***
Despite my misgivings about having to interact with Stoddard, the meeting came off smoothly. I concluded that my own discomfort at having to work with him had more to do with that little voice in my head called a conscience, and had nothing to do with him. The guy was bright and capable. I could understand Kate’s attraction to him.
Everyone read Sorensen’s letter. Stoddard summed up our situation succinctly. “As I see it, we’ve got three options: We can place Stimson under round-the-clock surveillance; we can pick her up, confront her with the letter and see if she confesses; or we can go for a search warrant of her home.”
To Stoddard I said, “I’m afraid I don’t have much faith in option two. Do you have any idea how often inmates complain about correctional officers? They do it all day long. It isn’t likely that an experienced officer like Stimson is going to break out in a cold sweat because an inmate, and a dead one at that, has made an allegation against her. If the only evidence I’ve got is the uncorroborated letter from Sorensen, the department couldn’t sustain a job action against Stimson, much less consider seeking criminal charges. It would be the word of a dead inmate serving his third prison sentence against a corrections officer with four years’ experience and a relatively clean record. The officers union would have a field day with us.”
“And another thing,” chimed in Kate. “Have we got enough to get a warrant? I’m not sure that the letter by itself is legally strong enough for a judge to conclude that we’ve got probable cause. Unless I’ve forgotten what I learned in Search and Seizure 101, no probable cause, no warrant.”
Stoddard replied, “It would probably be a close call, but I think a well-written affidavit, carefully laying out the facts, will result in a judge approving the warrant application. If we do get turned down, we go to plan B—place Stimson under twenty-four-hour surveillance. We won’t be out anything but the time it took us to prepare the thing. I recommend we go for it.”
Nobody disagreed. The consensus was that we opt for the warrant first, and then confront Stimson with the letter and any incriminating evidence that turned up in the search.
Chapter Forty-one
While Webb, Gill, and Stoddard prepared the search warrant affidavit, Kate drove to Stimson’s home and established visual surveillance. It appeared that nobody was home. Department records revealed that Stimson was single and lived in the small city of Lehi, located about fifteen minutes from the prison.
I decided to follow up on a small detail Gill had overlooked after he completed his interview with Stimson. I pulled the original ticket she had written to inmate Eddie Sandoval on the evening of the murder. Sandoval had come to the prison from Salt Lake City eighteen months ago on several drug charges.
His prison record was mixed. The incident with Stimson represented his third minor disciplinary violation since entering prison. While not directly affiliated with any prison gang, Sandoval’s file revealed associations with several known members of one of our most dangerous gangs, the Mexican Mafia.
With ticket in hand and uncertain of the reception I was about to receive, I located Sandoval in the education building, attending a late afternoon drug treatment class. I brought him into a small, unoccupied classroom next to where his treatment group was meeting. I introduced myself and tried to establish rapport by making small talk. He wasn’t buying it. It immediately became clear that niceties would not placate the hostility and suspicion written all over his face, so I decided to take the direct approach.
“Look, Eddie, I’ll get right to the point. You received a disciplinary last evening from Officer Stimson for refusing to turn the volume down on your box. What time did the incident go down?”
He stared at me without speaking for almost a minute and then said, “Fuckin’-a, man. You pulled my ass out of group for this? Half the guys in that room are gonna figure I’m some kind of punk-ass snitch. I don’t remember exactly when I got the goddamn thing. It was in the evening. Go look it up on the fuckin’ ticket, man, and stop botherin’ my ass.”
We both stood and I said to him, “Okay, Eddie, sorry to have bothered you. You can go back to class now. But one more thing. By tomorrow, it won’t be half the cons in here who think you’re a punk-ass snitch. By the time I’m finished, it’ll be all of them. So why don’t you just sit your sorry ass down and help me out.”
He gave me a cold, hard stare, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “I got the ticket around four-forty-five, maybe four-fifty.”
“You’re sure about the time?”
