by Mike Markel
“Yeah, why don’t you fuckin’ do that?”
“Now, what you wanted to do—I’m not judging or anything, but here’s what I think your plan was: Buy some dope. Am I right?”
“You gonna arrest me for what you think I was gonna do?”
I smiled. “No, Kendra, but there’s the thing. We entered all your belongings in the system. Except for your clothes and some food in your pockets, you had eighteen bucks on you. Eighteen bucks.” I was looking at her hard.
She froze, for only a moment, and I knew I was right.
“So I thought, what kind of dope is she gonna be able to score with eighteen bucks? Then it hit me. You weren’t talking about eighteen bucks. There’s some other money out there, some other money you were afraid we’d gotten our hands on. But when we tracked you down at the camp you were so strung out you had no idea whether we’d found it.” I paused. “Am I right?”
She shook her head. “No fuckin’ way. Where the hell am I gonna get serious money?”
“That’s a very reasonable question. Here’s my answer. Somebody gave you some money to deliver the drugs to Lake. That person knew that Lake, being a drug addict, would shoot up right away—and then he would die.” I looked at her. She was scratching at her arm, forming nasty new red marks. “You with me so far?”
“You’re full of shit.”
“Could be, but let’s find out. You know why I asked my partner to leave the room?”
“Don’t give a shit.”
“It’s because he’s a Boy Scout. Actually, he’s worse than that. He’s a Mormon. I wanted to talk to you in private, just the two of us. Here’s what’s gonna happen: If I’m full of shit, and what you told us before was the truth, you just tell me. I’ll get the two officers back here and they’ll bring you over to the hospital. The docs will give you something to help you get through the night. And then we’ll bring you back here to Holding. Tomorrow, at noon, I’ll release you. And you can take your eighteen dollars and your candy bar and your filthy clothes and be on your way. We’ll even drive you back to your tent.”
“Why you gonna keep me till noon? Let me go right from the hospital. You don’t have any right to hold me.”
“You see, that’s the problem. I don’t think you were telling me the truth. So I have to do a little more investigating, and it’ll take me until tomorrow, around noon.”
“What kind of investigating?”
“You just told me what kind of investigating to do. You’ve got some money stashed out there. Otherwise, you wouldn’t care if I released you tonight or tomorrow. How much is it, Kendra?”
“All right,” Kendra said. “What if there is some money? How do you prove I didn’t it get some other way? Some legal way?”
“Come on, Kendra, you’re gonna go into the office and sell some stocks and bonds? Write some software? No offense, but I can’t even see a john paying you five bucks for a suck. Whatever money you’ve got, you earned it selling drugs or—like I said—delivering the heroin to Lake. So these are your choices. You stick with your story, and I’ll go find the dirty money, or you tell me the truth now.
“Here’s the part you haven’t figured out yet, the part I don’t want my partner to hear. If you stick with your story, tomorrow morning, once the sun is up, I’m gonna get one of the drug-sniffing dogs, write it up as a sweep of the homeless camp, then walk on down to the riverbed where we picked you up. My guess is there’ll be enough drug residue on any money you’ve touched it’ll take the dog about thirty seconds to find it.”
“Go ahead,” Kendra said. “Find it, log it in. Give it to me when you release me at noon.”
I shook my head. “Think for a minute, Kendra. Just sit there and think for a minute. Why did I ask my partner to leave the room? Why did I say I’d head out to the camp tomorrow, bright and early, just me and the dog?”
Her eyebrows were scrunched up for a few seconds, then she closed her eyes. “Fuck.”
“Fuck, indeed.” I paused. “I need you to make up your mind. My partner’s gonna start to worry about what the two of us are talking about. What’s your decision: stick with your story and let me go find the money, or tell us a better story?”
“If I tell you a better story, what happens to my money?”
“We log it in, with your eighteen bucks.”
“No questions asked?”
