The Strategist

by John Hardy Bell

  “He didn’t do it, Walter. If I was fifty-one percent sure of it before we came here then I’m one-hundred percent sure now. I’m sorry we can’t see eye to eye on this, but you are so barking up the wrong tree with Clemmons it’s not even funny.”

  “You’re right, Chloe. It’s not funny at all.” He walked past her and headed straight for the car without saying another word.

  The more Sullivan fought him on this, the tougher things were going to get for her, and not just with this investigation, but with every investigation she would conduct with him going forward. Her chances of having a future working relationship with Graham were dying by the second, and she was the one digging the grave. Once he branded her as being difficult, her chances of having a solid working relationship with any detective in the unit were slim.

  But right now she couldn’t be swayed by fear. Right now she could only be swayed by truth. Unfortunately, the truth of this case was getting murkier with each passing moment. As was her perception of Detective Graham. In the dozen or so cases they worked together, she had never seen him this short-sided in his pursuit of a suspect. Even with all the evidence to the contrary, he was absolutely hell-bent on making Clemmons something that he clearly was not.

  The longer Graham persisted, the more she began to wonder if his motives were something beyond the justice he took an oath to pursue. She began to wonder if his motives were somehow personal.

  She had nothing to support that suspicion other than a gut-feeling. But it was the same gut-feeling that told her Julia Leeds wasn’t killed for her flat screen television. It was the same gut feeling that told her that Julia’s car being found here, a block away from the suspicious Impala that happened to belong to one of her co-workers, was entirely too convenient. It was the same gut-feeling that was telling her that Graham was already formulating the reasons for his impending recommendation that she be dismissed from the Leeds case.

  More times than not, her gut was right. She had no reason to doubt it now. There was more here, and she would figure it out, even if she had to do it on her own.

  Based on the hostile glare that Graham gave her as they drove away from Clemmons’ house, Sullivan couldn’t shake the fear that she was already on her own.

  CHAPTER 22

  Stephen Clemmons sat on his couch staring at the cover of a textbook he had been studying every night for the past three months: Advanced Case Studies in Criminal Justice.

  After two years of night classes, he was a semester and a half away from completing his Associates degree in Paralegal Studies. It had been a long journey from where he started, and there were more than a few missteps along the way. But Stephen knew that he was doing it the right way, which was a lot more than he could say for anyone else he knew.

  He had put in an application five different times before finally landing the mail clerk job at Brown, Wallace, and Epstein. Most people don’t view being a mail clerk as anything to be even remotely proud of. But as far as Stephen was concerned, it was the perfect job. The pay may have been minimal, the work may have been tedious, and his tiny basement cubicle may not have provided the most scenic view, but he got to watch some of the best lawyers in the country up close on a daily basis. Just being in their presence was an educational experience that far exceeded anything he had learned in the classroom. He even got to know a few of the attorneys personally. One of them, a third-year associate who graduated from Harvard, invited him out for beers on a routine basis. Though Stephen had absolutely nothing in common with him or his group of well-bred, well-paid friends, he was perfectly content to sit back and listen to their stories of courtroom battles and boardroom takeovers, dreaming of the day when he was in the position to tell a few stories of his own. At thirty-four-years-old, he had gotten a much later start than any of them, but as his mail room supervisor said after Stephen told her about his law school aspirations, it’s not where you start, it’s where you finish.

  After years of hard work, after years of nearly everyone he knew telling him that he was wasting time, Stephen could finally see the finish line. Stories about CEOs who slowly climbed their way out of the mail room and kept crawling until they reached the top floor are so commonplace that they are almost cliché. But Stephen was still inspired by them. He may not have had designs on climbing all the way to the senior partner penthouse suite, but he was well on his way to making it out of the basement and into a room with a much brighter view.

  Then a junior partner who worked in his firm was murdered, and it was as if everything he had worked so hard for instantaneously blew up in his face.

  He had just finished getting ready for work that morning when the doorbell rang. Stephen was startled when he looked through the peephole to see two uniformed officers standing on his front porch. After inviting themselves in, the officers proceeded to ask him a series of rapid-fire questions about his car, where he had been the night before, if he was aware of a vandalized Range Rover in the alley across the street, where he worked, how long he had worked there, and if he knew a woman named Julia Leeds.

  The questions came so fast he was barely able to process them. He told the officers as calmly as he could that the car was indeed his, that he had been up most of the night studying for a midterm, and that he knew nothing about a vandalized Range Rover. Lastly, he told them that he didn’t know Julia Leeds.

  Stephen wasn’t sure why he lied about her, other than his survival instincts telling him that he should. When you live in this neighborhood and the cops show up at your door for any reason, survival trumps everything, including the truth. But in this instance, he had nothing to hide. He and Julia may have worked in the same office, but they were far from being friends. They had only had one conversation in the entire time he had been there. If pressed, it was entirely likely that she wouldn’t have remembered it at all. But he knew exactly who she was. The fact that the police were now mentioning her name in reference to questions about his car and his whereabouts made him nervous enough to justify that particular omission.

