“Actually,” she said, “he’s a little late. But I haven’t heard from him, so I’m sure he’ll be in at any moment. Is there a message?”
“No, no message.” I thanked her and pressed the Clear button. So Coleman hadn’t made it in to work yet, nor had he called in to explain why he wasn’t there on time. I called information again and got Coleman’s home telephone number.
No, said the female voice who answered the phone at Coleman’s house and who identified herself as the housekeeper, Mr. Coleman wasn’t at home, either. When I pressed her, she told me that she had just come in to work, having had the weekend off, and she hadn’t seen Coleman and didn’t know where he was.
Reasonably certain now that it probably was Coleman who lay dead and decomposing in the woods, I turned off the phone. Putting it back into my purse, I started grimly across the parking lot to meet Sy Berkowitz, who had driven up as I was talking to Coleman’s housekeeper.
* * * *
“I can’t believe they’ve saddled me with you on this!” Sy said as he climbed out of his tiny red car. I thought to myself, not for the first time, that it was just about the kind of pseudo-sports car I would expect him to drive. While there was nothing wrong with it, per se, a real sports car would leave it in the dust. And I always thought of it as a red bug, which gave me a chuckle, because in the Deep South, red bugs were what we called the almost microscopic biting red mites that live in moss and on blackberry bushes. I found the parasitic comparison highly amusing and appropriate where Sy was concerned. And no offense to the bugs intended, of course.
“Well, somebody has to tell you how to do your job,” I replied sarcastically. And then we went at it, though even we had the good sense to do it in lowered voices.
After a couple of minutes, when we each had gotten enough bile out of our systems to be able to get to work, I told Sy he would have to keep his mouth shut about why he was even there.
“The police aren’t releasing a name yet,” I explained, “and no one else in the press knows that the cops think it’s Coleman. There’s no point in tipping our hand to any of them.”
Still smarting at the insult of having to work with me, Sy wanted to know what the police were saying and how I knew for sure it was Coleman. So I told him about overhearing Reider talking on the radio and how I had checked Coleman’s home and office, only to be told no one knew where he was.
“Maybe he offed himself,” Sy speculated. “He was in some pretty hot water.”
“It’s possible,” I agreed. “The police aren’t saying anything about how he died, if they can even tell yet. Now, I’ve told you what I know. It’s your turn.”
Sy glared at me, obviously not liking the bitter taste that our forced cooperation was leaving in his mouth. Still, he knew better than to disobey Mack Thompson’s direct order.
“The feds were about to take Coleman to a grand jury,” he offered finally. “They’ve got him on a long list of numerous counts of fraud, embezzlement, income tax evasion, and apparently even some insider trading on the stock market with money that wasn’t his. He’s apparently had a pretty free hand with the Phoenix money all this time and has been dipping into it regularly to finance his lifestyle.”
“What lifestyle was that?”
“A big house over in Great Falls and condos in Aspen and the Bahamas. A string of girlfriends barely old enough to vote. An antique car collection. A stock portfolio that would make your eyes bug out. And rumors of a numbered offshore bank account somewhere.”
“I take it he couldn’t have managed all that on his salary?”
“No way,” Sy laughed. “And apparently he not only was embezzling money directly from the fund, but he also had a nice little scheme going with the heads of two or three of the organizations that The Phoenix Group gave money to. In return for fat grants to their charities every year, they were using some creative accounting to disguise the kickback payments they were making to Coleman. And in another week or so, it was all going to come tumbling down around him and take him and several of his buddies with it.”
“How did the feds get onto what he was doing?”
“The story I hear is that they were putting the squeeze to one of his kickback cronies on something else entirely, and the guy offered up Coleman to them in return for them letting him off more lightly.”
“Sounds like Coleman had ample reason to kill himself,” I agreed.
“Or one of his other charity pals did it for him,” Sy added.
