Close Case (22 page)

“After you get home. I promise.”

He looked at me with that expression I’d seen so many times now—too many times. It was a look of frustration and helplessness, resulting from his mistaken certainty that he could make everything better if I’d just let him.

“If you want to do something for me, talk to Mike. He’s prideful, and he’s taking it out on me.”

“I could say the same thing about you.”

“That I’m taking it out on you or on Mike?”

He shook his head. “I’ll see you at home.”

Heidi showed up at Papa Haydn on 23rd Avenue and Irving at seven o’clock, prompt as usual. To her surprise, Jack Streeter was already waiting for her in the cramped alcove. A relationship with the trusted public face of the police bureau already had its advantages. Heidi had spent countless hours over the years waiting for overage, trust-fund hippie kids.

“Hey, there you are,” he said, kissing her cheek. “Believe it or not, they’ve actually got the table ready for us, but I was afraid you wouldn’t find me.”

They followed their hostess past a crowd of waiting bodies to a table adjacent to the front window.

“I still love this place,” Heidi said. Papa Haydn had been an old standby for years, outlasting many trendy hot spots.

“Good. It’s important, you know, that the site of our first date still be open years from now.” He clinked his water glass against hers and smiled.

Heidi didn’t know whether that was the best first-date opening line she’d ever heard or a reason to be wary. She decided to give him the benefit of the doubt but to keep one eye open.

“I never even look at the menu. French onion soup to start, gorganzola pasta for dinner; then I evaluate the good stuff,” she said, looking over her shoulder at the long case of pies, cakes, custards, mousses, tortes, and tarts at the front counter.

When the waitress stopped at the table, Jack ordered for both of them, throwing in a bottle of Pinot Gris. Again, Heidi was torn between believing she’d found the man she was going to marry or the cheesiest chick magnet on the planet.

When the wine arrived and two glasses were filled, Jack lifted his for a toast. “To the prettiest crime-beat reporter I’ve ever met.”

“No, to the best,” she said, tapping her glass against his. Oh, God, she thought, was that confident and sophisticated or just really embarrassing?

“So how come I’ve never met you before?” Jack asked, setting down his glass.

“Honestly? Because I’ve been here for three years and never written a single inch of significant type.” Heidi gave him a quick overview of her paper résumé, skipping the part where she could have had a much more powerful position if she’d left it up to her parents.

“Got it. Not too different than life on patrol, where a quiet guy with a master’s degree in psychology gets less attention than a muscle head who shakes things up on the corner a little more than he should.”

“I take it you’re the psych degree?”

He filled her in on his credentials. “I thought I was going to be the male Clarice Starling, chasing down serial killers with my dead-on criminal profiles. Then I realized the FBI’s like joining the military; for all I knew, they’d send me off to investigate bank robberies in Alabama. I didn’t want to leave the Northwest—the mountains, the ocean, my family. So I joined the Portland Police. They decided they liked the way I talk,” he said, moving into a exaggerated announcer voice, “and look,” he added, striking an anchorly pose, “and here I am.”

“Do you miss the police work? I mean, not to say that what you do isn’t police—”

“I know what you mean. Yeah, I miss the adrenaline sometimes. But I think I do a lot of good as it stands. I control the message, and as you know that can mean everything. Not that I’d ever spin
you,
of course,” he said, smiling.

“Of course not. But, I guess I’ve heard it said that cops and reporters can have mutually beneficial relationships.”

“Exactly.”

Heidi had no idea whether this was intense flirting or grooming for a future story. “Is that what your friendship with Percy was like?”

Jack almost spit out his wine laughing. “I was sort of hoping that you and I would have something a little different than what I had with Percy.”

Heidi blushed. “I’m sorry. It’s just the most obvious topic, given how we met.”

“Right. So years from now, if we’re happily paired up, we’ll have to come up with another cover story, OK?”

“Agreed.”

“Good. But, to answer your question, yeah, I got along real well with Percy. We mostly knew each other through PAL.” He caught Heidi’s quizzical look. “Police Activities League. We do summer camps and after-school programs for kids. The bureau runs it, but we’ve got all kinds of volunteers. Percy was an absolute ten for us during the summers. OK, maybe a nine-point-eight. Man couldn’t play Ping-Pong for shit.”

“Wow. I don’t think I ever heard him talk about that stuff.”

Jack smiled. “No, I guess he wouldn’t. Can’t spoil that hard-nosed-reporter image, right?”

“Is that what he was like in your experience? Hard-nosed?”

