Lies Still Told, page 8
He supposed that had been a good reason. Not good enough to save the marriage, which had ended when Traci was still in middle school, but still, he and Jacqui remained mostly civil to each other, and they shared one great kid.
It would be easy enough to find the case that Badger Crawford had referenced. By that time, most of the records were computerized, some still on paper. First thing tomorrow morning, he was looking it up. He thought about calling his dad and just asking him about it, but given how reluctant his dad had been for him to move forward with the investigation into Platt’s murder, A.L. was equally reluctant to give him a heads-up about Badger’s cryptic message. He’d do his research first. Then he’d know for sure if his dad was giving him the brush-off.
Every ten minutes or so during the long drive back to Baywood, A.L. would glance at his phone to ensure he hadn’t missed a call or a return text from Rena. She surely had to be done with her statement by now. Faster had said he’d get her out of the building. She was smart enough that she could avoid James Adeva and any other lurking media type in her sleep.
Gabe would have told her that he’d called. That he wanted her to check in when she could. She had his text.
But there was no phone activity that he missed, and A.L., fighting hard to see the lines of the snowy highway between swishes of the windshield wipers, which were on high, worried.
It was almost midnight by the time he hit the outskirts of Baywood. When he got to Tess’s house, a nice little three-bedroom ranch, he could see that the living room light was on. That did not mean she wasn’t in bed. He had a key. When he entered, he was quiet about it, hoping to avoid startling her little Yorkie. Tabitha could bark up a storm at times. He tolerated it because noise was a good deterrent to somebody with bad intentions. And he didn’t want anybody with bad intentions to be anywhere near Tess.
Who was awake and snuggled in the corner of the couch, both a book and Tabitha fighting for position on her lap. She wore her flannel pajamas, the ones with pink elephants, which were cute, but what he really liked was that the shirt unbuttoned down the front, and she never wore a bra to bed.
“I’m really glad you’re home safe. Highway patrol is reporting lots of accidents,” she said. “Shush,” she added, after two quick yips from Tabitha. “He’s a friend, remember.”
He grabbed a dog treat from the container on Tess’s counter. Tossed in on the floor. Tabitha stopped barking, jumped off the couch, and started chewing. “Yeah. Saw a few of those.” Everyone that he’d passed had already had a police response, so he’d had no need to stop. “It’s bad.”
He took off his coat and came to sit next to her. She leaned into him, and he kissed her. She tasted delicious and familiar in so many ways. He licked his lips. “Popcorn?” he asked.
“Guilty,” she said. “I just put the bowl in the sink ten minutes ago. I can make you some.”
“I’ll just grab some cereal,” he said. He went into the kitchen, which by now, he was comfortable in. Knew where everything was kept. He stayed over a night or two during the week and on the weekends when Traci wasn’t at his house. There’d been no discussion about combining residences. He was comfortable with that. So was she.
Or so he thought. They’d not really talked about it.
And he sure as hell wasn’t up to that kind of conversation tonight. He was running on fumes. He got his cereal and returned to the couch.
“Have you talked to Rena?” she asked, her voice heavy with concern.
He shook his head. “To Gabe. Told him to have Rena call me. I sent her a text, too. She’ll call when she’s ready.”
“What will happen?”
“I imagine she’ll be suspended, pending investigation of the shooting. From what I heard, the gunman popped off a round first. It was at Mason Home Goods, so there will not only be all the customers as eye witnesses, there will likely be some security video as well. The investigation shouldn’t be brain surgery.” He took a bite. “That does not mean that they won’t fuck it up.”
“They?”
“The Review Board will run it. Two officers and somebody from the community. I’m not even sure who that is right now.”
“I suppose that’s an attempt at greater transparency,” Tess said.
“I hope they’re transparent about the fact that she likely saved lives,” A.L. replied. “Sorry,” he added. “Not upset with you. Upset with the situation.”
“Of course you are. It’s horrible.” She sat up straight. “Is it possible that Rena could be prosecuted?”
“It’s possible,” he said, his chest hurting. “I hope not.”
“She must be scared.”
“I’m scared for her,” he admitted. “And angry that two masked gunmen have put her in this position.”
“I’m glad it wasn’t you,” she said. “And thinking that makes me feel as if I’m not a good friend to Rena.”
“She would get that,” A.L. said. He put his now-empty bowl down and put an arm around her. He closed his eyes. “God, I’m beat.”
“No, no, no,” said Tess gently, scrambling out of his embrace and standing up. “I am not falling asleep with you on the sofa like this again. Last time, you almost smothered me. Let’s go to bed.” She reached out a hand to help him off the couch. She was not wearing her prosthetic arm, having already removed it for the night.
He heaved himself off the couch, unbuttoning his shirt as he walked down the hall. He was in the bedroom and down to his boxer shorts when she asked, “How was your visit to the prison? Was it worth it?”