“No questions asked. If we release you, you take the money with you.” I looked at her. “The sooner you tell us a good story, the sooner you get to the hospital. You sit here for a while. I’ll check back with you later.”
Before I could close the file and stand up, she spoke. “Go get your stupid partner.”
I turned to the mirror and waved him in.
Kendra frowned at me. “He heard all that? Everything you said was crap?”
“Most of it. He would’ve wanted half your money.” Ryan came back into the room. “Turn the system on, Detective. Ms. Crimmons wants to amend her statement from earlier.” When he did it, I announced the time and names.
I turned back to Kendra. “All right, Kendra, tell us the story. What happened that night?”
“That day, I was in town …”
“Where in town?”
“Lots of places.”
“What were you there for?”
“Score some drugs.”
“For yourself? For Lake?”
She shrugged. “Score some drugs. I didn’t plan out who I was gonna share them with.”
“Okay, go on.”
“So I met with a guy I see sometimes. Bought some weed and some crystal off him.”
“Where was this?”
“Down under the overpass. Near the skate park.”
“So what happened?”
“He says, Want to make a quick fifty? I say, What do I gotta do? He says, Go over there, behind that concrete pillar. Wait ten minutes. A guy’s gonna come up to you. He’s got a business proposition for you. I say, I’m not gonna blow him outside in broad daylight, if that’s what he wants. He said, Just listen to what he has to say. If you don’t want to do what he wants, walk away. He holds fifty dollars in front of my face. I take it and walk over to that concrete pillar.”
“Then what happened?”
“Ten minutes later, a guy comes up to me. He says, You know Lake Williams? I say, Why you asking? He says, You be in the parking area in Ten Mile Park tonight at ten. Someone’s gonna drive up and give you something to give to Lake Williams. You bring it right to Lake. I say, Why should I do that? He says, The guy will give you five-hundred bucks. Cash. I say, Then what? He says, Then nothing. That’s the deal. Deliver this thing to Lake tonight for five-hundred dollars.”
“This guy you’re talking to, who is he?”
“Never seen him before.”
“Can you describe him?”
“White guy, maybe forty. Long hair, going grey. Needed a shave.”
“What was he wearing?”
“Black jeans, dark jacket with a hood.”
“Any distinguishing characteristics? Tattoos, scars, anything?”
“All I could see was his face and his hands. No tats there.”
“How about his voice? Any kind of accent? Speech impediment?”
Kendra shook her head. “I think he smokes. You know, raspy voice. Smelled like cigarettes.”
“And the first guy, the one you bought the dope from. What’s his name?”
She smiled a little. “We don’t do names. He calls himself Lucky.”
“Tell me about him.”
“Don’t know anything about him. Tall, skinny. White guy. Maybe thirty. Gold loop earrings. That’s all I know about him. It’s strictly business. We don’t hang out.”
“Okay, that night, ten o’clock, what did you do?”
“Like he told me to. I’m standing by the parking area. A pickup pulls in, real slow.”
“What kind of pickup?”
“Don’t know. It was dark out.”
“Could you
identify the driver?”
“No, I walked up to the passenger side. Window slides down. An arm reaches out, hands me a baggie. Tells me to give it to Lake. Asks if I understand. I say yeah. Arm gives me five bills. Five hundreds.”
“He didn’t explain why he’s giving you so much money?”
Kendra looked at me. “He didn’t say. I didn’t ask.”
“What happened next?”
“The guy drives away.”
“Did you get a look at his license plate? Any writing on the truck? Any damage you remember?”
“I don’t see good enough to read license plates or writing on trucks. I used to have glasses, but not anymore. And why would I want to do that?”
“What did you do next?”
She scratched hard at one arm, then the other. “What he told me to do: Go to Lake’s tent and give him the baggie.”
“Did Lake ask where you got it?”
“You think homeless people spend all their time asking questions? ‘That looks like a nice sandwich. Where’d you get it?’”
“Then what happened?”