  When they finally informed him that they were investigating a homicide, Stephen’s nervousness turned into outright fear.

  Before the officers left, they informed him it would be best not to go into work because detectives would probably need to talk to him again before the day was over. Stephen called into work, telling his supervisor he was sick. That wasn’t a lie. He threw up twenty minutes after the officers left.

  The detectives that the officers spoke of did not show up until today. But when they left, as had happened after the officer’s initial visit, Stephen felt like throwing up.

  The revelation of his conversation with Matthew Westerly, his third-year associate beer buddy, definitely made him nervous. Even though he knew there was nothing more to the story, his initial withholding of it made it a bigger deal than it should have been. Now it looked like he had something to hide. He was also nervous about Detective Graham’s claim of multiple witnesses that still needed to be talked to. Who exactly were these witnesses and what did they see?

  Why the police would show up on his doorstep, let alone suspect him of anything, was beyond his ability to comprehend. He couldn’t remember the last time he was anywhere near the area where Julia lived. He certainly wasn’t there the night she was killed. But it was obvious the police didn’t believe him. The only question in his mind now was why?

  He began to wonder if he was being targeted because he worked with Julia. Whether he personally knew her or not, the fact that police would show up at his house to ask him about the murder of a person he happened to work in the same building with seemed entirely too crazy to be coincidental. The very real possibility that it wasn’t coincidental led to a whole other series of questions that he was not at all prepared to deal with.

  It didn’t take much imagination to figure out what all of this would mean for him. To even be mentioned in connection with something so horrible effectively meant that everything he had worked for could instantly be taken away.
There certainly wouldn’t be a future at Brown and Wallace. And that was the best case scenario.

  Stephen may not have known much about the world as a whole, but he did have a firm understanding of his place in it. It didn’t matter that he was completely innocent. Being black and under suspicion was as good as being guilty. And no amount of evidence to the contrary, short of a full confession by the real killer, would ever change that verdict.

  He thought of the hundred or so lawyers who worked at the firm and wondered if any one of them would ever consider defending him if it came down to that. Probably not even his Harvard educated beer buddy, Stephen solemnly concluded, especially now that the police had gotten to him. If there was a fight to be waged, he would have to take it on all by himself.

  After the detectives finally drove away, Stephen walked to his car. He had anxiously watched as Detective Graham took pictures of it while his partner looked on. Even though they were out of earshot, it appeared that they were having a disagreement of some sort. Not that it mattered. Detective Sullivan may have seemed more sympathetic than her partner, but at the end of the day they played for the same team.

  He wondered if Detective Graham had gotten any pictures of the car’s interior, the same car interior that had been vandalized night of Julia’s murder.

  Steven first noticed it after the officers left his house Friday morning. As much as he knew he needed to heed their instructions to stay close, sitting around the house only made him anxious and he desperately needed to get some fresh air. Despite the fact that both he and the car had been branded as “suspicious”, Stephen decided there would be no harm in taking it out for a quick drive around the neighborhood.

  The problem came when he put his key in the driver’s side lock. No matter how hard he turned, the door wouldn’t open. He took the key out and inserted it again. It still wouldn’t open. So he went to the passenger’s side. When he put the key in that lock it turned and the door opened as it was supposed to.

  He breathed a sigh of relief and ducked inside. But what he saw as he slid into the passenger’s seat nearly made his heart stop.

  The ignition housing had been completely ripped open, exposing the red and green wires underneath, and a large screwdriver was jammed inside the starter.

  When Stephen was a teenager, he ran with a crowd that he probably shouldn’t have, and a few times they convinced him to tag along while they broke into cars and stole the stereos inside. On one occasion they decided that taking the stereo wasn’t enough and thought it would be a lot more fun to steal the actual car. Monte Collins, the leader and most experienced criminal of the group, ripped open the starter, crossed a couple of wires, and used a screwdriver to start the ignition. He did it all in under ninety seconds.

  What Stephen saw now didn’t look nearly as professional as what Monte had done. But when he turned the screwdriver and heard the engine roar to life, he knew it was just as effective.

  He had felt sick yet again. A horribly surreal day had instantly taken a turn into the otherworldly. When the cops first showed up, Stephen felt like he was living out an episode of Law & Order. But things like this don’t even happen in TV shows. Now he felt like he was living a game of chess where he was the only pawn on a board filled with kings.

  There was simply no way to win.

  Standing here three days later looking at the screwdriver that someone had used to steal his car, a thought suddenly came to him. He may have been home studying the night that Julia Leeds was killed, but his car was exactly where Detective Graham said it was. And even though the proof that someone else had driven it there was right here for the entire world to see, short of that full confession he prayed would soon come, who in the hell was going to believe him?

  If the Denver police department had anything to say about it, the answer would be no one.

