Читать книгу Let Justice Descend - Lisa Black - Страница 12

Chapter 4

Before Riley could hustle her outside to deal with the nother-lawyer guy, said guy had managed to dart around the contamination officer and into the small foyer, where he thoughtfully wiped his feet on the mat and paid no attention to his supposed client.

“Who are—” Kelly began.

“My name is Raymond Stanton. I’m the Central Committee Chairman of the Cuyahoga County unit.”

Riley protested. “I thought you said—”

“And I double as an attorney for the party. I’m here to take possession of all RNC equipment.”

“You’re prompt,” Riley said.

“Has the house been cleared? I can collect the items now.”

“We can’t disperse any of the woman’s possessions until it’s all gone through probate.”

“I am here only for RNC equipment. Of course I have no interest in any of Ms. Cragin’s personal possessions. Items such as campaign materials, her laptop, her phone, RNC paperwork, were all loaned from the committee and never actually owned by Ms. Cragin.”

“Yes, but her next of kin—”

“Have been notified.”

“What? You called this woman’s children—”

“Of course not. They were personally visited at their workplaces by members of the RNC from their locality. We didn’t want them to hear it on the news, where it will probably appear in the next few minutes.”

Huh, Maggie thought. Despite attorney Stanton’s cold tone, it couldn’t have been a worse way for loved ones to hear the news than having a uniformed officer show up on their doorstep.

“Well, that’s nice of you,” Riley said. “But this is a crime scene, and nothing is going to be removed until we have cleared it.”

“But RNC items—”

“Aren’t going anywhere until we have completed our investigation.”

The attorney scowled but didn’t argue. Maggie figured he hadn’t truly expected to win that battle. “What can you tell me about Ms. Cragin’s death? A lot of people are going to have a lot of questions.”

“No doubt. But at present we have no details for release. When we do, I’ll be sure to let you know.”

Stanton looked as if there were several comments he could make in response to Riley’s tone of voice but knew better than to waste his time. “Miss Henessey? First we have to cancel that ribbon cutting and then we have much coordinating to do. You best knew the senator’s contacts.”

She took a few steps into the kitchen to retrieve her tote bag, then walked out the door without so much as a good-bye.

As she watched their retreating backs, Maggie couldn’t help but ask, “Are you going to let her—”

“Yeah, for now,” Riley said. “We’ve gotten a time line and the basics from her, and we know where they’ll be. They’re a straightforward lot, I’ll say that for them.”

Jack said, “That isn’t the word I would use.”

Maggie said, “There’s something I need to show you.”

* * *

Maggie had examined the senator’s bedroom upstairs for signs of disturbance but found no sign that the killer had searched the house. She did note a streak through the dust on top of the antique dresser, pointing straight at a pink heart-shaped porcelain box with flowers spelling MOM on its lid. Black powder now marred the gloss, with a sharp outline where Maggie had lifted a piece of fingerprint tape from across the capital M. “Only some rings inside,” she pointed out, lifting the lid so they could see the jumble of inexpensive jewelry nestled against worn velveteen, “but look at the bottom.”

She flipped it over, where a piece of paper had been taped to the bottom. 14-138-67 had been written in ink.

“The safe combination?” Jack asked.

“Maybe. Carol does the same thing with her Windows password and her electric stapler.”

“Did you try it?”

“Of course not. I was waiting for you two.”

“And it’s processed?” He meant the safe.

“Yep. Didn’t get anything—big surprise with that surface. But not even from the handle, which is smooth steel.”

“Like it was wiped?”

“We don’t make assumptions like that in real life,” she scolded gently. “Sometimes people don’t leave prints. They have dry skin, they just washed up, they work with abrasives.”

Riley, meanwhile, had already gloved up as if more than pumped for the experiment with the vision of a Mission: Impossible type burning fuse motif dancing in his mind. “Let’s give it a shot.”

It took him three tries, carefully spinning the oversized dial. He finally tried starting left instead of right and snickered with delight when the handle clicked and turned. Maggie and Jack crowded over him to get a glimpse, hoping against hope that the contents of the safe would tell them in an instant who had murdered Diane Cragin.

The contents did not.

But they certainly raised a number of new questions.

At first Maggie saw only a stack of reusable grocery shopping bags, the lightweight mesh kind that she kept hooked over a shelf in her own pantry. They formed a pile of roughly square shapes that could have held more campaign flyers or file folders. Riley pulled up the top edge of the uppermost bag so they could peek in.

Money. Stacks of it.

“Holy shit,” Riley said. Maggie’s mouth opened. Jack said nothing.

Riley pulled the bag out—getting fingerprints off the mesh would be virtually impossible anyway—and rested it on the floor so he could open it all the way. The bag had been filled to half of its volume with bundles of cash, used and uncrisp bills, held together with rubber bands. Mostly twenties, but Maggie caught sight of tens, hundreds, and even ones. A few of the bundles had been wrapped in what looked like ordinary kitchen plastic wrap or put in plastic sandwich bags. Some fanned out freely from their rubber bands.

