Corruption of Justice

by Brenda English

  Lansing started laughing. Peterson kept up his severe look, but I thought his eyes didn’t look quite as serious as the rest of his face, so I decided not to take the bait and risk getting into a real argument with him. There was too much to tell him at the moment.

  “I think Robert Coleman and Dan Magruder were killed by the same person,” I told Peterson, indulging in a non sequitur of my own.

  He gave me much the same look that Lansing had when I had trotted my theory out for him, even though Lansing had alerted him to expect something unexpected.

  I took him back through the same scenario I had run through with Lansing earlier. Peterson listened in silence as I tried to anticipate and answer all his questions before he asked them. When I was done, he looked at Lansing with an expression that asked what Lansing thought of this whole idea.

  “I don’t quite know what to make of it,” Lansing told him, answering Peterson’s unspoken question. “I just got the sketch of the man who was seen going toward Magruder’s apartment, and I’ve had Sutton take a look at it, but she couldn’t say whether it’s the same guy they saw in the park or not.”

  Before Peterson could respond, Lansing’s telephone rang.

  “But I do think there’s some sense to what she says,” Lansing finished saying to Peterson as he lifted the receiver, into which he then said, “Hello.” He listened silently for a brief moment, said, “Thanks a lot,” and hung up, looking from Peterson to me and back to Peterson.

  “That was the ballistics section out at the crime lab,” Lansing explained. “I called them as soon as Sutton laid all this on me and asked them to do an emergency comparison on the slug we found near Coleman with the one they took out of Magruder.” He paused and looked from Peterson to me and back to Peterson. “We’ve got a match.”

  Silence reigned as we all took it in. I suspected each of us was a little stunned, though for different reasons. I was silenced by the impact of having my theory suddenly transformed into a threatening reality, in which my life was still at risk. Peterson and Lansing both were probably looking at all the new dimensions their individual cases had just taken on, in light of the previously unsuspected but now suddenly confirmed connection between them. And I was sure they must have been equally surprised by the fact that the theory, which clearly now was much more than that, had come from me.

  Once he regained his tongue, Peterson managed to think up some new questions for me. He apparently still wasn’t quite convinced that, whatever connection existed between the murders of Robert Coleman and Dan Magruder, it had anything at all to do with the attempt on my life.

  “How do we know the dead guy at your car wasn’t the one with the bomb, that it didn’t just blow up prematurely?” Peterson wanted to know.

  I told him what Detective Moore had said about the kid and Moore’s belief that the kid just made a fatal error in choosing my car, that the bomb clearly had been intended to kill me.

  “And what about the IA stuff you were looking into on Magruder?” Peterson asked, turning to Lansing.

  Lansing explained about Terry Porter’s telephone records.

  “It’s not necessarily an iron-clad alibi,” Lansing conceded, “but my gut tells me he really was at home in Texas during the time.”

  “I suppose the next question,” he went on, “is where do we go from here?”

  “You sure you want to discuss this in front of a reporter?” Peterson asked.

  I heard my cell phone start to ring in my purse. I stood up and started out into the hall.

  “Why don’t you boys make your plans while I go answer this,” I said on my way out the door.

  Seventeen

  “This is Lawson Thomas,” a male voice said through the cell phone once I wrestled it out of my purse and answered it in the hallway.

  “Senator Thomas,” I said, “what a surprise.” I was pretty sure when I had met with him in Tallahassee that Thomas had made a genuine effort to tell me everything he remembered—even as little as it was—about the now twenty-year-old investigation of Robert Coleman. Although I had left my card with him, with my standard instructions to call if he remembered something else, I hadn’t really expected to hear anything more from him.

  “I’m as surprised as you are,” Thomas said. “But something a little odd has come up that may or may not mean anything. I suppose the only reason I’m calling you about it is that it bothers me, knowing that Robert Coleman has been murdered.”

  “So what happened?” I asked, tuning out Lansing’s and Peterson’s voices in the office behind me, to which I still had been trying to listen with one ear.

  “I have to admit that your visit yesterday, especially in light of Coleman getting killed, got me to remembering and got my curiosity up,” Thomas said. “To the point that I called over to the state attorney’s office, in fact, and talked to the woman who was my secretary when I worked there. She’s still a secretary there, although she has to be getting pretty close to retirement by now. I called and asked her to locate the Coleman file. I told her I needed her to refresh my memory about a couple of things.”

  “So you thought the file might have information in it that would have a bearing on who killed Coleman?”

  “Not really,” Thomas said. “As I say, knowing he had been murdered just made me curious again about why Ford closed the earlier investigation. I suppose I really just called over there to satisfy myself. Which is why I would prefer it if you would keep my name out of any stories you write about all this. It isn’t completely ethical for me to start going through old files there, when I no longer work there and years after I’ve left. Especially files for cases that weren’t mine in the first place. And I wouldn’t want to get Martha in trouble, either.”

  Martha, apparently, was his former secretary.

  “I think I can promise that neither of your names will come up in any of my stories,” I told him.

  “Thanks,” Thomas said, “I appreciate that. Anyway, Martha called me back just now and said the file seems to be missing.”

