Читать книгу Let Justice Descend - Lisa Black - Страница 11

Chapter 3

The press had begun to gather outside the tiny walled yard, and Maggie had finished processing the kitchen, so the detectives brought Kelly Henessey inside, where her accusations could not be overheard by neighbors or reporters with notepads and parabolic mikes. Maggie steered her toward the old wooden table and its three chairs and away from the countertops, sink, and cabinets, now dirtied with black fingerprint powder. She had collected several prints from the taps and the glasses in the sink but knew they would most likely match the victim.

Then she lingered, not knowing where to place her focus next and not wanting to tell the detectives what she had found in front of a witness/suspect/closest thing to a family member in the vicinity. Besides, she was curious—about the victim and her untimely death, but also about the political arena.

It took Riley a while to settle the chief of staff down to answering the questions put to her. After she had cursed the entire Democratic party with every foul thing she could think of, Kelly had ached to make phone calls to the entire Republican counterpart to discuss press conferences, next week’s quorum call, who would replace Diane in the upcoming election, and where on earth the senator would be buried. Riley nearly had to pull the phone out of her hand to stop her from spreading the news just yet, and at least until the woman’s own children could be notified.

That immediately proved difficult. Kelly didn’t have their phone numbers and wasn’t positive of which cities the son and the daughter lived in. Diane Cragin either had not been very close to her children or had been so close that she chose to safeguard their privacy like the Holy Grail. Maggie guessed it might be the former when Kelly said, “Diane gave me the impression they didn’t call her much, had sided with their father in the divorce. And don’t ask me where he lives—I don’t even know his name. They split up ages ago, like twenty or thirty years, and she never talked about it.” Kelly didn’t know of any other family members at all, not siblings or aunts or nephews. Maybe Diane Cragin lived in a personal vacuum. Maybe she had simply been too busy to stay in touch.

Normally police would turn to the victim’s address book—formerly kept in decorative volume and stored in a desk, now kept in digital format on cell phones. But Diane Cragin’s phone, once the screen went to sleep, required a passcode, and Maggie knew better than to mess with that. Enter the wrong code and most phones would lock the user out for a period of time. After several it might wipe itself clean altogether, and all those contacts, texts, e-mails, and search histories would be gone for good. Maggie wished she could at least put it into airplane mode to keep it from any external interference, but without a passcode she couldn’t get to the settings. Instead she’d called the IT department and a tech had made the fifteen-minute drive to pick the phone up from her. The IT tech hadn’t even argued—her first indication of how different the investigation into the murder of a senator within city limits would be from the average drive-by or domestic case. Unfair, but undeniable.

After turning over the phone she photographed the contents of the handbag and the briefcase. They were both stuffed but, like the dining room table, Maggie couldn’t guess if any item held a clue to her death. She would spread out the items at the lab, but a cursory look didn’t find any threatening letters, illegal drugs, weapons, or large sums of money. If the agendas and reports were clues, they weren’t very obvious ones.

Meanwhile, she listened to Kelly as she offered to ask the victim’s hairdresser and pointed out that the woman who had been dying Diane’s roots for over a decade might have more personal information. “But you’ve got to let me call somebody. We have so much to do.”

“I get that,” Riley said. “But it’s important that we do everything correctly here, right? And that means getting as much information as we can before—”

“I saw the press outside, which means they’re probably airing as we speak. Fox News will jump on this with everything they’ve got, and we have to manage the message.”

Jack, not the soul of patience, spoke. “Your boss is dead. That’s a little more pertinent than this month’s election.”

“No, it’s not! I mean because she is dead. The last thing we can do is let them get away with it. They’ll spin this around so that she was killed by the rich corporate Illuminati rather than the oh-so-hardworking street thugs that fat asshole caters to.”

“I’m going to level with you,” Riley said. Maggie assumed that meant he intended to do everything but, and from the skeptical look on her face, so did Kelly. “We’re starting from scratch here. Ms. Cragin’s world obviously spread pretty wide, and the killer didn’t leave us any indication whether his motives were personal, political, monetary, or he just likes killing people. So let’s start with the first person you would suspect. Even though he might be the last person you would—”

“Joe Green,” she said, reiterating a statement she’d already made several times in as many minutes. The Democratic candidate for United States senator from Ohio.”

“Okay. Why?”

