The Flats

by Kate Birdsall

  “We’ll just sit on him, then,” I say. “We’ve got seventy-two hours. It’ll clear his system by morning. We have plenty of time to crack him.”

  Fishner levels her gaze at me. “Counselor, give us a minute, please.” She doesn’t look at Becker or Goran because she’s focused on me. She stands up and crosses her arms as the prosecutor leaves the office, shutting the door behind her.

  “His lawyer is on the way,” Fishner says.

  We stare at each other for a few seconds. “Lieutenant, look—”

  “No.”

  “I just—”

  “You. Just.”

  I look away and run my hand through my hair. When I look back, I cringe before I can stop myself. She’s been mad before but never like this. I’m a little scared that I’ve crossed the line and may have truly screwed up this time. I try to catch Goran’s eye, but he’s focused on a point somewhere on Fishner’s desk.

  She takes three long, even breaths. “Detective Boyle, let me ask you a question.” Her voice sounds weird and tight, even though she’s speaking in low tones. “What, exactly, was unclear about my orders to stay on the desk and catch up on paperwork?”

  I don’t say anything. I look at the floor.

  “And you.” She jabs a finger at Goran. “You allowed this to happen? Was there something unclear in my orders? Detective Goran, this surprises me, coming from you. I’m disappointed.”

  “I apologize, Lieutenant,” he says.

  She gives him a tight nod. “Go write your search report. Wait for me before you talk to Miller.”

  I turn to follow him.

  “Not you, Boyle. Sit down.”

  Goran slinks through the door and closes it gently behind him.

  “Sit down,” she repeats, and I do as I’m told. “Answer me.” She uncrosses her arms and recrosses them in the other direction. “In case you forgot the question, or maybe you weren’t listening in the first place, I’ll ask it again. What, exactly, was unclear about my orders to stay on the desk?”

  I glance at the windowed wall. The blinds aren’t closed all the way. The guys are trying not to watch, but I know they’re out there gossiping, every one of them relieved they aren’t in here with me. Not that I’d be any different.

  “Lieutenant, I—”

  “Look at me.”

  I raise my eyes to hers.

  “Go home, Detective.”

  “But what about Miller? He—”

  “No. Go home.” Her nostrils flare.

  In her mind, I should have waited. But I shouldn’t have. I did the right thing. We have him now, and that’s what matters. The drugs will wear off, and we’ll nail him. Then I can tell Teresa and Peter Whittle that we caught their son’s killer. It won’t mean much to them, but it’s something. It might not help their grief, but it could be justice.

  “This is such a blatant disregard for authority that I’m not even sure what to do with you.”

  She’s relaxing a little bit now. I can tell because her voice sounds closer to normal. I don’t want her to get scary again, so I keep my mouth shut.

  “An attorney could say that you tainted—or planted—evidence because your brother is involved.” After a pause, she adds, “You know that, right?”

  I nod.

  “Look, I know you hate it when anyone worries about you, but maybe if I put it to you this way, you’ll listen. First, killing that guy, which, okay, that was a good shoot. But then you turned to shit for weeks. Liz, officer-involved shootings are nothing to laugh at. You’ve been on edge ever since. Don’t think I haven’t heard about you bawling out the rookies. Don’t think I haven’t noticed how close to the wire you look these days. Even on the best day of the best week, Special Homicide burns people out.” She leans a hip against her desk. “You need to step back. What happened today with your brother could jeopardize this whole case, your closure rate, your squad. You know that.”

  I lean forward, my hands on my knees. I have nothing to say that’s going to help the situation. It’s not going to jeopardize the case or my closure rate or the squad. She’s exaggerating. I squeeze my knees until my knuckles turn white.

  Fishner’s gaze flicks to my hands. “The biggest problem with all of this? You’re turning into some kind of raging, rogue detective. You know that shit doesn’t fly with me, Liz. You know it doesn’t. You’re good, but you’re not that good. No one is irreplaceable.” She uncrosses her arms and places her hands flat on her desk. “This bullshit with your brother is… I don’t even know the word. It’s unbelievable. You were about to smack Ricky Harris around in there yesterday, too, in front of his lawyer.”