“How much is that?” she asked.

“Hard to guess with the different denominations. Did the lady not believe in banks? Is this bribes, kickbacks? Maybe she was embezzling from the party. Or hell, it could be legitimate campaign contributions for all I know,” Riley said. “Maybe this is what the lawyer-slash-chairman wanted to pick up, along with the senator’s laptop and her chief of staff.”

Jack asked, “Whatever it is, it’s one big stack of motive.”

Maggie said, “But why kill her and then leave it?”

“Because they knew they could get it later?”

“Or they didn’t have the combination.”

Jack asked Riley, “Are they all filled with money?”

Riley reached for another bag, but Maggie put a hand on his shoulder. “We have to document every single step of this. Impounded cash creates suspicion that never goes away. If I were you, I’d call your supervisor right now and get a few more witnesses here.” She snapped a photo of the open safe door and the bag with the money.

“Don’t get paranoid,” Riley protested, but weakly.

“We work for a police department. You can smoke pot or beat your wife or bring your dog to work, but there’s two things you can’t do: You can’t talk back to your supervisor, and you can’t steal.” She took another photo. “I’m just looking out for you, bro.”

He pulled out another bag and said, “And yourself. This is all going to have to go to the lab.”

“The lab?”

Jack agreed as Riley pulled out a third bag filled with cash. “Prints, DNA, whatever we can get. I don’t know about you, but I’m curious to know where this came from.”

Morosely, Riley told him: “Us. The taxpayers. That’s where it came from.”

* * *

It’s said that money changes everything, Maggie reflected, but that wasn’t entirely true in this case. They had left the senator’s house shortly after finding the money, but only because there had been nothing more to accomplish there. The killer could have used the senator’s keys to enter the house, but if so he—or she—had done so without leaving a smear of mud on the floor or any sign of a search. Maggie had processed every obvious surface, including the inside of the safe—which had no more usable prints than the outside. The place seemed to be more of an office than a home, and from the variety of lipstick shades on the glasses in the dishwasher and two brands of cigarettes in the tray in the yard and different entrees from the same take-out place in the fridge, Maggie assumed that many more staff members besides Kelly had been inside.

Riley got two patrol officers to help move the money and hung on to them so that they would be the ones helping to count it as well. Limiting the personnel involved while documenting their presence would keep everyone’s story straight, as well as streamline the paperwork.

The mourning dove had soughed them a chorus as they left, either happy to have the yard to itself again or warning them of some clue they had missed. Maggie hoped it wasn’t the latter.

She had called her boss, Denny, to warn him, and Carol had agreed to come in and help for the overtime. The older woman had cleared and cleaned the large examination table in the center of the lab and now considered the large stacks covering the stainless steel surface.

Maggie glanced at her. “I swear this isn’t my fault.”

“You’ve been saying that a lot lately.”

“Doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

“She was really electrocuted?”

“Yep.”

“That’s a new one on me.”

“My reaction exactly.”

They gave each of the two patrol officers and the two detectives a piece of paper and a pen to tally the amounts. Maggie photographed each bag, each bag with the top opened, the contents of each bag after removal, close-ups of each stack, then each stack with a sticky note assigning it a unique number, then each stack next to the tally sheet showing its total. Some of the bundles had a piece of paper tucked under the rubber bands, which noted the amount of money in the stack—so far, those notes had proven scrupulously accurate. Some of the mesh bags had one or two plastic grocery bags inside them, separating the bills further, and these Maggie would label and move directly to the superglue tank, substituting fresh paper bags for the removed plastic ones—thus designing a system on the fly to be able to reconstruct which bills had been in which bags with which accoutrements like notes or trace evidence. And all on the off chance that it might help, in some way, discern who had executed Diane Cragin.

She did not let anyone remove the rubber bands, so they had to count the money while it was still wadded together. There might be trace evidence caught in the bundles, and besides, less handling meant less jostling and disturbing of any fingerprints she might need to process. Secretly she intended to put that idea off for as long as possible. Money, both paper and coin, remained one of the most difficult items to process for latent prints. Coins were small with a textured surface, and bills were porous with complicated and colored backgrounds. They passed through a lot of hands during their lifetime, giving a suspect the foundation to say that they’d handed that dollar bill to a cashier at the GetGo one time, not to the victim. Of course there could be something said for volume—explaining one’s prints on one bill would be easy. Explaining them found on 80 percent of the bills in Diane Cragin’s safe, much more difficult.

At any rate, not having to unbundle and rebundle the stacks of bills saved everyone time, so she heard no complaints. At least not about that. She did hear mild grumbling about the disposable lab coats, sleeve guards, and latex gloves she made everyone wear to protect any trace evidence that might be mixed in with the cash. This money had been, obviously, collected over a period of time and from more than one person—hence the different styles of sorting, sometimes mixing the denominations, sometimes noting the totals, sometimes binding with rubber bands. Perhaps all this money had a completely legitimate explanation, and even if it didn’t, it might not have a single thing to do with the murder. But Maggie wasn’t about to take that chance.