“Why do you want to know, man?”
I ignored the question.
“I’m sure,” he snapped.
“What makes you so sure?”
“Look, man. I’m sure because we stand for mandatory count at four-thirty and I go to chow at five o’clock. I got the chicken-shit ticket between count and dinner. I remember thinkin’ if the hack bitch would just shut the fuck up and write the ticket, I’d make the culinary on time with the rest of my homeboys. I was hungry, okay.”
I pulled the ticket out of my pocket to confirm what I already suspected. Stimson had written that the incident occurred at 1720 hours. That’s military time for 5:20 p.m. She had fudged it by a good half hour.
I found Webb, Gill, and Stoddard in the small conference room adjacent to my office putting the finishing touches on the warrant affidavit. Kate had recently checked in and continued to report no activity around Stimson’s home.
I dropped the ticket Stimson had issued to Eddie Sandoval on the conference table in front of them. “I think I just discovered something that will strengthen our search warrant.” All three immediately looked up.
“You have our undivided attention,” replied Gill.
“I just spoke with the inmate who received this disciplinary. Note the time Stimson wrote on the ticket. She says she wrote him up at 5:20 p.m. Sandoval says that’s a crock. He was eating chow in the culinary at five o’clock with his housing unit. He says the incident went down at 4:40, maybe 4:45, shortly after he stood for a mandatory count. I double checked him on both the schedule for dinner and the mandatory count. He’s telling the truth.”
“Solidifying her alibi,” muttered Stoddard. “She took a calculated risk that we wouldn’t verify the time line, and even if we did, she could still claim the whole thing was an innocent mistake. This is a very smart lady.”
“I’m glad you thought to check that, Sam,” said Webb. “By itself, it’s an innocuous mistake. But combine it with her apparent involvement in getting Sorensen to forge the suicide note, and it’s no longer insignificant. We’ll add this information to the warrant affidavit. It will definitely help. I want to place a pickup order on Officer Stimson right now. We’ve got more than enough to bring her in for questioning. We can decide after the interrogation whether or not to book her.”
“And do I ever feel like a dumb shit,” said Gill. “I interviewed the lady myself and even got a copy of the ticket. I just never thought to verify the time sequence. Maybe I’m getting too damned old for this job.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” said Webb. “You are as old as dirt, but this was an easy one to miss.”
I left the conference room and returned to my office. As I walked by her desk, Patti looked up and said, “Did Bob Fuller get hold of you?”
“I didn’t see Warden Fuller. Where was he?”
“He came by to see you. Said it was important. The last time I noticed, he was sitting right outside the conference room door while you were in your meeting. I thought you saw him. He sure left in a hurry.”
***
Bill Allred was a guy who made a habit out of driving in his rear-view mirror. He spotted the tail. He’d just completed a full morning of parole violation hearings and was on his way back to the office.
He first noticed the white Ford Taurus after leaving the prison’s main gate. It followed him to the freeway entrance and then north to Salt Lake City. Instead of driving straight to his office, Al
lred diverted onto several side streets before turning into the South Town Mall. The Taurus stayed right with him until he turned into the parking lot, then it continued past. The lone occupant never got close enough for Allred to get any kind of look at him. He always felt a certain level of paranoia about the possibility of being stalked by ex-cons or their associates. Yet this Taurus looked more like a plain vanilla cop car than something an offender might drive. Allred parked his car and casually walked to the entrance of Dillard’s department store, carefully perusing the lot to see if the guy in the Taurus had brought a friend or was flying solo. He wasn’t sure.
Burnham and Turner pulled alongside one another about a block from the mall. “Do you think he made us?” asked Turner.
“Hard to say. He sure didn’t take the most direct route into the mall, that’s for sure. He may have been suspicious and was trying to check it out. Since you’re feeling like he might have burned you, I’ll establish a visual on his car and take the lead for a while. I’ll radio you as soon as he moves,” said Burnham.