“Yeah, I guess. But reasonable, for the most part. You knew him, so you know he never pulled his punches. But he always at least heard me out on the bureau’s side. And a couple of times, I think he actually toned a story down because of it.”

“You know those numbers I asked you for today?”

“Yeah. Did you get them all right?”

“No problem. Thanks. I asked for them because I think Percy was working on something involving them, but he never wrote the story, from what I can tell. I was hoping to put the pieces together, sort of like a posthumous thing for Percy. Did he ever talk to you about it?”

“No, but he could get those numbers without going to me. A public information request, maybe, or any of the sources you know the guy had.”

“Right, I’m just making sure. He might not have even put it in terms of these numbers, but did he say anything having to do with the racial makeup of arrests or anything like that? He seemed really interested in it.”

Jack shook his head. “Sorry. I can ask around the department—check with some of the guys who knew him—if you want.”

“No,” she said quickly. “It’s probably better if I figure out a little bit more before I start asking questions. I wouldn’t even know what to ask at this point,” she added, laughing.

“All right. Just let me know if I can help you.”

“It would help to know how exactly the information you gave me is compiled. Like, do the officers enter their own numbers, or do they report this stuff from their cars, or—”

“Boy, you don’t let up, do you?”

“I’m sorry,” Heidi said, meaning it. “It can take me awhile to get my head out of work sometimes.”

“I’ll tell you what: I’ll give you whatever you want to know about stop-and-search cards, if you promise to let me ask you a question next.”

“Deal.”

“It’s really very complicated,” he said, pretending to be deadly serious. “The officer makes a stop, maybe conducts a search, then fills out a little card that we keep in the patrol cars, saying what kind of stop it was, whether there was a search, and the race of the person involved. Then, at the end of the shift, they all drop their cards in a box in the report writing room. The shift sergeant reviews them—if he or she so chooses—and then delivers them to the records desk. Someone there enters each card into the computer. I hit
PRINT
, and you pick up your reports. Voilà! We are a well-oiled machine at PPB.”

“But can you pull the information up by individual officers?”

“No, just by precinct. The troops were mad enough about having to do it at all. You can imagine if we kept track of this stuff by individual officer.”

“If the cops don’t like it, why do they bother filling out the cards?”

“Because their sergeants want to make sure they’re doing what they’re supposed to. I don’t know where you live—yet.” He smiled, and she smiled back. “But in our hot spots, our most frequent calls aren’t for robbery or rape. They’re for stuff like loitering, graffiti, and street-level drug crimes. That’s the kind of stuff that makes a neighborhood
feel
unsafe. And, once it feels unsafe, the good guys start hiding inside and the bad guys take over. All the warm, fuzzy talk about community policing aside, our whole philosophy right now is to get our guys out there, talking to these kids on the corners, and stopping and searching them when necessary. The cards were required as part of the racial profiling stuff, but sergeants have been using them as a way to make sure the patrol guys are being proactive instead of sitting around eating doughnuts.”

It made sense to Heidi. “What about the cards? What happens to those?”

“Garbage. Or, hopefully, the recycling bin. Once it goes in the computer, we don’t need the card.”

“What about the officer’s police reports? Would those have the stops on them?”

“Nope. We don’t write reports for every encounter, just arrests or other incidents that need to be documented. That’s why they passed the law about the cards.”

“Can the press see those?”

“Usually, unless the case is sealed during the investigation. We keep a press binder in the records departments at the precincts with copies of recent reports. Your buddy Dan Manning trolls those every week. So did Percy, probably closer to every day.”

“So I could look through them too.”

“Just show your ID at the front desk. Are we done now? Can I ask my question?”

Heidi figured she better stop grilling Jack about record-keeping if she had any hope of a second dinner invitation. “Ask away.”

“What was it like growing up with a name like Heidi Hatmaker?”

It was the perfect question. Heidi told him stories about growing up with two sisters and a brother in Woodstock, Vermont, where the closest she ever came to evil was kids on the playground who called her Hearty Fartmaker. When he was still laughing by the time she’d finished the last drop of her French onion soup, she knew it was the beginning of a really good date.

Heidi was full of energy when she got back to her apartment after dinner. And coffee. And a walk through the Rose Gardens and the sweetest good-night kiss at her car door. There was no way she was going to fall asleep.

She took another look at the search-record printouts Jack had given her, comparing them to the identical numbers that Percy had recorded in his notes. The trend was clear: The cops were searching plenty of African-Americans in Northeast Precinct, then arresting them at lower rates than their Latino, white, and Asian counterparts. But without access to more information, Heidi had no idea who was responsible for the disparity or what it meant.

