Among the Shadows

by Bruce Robert Coffin

  “Was he in last Sunday night?”

  Polowski laughed, causing Byron to look up from his notebook. “He’s in every Sunday.”

  “Do you remember anything different about last Sunday?”

  He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “Nope, nothing jumps out. Why you asking?”

  “Did he come in with anyone?”

  “Yeah, now you mention it, he did come in with a guy.”

  “Do you know the guy’s name?”

  He shook his head. “Sorry.”

  “You recognize him?”

  “Nope, never seen him before. I took him to be a friend of Cleo’s. Think they go back a ways.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Just the way they were talking. Nothing in particular, just seemed like they’d known each other awhile.”

  “Can you describe him?” Byron asked.

  “Sure, white guy, late fifties, rugged build, about your height I’d say. Six foot plus.”

  “Hair?”

  “Gray, at least what little I could see of it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He was wearing a ball cap.”

  “Do you remember what the hat looked like? Logo?” Polowski shook his head. “How about facial hair, beard, mustache?”

  “Goatee, trimmed up real neat.”

  “Can you remember what time they arrived?”

  “Early evening I guess, but they closed the place. I kicked them out about eleven-­thirty.”

  “Have you seen either of them since Sunday night?”

  “No. But I haven’t worked there since Sunday.” Byron watched as Polowski reached up under his T-­shirt and scratched deep into an armpit. “They in some kind of trouble?”

  “Riordan’s dead.” As if to punctuate this statement, the coffee maker beeped, signaling it was done. Byron studied the bartender’s face. His expression was one of indifference.

  Polowski got up and poured the coffee. “Heart attack?”

  “Possible suicide.”

  “Wouldn’t have seen that coming.” He opened the fridge. “How do you take it?”

  “Black, thanks. Why do you say that?”

  He handed the mug to Byron, then sat down. “Cleo used to be a Portland cop. You know him?”

  “I know of him.”

  “Well, he was one of the most confident men I’ve ever met.”

  “Confident?”

  “Yeah, I’m being kind. Full of himself, I guess you’d say. Liked to drink, a lot. Turned into an asshole when he drank. Didn’t have many friends.”

  “Sounds like he might’ve had one.”

  “Maybe. This other guy, is he in some kind of trouble?”

  Not an unusual question, Byron thought. But it was also exactly the sort of question a friend of Mr. Baseball Cap might ask. “No,” Byron said, handing the bartender a business card. “But if he should happen to come in again, give me call.”

  “Sure thing.”

  THE SUN HAD crept below the horizon by the time Byron returned to Riordan’s. Stevens and Pelligrosso were busy photographing the kitchen. The blood spatter that appeared as brownish maroon stains by daylight now glowed eerily in the darkened room. The luminol cast a bluish light, reminding him of a child’s glow stick. Normally, investigators spray the chemical, which reacts with minerals contained in blood, on any surface suspected of having been cleaned by a suspect. In the case of Riordan’s kitchen, where no attempt had been made to hide the blood, it simply made photographing the smaller blood droplets easier.

  “What do you think?” Byron asked Stevens.

  “I think we’ve got a problem.”

  “How so?”

  “I don’t think he was alone when this happened.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Check this out.” She had Pelligrosso hold a flashlight from the side and shine it across the kitchen table. “I was checking for blood spatter detail on the table when I found these.”

  Byron bent down and looked closely at the tabletop. “What am I looking at?”

  “See these marks?” she asked, pointing to several circular patterns on the table.

  “Are those rings from Cleo’s glass?”

  “Not Cleo’s. His are over here. There was another person drinking with him. Probably took the glass from the scene.”

  “How do we know the rings weren’t already there, from some other time?”

  “Follow me.” Stevens led him to the next room where she’d set up her laptop. “I downloaded some of the pictures to my computer already. This is a picture looking toward the door from the table. I wanted a shot of the floor showing the back spatter from the entry wound. Everything was enhanced with luminol. Can you see it?”