It took Allred a moment in the department store to calm down and to begin thinking rationally. For a moment on the street, he found himself having to choke down a sense of panic. He spent a few minutes in the men’s clothing section, then walked a short distance to the food court, ordered a salad, a slice of pizza, and a soft drink. He took his lunch tray and carried it to a location that provided a clear view of anyone entering or leaving the food court. Nobody looked suspicious or paid him the slightest bit of attention. Maybe he wasn’t being followed. Maybe it was just a figment of his imagination. Maybe.
After he finished his lunch, Allred walked to a bank of public telephones by the food court restrooms. He dialed the number. The call was answered after the first ring.
Chapter Forty-two
The search warrant was signed by a cranky district court judge named Homer Billings. Unable to find a judge in the Salt Lake County Court complex so late in the evening, Stoddard and Webb checked the on-call roster and found Judge Billings’ name. When they arrived at his home, they found him curled up in his bathrobe, slippers, and pajamas watching some mindless reality show in his home theater.
We met in a strip mall parking lot several blocks from Stimson’s home. Kate had been sitting on the house since mid-afternoon and felt sure it was unoccupied. As a precaution, Kate and I covered the back of the house while Gill, Webb, and Vince Turner went to the front. They knocked on the front door but got no answer. Turner entered through a side door after breaking a glass panel and unlocking the door from the inside.
Stimson lived in a quiet residential neighborhood where the homes looked twenty to twenty-five years old. The house was a small two-level affair, with the main floor at ground level and a below-ground finished basement of equal size. A detached two-car garage was connected to the house by a covered walkway that led to a side door.
The interior was as neat as a pin. Everything in its place. The family room downstairs gave me the creeps. I had the eerie sense that I’d walked into a taxidermy shop. Stimson was obviously a hunter. The heads of four big-game animals were mounted on the walls. A locked gun cabinet containing several hunting rifles stood against one wall. Stimson’s leisure reading appeared to be hunting and outdoor magazines. Copies of publications like Field & Stream and Guns & Ammo were neatly stacked on a coffee table.
Stimson appeared to be an outdoors type, into hunting and camping, comfortable with guns. Framed membership certificates to the John Birch Society and the National Rifle Association were mounted on a wall above a desk and home computer. As a card-carrying member of the John Birch Society, she probably embraced political views well to the right of center. The truth was, that could describe a lot of cops. What I found odd about the home was the complete absence of pictures of anybody—friends, family, pets. There wasn’t a single photograph of anyone or anything in the entire house. The place felt sterile and empty.
The search went smoothly. We found her uniform pants and shirt in a black plastic trash bag in the garbage can next to the house. The uniform had been recently worn and appeared to be in good condition. We also seized two pair of department-issued shoes, her computer, and the tape from her telephone answering machine. We hoped that blood, hair, or other trace evidence from Sorensen’s body had transferred to Stimson’s uniform.
Gill transported the evidence to the State Crime Laboratory. Both a hair-and-fiber expert and a blood/DNA specialist were standing by. They’d promised a quick response.
Stimson had been a no-show the entire afternoon. Webb decided to establish round-the-clock surveillance of the residence until she was apprehended.
***
Carol Stimson nursed a cup of coffee and a BLT sandwich in a restaurant inside the downtown Salt Lake Sheraton Hotel. Fortunately, she had received the warning call not to return home just moments before she turned down her street. She did a quick about face and jumped back onto I-15, ending up at the Sheraton. She carefully weighed her options. Even if she wasn’t criminally indicted, which now seemed likely, her career as a corrections officer was over. Moreover, going back to the little house she rented in Lehi was now out of the question. Kincaid and his cop friends would have the place under surveillance. That angered her, because some things she desperately wanted to take with her were stored in the house.
She’d become a liability. She knew it, and so would they. She had no intention of ending up like Vogue, Watts, and Milo Sorensen.