  I don’t tell her that I wasn’t going to touch him. At this point, arguing could set her off even more.

  “You defied my direct order by going to the Miller property. And now? Now we have an inebriated suspect and the possibility that none of what you found will be admissible. Now you have to go home, which means no sleep for the rest of your squad. You need to step back, and I will do paperwork to make that happen if need be. But I hope you’re smart enough to keep this out of your jacket. We’d both hate to see you back in one of the districts or in Property Crimes. Like I said, some of us care about rules.”

  I just stare at her.

  “Goodbye, Liz,” she says.

  “Yes, Lieutenant,” I reply around the lump in my throat. Suppressing the urge to run, I walk out of the office.

  In the squad room, the guys are pretending to be working really hard on paperwork. Goran glances up as I walk to my desk for my jacket and keys. I make a face at him, and he wiggles his eyebrows. I give him a tight nod.

  “Hey, nice job, Boyle,” Domislaw grunts from his desk.

  I fake a smile for him and nod.

  “Liz,” Julia Becker calls.

  I look over and see her standing in front of the vending machine. She grabs her Diet Coke from the slot and starts strutting my way, one foot in front of the other as if she’s on a runway. I am so over all of this, and I’m sure it shows.

  “Relax,” she says when she’s about three feet away from me.

  I catch a whiff of her good perfume. She smiles. I wonder if she knows that we call her a shark and an ice maiden. I don’t say anything. I just look at her.

  “I think I know why you did what you did.” She pauses as if waiting for a response, but I keep zipped. “It might not be by the book, exactly, but we all suspect the lab is going to tell us that the evidence you found is damning for Sean Miller. Damning enough to book him, in all likelihood.” She’s smiling with her eyes but not her lips. “It looks like a decent case to me.”

  Why does she enunciate like that? Seriously, don’t most people speak differently than they write? Lawyers. Sheesh. I’m drained, coming down hard off the adrenaline, feeling hollow pressure in my head and a weird sort of tingling in my hands. “All right, I’m gonna head home,” I say.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow.” She puts her hand on my arm. “Take care of yourself. I’m going to go watch an interrogation now.”

  After Becker leaves, Goran stands up and tells me to follow him. We go into the stairwell, where one of the fluorescent lights blinks and buzzes above us. I feel light-headed and strange. I haven’t eaten anything since… I can’t remember.

  He leans back against the wall and raises his eyebrows. The flickering light casts harsh shadows on his face.

  I fiddle with the clasp on my watch. “What?”

  “Where do I even start?”

  I sigh and roll my eyes.

  He shakes his head. “Why didn’t you tell me what was going on with Chris? As soon as it happened, as soon as Jo called you?”

  “I don’t know.” I shrug. “I wanted to keep you out of it. I figured the fewer people involved, the better for Christopher. I knew she wasn’t going to let me interview him, and I wanted it
to be you who did. If you’d known, then…”

  He takes a breath, his blue eyes back on mine, unwavering. “The better for Chris or for you?” He’s staring me down. He’s not going to let it go.

  “For all of us,” I lie.

  He pops a piece of gum into his mouth. “Liz, come on.”

  “What?”

  “Talk to me.”

  Goran is the only one on the squad who knows anything about me. Well, I’m guessing Fishner knows some things, since she has access to my personnel file. I’m sure there’s stuff in my jacket about my dead dad and sister, but she’s never said anything, and I’d just as soon keep it that way. But Goran… I told him all about it one night, drunk and emotional, after we’d collared a guy who’d done bad shit to a girl who’d been about the same age as my sister when a guy did bad shit to her. I can only hope he knows me well enough to give me a break on this.

  I glance at the ceiling then look back at him. “What do you want to know, Tom?”

  He smiles at me the same way he might look at one of his kids. This time, maybe for the first time since I’ve known him, it doesn’t piss me off. It comforts me.

  “Are you going off the deep end? ’Cause if you are, I need to know. I’m your partner.” He grins. “Sometimes your friend.”

