Unpunished

by Lisa Black

  Next thing he knew he was sitting on the sidewalk, hand scraped, and a considerable amount of wind expelled from his lungs.

  The direct approach hadn’t worked.

  With stinging fingers, he pulled out his badge and shouted, “Cop! I’m a cop!”

  The men reconsidered. One backed up, one looked as if that just made things more fun, the third considered the whole matter anew while Jack realized that not only one Red Line train had just pulled into the station, but two. He hauled himself up with a fistful of chain-link and got back into motion, protesting knee and all. The men let him brush by with only a shoulder bump. Rescuing a damsel in distress from a pursuing male was one thing. Getting hung up with the cops seemed like another thing entirely.

  Jack also sped past the attendant. The guy shouted but didn’t leave his booth.

  Jack had to make a choice about which platform Shania would have chosen—heading east or heading west? She’d have probably picked the first to arrive, and since they were both now standing still he couldn’t tell which one that was. He dashed down the first set of steps, hoping she’d be panicked enough to take the first exit open to her. Heading east, back to the city.

  The train began to move just as he hit the last step. He checked each car for Shania as it passed, though by the last car the train became a blur of color and glass.

  With it out of the way he looked over to the other platform, just in time to see Shania Paulson stumble into one of the train cars there and cling to a pole.

  He’d never get up the steps and over to the other side before the train left. Already the doors had shut. And he wasn’t about to jump down onto the rails—he’d probably touch the wrong one, and even if he didn’t electrocute himself he still wouldn’t be able to get into the car.

  He caught her eye as the train began to move. She stared at him with fear, weariness—and just a little bit of triumph.

  The train rumbled away, heading into the western suburbs.

  The tiled steps behind him vibrated as Riley nearly fell down them. He slowed to a near stop when he saw Jack, alone, on an empty platform. He swiped one hand across his face and gasped for air. It must not have felt sufficient because he leaned over, hands on knees, sucking in oxygen to the depths of his lungs. Jack did the same, though with less body language.

  Then Riley straightened, threw his head back, and asked, “Are we sure she doesn’t play for the Indians?”

  Chapter 22

  Maggie followed Roger Correa across the parking lot in front of the building at East 22nd, feeling more uncertain with every step. “Mr. Correa—”

  “Roger, for heaven’s sake. We just spent two hours knee-to-knee.”

  “Not really, no, but fine. Roger. If you are planning to break into this CEO’s office or something like that, then you can—”

  “No one’s breaking into anything. Think I’d bring along a member of the police department for a caper like that? Nah.” He splashed through a small puddle in the asphalt and held the door for her. “We’re only going to go where we’re invited.”

  She peered into the square, empty lobby of the place before stepping through the second set of doors. Her shoes squeaked on the linoleum. Two weak overhead lights let her see the place. Two vinyl chairs, framed posters of happy teens under the New Horizons logo, and a receptionist’s desk that didn’t have so much as a paper clip on its blotter. “Who’s inviting us?”

  “A friend of mine.” He continued up a barely lit hallway to a stairwell. It turned out to be even more dimly lit than the lobby, so much so that Correa reached back and took her hand. It smelled like an apartment building long past its prime, a combination of boiled cabbage, stale beer, and uncleaned toilets. A shaggy-looking man appeared on the first landing, and Maggie’s unease festered and grew.

  The shaggy-looking man, however, brushed by them without a word. Roger Correa let go of her fingers and led her up to the second-floor hallway. There they found an office, one equipped with more than sufficient lighting, and a lone female behind a desk.

  “Evening, Angie,” Roger said.

  Angie appeared to be about Maggie’s age, with curly brown hair and a few acne scars. She had thin arms and fluttery hands and seemed unsurprised, yet not happy, to see Correa.

  “Angie, Maggie, Maggie, Angie. Maggie’s helping me out with photography tonight.”

  Maggie nodded at the woman, who returned the gesture while the furrow between her eyes deepened. “I could lose my job, you know.”

