First Offense (26 page)

“Yes,” Ann said meekly. “But that was different.”

Claudette shook her head. “No, Ann, just because you’re a woman doesn’t make it different. People believe the worst, like I just said. Some people think Sawyer’s a good-looking young guy. One of the typists saw him coming out of the jail the day he was released and thought he was a rock star. She was walking around telling everyone she’d do anything to meet him. Don’t you see what I’m saying?”

Ann gave her a wary look. “Do you believe it?”

Claudette gasped, placing a hand on her jaw. “Of course I don’t believe it. Anyway, go home and get some rest. If you want, take next week off and get out of town or something. Put all of this stuff about Hank and this Sawyer kid out of your mind.”

“I don’t have time to take off work,” Ann said forcefully. “In fact, I have to go to the jail and see Delvecchio right now. They called and said he was insisting that he had to see me. Maybe he’s ready to confess to the homicides.”

Claudette shook her head, thinking it was useless. Ann simply could not relax. “What happened with the dog bite?”

“I don’t know,” Ann said, desperate now to get out of the confining room and away from her supervisor. “Let me go, Claudette. I have to go.” When the woman didn’t budge, Ann shoved her aside and took off down the hall.

What in the hell was going on? she asked herself. First she was shot. Then someone broke into her house and almost raped her. Now she was getting phone calls from her husband, a man who’d been missing for four years. If Hank was alive, why would he call her and speak to her that way? On the other hand, the call supported her suspicions that he’d been the man in the driveway. No wonder she hadn’t been able to pull the trigger.

Reaching the doors for the elevator, Ann stopped and stabbed at the button again and again, breaking her fingernail off at the quick.

“Guess you really want to go down,” a man said, stepping into the elevator and then noticing her bleeding finger. “Gosh,” he said, “are you hurt?”

“Just a fingernail,” she said sweetly. “Typical female, huh? Break a fingernail, and you’d think we’d broken a leg. Guess we don’t have enough excitement in our lives.”

When the man laughed, Ann shot him a look laced with enough venom to drop an elephant.

Chapter
14

W
hen Reed returned to the police station, he tried to get consent from the captain to put together a surveillance team to watch Ann’s house. The idea that more than one person had been involved in the break-in was alarming, especially if the accomplice had taken a shot at her. The first possibility that came to Reed’s mind was the Colombians. Sawyer and his friends get in a mess, and their South American friends step in to do the cleanup. If this was the case, Ann’s life was in grave jeopardy, and he had to find a way to guarantee her safety.

The problem was manpower. They had a hostage situation brewing on the west side of town, two recent gang killings, and a number of men out with the same flu bug Whittaker had. Reed wasn’t prepared to spring the officers watching Dr. and Mrs. Sawyer’s house. He was certain Sawyer would return to his parents’ house, and then they could pick up the tail again. Ann was at work now. By tonight they should be able to cut someone loose to keep an eye on her. Unfortunately, as the captain had clearly stated, they were not in the private protection business. It would have to be catch-as-catch-can.

A records clerk walked in and tossed something into Reed’s in basket and started to leave. “What’d you give me?” Reed asked. “Is it related to the Sawyer case?”

“You asked for anything we had on the Henderson house. This is the only thing I could find.”

Reed picked up the paper as the records clerk left. It was an incident report filed by the traffic division several months back. Seems the neighbors had complained that the three boys were using the street as a racetrack. Of the three vehicles listed on the report. Sawyer’s Porsche was the only car that he recognized. As soon as they had learned the names of his roommates, Reed had checked the computer and obtained photos from their driving records and then run a check for any vehicles registered to Brett Wilkinson and Peter Chen. What he’d come up with was a Volkswagen Jetta and an older Ford Bronco. These were the vehicles he had informed patrol the suspects would be driving.

According to the traffic division’s incident report, however, Wilkinson was driving a brand-new BMW with tinted windows and skirts, gold trim on the emblems, the whole ball of wax. Chen, they said, was reportedly driving a new Lexus. Neither vehicle had hard plates, only paper dealer tags, and vehicles were not entered into the computer system until plates were issued. No wonder they hadn’t been able to bring these guys in. Reed thought. They were looking for the wrong cars.