  “What do you mean? I’m not going off the deep end. In fact, as you well know, we just arrested Sean Miller, and now you’re going to grill the shit out of him. I’m fine.”

  He stares at me and chews his gum.

  “I’m not going off the fucking deep end, Tom.”

  “You still talking to that shrink?”

  For a second, I imagine Shue in her office, gazing through her glasses and into my eyes, probing. “Yeah, I have a couple more appointments,” I mumble.

  I know Goran would never talk to a shrink unless it was mandatory, and until about two days ago, I felt the same way. But I don’t want to become a statistic.

  “You need to talk to somebody, and it’s obviously not gonna be me.” He looks hurt for a second, then he’s all cop again.

  I reach for his arm and close my fingers around his elbow. “I’m sorry.”

  He chomps his gum and squeezes my shoulder hard. The whole thing—and I’m not exactly a petite woman—fits into the palm of his big hand. “When you want to talk, say the word.” He smiles and releases me. “I mean it.”

  I give him a half smile.

  “Good job showing up today,” he says as he opens the door to the stairwell. “I knew you would. That guy is such an asshole.” He slips back into the hall.

  I take the stairs down to the first floor. In my car, I grab a stale protein bar from my glove box and scarf it on the way to the gym for the second time today. I can’t believe the call about my brother was just this morning. I feel as if days have passed since then.

  At the gym, I go straight for the heavy bag. Punching things feels good. It helps me get the tension out of my shoulders. I don’t like being in trouble, but at least we got Sean Miller into custody. Christopher can probably get immunity for testifying against Miller, and maybe against Ricky Harris. Miller and Harris can both go to prison.

  I take a quick shower after my workout. As I’m getting dressed, I’m startled by an instinct to call Cora, my ex, and tell her about what’s going on. I shake it off, grab my stuff, and head home. I stop at a convenience store on the way and buy a six-pack of dark beer.

  At home, Ivan is glad to see me. Before I even crack a beer, I feed him, fill his water bowl, and scoop the litter box. I look at my six-pack and consider how much more effective that bottle of bourbon on top of my refrigerator would be, but I decide against it. Prying off the cap on my first bottle, I congratulate myself for showing such restraint.

  A couple of hours later, as I’m draining my fourth beer, my phone buzzes. “Boyle.”

  “Hey,” Goran says. “Chris’s alibis check out. He was at the Emerald Club during the time of the murder, and he was at work the day Kevin was abducted.”

  “What about the rest of the time? It needs to be tight.”

  “He was with his girlfriend a couple of nights, worked several double shifts, had dinner with your mom, all like he said. He’s pretty much in the clear.”

  “Thank God. Thanks for letting me know. Anything on Miller?”

  Goran says, “Miller claims he found the vic’s body in his garage and panicked, so he cleaned up then did a dump job.”

  I take a few seconds to let that sink in. “Wait a minute. He copped to dumping the body?” I feel my shoulders and neck relax. “Okay. Fuck yeah, Tom. Good. We can close this shit out.”

  “Yeah, but he swears up and down that was it. He has no idea what happened. And he lawyered up.”

  “Who’s his lawyer?”

  “Rodriguez. So far, he’s not saying anything about Miller being intoxicated or about you being there, uh, against everyone’s better judgment. Good work, Boyle, even if it’s just dumb luck and even if you’re a pain in the ass.”

  Rodriguez is a Legal Aid lawyer who’s been around for a while. He’s a nice enough guy but a terrible defense attorney. So there is a silver lining. Everything will stay in the record with that guy at the defense table. I’m sure Becker is elated. “Okay, it could definitely be worse.”

  “Anyway, Miller’s story is that a few people had access to his house, and he’s been out of town a couple of times in the past few weeks. I guess he’s well known for his epic house parties, which bring all kinds of lowlifes to his place. So he claims that the killer could have been anyone.”

  “It doesn’t look good, though. I mean, he did dump a kid’s body in the Flats, and he admitted it.” I pad down the hallway to the kitchen, where I toss my bottle into the recycle bin and open another beer.

