7 - Rogue: Ike Schwartz Mystery 7

by Frederick Ramsay

  “No, no, Sheila, this won’t do. You’ve drifted away from your story. You told us that he intimated there were ‘higher ups,’ not you.”

  “I…did I? I meant the other.”

  “Did you? I have problems with how this plays out. Maybe you can help me. You’ve had some experience in these matters, correct?”

  “Me? Experience? I don’t know what that would be.”

  “No? You said you helped Fiske rework his CV. At some point he decided he needed a mention of military service. But he had none, and I’m guessing he didn’t even know where to begin, so you supplied it for him, right?”

  “Well, I might have said something.”

  Ike slid some sheets of paper from the stack in front of him. “I have here a list of all the people in the Military Police battalion your ex-boss claimed to have served in and guess what? His name is not here, not as Scott Fiske, not as Frank Scott, the name he was born with, but I did find a Sheila Phillips. That would be you, wouldn’t it? Or it was before you were married to Staff Sergeant Nelson Overton.”

  “Yeah, okay, yeah, that’s me. My husband died, you know. So, okay, I was just trying to help him out.”

  “You were stationed briefly in Iraq, I gather, both you and your husband.”

  “How’d you know about that?”

  “Come on, Sheila, I’m a cop. We’re both cops, or you were. It’s what we do, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess. I don’t see where this is going, though.”

  “Going? Maybe nowhere. You worked a desk back then, or did you do duty outside?”

  “Both. I drove patrol when my name came up.”

  “Car?”

  “You kidding? It’s Iraq. Hummers and trucks. IEDs were bad enough in something big. Drive around Bagdad in a car? It’d be suicide. Still, one got my husband anyway.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, yeah, everybody’s sorry. We go over there to clean up somebody else’s mess, get blown to pieces, and back here, you’re sorry. Thanks for nothing.”

  Ike stared at Sheila for nearly a full minute. He started to say something but Sheila cut him short.

  “Do you have any idea what that was like, Sheriff? To see your friends blown up, body parts all over the road. Kids—kids shot by some rag-head fanatic. My platoon leader? He went frickin’ nuts right in the mess hall. Started crying and calling for his mommy. He was sent home with a Section Eight. We thought he was the lucky one.”

  Ike sat back and listened. He remembered the rant he’d made to Charlie. When? Three weeks ago, about battle-traumatized veterans. Was this woman one of the war damaged? He shook his head and turned over more pages in the reports in front of him. When Sheila seemed to have calmed down he turned to her.

  “I must inform you that we have a warrant to search your house. What are the chances we will find an automatic there? The ME says it should be a .25 caliber. Is that about right? Nasty little thing, wouldn’t you agree? Every cop knows that small-caliber bullets have no stopping power whatsoever, but if you use something like a .22 or .25, and your aim is good, or you can shoot at close range, the bullet, because of its lack of velocity, will penetrate but not exit. Instead it will tumble and ricochet around and do all sorts of damage. Especially in a head shot, right?”

  “I don’t know. If you say so. Wait, you’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking, are you? So what if I have a gun? Lots of people have guns. There’s no law that says I can’t own a gun. That doesn’t mean I used it.”

  “No there isn’t, and no it doesn’t. But you did, I think, and recently. Is your little gun registered, Sheila?”

  “Look, I don’t know what you’re getting at, Sheriff, but you got no right to search through my stuff and I resent even the implication that I done…I did anything. Jesus, I lose everything, I mean everything, in Iraq, and this is what I get back?”

  “Everyone suffers losses, Sheila. I have, you have. Life’s tough but we learn to take it as it comes. So, our problem is maybe gun registration, a lack of an alibi, some fingerprints on shell casings, and on and on. Ballistics will determine if your little .25 is important, unless you dumped it. We did find the shell ejected from the .45 in the leaves out in the park, by the way. Too bad about that. Who’d a thought? It all just piles up and finally spills over, you know?”