  “I see some fine spray, but that’s it.”

  “That’s all we could see at first. This is the same photo, but I enhanced the contrast. Do you see it now?”

  “There’s nothing in the middle.”

  “Bingo. Something blocked the blowback spatter,” Stevens said, referring to the fine spray of blood droplets typical of bullet-­entry wounds. The blood spatter travels in an ever-­expanding pattern, moving in the opposite direction from the bullet.

  “Something or someone?” Byron asked.

  “My guess? Someone was standing right here beside Riordan when the gun went off,” Stevens said, pointing to the screen.

  Byron felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck. He knew the presence of another person didn’t necessarily mean Riordan’s death wasn’t a suicide. But he also knew the death of two former SRT members, under suspicious circumstances, inside of a week, wasn’t a coincidence. If this was a murder, it meant that they’d been looking at O’Halloran’s death all wrong. It wasn’t some misguided attempt to put a dying man out of his misery. Someone was making a statement and their target, or targets, was becoming clearer by the moment.

  He pulled out his cell and dialed Diane.

  “Hey, Sarge.”

  “Diane, I need you to do something else for me.”

  “Name it.”

  “Grab Nuge and canvass Riordan’s entire neighborhood. I want to know if anyone remembers him having a visitor in the last day or two.”

  BYRON DROVE TO 109 and found LeRoyer pacing in front of the snack box.

  “You know that crap will kill ya, Marty.”

  “So will this job. Remember when this stuff only cost a quarter?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Well, it did.” He pulled a bill out of his pocket. “Don’t suppose you got change for a five.”

  “Sorry. Why don’t you write an IOU like everybody else?”

  LeRoyer’s face lit up and he grabbed a Milky Way. “Good idea,” he said, pocketing the money. “Billingslea called. Says you threatened to physically remove him from a public street.”

  “I was just explaining his options.”

  “Jesus, John. You can’t go around threatening reporters. Like it or not, he’s the police-­beat guy.”

  “Doesn’t give him the right to fuck up an investigation. He was gonna try and talk with Riordan’s daughter. Don’t suppose he mentioned that, did he?”

  “Just ease up on the guy, okay? So, give me some good news. Make my friggin’ day and tell me this is just a suicide and isn’t linked to O’Halloran’s death in any way.”

  “Okay, but I’d be lying.”

  LeRoyer returned the unopened candy bar to the snack box. “There goes my appetite.”

  They walked through CID toward LeRoyer’s office while Byron filled him in.

  “So we still don’t know what we have yet?” LeRoyer asked hopefully.

  “We’ll know more tomorrow.”

  “Great, another sleepless night. Donna’s already peeved at me. I
fell asleep during our anniversary dinner the other night.”

  “Happy anniversary.”

  “Yeah, thanks.” LeRoyer’s cell chimed with an incoming message. He removed it from his suit coat pocket and looked at it. “Speak of the devil.”

  “Stanton?” Byron asked.

  “No, it’s my other boss. She wants to know if I’m ever coming home tonight.”

  “You might as well. We’re not gonna be able to do much more tonight. I’m waitin’ on the last of my ­people.”

  LeRoyer stood up and grabbed his suit jacket off the back of his chair. “You’re right. I’ll call Stanton on the way home. Oh, almost forgot. Billingslea has already begun poking around, and don’t forget we’ve got CompStat tomorrow.”

  “And?”

  “And you’re up.”

  Byron rubbed his temples. “You’re just full of good news.”

  Chapter Eleven

  IT WAS NEARLY one o’clock Wednesday afternoon when Byron headed down to the police department’s first-­floor conference room for the weekly CompStat meeting. As usual, he avoided the elevator, favoring instead the solitude of a darkened stairwell. It wasn’t a fear of elevators that motivated him as much as the likelihood of sharing one with someone boorish. Worse still, being stuck in one with such a person. He’d never quite developed a knack for suffering fools.

