Corruption of Justice

by Brenda English

  On our last two sails, I had struggled to remember starboard from port. (“What’s wrong with good old left and right?” I had asked Lansing. He had laughed, but I hadn’t been joking at all.) I still couldn’t remember which way to wrap the lines from the sail around the winches. And his insistence on my taking the wheel both times had just about sent me into a panic, especially when I had to move the boat through a change of tack or turn it around, making the sail swing powerfully from one side of the boat to the other.

  Perhaps, I thought, I eventually would get comfortable with it all, but I certainly didn’t want to flaunt my lack of sailing knowledge or ability in front of this nimble child who clearly had been spending time on this boat since he was a toddler.

  A couple of longer tacks found all three of us sitting in the cockpit, looking at each other.

  “What grade will you be in when school starts next month?” I asked David, broaching what I hoped was a safe subject, determined that Lansing see I could make conversation with his son.

  “First grade.” No elaboration.

  “Are you looking forward to it?”

  “Yes.” Although you couldn’t have proven it by the still-serious expression.

  “Do you have friends from your neighborhood who will be in school with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” I concluded inanely, “that’s always good.”

  I tried to sneak a look at Lansing, where he sat to my left, steering the boat, only to find him watching me with a completely unreadable expression that was matched only by the one on his son’s face.

  A little while later, David looked at me again and asked, “Are you going to marry my dad?”

  Lansing and I both almost choked to death on the spot.

  “David!” he said in a chastising voice. “You don’t ask a question like that!”

  “No, no,” I said, motioning Lansing to silence. “It’s all right. I understand why he would want to know.”

  I turned to David, who still watched me solemnly.

  “David,” I said, hoping I sounded reassuring, “your dad and I haven’t known each other nearly long enough to decide something like that. I do like your dad. Very much. He saved my life a couple of months ago, when a bad person tried to hurt me. But I also like him because I like who he is. I think he’s a good guy, just like you do. And I enjoy spending time with him.”

  “Oh,” David said, noncommittally. “Okay.”

  “That’s more than she’s ever told me,” the father commented dryly. I gave him a glare. God, I thought, this is absolutely agonizing. How the hell did I let myself get talked into this, anyway?

  Celibacy looking better and better, is it?

  Screw you, I answered silently.

  Sorry, can’t help you there.

  Was that why I was such a sucker, I wondered. Because I was so starved for sex that I would endure anything to get this man into bed? It had been a while, after all. Okay, more than a while.

  But I knew that wasn’t it. I really enjoyed sex. I wasn’t even above having a relationship that was more physical than emotional. As a history of my relationships would make painfully obvious (and might even make one wonder whether I preferred it). But I knew I would never consider putting my career at risk just for sex with a guy who also presented a huge conflict of interest for me. There were too many willing guys out there who didn’t. But Noah Lansing was someone I just couldn’t seem to take or leave. He had gotten under my skin and into my brain in a way I couldn’t remember any other man ever doing, not even Jack Brooks, my ex-husband.

  My body felt electrified whenever I was near Lansing, as if every nerve ending suddenly had woken up. His hand on my arm, his arm around my shoulder, were enough to make me want to throw all caution to the winds. And I couldn’t even remember the one kiss he had given me without also remembering the feeling of coming home that had overwhelmed me when he had put his arms around me. I didn’t know what Lansing was to me or what he would be, but I knew there was nothing casual about it. Except, of course, his son was in the picture. A son I was afraid I was failing to impress in every possible way.

  The son in question got up at about that point and asked his father if he could go up to the bow for a little while. We were on our way back up the river and would be reaching the buoy at Piscataway Creek in another twenty or thirty minutes.

  “Sure, go ahead,” Lansing answered. “Just hook up your safety harness while you’re up there. And remember, no dangling your feet over the side.”

  “I’ll remember,” David said, standing up eagerly. He and his father clipped a blue nylon line to the floatation jacket David had worn throughout the trip. Then Lansing attached the other end of the tether to a similar line that ran the length of the boat and that was designed to keep David with the boat in case he fell overboard. Once he was in harness, David easily made his way up onto the top deck and sat down in a spot that was back from the edge of the bow but also out of the way of sails, booms, and rigging. He stared ahead as we moved upriver, the wind blowing his hair back from his intent little face.

  “I saw your piece on Magruder in the paper this morning,” Lansing said once David was settled up front.

  “And?”

  “And you did a good job. The guys on the street will like it. You obviously have some understanding of what their jobs are about.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “And you want to tell me which one of those guys had some beef with Magruder? Which one might have had a reason to shoot him?”

  “We’re still looking into all that,” Lansing said cryptically. “I can’t tell you the details of our investigation.”

  “Does that mean you’re still looking generally into who might have held a grudge or that you have someone specific in mind?”

  “You know that’s what I can’t discuss.”

  “And you know I’ll find out anyway.”

  “Boy, Bill is right about you, isn’t he?”

  “That depends. What did he say?”

  “He said you’re so stubborn that you could outlast a redwood if you thought it knew something you wanted to know.”

  “Some people think that’s a good thing,” I pointed out. “Like my editors.”

