by Rick Reed
Kim leaned forward lowering her voice, more out of habit than fear of being overheard. “Eric and Trent are on the task force. I’ve heard through the grapevine that Eric’s the one who identified Nina.”
“We were at the landfill still recovering the remains when Eric contacted the chief directly and showed up at the morgue with him. He identified her for us.”
“You mean Eric Manson didn’t tell you?” she asked, looking from Liddell to Jack. “Eric got her charges dismissed a couple of months ago so we could keep her in play. Maybe he thought that detail wasn’t important.”
Jack felt his jaw clenching. He would deal with Eric later.
“Then the dumb broad got hooked on crack cocaine. I thought I was going to have to arrest her myself, but then she got killed,” Kim said.
“Is MS-13 involved?” Jack asked.
“Nah,” she said. “They aren’t interested in Harrisburg.”
“Do you know Detective Mike Jones from Harrisburg PD is working the murders of Hope Dupree and her pimp, Dick Longest?”
“Yeah.” A tic started at the corner of her mouth.
Jack and Liddell exchanged a look. Jack said, “He’s working several similar killings. He’s the one that told us about Hope Dupree and Dick Longest.”
Kim paced a bit, no doubt deciding how she could tell.
“Between us?” she asked, and both men nodded.
“Jones would have you believe these killings are the work of a drug gang. If you ask me, he’s using them as a convenient excuse for not catching the real killer. It’s common knowledge that one of their county councilman’s kids is involved in those earlier murders.”
“So, why doesn’t Jones know about Dupree?” Liddell asked.
She looked around out of pure habit before answering. “This goes to the grave with you, okay? There’s dirty stuff going on in Saline County. A lot of big people are involved. Judges. A couple of cops. A state representative. Someone higher up, maybe. Dupree was our mole.”
“Our, meaning you? Or you and the Feds?” Jack asked.
She didn’t answer his question, and that was all the answer that was needed. Instead she said, “That’s why it’s being kept quiet, Jack. We couldn’t risk a leak. We wouldn’t have brought Eric in on this, but we needed our prosecutor to drop the charges against her.”
“Is Jones dirty, too?” Jack asked.
Kim screwed up her lips, considering what to say. “Truth? We just don’t know. That was part of Dupree’s assignment. She was inside.”
“Your best guess, Kim?” Jack asked. “Do you think Hope’s death has anything to do with our cases?”
She gave an exaggerated shrug. “You’re the big-shot detective. You tell me.”
Back in the main hallway Liddell dug deep in his pockets and came up empty. “You got some change, pod’na?”
Jack gave him what he had, which was mostly nickels, and mulled over the new information while Liddell plunked the change into the slot and punched some buttons.
“You going to talk to Eric?” Liddell asked. The snack machine whirred, but the candy bar didn’t drop. Annoyed like a hungry bear, Liddell shook the machine until it wobbled on its metal feet.
“You mean, am I going to ask an attorney why he lied? No, thanks. If his lips are moving . . .” Jack replied. “Besides, it doesn’t get us anywhere.”
Jack watched Liddell shake the candy machine.
“Damn machine.”
“Hey, it’s the A-Team.” Larry Jansen said. It was cool in the basement and Jansen wore his rumpled trench coat over a suit and tie that looked like it was discarded by a thrift shop. He was smiling and rubbing his hands together as he approached them. “I got something for you.”
“Your, uh,” Liddell said, directing his gaze down at Jansen’s crotch.
Jansen reached for his zipper, to find it was pulled up.
“Gotcha,” Liddell said. “You got any change?”
“Go to hell, big shot,” Jansen said to Liddell. “I guess you’ve got bigger things to worry about than a missing exotic dancer.”
“What did you say?” Jack asked. He had checked and there were no recent missing person reports.
Jansen grinned and shoved his hands in the pockets of his trench coat. “It’s my case. I took the report this morning. I only mentioned it because . . .”
