by Mike Markel
“Are we putting Cory in danger?”
“If they killed Lake and then they killed Kendra,” Ryan said, “Cory could be next. He already got worked over. He has a right to know that we told them what he said. Here’s the way I’d look at it. If the football guys are telling the truth that the athletics department is clean—they had nothing to do with killing Lake or Kendra, and there’s no contact who buys drugs for the program—they won’t hurt Cory. If they’re lying—they ordered the two murders and there is a contact—they might start planning what to do to make sure Cory doesn’t name him. But Cory has a responsibility, too. If he wants us to protect him, he has to start working with us. We spelled it out to him very clearly. But he’s not there yet.”
“That sound right to you, Karen?” the chief said.
“Absolutely.”
“Good,” the chief said as he pulled the BMW into his reserved spot in the lot behind headquarters and shut off the engine.
“Thanks for the backup, chief,” I said. “We’ll meet with Harold and Robin and see if they got anything off of Kendra. We’ll try to get the word to Cory that we met with the president and the football guys and told them he’s got a contact at the university. We’ll try to get him to come in and make a formal statement.”
The chief said, “Okay, keep me up-to-date.”
Ryan and I headed to the bullpen, hung up our coats, and headed downstairs to see what the medical examiner and the evidence tech had found.
We caught up with Robin in her office. She had her headphones on. I had to rap on her door a couple times to get her to hear me.
“Hey, cops.” She gave us a bright smile.
“You get a chance to process Kendra Crimmons?”
“Done.”
“And?”
“She had seven dollars on her: a five and two one’s. No drugs on her person. No defensive wounds. I can’t tell you cause of death, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the three knife wounds to her abdomen had something to do with it.”
“Interesting knife?”
“Not really. Blade about eight inches, one inch wide at the hilt, serrated on one side.”
“You find anything on her clothes to say she was killed somewhere else and dumped at the skate park?”
“Her clothes had so much crap on them I couldn’t give you anything that would hold up in court. But no, I didn’t find any exotic organics or minerals or anything that would put her someplace else. Nothing that would suggest she was transported in the trunk of a car or the bed of a pickup. If you want to find the killer—”
“We kinda would.”
“Then you’re gonna have to find an eyewitness or some CCTV footage or something. Maybe she’s full of the same heroin that took out Lake. Harold might have that for you.”
“I doubt it,” I said. “If she was dumb enough to shoot up stuff she didn’t trust, the guy wouldn’t have had to stab her three times. But thanks for the help. We’re gonna check in with Harold now.”
Ryan and I headed down to the lab. We opened the heavy door and walked in. Kendra was already on the table. Harold was bent over her torso. I called out to him, but he couldn’t hear me because he was running some kind of saw. Ryan drifted over to watch the action. I stayed near the door.
Harold stopped the saw and looked up when Ryan walked up next to him. He wiped the perspiration off his scalp and slid his safety goggles up on his head.
Ryan said, “You have a cause of death?”
Harold turned around to see if I was there, too. “Hey, beautiful.” Then he turned back to Ryan. “I haven’t called it yet because I don’t have the results on the blood work yet. She might have OD’ed like her friend. But there were three knife wounds. One hit the liver and she bled out internally. But whether that came first or any drugs killed her, I can’t say yet.”
I said, “Over at the skate park you said time of death was midnight or early morning.”
“Yeah, I’m sticking with that. Probably midnight to two, give or take.”
“All right, thanks, Harold.”
“Sure thing. I’ll let you know when I enter the report.”
Back at our desks, Ryan and I talked about how to lure Cory in. “How do we get him a message? We don’t have any contact information on him.” I said.
“We could re-post the bulletin that goes to all the uniforms and detectives. Include a booking photo. Say we need him to get in touch. We want to make a deal. Something like that.”
I thought for a second. “He might misinterpret that to mean what we already told him: We want to make a deal but he needs to name the contact first. I’d be more direct: We told the coach what you told us.”
“Yeah, that’s better. If he’s too stupid to understand what that means, we’re not going to be able to help him. He’s on his own.”
I nodded. “Would you get that downstairs?”
He popped out of his chair and headed off to set up the bulletin.
Then we waited. It happens a lot. When we wait, we start working on the forms. For every investigation, we need to record every person we interview, every piece of evidence we discover, every lead we follow. Over the course of the afternoon, I checked in a few too many times with the sergeant downstairs to see if any officers reported any sight of Cory McDermott. Nothing. That didn’t surprise me: He was all beat up, and he worked at night. It made sense that he was sleeping somewhere.
Even though it didn’t surprise me, it did worry me. If one of the football guys killed Lake and then Kendra, there was only one person left who could implicate them: Cory. And if Cory took the beatdown because he neglected to kill Kendra, his decision to talk to the cops might have sealed his fate. We wanted to force the football guys to do something that would move our investigation forward. But if they took out Cory—and did it cleanly—it would shut down the investigation. Shit.
Around four o’clock, I said to Ryan, “I’m getting antsy.”
Ryan looked up from his screen. “I see that.”
“I think we screwed this up.”