She scrunched her bottom more firmly onto the chair and shook out her fingers as if preparing for a typing test. “He’s running for her senate seat, as if he would know the slightest thing about a national office. He’s only some stupid chief of, like, the Economic Development office in the city—” She paused, as if realizing that full-time Clevelanders might not appreciate her dismissal of a local position, then cleared her throat and pressed on: “And he hasn’t raised half the funds she has. I mean, not even a whole million, only $708,000 to her $3,347,000, which means even the Dems know he hasn’t got a chance, because if he did, they’d give him more money.”

“You think he’d be desperate enough to murder?”

“I doubt it would be the first time.”

“Really,” Jack said. “Who else has he killed?”

She backpedaled, but with obvious reluctance. “I don’t know offhand. But he’s been bribing, extorting, and corrupting his way through Cleveland government for a long time. Take his latest project. He’s getting some kid financed to buy up riverfront land and build an ‘innovation center,’ a building where start-ups can rent a little space along with copiers, printers, and phones and start their own business, because we all know someone who turned their science fair project into the next Starbucks or Apple, right? That’s all cute and fine, except he’s asking the city to approve a twelve-million-dollar grant to pay for this—that’s not a twelve-million-dollar tax loan or tax credit or even subsidy, it’s just a twelve-million-dollar blank check. I don’t know how much of that is kicking back to Green, but I’ve heard estimates as high as sixty percent.”

“What has that got to do with Diane?” Riley asked when she paused to take a breath.

“Diane is the whole reason anyone is paying attention to it! Green had been keeping this as far under the radar as he could. Somehow he got the levy passed last year, but since then he’s quashed anyone who even mentions it, except when he wants to announce how he’s bringing jobs to Cleveland.” Her fingers made air quotes around the last four words, derision dripping from her voice. “Then he talks up a storm about how innovation and entrepreneurship are the keys to the future—well, yeah, because no one can make a freakin’ livable wage in this economy. But the media, news channels, a newspaper reporter who’s been trying to follow the money trail—they were all stonewalled. Diane was trying to help find the truth.”

Riley said, “Okay. Anything else?”

“Else? What else do you need?”

“We’ll check out his whereabouts. But—”

“That won’t help. He’s got a cadre of loyalists, his own doctor to keep his happy pills off the books, mechanics to sweep for bugs or plant a few, and I’m sure there’s a few professional assassins in the lot. Look, he—I mean, you live here, you must know about this guy. He’s chief of Economic Development, which is in the Regional Development division. So he’s right in there with Community Development, Building and Housing, City Planning, even the port. As they can tell you in New Jersey, that’s where the money is. Utility contracts, building contracts, construction, rezoning—anything you want to accomplish in the city of Cleveland, you have to grease Green’s palm. You want specifics?” She gestured with both hands, pointing her right index finger to the left and the left to the right, illustrating the interconnectedness of this circle of favors and funds. “A halfway house system gave him a refrigerator and a trip to Las Vegas to get a partnership arrangement with the Department of Corrections. A paving company that did some work in the park system, the, um, Emerald Necklace place—”

“The Metroparks,” Maggie supplied.

“Yeah, that. They also paved Green’s driveway and his sister’s. The union negotiator for a housing development along the lake gave him limousine service for three years. One guy got a lease for an ice-skating rink at the same time Green got a speedboat that had belonged to the guy’s restaurant business. A bank executive had sex with him a few times to get her daughter a teaching position at a downtown charter school. What else would you like to know? I can go on and on.”

“One thing,” Jack said. “Do you have any proof of any of this?”

“That’s not the question you should be asking. You should—”

“Don’t tell me what questions I should be asking!” Jack shot back, his voice suddenly thunderous in that way that sucked all the air out of the room and made time slow to a crawl. Even knowing him, knowing as much as she did about him, and even though it wasn’t directed at her, it made Maggie’s heart flutter to a skitterish beat.

But then, fear pervaded because she did know quite a bit about him.

Kelly, of course, didn’t have that knowledge. She didn’t know that Jack had deceived everyone around him far more thoroughly than any politician could. “Don’t try the good cop, bad cop bit on me. It’s going to take a hell of a lot more than that act to throw me off.”

This almost made Maggie smile, because the two men were not putting on a show. Riley really was a pleasant, fairly compassionate officer. And Jack was—well, Jack.

“We don’t act,” Riley said, calmly but more coolly than usual. “Your boss has been murdered, and we are going to find out who did it. We need facts, not all the rhetoric. Now, do you have evidence to prove any of this?”

