Rachel Lee - With Malice

“Look, Senator, here are the facts. If it comes out about you and Stacy, there’ll be a Grade-A shitstorm. Forget your chances for president. They’ll be ancient history. But let’s put that aside for a moment. S.R. 52 will die a quick and painful death. Right now, we need three votes in the House and one in the Senate, and it passes. And it’s good law, Grant. It’s important law.”

Grant sounded impatient. “I know that, Jerry.”

“No, sir, I don’t think you do.” He hated to play this card, but sometimes it mattered. “You’re a hell of a man, Grant. Smart and honest and strong. But you also had a hell of a head start in life. For you, this bill is about snorkeling in the Keys when you were a teenager. Beyond that it’s about abstractions. Economics, numbers and the world your children will inherit. And yes, that’s important.

“But I didn’t snorkel when I was a kid. I watched my dad’s hands bleed as he hauled in crab traps on a smelly, oily dock on Chesapeake Bay. I got out because I could run and catch a football well enough to get a scholarship. But my brother’s still there, in a town that’s dying because the crab traps are coming up lighter and lighter, year by year. His hands are still bloody, and he has less and less to show for it. He’s the human face I see on S.R. 52. If you go down, he goes down. My hometown goes down.”

He heard the honking behind him and realized the light had turned to green. A car flashed around him as he pulled into the intersection, the driver yelling an obscenity as he passed.

“Grant, right now you’re still golden under the law. You don’t know anything, and you’re under no legal obligation to say anything. And as much as it may raise your moral hackles, that’s the way it has to stay. My brother and my hometown and thousands of other hometowns just like it, they need you. So if this hits the fan, I’ll take the fall. Not you.”

“Drop by my parents’ house this afternoon and we’ll talk about it.”

Jerry suppressed a sigh. “I’ll be there, sir. But this one is non-negotiable.”

“We’ll talk about it,” Grant repeated.

The squad room was curiously quiet as Karen walked in and sagged into her chair. She was alone but for Dave Previn, who seemed to be trying to bury his head in his hands as he talked on the phone. Karen switched on her computer and spread her notes on her desk. She needed to get the initial reports in while the information was fresh, but her mind rebelled at the thought of anything but sleep. Previn finally hung up the phone and leaned back in his chair with a heavy sigh. When their eyes met, he spoke.

“You wouldn’t think planning a boy’s tenth birthday party would be this frigging complicated. But Linda wants to go all out. And it has to matter to me whether the picture on the cake is a Buccaneers’ helmet or their flag.”

“And good morning to you, too,” Karen said simply. “Go with the helmet.”

“You think I’m going to call her back?” He shook his head. “Uh-uh. Not this little gray duck.”

His face said what everyone in the office knew, but no one talked about: his marriage was a mess. She looked around. “So where is everyone?”

Dave gave a disgusted look. “Task force meeting. Apparently the College Hill drive-by opened up a whole can of worms. The civil rights caucus says we’re not doing enough to stop the violence in the projects. The mayor has egg on his face. Now it’s top priority and all that. Like we wouldn’t care about murder otherwise.”

Karen nodded. “To protect and to serve, right?”

“Whatever. Oh, and the lieutenant wants to see you about the Senator Lawrence thing. Probably another task force in the making. We ought to form a task force on task forces.”

“The lieutenant’s not in on the College Hill thing?”

“Sure he is. He wants you to interrupt him. So congratulations, Karen. You’re front-page news.”

She rose from her seat. “Just what I always wanted.”

The task force had taken over the largest conference room on the floor. From the sounds she heard outside the door, tempers were fraying. She considered going back to write her reports, to let Lieutenant Simpson calm down before she met with him. But he would probably be even angrier if she did.

With a brief knock, she opened the door and stepped into a chaotic swirl of voices and a view of Fred Lowery gesturing at a dry-erase board scrawled with multi-colored threads of preliminary evidence. Warren Simpson sat at the near end of the table, paperwork intermixed with the foam-boxed leftovers of McDonald’s pancakes and sausage, syrup-dappled paper napkins and an extra large coffee mug that was his office trademark. The voices quieted as she entered—a brief symphony of terse “Hiyas” and “What’s ups?”—and Simpson turned to look.

He reached for his mug. “Excuse me, y’all.” His baritone voice poured out like molasses, thick and rich. Without another word, he rose and led Karen out and to his office, closing the door behind them. His eyes swept over her briefly. “You look like you need to sit down.”

“At least,” Karen said. “A few hours’ sleep wouldn’t hurt, either.”

He nodded. “Seems to be an epidemic around here. So what’s the deal on the Lawrence case?”

Cases were usually referred to by the victim’s name. In almost any other situation, this would be the Reese case, but Abigail Reese was as subsumed in death as she had been in life.

Or maybe not. Maybe it was simply that she really was part of the Lawrence family. That option left less of a bitter taste in her mouth.

“Apparently she surprised a burglar. He may have been after some of the senator’s files.” She gave him a quick rundown of her morning. “But there’s more to it. Jerry Connally—the senator’s chief of staff or some such—was holding something back.”

Simpson grunted. “Hardly surprising.” He leaned forward. “Okay, here’s the deal. We have two messes in the making, and the media are going to be all over both of them. Any other month and I’d put a half-dozen detectives on this with you. No stone unturned and all that. But if I do that, the civil rights caucus will play the race card, saying we’re more worried about a rich white senator than we are about poor black kids dying in the streets.”

“Never mind that Abigail Reese was a black woman,” Karen said.

“Right. And never mind that cleaning out the projects would take a hell of a lot more than just busting the gang-bangers. Regardless, the mayor has spoken—and loudly.” He paused for a moment, drawing tiny circles on his desk blotter. “And you know what? In the big scheme of things, the mayor might be right. So College Hill gets as much as we can put there. Which means you’re on point with Senator Lawrence.”

What he said made sense on a lot of levels. And it was true that, in the big scheme of things, it might well be better to focus the city’s efforts at trying to bring some measure of safety and hope to the bleak lives in the projects. Abigail Reese’s murder, however ugly and awful, did not seem to be a symptom of a festering cancer in the city. The College Hill murders were, without doubt.

She nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“So what’s your caseload right now?”

“Not too bad. I have six active cases, plus the two from tonight. The state attorney says he’ll probably get pleas on four of them. The Hart case goes to trial next month. And I’m still waiting on ballistics on Vance. If they come back positive—and they will—that’ll plead out, too.”

“So you’re clear except for Lawrence.”

“And the girl in the alley,” Karen said.

“I’ll pull you off that. Previn can take it.”

Karen shifted in her seat. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, sir. Previn’s only been here three months. He’s not ready to solo.”