  “That’s only because they don’t actually have to spend any time with you. It’s the rest of us you’re always out here giving a hard time.”

  “Sticks and stones,” I replied, smiling. “You can tell me now or tell me later, but eventually, you know you’re going to tell me.”

  “Never,” Lansing responded, grinning at me over the top of the wheel and taking up the challenge. I suspected he was enjoying it.

  “We’ll see.”

  * * * *

  Once again, I stayed out of the way as Lansing and David tied up the boat back at the marina. Although I had helped Lansing with the lines and with taking down and stowing sails on previous trips, I knew the two of them could do it faster and with a minimum of hassle if they didn’t have to keep tripping over me.

  With the boat secured and closed up, the three of us walked back up the pier to the graveled parking lot where my Bug and Lansing’s dark green Ford Explorer sat baking in the midday sun. The VW was the more distant of the two, so the father and son walked me over to it.

  “Is this your car?” David asked, once we reached the Bug and I started putting the top down.

  “For a long time now,” I told him. “My parents gave it to me when I finished college.”

  “It sure is funny looking,” David said. “But I like it.”

  “So do I,” I told him, thinking there was at least one thing we agreed on. Although it was used when my parents bought it for me, I had taken to the little Bug, with its white ragtop, instantly and had held on to it, through many a long, hot, Southern summer when I often asked myself why I didn’t buy something with air-conditioning, through the recent rebuilding of its engine, and through most of the more than one hundred eighty-five th
ousand miles on its odometer. I suspected that its connection to my parents, killed in an accident with a semi shortly after I moved to Florida, had almost as much to do with my keeping the car so long as did the fact that it was so simple to repair and maintain.

  “I’ll take you for a ride in it with the top down sometime, if you like,” I told David.

  There was no response. Just a thoughtful look on David’s face.

  “Would you like to come with us to get pizza?” Lansing asked, trying to fill the silence, I guessed. “It’s David’s favorite lunch.”

  “Thanks for the invitation, but I really can’t,” I told him, lying through my teeth. “I’ve got a lot of things I need to do this afternoon.”

  Like what? Sitting around, feeling sorry for yourself?

  I ignored the voice.

  The truth was that I didn’t think I could spend another couple of hours gritting my teeth and worrying over what this near-silent little boy at my feet thought of me. I couldn’t believe how nerve-racking the morning had been, and I knew I couldn’t handle an afternoon of more of the same.

  “Sure, we understand, don’t we, David?” Lansing answered, smiling down at his son.

  David reached up and took my hand.

  “Will you come sailing with us again?” he asked. “I like you.” Then the kid smiled.

  My jaw dropped. I looked up at Lansing in surprise and confusion. He started laughing at me.

  “I guess I should have warned you,” he explained, obviously delighted at seeing me off balance. “David is one of those kids who gives people a thorough once-over before he says much. But once he decides he likes you, he’s your buddy, and then you get to see the real David, who has lots to say.”

  I turned back to the little boy, whose face was as transformed by his smile as his father’s face always was by the larger version.

  “Sure,” I told him, smiling back now and feeling like an idiot. “I’ll go sailing with you again. Any time you like.”

  Noah Lansing leaned over and kissed me on the check.

  “See you soon,” he said, brushing away a few stray tendrils of hair that had crept out of the thick braid I usually wear and had blown into my eyes. “Probably when you’re butting into one of my cases.”

  He and David turned and walked back across the parking lot to the Explorer, holding hands and talking about the sail they had just taken. I finished putting the top down on the Bug and had just climbed into the driver’s seat when they drove by me, waving.

  I put my head back against the seat and tried to figure out what had gone on here.

  Getting in deeper and deeper, aren’t you?

  I started the engine to drown out my other little buddy.

  Monday

  Five

  Noah Lansing might have vowed not to tell me what it was he knew about Dan Magruder’s murder, but that didn’t mean I didn’t have other ways of finding out. I had been covering the Fairfax County Police Department for two years before Lansing joined it, and my constant visits to each of the county’s police substations meant that I had a more-than-nodding acquaintance with many of the patrol officers, detectives, and clerical staff who spent their working hours at one station or the other. I had traded information with several of them, had done favorable stories about others. One of them was bound to be in a talkative mood.

  I got to the Mount Vernon Station just as Officer Allen Reider was heading out the back door to his patrol car. Reider, a black veteran of some ten years on the force, had been one of the highlights of my feature story on the training and education of the county police. He was a street-smart, no-nonsense cop by day and a law student by night, with plans to become a prosecuting attorney once he passed the bar exam in a couple of years. When I greeted him in the parking lot, he told me he had just finished booking an early-morning shoplifter whom he had arrested at the 7-Eleven on Richmond Highway, just south of the giant Mount Vernon Multiplex movie theater complex.

  “The idiot did it while I was standing in the store, talking to the manager,” Reider said, laughing and shaking his head in disbelief. “Another customer noticed him stuffing his pockets full of candy bars and came over to tell me about it, just as the guy was walking out the door.”

