Close Case Read online

  “May as well.”

  “OK, but you’re wearing this.” Chuck grabbed another vest from a locker.

  I hopped into the passenger seat of a white Crown Vic from the precinct detectives’ fleet. Rifling through the glove box, I unearthed an old box of Junior Mints from a pile of abandoned notepads, drivers’ manuals, receipts, and fast-food coupons. At a different place and time, I might have been grossed out, but given my current hunger pangs, I was willing to compromise culinary standards.

  We beat Johnson and Walker to the meeting spot, a corner parking lot behind a car repair shop two doors down from the Hankses’. Waiting in the dark, the stillness was a momentary relief from the manic chaos of the last few hours.

  Chuck looked at me and smiled. “Excited?”

  “Of course not,” I said, popping another crusty mint morsel into my mouth. “I just want Hanks picked up so we can get the hell out of here.”

  “You’re so full of shit,” he said jokingly. “Admit it, babe. You came along for the fun of it.” He started to sing the theme song from the watch-real-cops-chase-after-real-scumbags show: “Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do?”

  “Sing all you want, reggae boy. You won’t be teasing me when you need my legal know-how.” He eyed me cynically, then burst out laughing when he realized I had been serious.

  So maybe my tag-along wasn’t motivated entirely by lawyerly concerns. The truth was, I liked the idea of some real live, not-so-real-life, television prosecutor action. On the rare occasion when I’ve watched one of those shows, the DA always winds up toe-to-toe with the suspect, telling him he’s a “skell” who will “fry” for his crimes. And, of course, if the tough talker’s a woman, she’s always got cute clothes, a perfect body, and good hair.

  My daily reality’s a lot less glamorous. I occasionally drop in on crime scenes, but I’ve never gotten in a suspect’s face. Hell, I never even speak to them directly. Even in the third person, I refer to them—boringly and respectfully—by their names or by the generic term defendant. And forget the model good looks; I run a minimum of twenty-five miles a week to remain only mildly dissatisfied with my body, and, for me, dressing up means wearing pantyhose and brushing my hair.

  Tonight, things could be different. In my ponytail, sweatshirt, and jeans, I might not look the part, but I was ready for action. I was in the front seat of a police car. I was pumped full of aged sugar and chocolate. I even had a vest.

  “OK, maybe it sounded just a little bit fun. But can you blame me? Don’t I deserve a thrill on my birthday?”

  “I’d try to sneak something in before the boys get here, but it’s not technically your birthday anymore,” he said.

  “Not to mention that right now I’m technically way more in the mood for these Junior Mints than for what you’ve got in mind.”

  “Ouch.”

  A second Crown Vic pulled up next to Chuck, and Jack Walker rolled down the passenger window. “All set?” he asked.

  “Ready. Got the warrants by phone. No-knock’s OK.”

  “Approach on foot?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Chuck agreed. “Looks like they’re sleeping, but why take a chance?”

  I opened my door with the rest of them and felt Chuck grab my left forearm. “No way, Kincaid. You stay here, and I’ll tell you when it’s clear.”

  There was neither time for nor any point in arguing, so I slumped back in the seat.

  “See this red button here?” Chuck pointed to a button on the computerized terminal that was mounted to the dash. “If anything goes wrong, you push that button and you drive away, OK?” He began walking with the other detectives.

  “Wait,” I said. “What is it?”

  “It’s for an officer down.”

  They never said anything about that on Cops.

  I looked at my watch again, but it was only a minute later than the last time I checked. Was this thing working? Where were they?

  As I watched Chuck, Jack, and Ray move to the house twenty minutes ago, there were a tense few seconds when I was grateful for the safety of the locked car. But then, down the street, I saw lights come on inside the Hanks house. No gunfire or other scary sounds. Everything had seemed hunky-dory. I expected Chuck to wave me in or call my cell, then I’d run right over.

  Now I wasn’t so sure. I looked at my phone, wondering whether to call someone and, if so, whom. I stared at the door, wondering whether I should get out of the car and what I’d do if I did. I found myself picturing the no-knock entry, wondering whether Chuck had been the one in front, the one to kick the door. And, most of all, I stared at the red button and thought about what I’d be losing if I needed to press it.

