Corruption of Justice

by Brenda English

  * * * *

  “So you’re going to make me talk business first?” Noah Lansing wanted to know. I had called him at home, and as soon as he answered the phone, he started grilling me about my safety. I had ignored his questions and plowed ahead with one of my own about the Magruder investigation.

  “Obviously, I’m alive,” I responded. “We can get into details later.”

  “I think we may have a witness who saw the guy,” Noah Lansing said.

  “Which guy?”

  “The guy who shot Magruder.”

  “The witness is coming forward only now? Where’s this person been for the last six days?”

  “He was out of town until now. I just got home from interviewing him. He lives on Magruder’s floor, but he left town Friday and just got back last night. He didn’t know about Magruder until he started going through the weekend’s papers. He called me this afternoon.”

  “So, what did he see?”

  “Maybe nothing. Or maybe the shooter.”

  “Explain, please.”

  “This guy says he was leaving the building to go to National Airport about the time we think Magruder was killed.”

  “And?”

  “He passed a guy getting off the elevator just as he was getting on. He said the guy was wearing some kind of police uniform. But he doesn’t remember enough about it for us to know what kind.”

  “Could it have been one of yours?”

  “We don’t know. He couldn’t even remember what color it was, just that it made him think police uniform. He said it might even have been a security guard’s uniform, but nobody in the building works for a security company as far as we can tell, and the apartment complex doesn’t use uniformed security.”

  “So you’re saying there may be something to this idea that Magruder was killed in retaliation for what he did at the McLean Station?”

  “No, I’m not saying that. I’m saying we’re looking into all possibilities, including the possibility that he opened the door to somebody he thought was another law enforcement officer.”

  “What about Terry Porter’s alibi in Texas? He probably still has a uniform or two hanging around.”

  “We’re still talking to him, trying to find somebody who can place him in Texas on Friday afternoon.”

  “But you haven’t ruled him out?”

  “Not yet. But, off the record?”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t get too carried away with that idea. Yes, Magruder got death threats, but we don’t know who made those threats or whether they were serious, and I don’t believe Magruder would have opened his door and let either Porter or Monk inside. He knew them both personally and knew they would have it in for him in a big way. He wasn’t stupid.”

  “Maybe one of them hired it done.”

  “It’s a possibility, but we’ve got nothing in that direction, either.”

  “Okay, I’ll just go with the witness turning up for now.”

  “Can you also say that we’re looking for anyone else who might have noticed someone, other than Magruder, in a uniform in the building or the parking lot around that time? The Fraternal Order of Police has come up with a twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward for anybody who can lead us to the killer, so maybe that will jog some memories.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I can put that in.”

  “Now, can we go back to my original topic?”

  “I’m fine,” I told him, trying to wipe my impatience with his concern out of my voice. “No one is following me. No one has bothered me. I was very careful when I left the paper. I don’t know how whoever blew up my car would even know where I am at the moment.”

  “When do you think you’ll be back in D.C.?”

  “Tomorrow. I think I’ve done everything I can here at the moment. And there’s someone I need to talk to who turns out to be in Washington instead of here. So I’ll probably come back whenever I can get a flight out tomorrow.”

  “Will you call me when you get back and let’s talk about where you’re going to stay until they catch this guy?”

  “For that matter, I still have to figure out where I’m going to live.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I realized I hadn’t told Lansing yet about the little visit from the manager of my apartment building and the eviction notice he had served on me, perhaps because I had been trying so hard to put it out of my own mind.

  “So,” I said, after explaining what I meant, “before the end of the next week, I have to find a new apartment and move, on top of everything else. Although I have no idea when I’ll find the time to go apartment hunting between now and then.

  “That sucks,” Lansing said. “Why don’t you fight it? It’s not like you to take defeat lying down.”

  Except when it comes to Lansing, of course, when lying down would be your preference.

  You really have a dirty mind, I thought.

  “Because,” I told Lansing, “I have too many other things to do in the next few days. And besides, it probably would only be delaying the inevitable.”

  “You’ll call me when you get back to D.C?”

  “I’ll call. I’ll call. But right now I’ve got to call my editor in order to get the Magruder stuff into tomorrow’s paper.”

  “I’ll be waiting to hear from you.”

  I told Lansing good night and hung up.

  You’re scared to death of him, aren’t you?

  No, I thought back, I’m not scared of him. He’s only a cop, not my editor.

  Yeah, but it’s not the cop part that scares you.

  I didn’t like the frequency with which I seemed unable to come up with an appropriately biting response anymore. So I picked up the phone and dialed Rob Perry for the third time that evening.

  * * * *

  The male voice who answered the phone in Judge Henry Bryant’s Washington hotel room, when I finally called there, grilled me on who I was and why I was calling.

  “And who is this?” I asked, not liking the tone of voice I was listening to.

  “This is Dell Curl. I’m Judge Bryant’s assistant. And you’re not the reporter we’ve been talking to at the Washington News.”

