False Witness

by Andrew Grant

  “Devereaux?” It was Kendrick’s voice, somewhere behind him. “What are you doing here? Why don’t you ever answer your phone?”

  Devereaux closed his eyes and counted to ten. “All right, Tim. What do you want?”

  “I have good news.” Kendrick came right up close. “My granddad’s woken up.”

  “And the good news would be…?” Devereaux folded his arms.

  “He’s woken up!” Kendrick took a step back toward the entrance. “He’s ready to talk. He has the proof you wanted. So come on. Let’s go!”

  Devereaux didn’t move. “Now?”

  “Why not?” Kendrick took another step. “You said you wanted proof your father was innocent. My granddad has it. He’s two minutes away. What are you waiting for?”

  —

  Chris Lambert was sitting upright in an armchair next to his neatly made bed when Devereaux followed Kendrick into his room off the basement corridor. The scent of the air was as nauseating as usual. The underground environment, as oppressive. But Lambert was looking much healthier. His skin seemed less transparent. He’d been shaved. His face even looked a little plumper than it had a couple of days earlier.

  “Nearly dying seems to agree with you, Lambert.” Devereaux stayed near the door. “Why not take it a step further next time?”

  “Devereaux, don’t—” Kendrick’s hands balled themselves into fists.

  “It’s all right, Tim.” Lambert’s voice was stronger now, too. “Let him get his snarkiness out of the way. He’ll be thanking us in a minute. And paying us a lot of money.”

  “Don’t hold your breath.” Devereaux leaned against the doorframe. “Or on second thought…”

  “Tim?” Lambert nodded. “Go ahead. Show him.”

  Kendrick took an iPad from the shelf under the nightstand, called up a picture—a copy of an old Polaroid photograph—and handed it to Devereaux.

  “A desk.” Devereaux studied the image for a few seconds. “With some papers on it. Damn. If only I’d brought my checkbook…”

  “Look closer.” Lambert leaned forward in his chair. “Enlarge the picture. You see the folder? The page sticking out from underneath it?”

  Devereaux zoomed in on the center of the image. He saw that there was a piece of paper, its lower three-quarters covered by a plain manila file. Someone had added four column headings in flowing, old-fashioned handwriting. The first was labeled Date. Then Officers. Summary. And Source. Devereaux scanned across the top row: April–May 1973. HT & JJ. Dealer disappeared—body found in abandoned furnace—no arrests. Scorpio.

  “You know who HT is, right?” Lambert shot Devereaux a smug smile.

  Devereaux tossed the iPad back to Kendrick without saying a word. He guessed that the entry referred to Hayden Tomcik, the detective who—along with his partner Jim Jenner—had broken the news of his father’s death. Tomcik had looked out for Devereaux in the years that followed, eventually pulling the strings that enabled Devereaux to enter the police academy at a time when life behind bars had seemed a more likely fate. Devereaux owed Tomcik his life. But he also knew that Tomcik was no angel. He’d read Tomcik’s private files. He knew that back in the day when officers had a little more latitude to play with, Tomcik wasn’t one to stand back and watch while a violent criminal slipped through the cracks in the system. If the law failed to deliver justice, Tomcik would find another way to ensure it was served. A drug pusher found dead in a furnace? Sure. If a witness had been bribed, say, or jury members intimidated, putting an untraceable nine in the scumbag’s head and leaving his body to rot was something Tomcik could have lived with. He wouldn’t have welcomed it. But he’d have preferred it to the alternative. Devereaux didn’t condone it. But he certainly wasn’t happy about Lambert trying to profit from it by peddling the gory details.

  “H. T.” Lambert left an exaggerated gap between the initials as if spelling them out for an idiot child. “Hayden Tomcik. Asshole extraordinaire. Bane of my existence, for more than half my life. Corrupt piece of shit. And the guy you treated like a hero—even though he’s the one who killed your father. You did know that?”