  I commiserated with Reider on the intelligence level of the average criminal and was wondering how best to work the conversation around to Dan Magruder when Reider did it for me.

  “I really liked the story you did on Dan Magruder,” he said. “Too bad he won’t ever get to read it.”

  I agreed. “That’s not the way I prefer to get my pieces noticed,” I added. “He seemed like a really good guy. I just wish I could get a handle on why someone would want to kill him.”

  Reider got a funny look on his face. Funny strange, not funny ha-ha. He looked down and studied his shoes.

  “You know, don’t you?” I asked him, certain that was what the expression I had seen cross his face meant.

  “I’ve heard some things,” Reider said, looking up at me again. “Some talk.”

  “Talk about what?”

  “Off the record?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I overheard a couple of the detectives talking about something that happened when he worked at the McLean Station, that it was the reason he transferred down here.”

  “What happened?” I wanted to know.

  Reider grew hesitant again. I could tell he knew details, and I wanted to know them, too. Just as he opened his mouth to speak—I hoped to tell me what the big secret was—his radio crackled to life. The 911 emergency center, the dispatcher explained, had just received a call about a body found in Grist Mill Park. All available units were told to respond immediately.

  “Shit,” Reider said, flinging open the car door. “A body on Monday morning!” Obviously, all thought of what he knew about Dan Magruder had just fled his mind.

  “Talk to you later,” I told him as he started the patrol car. Reider tossed a wave in my direction, and I turned and ran for my own car, to head to the park as well. Sixty seconds later, as I maneuvered the Bug out into the traffic on Sherwood Hall Lane, I called the News to ask for a photographer to meet me at the park and told Ray Holt, an assistant metro editor who worked the early shift, where I was headed.

  * * * *

  Within ten minutes, I was pulling into the parking lot at Grist Mill Park, the scene of my recent stop just three days before with the now-late Officer Dan Magruder. Allen Reider was getting out of his cruiser in front of me. A second cruiser already was on the scene, and a third, with two people inside, pulled in right behind me, with a full complement of flashing lights and eardrum-destroying sirens.

  At 9:15 in the morning, it was a little early for any neighborhood children to be in the park. But there was a small crowd of adults, several of them accompanied by dogs on leashes, and most of them dressed in comfortable clothes that told me they probably had been out for their morning walks, jogs, or bike rides.

  I could see one man at the edge of the group, talking to the first officer, whose back was turned to me. The man clearly was excited or upset, punctuating his remarks with wild arm gestures that kept pulling his gray T-shirt up to reveal his potbelly and jerking the leashed cocker spaniel at his feet off balance. Allen Reider quickly joined the officer to whom the man was telling his story and asked a couple of questions. Reider was talking into his shoulder mike just as I walked up, followed closely by the cop from the third cruiser and his passenger, a young man dressed in the dark blue uniform of the police auxiliary. Reider turned in our direction.

  “I’m going with Mike to see what this guy found,” he said to the cop behind me, whom I didn’t know. Mike was Mike Monroe, the first cop on the scene, who now had turned so that I could see his face. I knew him to say hello to, but I had never dealt with him on a story. He was about Dan Magruder’s age, and it was clear that he was happy to defer to Allen Reider’s additional years of experience in this particular case.

  “We need you
to keep everyone out of there while we check it out,” Reider was saying to the third officer. He gestured to the auxiliary officer. “You go down the bike path a ways and stop anyone else from coming down here or going into the woods. Phil, can you keep all these people here in the parking lot and off the bike path?”

  Phil, the cop who had followed me into the park and who I didn’t know at all, said he could. His auxiliary partner started down the bicycle path at a quick jog.

  “Allen?” I said, hoping to talk my way as far in as possible.

  “Sorry, Sutton, that means you, too,” he replied, knowing what my question would be before I could get it out. He turned to follow Monroe and the excited witness, both of whom had started down the bicycle path as well.

  I watched for a minute as the three, led by the dog, walked 150 feet or so down the bike path and then stepped off into the woods to their left. Around me, the neighbors were silent for the first few seconds and then broke into concerned conversations with each other.

  “I’m Sutton McPhee with the Washington News,” I said, interrupting them in a voice slightly louder than theirs. “Did any of you hear what that man said to the police, what exactly he saw?”

  “That’s Harry Watson, dear,” said an elderly lady who had long since picked her shiny black Scottie up in her arms to calm him down in the excitement. “He lives just over there on Ferry Landing Road.”

  “He said he found a dead guy in the woods,” added a second woman, who was dogless, forty-fiveish, and dressed in white running shoes, black compression shorts, and a white tank top. “His dog dragged him into the trees to where it was.”

  “Was he certain the guy was dead?”

  “Harry would know,” a third neighbor responded, this one an elderly man who was holding onto a red bicycle. “He worked on a morgue detail in Vietnam. Said he knows a dead guy when he smells one.”

  A pretty good bet then, I thought to myself, that the body Harry had found definitely was dead.

  I asked a couple more questions, but no one in the group had anything substantive to add. Like the police, they all had arrived on the scene after Harry had discovered the body, so they knew only what they had overheard Harry tell the police.