A Man of Lies, page 16
“I don’t know.” Conrad grimaces. “And I don’t like it.”
“What he said about not needing to worry about blowback, do you think that’s true? Can he really keep this under control?”
“Maybe.” Conrad leads them back into the station. “I’m sure he has a plan. Whether we’re protected, though?” Conrad shrugs. “Let’s hope he’s got our back, but assume we’re on our own.”
“He’s gotta know that if we go down, we’re taking him with us.”
“All I know is he thinks he’s better than us, and he’s keeping us in the dark. That’s not how you treat a partner, and if he won’t respect us, it’s time we stopped respecting him.”
In a way, Owen always knew this would happen. At the end of the day, Holzmann is a criminal—he’s a civilized criminal, but he’s a criminal nonetheless—and Conrad has a point. There can be no relationship where there is no respect.
For the time being, the two have nothing to do. The tip line hasn’t been set up yet, so there are no tips for them to follow. Owen grabs a workstation and logs in as Melissa Fulli. There’s no reason they can’t get started tracking down Cassiopeia Mullen, just in case.
She’s got a couple arrests for larceny. Two for assault that she pled down. A juvie file, though that’s under seal. She’s a person of interest in a string of home break-ins in Leavenworth and Old Market. She appears to be just another garden-variety petty criminal.
“Hey,” Owen says, getting Conrad’s attention. One of Mullen’s known associates stands out to him. “Is this guy”—Owen points from the screen to the board in the briefing room—“that guy?”
“Son of a bitch.” The not-yet-identified body from the Elkhorn massacre is Mullen’s friend, Victor Velasquez. He has his own file, twice the length of Mullen’s. His fingerprints are in the system. His body will be IDed by the end of the day.
“Should we tell someone?” Owen asks. Sergeant Nowicki is across the bullpen. They’d win a lot of goodwill bringing this to him.
“No,” Conrad says. “We need to stay as far away from this as we can.”
“And if Holzmann isn’t bullshitting us? If he really can keep us clean, but only if we track down Mullen for him?”
They can track down this girl, that’s not hard, but they’re going to leave a trail behind if they do. When the ID on Velasquez’s body comes back, that’s going to lead the main investigation to Mullen. Questions will come up about why they were looking into her. Questions they can’t answer.
But if they don’t track her down, they’re burning Holzmann. The last two days notwithstanding, he hasn’t lied to them once. If he can protect them, but only if they find Mullen, they need to do so, and fast.
“All right, people,” Sarge calls across the bullpen. “Tip line is up, get ready for every fucking crackpot in the city to come forward.”
Conrad smiles. “I’ve got an idea.”
CHAPTER 39 Owen Oster, 12:56 P.M.
They have to camp out in the file room for an hour, doing their best to dodge Sarge and avoid getting put on some bullshit lead while staying close enough that when their own anonymous tip makes its way through the system, Conrad is within earshot.
Jesse Taylor gets assigned to it. Owen doesn’t know him personally—they usually work different shifts—but he’s never heard anything about the guy, which is a good sign. You only hear about the really good or really bad ones. Owen catches up with him on the far side of the pen.
“Taylor,” he says, leaning against the workstation wall and giving his best smile. “How’s it going?”
Taylor blinks up at Owen, trying to place him, trying to decide how to react.
“Fine,” he says, opting for the noncommittal route.
“Hey, listen,” Owen says, grabbing a chair from the adjoining station. “I got a favor to ask. Nothing big.” He looks around the pen to ensure they aren’t being eavesdropped on before leaning back in. “That girl Nowicki just put you on, my partner liked her for a break-in last year. We did some of the best damn police work you’ve ever seen, and then the detectives went and fucked it up, lost chain of custody on this necklace we tracked back to her and, well, you know. It’s a break-in. Nobody looked that hard. But he was so fucking proud of his work, and to see it just thrown out like that—he’s still pissed. So here’s the thing. You mind if we look into this one? My partner would really like to have a word with her.”
