by Dale Mayer
He motioned at the chair across from him. “Close the door, Morgan.”
She walked in, closed the door, then sat down and sipped her coffee.
“Why the hell aren’t you quaking in your boots?”
“Because I’m right, and I know it. So do you, Sergeant,” she said calmly. “You could protect your friends, and I could protect mine, but, at the end of the day, the truth has to come out.”
He glared at her, and then his shoulders slumped. “I just talked to him. He was yelling and screaming at me pretty hard.”
“I don’t care. He’s not being cooperative. We’ve got three dead kids, not even in a week, and, for all we know, this has been going on for ten years up there.”
“He’s sending over the files by courier.”
“That’s not good enough, sir. For all we know, he’s not letting us see way more, protecting his rich donors. He wanted to go through the complaints first. I was supposed to have them last night, and, for some reason, he’s stalling.”
Colby stared at her in shock.
“Yeah, I assume he’s pulling out the complaints that might reflect badly on any of the wealthy donors’ fine upstanding offspring.”
Colby picked up the phone, while she sat here, and called Dr. Agress back. “Hey, make sure you send all complaints. No cleaning of this pile is allowed.”
She heard the dean’s loud protest on the other end of the line.
“No. Listen to me. The warrant is already being issued, and Detective Morgan is coming up there. No courier. You should have been sending copies to another department as well. The legal department if nothing else. This is no longer secret. It needs to be dealt with. You give those complaints to her, all of them, or we’ll have a bigger problem than you’re prepared to deal with. If there’s nothing to hide, then we won’t need to keep them.” With that, he hung up. “Go get them.”
She nodded and walked out. As she returned to the squad room, she put down her coffee and grabbed her keys and her jacket.
Rodney immediately hopped to his feet. “And?”
“I’m going to get all the files from the damn Dr. Agress.” And she walked out.
Rodney raced behind her. “I’m coming.”
“You can, but I’ll also stop and see where Pamela is.”
“Did you find out?”
“Nope, but I’ll go to her husband’s house and then her mother’s house. Pamela’s got to be at one of those two places, or else she’s been locked up somewhere. We need to find her because now that’s become a critical issue too.” She walked like a woman on a mission, but, when she got outside, she swore and threw up her hands.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“I left my car at home.”
“Perfect. I’ll drive.” When they got into his vehicle, he looked over at her. “We were all talking about how you burned Colby.”
“And I shouldn’t have.”
“Actually, as it turned out, you should have. It couldn’t have been easy, and I don’t know how he took it, but I know he would respect you for doing what you thought was right.”
“Maybe. I expected to get fired.”
“You didn’t get fired,” he said quietly, “or did you?” He looked at her sharply.
She shook her head. “No. He contacted Dr. Agress, and then, after Colby and I talked, he called him a second time.”
“Good, that means that he knows you’re in the right and that you’ll do the job, regardless of who it offends.”
“That’s one way to look at it,” she said, with half a smile.
When they got to the the Faculty of Arts offices, Dr. Agress wasn’t there, but his executive assistant was waiting for them. She looked at Kate and pointed to two boxes. “That’s all of them.”
“So how do I know that it’s all of them?” Kate calmly faced her.
“Well, of course it is.” The assistant looked surprised.
“You’ve lied to me before.”
At that, the woman’s face flushed and then turned white. She sat down in her chair. “You can check the files, depending on the scope of the warrant, but you can’t take anything else away, except for these, without Dr. Agress’s permission.”
“I also want digital copies of all the emails.”
At that, the woman’s jaw dropped. “But there are hundreds of them.”
“And I’m sure you have them all in a folder,” Kate said.
“Why, yes, of course we do.”
“Good, so zip them up and send them.” Kate put her card down in front of the woman. “Send them all to this email address.”
“Is that really necessary?”
“We have two dead students gone in three days alone. All three dead students happened in the last eight days. So, what do you think?”
At that, the woman pinched her lips together and started typing. “Yes, I understand.” She sent the dean a copy of the message. “I don’t even know if Dr. Agress has seen these.”
“Has he?”
She shook her head. “Not most of them, no.”
“Exactly, so maybe it’s time he took a closer look at what’s been happening under his nose.”
“He’s a good man,” she said defiantly.
“I’m glad to hear that because I’m counting on him to do the right thing at this point.” Kate stood here and waited until the woman was done.
“Okay, they’ve been sent,” she said.
“Good. We’ll take these boxes. They will be returned to you, if we don’t find anything we need. If I find anything incomplete, I’ll be back. Please make sure that you’re complying with what you’ve been asked to do.”
The woman nodded.
“And, if it’s not what we’re asking you to do, you need to understand that going against the law right now won’t go well for you.”
The woman looked at her resentfully. “I owe my allegiance to the dean, who gave me this job.”
