“How’s your story coming? Has Joe uncovered the truth in Pennsylvania?”
“Joe is kicking ass and taking names! Pennsylvania may never be the same!” Mimi had spent an hour on the phone with him after her return from lunch with the cops, and what he’d uncovered was sure to rock the Pennsylvania state law enforcement community: It was the drunk-driving brother of a state trooper who’d caused the accident that killed the husbands of the Sunset Vista women, and the cops had covered it up to protect one of their own. But that was Joe’s story, Mimi said. She wasn’t sure what her story was, or if she even had one.
Gianna sat up quickly to look at her, losing the towel that was loosely draped over her and exposing breasts that always made it difficult for Mimi to think about anything but them. “This was your story! What happened, Mimi?”
Mimi sighed, sat up and told her. All of it. All of her doubts and concerns, including how she was guilty of stereotyping the women and then unfairly blaming them for failures that weren’t theirs. “I’m as guilty as any right-wing fool who blames the victim for her misfortune!”
“No you’re not! Stop whipping yourself.”
“And I’ve got lots of ambivalent feelings about Alfreda Tompkins.”
“You’re not the only one. She called and cussed me up one side and down the other for ‘taking Bobby Gilliam away from’ her!”
“‘Taking him from her?’ Like you’re, what, a rival instead of his boss?”
“Exactly like that. What was she supposed to do now? she asked. I told her to hire a lawyer. She wanted to know why. To keep her sons out of jail, I told her. Then she really got pissed off and that’s when I hung up.”
“Let’s get out of town,” Mimi said.
“What?”
“A long weekend—Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Let’s go up to the lake on Wednesday, come back Sunday night. What do you think?”
“If you’ll let me sleep for four days, I’m in.”
“You definitely can spend four days in bed but you’ll have to do more than sleep, love of my life.”
“I’ll put in for the days off tomorrow.”
“Me, too.”
“Shall we go home and practice for those four days?”
Mimi’s answer was to pull Gianna up and into an embrace that dramatically increased the temp in the steam room. “You know you’re wet,” she said into Gianna’s mouth.
“Imagine that,” was the breathless reply.
Gianna’s debrief of Alice, Linda, and Bobby didn’t take long; she already knew most of what they had to report because she’d been in such close contact with each of them for the duration of their covert stay at Sunset Vista. She just needed their written reports so she could complete hers. And despite the fact that she’d promised herself she wouldn’t comment on the damage to Bobby’s face, she couldn’t help herself. “I’m glad you threw the son of a bitch down those steps! He came way too close to putting your eye out!” She wasn’t expecting the grin she received in response.
“That’s almost exactly what Ms. Patterson said.”
She allowed the smile that lifted her lips. “Smart woman, Ms. Patterson,” she said, waving them away and pointing to her desk. “Paperwork calls!”
Linda and Alice saluted and left. Bobby stood standing at the corner of her desk, facing her, so his words wouldn’t be overheard. “I’m kinda worried about Alfreda Tompkins, Boss. She’s—”
“She’s mad as hell that you left. I know. She called me.”
“I tried to explain—”
“But she didn’t want to hear it. I know. Don’t beat yourself up, Bobby. You did your job, more than your job if I know you—and I do.”
“She kept wanting me to tell her what she should do, Boss: Should she keep her job, should she leave town, what should she do about her boys? And the worst thing is, she’d have done anything I said!”
“I told her to get a lawyer to help with her sons.”
“I told her to go see Beverly Connors to help with herself,” Bobby said. “The woman needs all the help she can get!”
“You’re a good man, Bobby Gilliam, and a damn fine cop. I’m honored to work with you.”