  “I know everything there is to know about Tomcik and my father.” Devereaux thrust his hands into his pockets. “There’s no mileage in it for you. You’re wasting my time, just like I knew you would. As for Tomcik—he was a thousand times the cop you ever were. You want to build yourself up by knocking down a dead man’s memory? That’s between you and your conscience. If you have one. If you weren’t so washed up and I thought you could take it, I’d give you an ass kicking you’d never forget. As it is, I’m out of here. Don’t send your grandson after me again. If you do, maybe I’ll give him what you deserve.”

  “You still don’t get it, do you?” Lambert shook his head as if genuinely surprised. “This list of Tomcik’s crimes. It doesn’t come from the department. Tomcik was too well connected for any of his activities to see the light of day. This comes from an independent source. It’s thoroughly researched. It’s based on firsthand testimony. And it’s comprehensive. It doesn’t just cover the odd missing drug dealer, who no one was ever going to lose sleep over. No. It contains the mother lode. It proves that what I told you Thursday night is true. That Tomcik was the worst kind of scumbag there is. That he murdered a fellow cop.”

  “Which fellow cop?” Devereaux’s voice was loaded with skepticism. “When?”

  “John Devereaux. 1976. I think you know the exact date.”

  “Rubbish.” Devereaux was scathing. “Raymond Kerr killed John Devereaux.”

  “Sure.” Lambert nodded. “That’s what the report said. What the Officer Involved Shooting Board signed off on. But it’s not what happened.”

  “So what did happen?” Devereaux couldn’t resist taking the bait.

  “It’s simple. John Devereaux was on to Tomcik and his partner, so they killed him. Then they set up Raymond Kerr to take the fall. They pegged Kerr as a notorious serial killer. But he was no such thing.”

  “The killings were real.” Devereaux levered himself away from the wall. “There are crime scene photos. I’ve seen them. So have you.”

  “Right.” Lambert nodded again. “But the killer was a young guy Raymond Kerr had been trying to help. John Devereaux had recently shot the kid, creating the perfect apparent motive for Kerr to take revenge.”

  “Raymond Kerr was not the innocent party here.” Devereaux folded his arms.

  “He was.” Lambert was insistent. “The poor guy had a hell of a life. His wife had died, leaving just him and a little boy. Aka, you. Who was now orphaned. Which was a problem for Tomcik. What was he to do? Who’d take in the spawn of a mass murderer? The embodiment of evil? No one would. But the kid of a hero cop? That was a different proposition. How did he get away with fudging the paperwork? I guess he had experience with that. It was easier in those days. And the circumstances helped, like you being young and never having been to school.”

  Devereaux was silent.

  “Don’t deny you know. I spoke to Bronson Segard.” Segard had taken over as Tomcik’s partner after Jim Jenner was killed.

  “Raymond Kerr was my father.” Devereaux spoke quietly. “But you’re wrong about the rest.”

  “Why would you cling to that?” Lambert made as if to slam his palm into his forehead. “Why would you choose to believe that your father was a monster? I guess if you think that’s true, and you’re OK with it, then walk away. But I know this: Any normal person would want to know the truth. And I can prove what that is.”

  “You’ve shown me part of one page.” Devereaux rubbed his eyes. “That proves nothing. What more is there?”

  “There’s plenty more.” Lambert grinned. “Pay me, and I’ll give it to you.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “Yes it does.” Devereaux paused. “You’re asking for a lot of money. I need to know what you’re selling is genuine. Think of it like art. You’ve got to prove the prov
enance.”

  “Fair enough. I got it from a journalist.”

  “I’m walking away…”

  “Wait.” Lambert held up his hands. “It wasn’t just any journalist. It was Frederick McKinzie.”

  Frederick McKinzie was a legend in Birmingham. He’d been the main man at the Tribune throughout some of the most tumultuous decades of the twentieth century. When McKinzie spoke, people listened. Even cops. They simply didn’t make reporters like him anymore.

  “Frederick McKinzie’s been dead for years, and none of this was ever published. How did you get hold of his material? How do you know it’s real?”

