I was about ready to walk over and start asking questions of Phil, the cop who was keeping us away from the bike path, when I saw Allen Reider step back onto the path from the woods. Monroe and the witness apparently had stayed with the body.
Good, I thought, maybe I can get some answers out of Allen now. That hope died a quick death, however, when I turned at the sound of another car pulling up behind us. This one clearly was an unmarked police sedan, if its hulking gray profile and the forest of antennae that sprouted all over it were any indication. Its driver’s side door opened to disgorge Detective Jim Peterson.
“Aw, shit,” I muttered to myself as I started in Peterson’s direction. Clearly, he had caught the call on this and would be the detective in charge of any investigation. Just as he had been when my sister Cara was murdered. I had not been the most cooperative of relatives during that case, having insisted on conducting an investigation of my own when the police failed to come up with any solid leads in Cara’s death. Peterson was a good cop and a pretty straight shooter, but before it was all over and the men who killed my sister were in jail, Peterson was threatening to have me fired or arrested or both. True, I had managed to find the killers when he hadn’t, but I also had stepped on a lot of toes in the process, mostly his.
Then Rob Perry had added insult to injury by moving me over to the police beat to cover Peterson and the rest of the Fairfax County Police. It had taken me a large part of the two years since then to defuse most of Peterson’s anger and frustration with me, of which he got reminded every time we bashed heads over one of his cases. All things considered, he actually treated me pretty civilly, but he never looked particularly thrilled to see me when I turned up at a murder scene to which he had been sent. Like now.
Peterson reached into the front seat of his car and took out a light brown jacket, as if to put it on over the short-sleeved white shirt and tie he wore, then looked around at the midmorning sunlight, thought better of his decision, and put the jacket back inside the car.
“Morning, Sutton,” he said as we met halfway across the parking lot. As usual, he was cordial and professional, at least when he wasn’t pissed off at me about some specific transgression.
“Detective Peterson,” I responded, reaching out to offer my hand for shaking. He took it in his own much larger one and gave it the firm handshake I had come to expect from him. He was another four to six inches taller than my five-foot-eight, and strong. Even with his thinning brown hair and the extra pounds that had crept up with middle age, everything about him still said that he worked out from time to time. And his temperament and contact with reality were as solid as his physical presence.
“I’ll save you some time,” Peterson said when he released my hand. “I don’t know anything more than you do at this point, so I can’t answer any questions until after I see what’s in there.” He gestured toward the woods behind me.
“Okay, fair enough. I’ll wait.”
“And would you tell them the same thing?” Peterson said, thumbing his hand toward Mount Vernon Memorial Highway as he started around me to go to where Allen Reider was motioning to him from the end of the bike path.
By “them,” Peterson apparently meant the TV remote truck, emblazoned with the Channel 3 logo, that was pulling into the parking lot. My mood sank. It was the vanguard for what I knew would be the imminent arrival of the rest of the local press who covered the police. So much for any chance at prying exclusive information out of Peterson when he returned.
* * * *
By the time I saw Peterson again, the usual crime scene circus was in full flower. The patrol cops had draped the areas where the bike path entered and exited the woods in yellow crime scene tape, further reinforcing their orders that no one other than the police was to venture into the woods or down the bike path. Several more of my esteemed colleagues from the press had arrived, including Guy Campbell, the photographer the News had sent out, as well as the reporters and crews in two more TV remote trucks, a reporter from the all-news radio station, and reporters from the Washington Post and a couple of local weekly papers.
Overhead circled a Fairfax County Police helicopter, recognizable by its dark blue and gray paint job, and just off to the east was a television helicopter from Channel 19. Apparently, the police wouldn’t let it fly directly over the crime scene. An increasingly large retinue of neighbors joined all of us in the parking lot, prompting Officer Phil to call on his radio for a couple more officers to provide backup. Clearly, he had no intention of being responsible for letting any of us contaminate the crime scene, and I didn’t blame him. I had had to answer to an angry Detective Peterson once or twice. It was no fun.
An additional detective, two crime scene specialists, and the shift supervisor from the Mount Vernon Station also had arrived just after the new batch of cops, but they all had quickly disappeared down the bike path to join Peterson and Reider.
I long since had run out of people to question and had retired to my car, to sit in the shade, when there was a stir in the press ranks. Through the windshield, I saw Mike Monroe walk back into the parking lot with Harry, the witness, and his dog. Right behind them was a grim-looking Peterson. I scrambled around to find my notebook and pen, which had fallen out of my lap and onto the car’s floor, so I could go over and ply Peterson with questions. When I finally retrieved them and started to get out of the car, however, I saw that Peterson had been cornered by the rest of the press some yards away. Monroe and the witness, on the other hand, were coming my way, apparently headed for the cruiser two parking spots away from me. Some instinct told me to wait.
Monroe opened the passenger door for Harry, who looked grateful for a chance to get off his feet finally, and then walked around to the driver’s side, where he opened his own door and sat down inside the car as well. Immediately, he began a conversation over the radio, on what I guessed was one of the private frequencies, and I could hear every word he said to the person on the other end.