This time he saluted and left. She watched him make his way across the room to sit at the table with Alice and Linda, and she watched some of the others watch the three of them—the new guard taking the measure of the old guard. The HCU team would always be close, no getting around that, and the glue that was Cassie Ali would never erode. But next assignment she’d mix-and-match. Same thing with Jim, Tony, and Tim. Then her eyes and her thoughts returned to Bobby Gilliam. How on earth would he know to refer Alfreda Tompkins to Dr. Beverly Connors? Bev was Gianna’s best friend, Mimi’s ex-lover, and a clinical psychologist in private practice who specialized in the treatment of families but who, thanks to Cassie Ali, also saw a fair number of cops who didn’t want to be seen by the department shrink. Was Bobby a patient? She thought it a real possibility and hoped that Alfreda would take his suggestion to see Bev. She also hoped that he’d suggest the same to Alice Long. She was wound way too tight, and given how Mimi said she was handling things with Evie, not doing much to help herself. Alice really needed to see Bev. Don’t count on it, Cassie said in her head. What they all needed was a vacation—she picked up the phone to call upstairs to her old office. She’d turned the space over to Eric and Tommi since much of the work her sergeants did involved personnel and HR matters, which couldn’t be handled in a room full of people. When Tommi answered, Gianna asked her to fill out whatever paperwork Gianna needed to request days off, and to please get it signed by the proper person.
“That would be the Chief,” Tommi said, “and you have to do that yourself. I’ll get it ready and bring it to you.” Gianna thanked her and hung up, imagining four days in bed with Mimi.
Tyler signed off on Mimi’s vacation request without even reading it. “You going to hang out with the girls?” Kate and Sue were friends of his that he’d introduced Mimi and Gianna to. They had a house in Dunedin, on Florida’s West Coast, on the Gulf of Mexico, that was close enough to a villa to be called that. Government employees both, they’d made a killing in tech stocks, had taken early retirement, left D.C., and never looked back. Mimi wished they were going to hang out with the girls, which would have felt like a real vacation. “Up to Freddie’s cabin,” she said. “Getting Gianna to take four days—might as well ask her to take four weeks.”
“So you’ll take what you can get and be happy about it,” Tyler said, his eyes never leaving his computer screen and the story he was editing.
“You know me too well. Thanks,” Mimi said, and returned to her desk and a ringing telephone.
“This is Sancho Panza,” she heard when she answered it. He was a source inside the Corrections Department, so-called because he called Mimi Don Quixote for all the windmills she attacked—with varying degrees of success. “I’m calling about a juvenile whose name I never confirmed and who I never acknowledged was in our system,” he said, and Mimi knew he meant Will Tompkins, Alfreda’s oldest son.
“I wish I knew what you were talking about,” she said.
“Then you won’t care that the little fucker and a pal escaped early this morning and put two of ours in the hospital—one in serious condition. The little fucker sliced his face with a knife.”
“Why should I care what somebody I don’t know has done?”
“’Cause it looks like his daddy set the whole thing up. That’s daddy with a capital D.” And the call went dead.
Mimi sat still and quiet, turning over in her mind what she’d just heard. But before she could reach any decision about what to do the phone rang, and before she could speak Alfreda Tompkins was a shrill presence in her ear, demanding a phone number for Bobby Gilliam.
“First, I need for you to stop screaming in my ear, Ms. Tompkins, and calm down and tell me what’s going on.”
“What’s going on is I need to talk to Detective Gilliam!”
/> “Then you’re talking to the wrong person. You need to call his boss. Good-bye, Ms. Tompkins.”
“Don’t hang up! You helped me before! I need you to help me now!”
“Help you with what, Ms. Tompkins?”
There was silence on the other end of the phone and Mimi let it play out. She knew why the woman wanted to talk to Bobby Gilliam, and Mimi needed to hear her say it. Finally she did but she was no longer screaming and yelling. “My son escaped from that detention facility this morning and all these people have been calling me looking for him but I don’t know where he is.”
“What does this have to do with Detective Gilliam?”
“I don’t know what to do, Ms. Patterson!” she wailed. “What should I do?”
“Do about what? Help me understand, Ms. Tompkins. Do you know where your son is?”
“No! I haven’t heard from him.”
“What have you heard? What happened this morning?”
“They say he escaped, that’s all I know.”