“Like I said before: He shoots up, crashes pretty bad. I take just a little bit. When I come to, I see he’s in trouble, I leave.”
“You didn’t think to call 911?”
“That wasn’t my first thought, no.”
“Here’s what we’re gonna do, Kendra. We’re gonna send you over to the hospital, see if they can do anything for you. Then you’re gonna spend the night in Holding. We’ll feed you. Tomorrow morning, we’ll talk again. You tell us where the cash is, we’ll see that as a sign you want to cooperate.”
“I didn’t know the dope was so strong. I didn’t break any laws.”
“You mean, by shooting up as Lake crashed? Yeah, you got my vote for Citizen of the Month.”
Chapter 14
First thing Wednesday morning, Ryan and I walked over to Holding, where we have four small cells. When the new police headquarters was built eight years ago, we made sure to include holding cells. In the old building, we had a single grey-bar cell, where we could hold people for only four hours. If we needed to hold them longer than that, or overnight, we had to ship them off to County’s jail, a couple miles away. We had to pay County a fee for every person they held, and it cost us an hour of an officer’s time for the transport and the booking.
The officer in Booking opened the heavy steel door and we walked into the cell, which was about ten by ten, with a stainless-steel toilet and a concrete bed with a thin foam pad on it.
“Good morning, Kendra,” I said. “You remember us?”
She was sitting up on the bed. She rubbed some junk out of an eye, then studied her finger from a few different angles before wiping it on her white jumpsuit. “Yeah, you’re the two fuckers who tricked me into telling you about my money, which I earned legally.”
“Okay, good. They give you something at the hospital to hold you for a little bit?” She scowled, as if I was expecting her to thank me for something that someone else had done. “How much of what we talked about yesterday do you remember?”
“All of it.” She spat out the words. “I’m a junkie, not an idiot.”
“Great. Let’s start with you telling us about where you stashed the five-hundred bucks.” Her expression said she really didn’t want to tell us. “Remember the concept, Kendra. Someone killed Lake. Most obvious person is you. He used to beat you up. You buy the uncut heroin and go to his tent. He’s so out of it he shoots it right up. It kills him. We go that route, you’ll go before a grand jury, maybe face murder charges—at least manslaughter. One thing for sure: You’ll be living in County for a while in a cell just like this one. One difference: County doesn’t care about your habit. You see that drain in the floor?” I pointed. “Their idea of inmate welfare is to hose the cell down every once in a while.”
Ryan said, “And your attorney? A public defender. He could be twenty-four, twenty-five years old, excited because he just passed the bar—on his third try. You could be his first case.”
“Therefore,” I said, “let’s ratchet back the attitude. You don’t like me? I get that. Just between us, I don’t give a shit. I’m not crazy about you, either. But it’s time for you to start acting a little smarter. You want us to believe you didn’t kill Lake. You want to help us figure out who did. Where’s the money, Kendra?”
She shook her head in disgust. “Down by where you grabbed me. There’s a cottonwood. On the side away from the stream, there’s a bunch of river rocks piled up. Dig down three or four inches. You’ll find the envelope.”
“And inside the envelope?”
“Five bills. Hundreds.”
“All right. We’ll get that envelope and log it in with your other stuff. Can you tell us any more about your dealer or the guy who told you to wait in the parking area?”
“Told you everything I know yesterday.”
“If you’re afraid one of them is gonna come after you, we can keep you in here until we pick them up.”
She shook her head. “I can’t ID them. I don’t know them; they don’t know me.”
“You sure?”
“I’m more afraid of shooting some bad product. I don’t know anything about the two guys. The one I scored from a few times is called Lucky. The other one, I don’t know his name. Never seen him before.”
I nodded. “We can hold you forty-eight hours. That’s one more day. We’re gonna use that time to try to figure out if anything you said is true. We’ll start by looking for the envelope with the cash. If we find it where you said, that’s a good sign. You think of anything else we can use to check out the rest of your story—you remember something about the pickup truck or any physical characteristics of the two guys—you bang on your door here and tell the officer you want to get in touch with Seagate. We’ll talk. All right?” I turned to leave.