  I would never say this aloud to anyone—much too sickening—but I still felt overwhelmingly lucky to have this second chance with Chuck. It wasn’t just the physical. Don’t get me wrong; he turned more heads in a bar than I did. But what I had really found in Chuck was a match. There was nothing he simply tolerated or even just accepted; he actually embraced and genuinely liked everything about me. Sure, my ex-husband Roger had enjoyed dissecting the New York Times op-ed page with me. And no doubt the world was replete with men who wouldn’t mind a girlfriend who dug football, beer, and the joy of the perfect draw on a golf drive.

  But Chuck got all of me. And in him, all the various me’s I carry around in my conflicted self had found a partner. In a single Sunday morning, he could scream at the TV during Meet the Talking Heads, bend me over the sink for an X-rated interruption of my morning primp, then laugh when I surprised him with a wet willy while we cooked pancakes in the kitchen. And like me, he’d enjoy every part of it equally, never missing a beat in the unpredictably syncopated rhythm that accompanied our personalities.

  And now he was inside the house of a kid who was willing to crush a man’s skull with a bat for a car. I was on the verge of calling Calabrese for advice when I saw Chuck emerge from the house, towing a handcuffed Trevor Hanks at his side. Chuck yanked the back door open and guided Trevor in.

  “Who the fuck’s that?” Hanks asked. Maybe it was the relief of seeing Chuck still alive. Or maybe it was the pressure of worrying that he wasn’t. Or maybe it was just the dismissive expression on Hanks’s hardened face when he looked at me. Whatever the cause, I snapped into serious skell-confronting mode.

  “Who am I? I, Mr. Hanks, am the prosecutor who’s going to make sure you just lived your last day of freedom.”

  He aimed for my face, but the glob of goo that Trevor Hanks spat in my direction was caught in the fencing that separated us. “Fuck you, bitch. No way you’re pinning that coon’s death on me.”

  Chuck hopped in the car, strapped on his seatbelt, and hit the gas. Just as quickly, he slammed on the brakes, jerking the unbelted Trevor Hanks forward. Hanks’s face thudded against the gate in front of him, still wet from his own saliva. “Act up again, Hanks, and we’re making a pit stop under the Burnside Bridge. You got me? Now, just as a reminder, you have the right to shut the fuck up.”

  Chuck scribbled something on his notepad and passed it to me.

  He lawyered up inside the house when we pulled his jacket from the washer. Oh, shit. This never happened to the tough-talking good-hair girls on television.

  We finally got home just short of four o’clock in the morning.

  Vinnie, whom we had dropped off at the house before our venture east, was unabashedly pissed. And pissing. And gnawing. The vicious pillaging of a 1984 Van Halen T-shirt was, to Chuck, the equivalent of a declaration of war. Acting as this household’s Secretary of State, I tried to negotiate a diplomatic solution by pulling Vinnie into the bed to sleep with us.

  With the lights out, Vinnie snoring, and my birthday over, I snuggled into the crook of Chuck’s arm and held him. Then I pecked a sleepy kiss on his chest and tightened my squeeze.

  That kind of sweetness wasn’t lost on a guy who knew me as well as Chuck. “Hey, you. What’s up?”

  I was too exhausted to choose my words. How
could I tell him that—as much as I admired him for being a cop, and as much as I had almost refused to date him, precisely because he was a cop—I had never truly understood all that his job entailed? Did it make any sense at all that it took an empty police car, twenty minutes, and a little red button for me to understand the instinctual terror that he had to overcome on a daily basis? And if it did, could he possibly understand that for a second—just a second during those twenty minutes—I had selfishly regretted letting him move in with me?

  “Just sleepy,” I muttered, pulling him even tighter.

  Tuesday morning, my alarm blared at 6:30 A.M. as commanded. Chuck might be able to take a few hours of comp time, but my office still expected me in by eight. Maybe the DAs needed to look into unionizing, I thought, smacking the I’m-up-now-so-stop-playing-loud-music button on my clock-radio.

  Despite my late night, I was still the first deputy to make it into MCU. They’d arrive soon enough, I thought. Russ Frist would undoubtedly stop by to pepper me for an update on the Crenshaw case. I swear, with his fretting over whatever I was doing, I didn’t know when the guy had time to do his own work.

