“Turned out the damned thing was full of rusty hubcaps, of all things, but I made the cops come open it.” He spit audibly as he spoke and I swallowed a laugh, picturing a beer-bellied Bubba, complete with overalls, staring at a coffin someone dumped in his driveway.
He filled me in on the details of his call for help, clearly still annoyed at the amused response he’d gotten. “They asked me what was in there. Can you believe that?” he said. “I told ’em I wasn’t opening the damned thing. I didn’t want to be looking at rotted old bones first thing in the morning. That’s what my tax dollars pay them for!”
No rotted old bones before coffee. I could go with him on that.
Why anyone had the thing in the first place was a mystery, but Jerry said when I talked to him again there was no forensic evidence it had ever been used for its intended purpose. I laughed as I typed. It wasn’t a front-page exclusive, but the “news of the weird” vibe made it an interesting read—the kind of story likely to get a ton of Facebook shares, which usually made bean counters like Les very happy. So score one for the crime reporter.
After I filed the story, I opened my Neal folder and stared at the documents inside, trying to wedge him into my scenario with Lowe as the drug pusher. My brain sparred between DonnaJo’s praise of Neal and the idea that a failed bankruptcy filing and his kid’s mounting medical bills might make it pretty hard to walk past several hundred thousand dollars in cash.
No matter which way I turned my puzzle piece, I couldn’t make Neal fit with Lowe. But if he wasn’t guilty, where the hell was he?
What if he’s the victim? I listened to my instincts as I thought again about Mike’s parting words. “If this was a cop, they’re into something very serious, something they could go to prison for. And going to prison is pretty much every cop’s worst nightmare.”
An assistant CA could certainly help put a crooked cop in prison. What if Neal suspected something? Or someone, and they decided their secret was worth killing Neal?
The skin on my arm pricked up into goosebumps. From everything I’d seen, if there was a way to make the lawyer the villain, the police department was determined to take it. Which made me wonder who would prove Neal’s innocence if he hadn’t done it. My short list consisted of DonnaJo and myself. A story that kept an innocent man out of prison and locked up a dirty cop as a bonus? There was no way the Post could ignore that. The goosebumps didn’t go anywhere.
You’re so far ahead of yourself, you’re going to lose sight of your own ass, I thought, trying to couch the excitement. One thing at a time. I snatched up my phone and dialed DonnaJo’s cell.
“I have about three minutes. I’m in recess,” she said when she picked up.
I talked fast, not mentioning anyone specifically, but giving her a broad overview of what I suspected.
“I’m still in the middle of this,” I said. “But I have a pretty good hunch the cops want to send Neal up for it if they can.”
“What do you need?” There was no hint of reservation in her tone. “Those assholes at the PD aren’t going to set Gavin up. No way. He didn’t do it, Nichelle. I’d bet my license on that.”
“Hopefully I won’t need you to. But I do need to know about Neal. If he’s made any enemies, maybe? Assuming he didn’t take off with the evidence, our most viable option is foul play.”
DonnaJo was quiet, the background chatter from the courthouse the only sign I hadn’t lost her.
“Jesus, I guess it is, isn’t it? Makes you think,” she said finally. “I love my job, but I’m not willing to die for it. I really don’t know what Gavin has going on, but something’s had him in a foul mood for the past few weeks.”
I’d bet it had. And I had a sudden idea for how I might find out what that something was.
“Can we grab a drink tonight?” I asked. “I’ll come by there to get you about six?”
“Sounds good. I can meet you, if you’d rather.”
“Nope. I’ll come get you.”
She was quiet for a long minute, and I held my breath. DonnaJo was smart.
“I don’t think I want to know, so I’ll just see you when you get here.”
Very smart.
“See you then.”
I hung up and flipped open my computer, typing Lowe’s name into my Google toolbar.
Facebook and LinkedIn were the top two hits, but his accounts were locked down to exclude everyone but friends or connections. I went back to the search results and kept scrolling. A ton of stuff from the Telegraph, most of it written by me, and a good many city council meeting minutes and agendas. TV news stories. A magazine article.
I was on page seven by the time I saw it.
The current command staff at the PD had been in place when I’d come to Richmond, and I’d never done any backgrounding on any of them. So until Google provided me with an old team photo, I had no way of knowing that Dave Lowe had been a trainer for the 1998 UVA baseball team.
And grinning his perfect grin from the back row of the photo on my screen was Grant Parker.
“Fuck me,” I whispered, sitting back in my chair, my eyes locked on the photo. No way.
And yet, there it was. Full color. Undeniable.
“Could I be any dumber?” I said, muffled by the fingers that had flown up to my lips. Parker had hardly ever spoken to me before I’d mentioned the drug dealers in that staff meeting, yet in a week, he’d managed to become something like a friend. At least, I was beginning to think he might.
I ran back through every conversation, ticking off questions about my story he’d tossed into each one. He’d even shown up at the river Friday night.
Covering cops for six years taught me true coincidences are few and far between.
Closing my eyes, I called up the crime scene shots of drug dealers Noah Smith and Darryl Wright from my memory, their eyes open, blood and gore splattering the walls behind them.
