Dominion

by Randy Alcorn

  Dani threw her arms around Wilberforce and cried without reserve, her tears mingling with his. She’d rarely hugged a white man. In his hug she felt healing. In her hug he felt reward. In their hug both felt praise to Elyon.

  Ollie’s southeast Portland house was as comfortable and casual as his office, though thanks to his wife, Clarence assumed, not as messy.

  Sue Keels extended her hand, and Clarence shook it. She was light skinned, blonde, petite, almost tiny. Jake looked at both his good friends, thinking the physical contrast between them couldn’t have been more pronounced.

  “Jake’s told me all about you, Clarence,” Sue said. “And Little Finn went on and on about you. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you. I love your columns, especially on the pro-life issue. That one’s very close to my heart.” Clarence sensed her sincerity, to which he immediately warmed.

  “Sorry to cut into everybody’s weekend,” Jake said, “but Janet and I were over at Sue’s last night and the case came up. Of course, there’s a lot I don’t know, but both of you,” he looked at Ollie and Clarence, “have filled me in on some of it. When we were talking last night one thing led to another and suddenly … why don’t you fill them in, Sue? First, give them some background.”

  “Well,” Sue said, “I’m very involved in pro-life work. I go down a couple of afternoons a week to an abortion clinic to do sidewalk counseling, you know, where I talk to girls coming in for abortions. I tell them about the baby’s development, show them intrauterine photos, give them options, offer financial help, tell them about adoptions, that sort of thing. Well, anyway, in late August I was at the Lovepeace Abortion Clinic, and a girl came up by herself. That’s a little unusual. Most come in with a girlfriend, boyfriend, sister, mother, somebody. Well, this girl was really broken. When I showed her the pictures of the babies, she started crying. I asked her if she really wanted an abortion. She shook her head. I invited her to come down the street and sit in my car and talk. She did. Before I go further, I should explain that normally I treat these conversations as totally confidential. But there’s a reason I’m making an exception this time.

  “Anyway,” Sue continued, “we talked for nearly an hour, so she missed her abortion appointment. I really liked her. She was a very sharp girl. Articulate. Pretty. Poised. She said she didn’t want an abortion, but she was being pressured to get it. That’s common, of course. You’ve got a lot of girls who don’t want the abortion, but they get herded in by someone who does. I asked if the pressure was coming from her parents, and she said no, they didn’t even know she was pregnant. She said if they knew they’d be really disappointed in her. And she wondered how it would affect her plans to start college in just a few weeks.

  “She said she’d been given the money to get an abortion, and someone had made the appointment for her. I asked her if it was the father of her child. She hesitated and didn’t really answer. Later I said something about how boyfriends often push girls to get abortions, but then the girl ends up carrying most of the guilt and going through the post-abortion trauma and all that. Then she told me she didn’t have a boyfriend, which I thought was a little strange. This girl definitely wasn’t a hooker, and she didn’t strike me as someone who would sleep around. In fact, she finally told me through tears that she’d only had sex a half-dozen times, all in late June I think. She was really distraught.”

  Ollie and Clarence both leaned forward, listening intently and wondering where this was going.

  “Well,” Sue laughed, “I guess I’m babbling on, but—”

  “No, Sue,” Jake said. “It’s important. Tell them what happened next.”

  “Well, she said she didn’t want her baby to suffer for her mistake, and she thanked me for talking to her. I gave her the Crisis Pregnancy Center phone number, offered financial help, told her she needed to talk to her parents and if there were any problems at home she could come stay with me, all of that. She said actually her parents had always been supportive, and she felt sure they’d stand by her after the initial shock.

  “We really hit it off. She reminded me of my daughter Angela. I called her the next couple of days to check up on her. She said whoever had made the appointment for her found out she didn’t show up, and now she was getting a lot of pressure to abort. I encouraged her again to tell her parents because they really needed to know. Actually, I was optimistic things were going to turn out okay. In fact, we were scheduled to meet for lunch that Saturday afternoon. I was really looking forward to it. Then it all happened.”

  “What happened?” Ollie asked.