  A voice mail from Jessica Walters was waiting for me. “Hey, girl. I saw your defendants on the news this morning. Your instincts paid off, with the added bonus of solving my little PR problem. Good job.”

  I called her back and gave her the details from the night before, including my confrontation with Calabrese.

  “Oh, I see. When you offered to lend me an MCT guy for my vandalism case, you were farming out the team’s biggest hothead?”

  “I didn’t know that at the time, but, yeah, pretty much. Now we just need to figure out how to merge our cases. My inclination is to get the murder indictment, then use the crime spree on Twenty-third to connect the defendants to the murder. Unless your victims are going to freak, I’d rather not water down the indictment with a bunch of criminal mischief and assault charges.”

  “Sounds like a plan. I’ll explain it to them.”

  “Thanks.” I still needed to talk to Percy’s parents in Los Angeles and establish a long-distance rapport with them. “So the television stations have the story already?”

  “I saw it this morning,” she said. “Nothing detailed. Just that they were suspects in the Twenty-third Avenue mess and in the Crenshaw case.”

  That’s all the radio news had too. The bureau’s press release on the arrest must have been bare bones, the best kind as far as I was concerned.

  Ten seconds after I hung up, Raymond Johnson’s head popped around my door. I wondered if the timing was fortuitous or if he’d arrived earlier and overheard my Calabrese-bashing to Jessica.

  “What’s your pretty face doing in here?” I asked cheerfully. Was I usually that cheerful, I wondered, or was I trying to be nice in the event he heard me bad-mouthing his colleague? No, I was always that cheerful. Definitely.

  And Johnson’s face was awfully pretty. At least, it was usually. But this morning, he looked exhausted.

  “I was dropping off some evidence across the street, so I figured I’d stop in.”

  “Are you up early or late?” I asked.

  “Way, way too late. Jack and I pulled the all-nighter, since we’re the leads. Not that it feels like it, of course. Damn Calabrese, stumbling on the bad guys like that. He did one hell of a job on Corbett, though. Full signed confession.”

  It was a normal enough comment, but it made me wonder again if he’d heard me on the phone or perhaps spoken to Calabrese.

  “He was something, all right,” I said. “Anything I need to know about?”

  “We finished the searches. Walker oversaw the work at Corbett’s house, and I stayed at Hanks’s. We took the clothes from the washing machine, still wet. No visible blood, but the lab’s working on it.”

  “Did you find the bat?” According to Corbett, Hanks had thrown the bat into the back of the car he was driving Sunday night.

  “Nope.” Ray was obviously disappointed. “But the car Corbett described matches a Jeep Liberty that was parked in the driveway, registered to Hanks’s dad. Henry Hanks. Can you believe that shit?”

  “No kidding. You mean he lives in a house like that and drives a Jeep?”

  “A new one too. The lease company already called. Henry’s three months behind on the payments, and they’re ready to repo it. Anyway, Hanks must have gotten rid of the bat before we showed. We got the Jeep at the lab, though. Maybe they’ll find something.”

  “Very good. So do you finally get to go home now?”

  “Ah, if only I could. I just got one last thing to do. Peter Anderson finally paged me back. The condo super? I guess he was out all night with his buddies. Anyway, he says he’s in a good enough condition to talk now, so I’m headed up there. You can indict the case either way, though, right?”

  “All set,” I said, pointing to the charging instrument I was writing on my computer screen. Just as Mike had said, DAs love cases with confessions.

  “All right. Catch you later.”

  “Catch some sleep!” I hollered down the hall as he left. I noticed other office lights on, but still no Russ.

  Just as I was printing out the charging instruments for Hanks and Corbett, Alice Gerstein walked in. Alice, senior MCU paralegal extraordinaire, has many talents: typing, filing, mailing, printing, researching; the list goes on. But Alice’s most important skill—the reason why she is the only indispensable member of the unit—is her ability to force this motley crew of misbehaving children with law degrees to follow the rules. And one of the rules was that I—still, after six months, the newest member of the unit—was supposed to pull screening duty first thing in the morning. Before I touched a single file, I was supposed to review the police reports that had been put aside as potentially major enough for our Major Crimes Unit to handle.