“Just to be clear,” Taylor says, “you’re asking if you can do my work for me?”
Owen nods.
“And this is me doing you a favor?”
Owen nods again.
“So you want nothing in return?”
Owen shakes his head. Taylor doesn’t have to think too hard.
Twenty minutes later Owen is back in the database, this time logged in as himself, and noting down known addresses for Cassiopeia Mullen and her associates. Conrad is on the phone setting up flags on her cell and credit cards. It isn’t, in the strictest sense of the term, legal for him to be requesting those things without a warrant or probable cause, and any evidence derived from those flags would be thrown out of court. But they’re not planning on developing any evidence.
Silence washes across the bullpen as two people walk in. The two are cops, or at least they wear badges, though nobody in the room would claim brotherhood with them. A man and a woman, unremarkable in professional navy suits. The woman is pudgy from decades behind a desk. The man needs more sun. Owen doesn’t know them, but he doesn’t need to. Professional Oversight has a look to them. A way of carrying themselves. A way of sucking all the joy and life out of a room full of police. They scan the room, catch sight of Owen and Conrad, and start toward them.
So this is how it ends. A brilliant fucking finale to the two shittiest days of his life. All Owen wanted was a quiet life of comfort. He’d done his work. He was a good guy. That should have been enough for the world, but it was full of liars and cheats who wanted to take advantage of him. And at the end of the day, was what he’d done so fucking bad? Sure, he and Conrad had broken the law, but only to help shitty criminals hurt each other more.
Owen won’t run or cower or hide. He’s a fucking man, and he’ll take the world’s bullshit on the chin. He and Conrad come to their feet, standing tall and proud in the face of gross injustice. The detectives walk toward them.
And then they pass. The woman casts a curious glance Owen’s way, and then he is forgotten. They continue across the room, stopping at Sarge’s desk for a moment of quiet conversation. His shoulders slump, and he presses his fingers into his forehead. He leads the two across the pen and into the break room, then comes back out, alone, and closes the door.
“Break room’s closed,” he calls to the pen. At the collective groan and scattering of boos, he raises his hands. “None of you lazy fucks should be taking breaks anyways.” He waves away a few more shouts and heads to the shift commander’s office.
“Fuck,” Owen says, sitting down once more and letting out a held breath.
“I’m fucking done with this,” Conrad says. Sweat prickles his forehead. “I can’t take this fucking stress.”
“I’ve been trying to tell you to do some meditation.”
“Nah, man. It’s all too much.”
“So what?” Owen asks. “You want to go straight?”
“Fuck no, but I’m done working for Holzmann.”
“With Holzmann,” Owen corrects him.
Conrad frowns, then continues, “He wants to get into this safe badly enough that he’s burning every bridge he has to get it. Whatever’s in there is worth more to him than the network he spent his life building. We know what the safe looks like. We’re tracking the key now. And we know the guy who can open it.”
“So what are you saying?” Owen asks.
“I’m saying I think it’s time we hung up our dirty badges and went into business for ourselves.”
CHAPTER 40 Peter Van Horn, 1:19 P.M.
Sergeant Nowicki’s voice wakes Peter from his nap. “There’s your guy,” he says. “The fuck do you people think he did, gets you out here in one day?”
“Thank you, Sergeant,” a woman replies, the dismissal clear in her voice. “We’ll take it from here.”
“Just stay out of my people’s way. We’ve got real police work to do.”
“Close the door on your way out, please.” A man this time. Peter doesn’t recognize either of their voices. He cracks one eye.
They’re police. That much is obvious. They wear the same neutral suits that detectives always wear. Plus, they’ve got badges around their necks. The badges are the big giveaway. They both look to be in their fifties. Maybe forties? Peter has never been good at judging ages. The man, with the tired air of a civil servant, gives the door a tug, making sure the latch caught. The woman looks down at Peter and smiles. She reminds him of his mother. She has the same calm about her. She has seen the worst the world can throw at her and survived. She pulls out the chair next to his and sits.
