Playing God (16 page)

Burgess looked at it curiously. "Lucas Brown?"

"A.k.a Kevin O'Leary. Drug guys are very familiar with him. Sheet as long as my arm. Drugs, extortion, simple assault, gross sexual assault—three rapes where the complainant refused to go forward, plus one as a juvie. Been doing time down in Massachusetts. Back on the street maybe six months. New name. Fresh start."

He'd wondered how someone like O'Leary had gotten under their radar. Now he understood. Lucas Brown was a known, and ugly, quantity. He handed around copies of Jen Kelly's list. "We need to check on Pleasant's credit cards. Probably all his financial records. Look for cash deposits that might support the drug sales angle. Both his father-in-law and ex-wife said Pleasant had financial problems. Find his accountant. Also, phone records. Stan, see if Rita Callahan's gotten the subpoenas we need. And Terry? Put your devious mind to work on how Pleasant might have gotten his hands on drugs to sell."

"Cancer doc, right?" Kyle raised an eyebrow. "Which means pain management. Oxycontin's a great little money maker. I'll see what the drug guys know."

Berman cleared his throat. "On the house-to-house. One guy says he saw a big man in a dark coat sneaking through the bushes, but between the blowing snow and the weather warming up, we've got no prints. He has to get up a lot. Prostate. Says he's seen Pleasant's car there before. Never this late." He held out a sheaf of papers. "Otherwise, we got squat."

"Went by Salernos," Kyle said. "But it was the day shift and nobody knew anything. Gotta go back at night."

Burgess asked Perry and Kyle to run background checks on Jack Kelly, Janet Pleasant, Jen Kelly and Ted Shaw, then called Pleasant's office and arranged meetings with Betty Ling and Chris Perlin during their lunch breaks. He was writing up yesterday's interviews—blessing the computer jock who'd put report templates up on all the computers—when Cote's secretary called, wondering if Burgess might be free? He didn't expect to be free for the next several weeks, agreed he'd be right up.

"Ted Shaw called, sounding pleased," Cote said. "Says you've promised him a quick arrest and a black-out on publicity."

Burgess shook his head. "I didn't. Couldn't. Man hears what he wants to hear. Drunk as he was, I'm surprised he heard anything."

"I hope comments like that go no farther than this office. Shaw's a very prominent man. Now, tell me about this quick arrest. Are you close?"

Of course Cote hadn't read his reports. He wasn't done writing them. Still. Guy should know if they were close to an arrest, he'd have heard. "I don't even have a suspect yet." It was hot in the office. Be so easy to go to sleep. And boy would it piss Cote off. "It's gonna take time."

"You need more people on this?"

Like more bodies were the answer. "Devlin could use some help on the forensics, and I could use a good financial person. We've got phone bills, credit cards, and financial stuff to wade through. Trying to get a handle on the victim's finances."

"The victim was a wealthy physician."

Dani was right. It was hard to believe Cote had ever been a cop. "The victim was a philandering husband who was habitually late with his child support. Maybe videotaped having sex and being blackmailed. He'd been bailed out of some financial scrapes by his father-in-law, may have supplemented his income by supplying drugs to individuals other than his patients. And I haven't met anyone, aside from his wife, who didn't either detest him, disapprove of his habits, or both."

Cote's nose wrinkled like he'd smelled bad cheese. "Not a word of this gets out, understand? And where are your reports? I haven't seen anything since yesterday."

"Since then I've been interviewing people. I was just writing those up."

"Well, get back to it, and stop wasting my time." Cote picked up the phone. "I'll tell Vince to find you some more help. I want this thing cleared up before the press gets wind of all the dirt. And I'm sure I don't have to remind you. All contact with the press goes through this office." Cote looked petulantly down at his immaculate desk, nostrils quivering in frustration. "Chief's really feeling the heat on this one, Joe. Every VIP in the West End's called to express concern. When are you going to get out there and get us something?"

Hadn't Cote just told him to stay in and write reports? He was the primary on this. Cote couldn't investigate his way out of a paper bag. He stood up, towering over his seated superior, and planted his hands on the man's blotter. "This one's going to take time, Captain. There won't be a quick arrest."

Cote pushed his chair back. "Just find the hooker who was in the car—"

"I'm not sure she was a hooker."

Cote wasn't listening. He smirked, and Burgess knew what was coming. "Ask your friend Alana Black. I'm sure she'll be happy to tell you."

He didn't like Alana's name in that dirty mind, coming out of that pursed up, duck's ass mouth, even if she was a lying, manipulative, game-playing whore. Below the prissy veneer was a greedy pubescent boy, wanting to ask what she was like in bed. And anyway, could Cote really believe you could walk out on the street and find anyone you wanted? That sources gave up everything the second a cop crooked his finger? "She's been helpful, Paul, but she doesn't know the girl. No one does."

"Maybe you need to ask her again." Cote licked his lips.

He wanted to slap Cote's flabby face and tell him get real, but Cote had rank, and the two of them had history. "I
need
to write reports, then interview Pleasant's office staff. I'll send up copies when I'm done."

Cote waited he'd reached the door. "Try to stay away from the widow, Joe, and tread lightly over at Maine Med. These people aren't used to being bothered by the police. And give my love to Alana." He cupped his hands like he was fondling breasts.

Bothered by the police? Burgess flew down the stairs, fuming. He shouldn't let Cote get to him. Cote wanted him to lose it.

Staring at the screen, trying to write reports, what he saw was Kristin Marks, only nine when she was kidnapped, assaulted, strangled and dumped in a landfill.

