by Mike Markel
“You like Alicia?”
“Not as his needle buddy. She’s no junkie. Real healthy, athletic. Did she want to kill him? Can’t be sure, but I don’t think so. She’s moved on. She’s a real-estate agent here in town. Married. But what do I know?”
“How about the father? Why is he contradicting his daughter?”
I turned to Ryan. “He’s a recovering alcoholic,” Ryan said, “and he’s found Jesus. He says she’s spinning it because she’s ashamed of his actions when he tried to attack Lake. He’s a new man, now.”
The chief looked at me. “And you buy that?”
“So far,” I said.
“What do you want to do, then?”
My cell rang. I pulled it out of my pocket. “It’s Robin.” The chief gestured for me to take it. I put it on Speaker.
“Seagate.”
“Hey, Karen. Want to know who was hanging out in the tent Sunday night?”
“If you don’t mind.”
“The guy was LaKadrian Williams. The woman was Kendra Crimmons. They’re both in our system.”
“Is that Crimmons with a C?”
“Yeah.”
“How’d you ID her?”
“From the DNA in the white blood cells. In the syringe.”
“And you said the prints on the baggie were no good?”
“Right.”
“Like she wiped them off?”
“The baggie closes with one of those plastic zippers, so I can’t tell.”
“All right, Robin. Thanks.” I ended the call and turned to Ryan. “That’s the woman lives out at the camp, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “The guys called her Kendra.”
The chief looked puzzled. “If she killed him,” he said, “why wouldn’t she just grab the drug kit when she left the tent? Throw it away someplace.”
“Maybe she wanted it to look like a simple OD,” Ryan said. “She wiped off her prints. She didn’t know her DNA was in the syringe.”
“Maybe it was really good heroin,” I said. “She was too high to think straight. When she came back down, she realized Lake was dead. She wanted us to know he was a junkie, so she left Exhibit A there for us.”
The three of us were silent for a minute. “Well, Chief,” I said, “want us to keep working this?”
“Bring her in.” He nodded. “Take a statement. Then talk to me again.”
Ryan and I headed back to our desks and pulled up her record. She was forty-one years old, with a string of offenses going back twenty-five years. Her two main offenses were the familiar chicken and egg: hooking and using. Before she was sweet sixteen, she was arrested for prostitution and possession. She moved from her grandmother’s house—her mother was already in prison, her father long gone—to the juvenile justice system. Group living didn’t suit her tastes, and she escaped back onto the streets. She started selling drugs, as well as her body, and spent the next two decades in and out of prison and the emergency room. If Kendra Crimmons ever had half a chance, she blew it. But I doubt she ever had.
“Well.” Ryan looked up from his computer screen. “That’s a cheerful story, isn’t it?”
“One or two more bad decisions in high school and that would’ve been me.”
We got our coats and drove out toward the homeless camp in Ten Mile Park. The sky was overcast, the breeze picking up enough to rock the heavy cruiser a little bit. A half-hour later, we pulled into the empty parking area. The crime-scene tape and all the police vehicles were gone. We got on the main walking path, which we followed for a few dozen yards, then branched off to the left on a narrower path that we hoped would lead us to the homeless camp.
The clearing was a little less forlorn now that it wasn’t raining, but the breeze ruffled the tents and snapped some of the laundry on the clotheslines strung between tree limbs. Plastic bags and other garbage swirled in the clearing as we approached the picnic table and the oil drum in the center. Three guys huddled around the drum, hands out toward the fire, as bits of paper rose into the wavy air.
I put my shield around my neck. One of the guys, who I recognized from yesterday, muttered something to the two other guys. I couldn’t make out what he said, but it didn’t sound like, Great news, they’re back.
“Good morning,” I said. They glanced at me briefly, then looked away. They didn’t say anything, but they wanted us to know they didn’t intend to help us more than necessary. Nothing personal against me and Ryan—just the result of having lost every fight they’ve ever had with the system. And here we were with gold badges around our necks that said System. “My name is Seagate. This is Miner. We need to talk to Kendra. Do you know if she’s around?”
They all shrugged their shoulders. Ryan and I walked over to Kendra’s tent, the grey one on shipping pallets. “Kendra Crimmons,” I said, loud but polite and legal. “Rawlings Police Department. Can we talk to you?”
No reply. I tried again. Still no reply. The tent wall flapped in the wind.
Ryan walked around to the side and looked in through a mesh window. He shined a flashlight in, then turned to me and shook his head.
We walked back over to the guys at the oil drum. I pulled a booking photo of Kendra out of my pocket and held it up so each of the three guys could see it. “This is Kendra Crimmons. We need to talk to her about Lake’s death, couple nights ago.”
One of the guys wore a go-fuck-yourself expression. Another gazed off into the middle distance. A third one dragged a foot back and forth, making arcs in the dirt.
“We’re not here to arrest her,” I said. “We’re not charging her with anything. We just need to talk to her. We’re trying to figure out what happened to Lake.”
Ryan stepped forward until he was about a foot away from one of the men. “You guys know this whole encampment is illegal. You’re doing illegal burning right here. You’re camping overnight. You don’t have approved sanitary facilities. If we call this in, the city has to act on it. They have to take it down.” He looked at them, but they didn’t respond.
