by Mike Markel
“So you don’t know if there was anyone had a grudge against him? Anyone he might have had some conflicts with?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t know of anyone like that at all.”
“To your knowledge, he wasn’t involved in any—I don’t know—inappropriate activities? Hanging around anyone who might have lured him into something he shouldn’t have been into?”
She looked at me quizzically. “What do you mean? What kind of activities?”
I brushed it off with my hand. “Nothing in particular. Just a generic question we always ask: about people he was associating with. But, like you said, you didn’t see him regularly now since he’s not in any of your courses.” I stood up, and Ryan did, too. “Do you want us to notify the department, see if they can send someone over to help you get home or whatever?”
“No, Detective.” She pushed herself to her feet but kept one hand on the table for balance. “I’ll be okay. Thank you for asking.”
“All right, Professor Wilcox. Sorry to have to tell you this about Kirk, but we appreciate you helping us out with the information. If you think of anything that can help us with the investigation, would you give us a call?” I put my card on the table.
Ryan and I took the stairs down to the parking lot. Inside the Charger, I said, “She is a very good liar.”
“She is, indeed.”
“But she did not kill Kirk Hendrickson.”
“No, she did not,” Ryan said.
Chapter 30
We caught up with the chief in the incident room, where he was studying our board. He looked up when he heard us. “Any luck?”
“Lauren Wilcox ID’ed Kirk Hendrickson from his tat. She was the one working with him on hacking Rossman Mining, but she didn’t kill him.”
The chief glanced at Ryan to see if we were on the same page. Ryan nodded.
“I got a call from Florence Rossman.” The chief walked over to one of the old desk chairs, sat down, and interlaced his fingers behind his head.
“Oh, yeah?” I sat down a few feet away. “What did she want?”
“She started off by asking where we were on Lee’s murder. I told her it was our top priority, et cetera. Then she told me Bill’s regained consciousness.”
“That’s good.”
The chief nodded in agreement. “And he has a lot to say.”
“Also good.”
“The guys beat him up because he was grabbing some dirty water. But Bill explained why he was doing that. His father told him that he and Cheryl Garrity were arguing about what to do about the pollution levels in the wastewater. The DEQ analyst who oversees the data collection and reporting found discrepancies between what was in the dirty water and what the company said was in it.”
“What did Cheryl want to do about these discrepancies?”
“Bill said Cheryl wanted to ‘work with’ the DEQ analyst to see if they could reconcile the discrepancies.”
“As in bribery?” I said.
“That’s how I’d interpret it.”
“And Lee? What did he want to do?”
“Lee wanted to get to the bottom of it. If the company was reporting inaccurate information, find out how that was happening and fix it.”
“So Bill was grabbing some dirty water to get it tested independently?”
“That’s right.” The creaky chair groaned as the chief shifted his weight. “Bill offered to get the water. Lee okayed it, telling him to get it to Nathan Kress.”
“Not Lauren Wilcox.”
“No, Lee trusted Nathan.”
“Holy shit. That means Cheryl Garrity did kill Kirk Hendrickson.”
The chief put up his palm. “Hold on. Let me tell you Florence’s plan.”
“Florence has a plan?”
“She wants to set up a meeting with Cheryl. She’ll wear a wire. Cheryl will confess. Game over.”
“I have a plan, too: Now that Bill Rossman’s talking, we depose him. Game over.”
The chief shook his head. “Getting Cheryl to confess, on tape, is stronger. Her lawyer could poke all kinds of holes in Bill’s deposition.”
“Such as?”
“One, it’s hearsay. Bill wasn’t present when Cheryl and Lee argued about what to do. So the lawyer says it was really Cheryl who wanted to do the right thing, and Lee wanted to bribe the DEQ analyst.” The chief started sticking out fingers with every point he made. “Two, we don’t have any evidence to support Bill’s story. Three, Bill’s a grieving son lying to protect his father’s memory. Four, he’s a moody high-school graduate who spends his time drinking beer and screwing women he doesn’t know.” He paused. “Get my point?”