Jack and Riley chafed a bit, no doubt anxious to get out and retrace Diane Cragin’s last steps, interview all her known associates, and start writing a request for information to her cell service provider. But it made an interesting alternative to arresting drunk drivers and car-hopping kids for the two patrol officers, for they had a marvelous time discussing how finding a safe with this much money in it could outfit one heck of a man cave. One of them leaned toward a maximum amount of sports channels, the other toward an extremely well-stocked bar.

“One hundred ten inch,” one said. “4G.”

“Two blenders and a margarita machine,” said the other.

Riley said, “I want to know when this guy—person—set up his little electrocution machine. The assistant said Cragin went home before the fund-raiser and was on time for that. From her place to City Club, the very latest she could have left her place would be four forty-five. The Secret Service agent escorted her home around nine-thirty. That gives our guy close to five hours.”

Jack said, “The sun sets at seven-thirty, but he didn’t necessarily need the cover of darkness. No one can see into that yard unless they actually stop and look through the outer gate.”

Maggie asked if the outer gate would have been locked during the day.

“No,” Jack said. “Only at night, according to the Secret Service agent.”

Riley said, “Lots of trees and only one streetlight, at the corner, but I’ll bet it’s pretty dark at night. Much less risky than during the day.” He picked up another stack, latex-gloved fingers easily paging through the bills.

“It depends on the neighbors—if they’re professionals who are at work all day, then daytime would be better. If they’re nosey old-money types who spend all day peering through the blinds, then not so much. What about cameras? Somebody on that street—probably everybody on that street—must have home security.”

“Negative.” One of the patrolmen spoke up. “I helped with the canvas, and I didn’t see cameras unless they were really well hidden. One house did, but it’s at the very end of the street. Another one had a doorbell camera, but it also had a walled yard like the victim’s, so they’re not going to see anything beyond their front stoop.”

“We’ll have to send out another team when people start getting home from work,” Riley said.

“Every possible channel, too,” the patrolman said to his cohort, returning to their running conversation. “DirecTV.”

“No way. You can stream all the subscription ones, get anything you want that way.”

“Netflix and stuff? Every time I think, ‘That sounds good, I’ll have to see that,’ they never have it.”

“But there’s never anything on satellite, either. Why pay that big monthly bill? Much more economical to stream.”

The first patrolman nodded at the table. “I got all this money, what do I care about economical?”

“Just ’cause you got the cash, don’t mean you gotta waste it.”

Maggie bagged up his finished cash in fresh brown paper and removed the plastic bags from another set. The plastic went into the superglue chamber, and the kid began to count. Then he whistled.

“What?” she asked.

“This is all hundreds.”

“So’s this pile,” Jack said.

“I got twenties and tens,” the other patrolman grumbled.

“Mine have notes,” Riley said. “Scraps of paper. Think a handwriting expert could do anything with this? Might be very interesting if it isn’t the victim’s.” He held up a two-inch square of lavender-colored notepaper on which had been written 3325.

Maggie said, “I’m not sure what they can do with numbers, though that two looks pretty distinctive. That’s the amount?”

“Yep. Guess they didn’t bother with a dollar sign. Come to think of it, Miss Diane didn’t bother with a ledger or tally or little black book. This much money, you’d think she’d keep track of the running total.”

“Maybe it’s on her laptop,” Maggie said. “Our digital gal says it’s got a passcode, but she might be able to crack it.”

“Try her birthday,” one of the patrolmen suggested. “It’s always their birthday.”

“They’ve got equipment to download and copy the whole hard drive,” she said.

“A computer system to crack other computer systems,” he said. “Sounds disloyal.”

“What’s this?” Jack asked. He had found another tally note, but this one had something on the other side. It had been torn from what looked like ordinary copy paper, with printed words on the other side: 426–115th Co and below it ealth Adminis and under that Our Own Directiv.

“A report? Meeting minutes? Press release?” Maggie suggested.

“Could be anything.”

Maggie photographed it and slipped it into an envelope, labeled to correspond with the relevant stack and bag. Then they went back to work. Maggie made coffee. Carol made several “Look! A squirrel!” jokes as if she might pocket one of the stacks while their heads were turned. Conversation between the patrolmen moved on to which fast cars to put in the garage of their newly lavish homes.

The final count: $964,858. And, mercifully, no cents.

Then they all had to trade stacks and recount to make sure the first person had gotten the number right. Any discrepancies meant the stack had to be counted a third time. By the time everything jived, all six people had cricks in their fingers as well as their necks, but it was done and could be sealed and locked and noted and signed for so that Maggie could process all of it at a later date. If any of it went missing, a later count would reveal that.

Long past their lunchtime, the two patrolmen were especially happy to go.

“You’d think counting money would be fun,” one said.

“Only when it’s yours,” said the other.