Jesus. What if our sports columnist had been responsible for that?
I dropped my forehead into one hand and pulled in a deep breath, my head swimming.
Think, Nichelle.
With an enshrined jersey number at UVA and a popular sports column, Grant Parker was a local hero, beloved by thousands of people. Apart from his occasional ego Tourette’s, he seemed like a nice enough guy, too. Why would he be in on a massive murder and drug trafficking scheme?
I had only one answer, and I’d never wanted so badly to be wrong.
The fancy new motorcycle. The thick stack of fifties he’d pulled out at the restaurant. I’d seen a lot in my tenure at the crime desk, and money was second only to sex on the list of motives for murder.
I thought about Parker carrying Katie DeLuca to her car and wondered if the kindness was motivated by guilt. What if Parker knew about the boat all along? Hell, what if he’d set up some sort of rendezvous between the cops and the ballplayers, then shown up to check it out when it went bad? Suddenly nothing seemed too crazy to consider.
I bookmarked the team photo on my computer and sat back in my chair, unsure of what to do with that information. I couldn’t tell Les, and I sure as hell couldn’t tell Bob. They’d laugh me out of the building—possibly the city. I had no one I trusted at the police department, even assuming that Mike and Aaron weren’t part of my growing conspiracy theory, and staring at a photo of Parker and Lowe, that no longer seemed a safe assumption.
I glanced back down at my desk and saw DonnaJo’s email about Neal and his active cases.
His wife had refused to comment on Tuesday, but she was just going to have to get over that. She had to know something, even if she didn’t know she knew it. And I needed to know it, too.
Scribbling down their address in Henrico, I stuffed the files into my bag and took a drive to the suburbs.
Grace Neal looked positively haggard when she opened her front door, her flat brown eyes not even registering surprise to see me standing there.
“Could you please just leave me alone?” she said, her voic
e raspy. “I know everyone thinks my husband is a felon, but I just want to take care of my little boy and have my husband back at home. I told Charlie Lewis yesterday when she came by poking a camera in my face: I’m not giving interviews. Go away.”
She moved to shut the door. Desperate, I stuck my foot in the crack, wincing at the pressure. She was strong for a petite little thing.
“Are you serious?” Her eyes widened and she pushed harder.
I gritted my teeth and stood my ground.
“Mrs. Neal, I know you don’t want to talk to me, and frankly, I don’t blame you,” I said. “I can’t believe I’m actually doing this, but I sort of don’t have a choice. There’s something wrong at the police department, and I think your husband might know what it is. I thought he might be part of it, but now I’m not so sure. So I’m going to need you to open that door and let some blood back into my foot, and then I’m going to need your help to figure this out.”
She stared a good thirty seconds, my foot still pinched in the heavy oak door, before she swung it wide and waved me inside.
“Just be quiet, please,” she said. “It’s so hard to get him to sleep sometimes.”
I hobbled through the bright foyer into her family room, wide and sunny with butter-colored walls and cushy, overstuffed furniture. It looked like a spread from Better Homes and Gardens, save for an end table that held a small lamp and a very large piece of medical equipment with a mask attached to it.
“My son has Cystic Fibrosis,” she said, following my gaze. “It means he has a buildup of thick mucus in a lot of his organs, including his lungs. That helps him breathe a little easier.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” I was, but the words sounded lame. I didn’t really know what else to say.
“It is what it is.” She flashed a tired half-smile. “He’s a wonderful little boy, and I wouldn’t trade him for anything. But sometimes it’s hard. I’ve never had to take care of him by myself for so long before.”
“And you haven’t heard from your husband at all?” I watched her for signs of dishonesty.
“Not since he left here on Sunday.” Grace Neal held my gaze as she spoke, not fidgeting or wavering. “I know he didn’t steal that evidence, but why do you think my Gavin’s innocent?”
“I have a theory, and I’m wondering if your husband may think the same thing.”
“He’s suspicious of something.” She nodded. “He got his nose all out of joint a few months ago over the guns from that case he worked last year. The trucker from New York?”
I nodded as I reached into my bag and pulled out a notebook.
“Tell me why he was mad.” I clicked out a pen.
“Gavin has a thing about guns,” she said. “A sort of personal vendetta. He had a good friend when he was a little boy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and caught a stray bullet from an unregistered gun. He became a prosecutor to keep them off the streets. I’ve never seen him work so hard on a case. He triple checked every detail, staying at the office until midnight for a week before his opening argument. He was ecstatic at the thought of so many guns being destroyed after he won, and he spent months after the trial counting the days until they were sent off to be scrapped.”
I guessed where her story was going from what Joey had said about the guns being on the boat.
“About two months ago, he went down to the police department to ride along while the guns were taken out of the evidence lock-up over to be chomped—they put them in this big shredding machine and the city sells the scrap metal. Gavin thinks it’s the greatest invention of the twentieth century.” She half-smiled, then sighed.
“But then he got to the evidence room and they told him he wasn’t allowed to go. They kept saying it was against regulations. He put up a fuss because he knows the rules inside and out, but they wouldn’t budge. The guy in the evidence room said he had orders from the command staff.”
“Of course he did,” I muttered.