By this time, we had started walking over to where Bill Russell and the rest of the press waited patiently for something more to happen. Sy and I still were eyeing each other warily when the medical examiner’s crew came out of the woods, put the bagged body on a stretcher, and wheeled it up the bike path in our direction. Even the bagging, however, couldn’t completely hide the odor that came along with it. It wasn’t a new experience for me, which didn’t make it any easier to bear, but at least I was prepared for it, unlike Sy, several of the other reporters, and all the neighbors and other gawkers who still were standing around.
“Jesus Christ!” Sy said, slapping a hand over his nose and mouth and trying not to gag in front of me. A couple of people in the crowd lacked his self-control and took themselves off to the other side of the barn in a hurry.
Within minutes, the two bearers of the body had it enclosed in the van and were driving out of the parking lot. The odor it had brought didn’t dissipate quite as quickly.
“You folks might as well go on back to work,” Bill Russell told the press finally, when the weaker stomachs in the group seemed under control again. “This is as close as you’re going to get to the crime scene until they’re completely finished with it, so there’s really nothing more to see here. If you want to stay in touch with me, I’ll let you know as soon as we have anything new to tell you.”
“He’s right,” I said to Sy. “If you want to go back, I’ll hang around here just to be on the safe side.”
“You sure they’re not going to come out of the woods and say anything else?” he asked, all his suspicions of me coming back into his eyes.
“Trust me,” I told him and immediately realized it was a stupid thing to say. Sy Berkowitz trusted no one because he was so untrustworthy himself.
“The detectives won’t say anything before they absolutely have to,” I explained. Well, that part was true. What also was true but which I felt no compulsion to explain to Sy was that, sometimes, I could make the police have to a little sooner than they had planned.
I called over to Guy Campbell, our photographer, who had taken himself to a small patch of shade at the edge of the trees. “Can you stay to get pictures of the scene once they pack up?” I asked him. There would be little to see at that point. Still, better to have photos of a spot in the woods and not use them than to have some editor ask for them and have to say we hadn’t gotten them.
“Yeah, as long as they don’t page me from the paper to go to something more pressing,” Guy answered.
“Okay,” Sy agreed, apparently deciding I was right. “I’ll go back and get started on the writing. When you get back, you can fill in anything else you have.” And, no doubt, play a definite second fiddle, if he had anything to say about it. But it was an argument we could have when the time came, which wasn’t now.
“Sounds good,” I said. “I should be there soon.” To stand over your shoulder and watch every word you write, I added in my head but didn’t say out loud. Sy turned and strode off to his little red toy, and I went over to where Bill Russell had sat down on the grass to wait and joined him.
“Who was that?” Bill wanted to know. He didn’t miss much. He had seen Sy walk up to me and the two of us talking.
“He’s a reporter at the News. We’re working on a story together, and we needed to compare some notes.” Well, it was the truth. I just didn’t tell Bill it was this story. He would find out soon enough, like this afternoon or, at the latest, when tomorrow morning’s paper came out.
He was giving me the evil eye, that look I get from him when he thinks I know more than I’m telling, when Peterson walked up from the bike path.
“All done?” Bill asked.
“Not yet,” Peterson said. “We’re going to get some more people in here to give the woods a good going over to make sure we haven’t missed anything. But I’ve got stuff to go check on, so I’m heading out.”
“I might as well get back up to Fairfax,” Bill said, standing up and brushing the grass and dust off his pants. “My phone probably is already ringing off the hook.”
The two of them took their leave from me, and I joined the remaining two reporters in walking over to the parking lot. Instead of driving away, however, I waited in the Bug for a couple of minutes and then dialed the number for Peterson’s pager, a number I had gotten when he was investigating my sister’s murder and one I had put to good use several times in the two years since. He called me back from his car phone.
“It’s Sutton,” I said, when he rang me back and identified himself.
“I haven’t learned anything new in the two minutes since I last saw you,” Peterson said pointedly.