“Peterson wants you to get Bill Russell out here,” Monroe said into his mike. “Looks like this guy was high-profile. There’s ID with the body that says he’s some guy named Robert M. Coleman.” Monroe spelled out the last name. “The ID says he’s the director of The Phoenix Group, some big charity setup over in Tysons.”
Well, that was one way to describe The Phoenix Group, I thought, as I grabbed my cell phone and started dialing the newsroom. I could hear Peterson answering questions from the other reporters, but I knew that, whatever he was telling them, this was more important.
“Metro desk, Ray Holt,” the voice in my ear said, cutting the third ring off in the middle.
“Ray, it’s Sutton,” I said, speaking as softly as I could.
“What have you got, Sutton?”
I told him. With my new digital phone, I didn’t worry as much about transmitting sensitive information over the airwaves the way I had when everything was analog and an easy mark for eavesdroppers.
“Oh-hh-hh boy,” Ray responded, his emphasis on the first word telling me he understood the magnitude of the story. Robert Coleman was a long-time fixture in the power circles of both Washington and northern Virginia. The Phoenix Group was an endowed foundation, started two decades ago to comply with the will of Martin Bird, a multimillionaire bakery magnate who had died without any heirs. The Phoenix Group had proven to have very deep pockets indeed, doling out at least four million dollars a year to community programs, medical research, and a variety of other good causes. Coleman had headed it up for the last ten years or so.
“Is Rob in yet?” I asked Ray. With three failed marriages and two grown daughters to his credit, Rob’s life these days centered around his job at the News. Actually, not just these days; it always had. That’s why he had three failed marriages. Though his workday at the morning paper officially began at midafternoon, it wasn’t unusual to find him there well before lunch.
“Haven’t seen him,” Ray said.
“Find him if you can,”
I told Ray. “He’ll want to know about this because it’s big enough for page one. And do me a favor?”
“Sure.”
“Call down to the library and ask Cooper to pull up whatever he can find on Coleman. I’ll need it for background.” Cooper Diggs was the head research librarian and a computer Wunderkind. He could locate and coax out information from the electronic forest better than anyone I knew. His expertise had provided me with critical puzzle pieces for more than one of the bigger stories I had covered, and had even provided a key bit of information in solving Cara’s murder.
“Will do.”
“Thanks, Ray. I’ll be back in touch as soon as I know anything more.” Which, I thought as I climbed out of the VW and headed toward Peterson’s question-and-answer session, I intended to know as soon as I could get my hands on Peterson outside the hearing of the rest of the press.
Six
“No,” Peterson was saying when I stepped up to the edge of the group of reporters clustered around him, “we can’t give you any sort of ID yet or a cause of death. All I can tell you at this point is that the body is male, definitely dead, and appears to have been dead for a while, at least a day, maybe two or three.”
That meant, if you knew how to translate it, that the police might know the identity of the corpse, but they weren’t telling yet. That they might or might not know how he died, depending on the state of the body. And that the state of the body probably wasn’t too great at this point, given the fact that it had been lying out in the open in the woods in August heat and humidity for one or more days. Decomposition can set in pretty quickly in those circumstances, not to mention what insects and animals can do, making any sort of definitive statement about cause of death a proper topic for the medical examiner, who would be able to speak with authority after conducting an autopsy.
“Was it a homicide?” Beth Bleek from the all-news radio station wanted to know.
‘Obviously, we have to treat it as a possible homicide until we know differently,” Peterson explained, “until the medical examiner can tell us exactly how the person died.”
Peterson had dealt with enough reporters at enough homicide scenes that he wasn’t about to get trapped into saying anything that he might have to take back later. But I decided to make him sweat a little, not that we all weren’t sweaty enough already. The August sun in Virginia can shine with just as much intensity as the one they have in Florida, even at ten o’clock in the morning.
“Was there any sort of ID with the body, anything to tell you who the guy is?” I asked, now knowing full well there was.
Peterson gave me a hard look, but he still wasn’t giving away the store.
“There were some personal effects on the body, but you know we can’t release anything until we can confirm that those effects were his and until we reach next of kin.” I did know that; I was just having a little fun. Because, of course, the other reporters now began clamoring for a name.
Peterson finally managed to extricate himself from our clutches without saying anything more forthcoming and went over to Monroe’s police cruiser, where he spoke briefly with Harry, the former Vietnam morgue jockey who had had the bad luck to find the body. Then Peterson told Monroe to take Harry down to the station where, no doubt, Harry could sit in air-conditioned comfort, free of the press, to wait for one of the investigators to come and take a formal statement from him. Monroe agreed, and Peterson took himself back down the bike path. Apparently, the company of a dead guy was preferable to that of the press.
I knew it would be a while yet before the body would be brought out of the woods. The crime scene would have to be thoroughly documented with the body in place before the victim could be moved. Only then would the two guys I saw pulling up in a medical examiner’s van be allowed to take the body away.
I went back to the VW to sit out of the sun’s glare again and was making notes to myself on what questions I needed to get answered when my cell phone rang. It was Rob Perry, whom Ray Holt apparently had managed to locate.