She thought about driving out to Northeast Precinct to look at the press binder of police reports, but it was a little too late to start a job like that. Then she realized she had been so focused on cracking the numbers Percy had been tracking that she hadn’t gone back to his original notes.

She had been able to rule out some of Percy’s entries because of their apparent connection to other projects, like the recent team-written article about Nike and Percy’s ongoing coverage of a former mayor’s newly emerged sex scandal. But there were more than a few odds and ends that could relate to Northeast Precinct.

Meeting dates and time were scribbled in the margins. Names, but apparently only first names: Tom, Peter, Amy. Recently, Percy had added a reference to Powell and Foster streets. Did he meet someone at that intersection? Had something important happened there? Percy had definitely never intended for these notes to be interpreted by anyone other than him. They could relate to anything.

Heidi did understand some of them, though.
Sat. 2:00 Kennedy School.
Given its placement in Percy’s book, the note had probably been made in the last month or so. The Kennedy School was the big McMenamin’s complex in North Portland. Chances are, he’d met someone at the bar, in which case she’d never know who it was or whether the meeting related to his investigation. On the other hand, the Kennedy School had meeting rooms.

She looked up the telephone number and dialed.

“Hi. I’m wondering if someone there could help me with sort of an odd request. I’ve got a monthly report due to my boss tomorrow where I’m supposed to summarize all of the meetings and conferences and things I’ve gone to, and I’m having a hard time reconstructing a few dates from my calendar. Is there someone there who could help me figure out what meeting I might have had there a few Saturdays ago?”

After several minutes of the loud background noise of Thursday night partiers, someone else picked up the phone. “Yeah. You need some help with the events calendar?”

She repeated her cover story.

“What Saturday was it?”

“I’m not even sure. Probably about a month ago. I think I’m getting early Alzheimer’s.”

“Happens to everyone. OK, let’s see here. Actually, we don’t have a lot of Saturday events. It probably wasn’t a kids’ party, right?”

“No.” It could have been, of course, but not if it was related to this story.

“Oh, was it the Buckeye Neighborhood Association meeting? Second Saturday of every month, two o’clock. Contact person: Selma Gooding.”

“Yeah, that was it.” Buckeye was a Northeast hot spot. “I can’t believe I forgot about that.”

“Well, the next one’s day after tomorrow, so don’t forget that one either.”

“I won’t. Thanks.”

Between losing the motion in Crenshaw, cutting a deal with a loser like Hanks, my blowup at MCT, and the fallout with Chuck at home, I had been grateful when one of the worst days in recent years had finally come to a close. Chuck and I had talked for hours but had gotten nowhere. The discussion had begun reasonably enough, with me explaining that I really had meant to tell him about my inheritance of the Hamilton case. But as we moved from topic to topic—covering the tensions between me and the other detectives, him and Mike, and him and me—it quickly dissolved into a long, frustrating night where we argued more about the things we said during the argument than any of the things that had necessitated the we-need-to-talk talk in the first place.

In the end, he wound up outside, tinkering with his car in the dark and leaving me to watch the
Daily Show
alone. He came to bed eventually, but the night was spent without the usual spooning.

If I had any hopes of things looking up with a new day, they were quickly squashed. When I woke Friday, Chuck had already left. A note on his pillow said he wanted to hit the gym before work.

Then, on the drive to the courthouse, I was pulled over for a rolling stop at the corner of my block. I didn’t recognize the young officer, but I made a point of holding out my District Attorney badge while I was pretending to fumble with my driver’s license and registration.

As he was writing out a ticket for running the stop sign, I was more explicit. “I don’t think we’ve met before. I’m at the DA’s office, in MCU. I live just back there,” I said, gesturing to my bungalow at the middle of the block.

“Nice place,” he said, smiling and handing me my citation. “I’d cut you some slack, but I wouldn’t want you to prosecute me for shirking my duties.”

Apparently word of the Hamilton case had gotten out.

Then came the grand jury hearing itself—the one I’d taken so much grief for, the one Russ Frist had told me not to worry about. My first witness was Marla Mavens, Delores Tompkins’s mother. She knew nothing about the shooting itself, but I thought the grand jurors needed to hear something about Delores other than the fact that she was shot by a cop. Mrs. Mavens brought a picture of her daughter and her two grandsons with her.

She told the grand jury that Delores’s only flaw in life had been her pattern of picking bad men for herself instead of finding her own way. The separate fathers of her two children were both long gone. More recently, she’d been seeing someone who seemed like a good man until Delores figured out that he was deeply involved in drugs, yet another disappointment.

