after the Meyer homicide. The timing seemed suspicious to him, but he knew that criminals led dangerous lives. With a click, he accessed the official report of Hetzel’s death. The attending detective was Leanne Hollander. Clint skimmed through her description of the scene. Hetzel had been found in the basement of an abandoned home at the bottom of a short flight of stairs. The body was estimated to be at least ten days old at the time of discovery. Cause of death was difficult to determine at the scene, but the autopsy later revealed a broken neck with some indications of strangling as well.

  Someone choked him and threw him down the stairs. Clint flipped through the remainder of the pages until he reached the original patrol report. The responding officer’s name blared at him from the screen.

  Tyler Garrett.

  A small thrill went through him. He quickly read Garrett’s account. While on his way to conduct follow up on a hit-and-run, he claimed to have been flagged down by a citizen. The citizen complained of a suspicious smell coming from a nearby
abandoned house. Garrett investigated and discovered the deceased.

  Clint sat back, thinking. The chain of events cascaded through his mind.

  Ezekiel Hetzel murders Sonya Meyer.

  Tyler Garrett shows up and uses a pretense to intrude onto the homicide scene.

  Ezekiel Hetzel is murdered within days.

  Tyler Garrett discovers Hetzel’s body weeks later.

  The events had to be connected. There was just too much coincidence at play for it to be otherwise. Even the location Hetzel was discovered convinced Clint of this. He’d followed Garrett to several different abandoned houses throughout Spokane. Commonly called zombie houses, these empty homes once belonged to people who were foolish enough to use easy credit to punch above their financial weight class. When the real estate crisis hit, and they found themselves upside down in their dream home, foreclosure was the result. The bank had owned hundreds of these properties throughout Spokane in the immediate aftermath of the crisis, and Clint reckoned there were still dozens of them scattered throughout the city. These zombie houses afforded many criminals a safe place away from prying eyes where they could do their dirty deeds. Garrett was no different.

  Clint believed Garrett met his cohorts inside these houses and wouldn’t be surprised at all if he hid drugs or money there, too. And though he didn’t recognize the address where Hetzel was found, he was certain it was one of Garrett’s haunts. When he needed to dispose of Hetzel, he’d chosen that location to do it.

  But can you prove it?

  That was the question, the challenge he had been unable to overcome for two years. Were these facts suspicious? Certainly. Did they prove anything? Not by themselves. But in Garrett’s case, seeming coincidence after coincidence had occurred. At what point was there enough circumstantial evidence for even a skeptical mind to accept his culpability?

  Who was Hetzel to Garrett? Clint suspected the man was just another lackey, perhaps a precursor to Ellis. But why would Garrett have sent Hetzel to murder Sonya Meyer? As a favor to Councilman Hahn?

  The trail of breadcrumbs certainly seemed to lead there. The connection between Meyer, the victim, and Hetzel, her attacker, was now concrete. A defense attorney might argue that skin from Hetzel under Meyer’s fingernails only proved that she scratched him, not that he murdered her. But Clint thought the evidence was damning. The connection to Garrett, however, was a tenuous one. Garrett had discovered Hetzel’s body in the course of his duties as a police officer, that was all.

  Clint searched through the report for the name of the concerned citizen who had alerted Garrett to the body. There was no listing in the section for persons involved. Then he found Garrett’s convenient explanation in the officer’s own narrative:

  Upon ascertaining that the victim inside the abandoned residence was deceased, I notified dispatch of the situation and the need for investigative follow-up. I then returned to my vehicle to further interview the yet-unidentified complainant who had alerted me to the suspicious smell at the house. However, she was no longer in the area, and my attempts to locate her were not successful.

  Clint shook his head. He doubted very much that this anonymous citizen actually existed. He found it far more likely that Garrett himself had killed Hetzel in the aftermath of the Meyer murder, and left the body in the abandoned house to be discovered at a later date. But once more, what he believed was still a far cry from what he could prove. And if he was unable to link Garrett to the murder, then Garrett’s connection to the councilman was unimportant.

  He rose from his chair and began pacing the short stretch of floor behind his desk. This latest development was one more in a case full of them. He wondered if he had lost perspective, due to being so close to the facts for so long. Perhaps there was probable cause, and he wasn’t seeing it. Or maybe he didn’t have anything but steam, and he wasn’t seeing that.

  Walk through it, he told himself.

  Make the case.

  Clint stopped pacing and sat. He flipped to a new page of his legal pad and started to make notes. He didn’t bother writing in code, preferring to use all his energy to consider the case. He could shred the notes afterward, anyway.

  He imagined standing, file in hand, before a skeptical prosecutor with no foreknowledge of the case. What would it take to convince her to charge Garrett? What gave him not just probable cause, but enough for a jury to convict Garrett beyond a reasonable doubt?