“Peter Van Horn?” she asks, extending her hand. Peter takes it. Her shake isn’t overtly feminine, but neither does she go out of her way to prove her strength. “I’m Chloe Rutherford. This is Ethan Pruitt. Do you mind if we join you?”
Peter can’t help but notice that she already has.
“Go ahead,” he says. As Ethan sits across from him, Peter gets a better view of their badges, which identify them as being a part of the Professional Oversight division.
“Thanks, Peter,” Ethan says. “Do you mind if we call you Peter, or would you prefer Officer Van Horn?”
“Peter is fine.” These two seem nice enough. If his life is going to be ruined—to the extent that a life he doesn’t like and didn’t want can be ruined—it might as well be by nice people.
“Great,” says Ethan, smiling across at him. “Hopefully this won’t take too much of your time. We just have a couple things we want to clear up.”
“We know how people look at us,” Chloe says, picking up right as Ethan stops. “We know what they say. We’re traitors, right? The worst of the worst?” She smiles as she says it, and Peter just shrugs.
“Odd as it might seem, though,” Ethan continues, “we’re actually on the same side. All of us here at this table want the same thing. We want to find the truth about what happened and put this whole mess behind us so you can get back to what really matters.”
“Putting the real criminals away,” Chloe finishes for him. “So we appreciate your candor here, Peter. It means a lot to us.”
“Yeah,” Peter says. “Sure. I’ve been trying to tell people all along what’s happened, but nobody wants to listen.”
Chloe folds her hands in her lap. “That’s what we’re here for, Peter. We’re here to listen. So why don’t you just start at the beginning?”
As she looks in his eyes, keeping his gaze on her, Ethan pulls a pad from his briefcase to take notes. It’ll be a relief to tell someone, but the coil hasn’t let go of his chest. The dread is still there. The absolute confidence that disaster is looming, just around the corner, and no matter what he does, it will come for him.
“Right,” he says. “So two nights ago I was moonlighting at a U-Store-It.”
Once Peter starts talking, it’s hard to stop, and the events of the night come pouring out. The disagreement with Owen, the implied offer of questionable money, Owen’s missing car in the parking lot. He tries to include as much detail as he can. You never know what might be important. As Peter is about to launch into a description of the meeting with Dumetz and Owen lying on the phone, Ethan puts his pen down and clears his throat.
“Is something wrong?” Peter asks.
Ethan frowns and starts flipping through his briefcase. “No, Peter,” he says. “This is all great. We were hoping, though—ah, here we go.” His fingers close on a thick piece of glossy paper. A picture. Peter doesn’t know what it shows, but, at the same time, he does. Not the details of it. The details don’t matter. But the gist.
He was going to tell them. He was. He’s not trying to hide anything. He doesn’t know how they got it—he left no trace—but that doesn’t matter. He was going to tell them, but now it looks like he was lying. It looks like he was hiding. Because he didn’t get to tell. They already knew. He left no trace, but they knew. Ethan turns the paper over and lays it flat on the table so everyone can see.
“We were hoping—” Ethan is saying, but Peter can’t hear him. Can’t hear anything over the roaring in his ears and the screaming in his chest and he can’t breathe. His body locks. This can’t be happening. He’s not a bad person. He might not be a great cop, but he’s not bad. It all keeps going sideways, and he can’t get out.
His arms won’t move. He grips the side of the table and he can feel the pain in his fingers as the tendons strain and the hiss of the coffeemaker at the end of a brew cycle scratches at his ears and he needs to get out of this room.
He doesn’t know how, but he knows that this will end with him in a box. A jail cell or a coffin. Like his family. His brother. He was so weak at the end, gasping for breath, but he always fought. Always strained to pull air into traitorous, dying lungs. And here’s Peter, the one who lived, the one whose body isn’t actively destroying itself, and what is he doing? He can’t even make his chest rise. Can’t pull in air, though nothing is broken in his body except for him.