“How’s that?”
“We told the football guys Cory says he’s got a contact on the team who supplies drugs. We want them to make a move. And we’ve tried to alert Cory that we’ve told them. We’ve set up a race: Who’s gonna move first? If the football guys know where to find Cory, they can kill him before he even hears from us that we want him to come in.”
“Therefore?”
“Therefore we’ve put his life in danger unnecessarily.”
“What should we do now?”
“Tell the football guys that Cory’s come in and told us everything. He’s working with the prosecutor to knock down his sentence.”
“What’s the ‘everything’ he’s told us?”
“I don’t know, but they will.”
“What if the football guys don’t believe us?” Ryan said.
“Unless they’ve already got Cory tied to a chair in a basement somewhere, they can’t be sure he didn’t come in and make a statement. They can’t take the chance we’re bluffing. This is a capital-punishment state.”
Ryan leaned back in his chair and knit his fingers behind his head. “Let me think this through. Possibility One: They’re telling the truth. They’re clean. They didn’t kill anyone. They’ll thank us for getting rid of the contact. Possibility Two: They’re dirty, and they’re murderers. If they think he’s already made a statement, they’re too late. There’s no point in killing him.”
“That’s right,” I said. “If he’s already made a statement, the whole scheme falls apart, and it’s every man for himself.”
“So we tell President Billingham that Cory McDermott is talking, and the prosecutor is working out the details of the deal. Billingham tells the football guys, and if they’re dirty they’ll sacrifice the most vulnerable one.” We were both silent for a minute. “What are we not getting?”
We sat there another minute. “Let’s run this by the chief,” I said.
We headed
down to his office and ran the idea by him. He quizzed us a little bit. Although he doesn’t at all mind lying to suspects and criminals, he doesn’t like lying to good guys, like President Billingham.
“Yeah, Chief,” I said to him, “but it’s risky to tell Billingham the truth. He might decide his relationship with Carl Davis, the A.D., and the coach is too valuable for them to find out he was playing them. Or he might want to think about it a while. In the meantime, the football guys could get their hands on Cory. They’ve got his phone number; we don’t. We think they were the ones who already beat the shit out of him. That was a warning. What do you think they’re gonna do to him now?”
The chief sat there, his fingers lightly tapping his desk, his head bowed. He hit a few keys on his keyboard. “Let me call President Billingham.”
“Listen, Chief, why don’t you let me call him? That way, if it blows up, you can say it was my idea.”
“I appreciate that, but no. It’s my responsibility. I’ll do it.”
The chief picked up his personal cell and phoned the president. He relayed the message. When the president asked who the contact was, the chief was smooth: We couldn’t divulge that information until the prosecutor works out the details with Cory McDermott’s attorney. The president said he hoped he wouldn’t be blindsided by a public announcement about the contact. Chief Murtaugh assured him he’d give him a heads-up. They ended the call. Then the chief made another call, this one to Larry Klein, our county prosecutor. The chief sketched in what he had just told President Billingham. Larry Klein said thanks.
“Thanks, Chief,” I said. “Hope your idea works.”
He smiled. “You’ll be the first to know.”
That night, around nine, after I’d returned from my eight o’clock AA meeting, I checked my voicemail. Carl Davis had left me a message.
Chapter 24
The voicemail from Carl Davis was brief. “Detective Seagate, this is Carl Davis. Tomorrow, sometime before noon, please expect to receive a phone call from an attorney, Christopher Reid, relative to your investigations. Have a good evening.”
I went online to look up Christopher Reid, an attorney in Rawlings. I tried Reid and Reed. There was no such person. I tried a national search for an attorney named Christopher Reid. Bingo. There were twenty-seven of them. Rather than looking through all of them, I decided to do what a normal person would do: I ate dinner, watched a little TV, and went to bed.
Friday morning, around nine-thirty, the chief called us into his office. We sat down. “I just got a call from President Billingham. He wanted to make sure we had heard from an attorney.”
I said, “Carl Davis called me last night, around eight. He said a lawyer named Christopher Reid would contact me this morning.”
“Who’s he?” the chief said.
“I looked him up. Can’t find a lawyer with that name in town.”
“Who’s his client?”
I looked at Ryan, who shook his head. “Presumably the contact who Cory didn’t give us yesterday.” He looked like he was trying to suppress a smile. “With any luck, we’ll recognize him when we meet him.”
The chief looked at Ryan with a stony expression. “I’ll call President Billingham and tell him we expect to hear from the attorney. Dismissed.”
Around ten-thirty, I got the call from Christopher Reid. “Detective Seagate, are you and your partner available this morning at eleven-thirty? My client would like to come in and make a statement.”
I wanted to say, “Who the hell is your client?” But since our story was that Cory already told us, I said, “Yes, that would work, Mr. Reid. Do you need directions?”
“No, thank you. We’ll see you in an hour.”
“Looking forward to it.” I ended the call and glanced over at Ryan, who was wearing a huge grin. “If you say, ‘This is fun, huh?’ I will have you removed from the case.”
“This is amusing, huh?”