She decided to spend the night in a quiet, out-of-the-way place. The next day, she planned to take care of some unfinished business with Kincaid, and then leave Salt Lake City far behind. She hated the man—hated him because he had nearly gotten her fired and because he destroyed her reputation in the department. But most of all, she hated Kincaid for what he represented: someone who used his considerable power to protect stinking inmates at the expense of prison staff. It was his fault, and she intended to make him pay, and pay dearly. Cops didn’t do this sort of thing to other cops—it should have been like family. Street thugs and convicts were the bad guys. You never turned on a fellow officer. Somehow Kincaid had never learned this.
She intended to teach him a lesson. And the best way to do that was to strike at what Kincaid held most dear—his family.
Her first instincts about him had been correct. They should have killed him at the very beginning. Now things were starting to unravel. How had Kincaid connected her to Sorensen and the forged suicide note? She had taken a calculated risk by changing the time on the disciplinary ticket she’d given Sandoval. Had he figured that out too?
It hadn’t been difficult gathering information about him. Department gossip described Kincaid as a guy with inherited wealth who lived with the rest of the highbrows in affluent Park City. He was divorced and apparently had sole custody of a young daughter. A few hours spent on surveillance revealed the presence of an elderly woman in the home. She had even determined which elementary school Kincaid’s daughter attended. A hit would be cake.
***
Salt Lake County Sheriff’s detectives maintained the surveillance at Stimson’s home on the outside chance that she might still show up. Turner and Marcy Everest remained on surveillance at Allred’s home. He’d left the Board of Pardons shortly after five, driven straight home, and hadn’t moved since. The surveillance plan was the same as the previous evening: remain outside the house until certain Allred was tucked in for the night and then return early the next morning.
Kate, Terry, and I sat cloistered in the conference room outside my office. It was after seven o’clock. We were poring through six months of Bill Allred’s telephone records. The department employs over six hundred people at the Utah State Prison. The daunting task before us was how to identify department employee home and business telephone numbers that showed up on Allred’s phone records. There had to be a computer program that could do that for us, but I wasn’t aware of one, and neither were Terry or Kate. If we’d had more time, the departme
nt’s computer support people could probably have created a program for us.
Each of us worked with two months of phone records. We began by eliminating all out-of-state calls as well as those outside the Salt Lake Valley that would have been beyond the reasonable commuting distance of our employees. We took the remaining calls and generated a list of any number called more than once. That narrowed things down significantly. The first break occurred when we matched four calls during the six-month period to Stimson’s phone. Why would a Board of Pardons member to be calling the home of a low-ranking corrections officer assigned to an inmate housing unit?
Next, we took the list of North Point employees who were on duty and, hypothetically at least, on our list of possible murder suspects. It was here things really fell into place. Allred’s phone records revealed that besides Stimson, he’d made multiple calls to the homes of two additional department employees, each of whom was on duty at the North Point facility on the evening Sorensen was killed. Three calls had been made to Captain Steve Schumway and four to the home of Deputy Warden Bob Fuller. We also discovered a fifth call made to Fuller’s office at the prison.
Kate leaned back in her chair and looked over at me before speaking. “You look like you’re about to puke. Can I get you anything?”
“A new job would be nice,” I replied.
“If this turns out to be as rotten as it smells, we could all be looking for work,” said Burnham with a mischievous smirk.
“You might be right,” I said. The smirk disappeared.
“We’ll need to cross-check Allred’s phone records against Fuller’s and Schumway’s, as well as against each other. That’s going to take some time,” I said.
I looked over at Kate. She nodded. “Let’s do it. We need to wait for the lab results on Stimson’s clothing anyway. If the results come back positive, Webb will get a warrant for her charging murder one. And if anybody can get her to talk, it’ll be Webb and Gill. If she confesses, the others will fall like dominos.”
Sam Kincaid 01 - The Commission Page 18