He stares at the picture and he can’t breathe and the room narrows to just him and the image.
“We were hoping that you might tell us—” Ethan is still saying. How long does it take him to speak one sentence? How long for the executioner’s axe to fall?
The room isn’t narrowing. The room is just as painfully small as it has always been. These were the last moments of freedom that Peter had, and he spent them sleeping on a plastic table, brewing eleven pots of coffee. He can feel something in his finger pop as his hand strains against the table. There is just him and the picture and he can’t breathe and the box is closing in on him.
His arms are pinned to his sides. This is what death is like. This is what his brother and parents went through. What awaits him. He is paralyzed and he can’t breathe and there is just him and the doom walking toward him. Coming up out of the table. Out of the picture. There is nothing but the picture.
“We were hoping you might tell us about this,” Ethan finishes saying. The blow is delivered. The axe lands.
Peter looks at the picture, and there, on the table, is him, in black and white, standing in a room, and he is standing there in a ready crouch with his arms out straight, and in his hand is a gun, his gun, his gun is in his hand, and his gun is pointing at a body on the ground and he is standing there with his gun, and there is nothing but him and the picture of him and neither of them are moving, and he can’t breathe.
“Peter?” Chloe is beside him, and she is reaching out, but he can’t turn to look at her because she isn’t there. It is just him and the picture and the growing blackness.
* * *
“Peter?” Chloe says.
Peter is lying on the ground. There is a bag over his mouth, recycling his breath back to him, and something cool on his head, doing its best to contain the pain behind his brow. His eyes slowly open. His head is pounding, and it takes him a moment to place himself.
“Welcome back,” Chloe says. “You scared us for a second there.” She is kneeling beside him, holding the paper bag to his mouth.
Now he remembers.
He was going to tell these two everything. They had been so nice, and it would be such a relief to unburden himself, to lay it all in someone else’s lap.
And then he had a panic attack.
But lying here now, on the ground with a damp cloth pressed to the spike driving through his head, Peter knows that he can’t tell them anything.
“How’s your head?” Chloe asks. “You hit it pretty hard on your way down.”
Ethan and Chloe are not his friends. They do not want the truth. They want to turn a red case black. They want to say that Peter is a bad cop, but the rot stops with him.
“Do you feel up to keep going?” Ethan asks him from across the room. “We’d really like to get this ironed out quickly.”
Ethan and Chloe are here to lay the wrongs of the entire department on his back and drive him into the forest to be eaten by wolves, so that the rest of their people might continue their pristine, sin-free lives.
“I think,” Peter says, bringing himself up to a sitting position, “that we should get my union rep in here.”
“Are you sure about that, Peter?” Ethan asks. “Right now, we’re just having a friendly talk. Three police all looking for the truth together. If the union gets involved, this whole thing gets a lot more—” He pauses, searching for the right word, or at least pretending to. “Official.”
Chloe puts herself between Peter and the door. She’s not trapping him, but he will have to walk around her to get out.
“Peter, please think about this,” she says. “We know you have debts. And we both started off on a beat as well. We know how hard it can be to get by on what the department pays you, and that’s without family obligations. If someone is trying to take advantage of you, we can help. Whatever hole you think you’re in, I don’t care how deep, there’s a way out of it, but that way is through us.”
Peter has no friends. There is nobody left on this earth who loves him. If he is going to get out, then he needs to do what he should have done from the very beginning.
Peter Van Horn doesn’t like questions. They nag at him. Like mosquito bites, they sit just this side of painful. They grab at his focus, blemishes on the smooth surface of his existence. There are too many questions now.
“I’m done talking,” Peter says.
He is going to get answers.
CHAPTER 41 Jonny Boy Wright, 2:46 P.M.
End of the line,” the bus driver calls, making his way down the aisle. “Everybody off.” Besides Jonny Boy, there’re two homeless people and one confused old Mexican woman who got on the wrong bus. She pleads with the driver in Spanish, but he gestures to the back door and herds her out.
