Joel Goldman - Shakedown

“Somebody like Latrell, they don’t usually take seventeen years off between killing people. If they do, they make up for lost time. That’s another reason to like him for the Ordonez thing, especially since it was the same gun. Toss in the photograph and it looks tight to me,” Grisnik said.

“I don’t know. Latrell killing Marcellus and the others makes a twisted kind of sense, but I can’t make it stretch to fit Javy Ordonez. Right before he died, Latrell accused me of following him somewhere. Said I took his things. I don’t have any idea what he’s talking about. Could be whoever killed Javy found Latrell’s gun.”

“Maybe the guy you saw running from the scene was real. Could have been him,” Grisnik said.

“What’s the connection?”

“You started out thinking this was a drug war. Maybe you were right. Maybe the guy you saw was planning on taking out Marcellus, only Latrell saved him the trouble. The guy stays on Latrell, gets the gun and the photograph, pops Javy, and plants the picture. End of story.”

“Works better than your theory putting Javy on Latrell.”

“Hey, I’m just a mule-headed city cop, but I’ll tell you one thing. I’d rather get shot than drink any more of this coffee.” Grisnik sat the cup on a table and got up. “I’ll get someone started on those mug books. If you’re right, I don’t need the photograph. All I need is to find an arrest record on a woman who lived in Latrell’s house seventeen years ago. How hard can that be?”

“You mean you’ll have someone else do it?”

“That’s exactly what I mean. Hope everything goes okay with your friend. Anything new on Colby Hudson or Wendy?”

“Nothing. They’re off the grid.”

“That’s not good. I’ve got some feelers out. I’ll let you know if I get any bites.”

“I appreciate it.”

He was at the door to the waiting room when it hit me.

“Hey, Marty.” He turned toward me. “How’d you know my daughter’s name was Wendy?”

His eyes?ickered for an instant and his mouth pulled back in a tight smile. “Ammara Iverson told me. Gave me a description, too. How am I supposed to look for someone if I don’t know their name and what they look like? Get some rest. You look like hell,” he said, waving good-bye before I could answer.

At eleven o’clock, I walked out to the nurses’ station and asked a nurse if she could update me on Kate’s surgery. She started to say no but then I began to shake and she said she’d be right back. I hate pity, but I’m not above exploiting it.

She returned a few minutes later and told me that Kate’s surgery would last at least a couple more hours and that she would be in recovery for another two hours after that before I could see her. I thanked her and went back to the waiting room, sat down, and stopped shaking. If only it were that easy all the time.

I thought about the photograph of Latrell and the unidentified woman. Marty Grisnik believed that it made the case against Latrell for the Ordonez murder. That’s what we were supposed to think, but I couldn’t make it fit. If the woman were Latrell’s mother, it definitely wouldn’t fit. Their age differences ruined that scenario. The photograph had to have been planted by the killer to set up Latrell.

I thought again about Kate’s explanation of how we read faces. We manipulate our voluntary expressions, choosing honesty or deceit as it suits us. Our micro expressions are honest precisely because they are involuntary, beyond our powers of manipulation. Both are there to be seen, but we settle for what is easier to see, oblivious to what we need to know. Like the person with face blindness, we don’t recognize what we’re looking at.

The photograph of Latrell and the woman was just one example. If I accepted its presence in Javy’s car as proof of a connection between him and Latrell, I wouldn’t bother to ask if it made sense. I had to reject at face value everything that had happened since the drug house murders, challenge the assumptions I had made, and disregard my instinctive reactions to the evidence. I had to slow everything down to a freeze-frame and dissect it like it was a micro expression.

Troy Clark had assumed that someone on my squad had leaked the existence of the surveillance camera in Marcellus’s house. He seized on Colby Hudson’s failure to appear for his polygraph as proof that Colby was the source of the leak. That was the easiest explanation for him and it turned out to be wrong. Latrell Kelly was the killer.

Colby must have had another reason to duck his polygraph. Maybe he was afraid of being asked about his purchase of the car and the house or Thomas Rice’s death. Maybe he’d gotten in over his head and was hiding out or had been killed.

Colby had told me his version of buying the house and car, but I preferred the version told by Jill Rice because it fit with my bias against Colby and the intelligence Grisnik had picked up from his penitentiary sources. I was already concerned that Colby had been working undercover so long that he couldn’t remember which side he was on. Even if he was telling the truth, I didn’t like that he’d taken advantage of Jill Rice’s efforts to piss off her ex-husband. And, as much as anything else, I didn’t like that he was sleeping with my daughter.

When Colby disappeared and when drugs and cash were found in his house, I saw what Troy saw-an agent that had crossed the line and taken Wendy with him. It was no different than when Joy went looking for our son Kevin in Frank Tyler’s house after Tyler had picked Kevin up at school. When Joy called and told me that Kevin was missing and that she had found Tyler’s collection of child pornography, I was certain about what had happened and I was right.

The discovery of incriminating evidence in Colby’s house was dramatic and timely, fitting Troy’s suspicions and mine, but it could have been planted there just as the photograph of Latrell and the woman had probably been planted in Javy Ordonez’s car. Though I had considered the possibility of a frame-up when Ammara first told me about the drugs and cash, I rejected it because I preferred what I saw on the surface.

Troy had reacted in a similar way to my shaking, my body’s involuntary expressions, as proof that I couldn’t be trusted. He was wrong about me. Perhaps I was wrong about Colby.

If we believe too much too easily, we don’t ask the right questions. I realized that I had made that mistake with Colby’s story. He had said that Jill Rice had called our office looking for someone to buy her husband’s car, but no one had checked our phone records for that incoming call. I called Ammara Iverson.

“How’s Kate?” she asked.

“Still in surgery. Is anyone working late tonight?”

“Everyone is working. There is no late.”

“Have someone check the records of phone calls made to the office in the last six weeks for any calls originating from a land line or cell phone belonging to Jill Rice.”

“Not that it matters since you’re doing such a good job staying out of this case while you’re on medical leave and all, but why?”

“Colby says that he took a call from Jill Rice and that she was looking for someone to buy her ex-husband’s car. Jill Rice says she never made that call. We need to pick a winner in that liar’s match.”

“You have a favorite?”

“I wish I did.”

“I’ll call you when I know something.”

“Who did you find buried in Latrell’s basement?”

“Black female in the fresh grave. We’re checking her prints, but it’s probably Oleta Phillips. There were two skeletons in the second grave, one on top of the other.”

“One of them is probably Latrell’s mother. Anything else interesting turn up?”