  The conference room was two stories high with walls constructed of exposed brick and Sheetrock. The floor was tiled in an earthy rust-­colored terrazzo. Two large wood-­framed windows overlooked the plaza, which lead to the rear parking garage. At the center of the room stood a massive wooden table, fifteen feet long, surrounded by more than a dozen padded black-­metal chairs. Byron sat down in his usual seat at the far right side of the table closest to one of the conference room doors, just as the others began to arrive. The meetings always made him feel like he was sitting down to dinner as part of some dysfunctional Earl Hamner television family, living in the Blue Ridge Mountains of West Virginia during the Great Depression. Mind passing me the murders, Grandpa?

  CompStat had come to Portland, Maine, by way of a young, stat-­happy police captain, shortly after he’d earned his master’s in police administration. When the idea was first implemented, the brain trust at City Hall, unable to contain their giddiness, held a joint press conference at which they trumpeted loudly about things like “leading the Portland Police Department into the twenty-­first century” and “cutting-­edge crime fighting.” Byron wondered what century they’d thought the police had been fighting crime in. Not surprisingly, the captain’s rhetoric about saving Portland was really nothing more than a way to garner regional attention for himself in his bid to become a chief. Following that captain’s departure, to fix whatever might be ailing some other police agency, Portland PD was left with CompStat, and Byron and his cohorts were left to suffer through the tedious Wednesday afternoon meetings each week.

  CompStat meetings were usually comprised of the same personnel: the Chief, Assistant Chief, Commander, CID Lieutenant, CID Sergeants, Captain of Patrol, Community Policing Lieutenant and Sergeant, Crime Analyst, and several Senior Lead Officers. Each attendee was provided with a copy of the weekly Crime Analyst Report showing violent crimes, property crimes, and calls for ser­vice. Each report was broken down into subcategories like murder, gross sexual assault, aggravated assault, robbery, etc. Also factored in were things like location within the city where the crime occurred, time of day, day of the week, and so on. An increase in any given area would require an explanation, along with a plan to fix the problem. Any decrease in criminal activity and somebody would undoubtedly take credit, usually somebody of greater rank and importance than a sergeant.

  Byron knew he’d be occupying the hot seat at today’s meeting. All anyone wanted to talk about was the murder investigation and why it hadn’t been solved. The chief’s protocol was to make the supervisor about to be served up as the main course wait until last before being called upon, allowing adequate time for basting the goose.

  After everyone was seated, Chief Stanton, the master of ceremonies, started the meeting, beginning with Detective Sergeant Peterson, supervisor of the property crime unit. Peterson covered each of the property crime categories in agonizing detail, at least as far as Byron was concerned. He knew there was zero hope of being called away from the meeting, unless the world came to an end. Next, Stanton called for Detective Sergeant Crosby’s report on current drug investigations. And so it went until finally Byron was called upon.

  He wanted to keep his cards as close to the vest as possible while still providing something for the group and satisfying Stanton’s infernal need to know. The last thing he needed was one of the CompStat attendees leaking valuable case information to a news media vulture like Davis Billingslea, and not for the first time. Byron explained how they’d spent most of the previous week trying to establish whether or not O’Halloran’s death was at the hands of one of his nurses.

  He could see Assistant Chief Reginald Cross salivating to add his two cents. Cross suffered from what Diane referred to as “stater of the obvious syndrome.” He always led with the same worn out caveats: “I don’t want to tell you how to investigate cases, but—­” and “Wouldn’t it be better if—­?” Cross wasn’t alone in telling Byron how to go about being a detective, but he was the second-­highest ranking know-­it-­all.

  “I don’t understand why you’re trying to connect these two cases,” Cross said. “Cleo’s death was a suicide, wasn’t it?”

  “Inconclusive. We still can’t say he didn’t take his own life, but we have established he wasn’t alone when he died.”

  “Doesn’t mean someone else killed him. Maybe there was someone there and they didn’t want to get dragged into a police investigation. I don’t suppose that occurred to you?”