  “Missing?” I echoed stupidly.

  “She couldn’t find it anywhere. It wasn’t in the inactive files, where it should be, or anyplace else in the office that she could find. There was no record of anyone having checked it out of the files for any reason, and no indication of how long it’s been gone.”

  “Could Coleman or someone helping him have taken it?” I asked.

  “He could never have gotten it personally,” Thomas explained. “It would have required help from someone in the office, which would really surprise me. Martha says no one there would have given it to him, especially since it involved an investigation of him.”

  “Any idea when it was taken out last officially? And by whom?”

  “Henry signed it out of the inactive files and then back in again just before he left the department to take the judgeship. That wouldn’t have been unusual, though. It would have gone into the inactive files as soon as Ford Truesdale closed the investigation. But Henry probably would have needed to tie up some loose ends, even after the investigation was closed. But he signed it back in when he was finished, so it should still be there.”

  I asked Thomas a couple more questions, but he had no more helpful answers.

  “It just seemed very odd to me that the file wouldn’t be there,” Thomas concluded, “and I thought that might be something you would want to know.”

  “Oh, very definitely,” I agreed. “I can’t tell you, off the top of my head, what I think the file’s disappearance means. But I have to admit that that kind of coincidence always makes me very suspicious. Do you mind if I call you again if I think of any other questions for you?”

  “Not at all,” Thomas said, “as long as I can keep my name out of it.”

  I reassured him on that score again. I thanked Thomas for letting me know what he had learned and repeated the request to call me again if he found out anything else. I hung up, frustrated at the image of another brick wall rising up in fron
t of me. Clearly, I was going to have to do some hard thinking if I was going to find a way around this one, but first I had to find out what Lansing and Peterson were cooking up.

  “So what’s the verdict?” I asked, walking back into the office doorway.

  They exchanged looks again.

  “We’ve decided we need to touch base with Detective Moore and start comparing notes,” Lansing said, “in case you’re right about your car bombing being connected to our cases.”

  I groaned. When Moore heard this story, he would be even more determined to put me under armed guard twenty-four hours a day.

  “All right,” I said, “I’ve got to get back to the paper on something else, but I’ll be back in touch with both of you and with Moore.”

  “Will you let us send somebody with you?” Lansing asked, not sounding hopeful of the answer.

  “Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll call you from the paper,” I said, then turned and started down the hall.

  “Be careful,” I heard him call out.

  * * * *

  I did make an extra effort to keep an eye on the traffic around me as I drove back into the District. Nobody seemed particularly interested in me, evidenced by the fact that every other car on the road passed me as I kept pretty close to the speed limit. I figured that, in a place where everyone drives ten or fifteen miles over the posted speed limit, it was a good way to quickly spot anyone tailing me.

  In between glances out my window and into my rearview and side mirrors, I thought about Lawson Thomas’s call. Who would have wanted to make Coleman’s investigation file disappear from the state attorney’s office? I wondered. Well, Robert Coleman, for starters, obviously. But who would have taken the risk of stealing it for him? The only person I could think of who might fit that description was Ford Truesdale, the late state attorney, who, according to what Henry Bryant had told Thomas, had quashed the investigation for unknown reasons. But if it was Truesdale, there probably was no way now, with both him and Coleman dead, to find out what he might have done with the file or what was in it. And when was the file taken? Last week? Twenty years ago?

  Damn it all, I thought in frustration, so now what do I do? Finally, I decided to do what I usually do when I’ve run out of tracks to follow: Go back to the beginning and cast a wider net. As it happened, I also had expert help in that area in the person of Cooper Diggs, whom I planned to visit as soon as I got back to the paper.

  * * * *

  Cooper Diggs is a surprising anomaly. He is the handsome, intelligent, eldest offspring of a very prominent family from the Charleston, South Carolina, area. Cooper refused to follow several generations of forebears into either law or medicine and then dropped out of college and turned his almost magical abilities with computers into a job as director of the research library at the News. He told me once, brushing back the blond hair that regularly falls down into his eyes, how he had spent the first two decades of his life in Charleston living in a world of secrets that were rarely acknowledged but that affected the lives of everyone he knew, himself included. And how he hated it. Now, he revels in making a living unearthing people’s secrets, using his computers to search databases all over the world for the information trails most of us don’t even realize we are leaving.

  Cooper also is a first-rate hacker, with an ability to get into places he isn’t supposed to be, to take the information and run, often without detection. He’s been told by the folks at the News, in no uncertain terms, that under no circumstances is he to indulge in such activities at the office. But they have no control over what he does from home. Nor does Cooper offer his extracurricular services to the rank-and-file reporting staff. Although he spends his days helping them with research, his efforts usually stop at the line our bosses have drawn. But away from the office, he has crossed that line, more than once, at my request. Cooper apparently considers me a special case, and I value his friendship and his talents immensely, which I show by keeping to myself just how I obtain certain bits of information.

  When I got to the library, Cooper was happily ensconced in his electronic domain, with his fax machine buzzing loudly as it printed out pages, the photocopy machine clicking and flashing, and the screens of both the computers he uses aglow with lists of information.

