Fish Out of Water (4 page)

“My vision started blurring,” he muttered. “And then there was a pain in my head and I blacked out. When I came to, I was handcuffed to the gurney and someone was reading me my fucking rights.”

The room fell suddenly silent. Ellery kept his eyes fixed on Kaden Cameron’s face. Partly to see if his client was telling the truth, but partly because….

Because Jackson Rivers was shock white, and perspiration had popped out on that high, fair forehead. He’d heard Kaden—there was no doubt—but Ellery was sure he’d had the story memorized the first time Kaden had gone through it, before Ellery had even arrived on the scene.

The detail about the dirty cops had thrown him and thrown him hard, and Ellery was suddenly burning to know more.

But not before he cleared one or two things up.

“Wait a minute,” he said, studying the crime-scene photo. “Wait—didn’t you say your video was disabled?”

“Yeah,” Kaden grunted. “And it shouldn’t have been. Denny and I, we work hard to keep that thing in repair.”

Ellery looked at the picture again. “I knew it—this is too clear to be a video picture. It looks like a camera phone. But… but Officer Bridger—the older officer, the one with the gun—he was calling it in, right? The one who snuck up on you and—”

“He snuck up on me because I was
drugged
!” Kaden snarled.

“I know that!” Ellery snapped. “I’m just saying. I don’t have any actual
crime-scene photos.
It should be too early for them at all. But now—I’ve
just got
this
one trying to pass itself off as something official. If Bridger was in such an all-fired hurry to get the ambulance for his buddy and get backup for you, who took the damned picture?”

Kaden stopped short and looked automatically at Jackson. Jackson took one last hard breath—and stepped forward. Ellery wasn’t sure what the man’s demons were, but he could be
very
sure of one thing.

Jackson wasn’t stupid either.

“Let me see that photo,” he demanded.

Ellery handed it over without conscious thought. He
should
dig in his heels a little, just so Jackson knew whom he could and could not fuck with, but damn, that guy had a
way
about him. Ellery was pretty sure his mother would cave to whatever Jackson Rivers asked for, and that woman didn’t cave to
anything
.

He heard Jackson’s swallow across the room, and Ellery’s curiosity about what could shake him up this badly began to burn a hole in his belly. Ex–law enforcement showed its mark all over him, but he obviously didn’t like cops, and what Kaden had described was…

Horrific. Something horrific had happened to him. Something so bad his friend had protected him from an ugly—and apparently accepted—fact of his everyday life.

“You were lucky, K.” Jackson’s gruff voice shocked the silence that had fallen. “I don’t know why he didn’t kill you.”

Kaden agreed. “It’s a fuckin’ miracle right there.”

Suddenly Jackson looked over his shoulder. “Hey, do you
have
a gun in the store?”

Kaden nodded, looking puzzled. “We do, but we keep it in the safe because we hate it. And it’s a .22, because who needs a fucking cannon. What the hell kind of gun
is
that?”

“SIG Sauer P229,” Jackson said absently. “It’s not standard police issue, but it’s one of the most popular handguns in the world, and I’ll bet it’s got a filed-down serial number—or a suspicious history.” He glanced from the picture he was studying to Ellery. “We need an independent ballistics match—can you request that?”

Ellery nodded and grabbed his pen to add it to the list of things he’d written there as Kaden spoke.

“Wait.” Jackson jerked Ellery over with his chin. “Look here—the edge of the photo. What do you see?”

Ellery left the table and peered over his shoulder. Jackson was actually shorter than he was, not that he carried himself that way. And he smelled… well, like sex. Like sex and faintly of tobacco and a little like sweat. A man who had been called out of bed early, perhaps? Whose bed was anybody’s guess—his reputation, from what Ellery could see, was well-founded.

An impatient rustle in front of him brought Ellery’s attention back to the photo, and he saw the border Jackson was outlining with a blunt finger. “I don’t know. It’s sort of red and blurry—”

“K, get over here. What does this remind you of?”

“My head
hurts
, Jacky—can you maybe come over here for the man with a concussion?”

Jackson gave an apologetic grunt. “Yeah. Sorry about that.” He circled around the back and held the photo out so they could both see.