Then another thought popped into his mind: where had they gotten the cash for toys as costly as these? Of course, he thought, the answer had to be drugs, but having that in black and white would be useful in court. All they needed was for Sawyer and the rest to stroll into the courtroom, claim they were recreational drug users, and end up with nothing more substantial than another slap on the wrist. In many ways, he knew Abrams had been right when he said they should concentrate on something they could prove. The shooting and break-in might never be substantiated, along with the fingers Ann was certain she’d seen in the Henderson house. But the drug-trafficking charges looked promising.

Reed called the dealerships and learned that all three cars had been recently purchased for cash. If this didn’t smack of drug money. Reed didn’t know what did. He started scribbling numbers down on a piece of paper and then added up the columns. The collective price tag on the three cars was over a hundred thousand dollars. He’d like to see Sawyer explain that away on the witness stand. He certainly wouldn’t be able to make up another story about his probation officer to cover himself on this one. And he doubted if even Dr. Sawyer would come to his rescue. If the doctor admitted giving Jimmy that much cash to buy the Porsche, he’d end up with a shitload of IRS agents on his back. No legitimate businessperson walked around with that much green.

Reed called the radio room and gave the dispatcher the new vehicle descriptions for Wilkinson and Chen, thinking that now they would be picked up.

As soon as he hung up the phone, he started thinking about Sawyer’s father and his open hostility toward Ann. What if little Jimmy ran straight to his father the moment the shit started flying, begging him to bail him out? Could the polished surgeon have backed up his son when he paid a visit to Ann? Maybe he had been waiting outside, and when he heard Ann’s first shot, he panicked and fired into the house to protect his son. Reed rubbed his chin. It was possible. The man had said he’d been in Vietnam. He’d have to know how to use a firearm. Of all the scenarios Reed had come up with, he personally liked this one the best. Not that it was necessarily true, but it gave him something to look forward to: cuffing Dr. Sawyer and tossing his ass in jail. Yeah, Reed said to himself, give me that one.

The phone rang and Reed grabbed it. Claudette Landers started speaking before the detective could even say his name.

“That you. Reed?” she said.

“Yes, what’s going on? Hell, I haven’t heard from you in ages, Claudette. Since you got promoted, you never come around.”

“Yeah, well, you’re hearing from me now,” the woman said. “Ann is flipping out on me. Reed. She thinks Hank is calling her on the phone.”

“What in the—”

She cut him off, telling him what the caller had said and Ann’s reaction. “So, she’s back to square one again, running off at the mouth about Hank. What are we going to do?”

“Maybe there’s some truth to what she’s saying,” Reed said, thinking out loud.

“What? Are you as wacko as she is? The only way Hank Carlisle could be alive is if the man purposely disappeared, and if he purposely disappeared, then tell me the reason why.”

Reed cleared his throat, sorting through his own thoughts. “There was something back then. I mean, it wasn’t general knowledge.”

Claudette was wound up. “Are you going to tell me or not?”

“Right before Hank vanished, a cache of narcotics disappeared from the evidence room at the highway patrol. They decided it was an outside job, but that still doesn’t mean he couldn’t have been involved in some way.”

“Shit,” Claudette said, the line falling silent for some time as they both considered the implications. “You’re a jerk, you know,” she finally said. “Why didn’t you tell me this when the guy disappeared?”

“His disappearance was classified as foul play,” Reed said defensively. He was still reeling from the news of Ann’s phone call, and this woman was getting on his nerves.

“I can see it,” she said slowly. “What if—”

“Look,” Reed said quickly, “I don’t want to sit here and speculate all day. I want to call Ann and see what she has to say.”

“She’s at the jail, and don’t you dare hang up on me,” Claudette said. “What if Hank stole those drugs, and then somehow got involved with this Sawyer kid, maybe trying to unload them? Then this would all mesh, you see?”

“Let me go, Claudette,” Reed said, groaning. The picture she was painting was one he’d rather not discuss. Cops committing felonies, dealing narcotics, this sort of thing made him sick. And Hank’s coming back to shoot Ann and kidnap her son was too contemptible to imagine.

“Go,” she said abruptly, immediately disconnecting.