“What if I start to get the shakes again?”
“You’ll shake. We can’t keep bringing you back and forth to the hospital.” I stopped and faced her. “You work with us, Kendra, a lot of good things can happen for you. We can help you get into a program. But if you keep wasting our time and mouthing off,” I said, pointing to the floor, “aim for the drain.”
Ryan and I left Holding and headed for the chief’s office to brief him on where we were. Margaret, his gatekeeper, waved us in.
“Karen, Ryan.” The chief looked up from his computer and gestured for us to sit. He raised his eyebrow to tell us to start.
“Harold finished the autopsy on Lake Williams yesterday afternoon,” I said. “The vic’s heart stopped when he shot up a load of uncut heroin. Harold wanted me and Ryan to see a slide of his brain. Turns out he had CTE.”
The chief frowned. “He was less than thirty, right?”
“About twenty-seven,” I said. “It was Stage 2, which is enough to explain some of the symptoms he was showing: confusion, violence, depression.”
“Any evidence it was suicide?”
“We don’t think so. We worked on Kendra Crimmons, his drug buddy. She told us one of her dealers put her onto some guy who gave her five-hundred bucks to deliver the drugs to Lake. If he had wanted to kill himself with drugs, he could’ve gotten them himself, without any help from her.”
“And you believe her?”
I looked at Ryan, who shrugged his shoulders. “Her story is at least plausible,” I said. “I don’t see her as earning five-hundred, either dealing or hooking. She told us where she stashed the money, out at the camp. We’re gonna run out there now. If the money’s where she says, I think I’ll believe her.”
“She didn’t identify who gave her the money or give you a motive?”
“Nothing.”
“Is she holding back?”
“She’s showing a lot of attitude, but I think this story might be true. She’s learned not to be curious. Someone hands her some cash and tells her to give a baggie to Lake, I see her as doing it.”
The chief sighed. “So you two
are saying homicide?”
“If Kendra is telling us the truth—about a guy pulling up in a pickup and handing her money and the drugs—yeah, I think we are.”
“What’s your thinking on who and why?”
“We’re not that far along,” Ryan said. “Either someone wanted to kill him for something he already did, such as rape Alicia eight years ago—”
“Are you thinking Alicia herself?” the chief said.
“Or her father,” Ryan said.
The chief turned to me. “But you don’t like that?”
“No, we don’t,” I said. “Neither of them. Alicia seems to be living her life okay. I’m not saying it didn’t screw her up, but we’re not seeing what would cause her or her father to flip out now. More likely, someone wanted to prevent Lake from doing something he was gonna do. Or send a signal to someone else.”
The chief said, “There’s no test for CTE on live people?”
Ryan said, “There are some tests being developed, but there’s no way a guy living in a tent in Montana is going to have access to that technology.”
“So Lake wouldn’t have known he had CTE.”
I shook my head. “He would’ve known he was pissed off and violent, but he would’ve known that for the last ten years, my guess. Since the disease scrambles your thinking, he might not have been able to think it through. Besides, he was so young it probably never would have occurred to him to think CTE. Kendra told us he was violent sometimes but he was okay the day he died. Seems to me, you hang around with homeless people you’re gonna see a lot of violence, depression, and confusion, anyway.”
“Karen, you said the murder could have been to send a signal to someone. You got something in mind? Someone in the homeless camp?”
I shook my head. “They’re real into the live-and-let-live philosophy. At least that’s the impression I got. And I didn’t see anyone there who’s got five-hundred bucks to make this happen. Whoever wanted him dead is from outside. And has a pickup truck.”
“Which brings us back to his college days,” the chief said. “Someone he knew when he was in the world. So how are you going to work that?”
“Ryan says he can research the coach a little more. We think he’s not being straight with us.”