Sam Kincaid 01 - The Commission (21 page)

Chapter Forty-eight

An ambulance transported Sara and Aunt June to a Salt Lake City hospital. I rode with them, and Kate followed. Aunt June’s condition had suddenly taken a turn for the worse, and I was worried. Shortly after we arrived at the hospital, she had begun to complain of chest pains. The hospital ran a series of tests to identify the problem. A traumatized Sara was examined, given a mild sedative, and had fallen fast asleep. Both were held overnight for observation. As soon as Sara had fallen asleep and an emergency room physician stitched the cut above my eye, Kate and I left the hospital and drove to the Salt Lake City Police Department. The hostage incident and subsequent shooting of Stimson had occurred after the local evening news. It would be the lead story on every television news station at the nine and ten o’clock hours. If we wanted to maintain the element of surprise and apprehend Stimson’s co-conspirators, we needed to move quickly.

The subsequent search of Stimson’s Ford Explorer had yielded another piece of important evidence. Aside from a passport and over $200,000 in cash, she had kept a journal—a very incriminating journal that detailed her activities and those of her colleagues for the past three years. Among other things, the journal revealed that the group referred to themselves as the Commission. Their activities ranged from the theft of inmates’ personal property to drug trafficking both inside the prison and on the street. They also sold parole release dates and operated a prison protection racket where selected inmates paid for protection to avoid getting hurt. It was a tale of corruption and greed that was about to produce the biggest scandal in the history of the Utah Department of Corrections, a department that up to now had enjoyed a reputation for being squeaky clean.

Besides Kate and me, John Webb and Harvey Gill from the Sheriff’s Office, Deputy District Attorney Tom Stoddard, Captain Hyrum Locke, and my boss were at the meeting. I had no idea how Sloan heard about the shoot-out, but somebody had called him.

Looking at me, Locke asked, “Exactly where are the remaining suspects at the present time?”

“As far as I know, Bill Allred is still at home where he’s been most of the day. Steve Schumway is pulling a swing shift at the prison until eleven. As for Fuller, it’s hard to say. He usually works in his office until around six o’clock, and then goes home. Some nights, he stays late.”

“Then I suggest we get a team out to the prison immediately, and I believe I should assume command,” said Locke.

“No, I don’t think so,” Sloan said. “These are my employees, and they’ve sullied the reputation of an entire department.”

“All the more reason you should stay out of it,” countered Locke.

“They’re going to go down, all right, and the Utah Department of Corrections is going to take them down. It’s important to the future of this department for the public to see we’re not afraid to clean our own house. It’s also important for the morale of every honest man and woman who works for the department—and that’s ninety-nine percent of them,” said Sloan.

“But I insist,” Locke started to say when Sloan cut him off.

“No, Hyrum, you don’t insist. This is my party and you’re not invited. I’m afraid this is one time you’re going to miss out on a photo op.”

“You can’t do this,” said Locke indignantly.

“Watch me,” replied Sloan.

With that, a visibly angry Locke stormed out of the room and slammed the conference door behind him. While everyone else in the room maintained appropriate decorum during the tirade, I was grinning like a man who’d just won the lottery.

Sloan looked over at me, raised an eyebrow, and said, “Not a word out of you, Mr. Kincaid.”

“Yes, sir.”

***

We split into two teams. Kate, Stoddard, and I went to Bill Allred’s home. Sloan and the detectives from the Sheriff’s Office headed for the prison. I assigned Burnham and Marcy Everest to assist Sloan.

I was certain how Sloan intended to play this. Brad Ford would be lurking somewhere at the prison. Once the arrests were made, Ford would assemble the media and deliver a carefully worded press statement announcing the enforcement action taken by the department against four of its own staff. It was vintage Sloan engaged in damage control, doing the best he could to place a positive spin on a nasty department scandal.

Allred hadn’t left his home all day. When we arrived, Kate covered the back of the house, while Stoddard and I went to the front door. A subdued-looking Allred answered, and with as much bluster as he could manage under the circumstances, demanded to know what we wanted.

“Cut the bullshit, Bill,” I said. “For starters, you’re under arrest for three counts of conspiracy to commit first degree murder, and before it all shakes out, heaven only knows what else. Would you like me to read you your Miranda warnings?”