  “Don’t worry. Maggie here is accustomed to confidentiality.”

  Angie turned watery blue eyes toward her, apparently waiting for verification. Maggie nodded again, even though she felt she was already keeping too many things in confidence for comfort. Jack and his history, in fact, had greatly strained her confidentiality limit. But she couldn’t tell Angie that, and certainly not Roger Correa.

  “Do you have the statements?” he asked.

  “Yeah.” The woman opened a desk drawer and rummaged around. Her office didn’t have much in the way of décor, just another New Horizons poster and a bulletin board skewered with pushpins. They held receipts, memos, lists of names, and a blue “First Place” ribbon. It did not specify First Place in what. A glass paperweight in the shape of a cat and a framed photograph of Angie with a young boy sat on the desk, the only personal items in a sea of folders and invoices.

  She handed Correa a sheet of paper.

  He scanned it. “Seriously? How is he getting away with this? The prison system feeds people for two ninety-seven a day.”

  “The county administrator asked him that at a meeting last week.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “That this isn’t a prison.”

  “What is it?” Maggie asked, tired of listening to a conversation she couldn’t understand.

  “We are sitting in a halfway house called New Horizons. It’s a residence for the recently released, such as the gentleman we passed in the stairwell. Residents are provided with a small room, private bath, basic cable, and three squares a day. There are monitors here to keep a lid on any drug or alcohol use, do bed checks, arbitrate disputes, and provide a spot of counseling and job hunt assistance. The aim is to ease the ex-cons’ reentry into society and reduce recidivism.”

  Maggie said, “Sounds like a worthy program.”

  “It is,” Angie hastened to assure her. “It is a worthy program.”

  “Except it doesn’t work,” Roger said. “Here, take a photo of this invoice, would you?”

  “It could,” Angie argued. “It should.”

  “But has it?”

  She sighed, fingering a wrinkle in her brow that threatened to become permanent as Maggie snapped a picture of the paper. “Gene got arrested for disorderly and went back in for at least sixty days. Mohammad was found riding around in a stolen car but managed to explain it away as a misunderstanding. Marjorie is pregnant . . . again. Kelly failed his last two drug tests and Mr. Barkley had to call the prosecutors to try to get the warrant postponed. He has to keep him here. Our numbers go any lower and R and C will revoke our contract.”

  “That’s the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction,” Correa explained to Maggie.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I still don’t know what we’re doing here.”

  “New Horizons currently houses five male inmates—or clients, as Angie here prefers—and two females. Guess what their operating budget is, contracted and paid for by the state of Ohio and Cuyahoga County?” He waited for Maggie to guess, but when she frowned at him he continued without an answer. “Two point five million.”

  She looked around. “I’m guessing it didn’t go into furnishings.”

  Angie pulled out a small case and started up an e-cigarette. “It sure doesn’t go into my salary, I can tell you that.”

  “They charge the Ohio R and C fifteen dollars per inmate, sorry, client for food, let’s start with that. The prison system feeds inmates for twenty percent of that. CEO
Barkley got a letter from R and C last month asking why so much. He said it was because New Horizons purchases organic items from local farmers in order to support small businesses and assist in purging the effects of the drugs these people have been on. He quoted some New Agey type book on the subject and claimed it was having wonderful effects on the inm—clients. Is it having a wonderful effect, Angie?”

  She puffed. “They eat mac and cheese four times a week.”

  “CEO Barkley does, however, pay six figures to a lobbyist to drum up more clients and contracts and well-meaning donors. For six figures, you would think he’d work very hard for this establishment. How many times have you seen said lobbyist on these premises, Angie?”

  “Twice,” she said, with the weary air of someone who has been over all this, and more than once. “In three years.”

