by Tom Fowler
Officer, John Hanson College Campus Police.
“Shit,” I said to the empty office. As usual, it didn’t reply. I wondered if the guy with him also served on the college police force. Eddie said he was an alumnus of the school. He must have also been a large donor, or he may have held dirt on a couple of the guys who wore badges on campus. And he counted the basketball coach and at least one player on the team among his stable.
I called Gonzalez, who answered with his usual bright and sunny tone. “The hell do you want?”
“You’re always so happy to hear from me,” I said.
“I love talking to people who create work for me and complicate my life.”
“Today, I just have a simple question.”
“Thank Christ,” he said. “What is it?”
“Does the BCPD have any influence over the John Hanson Campus Police?”
His response came in the form of a deep breath blown into the phone. “What the hell do you need to know for?”
“I think it’s important.”
“Still on the basketball player?”
“Yeah.”
“They’re a qualified force according to the state, and they’ll be the first to tell you. The thing is they’re only allowed to handle certain things. We have oversight of the whole operation, and we step in for emergencies or things like major crimes.”
“Like murder,” I said.
“Sure . . . or rape and sexual assault, too. We get involved for the really bad stuff. The rest of the time, they’re on their own for the most part. Once a year, we have someone who audits their work.”
“Any problems?”
“I wouldn’t know offhand, but I don’t remember hearing anyone mention it. Why?”
“I may have seen one of their officers moonlighting. Let’s just say his commander would probably be disappointed in his choice of employment.” I hoped so, for the sakes of many. Eddie tossed around money on expensive cancer treatments. He could’ve kept a bunch of college cops on the payroll.
“Got a name?”
“Ronald Garver.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell, but I’ll see if I can find something out.” He paused. “See? You’re creating work for me again.”
“Think of it as laying the foundation for your next award.”
“Right,” Gonzalez said, and he hung up.
I put my phone down and sighed. I knew more than when I arrived at the office, yet the case grew murkier. Now, at least one member of the Hanson cops was involved somehow. The oversight by the county only came online in the forms of an annual compliance check and a takeover for serious crimes. Garver could fly under the radar for a while with those criteria in place.
Calvin had been quiet since last night. I sent him another text. No response came.
I didn’t have a good feeling about this, and I didn’t know what to do about it.
A couple hours later, the elevator on my floor dinged. Footsteps rushed down the hall. I opened my right-hand drawer, grabbed the .45, and held it on the desktop. Calvin burst through the outer door. His eyes were wide. Despite the cool day, sweat beaded on his forehead. Before I could ask what was wrong, he launched into a tirade. “You were right. Dammit, I shoulda listened to you. I shoulda listened. Now, it’s too late. Now—”
“Calvin,” I said, breaking in. “Stop.” I left the gun on the desk, stood, and put my hands on his shoulders. Despite him being bigger and stronger, I steered him into a seat with minimal resistance. “Take a breath.” I took a bottle of water from the fridge and set it before him. “Drink this. You look like you need it. When you’re ready, tell me what’s going on.”
He unscrewed the lid and guzzled the contents in a single drink. Calvin looked all around the office, his eyes still as big as dollar coins. He stared at me as if seeing me for the first time. “I shoulda listened to you,” he said again.
“While I’m always glad to hear I was right, you’re going to have to tell me more.” A dark feeling as to where this conversation would go twisted my stomach.
“My cousin,” he said after a few seconds. “My cousin Ben . . . he’s dead.”
I remembered what he told me last night after he defied Eddie Ferrugia and led Hanson to a decisive win over Northeastern. Tonight, they would learn their region and seeding in the big tournament. I didn’t expect the news to be a happy occasion for Calvin. “Would this be the cousin who was watching Iris and Tamika?”
His head wobbled up and down as if the connection to his neck were loose. “Yeah. I tried him this morning and got nothing, so I went over there.” He paused to collect himself. “Tamika was beat up and knocked out. Ben was dead, and Iris was gone.” He gazed up at me, his eyes wet. “She’s gone, man.”
“All right, Calvin. Take some breaths.” I fetched him a second water, which he picked up but didn’t open. “Let’s work this from the top. How long were Tamika and Iris staying with your cousin?”
“Two days.”
“Did anyone else know they were going to be there?”
“No way, man. Even my mom didn’t know.”
I leaned back in my chair and pondered how this could’ve gone so wrong. Calvin shouldn’t have stuck his thumb in Eddie Ferrugia’s eye, but Eddie also shouldn’t know where some random cousin lives. Either someone talked, or the Ferrugia regime was good at gathering information. It didn’t take a big stretch to go from data analysis to hacking.
“Would Ben or Tamika have told anyone? Called anybody while they were there?”
Calvin wanted to say no right away, but he stopped. “I don’t know. I hope not.” He took an iPhone out of his pocket. A moment later, he said, “Nothing on their Facebook about it.” Another pause. “Not Instagram, neither.”
So social media was out, but this still left myriad ways for one person to contact another. Ben or Tamika could’ve let something slip to a friend. How Eddie and his crew found out remained a problem to solve. For now, however, the matter of a missing infant took priority. “Did you come straight here from your cousin’s house?” I said. It took Calvin a moment, but he indicated he did. “How’s Tamika?” I continued, trying to focus Calvin on the task at hand.
