Players: A Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery (Book 7)

by Mike Markel

  “What do you mean?” The chief looked at Ryan.

  Ryan said, “I don’t like his story about why he left his last job—how the school didn’t want to let him build the program. He racked up some major NCAA violations and penalties at his last job, but he didn’t mention them. We gave him a lot of opportunities, but he acted like all the violations were petty stuff.”

  “Being a coach carries a lot of PR responsibilities,” the chief said. “You say he’s in his forties?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Anyone that age in that job knows how to spin his story. That might be all it is.”

  “True,” Ryan said. “The other way to crack this open is to find Kendra’s dealer. He’ll finger the guy who gave her the money. When we find that guy, we flip him.”

  “But you say she’s not telling you anything else.”

  “Not at the moment,” I said. “We might think of another way to come at her. We’re gonna keep her in Holding until tomorrow morning.”

  The chief said, “Any ideas on how to get her to give up the guy in the pickup?”

  “I already threatened to steal her money. That’s why she told us about the dealer and the guy who made the deal with her out by the skate park. Right now, I don’t think we have much leverage with her. There’s no evidence she killed him—hell, there’s no evidence for anything except she and Lake shot up some heroin that night. The only thing we can use to move her is to threaten to keep her locked up and make her go through withdrawal, which I don’t want to do.”

  “I don’t want to do that, either. See that she gets medical attention while we hold her. I’m fine with you keeping her a second night, but unless you can show probable cause that she killed Lake, we release her then.”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  The chief smiled and stood. “All you need to do is figure out why the football coach wanted to kill a player who dropped out seven years ago and lived in a tent.”

  “I’m sure Ryan won’t have any problem with that.” I glanced at him. He gave me a no-problem nod. “Thanks, Chief.”

  Ryan and I went back to the detectives’ bullpen, grabbed our coats, and headed out to the parking lot. It took us about thirty-five minutes to get out to Ten Mile Park. The extra five was the morning traffic.

  We walked into the clearing, where a young guy was shoving paper and brush into the oil can to start it up for the day.

  He looked up at us as we passed him on the way to the path down to the riverbed. “You looking for Kendra?” He put a lighter to the stuff in the can.

  “No, we know where she is.”

  “I was gonna tell you, we haven’t seen her in a while.”

  “We’ve got her.”

  “She kill Lake?”

  “We don’t know.” We walked up to him. “Any reason you think she would?”

  The guy shrugged. He was in his late twenties, thin and short. He had a patchy neck beard that covered up most of his old acne scars. He wore his green wool cap low on his forehead.

  “What’s that mean?” I said.

  “Nothing.”

  He sounded like my son. When Tommy says Nothing, it usually means Something. “Did Lake ever get violent with Kendra?”

  “Way we do it here, if she wants our help, she asks.”

  “Did she ask?”

  “She didn’t ask me.”

  I walked up closer to him. “What’s your name?”

  “Henry.”

  “Henry, I’m Detective Seagate. We’re not sure what happened here that night. We know Lake died of a drug overdose, but we don’t know if it was suicide or accidental. We haven’t ruled out homicide. If you can help us, we’d appreciate it.”

  “I don’t know anything.” Henry scratched at his wool cap, then looked in the can to see if the fire had started.

  “If you and the other people here can help us, we can help you.”

  “How you gonna do that?”

  “For one thing, if this was murder—and it was someone in the camp did it—I think you’d want him out of here, right? Now, once the public hears about a murder in an illegal camp in a city park, that’s gonna make it harder for the city to let you all stay here. We can tell the city how you cooperated with us. Even if it was someone in the camp who did it, that’s just one bad apple. But if we have to say you tried to protect one of your own—out of loyalty or something—how do you think the good citizens of Rawlings—the tax-paying citizens of Rawlings—are gonna react?” I looked at him. “So talk to me. Do you know if Lake beat her up?”

  He nodded but didn’t say anything.

  “He ever get into it with anyone else? Any of the guys?”

  Henry nodded again. “Lake wasn’t the only one gets pissed off.”

  “Anyone talk about getting even with him?”

  “Fights happen. Nobody I know ever said anything about getting even with him.”

  “Did you hear anything—a fight?—Sunday night? Anything unusual?”

  Henry shook his head.

  I handed him my card. “Let me know if you think of anything, okay?”

  He nodded.

  When we started walking across the clearing toward the path down to the riverbed, he called out to us. “Why you going down there?”

  I stopped and turned. “You let me know if you think of anything.”

  When Ryan and I were about thirty yards down the path, I glanced back. The leaves on the brush rustled in the breeze. Henry was standing there, at the start of the path, scratching at his wool cap. I couldn’t see his face closely enough to read it. Probably he was just wondering why we would check out Kendra’s place down by the riverbed if we knew she wasn’t there.

  Chapter 15

  Ryan and I followed the path down to the dried-out riverbed at Ten Mile Park. “Where did Kendra say she stashed the money?”

  “A cottonwood,” he said. “Buried on the side away from the riverbed, under some river rocks.”

  I shaded my eyes from the sun and scanned the area near where we picked her up yesterday. There was scrubby brush on both sides of the riverbed, but I didn’t see the cottonwood. “Let’s head down to where we found her.”

