House Rivals (16 page)

21

Agent Bertha Westerberg was not amused. DeMarco figured the only reason she didn't take out her Glock and pistol whip him was that they were in a Starbucks and there were a dozen people nearby.

He'd called her and told her that he had information that would advance the case against Bill Logan and asked her to meet him. When she arrived at the coffee shop, he said, “You told me the cops suspected a guy named Roy Patterson of being one of the people who assaulted Sarah. I have Patterson on tape admitting that he was hired by a man named Tim Sloan, and Sloan is Bill Logan's ex-brother-in-law.”

“You what?” she said. “How did you . . . Let me hear the tape.”

DeMarco took his RadioShack recorder from a pocket and hit
play—
and a moment later Westerberg went berserk. “Jesus Christ! I should arrest you right now. You attacked a man with a gun, hit him at least twice, and threatened to kill him. I'm not even sure how many crimes you've committed. And who was with you?”

“Nobody was with me,” DeMarco said. He was not about to get Thorpe in trouble.

“I could hear you talking to someone other than Patterson on that tape,” Westerberg said.

“Never mind what you heard. The big thing is, I got the guy on tape admitting Sloan paid him to assault Sarah. What we need to do next is go see Sloan and get him to admit that Logan paid him, except with Sloan I won't point a gun at him. I won't have to use a gun because I'll have you with me.”

Since Westerberg didn't appear to know what to say—her lips were moving but no words were coming out—DeMarco kept talking, “The other thing is, if you play with that recording a bit, all you'll hear is Patterson confessing. I mean, we can probably fix it so you won't hear me telling him I'm going to shoot him.”

“Good Lord,” Westerberg muttered.

It took some time for DeMarco to convince Westerberg to go along with his plan. She didn't like it at all but could see the logic in it, and since she didn't have a better idea, she finally agreed. She knew that if she didn't make progress on the case, she'd never get Mahoney's big boot off her boss's neck. It took him a while longer to convince her to let him go with her when she interviewed Sloan. DeMarco basically said that it was his football—meaning the recording—and she couldn't play with his football unless she let him join her team.

They drove in Westerberg's car to Sloan's place in silence. He could see that Westerberg was still fretting over the legal position he'd put her in. Tough shit. He'd noticed that she was wearing different clothes today: she had on the jacket from the suit she'd been wearing the night he met her, but was wearing a T-shirt under the jacket and tight-fitting jeans that looked good on her long legs. It appeared that she'd found time to go shopping. DeMarco was wearing the one suit he'd brought with him to Montana and a white dress shirt but no tie. He was wearing the suit because the FBI guys he'd seen always wore suits.

Sloan lived on the second floor of a dilapidated apartment building. Westerberg knocked hard on the door, hammering on it with her fist like she was trying to wake the dead. They finally heard someone inside the apartment say, “Christ, hold on, I'm coming.” An emaciated blonde in her thirties—one who looked as if she might enjoy a bowl of crystal meth for breakfast—finally opened the door.

Westerberg held up her identification and said, “FBI. We're here to see Tim Sloan.”

“What?” the woman said.

“Let us in,” Westerberg said.

“What?” the woman said again.

Westerberg pushed past the woman without waiting for an invitation, and said, “Where's Sloan?”

At that moment a man walked out of a bedroom wearing faded jeans with a rip in one knee and a soiled white T-shirt. He was barefoot. Like his girlfriend he was short and skinny and his dark hair was long and disheveled, springing away from his head in all directions. His mouth hung open and his eyes seemed to have a hard time focusing. He didn't look like the brightest guy in the world.

“Mr. Sloan,” Westerberg said, “I'm arresting you for assaulting Sarah Johnson.”

“What?” Sloan said—and DeMarco was starting to wonder if these two people had another word in their vocabulary.

Westerberg marched over to Sloan and said, “Turn around.” When he just stood there, still confused, she grabbed his left arm, spun him around, and slapped the cuffs on him. “Let's go,” she said.

Sloan's brain finally caught up to what was happening to him. “Can I put my shoes on?” he said.

Before Westerberg could answer, DeMarco said, “No. They'll give you flip-flops at the jail.” It was May; his feet weren't going to freeze.

They led Sloan out to Westerberg's car and put him in the backseat. On their way to the Bismarck Police Department on Ninth Street—Westerberg's temporary headquarters—Sloan asked several times: “What's going on? Why are you guys doing this?” Westerberg and DeMarco pointedly ignored the questions, saying nothing, letting Sloan's anxiety increase on the short ride to the station.

They marched Sloan into the police station, DeMarco gripping his upper arm. The sergeant at the desk in the lobby appeared to know Westerberg and when she told him she needed to use an interview room, he didn't ask why, he simply directed her to one. Inside the interview room, Westerberg removed the handcuffs from Sloan's thin wrists and pointed him to a chair on one side of a scarred wooden table. She and DeMarco took seats across from him.

Sloan said, “I want to know what's . . .”

Westerberg said, “I'm Special Agent Westerberg of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and . . .”

“FBI?” Sloan said.