  “I’m watching the late news Friday night. The lead story comes on and they show a girl’s picture. All of a sudden they’re interviewing her friends, her principal, all of them are raving about what a wonderful girl she was, and they’re crying. I just sat there staring at the picture.” The dampness in her eyes turned to drizzle. “It was her. Just like that, this sweet young girl I liked so much, who I was going to have lunch with the next day … she was dead.”

  Ollie and Clarence turned toward each other and spoke the same words at the same moment. “Leesa Fletcher.”

  “Clarence Abernathy? This is Miles Ferguson, your brother Ellis’s attorney.”

  “What’s going on? Is Ellis okay?”

  “He’s fine. But they wouldn’t let him call you. So he called me. He says you need to come see him. He’s got some information. Says you need to talk with an inmate who goes by the name Big Dog. His real name’s Ken Gold. Ellis says you should talk to him right away.”

  Ollie and Clarence drove south toward Salem, headed to the state penitentiary.

  “We ran the plates and got some interesting results,” Ollie said. “Found out the Lexus was in Sacramento the afternoon of September 3. In fact, it’s still there.”

  “What?”

  “They sold it. Actually, they traded it in for a brand new car.” Ollie glanced down and caught a peek at his notes. “A Mercedes SL 500, sport model, with all the trimmings. Midnight blue. Bought by one Jerome Rice. Accompanied by a friend. No doubt our Robert Rose. And are you ready for this? They paid cash.”

  “For a Mercedes SL 500? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “I talked to the guy who made the sale, Fred somebody. He’s still pumped about it. At least, he was until he found out I’m a homicide detective. He gave them forty-thousand-dollars trade-in on the Lexus. Can you imagine that? That’s what I paid for my house twenty years ago. And that was the old car. To get the Mercedes they produced another thirty-two thousand. All in circulated hundred dollar bills.”

  Clarence whistled. “Thirty-two thousand cash? Wow. I can’t believe they carried that kind of money to and from Portland.”

  “Neither can I. So here’s a thought for you. They didn’t.”

  “But you said—”

  “I said they came up with thirty-two thousand cash for a car dealer in Sacramento. That doesn’t mean they had that money in the car when they came to Oregon. And they almost certainly didn’t have it in southern Oregon when they were pulled over by the cop who called me.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Officer Seymour searched the car.”

  “Don’t you need a warrant for that?”

  “Well, first he saw the marijuana pipe poking out from under the passenger seat, with the seeds in it. So, under the plain view provision he legally confiscated it. Then he asked if they had any more drugs. Naturally they said no. Then he said, ‘So you wouldn’t mind if I searched the car, would you?’ They said, no, go ahead.”

  “You mean they agreed to a search? Even when they didn’t have to?”

  “Yeah. He asked for them to open the trunk. He said they had these smirks on their faces, like they thought he was some goat-roper cop who didn’t know how to handle smart city boys. He waited till backup got there, a cover unit. Didn’t want to be bending over the trunk and have the lid slammed on him. Of course, he patted them both down. They were unarmed. One had a pocketknife, that was a
ll. He checked their wallets, escorted the passenger, the shorter guy who looked more menacing, to the backseat of his patrol car.”

  “They didn’t seem nervous?”

  “No, not at all. That tells us a lot. Number one, if they have the HK in the car or that kind of money, they don’t give permission for a search. Number two, if they do, they’re sweatin’ bullets hopin’ he won’t find their secret cache. How do you hide an HK53 and at least thirty-two thousand in one hundred dollar bills—over three hundred one hundred dollar bills? That’s a pile of money, and that’s just what they spent on the car. Who knows how much more they had? But the officer said they were cool as ice water. Like they knew he couldn’t get them for anything but a teensy little violation.”

  “I don’t get it,” Clarence said. “Then where was the gun and the money?”