  “Yeah. Miller said he gave copies of his house and garage keys to his sister. She feeds the dog when he’s out of town. But he says he doesn’t lock the garage much, anyway.”

  “Uh-huh. Likely story.” I take a sip.

  “He says he doesn’t think it was locked when he went to Pittsburgh on his trip last week. Anyone could have gotten in.”

  I walk back down the hallway and plop down on the couch. “Why not call the police? I mean, if I found a dead body in my garage, I’d call the police. Unless I’d put it there, of course. But hey, maybe that’s just me.”

  “Yeah, I probably would, too,” he replies.

  I grab my notebook from the coffee table and flip it open. “So how long is Miller saying he was out of town? Kevin was abducted on Friday, and his body was found on Thursday. So if Miller’s telling the truth, could someone have been holding Kevin in the garage that whole time? It’s pretty soundproof in there, relatively isolated.”

  The sound of paper rustling comes over the line, probably Goran checking his notes. “He claims he was gone Monday through Thursday.”

  “Does he have tickets or reservations or something to prove his alibi?”

  “He drove, so no plane tickets. We can check gas stations if he didn’t save any receipts and can remember where he stopped. He came home Thursday around nine a.m. He says the garage door was stuck so he parked in the driveway. He went into the garage later that evening to check out the door, and that’s when he found the body. He says he put the kid’s body in the laundry bag then stuck it in the trunk of his car. He was going to drive up to the lake, but he changed his mind. He said he couldn’t stomach the idea of the kid never being found, never getting a decent burial. So he drove down to the Flats, but it was busy down there, still early. He went to Winky’s and got drunk. When it got to that dead time, he got the bag out of the car, laid the kid out near the dumpsters, where it was kind of screened from the bar, and started to raise hell. He said he was so upset it all came pretty naturally.”

  I remember the man I saw that day. Miller had been a snotty, sniveling wreck. �
��Yeah, I can see that. When did he clean up the garage? Before or after dropping the body?”

  “After moving the body into the car but before dropping it in the Flats. He also admits that he bought drugs from Ricky Harris, so there’s that. He basically corroborates what Chris said about all of that.”

  “Anything on the neighborhood canvass?” I ask.

  “’Course not. No one saw or heard a thing.”

  “Any line on Miller’s parents? Maybe we could talk to them.”

  “No parents. He and his sister were brought up in foster care, or so he claims. The sister is the owner of the black sedan your wit saw. Miller’s Chevy’s been broken down for a while, so he borrowed her car that week. He drove it to Pittsburgh, came back, then used it to take Kevin’s body down to the Flats. He’d just taken it back to her on Friday morning when he got picked up for drunk and disorderly.”

  “Oh, that’s convenient, isn’t it? He just happened to be driving a borrowed car the night he needed to get rid of a dead body.”

  “Yeah, he’s full of shit,” Goran replies.

  “And he lied to me about some friend of his giving him a ride to his sister’s. I wonder if he had her car cleaned before returning it. Did you get the sister’s address?”

  “Yep. She’s clean, no record.”

  “Any other relatives? Any connections to anyone else?”

  “Not as far as I can tell.”

  “But what the hell? Who would take Kevin to Miller’s house—to his garage— just to kill him? It makes no sense. There was blood all over the place, Tom. It wasn’t just someone dumping a body. They took him there, and they killed him there. And it just happens to be the couple of days Miller was away?”

  “He says a lot of people knew he was going away. He was going up to see a buddy in Pittsburgh—one of his ‘connections.’ Apparently, he was bragging about it at the party, how he was going to come back with some grade-A goods. He says upwards of a hundred people could have known he’d be out of town those days.”

  “All right, so what’s Fishner’s plan? We keeping Miller on the drugs?”

  “Yeah, we’re keeping him on the murder, too. We’re gonna go at him hard again first thing in the morning, just on the drugs and stolen property stuff for starters.” A pinging sound comes over the line, and I know he just spit his gum into a trash can. “You can take care of all your hunches tomorrow, partner,” he says. “Right now, I’m just happy we have Miller. I mean, you risked your shield to get him.”