“My question is about what you already know,” I replied, refusing to be baited.
“What do you need?” Peterson asked tiredly, apparently expecting to have to rehash everything he already had told the press.
“I need to know if Robert Coleman was murdered or committed suicide.”
“Goddamn it!” he interjected angrily. “Who told you it’s Coleman?”
“Nobody told me, although you just confirmed it. Let’s just say I had my ear to the ground and heard a rumor that it might be him. Now, how did he die, and will you confirm his identity? And am I going to look like an ass if I say in print that it’s Coleman?”
Peterson thought about it for a while.
“No,” he said finally, apparently deciding it wasn’t a battle worth fighting, “you won’t look like an ass. If you don’t quote me, you can say we’ve tentatively identified it as Coleman, based on effects found on the body and by matching the driver’s license photo with certain physical characteristics. He has a white streak in his hair that’s pretty distinctive.”
“How did he die?”
“You promise to keep my name out of this story?”
“Yes, you’re now an anonymous police source.”
“The body’s a little rough, but I’m guessing that he was shot in the heart. Probably died in seconds. There was no sign of a gun anywhere, so we’re assuming it’s a homicide.”
I jotted his statements down in my notebook.
“You finished with me, yet?” Peterson wanted to know.
“No, now I have something to give you in return.”
“Well, that’s a switch,” he observed dryly. “What is it?”
“You have to promise this doesn’t get out to the rest of the press before tomorrow.”
“Fine, fine. Now what?”
“Tomorrow’s story will say that a federal grand jury was about to be convened to indict Coleman for a long list of illegal things he apparently has been doing with The Phoenix Group’s money. That ought to give you some interesting ideas about homicide suspects. And as soon as they know who the corpse is, the feds probably will be all over your case, too. So get ready.”
“Well isn’t that just my damned luck?” Peterson said. “As if having you on my back wasn’t enough.”
“Okay, so we’ll talk again soon.”
“Sutton?”
“Yes?”
“Thanks for the heads-up.”
“I just thought you ought to know.”
* * * *
I turned off the phone and got back out of my car. There was one more thing I had to do before leaving. Officer Allen Reider still had information I needed, and he was coming across the parking lot to his cruiser.
“You have a second?” I asked when I intercepted him just as he reached his car and was brushing from his dark uniform pants all the dust and bits of brush and grass that his treks into the woods had left there.
“Just about,” he replied. He looked pretty enervated, probably the result of a combination of the heat and humidity and of having to stand around for a couple of hours with a decomposing body.
“What did Dan Magruder do that got him transferred to the Mount Vernon Station, that you think might have gotten him killed?”
It was clear that Reider had long since put Dan Magruder out of his mind. It took him a few seconds to switch mental gears back to our previous conversation from the morning. At first, I thought he might not tell me, but like Peterson before him, he apparently decided he was too tired to argue with me about what he knew or didn’t know.
“He turned in a couple of other officers at the McLean Station for stealing part of the money they recovered in a drug bust.”
“What?”
“Magruder was one of the patrol officers who responded when some kind of drug buy between a couple of groups of thugs went bad and ended up with bullets flying,” Reider explained. “He knew there was money recovered, so when he saw the incident report that the officers who got there first had filed and then one of the suspects told him the amount had been higher than what was in the report, Magruder went to the station commander and IA with it.” IA is internal affairs, the office responsible for investigating cops who decide that one law or another doesn’t apply to them.
“He did the right thing,” Reider went on, “but it apparently didn’t set well with the officers he turned in and their friends. When word leaked out about how IA got onto them, Magruder even got some anonymous death threats. So it was recommended that he request transfer to another part of the county, and Mount Vernon was about as far away as he could get.”
“Were the threats serious or just intended to scare him?”
“The guys in IA and his station commander thought they were serious enough to move him down here.”
“What happened to the two cops who stole the drug money?” I wanted to know.