  “Spills over? What spills? I don’t know what you are talking about, Sheriff, and I don’t like where I think you’re going with this. I shouldn’t talk to you anymore.”

  “No, of course not. You wouldn’t like the direction this is taking, so let me explain. As I was saying earlier, have you ever noticed that when you fixate on an idea, it is nearly impossible to stop thinking about it? It’s the same with murder investigations. How many bad guys have gotten away because a cop, for instance a cop like me, couldn’t see the evidence right under his nose? I made that mistake and it cost me valuable time, and maybe resulted in an unnecessary murder or two. I’m sorry about that part. You were a cop once. You would know all about that, of course.”

  “I got nothing to say to you anymore. This is ridiculous.”

  “Really? What I’d love to know is how you managed to get the phone into Fiske’s hands.”

  “What phone?”

  “The one I told you about. The one used to make the call to Doctor Harris the night she was forced off the road. That phone.”

  “I don’t know anything about a phone.”

  Ike sighed and held up the stack of reports. “Sheila, how many more of these reports do I have to read from before you tell me why you did it?”

  Sheila’s lips appeared as if drawn by a very sharp red pencil. Ike heaved a sigh.

  “Sheila Overton, I am arresting you for the murders of Robert Smith, Martin Duffy, Scott Fiske, and the attempted murder of Ruth Harris in Washington, DC. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed to you. Do you understand these rights as they have been read to you?”

  “I didn’t do it, he did.”

  “No, Sheila, it won’t wash. Now tell me why.”

  Sheila stared unfocused at the wall for a minute. After her outburst earlier, Ike figured she would either break, or slip into catatonia.

  “It was the phone that screwed up the deal, wasn’t it? You thought it was his. That’s why you went to arrest him.” She plucked absently at the buttons on her blouse. “I tossed it, you know. How’d I know he was a dumpster diver? If anything, I thought one of the maintenance guys would find it.” She straightened up and some life came back into her eyes. “He wrote me a note when I refused to open the door for him. I don’t know why I did that, you know. I should have let him in. Maybe I could have explained and he would understand it was for him. In the note he said you’d connected him to the phone. I didn’t even know he had it, for God’s sake. He wasn’t stupid. I guessed it would only be a matter of time before he figured out the rest and then he’d drop me like a hot potato.”

  “Maybe. That would depend on his part in this.”

  “He didn’t know anything. He talked all the time about getting ahead, about how he came from a bad background, and that’s why him and his kind never got the breaks. I could, like, you know, identify with that. We are the people who’re asked to do the scummy jobs, to put our lives on the line, while the stay-at-home Ivy League hotshots get all the goodies. That afternoon when he came over after you guys hit him up about the phone, I wanted to tell him I loved him. I would do anything for him, even if the Board found out about his CV. You do know what I mean about doing anything? We were in it together—us against them others. We were the little guys, the ones who get shoved around, and sent to fight wars for fat cats and Halliburton, and have their loved ones splattered
all over some god-awful road in some desert a zillion miles away.”

  Ike tensed in his chair, watching her eyes and trying to guess which way she would jump. She sat with the palms of her hands flat on the table, leaning toward him, her eyes flashing in anger. Real anger, Ike realized. After a moment, she slumped back in her chair, defeated.

  “You know what he said to me later when I went to his house and told him how I felt and what I was willing to do?” Shelia’s eyes began to tear up. “Honest to God, Sheriff, he said ‘That’s nice.’ Do you believe that? That’s nice? I kill for him to make his damn dreams come true, and it’s nice? So, it turns out he was just like all the rest. All show and no go. He didn’t care.”

  She sobbed, blew her nose, collected herself, and straightened up, suddenly calm. “So, I say to myself, ‘Okay, Mr. That’s Nice, you take me or you take nobody.’ I mean, after all that, what else was I supposed to do?”