“How so?”
“Well, the chief calls the university president and tells him we know who the contact is. The president must’ve called the football guys yesterday sometime after four. Since then, they’ve had a heart-to-heart with the contact and even hired him an out-of-town attorney. This attorney has flown in—”
“How do you know he’s flown in?”
“I don’t, but it makes for a better story. This attorney has talked with the contact, perhaps for just a half-hour on the phone, but maybe for hours, here in Rawlings, going over the options. The attorney is going to walk up to Reception in about fifty-five minutes. He’s going to say to the officer, ‘Christopher Reid, with my client, John Doe, to see Detective Karen Seagate.’” Ryan started to laugh. “You’ll get a call from Reception, telling you who’s here to see us—”
“That’s right, we’ll have about thirty seconds to prepare to take his statement, Jackass.”
“That’s Detective Jackass to you.” Ryan was still laughing. “I don’t know what you’re worried about. We don’t have to prepare anything. They’re the ones who are going to do the talking. All we need to do is ask questions.”
I gave him a look and went back to reading my notes. At eleven-thirty, I got the call from Reception saying a Mr. Christopher Reid and his client were here to see me. “Have an officer escort them to Interview 2, please.”
Ryan and I set up in Interview 2. A few moments later, the two men arrived at the door of the interview room.
Christopher Reid was a man of about fifty. His grey hair, shoulder length, was starting to thin on top. He had on a western style jacket, a tan gabardine with brown suede yokes extending down from the shoulders to the middle of his chest. He wore a white shirt, with snaps instead of buttons, and a bola tie around the open collar. The fact that the brown slacks matched the suede yokes, the tooled brown cowboy boots, and the brown cowboy hat he held in his left hand suggested that this was a coordinated outfit. Apparently, he wanted to look like a Hollywood rancher. I hoped this meant he was very stupid.
Behind him, wearing a conservative dark suit and a coordinated dark expression, was Ronald Weber, the owner of Weber Electric. Weber, the father of Alicia Weber, now Alicia Templeton, the guy who tried to attack Lake Williams at the hearing at the university after Alicia accused Lake of rape.
I breathed a sigh of relief that there was in fact a guy who was willing to cop to being Cory McDermott’s contact—and that Ryan and I knew who he was. What else he was willing to cop to, I didn’t know. The fact that he came with an attorney suggested maybe he was going to cop to the two murders.
We all took our seats. Ryan started up the recording equipment from the control on the wall, and I announced the names of the four of us.
I started by asking Weber to identify himself and where he worked. He answered in a low, steady voice. I didn’t get the feeling he was going to freak out or fall apart.
“Mr. Weber,” I said, “have you ever purchased illegal drugs to provide to current or prospective student-athletes at Central Montana State University?”
“Yes.”
“How often have you done this?”
“I can’t say precisely. Maybe fifty times?”
“When did you start buying these drugs?”
“About seven or eight years ago. I don’t remember exactly.”
“Did you buy these drugs from Cory McDermott, a former student-athlete?”
“Usually, but not always.”
“Did you buy these drugs at the direction of Carl Davis, the president of the Cougar Athletic Association?”
“No.”
“Was Mr. Davis aware that you were doing this?”
“No.”
“Did you buy these drugs at the direction of John Freedlander, the athletic director at CMSU?”
“No.”
“Was Mr. Freedlander aware that you were doing this?”
“No.”
“Same two questions about Andy Baxter, the football coach at CMSU.”
“No and no.”
�
��Are you saying nobody knew you were doing this?”
“Correct.”
“Why did you do it?”
“To help make the Cougars more competitive.”
“Explain.”
“If the student-athletes are happier, they’ll be more motivated. If the prospective student-athletes enjoy their visit, they’ll more likely accept a scholarship offer and attend.”
He presented this information like he was instructing his sales staff how to talk to customers. He didn’t appear to be embarrassed that the practices he was describing were felonies, as well as violations of numerous NCAA regulations.
I couldn’t help asking one more question on this topic. “Mr. Weber, if any of three gentlemen I mentioned found out you’ve been doing this for some years, how do you think they would react?”
The attorney gripped Ronald Weber’s arm with some force. “My client would only be speculating. I think that question is outside of the parameters of this statement.” Weber cooperated, sitting there silently, expressionless, gazing at the wall behind me.
“Mr. Weber, how did you get the drugs to the current and prospective student-athletes?”
“There wasn’t one way of doing it. Usually, they called me on the phone and we arranged a place to meet.”
“And that’s how you got drugs to recruits, too?”
“I never met with recruits personally. Current student-athletes would deliver the drugs to the recruits while they were visiting.”
“Did you do other things for student-athletes?”
He sighed, like I was asking for a lot of information. “Prostitutes. Cash—”
“What do you mean by ‘cash’?”
“Couple hundred dollars here and there, for incidental expenses. Jewelry. Tats. Liquor. I helped athletes sell game jerseys and rings.”
“Anything else?”
“Abortions for girlfriends.”
“You’re a busy man.” I took a second. “Where does all this money come from?”