  “I saw it with my own eyes. I took that picture myself. In his study. You see, he was investigating police corruption, back in the late seventies. Naturally, Tomcik was a main focus. Not many people dared to tell the truth, but I did. Frederick heard about me. He reached out. He asked me to help. And he interviewed me, more than once.”

  “And you repaid that trust by stealing his work?”

  “I’d have been stupid not to. Most revelations about Tomcik got buried. I hoped McKinzie would be different, but look what happened. His story got squashed. I don’t know how. Tomcik must have gotten to him. Or one of his buddies did. That guy was like an octopus—he had arms everywhere.”

  “What did you do? Break into his office and copy his files?”

  “No.” Lambert couldn’t resist a smug smile. “I did it when he invited me to his house, to do the first interview. He got called to the door, and I took pictures.”

  “He just got called to the door in the middle of an important interview?”

  “It could be that a uniform happened to call round with something that couldn’t wait. Tomcik wasn’t the only one who knew how to work an angle. The picture you saw—that was a polaroid, so I could put everything back in the right place. The rest are of McKinzie’s research. Every detail. Every page.”

  “So there are hard copies? It’s not all just in your head?”

  Lambert winked. “You don’t expect me to show all my cards on the first hand?”

  “If you have all this information, why did you sit on it for so long?”

  “That wasn’t my plan. I intended to use it right away. So I told Tomcik what I had, to give him the chance to do the right thing.”

  “To try to blackmail him, you mean.”

  “Tom-ay-to, tom-ah-to. Whatever. That’s water under the bridge. The point is, he refused. Certain threats were made. On my side, I was committed to exposing the truth. And I figured, how could I do that if the next body to show up in an abandoned furnace was mine?”

  “So you’re a chicken. You waited for Tomcik to die, then came after me.”

  “It wasn’t like that.” Lambert shook his head. “The truth is, I didn’t realize exactly what I had. I’d kept the copies of the files in case a chance ever came up to use them against Tomcik. When he died, I figured I might as well clear them out. But first I read through them, one final time. And I noticed something that had escaped me when I was just focusing on Tomcik. It was in your dad’s case. There were several mentions of Raymond Kerr having a little boy, named Cooper. There were no records of John Devereaux having any children. Not until after he was killed. Then there were all kinds of stories about his one orphaned son. That didn’t raise any red flags when I thought Devereaux had been killed by Kerr. But when I discovered that both of them had been killed by Tomcik, and connected that with the way Tomcik took so much interest in Cooper Devereaux? It was a lightbulb moment. It got me thinking. Was this more of Tomcik’s shenanigans? But why would he bother with it? Did he have a guilty conscience? Or was it a more practical issue? Because of a cute little orphan boy? That’s a loose end. And if there was one thing that Tomcik never did, it was leave a loose end. That’s one reason he stayed out of jail.”

  “So you figured this out and thought you’d use it to blackmail me?”

  “Not blackmail, no.” Lambert took a moment to think. “Blackmail’s far too cynical a word. It was more like making valuable information available to the person who’d benefit the most, at a reasonable rate. People pay for family trees and DNA tests, don’t they? What I’m offering you is much more significant.”

  “Except that I already know.”

  “No.” Lambert was emphatic. “You only have half the story. The sad half. I can give you the happy ending. I might not like you, Devereaux. But I don’t believe you’re the kind of cop who can walk away from cast-iron proof of murder. Specially when the victim is another cop. And the truth will redeem your own father.”

  “You’re certain McKinzie’s material is genuine?”

  “One hundred percent. I saw it with my own eyes. And Frederick McKinzie wasn’t a guy who made stuff up. You know that. So. Do we have a deal?”

  “Maybe.” Devereaux turned to leave the room. “Give me a couple of days.”

  Saturday. Late evening.

  Alexandra could not lie still.