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Charlie watched as Frank booked Sheila and escorted her to a holding cell.

  “Your case is pretty circumstantial don’t you think, Ike? Are you going to be able to convince the county attorney to prosecute?”

  “It’s tight even if she hadn’t semi-confessed, Charlie.”

  “Semi-confessed, what’s that mean?”

  “She admitted to it, that’s what I mean. I don’t have her statement in writing and she’s lawyered up now, so now I won’t get it. That’s why its semi.”

  “Then how do you put it together? Pretend I’m her lawyer. Irrespective of what she said to you, you can’t use it in court if she denies ever saying it. She was upset, didn’t understand, under emotional stress, lost her friend in a brutal murder, blah, blah, blah. You only suppose, Sheriff, that she set the thing up, and you assume she pulled the trigger. On what grounds? She knew about the killing and didn’t say anything? So what? Obstruction of justice, maybe, but…A good lawyer will have a field day. The fact she did a stint as an MP won’t buy you much, either. On the contrary, if she saw combat, he’ll use it against you, probably.”

  “Okay. You know what your problem is, Charlie? You are in the spy game. You look at things differently than I do. If I hadn’t let my concern for Ruth and my initial anger at what I thought caused her crash get to me early on, I’d have had this thing nailed down tight weeks ago.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No I didn’t and that turned out to be a tragic error—at least for Fiske. When I finally stepped back, things began to fall into place. As for the circumstantial bit, I had Grace run the surveillance tapes from the drugstore again. Overton is clearly visible on a different camera as she enters the store with Fiske. I called Eden and she confirmed it and also, that she was wearing a hoodie and sunglasses. Eden thought it odd at the time because it was a cloudy day. Overton became separated from Fiske because Eden, as is her wont, locked in on, as Agnes aptly described him, the willowy Doctor Fiske. Overton bought the phone and Overton made the call to Ruth.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yep. I will check, but yeah, she made the call. Overton made one serious mistake and a couple of little ones. The problem with automatics, if you are in the business of murdering people, is they eject shells all over the place. You have to pick them up and get rid of them and that takes time, assuming you can find them, and also, that you have the time to do it. But it’s something you must do because, unless you have been careful when you loaded the clip, your fingerprints will be on the casings and, furthermore, ballistics experts can sometimes match casings to firing pins. The normal drill is to shove each bullet into the clip with your thumb. If you are not sure you will have time to police your brass after you’ve shot someone, you will need to use an autoloader or you must wear gloves. Also, people forget that when they clean a weapon, they have to disassemble it, and that means the parts inside the gun proper can also be a repository of fingerprints.”

  “So you found her prints in the forty-five?”

  “Not yet, but now that we know it was originally hers, we know what to look for. She, being ex-MP, would know all about that, so she may have wiped the inside and the remaining shells in the clip.”

  “So what was the big mistake?”

  “In a minute, indulge me. Her next mistake was having Fiske find the phone. Actually that was more in the line of bad luck. If she had dumped it right away, in DC, we might never have picked up on him. Very foolish of her. She tried to be too tricky and it came back to bite her. The wrong guy, Fiske, found the thing.”

  “And you’re sure she didn’t want him to?”

  “Not consciously, perhaps subconsciously, who knows? Give that question to a shrink. The big mistake was leaving the .45 behind. She did it to implicate Fiske in the killing of Smith, but it was over the top and badly executed. She didn’t need to do that.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yes. When she shot Smith in the woods, the shell ejected from the .45 into the leaves. She couldn’t find it and short of setting the woods on fire, never would. She hoped no one else would either. Also, at the time, she didn’t realize she’d be giving up the gun later to implicate Fiske. I asked the ETs to rake the leaves. Actually they used a leaf blower and they found the shell, a little wet but not wiped.”

  “The report said it had a thumbprint.”

  “It did, and Grace went into the DoD’s fingerprint file and found a match for Sheila Phillips, her name before she married when she was in the MPs.”