Tragically, Delores finally seemed to be turning things around for herself in the weeks before her death. She had broken up with the louse in question, had gotten a job with benefits at a home improvement store, and had said she was working on something that made her feel special—something Marla had never heard her daughter express before. Marla had pushed to hear more about it, but Delores had wanted to keep it private. Now that she was gone, Marla would never know.

“Do you know why your daughter was in her car at three-thirty in the morning?”

Marla shook her head. “No, I can’t figure it. I was keeping the boys for her that night, like I do once a week or so. Or did. I’ve got them full-time now. But it wasn’t like her to be out late like that.”

“Can you think of any reason why she would try to drive away from a police officer during a traffic stop?” That was the kind of question I could never ask in court, where the rules of evidence actually applied.

“Delores? Oh, no. I can’t even imagine why she’d be pulled over, she was such a careful driver. But she certainly wouldn’t cause any trouble.”

After Marla left the room, I made a point of showing Delores’s PPDS printout to the grand jurors. No arrests, no convictions.

My next witness was Alan Carson, the Internal Affairs detective who responded to the scene of the shooting. With helmet hair and doughy skin, he looked like he’d sell Bibles door-to-door. From his assignment alone, I doubted that many cops outside his unit were friendly with him. But so far he had struck me as reasonable and competent, expertly reconstructing the incident based on the ballistics evidence.

He covered the few facts we knew about that night: Hamilton had discharged his weapon until it was empty, firing a total of seven bullets. Six of them penetrated the windshield of Delores’s Alero; three of them struck her—two in the head, one in the neck. No weapon or drugs were found in the car. Based on the car’s location when it was stopped and Hamilton’s location when he discharged the gun, the car could not have been moving faster than fifteen miles an hour when Hamilton started shooting. I might never be able to explain exactly why Hamilton had panicked that night, but I had enough to show he was at least reckless about the shooting, the standard for the manslaughter charge I was asking for.

When I walked Carson out of the room, I watched him pass the final witness waiting outside, Officer Geoff Hamilton. If looks could kill—well, it’s a damn good thing they can’t.

Hamilton didn’t have the right to an attorney during the hearing, so Jerome Black had to wait in the hall. I watched the grand jurors eye Hamilton while the foreman swore him in. He’d worn his uniform, much to my annoyance. His chubby face, stocky build, and boyish blond hair added to the appearance of earnest innocence.

“Mr. Hamilton,” I said, avoiding any mention of his official position, “we’ve already heard testimony establishing that you discharged your service weapon on the night in question, and that Delores Tompkins died as a consequence.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Shortly after the shooting, you had this to say.” I read the grand jury the terse statement Hamilton had given at the precinct. “Now you have asked for an opportunity to provide additional information to the grand jurors that you chose not to share with your own sergeant or with the officers investigating the shooting?”

“That’s correct, ma’am, after consulting with counsel.”

“Why don’t you go ahead and say what you’d like to say, then.”

“Well, I’ll start from the beginning. I initially noticed a black female now known to me as Delores Tompkins because she was crying in her vehicle, close to hysterical.” He had shifted into the formal tone officers tend to use during trial testimony. “Based on my experience, I thought she might have fled a recent domestic encounter, and I wanted to make sure she was not in any danger. I pulled my car to the left of hers at the red light at the intersection of Ainsworth and MLK, then rolled down my passenger’s side window and waved at her in an attempt to get her attention. The subject—”

“You mean Delores Tompkins,” I interrupted, trying to remind the grand jurors that she was the victim, not the suspect.

“That’s correct. Ms. Tompkins looked in my direction but abruptly drove away when the light changed. She then proceeded to turn right, moving westbound on Ainsworth. She then took a quick left on Garfield, then her next right. Based on her demeanor, the neighborhood we were in, and her erratic driving patterns, I suspected that the subject may have been under the influence of drugs and attempting to elude me. I activated my overhead lights, and the subject finally pulled over at Killingsworth and Mallory.”

“But we know that she was not in fact under the influence of drugs, isn’t that correct?”

“Correct, but I’m trying to explain what I thought at the time, based on my observations. Because she appeared to be attempting to evade me, I was interpreting the emotional demeanor I had witnessed earlier in a different light. Given the high-drug neighborhood, I thought it was at least a possibility that she was under the influence or perhaps looking to score.”

I nodded for him to continue, realizing that the training we give cops to withstand cross-examination was backfiring.