  “He did do one good job for his friend Barkley, though. He introduced him to the one bad apple in the county exec’s advisory board, guy named Elliott. Barkley bought the guy a junket to Las Vegas, and when the topic of New Horizons came up on the board’s agenda, Elliott vouched for them all the way. It kept the questions to a minimum for a good year or two—until someone at R and C noticed New Horizons’s abysmal rate of return on investment.”

  “Huh,” Maggie said. “Okay, that’s all very interesting. But—”

  “How do I know all this?” Correa went on. “I know all this because Angie has been letting me sneak peeks at her CEO’s correspondence for the past six months. Because Angie”—he beamed at the woman behind the desk, while she just looked unhappy—“doesn’t like liars any more than I do.”

  “What I meant to ask was, why are we sitting here? Why hasn’t R and C or the county or both opened an investigation or revoked their contract?”

  “That’s the beauty of county corruption. It’s all about defining terms. Overpriced food is used because it’s supposedly organic. A coconspirator is a consultant. A contractor paid four times usual rate just ran into errors made by the builder. Everything can be explained. It’s all for a good cause. That’s the added aura of social programs. No one wants to be the meanie who questions too much. If the people running it say it’s necessary to health and well-being, that’s accepted as true even when there is absolutely no evidence to support it.”

  “I can’t lose my job,” Angie said, interrupting his philosophical digressions with a focus on practicality. “My kid has to have a special tutor. And my asshole landlord is talking about raising the rent again.”

  “So what are you going to do?” Maggie asked Correa.

  “Publish, of course. Lay it out in an article so clearly that the county board can’t ignore it, so R and C has what they need to act, so Barkley will go to jail along with his consultant and—dare I hope—board member Elliott. A real sociologist will be brought in to run this place with Angie’s assistance, and maybe the less fortunate children who come to this program might actually be helped by it. Win-win for everybody. Here, take a picture of this, too. It’s the plane ticket they bought for Elliott.”

  Angie put away her e-cig, stowing it in its little box. “Anything else? My kid’s waiting for me, and my mom’s waiting to get rid of my kid for the night.”

  Correa rose and shook her hand. “Thank you, Angela, for doing what’s right. You’ve earned the gratitude of the city, even though they will never know it.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said.

  Correa and Maggie exited out the front doors. She looked around with a nightmare vision of CEO Barkley returning to get something he left in his office and stumbling onto their nefarious purpose. “You’ve been working on this for six months?”

  “It’s a time-consuming process. That’s why the first axes to fall at any paper cut out investigative reporting.”

  “Why haven’t you published already? It seems like you have plenty.”

  He moved closer to her, his arm brushing hers. “It’s probably like a criminal trial. The prosecutor thinks he has a slam dunk, until the defense attorney gets ahold of it. I think I’ve got proof incontrovertible, until a copy editor or editor gets ahold of it. They worry about staying on good terms with the county exec’s office and advertisers.”

  “Was Robert Davis holding you back?”

  He stepped over a water-filled hole in the pavement. “Are you interrogating me, Maggie?”

  “Yes.”

  He laughed. “Okay, fair enough. Yes, Bob did stand in my way. A lot. But that was his job and he did seem to care about doing it, I’ll say that for him. But it wasn’t just him, it was also Roth and the publisher and the state guy—”

  “State guy?”

  “Leroy Dunston, he covers state news. He felt I encroached on his territory too much since a lot of county funding comes from the state, so he should be reporting on its use. Problem is, the state doesn’t have enough manpower to pay attention to what the counties are doing, most of the time, and neither does Dunston.”

  “How will you get this story into print?”

  “Persistence”—he grinned—“is the key to success in every endeavor, from artistry to love. My mother used to say that.”

  “I’d say there can be a thin line between persistence and stalking.”

  He found that funny. “The subjects of my stories would say, ‘Between persistence and harassment.’ No one said journalism was easy. And now you’re thinking that I’m one step closer to Davis dangling from the end of a rope.”

  “Strap, actually.”

  “What?”

  She explained that the rope used was actually a flat mesh strap. Since Printing Supervisor Harding had been there, she assumed that detail would have been spread throughout the Herald office.