“Save it. I’m well aware of my Miranda rights,” he snapped. The momentary act of bravado had given way to a look of genuine desperation.

He turned to Stoddard, ignoring Kate and me. “My attorney is Franklin Meadows, and I want to make a deal.”

“Meadows is one of the best, and trust me, you’re going to need the best,” replied Stoddard.

“This is what I want. In exchange for my full cooperation, the death penalty is off the table. I want to be placed outside Utah in a federal minimum security institution, and I want you to go on record during my sentencing hearing that I cooperated fully,” said Allred.

“We’re getting a little ahead of ourselves,” said Stoddard. “Whatever we might decide to offer will be contingent upon how much you know and how fully you cooperate. Everything you’ve demanded is within our power to grant except a guarantee of placement in a minimum security federal prison. If the state agrees to pay to have you confined in a federal prison, the feds decide which one of their institutions you’re assigned to, not us. But until we know more, I won’t promise you anything.”

“For today, I’m invoking my constitutional right to remain silent and right to counsel. I’ll make no statement until I’ve conferred with Mr. Meadows.”

“Fair enough,” said Stoddard.

We released Allred into the custody of Sheriff’s Department deputies, who took him to the Salt Lake County Jail.

***

By the time we returned to the prison, Steve Schumway had been taken into custody without incident. He had invoked his right to remain silent and was demanding an attorney. Ford read a prepared statement to the assembled media, and then provided a photo op of Schumway as he was loaded into a waiting sheriff’s department vehicle for transportation to the Salt Lake County Jail, where he would join Allred.

Bob Fuller had left the prison earlier in the evening. His whereabouts were unknown. As soon as Schumway was driven away and the news media departed, Sloan pulled Kate and me aside and announced that we were taking a drive to the home of Deputy Warden Fuller. Burnham and Webb followed in Webb’s car.

Fuller lived in an upscale residential suburb of Salt Lake City. His beautiful home sat high on the east bench, where he had a spectacular view of the entire Salt Lake Valley. On the way there, Sloan reminisced about a long-dormant friendship with Fuller dating back almost twenty years. Sloan recounted years of camping, fly-fishing, and fall hunts that often included their wives.

“And then his lovely wife, Mary, died rather suddenly of colon cancer. I think it was about the time I became executive director, maybe five years ago. Bob never seemed to be the same after Mary’s death. Over time, we drifted apart and didn’t see much of each other.”

Sloan didn’t say anything else for several minutes. As I drove, he stared out the window into the empty night, lost in his own thoughts. He finally broke the silence, and in a melancholy tone of voice asked, “I wonder, if I’d paid more attention to our friendship after Mary’s death, if it might’ve kept him out of trouble?” It seemed a rhetorical question that neither Kate nor I tried to answer.

When we arrived at Fuller’s home, both the interior lights and the front porch light were on. It was almost as though he was expecting us. And maybe he was. Burnham agreed to cover the back of the house while Webb remained in front. Sloan didn’t anticipate problems, but I wasn’t so sure.

As I followed Sloan up the driveway, I turned to Kate and asked, “You wearing a vest?”

“Is the Pope Catholic?” she replied. “You’re not, are you?”

“Yeah, I’ve got one on,” I lied.

As we reached the front door, I was startled to hear Fuller’s voice over the intercom. “Please come in. I’ve been expecting you. I’m in the study down the hall.”

I didn’t like the feel of this and neither did Kate. We both unholstered our weapons and held them at our sides. Sloan walked into the living room and started down the dimly lit hallway, seemingly oblivious to the potential danger. Kate and I tagged along close behind.

Fuller was seated behind a large mahogany desk in a high-backed, black leather chair. The well-appointed office was shrouded in darkness, a small desk lamp providing the only light. Sloan wearily sat down in a chair facing the desk. He looked like a man carrying the burden of the world on his tired shoulders. Kate and I separated, moving along the office wall in opposite directions while trying to remain discreetly in the background. Fuller’s hands were folded and rested on the desk in front of him. Both hands where I could see them made me a tad less anxious. For a moment, neither man spoke. Sloan finally broke the silence.

