Deception (47 page)

50

“We balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination.”

S
HERLOCK
H
OLMES
,
T
HE
H
OUND OF THE
B
ASKERVILLES

W
EDNESDAY
, J
ANUARY
8, 5:00
A.M
.

I
SHOWED
UP
at the home of Brandon Phillips two hours after he’d been found.

Cimmatoni and Phillips should have been the up team. But with Phillips the victim, Sergeant Seymour had examined the workload. Manny and I were on Palatine and refused for obvious reasons to turn to detectives for assistance. Ray, Clarence, Paul Anderson, and his partner had been help I could trust. Jack and Noel were still assisting Karl and Tommi on the Frederick case, so Sarge gave the Phillips case to Kim Suda and Chris Doyle. Their last, the Hedstrom murder, was recent but had already dead-ended. I’d never seen a backup like this. And we’d just lost one of our five teams.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” Suda said. “What are you doing here?”

“I was in the neighborhood. I think that’s what you said when you came out of the closet at my last murder, wasn’t it, Kimmy? Of course, I wasn’t hiding here when you arrived.”

“Where are your gloves?” she asked. “Wouldn’t want you to contaminate the scene.”

“What time was the murder?” I asked.

“Gunshot heard at 2:36,” Doyle said, looking at Phillips. “No murder though.

Offed himself.”

Dr. Marsh was the ME on duty. Carlton Hatch treats the body like it’s the shroud of Turin. Marsh has the deft touch of an airport baggage handler. He flipped Phillips’s arms around like a rag doll.

“Apparent suicide,” Marsh said.

“Based on what?” I asked.

“Gun in his hand and brains on the floor.”

“Made to look like suicide,” I said.

“Hence the word
apparent.”

“Where’s Sheila?”

“Staying at her sister’s,” Doyle said. “Apparently she and Phillips had been having problems. If she needs an alibi, she’s got one. It’s a three-hour drive, and she was with her sister’s family all evening.”

“I talked with Sheila,” Suda said. “She’s a mess. Who wouldn’t be? Wait. What’s this?” Suda pointed at a dark scrap of cloth four feet from the body, two feet to my right.

Doyle bent over it. “Fabric,” he said. “Blood soaked. It’s been cut.”

Suda gestured to one of the CSIs. “You drop this?”

“No,” he said, staring at the cloth. “It wasn’t there.”

“Had to be,” Doyle said.

“We’ve been here two hours,” the criminalist said. “We have thirteen evidence bags, marked and ready for the lab. We picked up everything. You telling me we all missed this—including you?”

Suda gave me the evil eye. She wrote on her pad, then took three pictures of the scrap. “Bag it,” she said. The criminalist picked it up with tweezers and put it in a plastic bag.

I met Sarge outside his office when he arrived at 7:00 a.m.

“I’m going to need the lab results from the Phillips investigation,” I said. “We have to assume he was killed because of what he knew about Palatine. It was no suicide.”

“That’s a lot to assume.”

“You think it’s a coincidence he had something to tell me, then suddenly he was killed?”

Sarge shrugged.

“I don’t trust Suda and Doyle on this investigation,” I said.

“That’s funny. They don’t trust you on the Palatine investigation.”

“Come on. Can you trust a woman hiding in a closet at a murder scene? She breaks into my house and plants illegal bugs. Abuses my dog. Now a detective dies, and she’s in charge of the investigation?”

“Look, Suda’s in big trouble. After the investigation she’ll be suspended, at least. But that doesn’t make her the killer. And right now, we’re buried in murder cases. We need her. Anyway, remember, she planted the bugs under orders from the chief.”

“Even he doesn’t have the authority to do that.”

“My point is, she wasn’t winging it.” Sarge shook his head. “What’s happening to this department? One of our best has just died, and one of us might have killed him? It’s a nightmare.”

“I need those lab results as soon as they’re done.”

Sarge nodded. “I’ll give Doyle the lab results on the Palatine case. And I’ll tell him you’re getting the results on this one.”

“But I don’t want—”

“The universe isn’t about what you want, Chandler. Get used to it.”