He didn’t get the chance to finish. Liddell grabbed huge fistfuls of Jansen’s trench coat and began shaking him only a little less vigorously than he’d shaken the machine. “If you don’t tell us right now, I’ll drag your sorry ass into the chief’s office!”
“Okay! Okay! Jack . . . you know I was just kidding. Right?” By now Jansen’s back was against the cinder block wall, his face nearly buried in Liddell’s chest.
“Who is she?” Jack asked, and Liddell leaned his weight forward.
“I can’t breathe,” Jansen complained, looking up at Liddell’s towering figure.
“Yeah?” Liddell said. “Well then, you don’t want to waste any breath.”
Jansen swallowed hard. “We trade. I get to clear my missing person case, and you get the name.”
Jack didn’t care about clearing a missing-person case. “I’m listening,” he said, and Jansen began to talk.
“One for the A-Team, zero for Colombo,” Liddell said as Jansen disappeared down the hallway.
“You can bet he’s already on the phone with Claudine Setera,” Jack said.
“Yeah,” Liddell said. “She didn’t press us at the scene for a statement, so she has Jansen on speed dial.”
They pushed through the doors to the detective squad, where Garcia was sitting behind Jack’s desk in an animated telephone conversation.
“You’d better. You owe me, buster,” Garcia said, and hung up as they approached her.
Garcia was all of a hundred pounds, but she had a fierce temper. Jack felt sorry for whomever she was talking to.
“What up . . . An-gel-eena?” Liddell said, his skillet-sized hands making gang signs in the air, then reaching out to bump knuckles with her.
Her expression went from pinched to amused. “Shut up,” she said to Liddell, then to Jack, “I’ve got something. Maybe.”
“Okay,” Jack said, “go ahead. Then I need you to do something for me.”
Garcia checked her notes. “In a nutshell, Nina Parsons never had much to do with MS-13 when she worked for the prosecutor in Raleigh. The closest she came was reviewing some cases before they were filed in court. No reason for MS-13 to have her in their sights.”
That was awfully curious. Jack remembered Trent Wethington telling about Nina’s involvement with MS-13 in North Carolina. Trent said she had bragged about it. So either Trent was lying, or Garcia’s information was wrong. Garcia was seldom wrong.
“I agree with you about MS-13,” Jack said, realizing that this information was further confirmation of what he’d suspected before. “Now pull up anything you can find on this woman,” Jack said, handing her a slip of paper with the name Jansen had given them.
“Is your password still ‘JackMurphy’ with an exclamation mark?” she asked.
“This month,” Jack said. “Until those pencil heads in IT decide to change them again.”
She logged in to Jack’s computer with Jack’s password and typed the name into Google. The screen changed and a list of possible matches came up. She scrolled to one and clicked the mouse.
The picture of a pretty young woman’s smiling face filled the screen.
Garcia read off what she had found. “Samantha Steele. ‘Sammi’ to her friends. Dancer by profession. She’s got over three hundred friends on her Facebook page, Jack. She also has a Twitter account, and a MySpace. Who the hell uses MySpace anymore?” Garcia asked. “So, what about her?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Jarrod Poiles had reported his girlfriend missing about three o’clock that morning. Jack got his name by running Samantha Steele through the computer for addresses and associates. He wasn
’t surprised that Jansen hadn’t filed a missing person report even now.
Jack and Liddell went to the address on the computer readout and knocked loudly, but no one answered.
“That’s his pickup truck in back,” Liddell noted.
“Maybe he went out,” Jack said, but it wasn’t likely. The people who hung out at the Busy Body Lounge were late risers. They stayed up all night partying, then slept until they were conscious and/or sober, and did it all over again.
Jarrod Poiles was known on the street as J Rod. He worked as a bouncer for the Busy Body Lounge when he wasn’t stealing and selling food stamps.
“I’ll knock,” Liddell said, and using the side of his closed fist, he hammered the door until the front windows rattled. He kept on banging for several minutes before a voice from inside said, “What? This better be important.”