  “Well, one possibility is they’re innocent and never had the gun. Okay, not entirely innocent—obviously they were up to no good to steal those plates. But maybe they didn’t do the shooting. Thing is, I ran a full listing of crimes done in Portland that same night. One armed robbery, four burglaries, a rape, two car thefts, a few miscellaneous drug deals and prostitution arrests. Quiet night. Your sister was the only homicide. The armed robber was caught, and one of the burglaries and the rape happened while Herb says these two were at Taco Bell. The other three burglaries were in the middle of the night, after your sister was killed. The largest amount of cash was six hundred dollars, plus some jewelry, a microwave, and a stereo. If they hung around to do a burglary, no way they did the shooting. You don’t pull off a major hit, then fool around with a dinky burglary. You get out of town pronto. Besides, you don’t come to Portland to do burglaries. There’s plenty of nicer homes in San Diego, L.A., and the Bay Area. I mean, we’ve had some guys fly in and pull off some major heists, but we’d know if that happened.”

  “They fly in to steal stuff?”

  “Sure. They pull off their job, go straight to the airport, they’re on their flight home and gone. Plus they earn frequent flier mileage. And sometimes get to see a movie. Then there’s complimentary beverages and peanuts. Occasionally, a nice little chocolate. Anyway, we know they didn’t do a burglary. The officer didn’t find anything when he searched their car. No TV, microwave, nothing.”

  “So where does this leave us?”

  “Well, if they stole the license plate, we know they were up to no good. If they were up to no good, the only thing we know about that they could have done was the shooting.”

  “But if they did it, they’d have the HK53, right? And the officer should have found it.”

  “You can’t hide the HK in your boxer shorts, that’s for sure. They could have gotten rid of it. Maybe sold it cheap to somebody in Portland on the way out of town, but I doubt it. Too much risk of being identified and traced. If I were them, I’d disassemble it and throw it out piece by piece, one section off the bridge into the Willamette, the others off 1-5, maybe a hundred miles apart.”

  “Would they really ditch a weapon that valuable?”

  “If they’ve got brains, yeah. Especially if they know they’re coming into some really big money. Then a weapon worth a few thousand bucks doesn’t mean much. Why risk a murder charge by hanging on to a fancy gun? Not when you can buy ten fancy guns and still have another fifteen thousand pocket change.”

  “Okay, you’re saying they were paid to kill Leesa? By whom?”

  “Well, it’s a hunch, but right now I’m thinking this may be tied to Norcoast.”

  “What?” Clarence’s eyebrows crawled up his forehead. “Norcoast? Ollie, I know neither of us likes the guy, but murder?”

  “Look, whenever a pregnant teenage girl dies, there’s always one big question. Who’s the father? Turns out Leesa didn’t have a boyfriend. And most important, Leesa and Norcoasts’ daughter, Katie, were best buddies. Leesa almost lived over at Norcoasts’ house, stayed overnight there a couple of times a week right up to June or so.”

  “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

  “Hey, I’m just saying somebody wanted to kill Leesa, and they tried it twice, assuming she didn’t take up cocaine spur of the moment. The killer succeeded the second time. Whoever was behind the thing had money, connections, and a plan. Politicians have money, connections, and plans, especially if they’ve slept with a minor and gotten her pregnant. Hey, it’s just a theory. I’m open. Do you have a better one?”

  “Not offhand.”

  “There’s more. If our boys in the Lexus did the job, they were paid big money to kill Leesa. We know they didn’t have the money when they were pulled over in southern Oregon. But we know they did by the time they bought the car, before they left Sacramento.”

  “Didn’t the car dealership have to make sure the title was clear?”

  “Sure. Everything checked out. The dealer did the paperwork—they faxed it to me. It’s standard procedure for them to photocopy the driver’s license. They faxed that too, but it’s real grainy.” Ollie pointed to his file folder. “They’re sending me a color photocopy.”

  Clarence pulled the fax and stared at the picture, wondering if he was looking at the killer.

  “Let’s get back to the Sacramento connection,” Ollie said. “What can you tell me about Sacramento?”

  “Capital city.”

  “Who lives there?” Ollie asked.

  “Lots of people.”

  “What kinds of people?”

  “All kinds,” Clarence said. “Tons of political types, for one thing.” He looked at Ollie. “Possible link to Norcoast?”