  “That’s right, but we often have more than one reporter working on stories. I need to speak with Judge Bryant to get some information about some of his cases from when he was in Tallahassee. I was hoping he might have some time to see me for a few minutes tomorrow afternoon or evening.” I saw no reason to give this Curl guy any details on what case it was I was interested in.

  “Hold on. I’ll check,” Curl said.

  I waited, and then waited some more, and finally Curl came back to the phone.

  “Judge Bryant says he can give you a few minutes of his time tomorrow afternoon at six. You can meet us in the hotel bar at that time.”

  “Thank you,” I said with as much grace as I could muster. It was clear they didn’t want me in the hotel room where they might become a captive audience. In the bar, they could leave my company any time. “And please tell Judge Bryant I appreciate his finding some time for me.”

  Curl hung up without responding.

  Boy, I thought, putting my own receiver down hard, I couldn’t blame Henry Bryant for having someone to screen his calls, especially now that he was up for the Supreme Court, but that didn’t mean I had to like it when I was the one being kept at arm’s length.

  I reached into the drawer of the nightstand between the two double beds and took out the area telephone directory, through which I thumbed until I found the reservations and information number for the airline.

  What about Jack?

  “What about Jack?” I asked back, falling into my not infrequent but clearly worrisome habit of answering aloud when I was alone.

  Well, what about closure? When are you going to see him if you leave in the morning?

  “Maybe closure isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

  And maybe you’re just chickenshit.

  “Fine. Have
it your way. I just decided I have enough problems right now without reopening old wounds.” To cut off further conversation, especially when the name-calling was hitting uncomfortably close to home, I picked up the telephone and called the reservations number. The ticket agent who answered got me onto an 8 A.M. return flight to Washington.

  As I put the phone book away, I looked at the digital clock on the nightstand and saw that it was after nine P.M. Considering the size of the lunch I had eaten in Panama City, and considering the time now, I decided it wasn’t worth leaving the motel to find dinner someplace. Instead, I dug a handful of coins out of my shoulder bag and went out to the vending machines I had seen at the end of the corridor, next to the stairs.

  Back in the room with a diet soda and two packs of cheese-and-peanut butter crackers, I watched a couple of half-hour sitcoms and the first part of a hospital drama and then got ready to turn in early again. Considering how many different things I had on my mind, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find myself lying awake, stewing over it all. But the Florida heat must have been more tiring than I realized, because I fell asleep almost as soon as I lay down.

  It wasn’t until much later, 2:17 A.M. in fact, that I came wide awake in the bed. Apparently, it had taken that long for my subconscious to clear away all the other things my conscious brain had been dealing with and to point out to me what it was Detective Peterson had said. He had told me that Robert Coleman had been shot to death in Grist Mill Park sometime Friday afternoon and that his dark blue Volvo sedan was missing. Like the dark blue Volvo sedan I had seen at the park on that same Friday afternoon when I went there with Dan Magruder. The dark blue Volvo sedan to which Magruder had taken the drunk he had in custody in order to question the driver of the car.

  After that little epiphany, it was almost dawn before I finally fell asleep again.

  Friday

  Sixteen

  I caught a cab to the News building once I landed at Washington National. It was 11:30 a.m. by the metro room clock, and Rob Perry wasn’t in yet. I sat down at my desk in the relative quiet of the morning newsroom and rewound in my head the tape that I had been playing over and over, first in the middle of last night when I woke up and, later, all through my flight back to Washington. Every time I ran through it, I still came to the same conclusion.

  I picked up the phone and called Detective Moore in Alexandria. He might have information that would tell me whether what I thought I knew was wrong.

  “I’m glad you called,” Moore said when I identified myself. “Where are you now?”

  “I’m back in D.C., at the newspaper.”

  “Are you watching your back?”

  “As well as I know how. So far, I haven’t seen anything that looks like a familiar face or car, anyone who might be following me. I think I managed to fly to Tallahassee without anyone seeing me go, and I haven’t been back to my apartment since I got back. So I’m hoping that, if somebody is trying to tail me, they have no idea where I am at the moment.”

  “Are you going home tonight?”

  Good question. It was something Lansing also had wanted to talk about, which told me he wanted me to come back to his place so he could keep a personal eye on me. Was I sure I really wanted to make that a habit?

  “I don’t know yet,” I told Moore. “If I do, I’ll call you again.”

  “I just don’t think you should take any chances until we catch this guy,” Moore said.

  “I appreciate your concern,” I answered, and I did. I just didn’t have any intention of letting it get in the way of my job, a job that was looking much more complicated at this moment. “The other reason I called was to find out if there’s anything new on that front. Do you have anything yet on who it might be? I’m not working the story myself, but I obviously have a personal interest in knowing what’s happening.”

  “Not a lot yet. We’ve been going down the list of people you’ve done stories about in the last year or so, trying to find out where they are. So far, nothing promising. The ATF guys are still running tests and going through the evidence they collected. They say it looks like a simple dynamite package set up to blow when you turned on your car. Just about anybody who really wanted to could get their hands on the stuff to make one. Building the thing wouldn’t have required a lot of technical knowledge, and with a VW Beetle convertible, it wouldn’t have taken a lot of explosive to turn it into rubble.”