“She’s busted up,” he said. “They beat on her pretty good. Paramedics were looking at her . . . they say she should be OK in a few days.”
“Great. Now tell me about Iris.”
For the first time since he showed up, Calvin’s expression brightened. “She’s the best. I love my little girl, man. I’ll do anything to get her back.”
“Does she need anything above and beyond what’s normal for a baby?” Calvin shot me a blank look. “Like special formula, medicine . . . those kinds of things.” He shook his head. “Good. We still need to get her returned to you, but now there’s no ticking clock hanging over our heads. Where does . . . did Ben live?”
“Park Heights.”
In the city. Calvin told me he came here directly, so cops would still be processing everything. This meant I could lean on Rich. “All right,” I said. “I want to see the crime scene and—”
“We gotta get Iris back,” Calvin said.
“We will. There could be something there to point me in the right direction.” He was about to say something else, but I cut him off. “Let me do my job. You said you should’ve listened to me before. Do it now.”
Before the conversation could continue, Calvin’s phone rang. He stared at the number on the screen, unable to do anything.
“Is it Eddie?” I asked. He gave a single nod. “Pick it up.” It rang another time before Calvin answered the call. He was aware enough to put it on speaker without me prompting him.
“Calvin,” Eddie Ferrugia said, his voice filling the office. “How you doing?”
“You motherfucker, I want her back!”
I couldn’t fault Calvin for his emotional response—I probably would have said the same in his place—but it didn’t help. “Who are you talking about, Calvin?”
“My daughter,
you son of a bitch.”
“I have a way you can see her again.” Eddie paused. Calvin stewed. I waited them both out. “Wanna know what it is?”
“I think I can guess.”
“I’m sure you can, Calvin. You’re a smart kid. It surprised me a lot when you went against what we had planned. It hurt. I know you’re smarter than you showed.”
“You didn’t have to kill my cousin!” Calvin pounded my desk. He stood in a rush and stalked around the office. I held up a hand and moved it up and down in time with my breathing. He may not have been capable of calming himself, but I needed to try. Him being amped up didn’t help anyone, especially Iris.
“You didn’t have to defy me,” Eddie said. “You cost me a lot of money and a little bit of reputation. I needed to do something about it. You keep blaming me, Calvin. This is on you.”
Calvin paced around some more. After a moment, he stopped, leaned over the desk, and spoke through clenched teeth. “What do you want?”
“I want you to do what I tell you in the next game. We’ll know tonight what it’ll be. Once the line settles, we’ll have a play, and I’ll be in touch. You do exactly what I say, and you’ll get Iris home unharmed.”
“Fine,” Calvin said right away. “Whatever you want.”
“And no cops, Calvin. No cops and no private investigators. Did you know one of them came to see me yesterday?” I’d never introduced myself, but with a few high-visibility cases under my belt, someone puzzling out my identity wasn’t a big lift.
“I ain’t gonna talk to him,” Calvin said.
“Good. Very good, Calvin. You wait for my next call. Do what I say, and it’ll all turn out fine.”
Calvin hung up and crammed the phone back in his pocket. “Can you find him?”
I shrugged. “Sure. Just because he’s somewhere doesn’t mean Iris is there, though.”
“What are you going to do, then?”
“My job, Calvin, and it starts by going to your cousin’s crime scene.”
He pursed his lips and stared at me. “Can you get her for me?”
“Yes.”
“Whatever you gotta do, then. Just get Iris back alive.”
I said I would. Calvin left. I leaned forward in my chair, put my face in my hands, and wondered how this case careened so far off the rails.
Chapter 18
The Park Heights area of Baltimore is probably best known for containing Pimlico Race Course, the site of the annual Preakness Stakes. It extends north to Northern Parkway and south to the border of Druid Hill Park. For the most part, it’s residential. The neighborhood has some nice homes, but on other streets, blocks of row houses sit boarded up. Crime in the heights, however, started trending downward in 2010 as urban renewal efforts began.
I called Rich as I drove toward this area. “I’m calling about a murder,” I said when he picked up.
“Did someone kill his annoying cousin?”
“Actually . . . kind of.”
“Oh.” Rich paused, and when he came back on, his tone sounded more professional like it usually did. “What happened?”
“Calvin Murray’s cousin Ben was killed over in Park Heights.”
“Let me guess,” Rich said. “You want to see the crime scene.”
“I think it would help my case, yes.”
“What else happened?” Wariness dominated his voice now. Rich worked with me enough to know when I was playing an angle.
“Whoever killed Ben also beat up a woman and abducted an infant girl.”
“Jesus. You headed over there now?”
“Sure am.”
“I can’t meet you,” Rich said. “I’m tied up with something else. Probably will be for a while. I’ll call over there, though. Someone will let you in.”
“Thanks,” I said, and I enjoyed the rare moment where I got to hang up before Rich. Realizing where I was going and what I would see upon arriving sobered my good mood. I got on I-83 North, lead-footed my way to Cold Spring Lane, and snaked through the neighborhood to Finney Avenue. The left side of the road gave way to a park. Well-maintained rowhouses lined the right, each with a brick front, ample porch, and two flights of concrete steps leading up from street level.