“You said you were expecting us. How come?”

“Betty Schumway called me. She was upset to say the least—wondered if I knew what was going on. She’d seen your carefully orchestrated news conference on one of the local stations. I channel-surfed until I saw it myself.”

“For Christ’s sake, Bob, why did you do it?” Sloan asked. “You’ve not only managed to bring your own career to a disgraceful end, but look at the other lives and reputations you destroyed in the process.”

“Couple of reasons, actually. After Mary died, I bought a small ranch in Panama about an hour into the mountains outside Panama City—God’s country, a truly beautiful place. A gringo can live down there like a king if you come in with enough money. And I mean a king—cook, housekeeper, the whole package. I even had a young Panamanian señorita waiting for me. If you’re willing to lift a young woman out of poverty and treat her to the finer things, age differences don’t matter much down there.”

“For chrissake, Bob, you earn a decent salary. I just don’t understand,” said Sloan.

“Ah, but not enough money, Norm, at least not enough to live the lifestyle I had planned. And I almost made it—six more lousy months and I’d have retired, leaving all this shit behind.”

“And the other reason?” said Sloan.

“For whatever it’s worth, I never intended for it to go this far. I really didn’t. I’m not apologizing for taking from those asswipe convicts. They deserve whatever they get and then some.” A faint smile touched the corners of his mouth. “In a perverse sort of way, I got hooked on exploiting inmates. Imagine having the opportunity on a daily basis to threaten, intimidate, and take from a group of powerless lowlifes who have spent a lifetime doing exactly that to other people—kind of poetic justice, don’t you think?”

“Christ, Bob. That’s pathetic,” Sloan muttered.

Fuller continued, ignoring the insult. “But the killing, that was something altogether different. When we couldn’t get Vogue on our side, it threatened our entire operation. We couldn’t allow that to happen. We had reached a point where influencing parole release dates had become just as lucrative as the drug trafficking and protection rackets, and it was also a lot cleaner. Nobody in the Commission was particularly enamored with the idea of killing Vogue directly, so we came up with what we thought was a good idea—hire somebody who hated the man to do it for us.”

“Enter Charles Watts,” said Sloan.

“Yup. At first, we entertained the notion of leaving Watts alone after the hit. But we decided we couldn’t do that. He’s a druggie with a big mouth. At some point, he’d have gotten high somewhere and started talking. So we decided to take care of him ourselves—set it up to look like a suicide. As for Sorensen, not that he’s any great loss to the world, but we probably would have left him alone if you hadn’t discovered the staged suicide.”

“We didn’t discover the suicide,” replied Sloan. “The Medical Examiner’s Office did, but what difference does it make anyway?”

I stood transfixed listening to this sordid tale of greed and murder, knowing that not one word of what Fuller had just said would be admissible in court. The incriminating statement had come as the result of questioning without the Miranda warnings. A simple motion to suppress by a competent defense attorney would render the entire confession null and void. But Sloan was intent on ending this in his own way, and either was ignoring, or simply didn’t care about the legal niceties required by the justice system.

“You’re going to have to come along with us now, Bob,” Sloan said sadly.

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, old friend.”

I stiffened and so did Kate.

“The thought of spending the rest of my life in a cage waiting for the day the court appeals ran out, knowing you’d have to come for me for that last short walk, and then to go through the humiliation of having all those witnesses watch me die, hiding behind one-way glass—that’s not for me. I served my sentence each day I walked inside that prison. I wanted you to know how sorry I am for all this. I know I’ve let you down personally, and the department.”

Glancing over at me, he said, “Sorry about your family, Sam. I heard about that on the news too. We didn’t order that. Stimson went after you on her own. I knew she carried a grudge, but I had no idea she’d go this far.”

The room fell silent for a moment and I wondered what would happen next. For an instant, nobody moved. Then Fuller reached into his lap and brought a .357 magnum into view and shoved the four-inch barrel into his mouth. I heard Sloan scream, “No,” and start to rise from his chair as the firearm discharged. The force of the blast blew away most of the back of Fuller’s head, scattering brain, bone, and tissue on the headrest of the chair and the wall behind him. His open eyes stared vacantly at the ceiling, but saw nothing.