“So why do you have to do anything?”
Another long silence during which Mimi’s patience went into retreat. She was about to hang up when Alfreda, with a heavy sigh, finally came clean. “He hurt a guard when he escaped, Will did. He was with another boy, and the two of them, they attacked the guards, put one of them in the hospital. They’re calling it attempted murder, Ms. Patterson!” She was crying now. “He cut the man with a knife. The guard. And he said it was Will who cut him, not the other boy.” Sobs choked off her words and Mimi waited for her to regain her composure, but she ended the call. Mimi gave her ten minutes to call back, and when she didn’t, it was time to go to work. She spent the next two hours on the phone, calling friends and sources, checking, double-checking, triple-checking the facts surrounding William Tompkins’s escape from the Mid-Atlantic Juvenile Correctional Center, and she had all the confirmations she needed—except the big one: that Will Tompkins’s escape had been orchestrated by Dexter Davis. Mimi certainly believed it was possible; the cutting of the guard’s face was too eerily similar to DD’s knife attack on Bobby Gilliam. But she needed to get it independently confirmed.
She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket to call Bobby when a truly nasty thought ran through her brain: Was it possible that Dexter Davis was out? She called the Chief instead. He wasn’t in and Randolph, his aide-de-camp, didn’t know when he would be. “I don’t really need to talk to him, Captain, I just need a question answered, please: Is Dexter Davis still locked up?”
Mimi knew that Randolph tolerated her because the Chief did, but she also knew that addressing him by his rank scored her points in her own right. However, lest she forget even for a second that he was a cop first, he wanted to know why she asked the question, and when she told him, she heard his muttered curse. “I don’t think he knows this,” Randolph said. “I need to tell him.”
“Will you answer my question first, please, Captain?”
“Dexter Davis is still locked up, Ms. Patterson, and he will be until the Internal Affairs Bureau completes its investigation. And it’s my understanding that will take a while.”
I’ll just bet it will, Mimi thought as she punched in Bobby’s number, then had to be content with a message asking her to leave one. She did, and then she called Gianna. If the Chief didn’t know about Will Tompkins, then Gianna probably didn’t, either.
“Oh fuck a duck!” was Gianna’s less than professional response to hearing the news, and when Mimi shared all the information she had, Gianna’s only response was, “I’m just glad we don’t have to catch the little bastard. I’ve got enough to worry about.”
Oh, shit. “Like what?”
“Like maybe some homegrown terrorists wanting to blow up Metro GALCO. I gotta go, babe. Love you.”
“Love you, too,” Mimi said to dead space. Homegrown terrorists. Did it ever stop? Would it ever stop? At least this one was in Gianna’s wheelhouse. Blowing up the gay and lesbian center certainly was a hate crime, unlike the sex trafficking and Sunset View operations, which were—whatever they were. She still was pissed at the Chief for treating Gianna like some kind of recycling bin: Put lots of nasty stuff in and get back sanitized order. She supposed she should feel gratified at the level of trust he had in Gianna but she didn’t; she felt resentful. She also thought she should feel excited at the prospect of so many potential stories on the back burner doing a slow simmer, just waiting to erupt, but she didn’t. Any other time she’d have been standing in front of Tyler’s desk, hopping from foot to foot, rattling off the details of first one story, then another, then another. No doubt the news of the escape from the juvenile detention facility already was on the wires, the attack on the guard being a centerpiece of the story, but there would be nothing about Dexter Davis and why he was important to the story . . .