  “Why not? There’s a lot of inbreeding with politicals. May explain their mental condition. Suppose Norcoast needed somebody taken out. He’s not stupid. He’s so high profile and so much is on the line, he wouldn’t go straight to some gang member, certainly not a local. And how many L.A. gang members would he know and trust? But he might casually mention to someone with gang connections the name and address of someone he wishes would take a permanent vacation, and then say, ‘By the way, I want to give you some big money just for being my friend. No strings attached.’ Then the guy knows he’s supposed to call in some boys to get rid of his problem. The middle man can pay the guys handsomely and still keep a slug of the money for himself, while the guy who drops the hints can say he never ordered anything.”

  “You really think that’s possible?”

  “Of course it’s possible. Not probable maybe, but it’s a hunch. It fits a lot of the facts we know. That’s what detective work is about. You keep coming up with theories that fit the facts. When more facts materialize, you revise or eliminate your theories one by one. What doesn’t get eliminated is the answer. Anyway, right now I just want to find out one thing.”

  “What?”

  “Who does Reggie Norcoast know in Sacramento?”

  Ollie and Clarence walked into the prison side by side. Ellis’s visiting hours were already used up, but they’d set up an official police appointment to meet Ken Gold, a.k.a. Big Dog. It struck Clarence as ironic he was about to meet a stranger with no glass divider between them, when he hadn’t been able to touch his own brother for twenty years.

  A guard escorted Big Dog. He was medium-sized and soft-featured, contradicting his nickname. He was young but looked like a gang veteran, with a prominent scar across his chin and a crease in his jaw that looked as if a chunk of flesh had been shot out.

  “You’re Ellis’s brother?” Big Dog asked.

  Clarence nodded. “I’m Clarence. This is Ollie Chandler. Homicide detective.”

  “Okay.” Big Dog looked a little nervous. “I just got transferred in here a few weeks ago. Ellis has been talking about his sister. Well, I was there that night. I saw the guys that did it.”

  “Tell us exactly what happened,” Ollie said.

  “Me and my posse got down that night, done some smack, some ludes, some ice. I was on my dime speed, just kickin’ it up Tenth, comin’ home from Irving Park. I was almost to Brumbe
low.”

  “What time?”

  “About midnight. Heard all these pops, just a couple blocks away, toward MLK. Sounded like a war. But just one gat—no retaliation or nothin’. Like it was a big-time drive by, takin’ some dude outta the box. I knew somebody sufferin’, need bufferin,’ man, no doubt about that. Heard the tires squeal. Pulled a ghost, man, I mean they vamped outta there.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “I hear them comin’ my way, toward Tenth, man. All of a sudden they hang a right and they’re just two blocks away comin’ at me, crossin’ Moffat. I ride up over the curb, throw down my dime and jump behind this fence on Brumbelow, by McKenney’s old place. Then they fly by. See, I’m lookin’ out through a crack in the fence toward the passenger side and I see this loc starin’ out the window, rolled down. He had this herky rosco tucked up against the side-view mirror, pointed out at the street. At first I thought it was a gauge, but it looked more like some piece out of the movies, like Snipes or Arnold would carry. Ready to fire on someone, I’m tellin’ you, finger on the trigger. Like he was expectin’ a fight with 5-0 or was gonna get anybody who saw them. I was pressed up against that fence. Yo, he never saw me, or he’d a shot me, sure of that. Thought I was gonna get jammed for sure.”

  “What then?”

  “They jetted outta the hood, the gat man and his Ace Kool—I’m tellin’ you they were gone. Went down a few streets and turned out toward MLK.”

  “What did the guy with the gun look like?”

  “Wearin’ a red sweatshirt, like a Crab, with the hood down. Had a TWA and a mustache, maybe some chin whiskers. He was draped—could see gold chain on his neck.”

  “TWA?” Ollie asked.

  “Teeny weeny afro, you know, short crop.”

  “You mean he was … what color was he?” Clarence asked.

  “He be a brotha.”

  “Black?”

  Big Dog nodded, looking at Clarence as if to say, Did you ever meet a brotha who wasn’t black?