“Oh… Jesus. Looks like one of Rhonda’s pictures. Her damned….” Jackson met his gaze and nodded. “Her damned cell phone cover overlaps the frame.”

Jackson met Ellery’s eyes with a gaze that could pierce steel. “We need to find out where this came from. See here?” Ellery had no choice but to look over his shoulder to see. “The reflection here? Those are jeans—this wasn’t taken by a cop, and certainly not by a forensics expert. This was taken by someone else. Why don’t we have regular crime-scene photos here?”

Ellery frowned and pawed through the brief like it would suddenly sprout legitimacy. “I don’t know—I mean, we shouldn’t have
anything
yet.”

“Yeah? Who was the tech?” Jackson thrust the brief at Ellery and paced, energy burning off his body like a lightning charge.

“It doesn’t say,” Ellery muttered. “I’ve been looking for a signature, a chain of evidence, but I’ve got nothing. I mean, this is a
cop
, and I don’t even have a preliminary forensics report.”

Kaden stared at him hard. “So doesn’t that mean no more case?”

Ellery grimaced at him. “That’s what it
should
mean, Kaden, but we’ve got two things here that might screw that up.”

Jackson and Kaden sighed in tandem and shook their heads.

“A cop and a black man,” Kaden muttered.

“A cop and a black man,” Ellery confirmed.

Jackson’s jaw clenched, and Ellery spoke quickly to keep him from grinding his teeth.

“Okay, we’ve got some places to start here. We’ve got Connie—because it’s awfully damned convenient that your guy calls in sick the night two cops come in for a shakedown.”

“But they weren’t trying to shake me down!” Kaden objected. “I’m not stupid. A cop asks for money and you hand it over!”

“Cops don’t ask for money,” Ellery said, feeling dumb. He felt even dumber when the other two men in the room grunted and rolled their eyes. “I mean I know there are dirty cops,” he defended. “But there’s not even any investigations into this area of the city. General consensus is corruption isn’t a problem here. I mean these guys don’t always follow procedure, but what you’re talking about is blatant—and widespread. How could they get away with this?” Oh God. Could he
sound
any more like an idealistic fifth grader?

Kaden started to laugh, and it wasn’t a pleasant sound. “Hey, Jacky, think this guy’s neighborhood can be seen from space?”

“Yup, K—it’s just
so
white.” They bumped their fists together then, like it was an old joke between them, and Ellery was no longer part of the Hardy Boys.

“I’m serious,” he said stonily. “I don’t know what happened here, but we cannot go into this thinking every cop is out to get us, or we’ll never get to the bottom of this.”

Kaden looked bored, but Jackson didn’t—he looked
furious.
With deliberate steps, he strode into Ellery’s space, backing him up until he hit solid metal.

“You listen to me,” he hissed, just as Ellery’s head made a painful thump against the door. “This man is my
family
, and if you can’t get him out on bail, he’s walking into a killing field, do you understand me? Prison is no good for Kaden—half our neighborhood went to prison, and they know he’s the friend of an ex-cop and they hate him. And if you
can
get him out on bail….” Jackson looked behind him, and he and Kaden communicated wordlessly. Jackson shook his head and turned that disturbing crystal-green gaze back on Ellery. “He’s going to be in more danger than ever. His bail hearing is tomorrow, and then we’ve got what? Three months? Four? Before the prelim?”

Murder? Of a cop? “It could be a year or more,” Ellery admitted.

“So if they go for a capital crime and there’s no bail allowed, that’s a year or more with him in a cell and his family out here trying to survive. If they
do
let him out on bail, that’s
months
for every crooked cop in Northern California to find a reason to stop him and beat the holy Mother of God out of him—”

“You’re exaggerating,” Ellery rasped. Those things didn’t happen in Sacramento. It was one of the most diverse cities in the country—people
had
to learn to live together or the place would be a war zone.

“Just because it
hasn’t
happened here doesn’t mean it
won’t
,” Jackson snarled. “And if it
does
happen and shows up on YouTube going viral, wouldn’t it be convenient if the cop we see beating my
brother to death
is actually a dirty cop covering a murder.”