“What about Kirk?” I said. “How do we get Cheryl to admit to that one?”
“I told Florence we could coach her on that.”
Ryan said, “If Robin comes back from the garage and says she’s got the rubber on the concrete, Florence tells her it’s all on the CCTV.”
“There is no CCTV.” And immediately I felt the two sets of eyes looking at me. “Okay, I get it,” I said. I could feel my face getting hot. “But how do we know Florence will stay on script?”
“I think she wants to make sure we’ve got the best shot of putting Cheryl away for killing her husband. And if she doesn’t stay on script, then we go back to your plan: deposing Bill and getting as much evidence as we can on the two murders.”
“So who was it came up this idea: Florence or you?”
“The basic idea came from her.”
“Why do you think she suggested it? What does she know about the law?”
“She said she’d be able to get Cheryl to admit things we wouldn’t be able to.”
“For example?”
“She said we’d have to trust her.”
“You willing to do that?”
The chief let out a long breath. “Yes, I am. If it blows up in our face, what does it cost us? Cheryl Garrity doesn’t respect her local police department? Given that we have a backup, I think we should do it.”
“What do we do next?”
“I wanted to bring it to you—you’re the lead detective. It’s your case. You have to sign off.”
“Okay. Done.”
“I’ll call Florence.” The chief stood up. “See if she can set it up at her house, tonight at nine. We’ll go over at eight, wire her up, rehearse her. With any luck, we’ll have this thing wrapped up by ten o’clock.”
I stood. “Let me get in touch with Robin, see if there’s rubber on the concrete. If I’m right about that, let’s do it.”
“Let me know,” the chief said as he left the incident room.
Ryan and I went back to the bullpen, where I called her. “Hey, Robin, tell me what you see.”
“DMV says Cheryl Garrity drives a 2014 Lexus RX350 SUV in dark red. I contacted the Lexus dealer here in town, and that model comes with Bridgestone all-weather tires. I got the tire patterns off their site. I looked up the track distance, you know, the side-to-side wheelbase? And you called it: There’s rubber on the concrete that matches that model in tread design and track distance.”
“Great.”
“Couple other things. There’s some dark red paint on the concrete pillar next to her space, like she turned the wheel abruptly and smashed the passenger side of the Lex into it. It lines up with one of the tire patterns on the floor. Plus, the car in her spot this morning is a rental. It’s a Chevy Cruze.”
“I need you to do me one other thing while you’re there. Look around and tell me where you’d mount a CCTV camera so that it covers the Rossman Mining employee cars.”
“Give me a second.” I heard the soft squishing of her soles on the concrete as she walked around the area.
“Make it unobstrusive, so the Lexus woman could park there every day and not notice it.”
“They use tube fluorescents in the ceiling for the main lighting, but there’s flood lights mounted high up on the poles. You could put a wide-angle lens in the pole marked Secti
on M. That would do it.”
“Section M. All right, thanks a lot, Robin.” I ended the call and turned to Ryan. “Tell the chief to set it up, would you?”
I was jumpy the rest of the day, like I was getting prepared for some kind of performance. The truth was, I didn’t have much of a role to play, but I really did want it to go smooth. If Florence was telling us the truth about what Bill Rossman said, his father was a good guy—and Cheryl Garrity definitely was bad business. But I had no confidence that Florence could pull off this performance. And my instinct, when someone says “Trust me,” is to run for cover. Still, the chief was right in betting that Florence was being straight with us. After all, she wanted to get Lee’s killer more than any of us cops did.
The chief took me and Ryan and Jorge out to an Italian place for dinner. It was a nice gesture, but it was obvious we were all having a crappy time. The silences stretched for minutes. I think everyone was trying to think through the angles, see if we had prepared everything as much as we could. Naturally, I was trying to imagine everything that could go wrong. After all, I used to go out with Murphy, right before he came up with his Law.