“She did finally pull over. When I approached the vehicle, I realized that her engine was still running. I ordered her to turn off the engine and step out of the car, but she attempted to drive away. Apparently, she had stopped too close to a vehicle parked in front of her to pull out. I then saw her reverse lights go on, and I stepped to the left to avoid being hit by the car. Once she backed up—barely missing me—I was situated in front of the subject’s vehicle. I unholstered my weapon and again ordered her to stop and to step away from the vehicle.”

Hamilton’s voice had taken on a new urgency. The grand jurors were listening intently, pens in hand but taking no notes lest they lose a word of the story.

“What happened then?” the foreman asked.

“I don’t know how to explain it, but she drove her vehicle directly toward me. It was so quick. I discharged my weapon, and to this day I replay it in my head, wondering if I could have done something different, but I couldn’t. She would have run right into me.” His voice cracked, and for a moment I thought he might actually cry.

I did my best to cross-examine him, but Black had earned whatever fees Hamilton had paid him. This was a well-prepped witness. He deflected all my questions about why he didn’t move out of the way, why he fired seven times, why he aimed at the driver instead of the tires, returning each time to the same theme: All of a sudden, I had a car gunning right at me, and I responded. He swore he didn’t even realize he’d fired all his bullets until he was told later.

He was a better witness than I’d expected, which indicated that a trial would be tough if it ever came to that. But despite Hamilton’s skills on the stand, I was confident that the hearing was headed toward an indictment.

Then the grand jury foreman asked the question that changed everything.

“Do you regret what happened?”

Hamilton paused for nearly a minute. When he opened his mouth to speak, he broke down. “Oh, God, you have no idea. I wake up every night wishing I’d let her hit me. You know, maybe I would have made it. But even if I didn’t, at least I wouldn’t be suffering like this. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I won’t let myself drink because I’m too afraid of what will happen. I took my weapons to my dad’s house, so I’m not near them. Even if I get reinstated, I can’t imagine ever being a cop again.” At that point, he finally did shed tears. One of the women handed Hamilton a package of tissues from her purse, and I knew I was in trouble.

When Hamilton left the room, I did my best to shift the tide. I reminded the grand jury how low the standard was for an indictment. I emphasized that Hamilton wasn’t being accused of intentionally causing Delores’s death, only of recklessness. I even pulled out pictures I had from the file of Delores’s head injuries.

But, a full hour later—the longest grand jury deliberation I’d ever witnessed—the foreman walked out of the room and handed me a slip of paper. No indictment, by a vote of four to three.

I walked back to MCU in a daze, wondering how I was going to break the news to Marla Mavens that a grand jury had decided her daughter’s killing did not even warrant a full trial. And, of course, I’d feel the wrath of Russ Frist. He had called Alice Gerstein four times in the last hour wondering why I was taking so long with a grand jury hearing.

“Oh,” Alice added, “that annoying little Lisa Lopez came by twice looking for you. I didn’t tell her where you were, but she assured me she’d be back soon.”

Of course she would. I thanked Alice for protecting me. Lisa’s the type who’d bang down the grand jury’s door if she thought her need to see me was urgent.

My plan was to call Russ first. As harsh a critic as he could be, I knew it would be less painful than calling Mrs. Mavens. As it turned out, a ringing phone awaited me.

“Kincaid.”

“Dammit, Kincaid, why didn’t you call me back? And don’t tell me for a second that Alice didn’t give you my messages.”

“She did, Russ. And, literally, I just walked into my office. I was just about to call you.” I really was.

“Yeah, right. You really need to keep me in the loop on things, Sam.”

Great. He was mad at me before I even got to the bad stuff. I broke the news anyway. When he was done yelling about brain-dead grand jurors, Russ was surprisingly understanding. “I’ll call Duncan.”

“No, I’ll take my lumps.”

“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, Sam. He’ll blow a gasket when he gets the news, no matter who tells him. If you’re there, he’ll rip into you, and the two of you will butt heads as usual. I can be a buffer and walk him through the stuff he really cares about.”

“Like—”

“You know, the fallout. Who’s going to be pissed and why.”

“Start by explaining it to me.”

“It’s not that bad. The cops might think we cut Hamilton a break. As far as the community goes, we can lay the blame for the loss on those lame-ass grand jurors. The split vote shows we tried.”

“Thanks, Russ.” I would make the compassionate call to Mrs. Mavens and leave the political massaging to my boss.

“No problem. Besides, how bad can he be to a guy sitting at home with Lyme disease?”

Alice Gerstein walked in just seconds after my call to Mrs. Mavens, when the lump that had formed in my throat was still threatening to squeeze up and burst into a sob.