  We walked the fifty yards to the spot where we picked her up, which I identified from the dried-vomit starburst in the sand. On the other side of the riverbed, I saw a cottonwood rising out of the undergrowth. We crossed the riverbed and headed toward it. Both of us circled it a couple of times.

  “You see a pile of river rocks?”

  Ryan started walking around the stunted tree in larger concentric circles. “I’m not seeing anything.”

  “Is it possible some animal has gotten here?”

  Ryan shook his head. “Not unless Kendra buried some food along with the money.”

  “Kendra’s sitting in Holding. Could she be stupid enough to send us on a wild goose chase?”

  Ryan thought for a second. “Something’s wrong here—”

  “What is it?”

  He pointed back across the riverbed. “Wrong tree.”

  We crossed the riverbed and found the cottonwood, half-obscured ten yards back in the brush. At its base, on the side away from the riverbed, was a small pile of river rocks, just like Kendra said. We dug down a few inches and retrieved the envelope. I snapped on a pair of gloves and opened it carefully to confirm it contained the five hundreds, then placed it in the open evidence bag that Ryan was holding.

  This was our first break: Kendra was telling us the truth. Somebody gave her five-hundred dollars to deliver some deadly heroin to Lake Williams. Now all we had to figure out was who and why.

  I steered the Charger out of the parking area in Ten Mile Park. “You figured out how to get Kendra to finger her dealer or the guy who paid her to deliver the drugs?”

  Ryan was silent for a moment. “We agree that her story is plausible, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Including the part that she doesn’t have a name on the dealer, and she’d never
seen the guy who gave her fifty dollars to wait in the parking area—or the guy in the pickup who handed her the drugs.”

  “Unless you explain why I shouldn’t believe her.”

  “When you read Cory McDermott’s record—the dealer who used to play football with Lake?—you said he didn’t have an address or a phone. Presumably, he doesn’t have a driver’s license or a car registration.”

  “Not unless he’s a true moron,” I said. “Not valid ones, anyway.”

  “Let me check that right now.” Ryan swiveled the laptop toward him, hit the keys for a moment, and waited. “License and registration have lapsed.”

  “Any leverage we can use to get Kendra to remember better?”

  “I’m with the chief on this: I don’t want to use her addiction to force her to talk. If we can help her get into some kind of city or county drug program, we should do it, no strings attached.”

  “Yeah.” I thought for a second. We drove toward downtown under clear skies in light traffic. “Any reason not to let her walk?”

  “Not that I can think of,” he said.

  “You want to have a go at Alicia again?”

  “You don’t like her for paying Kendra to deliver the drugs, do you?”

  “No, not at all,” I said. “I don’t see her hanging around with junkies or dealers. But we do know she lied to us about her relationship with Lake. Said it was just casual, then it ended when she found out he screwed other girls. She didn’t tell us her father freaked out at the rape hearing. Didn’t tell us she had Lake’s baby. Why not bring her up to speed on the investigation? If nothing else, it’ll show her we plan on being a real pain in the ass. You know, if you want us to leave you alone, you need to start telling us the truth.”

  “What would we tell her?”

  “I’d start with how we now think it was homicide,” I said. “How Lake had CTE. If the fact that she didn’t abort Lake’s baby means there was something more to the relationship than she admitted, we might be able to read it in her face. Hell, she might even be willing to open up about his relationship with the coach.”

  “You mean, about whether the coach knew about his head traumas?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “If Kendra was just an accessory, we need to start looking harder at the football program. Alicia could help us decide how hard to come at Coach Baxter.”

  “That reminds me: I want to root around a little more in the coach’s background, too.”

  “Okay, you want to see if we can find Alicia first, then head back to headquarters?”

  A half-hour later, we were at the little strip mall with the offices of Alicia Templeton Real Estate. We walked in and I asked if she was available. The receptionist told us she was in her office and picked up the phone to ask her to come out: The police detectives were here to see her.

  Alicia Templeton greeted us with a white smile and a cheerful tone, but the tight eyes and forehead suggested the words were for the benefit of the receptionist. “Why don’t we talk in the conference room?” She led us back to a good-sized storage closet with a round table surrounded by six plastic chairs.

  “Sorry to barge in on you like this, Ms. Templeton, but we have some more information on the Lake Williams case we wanted to give you.”

  She sat there, her fingers interlaced on the Formica tabletop, her thumbs tapping together slowly. Her expression was impassive, but a deep sigh told us she didn’t want to hear anything more about him, presumably because she had told us all she had to say yesterday and she wasn’t really interested in him, anyway. “Go ahead.”

  “We have determined that Lake was murdered.”

  Her fingers stopped tapping, and her grey eyes widened a little. “You’re kidding.”

  “He died of a drug overdose—from some especially potent heroin that someone gave him.”

  She frowned. “How do you know it was meant to kill him?”

  “Someone paid a person to deliver the heroin to him. They knew he would shoot up and die.”

  “Do you know who did it?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Do you know why?”

  “We were hoping you could help us.”

  She shook her head. “Like I told you yesterday, I haven’t seen him since college.”