  Byron bit his tongue, trying to keep his real thoughts to himself. “It has. But we’re keeping all possibilities on the table until we can say with certainty it was a suicide.”

  “Sounds to me like you’re attempting to make a link where there isn’t one,” Cross said, playing to Stanton and the rest of the room. “If I were you I’d be focusing my efforts on solving O’Halloran’s murder, instead of searching for some conspiracy.”

  Byron was fighting exasperation. He glanced over at LeRoyer, who was giving him a watch-­yourself look. “As I said, Chief, we still need to prove Riordan wasn’t murdered.”

  “Seems pretty friggin’ clear to me.”

  As the sage advice from all corners of the room faded into a dull pointless hum, Byron imagined how great a dram of the Irish would be at that very moment. He made eye contact with Sergeant Peterson, who was sporting a large shit-­eating grin, apparently enjoying Byron’s quandary. He glanced down at his vibrating cell. The text from Peterson read: “Looks like somebody needs a big steaming cup of shut-­the-­fuck-­up!” It was all Byron could do not to laugh out loud.

  Homicide 101 continued ad nauseam. He needed to check in on his ­people and get back to the case. What he didn’t need or have time for was more useless advice.

  CompStat mercifully concluded with a promise from Lieutenant LeRoyer that CID would continue to put all of its resources toward the O’Halloran homicide.

  LeRoyer and Byron rode the elevator up to the fourth floor. “Thoughts?” LeRoyer asked, breaking the silence.

  He looked up, glaring at the lieutenant. “You don’t want to hear them.”

  The doors opened and they were immediately confronted by a mousy-­looking young man. His hair was slicked back and he wore a dark pinstriped suit. His general appearance screamed attorney. “Which one of you is John Byron?” pinstripe asked, skipping right past the customary formalities.

  Byron was pretty sure he had suits older than the man standing before him. “I’m Byron. Who are you?”

  “John Byron, you’ve been served,” striped-­suit sai
d as he quickly slipped a manila envelope into Byron’s hand and escaped into the elevator just as the doors were closing.

  “I’m guessing it’s not good news,” LeRoyer said.

  Byron opened the envelope and unfolded its contents.

  “Who’s it from? Another happy customer getting ready to sue?” LeRoyer asked with a chuckle as he peered over Byron’s shoulder.

  Byron turned and stared at his lieutenant.

  “Well, who’s it from?” LeRoyer asked.

  “Kay’s lawyer. She’s filed for divorce.”

  BYRON UNLOCKED THE door and stepped inside his cozy first-­floor Danforth Street apartment. A savvy realtor friend had once told him that “cozy,” a favorite adjective among their ilk, actually meant a place too small to swing a cat. He’d found the description rather disturbing, and he didn’t own a cat. A maze of cardboard boxes occupied the floor in each of the four rooms. Some were open but none had been emptied. He removed things as he needed, rather than unpack.

  It’d been nine months since Kay announced she wanted a trial separation. Calling it a separation had been her way of letting him down easy. He was pretty sure he’d known even then their marriage was over, but he hadn’t been ready for the feeling of finality the act of unpacking would have brought with it. It wasn’t optimistic pretense as much as living in denial and hoping things might still work out.

  He dragged out a stool and sat down at the kitchen counter with the envelope containing Kay’s divorce papers. He pulled out the documents and flipped through them. A twenty-­year marriage dissolved by one stroke of a pen. It was absurd, and would’ve been laughable had it not hurt so badly.

  One by one all of the things they had talked about, all of the dreams for their future, everything had fallen apart. The children, the camp at the lake, the grandchildren, retiring to Florida. All of those bullshit greeting card moments gone. What had happened? Where had they gone wrong? Was it his career? Hers? Or was it just the picture-­perfect dreams of two starry-­eyed kids looking for something more than their parents had had? Was it really anyone’s fault? Or had they simply paid the price for a lifetime of dreaming.