Back at headquarters, we checked and re-checked the recording device we were going to tape to Florence. Finally, at 7:30 we piled into the Charger and headed out to her place. We traveled east along the river, then took the winding road up to the foothills above the reservoir. Couple of times I spotted a set of still, shiny eyes in the brush along the road. We got closer to the Rossman house, and on one of the hairpin turns I could see down to the reservoir, a huge black hole with a necklace of dim lights.
As we got closer, the chief called Florence to tell her we were on our way and to ask her if there was someplace we could park the Charger out of sight. She told him they have an eight-car garage, and she’d leave one of the doors open.
We pulled into the big parking area with the garage built into the rock face. Florence had left a garage door open, like she said she would. I was wondering how you can have an eight-car garage. Not all that difficult, really: four doors, with each space two cars deep. In fact, it was closer to a twelve-car garage if you counted all the space along the back wall for the woodworking equipment, the wooden cabinets nicer than the ones I have in my kitchen, and the bay where you climb down a ladder to work under a car, like they have at those quick-lube places. Off to one side was a big metal frame holding a car engine on a set of chains. Lee Rossman apparently liked two-seater sports cars. I counted four of them, including a green Triumph with white racing stripes, from the sixties. The three guys I was with were all moon-eyed over a white coupe with a long hood. I didn’t see a nameplate on it, just a yellow crest shape with a black horse rearing up.
As we left, the chief located the button on the wall and shut the garage door. We walked over to the wide double doors that led into the house. I knocked. Florence answered the door and invited us in. She gave us each brief smiles, including me, who she’d slapped pretty hard last time we were together. Then she leaned in and hugged the chief. I introduced Jorge, who looked like he was having a vertigo attack when he gazed through the tall window at the reservoir below.
“You’ll be quite safe,” Florence said to him, “I assure you.” She led us into one of the conversation areas in the main public room and invited us to sit. The chief sat near her on a long leather couch. He opened with a few polite questions about how she was doing and thanked her for her willingness to do this. She answered with gracious but concise replies. It was clear she wanted to get this show going.
“Ms. Rossman, we believe Cheryl Garrity is responsible for two deaths: Lee, obviously, and a young man named Kirk Hendrickson. We think she killed him Wednesday night, after nine-thirty.”
Florence Rossman looked deeply sad. “I don’t know that name.”
“He was a college student at Central Montana; he wasn’t associated with the company,” I said. “We know that he and Lauren Wilcox, the professor—you know who I’m talking about?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Okay. He and Lauren Wilcox hacked Rossman Mining. We assume he was planning to publicize the data discrepancies that Bill told you about, in order to discredit the company and shut down its operations here in Montana. Cheryl lured him to the garage under Lee’s office, where she hit him with her car. She transported him to Allumbaugh Park, where she dumped his body.”
“How do you know this happened?”
“We have some circumstantial evidence—tire tracks, paint in the garage, and so forth. But here’s the important point: We need you to tell her she was recorded on closed-circuit television in the garage.”
“I didn’t know there were cameras in there.”
“There aren’t. But she doesn’t know that. You tell her there’s a camera mounted on the pillar near the Rossman cars. It’s on the pillar marked Section M. “M” as in mining. Tell her Lee had it installed. One of the employees’ cars was vandalized about a year ago, and he just did it on his own. He didn’t go through the building management. He thought it would be more effective if it was unobtrusive, so he had it attached to one of the floodlights. The pillar with Section M painted on it, if she asks. Can you do that?”
“Of course.”
The chief said, “Cheryl won’t have any way of knowing you’re aware of the Hendrickson murder. His death hasn’t yet been made public. But someone has shown you the footage from the garage. Earlier today we got Lauren Wilcox to identify Hendrickson by some tattoos in a photograph, but Detectives Seagate and Miner agree that she didn’t know that he was murdered, or even that he was missing. And Nathan Kress was not involved in any way, either. And obviously, your stepson could have no way of knowing about it.”