“You’re not gonna like what I have to tell you about your corpse,” Rob said without preamble when I pressed the Talk button and said “Hello.”
“What?”
“If it really is Robert Coleman, it’s definitely a page-one story.”
“But why wouldn’t I like that?’
“Because I just found out that one of Mark Lester’s people has been working for several weeks on a big piece about Coleman.” Mark Lester is the national editor who oversees the stories that make it onto the paper’s front page. He also manages the investigative team that breaks some of the paper’s biggest stories.
“Why are they looking into Coleman?” I wanted to know.
“Because, apparently, he was under investigation by the feds. The IRS and the justice department, for starters. Improper use of The Phoenix Group’s money, maybe tax evasion. That kind of stuff.”
“Nice guy,” I said, “but what’s the problem with the national side?”
“The reporter on the story is Sy Berkowitz, and he’s on his way out there to meet you now.”
“Goddamn it!” I yelled. “He’s not taking over this story!”
Sy Berkowitz was one of the least-liked reporters at the paper. He had followed Mark Lester down from a paper in Philadelphia three years before, where he also had worked under Lester’s tutelage. He had done some okay investigative pieces since coming to Washington. He also was an unpleasant, obnoxious jerk who treated the other reporters like they were morons and who did his dead-level best to horn in when one of us was onto a story big enough to make it to page one.
I never had much cared for Sy, anyway, just on general principles, but he had gotten onto my permanent shit list three months before, when he tried to take away my stories on the murders of Ann Kane, the Senate aide, and Janet Taylor, the wife of Fairfax County Supervisor Hubbard Taylor. Rob Perry repeatedly had fought off Sy and Mark’s attempts to steal the story for Sy, and I had had several unpleasant personal exchanges with Sy as well. He was about the last reporter in the world I wanted to have here covering the same story I was.
“Cool your jets, McPhee,” Rob said, trying to sound calming. “He’s not taking the story away.” I sighed in relief.
“But you are going to have to work together on this.”
I should have known there was another shoe to drop. “Why?” I asked, knowing the answer but hoping I could change reality somehow.
“You know why as well as I do. Because Coleman was Sy’s story already. But you’re the Fairfax County Police reporter, and now it’s your story, too, at least until somebody gets charged with killing the guy and the case gets moved into the courts. So make the best of it. And behave yourself!”
“Fine,” I said, not hesitating to let Rob hear the sulk in my voice at what I took to be his letting me down.
“And if Berkowitz tries to fuck you over,” Rob went on, ignoring my pouting, “I want to hear about it. I’ll ream him so many new assholes, he’ll spend the rest of his life in the can.”
I laughed. I should know Rob better than that, I chided myself. He would expect me to act like a professional and to get the best story possible. But he wouldn’t expect me to take any crap off Sy Berkowitz, either.
“Okay, Rob,” I told him, “I’ll try to be a good girl. But if I’ve got to work with Sy, it had better be share and share alike. I want to know everything he knows.”
“I’ve already told him and Lester both the same thing,” Rob said. “In front of Mack Thompson. I think they got the message.” Mack Thompson was the managing editor, and it wasn’t the first time he had refereed some fight between Rob and Mark over story ownership.
I turned and looked over my shoulder as I heard another car pull into the parking lot. It was Bill Russell, come to keep the press out of the investigators’ hair.
“Gotta go, Rob,” I said. “I just found another cop to aggravate.”
Rob snorted a laugh and hung up.
&
nbsp; * * * *
Bill Russell turned out to be no more forthcoming than Peterson had been, but I hadn’t really expected that he would be. After listening briefly to what he had to say, which was a rerun of Peterson’s comments, I decided I should try to confirm for myself that the body really was Robert Coleman, but I didn’t want to mention Coleman’s name in front of other reporters, who at this point still were completely in the dark about the corpse’s identity.
“Does the victim fit the description of any missing persons reports that you have?” I asked, figuring that someone as high-profile as Coleman couldn’t just drop out of sight without somebody noticing.
“None that come immediately to mind,” Bill said, “but there hasn’t been time to go through them that thoroughly, of course.”
Bill was dissembling. If a missing person report had been filed on Coleman in the last few days, Bill would have known about it immediately. His answer meant that no one had reported Coleman as missing. Could that be because the dead guy wasn’t Coleman after all? Perhaps the body had Coleman’s ID on him because he had mugged Coleman at some point and then ended up dead in Grist Mill Park, I thought. I left the press huddle and walked back over to my car.
“Bell Atlantic Mobile Information. May I help you?” a woman’s voice said when I dialed 411 on my cell phone.
“I need the listing for The Phoenix Group in Tysons Corner,” I told her. I expected I would feel pretty stupid if I stirred everyone up over Coleman being dead only to find out after the fact that he was happily at work in his office.
I dialed the number the telephone company computer gave me and asked the switchboard operator at The Phoenix Group for Robert Coleman’s office. As I expected, I got a secretary.
“No,” said the woman who identified herself as Kate Barnard, “Mr. Coleman isn’t in this morning.”
“When are you expecting him?” I asked.
Corruption of Justice Page 6