  Clint sorted his case into bullet points, occasionally drawing an arrow to move one point higher or lower in the list. He noted the source of each piece of evidence, and what its impact was. He scribbled furiously for twenty nonstop minutes, before leaning back and looking at what he had.

  The case was sprawling, a fact he knew would work against them when things eventually went before a jury. As he examined his bullet points, he realized that it could be divided into three separate prongs.

  The Ocampo drug conspiracy.

  The Sonya Meyer homicide.

  The ambush and murder of Officer Gary Stone.

  One, two, three.

  In the Meyer homicide, he’d received evidence that seemingly solved the crime, or at least the question of a perpetrator. Hetzel’s connection to Garrett suggested the motive behind the murder, as well. Clint wasn’t sure how much more he could accomplish on this case as it stood alone but knew it would eventually fold into his larger investigation.

  Clint shook his head. It was a lot for someone to take in if that person hadn’t been part of the situation from the very beginning. The Tyler Garrett saga had been long and twisting, but with two consistent outcomes. Garrett left chaos in his wake, and yet Garrett seemed to get away at each turn.

  The thought burned darkly in Clint’s gut. If there was one thing he was certain of in this world, it was that it was an unfair place in need of justice. And Tyler Garrett was in need of more justice than most.

  Clint wanted to bring it to him.

  He turned his eye toward the evidence pertaining to the Ocampo prong. He knew that Garrett had been in league with Ernesto Ocampo, a drug dealer. Along with Detectives Talbott and Pomeroy, they’d ran a small drug operation. When Garrett decided to cut out his partners and deal directly with Ocampo, the pair of detectives responded by luring him into an ambush. The trap failed, and the bait, Todd Trotter, was killed. That is what started the entire shit storm two years ago.

  Talbott upped the stakes when he planted drugs in Garrett’s house. It was clear to Clint that Talbott was betting the drugs were enough to either get Garrett out of the way or bully him back into line.

  He lost that bet. When Talbott confronted Garrett outside of a Liberty Lake apartment, Garrett returned fire and killed him. All the witnesses said a black man shot in self-defense, but none of them were able to identify Garrett. This included Derek Tillman, Garrett’s high school friend, outside whose apartment this deadly encounter just happened to occur.

  Can you prove it? Any of it?

  “No,” Clint grunted. Pomeroy had confessed everything to him shortly before his supposed suicide, making the confession useless to him now. Talbott was dead, too. Tillman refused to talk at the scene, and Clint doubted his position had softened over time. That left Ocampo, but Garrett had made short work of him, too.

  Along with three others, Ocampo was murdered in his north Spokane home. Clint knew it had been Garrett, but what evidence did he truly have?

  He scanned the pages he’d written, searching for the answer. Nona Henry? She was an eyewitness to Garrett going into and then leaving Ocampo’s residence at the time of the quadruple homicide. On the surface, this seemed compelling. But there were problems with it. Henry was elderly and her eyesight was less than stellar. She had seen Garrett at a distance. Garrett was black and she was white, and defense attorneys had been very successful in pointing out how inaccurate witnesses were when making an identification of someone outside the witness’s own race. Besides that, due to the media coverage of the Trotter shooting and subsequent events,
Garrett’s image had been plastered all over television for several days. His face would be familiar to her because of that. All these facts stacked up against Henry’s positive identification. It wasn’t enough to completely negate it, at least in Clint’s mind, but it was enough that her identification couldn’t be the centerpiece of his case.

  What else did he have to link together this little cabal, then? If the drugs found at the Pomeroy scene were ever tested and shown to match the drugs at the Ocampo scene, that would link Pomeroy and Ocampo, but not Garrett. He had to link Garrett to Ocampo, and Nona Henry’s fragile identification wasn’t enough.

  Clint had long suspected that Garrett had used the same gun when defending himself against Talbott and when he killed Ocampo. The lab should have made that connection by now, but he hadn’t heard anything about it. Perhaps Marty got the results and kept them to himself, but such a connection would be big news, so he doubted it.

  Of course, even if bullets from both scenes were conclusively proven to come from the same gun, what was there to say that Garrett fired that gun?

  Nothing.

  That was the problem. Much of his evidence was his own testimony, which he knew would make any prosecutor hesitate. Relying on a detective to make a case sometimes worked but if a jury failed to connect with the detective or if just one juror didn’t like or believe that detective, the case was shot. That’s why forensic evidence and witness testimony were paramount.

  He shook his head. He didn’t have much in the way of forensic evidence or witness testimonial evidence. But circumstantial? There was plenty of that. Talbott was shot by a black male outside Derek Tillman’s apartment. Derek Tillman was a friend of Garrett’s. Then Ocampo was killed, and Nona Henry identified Garrett entering and exiting the house. Taken individually, perhaps those facts remain unconvincing. But at a certain point, they begged the question: how likely was it that this exact confluence of events occurred, all centering around one man, and yet remained mere coincidence? The sheer volume of the coincidences added up to correlation.