  “Hey, Sutton,” Cooper said in greeting when I walked up. “It’s good to see you!” He stood up from his desk chair and reached out to shake my hand. Our friendship was just that, a friendship, so I had been expecting the handshake. “Especially in one piece,” he added.

  “No shit,” I agreed, sitting down in the extra chair at the end of his desk.

  “The police have any idea yet who tried to kill you?” It was the question of the day as far as I was concerned.

  “Not really, although I’m beginning to think I may have some idea why. And that’s what I need your help with.”

  Cooper’s eyes lit up, and his smile got even bigger. We’d had some interesting moments together, Cooper and I, on several of the stories I had followed in the last two years since I started covering the Fairfax County Police, and I could tell he was anticipating that I might be bringing him something else that was going to be at least as interesting. It was to me, at any rate, probably because it was me someone was trying to kill.

  “So let’s hear it,” Cooper said, clearly salivating in anticipation, although in his elegant, Southern gentlemanly way, of course.

  “To keep it simple for right now,” I began, “let’s just say that there may be a connection with an old story from Tallahassee that goes back to well before my time there. It involves a number of people, and I’d like you to look into their backgrounds and give me anything you can find on them, no matter how unimportant it might seem to be. I’m still missing a critical piece of the puzzle here, and I’m hoping you can turn up something that will help me figure out what it is.”

  Cooper reached over for a pen and a pad of notepaper.

  “Let’s have the names,” he said, preparing to jot them down.

  “Robert Coleman.” I said, and Cooper looked up at me in surprise.

  “Wow,” he commented, writing down Coleman’s name.

  “I’ve got the stuff you pulled for Sy, but I know you can find more on him, stuff that wouldn’t necessarily show up in old news stories.”

  Cooper grinned at me again. “Okay, who else?” he asked.

  I decided to throw everyone into the mix.

  “Ford Truesdale, now deceased. Formerly a state attorney in Tallahassee. Arthur Williams, also deceased. Owner and head of a Tallahassee development company called Three Rivers. Coleman once was his business partner. For fun, do a rundown on a Florida state senator named Lawson Thomas. Oh, and you might as well do Henry Bryant, too.”

  “As in Supreme Court Henry Bryant?” Cooper was getting more interested by the minute. I could see he was going to have a field day with this.

  “Right. I can’t imagine we’ll find anything there, considering he’s already been investigated for the nomination. But he was the assistant state attorney who handled an aborted investigation of Coleman at one point years ago. Truesdale was Bryant’s boss, and he apparently ordered Bryant to put the investigation on ice. I need to know why, but the late Mr. Truesdale obviously can’t tell me.”

  “What about Bryant? He’s in town, you know.”

  “I’m talking to him in just a little while,” I said. “But I’ve been told by someone else who was there at the time that it was Truesdale who quashed the case, so check on him real closely.”

  “I’ll start on it here,” Cooper said, tearing the sheet with the names off the top of the pad and sticking it to his computer screen. “And I’ll finish it up at home.”

  It was my turn to grin at him. We both knew what that meant, that no electronic stone would be left unturned, our bosses not withstanding.

  “I owe you another one, Cooper,” I said, standing up. I had to get up to the newsroom and touch base with Rob Perry and then produce any copy he might w
ant for tomorrow’s paper before heading over to the Mayflower Hotel to see Henry Bryant.

  “You know I’ll collect,” Cooper said. And I would reward him happily. While I understand the basics of computers and computer research, I have neither the time nor the inclination to reach Cooper’s level of expertise. So I’ve returned his favors by buying him more than one expensive dinner in my years at the News.

  “It will be worth every penny and more,” I replied.

  * * * *

  As soon as I reached my desk in the metro section, my phone rang. It was Bill Russell.

  “Well you have been busy, haven’t you?” Bill asked when I answered.

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re referring to,” I replied archly. Bill laughed.

  “I just got off a conference call with Lansing, Peterson, and Detective Moore in Alexandria,” he told me. “It was quite entertaining. But now seriously, Sutton, I wish you’d let them send an officer over to go around with you. I understand why you don’t want it. But this isn’t a game you’re playing here. And I think whoever tried to kill you is going to try again and probably do a better job next time.”

  “I assume this means you agree with my idea that whoever shot Coleman and Magruder also rigged my car,” I responded, ignoring the subject of a watchdog.

  “I think the odds are good that it’s the same guy,” Bill said. “The problem, though, is that you don’t know who the guy is, and neither do we. He could be in the car behind you in traffic, and how would you know until it’s too late?” Clearly, Bill wasn’t willing to let the subject of my safety drop yet.

  “Bill,” I said, “I appreciate your concern. I really do. But you also know I just can’t do my job that way.”

  “Well,” he answered, “if that’s your final word on the subject. But I do have another question for you.”

  “Oh? And why do I have the feeling that this other question is the real reason you called?”

  “I need to know,” he continued smoothly, ignoring my sarcastic response, “how much time you can give us on this business about the matching bullets before you have to put it in the paper. We need time to get our act together with Alexandria.”