Phillips’s death was too late to make the morning paper, but the arrest at the seminary dominated the front page. Oddly, pictures at the scene didn’t include the faces of Berkley and Branch. If anyone else had been in the pictures, their mugs would be right there on page one, no matter how humiliating.

I called Carp’s cell, which two days ago replaced Flyin’ Pie on my autodial.

“I saw your pictures. Nice. But what happened to the ones with your publisher and the mayor?”

“Don’t get me started,” she said. “I’ve been yelling at people all morning, and I’ve left two voice mails with Berkley. I chose two great photos with Branch and Berkley. They were going in, until Berkley called and nixed them.”

“Sounds like censorship,” I said. “Funny how journalists don’t play by their own rules.”

“Stop taking shots at journalists. I’m a journalist. Berkley’s an aristocrat.”

“Sorry. I heard Berkley yell at you to stop taking pictures. I thought it was pretty cool you didn’t stop.”

“Of course I didn’t stop. I do my job no matter who tells me not to.”

“That’s my girl.”

“Got to go. Couple of heads here I haven’t bitten off yet.” I looked at the newspaper again.

The front page featured two pictures of police officers, one of them with a big old guy leaning on a cane in the background. The article quoted Police Chief Lennox, who said a full investigation was being conducted to get to the bottom of the false intelligence that had been given to the police, who had acted in good faith, having every reason to believe a felony was in process in the seminary parking lot. He apologized to his “dear friend,” seventy-three-year-old Raylon Berkley, and to his “close friend” Mayor Branch, and vowed that such a thing would never happen again in our great city … blah blah blah.

The article said it was a private meeting between the two. “When asked why they would meet in a seminary parking lot at midnight, both men declined to answer.”

It would have been a perfect morning.

If only Brandon Phillips wasn’t dead.

And my T-shirt wasn’t bloodstained.

T
HURSDAY
, J
ANUARY
9, 1:30
P.M
.

They got a thirty-hour rush on the bloodstains in the Phillips case because the victim was a detective. By crime lab standards this was a jet on afterburners.

“Evidence is in,” Sarge said. “I told the lab you’d be there along with Suda.”

The criminalist, Kathy Strade, handed Suda and me identical pages at the same time. It gave the results of fourteen pieces of evidence. Suda scanned them one at a time, but I turned immediately to number fourteen, then went back to the top.

“That last little scrap we found on the floor?” Suda asked the criminalist.

“It was a freshly cut swatch of white fabric. Soaked with Phillips’s blood, like everything else,” said the criminalist.

“How do you suppose it got there, Chandler?”

I shrugged.

“Looked like a part of somebody’s T-shirt,” Strade said. “It’s like it was cut out and left there deliberately. But that’d be crazy.”

“Unless somebody found evidence elsewhere they didn’t want to turn in,” Suda said. “By dropping it at the crime scene they’d get the state to test and see whose blood was on it.”

“Who’d do such a thing?” I asked.

“Maybe the person who arrived on the crime scene when there were only thirteen pieces of evidence and suddenly there were fourteen.” Considering she’d bugged my house and drugged my Mulch, her morally superior look wasn’t convincing.

I assumed that classic “I’m just a man, so I’m stupid” pose, which usually works. Kathy Strade seemed to buy it.

I walked out thinking that either somebody was going all-out to frame me, or I’d done something so unthinkable I’d blocked it out. I’d need to burn my bloodstained T-shirt, with the hole in it, when I got home.

I was knocked out in that car, I told myself. Obviously I hadn’t killed Phillips. If someone was trying to frame me, they’d have left something from me at the scene. The evidence report showed they hadn’t. They were playing with me, showing me they had control.

By the time Clarence and I arrived at the morgue, on Knott Street, the forensic pathologist, Dr. Robert Jones, had finished undressing, weighing, photographing, and fingerprinting Brandon Phillips … or what was once Brandon Phillips. The body had been pulled from the cooler.

I reassured Jones that Clarence was there under authority of the chief, and there was an e-mail attachment, for heaven’s sake. Once Clarence asked him to spell his name and he sensed his fifteen minutes of fame, all was well. I nodded my approval to Clarence, who’d asked a man named Robert Jones how he spelled it.