Oh God. Yes. It was entirely possible. The penalties for policemen accused of racial bias were notoriously light. But—

“Not here,” Ellery said, praying he was right. “We have a black mayor—”

“We have a black
president
,” Jackson retorted. “If the last two years since Ferguson have proved anything, it’s that old prejudices don’t go away just because liberals like to hope a lot. Kaden can’t go to prison—he’ll never make it. And he can’t go free unless—”

“Unless we find out why this happened and all the bad guys are put away first,” Ellery said, his stomach knotting. Oh God. Jackson hadn’t been kidding—this was the case that could make a lawyer’s career.

Or it could shatter it into a thousand teeny tiny pieces.

Ellery could hear the three of them breathing in the silence that followed, and very quietly, Kaden make a soft groan of pain.

Jackson backed out of Ellery’s space immediately, and Ellery had just a little more air to breathe.

“K,” Jackson said softly, “we could let you go now to processing or—”

“I’ll get him into the infirmary,” Ellery said, surprising himself. “Has he seen his family yet?”

“In the hospital,” Jackson said. “Before they shipped him here and I got him into the interrogation room.”

Ellery looked at him sharply, and Jackson shrugged. “You’re right—not every cop is crooked, and I’ve got some contacts. He’s seen his wife and kids—and if you can get him out on bail, he’ll see them again.”

Ellery nodded. “I’ll see what I can do about getting him an overnight pass to the infirmary—to keep him out of general population. I can stay with him in there for a couple of hours.” Ellery glanced reflexively toward the door, where a guard waited patiently outside to take Kaden to his cell when his time with his lawyer was up.

Jackson backed up another step, giving Ellery some more space to breathe, and perversely, he missed that body, throwing off heat.

“So,” Jackson said after a moment that left Ellery adjusting his suit and looking surreptitiously at Kaden to see if
he
saw any… tension… in the way Ellery and Jackson were behaving.

It was probably all in Ellery’s fevered imagination anyway.

“So,” Jackson said again, taking a few steps toward the middle of the room. “We’ve got some leads. We need to trace the gun and the picture in the brief. We need to talk to Connie first; then someone needs to spend an afternoon analyzing that picture.”

“And I need to get hold of the
real
crime-scene photos.” Ellery tried not to harbor dark suspicions of being left to swing in the breeze by the DA’s office.

Jackson looked at him and swallowed, then closed his eyes. He turned to Kaden and said, “K?”

K shrugged. “You need to let him know how bad it could get.”

Jackson scrubbed his face with his hands. “Ellery, you need to type up your notes for your brief and let me see them—”

“I don’t need to—”

“We’re not doing this again, do you understand? Not with another lawyer. You need to type up your notes and let me see them, and then we can discuss whether you
really
want this case or whether you want to fucking bail.”

“Why does—”

“Because.” Jackson swung his arms wide, probably to relieve some of the tension. “You get your name on a request for another lawyer and everyone knows you saw it, everybody knows you elected to stay the fuck away. It’s your get-out-of-dead-free card.”

“You’re being dramatic—”

Jackson’s oxford was unbuttoned to the second button, a white tank exposed in the V at his throat. The sleeves were rolled up and it was—per usual, even when he wore a sport coat—untucked, which was why he could reach behind him, grab the back of the neck, and haul both shirts over his head.

Ellery’s mouth dried up, then his throat, then his eyeballs.

A giant flower of scar tissue bloomed right below Jackson’s collarbone, and another one at his midsection. Each bloom was accompanied by fissures, deep lines of stitching, layered, a thousand different ways to put a man back together one flap of muscle, fascia, and skin at a time.

“Those are….” Ellery managed to rasp, and Jackson raised his eyebrows. “Big,” Ellery said at last. “Those—usually bullets—” Usually a bullet scar looked smaller from the front.

“Hollow point, Teflon coated, went straight through the back of my Kevlar,” Jackson ground out. “See? You want to type up your notes. You want to review this case really good. And then, before you take Kaden back to the infirmary, you want to make really sure you want to stick around.”

Jackson pulled his shirt back on without self-consciousness and turned toward Kaden.

And broke. “I….” He scrubbed his face with his hands. “K, I swear to God, if you hadn’t been in the hospital, I would have smuggled you the hell out of town.”

“That’s illegal,” Ellery said and then felt stupid.