  She’d given her statement to the officers who’d intervened in the carjacking—her lawyer’s brain kicking in and marshaling the facts into a clear, succinct, and above all brief account of what had happened after leaving the restaurant—and politely declined their offer of a ride home. She realized it was probably illogical, but was hoping that the less time she spent with the police, the lower the chances would be of word reaching Devereaux about her involvement. When she got to her house she paid the babysitter, giving her a huge tip and practically bundling her out the door. She checked on Nicole, resisting the temptation to wake her daughter and hug her closer and tighter than ever before. She hurried to the bathroom, dumping her clothes in the laundry and rapidly removing all traces of makeup. Then she dove into bed and pulled the covers high up over her head.

  It was the images of movement that were agitating her now, crowding into her head, causing her to jerk and twist as she tried in vain to escape them. She kept seeing the guy in the hockey mask, appearing from nowhere. Over and over. Then she saw the gun in his hand, snapping upward and pointing at her face. And she saw Tim Jensen, pulling his arm away from her waist and scuttling out of harm’s way. Trying to hide behind her. Practically using her as a shield. Had he just pulled his arm back? Or had he actually pushed her forward? She hadn’t fully registered it in the moment, but now the individual scenes were running in a continuous loop in her memory, and she couldn’t be sure.

  Alexandra summoned every ounce of self-control she possessed and gradually managed to slow the images down. Finally she stopped them altogether. But that didn’t bring the relief she was hoping for. Because she was left with another picture in her head. Something she’d seen on the TV display in the back of the taxi that had brought her home. A segment from the local news. A report about a house fire. The subtitles described how a police officer had run into the burning building and rescued its owner. They were superimposed over footage a neighbor had taken of the aftermath, using his cellphone. The film was grainy and unstable, but the officer’s smoke-stained face was clearly recognizable.

  It was Devereaux.

  Devereaux had run into the flames to save a stranger. Jensen had run away from a man with a plastic gun, to save himself.

  Alexandra didn’t need one of Nicole’s puzzle books to spot the difference between those two pictures.

  Saturday. Late evening.

  Devereaux reached the line of trees at the side of Sixth Avenue, put his hand in his pocket to find his keys, then paused. Two guys were standing next to his Porsche, in the far corner of the parking lot. They were taking far too close an interest in it. They were probably in their late teens, and both were wearing jeans and black leather jackets with the sleeves cut off. The taller one leaned in close to the passenger-side window and cupped his hand at the side of his face to defeat the reflection and get a better view inside. Then he straightened up and started talking to the other guy. He was looming over him and making a series of exaggerated gestures with his hands like a high school footba
ll coach explaining a play to a freshman quarterback. Devereaux couldn’t hear the words—he was too far away—but the game plan looked simple enough. The smaller guy was to wait for the owner to return then step out from behind the nearest tree, pretending to be hurt and attracting his attention. The taller one would hit him from behind. Then they’d take the keys and drive away. A reasonable approach, Devereaux thought. No unnecessary complications. And car security was comprehensive these days. Locks were solidly shielded, and keys had built-in transponders that were needed to activate the engine’s electrical systems. It wasn’t like back in his day, when a coat hanger and a screwdriver could get you pretty much any ride you pleased.

  Devereaux gave the two guys time to get situated, then strolled slowly toward his car. He drew level with the rear fender and right on cue the smaller guy staggered out in front of him, clutching his gut like a movie cowboy who’d lost a shootout in an old-fashioned Western. Devereaux ignored him, focusing on the reflection in the Porsche’s gleaming blue paintwork and using it to time a perfectly delivered elbow to the face of the onrushing taller guy.

  “Stand still!” Devereaux glared at the shorter guy. “Move, and you get the same treatment. Are we clear?”

  The shorter guy nodded, but Devereaux still didn’t take his eyes off him while he called Dispatch and asked for a patrol car to be sent to escort prisoners in an attempted carjacking. “I have one confirmed suspect. Possibly two.”

  Devereaux ended his call and looked down at the taller guy, who was still writhing on the ground, blood and snot pouring from his shattered nose and covering his chin and neck.