The door flew open and a man about thirty years old, tall, overweight, his long hair braided Jamaican-style, appeared in the opening. He wore a dirty gold wifebeater and a heavy gold chain around his neck—and nothing else.
When the man saw Liddell’s size, he lost the attitude and yanked the end of his shirt over his turgid member.
“Are you a Gold Member?” Liddell asked, and Jack stifled a laugh.
“Jarrod Poiles?” Jack asked.
“Who’re you?” the man asked, looking from one detective to the other. His face took on the numb expression Jack had seen on many a suspect.
“We’re from the blind pole dancers association and wondered if you’d care to make a donation?” Liddell deadpanned.
“You’re cops,” Poiles said.
Jack and Liddell showed him their credentials, and he stepped back from the doorway. “You want to come in?”
“No, but we have to ask you some questions about your girlfriend,” Jack replied. “Then we have to take you somewhere. Get dressed.”
They followed J Rod into the front room of a shotgun-style shack where every flat surface was covered with empty fast food wrappers, boxes, and beer cans. J Rod found a filthy pair of jeans and pulled them on.
“What’s this about?” he asked. “Where is Sammi? She in trouble?”
When pressed, Jarod provided some useful information. He and Samantha Steele—her real name—met at the strip club a year ago, hit it off, and moved in together. She paid the rent, bought the drugs, they ate out three times a day, and fornicated like rabbits. It was a match made in heaven.
But what she liked to do when she wasn’t wrapping her naked body around a pole—while sweaty drunks masturbated into napkins and stuffed money into her G-string—was what caught Jack’s attention.
Jarrod said he found that Sammi had a God-given talent for oral sex, and so he acted as her “manager.” When she finished dancing for the night, she would meet clients he had lined up while she danced, or troll the parking lots around the Busy Body for customers.
Most nights, Jarrod kept an eye on her. But last night he got lucky with one of the other dancers, and when he got home he figured she’d done the same. When Jack told J Rod they needed him to come to the morgue, his expression froze, and he tried to work up some tears. They didn’t come.
Jansen opened the door of Duffy’s Tavern and the smell of stale beer and burned grease washed over him. The occasional raised voice followed by hooting laughter made him want to turn around and leave. But he had a meeting inside.
Internal Affairs caught Dick in the act, right where Jansen told them they’d be. Chief Pope wanted to fire Dick, but the mayor nixed that plan. So Dick was given a paid vacation and warned to keep quiet or Pope promised to bust him in rank and suspend him without pay.
Jansen told Pope about Dick’s “secret” meetings with Maureen Sinclair at La Sombra Coffee Shop. He told him that the leaks were coming from Dick and he resented like hell being suspected of something he didn’t do. Pope already knew that Dick had assigned Jansen to Murphy’s case, so it wasn’t a great leap of logic to figure out that Dick was the leak. Jansen resisted telling on Dick just enough to sell it, and it had worked.
Marlin Pope and Trent Wethington had someone’s head on a pike for the leaks. The pressure was off. Now it was time to make some real money.
Jansen smoothed the wrinkles in his coat, made sure his shirt was tucked in, and stepped into the gloom inside.
CHAPTER THIRTY
After leaving J Rod’s apartment, Jack busied himself on his cell phone while Liddell drove toward headquarters.
“Where to now, pod’na?” Liddell asked.
“Head downtown to the old courthouse building.”
When he provided no further information, Liddell followed up with, “Are you going to tell me who we’re going to see, or is it a surprise party for me?”
“Bob Rothschild.”
“It’s about time,” Liddell said, and sped up. “Are you gonna be the good cop or the bad one?”
“I’ll do the questioning, Bigfoot,” Jack said. “No point in both of us getting in trouble with the politicians.”
“That’s why I love you, pod’na. Always protecting me.”
The sarcastic tone didn’t sit well with him. “Do you want to question him, Bigfoot? I’ll be more than happy to wait in the car.”