  I nodded. “Yes, we do remember that.” I paused. “Unfortunately, you weren’t forthcoming with us yesterday.”

  She sat there silently: no protest, no denial, no explanation.

  “For example,” I said, “you told us you dated Lake for a while, then you split up because of his cheating and the abuse.”

  “That’s true.”

  “You didn’t tell us you had his child.”

  She flinched. “Where did you hear that?”

  “Births and deaths are public records.” I decided against saying her father told us. I wanted to save the father-daughter conflict in case we needed it later. “You’re sticking with ‘you dated for a while’?”

  “First of all, that is none of your business whether I had a baby or not. Second, I happen to believe that abortion is wrong. That’s all it is. And yes, I’m sticking with ‘we dated for a while.’ I can’t believe you’d throw it in my face that I didn’t have an abortion.”

  “Nobody is throwing anything in your face, Ms. Templeton. I’m just saying it’s curious you neglected to tell us you had a baby with this guy you dated for a while—and put his name on the baby’s birth certificate.”

  Alicia Templeton shifted in her chair, her hair swaying. “I don’t see what any of this has to do with a murder. I have a new life now, with a husband and a little girl. Don’t you think maybe you should move on, too, and worry more about why someone would want to kill Lake and less about my private life?” She was breathing heavily. A thin film of perspiration was forming on her upper lip.

  I nodded. “One other thing we learned that we wanted to tell you about. You mentioned that Lake had a temper and was abusive at times. You should know that he had CTE.”

  She looked confused. “What’s that?”

  “The brain damage caused by head trauma. You know, concussions? We think it might have started as early as college.”

  “That might have caused his temper and the violence?” Her eyes were shining.

  I nodded but didn’t say anything.

  She started to weep, quietly. She wiped at her eyes with her fingers, then covered her face with her hands and began to sob.

  I let her weep for a while. After about half a minute, she got it under control and straightened her posture. “I’m sorry … I didn’t realize … That’s very difficult to hear about a person. Any person.”

  I took that last part to be her way of saying her reaction didn’t mean she really cared about Lake. He was merely one of God’s children in distress.

  “I understand.” I glanced over at Ryan, who nodded to signal me to keep going. “Ms. Templeton, did you ever see Lake get hurt? I mean, his head?”

  “All the time. He’d get hit helmet-to-helmet a lot. I’d see his head bouncing off the turf after a tackle. He would play on special teams, too: kickoffs, punt returns. I’d ask him not to do that, but he would say he needed to put up the numbers. Three or four times he returned a punt or a kickoff for a touchdown. He had a little notebook where he wrote everything down: the yards from passes, the special teams, the blocking for runners. When I asked him if he had to play all those different positions—I don’t know what it’s called—he would shrug and say it would pay off someday. It would break my heart, what he looked like on Sundays. Bruises all over his face.”

  Ryan said, “Did Lake ever talk to you about whether the coach wanted him to sit out some plays?”

  “Lake told me the coach wanted him to put up the numbers just as much as he did. He would’ve been the first CMSU player to go pro in, like, twenty years. The first during Coach Baxter’s time. The coach wanted to see Lake in the highlights reel on TV and on the web. The coach told Lake that it would be a win-win for both of them
.”

  “When Lake tore his ACL,” Ryan said, “do you think he rushed the rehab?”

  “We weren’t together then. But I do know—from the times he got hurt when we were—that he hated any kind of rehab. You know, physical therapy? He would always start working out on his own as soon as he could.”

  “So you don’t know if Coach Baxter and the staff told him to take it easy on the knee after the ACL?”

  “All I know is, the other times he was hurt, they left it up to him—when he could start practicing and playing again.”

  “Ms. Templeton.” I wanted to change direction. “If I say the name Carl Davis, do you know who I mean?”

  She tilted her head. “Of course, he’s my godfather.”

  “We talked with him yesterday, over at the practice facility. He told us a very different story about the rape allegation than you did.”

  She frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “You said you never even told your parents about Lake raping you. That’s not true. Carl Davis knew all about it. He knew that your father tried to attack Lake in that room on campus. Now, help us understand this. Carl Davis wasn’t at that meeting, am I correct?”

  Out of the corner of my eye I caught Ryan glancing at me. His eyes showed a little concern. He knew Carl Davis wasn’t at that hearing, and Carl Davis told us explicitly he didn’t know anything about a rape. But I didn’t believe Carl Davis. I knew Davis and Ronald Weber were business buddies. It just made sense that Weber would go to Davis about the rape.

  “That’s right,” Alicia Templeton said. “He wasn’t there … But how did he know about my father?”

  “Your father must have told Mr. Davis.”

  She was shaking her head. “Why would he have done that?”

  “Your father is close to him. Like you said, Carl Davis is your godfather. He’s known you your whole life, known your father for decades. In fact, your father and Mr. Davis work together closely—on the Cougar Athletic Association. Your father’s done a lot of the electrical work on the stadium, the practice facility, the renovations to the locker rooms and all. And Mr. Davis made it clear to us that he and his late wife were close with your parents. Maybe your father saw him as a father figure. Maybe your father thought Mr. Davis could help somehow.”