I reached into my leather bag and fished a twenty from my wallet. I held it up. “Where can we find Kendra?” Now I had their attention.
The guy who was scratching at the dirt looked at me. He cleared his throat and pulled his hand out of his coat pocket. The finger joints were swollen and red. He pointed to a green tent. “Just to the right of that tent, there’s a path leads to a dried-out stream bed. That’s where she hangs.”
“She there now?”
He nodded, just a little.
I handed him the twenty.
Ryan and I turned and started across the clearing. He said, “Now you’re down twenty.”
“Worth it to get the hell out of here quicker.”
We passed between the green tent and a little shack made of corrugated steel, plywood sheets, and plastic tarps. I spotted a face looking up at us from the shadows inside the shack. We came to the edge of the clearing. I couldn’t see a path, but Ryan saw one. “This way,” he said.
I followed him as his black overcoat was swallowed up in the bushes and brambles. The wind was picking up, whistling and shaking the leaves on the bushes and the trees. Every so often I caught a whiff of sewage. We kept going, following the narrow path as it wound its way along. Soon it started to dip down, which I hoped meant we were close to the stream bed. The bushes started to thin out, then disappeared. Before us was the stream bed, about ten feet across, with a busted bicycle, two tires, and a rusted shopping cart scattered along the foot-wide strip of mud that ran down the center.
We looked around. No Kendra. “Shit,” I said. “I want my twenty back.”
Ryan picked his way through the busted crap and garbage, across the stream bed and up the far bank to get a different view. “There she is,” he said. About fifty yards away, off to the east, was a pile of dirty rags near some ratty shrubs. It took me a few seconds to figure out what I was seeing. It was a person, lying on her side, her back to us, her knees bent and legs drawn in. Her baggy bro
wn jacket and dark sweatpants blended seamlessly into the terrain.
I called out her name as we approached her, but she didn’t move.
Ryan walked around her body to face her. “Let’s hope she’s alive.”
“Yeah, let’s hope that.” But, to be honest, at the moment I didn’t have strong feelings about the issue one way or the other.
“Ms. Crimmons.” Ryan said her name, first softly, then with a little more energy.
I walked around to face her, too, but I didn’t see any movement. I reached down and shook her arm. “Kendra, you in there?”
The way she responded told me she was officially alive, if only barely. Her dark brown hair, matted and oily, obscured most of her face. Slowly her dirty, crusty dark eyes opened halfway. She tried to focus on me but she couldn’t quite make it before her eyelids closed slowly.
“Kendra, wake up.” I could see she was slipping back to wherever she had been. I shook her arm again. “Kendra. Get up. We’re cops. We need to talk to you.”
This statement didn’t work. “Help me get her up,” I said. We lifted her into a sitting position, but her arms were slack and her chin sank to her chest. She was about a hundred and fifty pounds of filthy rag doll.
“Hold her in this position.” I crouched down so my head was on her level. “Kendra, wake up.” I slapped her face lightly a few times.
Her eyes opened a little, then she let out a yelp. “Crap.” Her voice was low and craggy.
I recoiled from the sickly stench of cheap whisky and whatever other shit had been decomposing in her mouth in the couple weeks since she’d last brushed her teeth. I felt my stomach turn, tasting the sting of my own stomach acid at the back of my throat. I gagged a couple of times but somehow managed not to blow breakfast.
I used to drink, pass out, and puke, just like Kendra. Quite often, I would piss myself, too. One thing I remember about being so disgusting: You’re oblivious to how disgusting you are.
After a moment, I turned back to face Kendra Crimmons. She looked more than ten years older than her forty-one years. Her skin was puffy and blotchy; her eyes, bloodshot. Her nose had been broken, at least once; her nostrils were half-blocked with crusted snot. Her teeth were a yellow-green, outlined with a dark brown line along the gum line.
“Kendra, can you hear me?”
“Yeah, you don’t have to shout.”
“All right, Kendra, my name is Detective Seagate. The guy behind you—holding you upright—is Detective Miner.” She turned her head a quarter turn, just enough to confirm there was someone supporting her. “We need you to come with us. We’re gonna go to police headquarters and talk to you about Lake.”
“Gimme a second.” Over the breeze I heard a rumbling sound coming from deep inside her. Her face contorted into a grimace as her torso convulsed. I managed to pull back just in time to miss much of the vomit and phlegm that sprayed from her mouth and ran down the front of her jacket and onto her sweatpants.
Ryan gathered a handful of dead leaves and grasses and wiped most of it off her jacket and pants. She used her sleeve to clean off her chin.
“Okay,” she said, struggling to her feet. “That’s better.”
“Yeah, that’s great.” Ryan helped me lift her to her feet. After sinking to the ground a few times, Kendra managed to stay upright, as long as the two of us supported her. With only two breaks to snort some crud from her nose and hawk it back up, we covered the hundred yards back to the clearing. We walked her past the oil drum, her head bobbing up and down with her steps. She seemed not to notice the guys. They glanced up at her but showed no expression and said nothing.