“No, no, you do it,” Liddell said, sounding like Jack had offered to scald him with hot water. “I just wanted to complain a little so you wouldn’t think I was unwilling.”
They parked and walked across the street to a tall building. Inside, the lobby was decorated with stone pillars, polished marble floors, and brass fixtures at every turn. Liddell found the office number for Bob Rothschild, walked to the elevator, and punched the up button.
“He’s in 12A,” Liddell said. “Ever been here before?”
Jack shook his head. “Me neither,” Liddell said. “Some building, huh?”
“Big ego, big office,” Jack commented.
The elevator arrived, and when the doors opened, both detectives were surprised to find a small black man in a red uniform, complete with a red/gold embroidered cap, operating the elevator.
“What floor?”
“Twelve,” Liddell said, then whispered in Jack’s ear, “Do we tip him?”
“Nah, suh,” the man said. “I get paid well.”
Jack shot Liddell a scathing look, and Liddell’s face went red.
When they stepped off the elevator, Jack said, “If he’s got a secretary, you stay with her and see what she knows about Nina and Bob’s involvement.”
“You don’t want me to go in with you?”
“Like I said. No sense in both of us getting called in to the chief’s office.”
They reached 12A and Liddell asked, “Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be,” Jack said, and they entered the office.
Bob Rothschild was not part of a firm, but to look at his grand office space you would think he was the senior partner of Wee, Cheatem & Howe Law Firm.
They showed their credentials to a knockout redhead who was obviously hired for her skills. Liddell had made himself comfortable on a leather sofa, while Jack was buzzed into Rothschild’s inner sanctum.
Fifteen minutes later Jack came out of the office and made eye contact with Liddell.
Liddell grinned. They thanked the secretary and walked back to the elevator.
“She said she wants me,” Liddell said.
“She couldn’t afford to feed you.”
Liddell punched the down button on the elevator and heard the hum of a motor somewhere. “Yeah. You’re right. But she gave me a lot of information. And she’s not a secretary. She’s an administrative assistant to Bob.”
The elevator opened and this time the operator was a young woman. Same uniform, same cap, same expression on her face as the other one. “Floor please?”
At the car Liddell slid in behind the wheel. “Did you get anything from Bob?”
Jack summarized what he had learned. “I asked him what he did for Trent and he asked why it was any of my business. Whe
n I asked why he had been at our last few meetings with Trent he said he was on Trent’s election committee and was wondering how the scandal of these murders would affect the campaign. Then he asked me to leave.”
Liddell raised an eyebrow. “But you didn’t, and . . .”
“I asked him if he knew Nina Parsons on a personal level, and he lied. Then I asked what they were arguing about.”
“And then he threw you out,” Liddell said.
Jack nodded, and asked, “So, what did you get?”
Liddell pulled his notebook out. “The secretary—excuse me, administrative assistant—is Bob’s niece. She’s finishing her last year of college and going to IU in Bloomington next year for legal studies. Bob has her lined up to intern for a Superior Court judge when she’s home on break.”
He flipped the page. “Nina has been a visitor to Bob’s office many times over the last year because—like Bob—she was on Trent’s election committee for his run for governor. Bob is the chairman and treasurer of the committee, and Trent’s campaign manager. Nina’s job was to find dirt on Trent’s opponents and detractors. Her other job was to assist Bob.
“Bob’s niece said she arranged rooms and travel for Nina and Bob when they were required to go out of town to campaign. Nina and Bob traveled a lot together. She said about a month ago Nina suddenly quit the committee. Bob told his niece that Nina quit because of her increased caseload.”
“Anything else?” Jack asked.
“She’s a Scorpio and her favorite color is green. She likes long walks along the riverfront and holding hands in the rain.”
Jack ignored that crack, thinking about the information they had. Now he understood what Bob probably meant when he told Nina if she kept doing something her life was over. He was referring to her life in politics.
In the meantime, Liddell was looking at his iPhone. “You won’t believe this,” he said soberly.