“Yeah, I get how you might think that. But, with three university kids dead already, it would be awfully nice if somebody at this university would give a damn about their deaths.” And, with that, Kate swept up one of the boxes in her arms, as Rodney grabbed the other one. Then they turned and walked out. Once they were outside, he nudged her shoulder.
“You really do have a flair for drama.” He practically beamed.
She frowned. “No, it’s not that. I just have a nose for the truth, and it really pisses me off when people intentionally skirt around the edges of it to get to a place that’s more convenient for them.”
He laughed. “Personally I think that’s what everybody does.”
“Of course they do. But, when it’s important and when they get in my way”—she shook her head—“I just see red.”
“I get that.” He put the boxes in the trunk of his car. “There’s more here than I expected.”
“It’s probably a hell of a lot more than he wanted to give us too,” she snapped. As they drove off the campus, she said, “Pull up here at the pizza joint, would you? I just want to take a look around.”
They both hopped out, and he asked, “Is this the place where that ex-cop hangs out?”
She nodded. “Yes.” She walked into the small restaurant, Rodney following her, got herself a coffee, and ordered one for Rodney. There was a different guy at the counter this time. She looked at him for a moment. “Are you the owner?”
He looked up, smiled. “Yeah. I’ve been here for twenty years.”
“I guess you’ve seen all the accidents on this corner, huh?”
“Yeah, bad news. Some have been way worse than others. That poor woman with the baby last year? That one just broke my heart.”
“Do you know what happened?”
“I have a theory of what happened.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“She was upset and distracted. The weather was terrible. She didn’t hear the car coming and rode right out into the street. And that was it.”
Kate nodded. �
�I’m sorry to hear that. It’s got to be tough.”
“It was tough for those of us with scars. But a guy was sitting here at the time. His son had been killed in a cycling accident a couple years ago, same spot. He was pretty upset and said somebody had to do something about it.”
She stopped, looked at him. “Do you have any idea who that was?”
He shook his head. “No, he just mentioned that his son had been killed there earlier.”
“Thank you. If I brought you some pictures, would you recognize him?”
He shrugged. “Maybe.”
“I’ll be back this afternoon.”
And, with that, she headed outside, Rodney rushing to keep up with her. As they got into the car, she said, “Let’s go check on Pamela. I’ll start researching while we drive. As I remember, the only guy killed on a bicycle was years ago. He was twenty-two and riding home from the university. He lived close by, within a few blocks, I think.”
“That would be him, I’ll bet. What was his name?”
“Vance, I think, or something like that.” She looked it up. “Yeah, it’s Vance.” She checked further. “There’s a picture of him but not of his father.”
“You should pull up his driver’s license photo at least, if you can narrow down his name.”
At that, she searched, and soon she said, “Turn the car around, Rodney.” Without question, he immediately pulled a U-turn. “Take us back to that pizza place.”
She walked in a moment later, and, on her cell phone, she had the picture of the man. “Is this him?”
The owner frowned, looked at her phone, and his eyebrows shot up. “Yeah, it’s him all right. You know what? I see him around here every once in a while.”
“Any idea when you saw him last?”
“Sometime just after that last accident. He was swearing pretty heavily about it. I heard a lot about the efforts to get the traffic pattern changed, but he said that it didn’t go through.”
“I know. A lot of people are saying that. Thank you for your time.” She then turned and walked away.
*
“Is it him?” Rodney asked, as Kate got back in.
She nodded. “It is, but I need an address. Apparently he lives somewhere around this area.” She quickly mapped out the address from the driver’s license data. “I don’t know if it’s current or not, but maybe it’s time to find out.”
Rodney nodded, and, with the address entered into her phone, she quickly gave him directions on how to get there. When they pulled up to a small apartment building only about six stories high, she looked up at him. “That’s interesting. He lives close by, as if he can’t leave the area where his son died.”
“Think about it. If that happened to be his only child …”
“I don’t remember that from the case file, but it’s got to be hard for them to live right by the scene of the accident—but maybe it’s hard to leave it as well.”
“And it probably burns inside in a pretty ugly way,” he said quietly. They hopped out and then walked up to the address on the driver’s license. There was no answer, and she leaned on the doorbell a little bit harder.
Rodney turned toward her. “What do you think?”
“We might have to knock on a couple doors in the neighborhood and see if they know who lives here.”
Just then the door opened and a scraggly guy stood in front of her.
He glared at her. “What are you doing here?”
She recognized him as Bill, the ex-cop, the guy she’d seen at the pizza parlor. “Hi,” she said.
He just glared, but no fear was in his gaze. There was no sign of having been caught or anything.
“We want to talk to you.”
“That’s nice, but I don’t want to talk to you.”
“We can call you down to the station, if you don’t want to talk to us here.” Kate hardened the tone of her voice. “I guess, looking around this area, maybe you don’t want your neighbors to know that we have some questions for you.”