“They agreed to return the money to stay out of jail themselves, but they both were fired. They lost all their benefits and pension rights, and they can forget ever working as cops again.”
“Where are they now?” I wondered if either had an alibi for the time Magruder was being murdered. I also was wondering how I had managed to miss Magruder’s involvement in the story when it had happened. I had done a brief item at the time about the firings, but I had assumed, and no one with the police department had bothered to correct my assumption, that Internal Affairs already had been investigating the two men because of something suspicious in their behavior. Instead, I was now learning, they had been turned in by another officer at the scene: Dan Magruder. I gave myself several mental clouts because I had learned long ago, through pointed lectures from Rob Perry, never to assume I knew anything when checking out a story.
“Beats me,” Reider said.
So Magruder might have been killed by another cop. Or an ex-cop, anyway. Would that explain how the killer had gotten into Magruder’s apartment without breaking in? Because Magruder had opened the door to someone he knew, even if it was someone who carried a grudge? And a gun?
I ran the possible scenarios around my brain on the drive back up the George Washington Parkway and into Washington. I had to get back and stake my claim to the story on Robert Coleman’s murder, but some time during the afternoon, I also was going to have to make time to put in a call to Noah Lansing, in his role as police detective, and give him a grilling about Dan Magruder’s past run-in with his fellow officers. No wonder the police department didn’t want to talk about who might have had a reason to kill Magruder. The guys at the top of the list were a couple of their own.
Seven
Sy Berkowitz had an audience, but he wasn’t thrilled about it. Mark Lester, Rob Perry, and I all stood and looked over his shoulders as he finished writing his version of what we knew about Robert Coleman. I was biting my bottom
lip hard to keep my mouth shut, based on the warning look I had gotten from Rob the one time I started to point out something Sy had left out. I knew Rob’s look; it said for me to shut up and let him handle it.
“Okay,” Rob said when Sy stopped typing and read over the last couple of paragraphs he had written, “if you’re done for the moment, ship a copy over to Sutton’s queue and let her take a stab at anything else it may need from the police angle. Then Mark and I will go over that version together to see what we think.” He looked up at Mark as if asking for agreement. I saw Mark nod his head affirmatively.
I turned and started back to the stairs to go down to the metro newsroom on the third floor.
“I’ll come back up as soon as Sutton’s done,” I heard Rob tell Lester, and then he was right behind me on my way out the national newsroom door.
“What I saw of his story didn’t look too bad,” Rob told me as we walked down the stairs. “It didn’t sound like he was trying to take all the credit for the story, but you’ll have some blanks to fill in and some tweaking to do in places.”
“It’ll be fine,” I agreed. “I can handle the police end of it, and Cooper gave me copies of the information he had pulled on Coleman when Sy first started looking into him.” I wanted to reassure Rob that my ego wouldn’t be the stumbling block that Sy’s usually was. And as long as I had Rob in my corner to go to bat for me with Mack Thompson, I knew Sy and Mark probably would behave themselves, more or less. They had lost more than one fight with Rob in the past; they were a little more wary of him these days.
* * * *
Rob was right. Sy’s version wasn’t too terribly lopsided in his own favor, probably because he had known Rob was watching him write most of it. I added the information that I thought it needed from the police investigation, including Peterson’s anonymous information about Coleman dying from a gunshot to the heart, and fiddled around a little with the lead paragraph and a few of the others.
When I was satisfied with it, I put in a call to Bill Russell and a page to Peterson to check on any new developments. But things were about where we all had left them in Grist Mill Park. I saved the final version of the story and transmitted copies to Rob and Mark. Then I called across the newsroom to Rob to let him know the story was in his computer queue. He opened the file, rapidly scanned through the new version, gave me a thumbs up, and got up to trek back upstairs to Mark Lester’s office. I picked up the phone and paged Noah Lansing, thumbing through my clip files for a copy of the story on the McLean police firings while I waited for Lansing to call me.
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