“Excuse me?” Grace paused and gave me a quizzical smile.
“Sorry. Thinking out loud. Please, go on.”
She sighed again. “So Gavin called the command office, and someone gave him some bullshit about how they couldn’t be liable for putting Gavin in a dangerous situation in case someone tried to hijack the truck or something. Gavin argued, but the guy refused to give in. I felt so bad for him. Not that I wanted him to be in danger, but he was so excited about this. They finally said they’d send the deputy chief. That’s the second-in-command, right?”
I nodded.
“He said he’d go along and then call Gavin as soon as they got back from dropping the guns off at the shredder.
“And he did. Called Gavin a couple of hours later, said everything went smoothly. Gavin was so excited. He brought home champagne.”
“But then something went wrong?”
She nodded.
“The next day, he called his friend at the plant to see how much scrap they got out of them, and the guy said the guns never arrived.”
I sucked in a sharp breath even though I had suspected the words were coming.
“Yeah,” she said. “Gavin was pissed. We’ve been married for twelve years and I’ve never seen him so mad. He drove straight to the police department and demanded to see this deputy guy, but of course, the cop didn’t have time to talk. Gavin filed a complaint with the civil service commission. It got bogged down in red tape, but he kept after it.
“Finally, the commission told Gavin the guy at the scrap plant swore under oath he destroyed the guns. Apparently he was ‘mistaken’ when he told Gavin the guns never arrived. Gavin didn’t believe any of it, swore to me something fishy was going on at the police department, and from that point on, he made weekly random checks of the evidence room. Then Sunday, he never made it home.” Her voice faded on the last word.
Bingo. I nodded my head as I scribbled.
“Did he tell you what he suspected?” I asked.
“He did not.” She brushed at her eye and shook her head. “He said I didn’t need to be part of it, and I didn’t press him, to be honest with you. There were things he had to see at work that I didn’t care to know about. When he comes home after this nightmare, he’ll join a private firm with a fat salary and a corner office and a lot of tax law or something equally boring, if I have anything to say about it. He turns down half a dozen offers every single year. My husband is a brilliant lawyer, and he has a good heart. But I’m through with the crusading if this is how it’s going to end up.”
“Can’t say I blame you,” I said.
“Why are you asking, anyway?” she asked. “Do you think something happened to him? Something bad?”
“You don’t?” I didn’t mean to blurt it quite so bluntly, but I couldn’t believe she didn’t think the worst after what she just told me.
Grace bit her lip, her effort to control her breathing not really working. “I don’t want to,” she said, a small sob escaping with the words. “I just want him to come home.”
“I hope he does,” I said. “Thank you for talking to me, Grace. This is a big help. Can I ask one last favor?”
She sniffled and drug the back of one hand across her face. “Sure.”
“Does your husband have a home office, and may I check it out?”
She stood up and moved toward the back of the house.
“In here,” she said. “He likes to work in the sunroom where he can see the trees.”
I looked over the desk, but all of the files were labeled with one of two things: the names of medical companies and doctor’s offices, or defendants. I rifled through two drawers and a cabinet, but came up empty-handed. Damn. I had just turned back to the doorway to thank Grace for her time when an ear-splitting trill split the silence in the house.
“Shit,” the word slid between clenched teeth as Grace lunged for the cordless phone on the desk. “I keep the ringer up so I can hear it over Alex’s breathing machine.” She hit a button on the white handset
and raised it to her ear.
“Neal residence.”
I looked back at my notes, but a small, strangled sound from my hostess snapped my head back up.
“Thank you.” The words were automatic, little more than a whisper, her eyes wide and staring at nothing. The phone clattered to the tile floor and I jumped to my feet, dumping the notebook under the desk.
“Grace?”
“He’s gone.” She said it so softly I almost didn’t hear, tears falling fast. “My Gavin. He’s dead. That…they…the police pulled him out of the river an hour ago. They said his body was dumped there. Weighted down.”
Her face crumpled into a mask of grief and she would’ve fallen if I hadn’t caught her, leading her back to the sofa in the buttery-bright family room and holding her while she sobbed.
There are times when being right really sucks.
13.
The weight of the world
By the time I found a phone number for Grace Neal’s mother scrawled across the babysitter pad on their fridge and waited for her to arrive, my Blackberry had rung itself into a nearly-dead battery.
“Where the fuck have you been?” Les screamed in my ear when I called him back as I pointed the car down West Broad toward the city. “Don’t you own a goddamn scanner anymore? Your missing prosecutor just turned up in the river, dumped like something out of an old gangster movie, according to Channel Four. Of course, I have to get my information from Charlie Lewis, because my cops reporter is nowhere to be found when the biggest crime story of the year breaks. They’re having a press conference at police headquarters at five-thirty.”
I checked my clock. It was already five-fifteen, and I was all the way out in the west end. Damn.
“I know about the lawyer. I was interviewing his wife when the cops called. I stayed with her until her mother arrived.”
“You what? Since when are we in the business of babysitting strangers?”
Since I’m a decent human being, you prick. I clenched my jaw. He totally would have left the poor woman sitting there in shock. Of course, Charlie probably would have, too.
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