  “What about the guy who was killed?” I still hadn’t been able to get the image of his burned and torn body out of my head. “Any idea who he was yet? Maybe somebody hired him to do it, and he botched it.”

  “It’s possible, but I don’t think so. A couple of our gang detail guys say they think he may have been a kid who went by the street name of Espada. It means sword in Spanish. He seems to have dropped off the face of the earth since the weekend, and stealing collector-type cars like yours was one of his specialties, according to his buddies.”

  “Have you talked to his family?”

  “We don’t know who they are. He just showed up on the street one day and told people what to call him. His friends say he never talked about who he was or where he was from. My guess is he was a runaway. We’ve run his fingerprints through the computer, but we didn’t get a hit. And we’ve sent the physical description out around the country, but the odds of finding out who he was aren’t high. It’s possible he’s never even been reported missing from wherever he came from.”

  “Jesus.” Somewhere, I thought, there was a family who either might never know what happened to their son or didn’t care. I wasn’t sure which I thought was worse.

  “Yeah,” Moore said. Clearly, he understood what was going through my head.

  “So, is it okay for me to pass all this along to Penny James?” While it was true that I wasn’t covering the story, neither was I going to take any chances of letting the News get beaten on a story in which I personally was involved.

  “I already did. She called me this morning from home, just before you did.”

  I thanked Moore for the information and his efforts, without telling him what I now suspected, and hung up. I had hoped he would have a new theory on what had made my car explode, one that didn’t involve someone with a grudge against me, but nothing had changed. He and the ATF investigators clearly were convinced it was a deliberate act on someone’s part, an act that had killed the wrong person. After talking with Moore, I also was pretty sure now that I knew why someone had tried to blow me to bits. I just didn’t know who. But even the why meant I needed to check in with Detective Peterson and Noah Lansing.

  * * * *

  “We just found Coleman’s car,” Peterson said without preamble when he came on the line after being summoned to the phone by another detective. “I was about to go down there, so I don’t have time to chat.”

  “Where is it?”

  “In a shopping center parking lot in Woodbridge. Somebody who works at one of the stores noticed it after seeing a TV news broadcast about the license plate. The Prince William County police have it roped off for us, but I’ve got to get down there while our guys process the scene for evidence and then get it hauled back up here to impound so we can go over it thoroughly.”

  “Before you run off, there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  “Not now, Sutton. I don’t have the time.” He hung up before I could say another word. In frustration, I slammed down the telephone receiver, and then saw the voice mail message light come on. I called down to the photo department to let them know about Coleman’s car, and then I dialed into the voice mail system and heard Noah Lansing’s voice. I had just missed his call. Fortunately, he was still at his desk when I called him back.

  “Are you here or in Florida?” he wanted to know as soon as he answered the phone.

  “I’m here, at the paper, and I’m fine.”

  “You ready to talk about where you’re staying tonight?”

  “Not yet. There’s something else I need to
talk to you about first that’s a lot more important. I don’t want to get into it over the phone, so I’m coming out there. But while I’m on my way, there’s something important that I need you to check on.”

  “What?” Lansing sounded thoroughly suspicious now.

  “You need to find out where a guy named Clinton Sheets is.”

  “That’s the drunk that Dan Magruder arrested when you were with him last week,” Lansing said after a couple of seconds’ thought. Obviously, the name was familiar to Lansing from going over Magruder’s response reports.

  “Yes, and I think his life may be in danger. Can you find out if he’s still in jail or whether they’ve let him go yet?”

  “What do you mean, his life is in danger? McPhee, what the hell are you talking about? What are you up to?”

  “I’ll explain it when I get out there. Could you please just wait for me and find out where Sheets is?”

  “All right,” Lansing agreed, sounding not at all mollified. “But you be careful driving out here. And this had better be good.”

  “I don’t think good is quite the word I’m looking for,” I said. “I think frightening is more like it. I’ll see you in a little while.”

  Lansing hung up, and I dialed into Rob Perry’s voice mail to tell him I was back in town but out in Fairfax talking to the police, and that I would call him if I had anything in the way of stories.

  * * * *

  “Where’s Sheets?” I asked as soon as I walked into the door of Lansing’s Massey Building office, into which he had moved only four weeks earlier, from temporary quarters at the Great Falls Substation.

  “He’s still cooling his heels in the jail,” Lansing said, his eyebrows raised at my abruptness. “And Clinton Sheets is an alias. Once they ran his fingerprints through the computer, they got hits on two other names, Robert Clinton and Tommy Bob Clinton. Apparently, the second one is his real name. Anyway, he’s got a long list of offenses from Pennsylvania for public drunkenness and a couple for resisting arrest. We also turned up a warrant on him for failing to appear after the last time he was arrested up there, so the judge decided we could hang on to him, even with Magruder dead, until the folks in Pennsylvania can come and get him.”