“Yeah. It was. Oddly enough, even though it was pretty short. Not a whole lot to talk about with a guy who has been locked up for a long time.” He got into bed. “We were talking about Platt and why he was supporting Tawny Lane, and he said that if I was interested in debts of gratitude, I needed to look at a murder that happened about fifteen years ago in Baywood. He insinuated that Platt, Uncle Joe and my dad all might know something very interesting.”
She stopped pulling back the covers on her side of the bed. “What do you think he meant by that?”
“I have no idea. But I have to tell you, my gut is telling me that he wasn’t blowing smoke. I’m awfully afraid that I’m not going to like what I find.”
Chapter Seven
At seven thirty, A.L. was already on his way to work. It had stopped snowing sometime during the night. The main roads were cleared, but the side streets were still bad. There was hardly any traffic. His phone rang. He looked at the display and snatched it up.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” Rena said. “Sorry I didn’t call last night.”
“You probably had a few things to take care of,” he said, easing off to the side of the road to park. He wanted to give the conversation his full attention. “How are you?”
“Not great,” she said. “I think this could be the Big One.”
Nobody listening to their conversation would get it. But for years, whenever either of them had made a decision to move forward with something that might land them in deep shit, he or she would say to the other, “It’ll be okay. I don’t think this is going to be the Big One.”
Translation: The Big One was something you couldn’t come back from, something that might change the course of all that was to come after.
“No,” he said immediately.
She sighed. “I’m not sure. Do you have time for breakfast?”
He’d already had some toast. “Sure. Pancake Magic?”
“No. Let’s go to Lottie’s.”
The food wasn’t as good, but it was off the highway ten miles outside of Baywood. Not much chance of running into locals there on a snowy morning. “Fifteen minutes,” he said.
“Thanks, A.L.,” she said before hanging up.
He refused to let this be the Big One. She was too good a cop, too good a partner. Too damn good of a person.
She was already in a booth at the back of the restaurant when he got there. There were only a few others customers, and nobody gave him a second look as he joined her. The server brought him coffee, and they ordered breakfast. It was only once all that was done that he studied her.
“Did you sleep?” he asked.
“A little.”
Yeah, the brain was hard to shut down. It made you relive the experience time and time again, like it was going to fucking change at some point. “You want to tell me about it?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I imagine you have the basics from Faster.”
“I’d like your version.”
“I was shopping.”
“Of course.”
That got him a small smile. “I had picked up the gift I wanted, and I was just starting to walk toward the cash register. Heard a noise, realized it was an armed robbery and made the 911 call. Then I started to work my way toward the register. I was pretty sure the robbers were amateurs based on the fact that they hadn’t accounted for all the customers in the store. I didn’t intend to attempt apprehension. One of them had already pistol-whipped a store clerk. I just wanted the fools to get out of there without hurting anybody else.”
It made sense. She’d already made the 911 call. Reinforcements were on the way. The suspects would not have gotten far.
“I didn’t realize they were stupid enough not to have somebody watching the door. Anyway, the door opened, somebody yelled for the police, and the suspect closest to the register fired his weapon. He was going to take a second shot when I shot him. The second suspect surrendered without incident and was subsequently disarmed.”
She made it sound simple, but she’d likely had to move quickly amidst a great deal of confusion. “You made the right call, did the right thing,” he said.
“There’s a dead sixteen-year-old kid.” It was barely a whisper.
He didn’t respond because he saw the server on her way to their table, carrying plates and a coffeepot. Once their food was set down and cups were filled and the server was out of earshot, he leaned forward. “That’s a shame, it really is. But he was robbing a store, with a gun, a gun that he used in an attempt to hurt another person. He’s not an innocent kid at that point. When he started shooting, all bets were off. You did what you had to do, what you are trained to do, what the public would expect you to do. What the public would expect any of us to do.”
“There were people outside my house this morning. With signs.”
He didn’t ask what the signs said. It didn’t matter. But he knew seeing them had hurt Rena. “What now?” he asked.
“Faster and I met very early this morning. Hardly anybody around, which was good. I’m suspended pending an administrative review.”
“More time to shop,” he said.
“There is that,” she said. “Never got around to buying the gift that I went into the store for.”
They both knew she wouldn’t be shopping. She’d be reliving every detail of the event, her mind playing out a bunch of useless what-if scenarios. What if the suspect hadn’t fired his weapon? What if she hadn’t fired hers? What if she’d missed? The list could be endless.
She pushed her plate away. She’d eaten less than half of her meal. “I also never got around to talking to your dad about why Platt had called him or what he knew about Platt’s relationship with Rocky Patou’s wife or any other women.”
“No worries. I’ll do it.”
She sighed. “So tell me about your night?”
“Long drive,” he said.
“I’ll bet. Worth it?”
“I think so. Badger was noncommittal about Platt’s support of Tawny Lane. But he wasn’t surprised. Or particularly impressed. There was some kind of arrangement there. We’ll figure it out. He said he didn’t know Colby Kane. But he didn’t ask a lot of questions about why I was asking questions. I think he didn’t want to wade too deep and make a mistake. And by the end of the conversation, he was offering up information on an old case. Likely to divert our attention.”