“Therefore anything I know about the murder in the garage should completely surprise Cheryl.”
“That’s our belief,” the chief said. “It has to be the camera in the garage. We think that after Cheryl realizes that you know about the Hendrickson murder, she will realize that she has no alternative but to listen to anything you propose. At that point, it should be relatively easy for you to lead her into admitting that she killed him. Of course, it would be ideal if you could get her to confess to Lee’s murder, as well. We haven’t yet been able to gather sufficient forensic evidence to charge her with that crime, too.” He paused. “Do you want to talk about strategies for getting her to admit her role in the crimes?”
“I have known Cheryl Garrity for over four years, Chief Murtaugh. And my late husband knew her for decades. I believe I will be able to lead her to the statements that will incriminate her.”
The chief nodded. “Do you have any questions you want to ask us?”
“I do not,” she said.
“Karen.” The chief turned to me. “Would you like to go with Ms. Rossman and attach the wire?”
Chapter 31
Jorge busied himself with the recording equipment while Florence unbuttoned her blouse and I taped the receiver to her chest. She buttoned the blouse up, then turned to me, for a professional opinion, I guess. I thought the blouse was opaque enough to disguise the wire. She buttoned one more button, then walked up to her wood-framed dressing mirror. She frowned slightly, then went into a closet and came out with a cable-knit sweater. She put it on, looked at her image again, and was satisfied.
“Detective Seagate,” she said, once we were done with the costume, “I want you to know how sorry I am that I slapped you the other day.”
“I understand,” I said. “Forget it.”
“The beating that Bill took, on top of Lee’s death—it’s been an unbelievably stressful time. When I got that phone call from Ron—I realize now that you need to investigate the private lives of the people close to Lee—my emotions were just out of control. What I did was wrong, and I apologize.”
She walked toward me and put her arms around me tightly, holding the hug for a few seconds. Then she stepped back. “Did you feel it?”
“Excuse me?”
“Did y
ou feel the device?” She tapped the radio taped between her breasts.
“No,” I said after a second. “Feel free to hug Cheryl Garrity.”
I left the bedroom to tell the chief and Ryan we were ready. When we got back, Florence was seated at a long mahogany makeup table with dozen of bottles and jars up against the big mirror, which was ringed with light bulbs. In the mirror I could see she was seated still, her eyes closed. Her expression was serene, with a hint of a smile, like she was meditating.
Jorge and the chief were off to the side in an area about twelve by fifteen, kind of a separate living room inside the bedroom. Jorge was sitting on a small upholstered chair, his equipment on a side table. The chief sat on a high-back chair with a floor lamp next to it. I sat on the edge of the king-size four-poster bed. Ryan sat on the long bench at the foot of the bed.
At two minutes to nine, the doorbell chimed. Florence Rossman stood up and walked with a model’s gait to the bedroom door. She glanced back at the chief, who gave her an encouraging nod.
A few moments later, we heard the door open. Jorge adjusted a dial on the controls on his recorder. He turned to me and gave me a thumb’s up.
“Cheryl, thank you so much for coming. Let me take your coat.”
We heard the rustling of the fabric, then Cheryl Garrity said, “Thank you.”
“I hope the roads weren’t too bad.”
“No, they were fine,” Cheryl said brightly.
We heard the tapping of the shoes on the concrete floor, then silence as the women reached the carpeted area in the living room.
“Please sit,” Florence said.
“Thank you.”
“Let me start by telling you how much it has meant to me—your kind words over these last horrible days.”
“They have been horrible,” Cheryl said.
“It has been a real comfort to me to know that you have everything under control—at the office, I mean.”
“You know you will always be able to count on me for that,” Cheryl said.
“I asked you to stop by this evening so that we could chat about the future of Rossman Mining. I never sought the position of president, of course, but the tragic events of this week have thrust me into that position. I am confident that with your considerable assistance, we will be able to ensure that the company continues to prosper for many, many years.