Homicide autopsies are done in a special room, designed to limit access and protect evidence. Organs are removed and weighed, injuries photographed, measured, probed, and numbered. I figured this would be a long one, two hours, because when the victim’s one of our own, we have to get it right. And when the killer’s one of our own, well …

The doctor’s phone rang. He pushed his Bluetooth earpiece and chatted with his son in Boston while cutting up a dead man in Portland.

Dr. Jones hit a point of disagreement with his son and paced twenty feet away. Clarence was looking green and miserable. I examined Phillips’s right hand, gently moving each finger. I stopped with the index finger. The trigger finger. I wiggled it as Clarence watched.

“Please,” Dr. Jones said, abandoning his son in Boston. “Hands off.”

“Any suggestion this wasn’t a suicide?” I asked.

“Not that I can see.”

“Take a close look at that right index finger.”

“It seems … unusually angled.”

“Like it was broken?” I asked.

“Yes. But … it couldn’t be.”

“Why not?” Clarence asked.

“Because there’s no swelling,” I said. I asked the doctor, “But what if it was broken after he was already dead?”

“Then.” Robert Jones, spelled J-o-n-e-s, looked at me, then at Clarence, and said, “there wouldn’t be any swelling.”

Clarence wrote it down.

“Nice catch,” I said to Jones. “Most guys would’ve missed that.”

Jones wrapped it up in Boston, then turned to the microphone suspended over the body. He started speaking, looking at Clarence out of the corner of his eye.

“White male measuring 71 inches in length, weighing 189 pounds. Overall appearance consistent with stated age of 49, though unusually fit. Body cold with complete rigor mortis. No lacerations. All physical damage is to skull and brain. Appears to have been penetrated by a single high-velocity bullet shot from a handgun at close range. Though the bullet passed through and wasn’t recovered, the wound is consistent with that of a 9 mm revolver of the sort recovered on the scene next to the body. No other abnormalities … with the exception of—” he looked at Clarence sideways “—an apparently broken index finger.” He flipped a switch, shutting off the recorder.

“Apparently
broken?” I asked.

He reversed the recorder and played “exception of” then stopped and said, “a broken index finger. I surmise, due to lack of swelling, the finger may have been broken postmortem.”

“May have been?”

He rewound again and said, “The finger was probably broken postmortem.” He stopped it.

“Probably? Why not certainly? Any other explanation?”

He wasn’t going to change his report again, not while I was there.

Heading out the door, I turned and said, “Dr. Jones, if you find a case where a freshly broken finger of a live person doesn’t swell, would you send it to me? Put it in an e-mail attachment. I’d love to see it.”

Clarence and I walked around Lawndale and Chapman parks, beautiful even in winter, especially in the light snowfall. We stopped for coffee near the steps of the Multnomah County Courthouse. We walked an extra thirty feet to escape the pocket of air that smelled of wet cigarette fumes, where jury duty candidates had surfaced to smoke.

“I’ve been asking myself again what I would do if I were a homicide detective planning a murder in Portland to minimize the chances of me being caught. The answer came to me. Know what it is?”

He didn’t.

“Think about it,” I said. “The answer has the potential of landing this investigation on the runway.”

“I’m still on Brandon Phillips,” Clarence said. “If what you said is true, how could his finger break after he was dead?”

“If he were alone, it couldn’t. But suppose somebody was trying to wrap his finger around the trigger, and it kept popping out. So he squeezed it in there real tight. Still popped out. So he squeezed it harder. If he was strong and angry or scared enough, adrenaline flowing, he could’ve snapped the finger. By the way, guns don’t normally stay in the hand in a suicide. They drop to the floor, a couple of feet from the body.”

I hated myself for not meeting with Phillips in the middle of the night. If I hadn’t been drinking my life away at Rosie’s, maybe he’d still be alive.

Clarence and I drove the I-205 bridge to Vancouver, Washington, and arrived at Ray Eagle’s at 4:00 p.m. I found that red chair that didn’t look comfortable but was, and my legs reacquainted themselves with his ottoman.