  “Why, Ike? Why did that mousey little woman do it?”

  “Who knows? Poor woman, I think she really believed he would be pleased that she set him up to succeed Ruth. You remember my barking at you about the concussed and damaged men and women returning from the deserts and mountains?”

  “The ones with PTSD? Vividly. She was one of them?”

  “I think so, maybe. Her husband was blown up in Iraq. She returns, drops out of the service, and ends up with Fiske. God only knows how. She fixates on him and wants to please him the way my imagined vet did with a political cause. Hers was not political but clearly as deeply seated. When she realized he did not see her as a lover, wife, partner, or anything significant beyond a compliant and willing secretary, her world came crashing down around her ears. She realized if he discovered what she’d done, he would undoubtedly throw her under the bus. My God, but that had to hurt. So, a woman scorned, and all that—although I’m thinking he had no idea he’d done it. The guy was too self-absorbed.

  “She followed him home, came in the back way, which probably symbolized their relationship better than anything. She slips in, wants to have it out at the dining room table. They talk, she doesn’t hear what she needs to hear, snaps, and pops him with a different gun. Billy is searching for it even as we speak.”

  “Premeditated then?”

  “Yes and no. I don’t think she was thinking rationally. She just went into combat armed.”

  “I guess that’s a wrap, then, and you were right about the PTSD.”

  “Not quite. Right church, wrong pew.”

  Charlie stood and walked to the door. “I must remember to be nicer to my secretary in the future. Time for an early dinner?”

  “But not too much nicer, Charlie. You turn that society charm on her and she might kill for you.”

  “You think?”

  “Actually, no, and dinner will have to wait. Right now I need to go to the hospital and play one grunt for yes, two for no with Ruth to confirm that Overton made the call that night. Then it’ll be a wrap.”

  Chapter Forty-eight

  As usual, Ike hesitated outside the entrance to Ruth’s cubicle. He needed a moment to get his emotions under control and slow his heart rate. He never knew if Ruth would be better, worse, or remain the same. Only the first option gave him any hope or peace of mind. If he were a praying
man, he’d have been at it daily. As it was, he’d had a few conversations with the God he remembered having been introduced to by his mother as a child. The outcome of those chats had so far seemed inconclusive, but he kept the door open, just in case. He took a deep breath, cleared his throat, and entered.

  “I must say, you are looking pretty perky this evening, Ruth. The nurses are all smiles. In fact, they look like teenagers at a slumber party telling secrets, like they know something I should know. Do they? Yes? No? Look, I have to ask you some questions. I think you can make a sound, so if you can, give me one for yes and two for no, okay?”

  “Nnngh.”

  “Good. You can. I thought so, but dared not try before. Okay, the call you received that night was to meet Scott Fiske at a time and place specified, right?”

  “Nnngh.”

  “It wasn’t Fiske who called, was it?”

  “Nnngh, nnngh.”

  “The caller was Sheila Overton?”

  “Nnngh.”

  “Great. That locks it up. You may have to testify. I don’t know if grunts will be acceptable as evidence, but the DA will find a way to get them in front of a jury somehow. But surely you’ll be up and around by then. Turns out Overton was the one who stole the truck and smacked you. She also bumped off two other guys. One must have seen her return the truck, then read about what happened to you, added it up, and tried to blackmail her. The second guy must have tried it, too. You alert enough to follow this?”

  “Nnngh.”

  “Great. It came as a terrible shock to her when she realized that handsome, shallow Scott Fiske was not interested in her, was not going to marry her, did not even appreciate all the things she’d done. Imagine sacrificing everything for someone on whom you doted and have it amount to zilch? Anyway, when it appeared her notions of their relationship went away like snow in Phoenix, and he would inevitably dump her, she flipped. She had a busy couple of weeks. The upshot is, you are out an acting president. Sorry about that, but we’re finally finished.”