“What’s the case?” she asked.
“He mentioned a murder that happened about the same time that he got sent up, so about fifteen years ago. A woman got killed in her home. Spouse was a person of interest, but no charges were filed. Badger insinuated that my dad and my uncle would know something about it.”
“Did the person of interest play cards with your dad?”
“I don’t know. But last night, driving home in the snow, I started to think about how my mother really disliked the card club. As a kid, I believed my dad when he said it was the cigar smoke. Now, I’m not so sure.” He pushed his own plate aside. The Swedish pancakes had been decent. Not as good as at Pancake Magic, but then again, he might be biased. Traci had had a part-time job there for over a year, and it was a good place for a teenager to work. “I’ll figure out who the victim was and pull the file,” he said. “Then I’ll talk to my dad or my uncle. But that’s not the case we’re working on. I don’t want to fall down a rabbit hole and lose sight of what’s important.”
“Like you said, probably Badger’s goal.”
“Maybe. Maybe he just wanted to get under my skin. I think we need to know more about Badger. I’m going to send an email this morning to get his approved-visitor list. I think I’ll also see if they can pull any corresponding video of actual visitors in the last year.” While at the prison, he’d verified that they took thirty-second videos of visitors as they arrived and departed.
“Get it to me,” she said. “I know, I’m on leave. But I have to do something. I’m going to go crazy.”
Faster would have a cow. “Okay,” A.L. said. “By the way, I got word from the evidence techs that they have everything they need from Platt’s house. And before you ask, no evidence of paper napkins like what Platt’s address was written on.”
“Handwriting analysis back yet?”
“Expected today,” he said. “In the meantime, I’m going to talk to Hank Waymann again. We know that he’s had some kind of regular communication with his dad. Maybe Platt confided in him. Plus, I keep thinking about his initial response to hearing that his dad had been shot. He said, ‘Well, I can’t say that I’m surprised.’ I should have dug into it, but I’d already talked to Veronica, and her reaction was so bizarre that Hank’s seemed almost normal.”
“Are you going to Ames, Iowa?”
“No. Remember Virginia said that Hank was on his way to Baywood? I sent him a text late last night and let him know that we were releasing the scene. He responded that he appreciated that. He got to Baywood yesterday and had taken a room at a motel but said he would move into Platt’s house for a few days to work on getting it ready to sell.”
“Life moves on,” Rena said. “Must not freak him out to stay where his dad was killed.”
“Must not. And he’s got to keep moving forward.”
“Sometimes that is really hard.”
They were no longer talking about Hank Waymann. “Yeah. It is. But the best you can do right now is focus on something else. Get some sleep. Read a book. Don’t let this eat you up.” He tossed money on the table. “I’ve got this.”
“Thanks,” she said. “And thanks for meeting me.”
“You’re my partner.”
She nodded. “Let me know if you hear anything that I’d want to know.”
“I will.”
They were out the door and almost to their vehicles when she turned to him. “Did you get Tess’s present yet?”
“The vacuum cleaner will be delivered later today.”
She stopped. “You did not get her that, did you?”
“She likes to vacuum.”
“You’re an idiot, A.L. And I think a liar. I hope you’re lying right now. No cords. You know that, right? If it plugs into an electrical outlet or can be used to clean anything, it is not a gift.”
He shrugged. “I’ll be in touch.”
“No cords,” she repeated before she shut her door.
He went to his office and started looking up murders. The system let him enter a range of dates. Badger Crawford had said about fifteen years ago. He entered a four-year range that would cover as far back as seventeen years and as recent as thirteen. There were eleven. He immediately discounted the males, which reduced the number to five. He started pulling up individual records. If the husband had played cards with Platt, his dad and Uncle Joe, then he was likely about the same age. His wife probably had been, too. Fifteen years ago, they would have all been in their late forties or early fifties.
It took him less than five minutes to find Edith Grace. The murder had actually occurred almost sixteen years ago. Edith, who was married to Scott Grace at the time, had been forty-nine when she’d died of blunt force trauma to her head. There were scant other details online. He picked up the phone, requested the paper file from archives and told them he’d be down in fifteen minutes to pick it up. Otherwise, it might be the end of the day before they got it delivered to him.
Scott Grace. He did a quick name search on his computer. An obituary for Scott Grace popped up in the results. He clicked on a link and confirmed that it was the same Scott Grace. He’d died five years earlier.
His phone rang. It was his sister. “Hey, Liz,” he answered.
“I’m just making sure that you, Tess, Traci and John are coming tonight,” she said.
“Wouldn’t miss it.”
“I talked to Dad and Uncle Joe last night. They’re both coming, too.”
“Boy, that will be great,” he said.
She sighed. “We need to do this, A.L. We need to eat dinner together on a holiday. Mom would have liked that.”
She was probably right. “What can we bring?”
“Tess already texted me a week ago and offered to bring a salad and an appetizer. So we’re set.”
No doubt Tess hadn’t trusted him to make the inquiry. Sound judgment as usual. “Okay, we’ll see you about five.”