“I don’t give a fuck about my neighbors. I haven’t given a fuck about anything for a very long time.” She looked at him in surprise. He shrugged. “What’s to care about? I lost my son.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” she murmured. “You didn’t mention that when we were talking.”
“I don’t tell everyone. Particularly not nosy cops. And nobody can get the government to change the goddamned traffic pattern.”
“Was he killed because of the traffic pattern?”
“He was, and a couple of the others were too, but not enough for the city to actually care.”
“What do you mean, care?” she said.
“As long as there’s enough justification for the city to not do it, they never will.”
“I see. So I guess you would do a lot in order to make that traffic pattern change.”
“A hell of a lot,” Bill said, with a nod. “But it’s not likely to happen.”
“Maybe it takes more accidents,” she said.
“What? That’s a hell of a thing to wish for.” He stared at her.
“I’m not wishing for it, not by any means. I just wondered if people are trying to make it look like more and more accidents are there, hoping the city government would step up and make the changes.”
He stared at her uncomprehendingly.
She turned to look at her partner; he had suddenly stumbled into what she was getting at. His eyebrows shot up. “That’s an interesting idea,” Rodney said slowly.
“You’re talking nonsense,” Bill said, then looked up and down the hallway. “Haven’t you got anything better to do with your time?”
“Better than solving these crimes? No, I live and breathe them.”
“You guys do a hell of a job, do you? Right,” he said sarcastically.
“And yet the guy who hit your son was drunk and has served time for what was his third DUI.”
“Did you hear yourself? Third DUI.”
She nodded. “I get it, Bill. The law sucks when it comes to a lot of drunk drivers. He got off, and, because he got off on previous ones, he was out again and available to hit your son.”
“Exactly,” he sneered.
“So, I would think you’d be trying to change the drunk driving laws instead.”
“What’s to change?” he asked. “Nobody gives a damn. If it’s not their own child, nobody gives a crap.”
There was so much truth to his tale, so much woe in his voice, that she had to wonder. “Have you seen anybody else hanging around this intersection? Anybody who looks suspicious?”
He stared at her. “What? Now you want me to start tailing other people?”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “What if somebody—potentially somebody like you, who lost someone—is trying to make this whole traffic pattern thing change in order to save lives?”
“Then go ahead. I’m all for it.”
“But you didn’t have a hand in that, right?”
Bill stared at her in shock. “What? You talking about staging accidents? Hell no, and anybody who’s lost somebody wouldn’t do that.”
“I’m not so sure about that. People’s motives can get pretty twisted when they’re emotionally overwrought.”
“Maybe, definitely a few people are pretty overwrought. I saw the lady whose kid got killed in that accident last year. She was absolutely beside herself because she’d been riding her bike with her daughter.”
“I know about her too,” she said quietly. “When did you see her?”
“She seemed to haunt the place for a while. But she’d been hurt herself as well and was losing her sight. She was in poor shape. It was pretty sad. I mean, you think about that, and it’s not only the loss of life but also a loss of her way of life.”
“Agreed,” Rodney said at her side, staring at him. “We’re just wondering if something a little more nefarious is going on, like over the last two biking accidents.”
“You think that somebody might be still ha
nging around, somebody who was involved in it?”
She nodded. “But the cameras are very limited, and the observers aren’t very helpful.”
He snorted. “That’s nothing new.”
“I’m wondering about you. If you could tell me where you were during the accidents, then it would help us clear you as a viable suspect.”
“I was in the damn pizza parlor. It happened right in front of me.”
“And you can give me the actual details, can you?”
He shrugged. “I could, except that it’s something so horrific, I really don’t like bringing it back into my mind. I’m sure you guys think that’s absolutely stupid, but reliving that just brings my son’s death back for me.”
“And I get that, but you might want to consider the reality that there could be somebody out there causing these accidents and hurting other kids.”
Bill paled slightly. “Now that you mention it”—he stared off at nothing really and then turned to look back inside his apartment—“I did get an email from somebody that was a little odd.”
“From whom?”
“They just called themselves a concerned citizen.”
“Do you still have it?”
He frowned. “I don’t know. I was pretty upset about it.”
“What was it all about?”
“They wondered about changing the traffic pattern, after the proposal had already been rejected. Something about by stronger means.”
“That is something I need to see,” she said instantly.
He frowned at her, and she shook her head. “Please, this is not the time to fool around. There’s already been a couple deaths in the last handful of days, I don’t want more to happen and have more families torn apart.”
“God, no,” he said in shock, “but I don’t even know if I’ve still got it.”
“Can you take a look?”
“I guess, but I don’t understand why somebody would be doing this. When you say that, what do you mean? Are they trying to cause accidents?”
“Exactly,” she said instantly.
“But that’s just sick. Who’s sick enough to do that?”
“Somebody who’s broken over the loss of a loved one maybe,” she said quietly, “and that is something you should understand, Bill.”