Ah shit! She knew where young Will Tompkins was. At least, she had a pretty good idea. Wherever DD was housing and hiding the kids he had slinging his drugs was most likely where Will would go, though, as far as Mimi knew, the cops didn’t know where that was; they hadn’t had time to find out. So, who should she tell? Gianna had already made it clear that finding the boy wasn’t her job, and if that was the case, then it wouldn’t be Bobby Gilliam’s job, either. The Chief? It’s not your job, either, she told herself. You’re a reporter, not a cop, so act like a reporter. She typed up all her notes from the last several hours, blending what she already knew with what she’d learned, and the truth was that while she had at least three potential stories, she didn’t have one fully resourced, ready to go to publication story. Not yet.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It took them four days but The A’s finally connected the five persons of interest who’d been a presence at Metro GALCO to a vehicle and a residence. It was a tedious and painstaking process: waiting and watching until they had photos of all five; then more waiting, watching, and following until they were tracked to the vehicle; then more of the same until they were able to follow them to a townhouse development in suburban Prince William County, Virginia. In addition to The A’s, Eric and Tommi had assigned four other unit members, including the other two gay ones and four of the white ones, a decision made by Gianna after the vehicle, a four-wheel drive with Idaho license plates, turned out to be registered to a well-known member of an ultraright extremist group. C.A. had done a very thorough internet search and printed out pages of info on the group, which called itself, Why We Put the Constitution First. “Just reading about these freaks makes me want to take a shower,” he said. “They hate pretty much everybody and they’ve wrapped all that hatred in the Constitution and tied it with a Bill of Rights bow.”
“Which is good for us,” Gianna said. “Those big footprints leave an easy trail for us to follow.”
“So why do they think they’re so damn smart?” Tommi groused.
“White privilege,” Jim Dudley answered, and when he got half a dozen “what the hell are you talking about?” looks, he expounded. “Everybody knows white people are smarter than everybody else, right? I mean, look how elaborately they set up their Metro GALCO operation. Whatever it is they’re planning, when it happens, nobody will be able to trace it back to them. So damn smart they sent people in there who couldn’t pass for gay in a room full of ninety-year-old straight church ladies with cataracts.” Laughter exploded and continued for a while, but Jim wasn’t finished. “One thing they do just right, though, is trust that the people they hate don’t hate them back. That little fucker who massacred all those people in that church in South Carolina? They invited him in to pray with them. And I’ll bet you my paycheck that your—what do you call ’em—A’s? They’re not the only ones to notice that those five shits aren’t gay, but the others just aren’t cops and don’t think like we do.”
“Yeah,” Tommi said. “They’re not devious, which could very well get them slaughtered, just like those good people in that South Carolina church.”
“Which pisses me off all over again that Metr
o GALCO wouldn’t let us in there—”
“Let’s not go there, Eric,” Gianna said calmly. “Dead horse. Besides, if we were a presence there, whatever those little shitfucks are planning, wouldn’t be happening—at least not there. So—”
“Hey, Boss! Come look at this!” Kenny Chang was on his feet, waving her over with both arms like an air traffic controller landing a plane, and they all hurried across the room to him where he thrust a handful of paper at Gianna. “That townhouse in Prince William they live—”
“The shitfucks,” Tommi said.
“The—yeah, that’s a pretty good name for ’em,” Kenny said with a frown, then a nod. “Anyway, Boss, the house is leased to an outfit called WeNet4U, based in—you guessed it—Idaho, with an address listed as the same P.O. Box listed on the vehicle registration.”
“I’m liking this a lot,” Jim Dudley said. “Good work, you guys,” he said to the A’s. “And what are your names? I can’t keep calling you A’s.”
“Archie Ames,” Archie said.
“Annie Andersen,” Annie said.
“Geez,” Jim said. “Couldn’t call you B’s, could we?”
“I sure wish we could see inside that car and that townhouse,” Eric said.
“They’ve been very careful not to give us the probable cause we need to look,” Gianna replied, then added, “but I think it’s just a matter of time before they do. So let’s get the warrants ready.”
“Warrants!” Eric exclaimed. “We don’t even know their names!”
“Warrants for the vehicle and the residence,” Gianna said, “based on their connection to known race hatred and terrorist activities. We’ll start there. And involve Captain Randolph. He writes such good warrants the U.S. attorney tried to get him to teach a class.”
The A’s looked at each other, then at Gianna. “Ah, who’s Captain Randolph?” Archie asked.
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