We got her out to the parking area and over to the Charger. When I held the back door open so Ryan could shove her in, he said, “Want to pat her down?”
“I think she’d be fine with you doing it.”
“Has to be a female officer.” He smiled.
“You’re gonna have to hold her up.”
Ryan got behind her and supported her by the armpits as I took a deep breath and started the patdown. She had no weapons, no needles or other paraphernalia. Nothing illegal. She had part of a dinner roll, some half-eaten candy bars, an old handkerchief that for some reason smelled like diesel fuel, and, jammed in her underpants but sticking out of the front of her sweatpants, a small wad of bills. Rather than asking Ryan what he thought of the legality of checking it out, I decided to brush the wad with my elbow, knocking it free. It fell to the dirt.
Ryan picked up the money, unfolded it and started counting. “Eighteen dollars.” He shook his head. “Hardly worth an illegal search and seizure.”
“Yeah,” I said, “that was wrong, what you just did. You should put it back in her pants.”
Chapter 8
As soon as we got Kendra Crimmons in the back seat of the Charger, she tilted and fell over like a sack of potatoes. She began to snore almost immediately, choking and waking herself up every few minutes. I lowered my window for the trip. Stopped at a traffic light, I turned back to see how she was doing. She was breathing. On the black vinyl seat cover, near her mouth, was a swirly red and yellow pool of something nasty.
At headquarters, we hauled her inside and got a female officer to clean her up and put her in one of the interview rooms. Ryan and I headed off to the bathrooms.
We met up again and opened the door marked Janitor that leads to the little hallway where we look through the one-way mirrors into each of our two interview rooms. Kendra was wearing a white jumpsuit. She was seated at the interview table, her head resting on her hands, which were folded on the table. Ryan turned on the speaker. She was snoring peacefully.
“Think she’d tell us anything useful?” Ryan said.
I shook my head. “More likely she’d just puke on us again.”
We walked to the chief’s office to find out what he wanted us to do. “Chief, we brought Kendra in—the woman shooting up with Lake the night he died?—but she’s too drunk or stoned or something to give us a statement now. We’re gonna let her sober up and have a go at her later, okay?”
“Fine.”
“Meantime,” Ryan said, “we should talk to the people who run the football program. We’ve got one former player dead from an OD, another who’s a dealer, and a cheerleader who said she was raped by one of them. Maybe someone there knew Lake.”
The chief turned to me. “You okay with this, Karen?”
“Absolutely, as long as I can lead on all the interviews.” I paused. “Is a football the round one or the pointy one?”
The chief knit his eyebrows. “I keep mixing them up. Maybe check the Internet?”
I nodded my thanks, then Ryan and I turned and headed back to the bullpen. Once we got settled, he said, “Mind if I take a couple of minutes to read up a little on the program?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll start writing up Lake Williams.”
Forty minutes later, we headed out to the parking area for the ten-minute drive over to campus. “What’d you learn?”
“Andy Baxter, the head coach, came to the university a year before Lake enrolled, so he might be able to tell us something.”
“I meant about the rape.”
“That’s if there was a rape.” Ryan was laying down a marker: He wasn’t convinced yet.
“Yeah,” I said. “I got that.”
“I meant, Coach Baxter would know about Lake as a player, a student, a guy.”
“Anything in Baxter’s record you want to ask him about?”
“Well, there is one thing: He used to coach at Arkansas Southern, which is FBS. CMSU is FCS.” He paused to give me a moment to ponder that information.
I glanced at him. “Sorry, I drifted off when you switched to gibberish.”
“His former school had a better program than his current school. Coaches like to move sideways or up, not down.”
“Maybe he was a shitty coach?”
“No, he was a good coach.”
“And you’re gonna get him to tel
l you why he moved?”
“I’ll get him to answer the question. Can’t guarantee it’ll be the truth.”
“Open with this: ‘Do all your players turn into junkies, drug dealers, and rapists, or just most of them?’”
“Give me a second. I want to write that one down.”
Three minutes later, we pulled into a metered spot outside the football complex. I flipped down my visor to show the Official Police Business card.
The complex was a large, three-story brick, metal, and glass building connecting the football stadium and the indoor practice facility. Above the main entrance was a metal replica, about ten yards square, of the Central Montana State mascot, a cougar with a pissed-off expression. Beneath the cougar, shiny stainless-steel letters a foot tall identified the building as The Melissa and Carl Davis Football Complex.
I pointed to the letters. “Who are they?”
“Carl Davis is the president of the Cougar Athletic Association, the booster group.”
“He must do a lot of boosting.”
“Couple of years ago, on his fortieth anniversary with the group, he raised twelve million dollars to re-do the complex and build the practice facility.”
We entered through the big glass doors and walked across the expansive entrance, over the face of the cranky cougar in the carpet. At the wide reception desk, I showed the perky young woman my badge and asked if she could direct us to the main office. She told us it was in room 301, up on the third floor. “You can take these stairs.” She gave Ryan a broad smile as she pointed behind her to a wide stairway that arose out of the center of the lobby. Then she turned to me and pointed off to the side. “Or the elevator.”