The man had been easy to find—a twenty-three year old college student with a history of assaulting little girls. In the beginning, there had been plenty of evidence. Though his deviant history had taught him to use a condom, he'd left semen on Kristin's underwear. An eye-witness had seen him dragging the child into his car. Kristin's hair and fibers from her clothes were found in the car, fibers from the car found on her body.

Then the thing had begun to unravel. The perpetrator was the youngest son of a Superior Court judge, represented by the best criminal lawyer in town. Evidence began to disappear. The underpants vanished from the lab. The eyewitness left the state with no forwarding address. And the court declared a fatal flaw in the search warrant issued for the suspect's car, tainting all the evidence that had been collected.

From the moment he'd stood in that landfill, staring down at her pitiful little body, Burgess had worked the case day and night. For weeks he'd slept as little as humanly possible, following leads, checking and rechecking, doing everything he could to find Kristin's killer. Once the killer had been found, he'd continued to gather evidence, determined the man wouldn't walk away again with only a slap on the wrist.

He'd been like one man trying to bail the sea. They'd been understaffed at the time, and the case was a political hot potato, so he'd worked it virtually alone. Like a bloodhound, he found things no one expected him to find, brought them in, and watched them vanish like smoke. Lead after lead. Witness after witness. He would bring things in, and Cote, who'd had Vince Melia's job then, head of the investigations division, would tell him not to waste his time. Burgess would say a polite version of "fuck you," and go look some more, haunted by his vision of the body. Of her parents' faces. Of a small photo he carried of Kristin making her first communion, lovely as an angel in her white dress.

He lost thirty pounds. He lost his voice. He shambled about with a ghastly stare that scared people into cooperating, drank coffee until his hands shook like a drunk with DTs. And everything he found was lost, stolen, pissed away, or swallowed up by the justice system. Injustice system.

It ended the day Cote called him in and explained about the invalid warrant. A warrant Cote had obtained. Cote explained further that, because of this lost evidence, the DA had agreed to a plea bargain. Involuntary manslaughter and an alternative sentence of treatment in a private facility for sex offenders until the doctors determined he was fit to rejoin society. Burgess had yelled, "She deserves better," and grabbed Cote by the throat. It had taken four officers to pull him off. Four officers, four nightsticks, pepper spray and a pair of handcuffs.

At that point, he'd entered into what his doctors called a "dissociate state." Most of the story he'd gotten later from Kyle. He remembered being dragged into the Chief's office and dumped into a chair, his face so battered he could barely open his eyes, but he couldn't have seen much. He was still blinded from the pepper spray. His shoulder was dislocated, and, with his hands cuffed, he must have been in excruciating pain, but all he could feel was rage.

Tears from his eyes, blood and mucus from his broken nose, and blood and saliva from his battered mouth ran down his face. There were pains in his chest where they'd broken two ribs, but the real pain was from fury and horrible grief. What hurt was the profound immorality of the way justice for Kristin's life was traded away because it was expedient. Because people had screwed up.

The Chief's voice had been a steady drone in the background, like a small plane on a summer day, buzzing around but not penetrating the bands of red anger and black despair that surrounded him like the rings of Saturn. The first voice he heard was Kyle's. A Kyle unlike the self-contained detective he'd worked with for years, bursting into the room and blazing with a machine-gun fire of angry words. Maybe the words penetrated because he'd rarely heard Kyle's voice raised in anger. A few simple sentences. "What the hell is going on here? If he were a suspect, he'd be on his way to the hospital, and you don't even wipe his face? Who's got a key for these cuffs?"

There was a mumbled response, like a church congregation, as the cuffs were taken off. Kyle wiped his face, discovered the extent of his injuries. And then a few more indelible sentences. "This is a disgrace on the department. No one speaks to this man again without a lawyer and a representative of the police union present. I'm taking him to the hospital."

Like Kennedy after Chappaquiddick, they kept him sedated while they figured out what to do. His lawyers and friends battled to save his career while he lay deep in a chemical-induced trance. Then, as the anger faded into exhaustion, he fell into a deep, natural sleep. He woke on the third day, still almost too exhausted to open his eyes, to find Kyle dozing beside the bed, worn, pallid, and victorious. Thanks to Kyle, he still had a career. Because of Kristin Marks, he wasn't sure he wanted it.

It had been a long road back. Kristin still haunted him, awake or asleep. And that careless star-fucker Cote could still push his buttons. But today he had a new victim to attend to. He snapped open his notebook, and began taking out his anger on the keyboard.

Chapter 13

Report writing was an essential part of police work. If he left what he'd learned in his notebook in his unreadable scrawl and got run down by a snowplow, his colleagues would have to start over. By now, it was second nature. The words flowed. But it took time when he could have been interviewing people, searching for the elusive key to this thing. When he printed the last report, he felt like a kid let out of school. He gave the secretary copies for Cote, then grabbed his jacket and left.

He crossed the parking lot under a sky that was spitting snow. By the time he hit the street, the sky wasn't spitting, it was heaving. Great, fluffy white gobs smacked against the windshield and surrounded him with a lace-curtain landscape. At the hospital, he parked in his usual spot, nodded to Charlie and went to the cafeteria to meet Betty Ling.

She was waiting by the door, a small, no-nonsense Asian woman with thick, cropped hair and big glasses. She wore a dull green dress, shapeless and too long, low black Oxford shoes and a thin black cardigan. The white collar and cuffs on the dress gave it a severity that reminded him of the nuns at school. She was probably only in her mid-thirties, yet he half expected that if his questions displeased her, she'd slap his knuckles with a ruler. Before they'd exchanged a word, he knew she would do her best not to help.