Reed stared out over the room, taking in the cluttered steel-gray desks, the half-empty Styrofoam coffee cups, the poster of Marilyn Monroe Noah had tacked on the wall. Without conscious thought he reached down to the bottom file drawer in his desk and pulled out a bulging file. Reed had courted his own suspicions about Hank Carlisle at the time he vanished, but as the years clicked off and the man never surfaced, he had set them aside.

Reed knew things that the highway patrol investigation had failed to uncover about Ann’s husband, things Ann had kept carefully concealed. Hank’s childhood had been traumatic, bad enough to damage a person for life. In addition, the perfect marriage everyone had assumed simply did not exist. Oh, they had had their good times, and they had both adored the boy, but there had been plenty of times when Reed had asked himself why Ann stayed.

Rubbing his eyes, he recalled the early days following Hank’s disappearance. For the first month Ann had been unable to sleep and had staggered around like a zombie, trying to push her way through the days. By the second month her thinking had become so illogical that Reed had been forced to carry her physically to the emergency room, terrified she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The doctors had classified it as sleep deprivation and prescribed sleeping pills. What followed was even worse—Ann drugged most of the time, contacting psychics and all kinds of lunatics. On one occasion she’d even let a psychic claiming to have information about Hank take up residence in the house. She insisted the woman had to be close to Hank’s belongings in order to pick up the right vibes. It had taken Reed two weeks to persuade Ann to throw her out.

Damn, he thought, opening the file. Although he was no fan of Glen Hopkins, he’d felt a measure of relief when Ann finally had started dating. Now he just didn’t know. Was she tumbling back into the abyss again from lack of sleep and stress? Or was Hank Carlisle really a monster?

Reed rummaged through the paperwork until he reached the inventory of all the items the highway patrol officer had had in his possession at the time he disappeared. In particular, his eye rested on Hank’s revolver. As adversaries go, Reed thought. Hank Carlisle and that punk Jimmy Sawyer were worlds apart. He prayed Ann’s suspicions that her husband had surfaced were not valid. Hank was a trained police officer, a crack shot, and a shrewd man. He would balk at nothing, back down for nothing, and stop at nothing to get what he wanted.

Reed felt a shiver of strong dislike ripple through him. He had only feigned friendship with the man for Ann’s sake. For all they knew. Hank’s death had been a professional hit of some kind stemming from illegal activity. The incident had that distinctive odor to it: the lack of evidence, the car just sitting there with the doors open, not even a matchbook on the road to track down. Nothing. Too clean. Too neat. Professional, Reed had told himself. Even Melanie Chase had agreed with him, but they had also agreed that it was not right to voice their opinions to Ann. Such a burden would just make her loss more difficult to bear.

Reed was jolted out of his thoughts by a ruckus outside in the hall.

“Get the hell in there, you fucking asshole. Now,” Phil Whittaker was yelling, his voice nasal from his cold. “I have to get off my deathbed to track down scum like you.”

Phil shoved his prisoner, a young man in his early twenties, through the double doors leading into the detective bay. The man was handcuffed behind his back.

“Who you got there?” Reed said. Don’t say I never gave you anything,” Phil boasted. Tommy Reed, meet Brett Wilkinson. Hard to recognize him from his DMV photo, but I found the little fucker up at U.C. Santa Barbara. Of course, he’s not enrolled in the university. Tells me he’s just visiting some friends, trying to decide if he wants to enroll in January.” Phil stopped and sneezed, immediately reaching for his handkerchief. “Fuck this cold. And fuck you, Reed. You wanted him, you got him.”

Reed jumped up and pulled Whittaker to a comer of the room, leaving Brett Wilkinson standing there, looking around as if he didn’t know what he was supposed to do. “Why is he cuffed? I said I only wanted him brought in for questioning, not hooked and booked.”

Again the chunky detective sneezed. He pulled out his handkerchief, took one look at it, and tossed it into the trash can. “Wait a minute,” he told Reed, going for the nose spray in his pocket. “Wait a damn minute. I can’t breathe.”

Once he had medicated himself, Phil reached into his pocket and brought out a plastic bag filled with a variety of colored capsules. “Let’s see, we’ve got some speed here, some X—guaranteed to make you fuck for four days—and, let’s see, some ‘ludes, a few Seconal, a few hits of LSD. Shit, we have a regular little drugstore right in this bag. Ain’t that right, Brett? You a pharmacist, man?”