I parked behind the scad of emergency vehicles. A uniformed officer eyed me skeptically as I approached and showed him my credentials. “He’s good,” a familiar voice said. Paul King walked from behind an SUV and gave the thumbs-up.
“I’m actually very good,” I said as the uniform let me under the police tape. “He’s selling me short.”
My argument did not meet a sympathetic audience. King waited for me. As usual, he looked more like a mediocre rock singer than a cop with his mop of wild dirty blonde hair, scraggly goatee, and casual clothes. I wondered if he’d ever owned a suit in his life. Despite his appearance, King was a damned good detective who’d toiled away in several different departments over the years. “Rich told me you were coming by.”
“You’re on homicide detail now?”
King shrugged. “A man can only deal with vice for so long.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” As we approached the house, I noticed an ambulance parked very close. A woman sat in the back, her face cut and bruised and her arm in a sling. “You talk to her yet?”
“Figured we could after I gave you the tour,” King said.
We walked up the red-painted stairs and into the house. King led me to the second level, where a black man lay supine on a bed. His shirt and the sheets under him were all stained crimson. I placed him in his mid-twenties, and the unfortunate reality was he’d never get any older. A pistol lay near him on the mattress. Four holes marred his chest. He never had a chance.
“He probably got killed first,” King said. “We have some recent shoe prints going upstairs, so my guess is whoever shot this guy went upstairs, beat up the woman, and took the kid.”
“One guy?”
“Two.”
I nosed around the bedroom. The door jamb was pristine, so the door was either open already or the killers gained access without forcing it. “Bullets still in him?” I asked.
“Far as we know.”
I didn’t see any holes around the room, nor signs the police discovered any and marked them off. Apart from the grisly scene on the bed, the room itself looked neat and well-kept. No one ransacked the drawers after shooting Ben. They came in, pumped four bullets into him, and went upstairs. By then, Tamika and Iris were trapped. They couldn’t jump out the window without a serious risk of injury, and they couldn’t fight off or get past two men with guns.
We walked upstairs to a disheveled room. A tiny dresser fell to the floor, its drawers and contents scattered. A fist-sized hole pockmarked one wall. The sheets and blankets on the bed lay in disarray. Drops of blood dotted the floor, all identified by the officers and crime scene technicians who’d already visited this room. “Looks like she struggled,” I said.
“Yeah. I would, too, if I had a young child with me.”
“They just beat her up, though? No signs of anything worse?”
“You mean other than taking the kid? No.”
I looked around some more, but nothing jumped out at me. It didn’t appear the police missed anything. King and I walked back down and emerged from the front of the house. Tamika still sat in the rear of the ambulance, tended to by a paramedic. We approached, and she glared at us. “You the detectives?”
“I am,” King said, showing his badge. “He’s a private investigator.”
“It means I’ll be the one who really figures this out,” I said, ignoring King’s eye roll.
“I don’t care who does it. I want my daughter back.”
“Miss . . . Robinson, is it?” Tamika nodded. “Can you tell us what happened?”
“Same thing I told the other cops. Me and Iris was upstairs. Ben was on the second floor. You know Calvin asked him to look after us?” I bobbed my head. “Poor Ben.” Her eyes, already puffy and red, welled. A tear slid do
wn her cheek, passing over a bruise to rest in a cut near her lips. “Anyway, they must have been all quiet. First thing I heard was Ben asking who the hell was there. Then, I heard some footsteps and a few gunshots.” Tamika dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. We waited.
“Take your time,” King said.
“I figured Ben was dead at that point,” she said. “We didn’t have no good options. Can’t jump from the third floor. Don’t wanna get shot. It was two of them. They came in. I held Iris. The big one punched me in the face. I went down on the bed. Iris musta slipped out of my arms. The other one grabbed her up. I tried to stop them, but the first guy kept beating on me.” She cried in earnest now, and we took a couple steps back.
“Anyone get a look at these guys?” I whispered.
King shook his head. “Nothing on the vehicle, either.”
“Nobody heard four gunshots and a crying baby?”
“How long have you lived in Baltimore?” He made a valid point. “Even if someone did hear what happened, you think they’re going to peek out the window? Uniforms are talking to the neighbors, but we don’t expect to learn anything.”
“Sounds like a professional job,” I said.
“Yeah . . . worries me.”
Tamika composed herself but didn’t have much more to say. The men wore masks, so she didn’t get a good look at either, but she thought both were white. Fairly tall and wide. She could’ve described the two goons who sat with Eddie Ferrugia last night.
“Body’s on its way to the ME,” King said. “You want to tag along?”
“I can’t think of anything else to do,” I said.
We left Park Heights a few minutes later. From there, we stopped at the precinct so King could file some paperwork. I sat in a guest chair and struggled to seem interested. “No point in rushing,” he said at one point. “ME needs time, and the fucking body isn’t going anywhere.” He had a point, but I would’ve preferred knowing about this detour before we left.