  I recognized the familiar Redweld file in her hand. It appeared unusually fat for a Tuesday. “Ahem. Why are these reports still on my desk, Ms. Kincaid?”

  “MCT made two arrests last night in the Crenshaw case. The documents are printing as we speak. I was going to grab the screening pile on my way back from the printer.”

  She eyed me skeptically.

  “I swear.”

  “Well, then, I guess I saved you a trip,” she said, handing the file to me. “I’ll put a file together for Crenshaw and bring your documents in for you to sign.”

  “You won’t let me leave this office, will you?” I asked.

  “Of course I will,” she said, “just as soon as you’ve read every last one of those reports.”

  How does she do it? I wondered, opening the file. I bet Mike Calabrese would have listened to Alice Gerstein if they had been her knuckles against the glass last night.

  At least I’d managed to achieve efficiency in my screening duties. I learned months ago that others in the office used the MCU screening pile to cover their asses. The reports dropped there rarely detailed anything other than minor offenses. But any incident that might arguably fall within the technical definition of a major crime has to be reviewed by an MCU deputy, just to make sure that MCU takes the heat if a big case slips through the cracks. Lucky moi.

  Some of this morning’s gems didn’t even pass the straight-face test. Did I really need to see the report about Peter Medina, who ingested enough Ecstasy to seek sexual gratification from a tree in front of an assisted living complex? OK, for pure entertainment value—yes, I did need to see that one. By the time the police arrived, the parking lot was lined with onlookers and their walkers, and the naked and oblivious Medina had found true love, refusing to go to the hospital without his beloved sycamore.

  But what about Patricia Roberts? She had just returned from a toy-shopping lunch break when she learned that one of her fellow cubicle-inhabiting Dilberts, Jason Himes, had boosted credit from the boss for one too many of Patricia’s ideas. Out came the Nerf missile launcher that Patricia had purchased for her eleven-year-old son. Apparently Himes thought beaning someone i
n the head with a sponge ball warranted a police response. Perhaps, but it certainly did not constitute assault with a dangerous weapon.

  I entered a log note rejecting felony charges against Roberts. And I did it in all caps with lots of underlining. How’s that for adamant? I sent the file back to intake to decide whether to proceed on any misdemeanor counts. If it was up to me, I’d give her an oatmeal cookie and a pat on the back for a well-fired f-you. Maybe I’d stop by Toys R Us on the way home for a new office supply.

  I delivered the completed screens back to Alice Gerstein. “Still no Mr. Frist?” I asked.

  She turned and looked at his darkened office down the hall. “Not yet.”

  “In light of all the enforcing this morning with my screening duties, you might want to check on him, don’t you think?”

  “You know, I might just have to track that boy down,” Alice said, reaching for her Rolodex.

  A few minutes later, my phone rang.

  “Kincaid.”

  “You’re sounding awfully perky this morning.”

  The voice was familiar and yet unfamiliar. “And you sound awfully friendly for someone whose voice I don’t recognize.”

  “It’s Russ.”

  The trademark Frist boom was seriously off. “Wouldn’t have known that, but—speak of the devil—Alice and I were just talking about you.”

  “You sicced that scary woman on me, didn’t you?”

  “I simply inquired as to your whereabouts. And where exactly are your current abouts?”

  “In my bed. I’m sicker than Gary Busey on a bender. It’s like what I had yesterday, times a thousand.”

  “You exert yourself at Gold’s again?”

  “No way this is from lifting, but talking about it’s making it even worse. I saw your arrests on TV this morning. How’s it look?”

  “Good, I think.”

  “That’s not a voice of confidence,” he said.

  “Well, one defendant, Todd Corbett, confessed, so that’s good. And he lied every step of the way. First he didn’t know anything about anything. Then he took some meth and broke some windows but didn’t know anything about Percy. Then he tried to steal the car, but Hanks was the one who got violent. Then he finally admitted taking his turn at the vic too, so they’re both looking at Agg Murder charges. But Calabrese pushed pretty hard to get every bit of it.” I gave him a quick summary of the interrogation.