  After a few minutes spent looking for the gray Crown Victoria that had been a constant presence on his street since Friday, Stephen had gone back inside, sat down on the couch, and looked at his textbook. He’d had the silly notion that a little bit of studying might serve to take his mind off of everything. But he never opened it.

  And after what happened today, he figured there would never be another reason to open it again.

  CHAPTER 23

  The Leeds job had been executed to absolute perfection.

  It was a bold declaration, but one that the man hired to carry out the job was fully prepared to make. Even by his own exceedingly high standards, perfection was rare. In this case however, he struggled to find another word to adequately describe the outcome.

  The growing number of media outlets reporting on the story had already come to the collective conclusion that Julia Leeds was the victim of a home invasion gone horribly wrong. Based on the information these news outlets, and thus the rest of the public, were privy to, the conclusion was a sound one.

  But as was usually the case, there was a great deal of the story that the media wasn’t privy to. And as hard as they may eventually try, Joseph Solomon went to great lengths to ensure that neither they, nor anyone else, would ever be privy to more.

  From the time he began his surveillance of Julia Leeds nearly three weeks ago, Solomon knew the operation would be fairly straightforward. Julia was a creature of habit, never once deviating from the daily routine of taking her dogs out for a six a.m. run, leaving for work at eight and arriving back home some twelve hours later. There were no dinner dates, no visitors, no late night telephone conversations. This predictability made her the easiest target imaginable. And aside from the minor hassle of disarming her security system and dealing with her two behemoth guard dogs, everything went exactly as he had drawn it up.

  Staging a burglary scene to look authentic, particularly when the motive is something else entirely, is a process that requires more meticulous planning than one realizes.

  ‘The devil is in the details,’ a man Solomon would loosely consider a mentor once told him. ‘A cop’s natural inclination is to dig. Never give them a reason to dig any further than the surface.’

  Home invasions were usually poorly planned and even more poorly executed. Robbers kicked down doors, left fingerprints, and ransacked the house until they found what they wanted, and if they were of the ruthless, drug-crazed variety, they killed anyone they saw without a moment’s hesitation.

  When a first responder entered a scene and saw any one of these things, he knew exactly what he was dealing with. The suspects would be profiled by the time the incident was called in to detectives, and those suspects usually resembled the meth freak or crack addict who routinely occupied the backseat of the cop’s patrol car.

  Solomon, however, was no out of control meth freak. He was focused, highly organized, and very skilled. But the scene he left behind could not reflect any of that. The scene he left had to look chaotic, violent, and rushed, all without a single trace of himself left behind. It was a tall order to be sure. Fortunately, he had an abundance of experience to draw from.

  He was particularly proud of the Leeds scene. It took him nearly two hours to make his way through each room, but by the time he was finished, every drawer in the house had been emptied, every closet had been rummaged through, the mattresses in the two spare bedrooms had been flipped, and most importantly, every item that a burglar would even consider taking had been removed from the house.

  He ended up leaving all of it in the same alley where Julia’s Range Rover was ultimately found. He had chosen that alley specifically. The lowlifes who occupied it could smell stolen merch a thousand miles away, even at 3:30 in the morning, so Solomon felt confident that nothing would be left behind.

  But there was another reason why he chose that alley. It was in direct proximity to the home of one Stephen Clemmons, the man whose car was seen near the crime scene a short time before Julia’s death. Solomon knew it had been seen because he was behind the wheel when he spotted Julia’s neighbor staring out his window at it.

  Clemmons came gift-
wrapped to Solomon, courtesy of the man who had hired him for the job. As part of the lengthy dossier he provided on Julia, he included a list of every employee at Brown, Wallace, and Epstein, along with their position within the firm, their home addresses and telephone numbers. The sheer amount of detail in the document was staggering; something only a high-level insider within the firm would have access to. But Solomon thought it would ultimately be useless, until he saw Clemmons’ highlighted address with the word ‘Diversion’ written next to it. He knew exactly what that word meant.

  Even though the diversion had been executed as smoothly as the rest of the operation, Solomon realized, with the benefit of hindsight, that stealing Clemmons’ car, driving it back to Julia’s, and doing everything he could to call attention to it while he was there was a really bad idea. He had never taken a chance like that before. And with good reason. There were a million reasons why the plan could have gone wrong. He could have been pulled over, Clemmons could have seen him steal the car or realized it was gone before it could be brought back, one of Julia’s neighbors could have immediately called the police, or worse yet the car could have gone unnoticed altogether.

  There was also the matter of involving a second person in the operation. Solomon preferred to work alone, but the logistics of stealing Clemmons’ car and Julia’s car and driving them both to the same location would have been impossible to navigate by himself. The man he entrusted with the task of driving the Range Rover had as large a stake in the outcome as anyone else. But Solomon had serious concerns about his ability to improvise should any aspect of the operation break down.

  Fortunately none of the worst case scenarios that he envisioned actually came to fruition. Solomon took the Impala without incident and brought it back three hours later. With the car parked safely in front of Clemmons’ house, he saw no need to conceal the hotwire job.