Her shoulders slumped about an inch. “If I had proof, we wouldn’t have needed to spend a penny on the campaign.”

Riley asked, “Speaking of the election, would killing Diane really make it a slam dunk for Green? Wouldn’t another candidate—”

“We’ll never get the ads, the name recognition, queued up fast enough. Even if we got someone already known—like the governor . . . that might be cool if he hadn’t already said he wasn’t interested. Two days? Impossible. All we can do is throw ourselves on the mercy of party loyalists and hope that is enough. And it may not be,” she added morosely. “There’s an awful lot of Independents these days.”

“Didn’t anyone else run in the primary?” Riley asked.

“Three, but they’re out of money, and the party wasn’t interested in any of them, anyway.”

“What about the voters? Were they interested?”

Another one of those long, perplexed looks, as if Kelly wondered what color the sky was on Riley’s planet, while the color of his skin began to flush with annoyance. Patiently, she explained, “Voters decide on the winner, but they don’t decide on who runs in the first place. Parties do. They pick the people they think could win, pay for their ads, and finance everything they need, depending on how much they need it—which depends on the district. If your district is ninety percent red or blue, obviously you don’t need to spend a lot of money.” She glanced at all three people in the kitchen to assess their tracking abilities, without appearing reassured, and went further. “Someone doesn’t wind up in office because they woke up in their bungalow in Podunk, Iowa, and decided to run for office. They get into office because their party needed a candidate and went looking for one, buttered them up, wooed them away from their jobs and homes, agreed to take care of their campaign, and sent them into the ring.”

“The other candidates are only there to make it look like a real contest,” Jack translated.

“Sort of.” Her shoulders slumped from the weight on them. “That’s why I have to get back to the HQ, so we can start figuring out who to pick.”

“What about you?” Jack asked.

Her jaw dropped a millimeter or two. “Me? I’m not a politician. I work for politicians.”

It didn’t seem like such a far-fetched idea to Maggie but was clearly laughable to Kelly. It also seemed to remove any All About Eve type motivations from Diane Cragin’s chief of staff.

Riley asked, “Let’s suppose it isn’t Green. Who else did Diane conflict with? Had she been getting any hate mail? People getting in her face at public appearances?”

“Um, everyone, yes, and all the time. That’s politics these days. Conflict drives interest, and without interest people don’t donate. But other than the usual rhetoric, I can’t think of anyone really . . . scary. Except maybe—”

A knock sounded at the door, and Riley went to speak to the scene contamination officer, who wanted to know if the chief of homicide and a few other bigwig looky-loos could be allowed into the yard. The detective went out to give them a guided tour, and Kelly moved over to the stacks of haphazard paper on the dining room table. “As I recall, these are physical letters, these are printouts of the e-mails, and these are ones we flagged for some sort of action, like referring them to someone in their precinct. Do we have any coffee? I’m running a quart low, and I’m going to need it. Can I please call DC now?”

“In a minute,” Jack said.

“And some of them,” she continued as if she hadn’t interrupted herself, “get kind of weird.” But instead of explaining, she crossed to the sink, hand reaching for a cabinet, before Jack could mutter a hey!

A frown of annoyance. “I just want a drink of water.”

Jack deferred to Maggie, who said, “Go ahead, I’m done with it. There might be black powder on the cabinet and the faucet, though.”

Kelly had the sense to stop before her pricey-looking clothes brushed the dirtied countertop edge. She got a glass from the second cabinet she opened and filled it from the tap. Then she noticed black powder from the faucet handle on her fingers, turned it back on, rinsed, turned off, still had traces of black. She finally solved the conundrum by soaking a paper towel and washing off the handles, then rinsing her fingers and filling the glass before turning the tap off, talking all the while. “I mean, this could be some psycho stalker, right? Someone who thought she was sending him love messages through the press releases and then imagined a rejection as well?”

Jack donned gloves to look through the pile, and Maggie did the same. “Did she have stalkers?”

“A few in the past. Nothing recent. Usually the FBI would pay them a visit and they’d decide to switch their attentions to someone else.”

“We’ll take a look. Are there any that aren’t here? Are some thrown out upon receipt?”

“Nothing is thrown out. You want to make a point to your congressman, send an old-fashioned letter. Not a phone call, not an e-mail. Someone has to actually open a letter, read it, and put it in a file, where it stays.”