  “That’s right, I heard that,” Correa said. “Ironic, really.”

  “Why?” She handed him back his camera.

  “A strapline is what we call a secondary heading, a subheading under the headline.”

  “Why is that ironic?”

  “Because it’s something a copy editor would write.” The pathos of this seemed to touch him and his face slid into sadness. “Poor guy.” They reached the car and he jerked open the passenger door for her.

  Maggie asked, “What happens if the county closes this place and Angie is out of a job?”

  “Then she’s screwed. But she knew that was a possible future for her the moment she started talking to me.” He stopped, turning to look at her. “That’s the kind of bravery they don’t give you medals for. No one will ever hear her name. I do what I do for those kind of people. And I appreciate”—he reached out and stroked the edge of her jaw—“all the help I can get.”

  She stepped back. If he thought this was some kind of date, he had another thought coming. But she didn’t step too far. As most intensely driven men do, Correa had his own kind of magnetism.

  He didn’t seem shot down by this not-so-subtle rejection, just got in the car and drove her back to the Herald parking lot.

  Chapter 23

  The next morning Maggie arrived at the lab early, having woken long before her alarm would have gone off. Enough with fuzzy video cameras and oral testimony by too-often-deceptive humans. She needed to get back to her roots: trace evidence, bloodstains, and gunshot residue.

  She also needed to call her brother, who had left two messages asking her to do exactly that, but told herself it would be best to wait a few hours. Musicians were not early risers.

  She started with Ronald Soltis. The officer at the scene hadn’t asked why she taped the back of the victim’s clothes, when she didn’t usually tape gunshot victims. Guns didn’t require the killer to get up close and personal as in bludgeoning or stabbings. Her coworkers might get curious if they happened to notice.

  She found a lot of fibers on the back of Soltis’s jacket and a few hairs, including a long blond one. A gangster always has to have his moll. She wondered what the current term would be for the girlfriend of a “gangsta” but figured she probably didn’t want to know. He had some brow
n cotton, crumbles of vegetation that could be marijuana or just debris from autumn leaves, and four dog hairs from something large and dark brown. The dark blue trilobal fibers gave her a bad moment, since they were similar to the upholstery in Jack’s car, but she reminded herself that dark blue interiors were common. The polarizing microscope told her that the fibers on Soltis were nylon, and most car interiors were polyester.

  To be sure, she pulled out her mounted slides from the previous vigilante cases, and the shade of blue appeared markedly different. Even better, she did not find Greta’s white fur. Maggie let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding and got another cup of coffee to celebrate. After three sips the doubt began to creep back in. Jack knew what she had found during her investigation of the vigilante murders that had led her to him. He would be careful not to leave those clues again. Absence of proof was not proof of absence. Not in his case.

  On the tape from the upper half of Soltis’s jacket back she picked up some particles of gunpowder, tiny disks with holes in them. The holes were there to increase the surface area—the surface would have burned, so the more surface area, the faster the burn and the more power behind the bullet as it exited the gun. A common type, known as perforated disk gunpowder. It told her nothing about who might have pulled the trigger.

  So her Ronald Soltis investigation came out a wash. She found nothing to implicate Jack, and nothing to point her in the direction of any other killer. Unless Ronnie’s killer had long blond hair. Sometimes molls got angry.

  She turned to more pressing matters, the Herald murder victims. The trace evidence on Robert Davis’s shirt hadn’t told her much, but now that she had Jerry Wilton’s tapings to compare, she might find items in common. That would be interesting. To strangle an able-bodied adult male, one would have to get a good amount of leverage on the strap ends, pull tight, and not let up. The victim, if not unconscious, would be struggling and kicking and trying to pull the strap away from his throat and, if he could think fast enough, striking at the person behind him. Either way it took a lot of up-close and personal work, and the front of the killer should be pressed against the back of the victim. So she paid special attention to the shirt backs.