Jon Talton - Powers of Arrest

Kristen Gruber’s phone records had turned up two more boyfriends. One was a thirty-five-year-old patrol sergeant in District 2 on the east side. The other was a diving instructor who lived in Butler County. Both were cooperative. Will was able to keep internal affairs away from his talk with the sergeant, so that smoothed things out. Both were tall, good-looking, and muscular; both single.

Neither knew about the other, or about the attorney she was also seeing. Both said she liked rough sex, where she would be bound or handcuffed during the act. It didn’t go both ways, however. She didn’t handcuff the men. Both voluntarily gave DNA samples. The sergeant had been with her on Friday night. The diving instructor wanted to take her out on Saturday night, but she said she had plans: she was going to take her boat out.

News stories were starting to say “the police are baffled” by Kristen’s murder. The chief and Lieutenant Fassbinder would love that. Will was not baffled. He was beginning to wonder if the killer was random, not someone she knew. That would complicate things.

This far into an investigation, you knew some victims like they were brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers. Others were like Kristen, cloudy at best. She had grown up on the West Side, the daughter of a mail carrier and a teacher. She was a tomboy, a star athlete in volleyball, swimming, and lacrosse at Seton High School in Price Hill. It was the female equivalent of Elder High, right next door. Her grades were good. At Ohio State, she majored in sociology and came back to join the force. Her parents said she had always wanted to be a police officer, even being a police Explorer in high school.

She always loved the water. Her father owned a boat when she was growing up, and she had bought the Rinker Fiesta 300 five years before.

Her parents said she had married when she was twenty-six and had divorced two years later. They had not approved, being pious Catholics. It had caused a rift between them that had taken some years to heal. The ex-husband was remarried and living in Los Angeles. He, like all the potential suspects, had no criminal record. He told a detective that it had been five years since he had even spoken to Kristen.

Cincinnati and Covington detectives went through the laborious task of sifting through Kristen’s cop life. Her record was better than clean, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t made enemies. Five years before, she had been the first officer on the scene in Sayler Park, where a couple was arrested for starving their baby daughter to death. The crime had shocked the city. Although the ten-week-old was barely alive when officers arrived, it weighed half what a normal infant its age should. At his sentencing, the father, a young white-trash hood, had threatened to rape and kill Kristen when he got out of prison. Such threats weren’t uncommon, but this one, so specific, would have to be checked out. At the same time, they were going through her emails for threats: so far, nothing was panning out.

The false-confession nuts were unchained by the crime. Most were well known to the police and regularly owned up to crimes they didn’t commit. That this was the murder of an attractive woman seen on national television only ramped up the lunatics. Their stories could be easily shot down by the information they couldn’t provide. But it all required detective time, and Will knew his colleagues resented it.

Kristen. She had lovers, many acquaintances, but no close friends, no real boyfriend, as far as he could tell. Work was her life, with sex and her boat to relieve the tension.

Kristen’s timeline also had unfortunate gaps. She had withdrawn a hundred dollars from an ATM downtown on Saturday. She made no calls that day. No one saw her leave the marina. So far, no one had seen her on the river that day or night.

Now he drove Cheryl Beth back home and they fell into silence. But it was a comfortable one. At the little house in Clifton, he pulled into the driveway, opened her car door, and walked her to the porch.

“Thank you for a nice evening.” He held out his hand.

“Oh, Will, come here.” She raised her head and they kissed. It lasted longer than five seconds and less than five minutes, then he held her close to him with one arm as he balanced on his cane, feeling every part of her against him.

He felt normal.

“May I see you again?”

“I’m counting on it,” she said. “Good night.”

Back in the car, he turned on his cell. One message: he listened to his ex-wife. He was way past her, but hearing Cindy’s voice, and the intonations and emotions behind the words he knew so well, battered his tranquility. Why would she be calling? He thought about ignoring it. Then the phone rang.

“Hello, Cindy.”

“Will, I’m sorry to bother you, but I need to talk. It’s about our son.”

Our son. As their marriage had fallen apart, piece by piece like a cursed dwelling, she would refer to John as her son. Tonight it was our son.

He sighed. “Give me the new address.” He wrote it down and backed out of Cheryl Beth’s driveway.

Cindy was now Cynthia Morrison, or Mrs. J. Bradford Morrison. She had remarried quickly and moved to her new husband’s house in Hyde Park. This somewhat surprised Will. Cindy disliked the city. Her insistence several years ago that they move to a new house out in Deerfield Township, such a long commute up I-71, was one more crack in their marriage. But, then, he couldn’t give her a home in the city’s most exclusive, leafiest, old-money neighborhood. Still, on the drive over he was smiling from his time with Cheryl Beth. He was past being hurt by Cindy. It was merely interesting now.

The address went with a massive Tudor behind a sweeping, immaculate lawn, and basking in ornamental lighting. An alarm company sign was prominently stuck into the grass. This was what J. Bradford Morrison had been able to buy as a stockbroker. He and Cindy at least had something in common to talk about: money.

Three steps up. No railing, of course. Will pulled down his lats, and carefully mounted each step, then up the walk to the wide front door.

“Thank you for coming.” She was already waiting. “Brad is out of town.”

Cindy had gone blond, an expensive color job and cut parted on one side and swept over her head. She was about as far as she could get from the twenty-year-old brunette bank teller he had met as a young patrolman. There had been a bank robbery. He impulsively asked her out. She had a baby son, had been abandoned by his father. Will and Cindy married too young. They weren’t the people they would become, and they became those people largely apart. He helped her finish her B.A., then later an M.B.A., as she rose in the bank. Sometimes she slept with her bosses. But she didn’t have to. She was smart as hell.

She led him past the expansive entry hall with its dark, hardwood floor, and into a living room that appeared as if no ordinary humans had ever been inside it, only interior designers. It was flawless. It was larger than his entire townhouse.

He sat in a broad cushioned chair, keeping his Lazarus tasselled loafers off the vast Persian rug, and she settled across from him on a cream-colored sofa, draping one aerobicized leg over the other. She had become a stick person with breasts.

“About our son,” Will prompted, moving quickly past the uncomfortable small talk.

“Something’s wrong with him,” she said, sitting upright with her hands carefully folded in her lap, as if she were talking to a client.

“He’s a young man,” Will said. “I’ve always thought you should lock up the young men until they were thirty. The young women you can let out at twenty.”

Not even a smile.