Maggie read over Jack’s shoulder as he quickly skimmed the letters. Nearly every one accused Diane Cragin of being a racist and usually added in another form of bigotry such as homophobia, zenophobia, or ageism. Some insisted that charter schools were destroying the American educational system by letting public schools deteriorate while private concerns used taxpayer-provided subsidies to steal all the best students. Many linked her with big oil and big energy, which explained why solar power and electric cars couldn’t get a foothold in the country’s business model.

If this represents a sampling of the suspect pool, Maggie thought, this investigation is off to a rough start.

Kelly, meanwhile, pulled a bottle of prescription meds from her purse and worked the childproof cap between her palms.

Jack asked, “Who is Randy Cunningham?”

A sigh of the greatly put-upon. “Used to be a representative. California.”

“This letter refers to he and the senator collecting bribes.”

“Ancient history,” she sneered, and then remembered to add, “and not true. At least not on Diane’s part.”

When she saw this did not satisfy him, she explained in more detail. “This was a really long time ago, like 2005.”

“Oh, yes,” Jack said with a straight face. “Ancient history.”

“Randy Cunningham was on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee for a while. During that time he sold his house for close to two million dollars to a guy named Mitchell something. This Mitchell something owned a defense contracting firm, specialized in counterterrorism analysis and all that. Mitchell’s company begins to get defense and intelligence contracts figuring into the tens of millions.”

“Wow,” Maggie said.

“About fifty percent of the national budget goes to defense—the discretionary budget, I mean. Of the entire budget, fifty percent plus is health costs and Social Security, and defense is actually about seventeen.” Her shoulders quivered in a small shrug. “It’s still a lot of money to play with.”

“How does the senator figure into this story?” Jack asked.

“Mitchell eventually resells Cunningham’s house at half the price. Meanwhile, when Cunningham is in DC, he’s living rent-free on a yacht that belongs to Mitchell. Eventually this all comes out, some reporters in San Diego get a Pulitzer, and Cunningham went to jail for a couple of years.”

“And the senator?”

“Diane was his chief of staff at the time. And . . . she had sold her condo for way more than market value to some woman who worked for a subsidiary of Mitchell’s company. But, as I said, never charged.”

Jack pointed out, “This e-mail says Diane was a crook then and is still one now.”

Kelly remained unimpressed and popped two pills into her mouth, then swallowed the water. “It’s not a secret.”

“Did anyone consider themselves particularly harmed by Cunningham and the senator?”

“I have no idea. I was in, like, ninth grade at the time.”

Now Jack sighed.

“Look at this,” Maggie said.

A handwritten message addressed to Senator “Jezebel” Cragin stated that she had clearly been paid off by the company that got the crib renovation contract, since they had a terrible record with water construction projects. The letter ended by pointing out that she proved Andrew Feinstein’s maxim that politicians are like prostitutes, only considerably more expensive.

The words weren’t particularly ominous, but the handwriting—all capital letters that didn’t stick to the lines and became more unstable toward the bottom of the page—indicated a strong emotion. The writer had not signed a name or left a return address on the envelope.

Maggie said, “He says she will be struck by lightning.” She and Jack exchanged a glance.

Kelly said, “Yeah, that’s the one I thought was weird. They’re not opioids.”

“What?” Maggie asked.

“These.” She held out the bottle long enough for Maggie to read Sarafem off the label. “I’m not crazy and I’m not addicted to pain meds, or alcohol, or oxy. I have a medical condition.”

“Okay.”

“Not everyone in DC is a coke-sniffing addict.” The woman stowed the bottle and hung her tote bag off the back of a chair. “They’d be a lot easier to get along with if they were. I’m going to need Diane’s stuff—her phone, her organizer, her laptop . . . even though she really didn’t do a lot on her laptop. I did it all on my laptop. For a former lawyer, she wasn’t much of a typist.”

“All her personal property will eventually be released to her next of kin,” Jack said.

Kelly’s face contorted with horror. “But her kids—they don’t care! They won’t even know what all the party stuff is, and we can’t wait that long, anyway. And technically, you know, it belongs to the RNC.”

Jack sounded implacable. “We can deal with disposition once the investigation is complete.”

“But—”

Riley came back inside. “I got rid of the powers that be, but some guy in a suit just showed up.” He looked at Kelly Henessey. “He says he’s your lawyer.”

“I don’t have a lawyer,” said Kelly Henessey.