“. . . and this is DeMarco.” That was good, DeMarco thought: she didn't say that DeMarco was FBI—he was just DeMarco.

“As I told you at your apartment,” Westerberg continued, “you've been arrested for assaulting Sarah Johnson on the night of April—”

“Hey, I didn't assault anyone.”

“Sloan,” DeMarco said, “your buddy, Roy Patterson, gave me a recorded statement that you paid him and another moron named Mark Jenkins two hundred bucks to rough up Sarah. You knocked her to the ground. You touched her in inappropriate places. You threatened to rape her and kill her—and Patterson has testified that you did all those things. You're looking at five years in prison.”

DeMarco had made up the number. He didn't know how long Sloan would serve but he doubted it would be that long. But Sloan didn't know that.

“I think I need a lawyer,” Sloan said.

Before Westerberg could answer, DeMarco said, “You definitely need a lawyer. But we might cut you a break if you admit that Bill Logan paid you to assault Johnson.”

“What kind of break?”

Westerberg said, “You're in no position to negotiate, Mr. Sloan. All I can say is that we want Logan more than we want you, so it's possible you won't serve time if you cooperate.”

“I don't know. I think I should talk to a—”

“Do you want to spend five years in prison?” DeMarco said. “And do you think Logan wouldn't give you up if he was in your position?”

“He didn't pay me to
assault
her,” Sloan said. “You keep using that word. He told me not to hurt her. He just said to scare her, and that's all I did.”

“It was an assault,” DeMarco said, and took out his handy-dandy RadioShack recorder. “Now I'm tired of fucking with you. I want you to say, for the record, that Logan paid you to assault Sarah Johnson. If you don't, you're going to be formally charged and you'll spend tonight in a cell. Tomorrow you'll be arraigned and released on bail. That is, you'll be released if you have money for the bondsman. Do you have five or ten grand in cash?”

“No,” Sloan said. “I'm flat broke.”

“I want you to say: Bill Logan paid me to assault Sarah Johnson,” ­DeMarco said. He hit
record
and held the recorder near Sloan's mouth. After swallowing a couple of times, Sloan said, “Bill Logan paid me to assault Sarah Johnson.”

“How much did he pay you?” DeMarco asked.

“Five hundred. I gave a hundred each to Roy and Mark.”

“That's Roy Patterson and Mark Jenkins. Is that right?” DeMarco said.

“Yeah,” Sloan said.

“And why did Logan pay you to assault Ms. Johnson?”

“He said she was causing him problems by writing a bunch of lies about his business or something. I guess she was a reporter.”

“Did you kill Sarah Johnson for Bill Logan?”

“What!” Sloan screamed. “I didn't kill anybody.”

DeMarco hit the
stop
button on the recorder. “Okay,” he said. “Because you've been cooperative, we're not going to charge you. But if at a later date you retract the statement you made today or refuse to testify against Logan, you're going away for five years. And don't even think about calling Logan. We're going to arrest him shortly and if he's not where he's supposed to be, I'm going to assume you called him and then we'll haul you back here and charge you. Now get out of here.”

“How am I supposed to get back home?”

“I don't know and I don't care.” DeMarco said.

“It's too far to walk, plus I don't have any shoes.”

“Tough shit,” DeMarco said.

“And I don't have any money to catch a cab or a bus.”

“Once again, tough shit,” DeMarco said.

“Call your girlfriend,” Westerberg said, “and have her come and pick you up.”

“I could, but her license has been suspended,” Sloan said.

“Get out of here. Now,” DeMarco said, and Sloan shuffled out of the room.

“Well, I thought that went pretty well,” DeMarco said to Westerberg.

“I'm going to lose my job,” Westerberg said.

“Nah. Mahoney won't let them fire you. And if we get the people who killed Sarah, you'll probably get promoted.”

“I don't know what DeMarco's up to,” Heckler said to Marjorie.

Marjorie was still in the office, she'd been there all day, working on a dozen different issues, but the whole time she'd been working she'd been thinking about DeMarco and her partner.

“This morning I followed DeMarco from his motel to a Starbucks where he met up with that tough-looking gal,” Heckler said, “the one I told you about with a gun who looks like a cop. And by the way, DeMarco didn't do anything to shake a tail like he did last night. I changed cars so if he was looking for the car I was driving last night, he wouldn't see it.”

“The woman he's with is probably FBI,” Marjorie said. “DeMarco told me and Bill he had an FBI agent working on Johnson's murder.”

“FBI?” Heckler said.

“Yeah,” Marjorie said. She could tell by the sound of Heckler's voice that he didn't like the idea of following an FBI agent. “Anyway, continue with what you were saying. What happened after DeMarco met her at Starbucks?”

“They drove in her car to an apartment building on the east side, and a few minutes later they came out with a guy in handcuffs.”

“So who was he?” Marjorie asked.

“I don't know. Some little raggedy-ass doofus who wasn't wearing shoes. He looked like a homeless guy.”

“A homeless guy?”

“Yeah. Anyway, they took him to the Bismarck police station on Ninth and DeMarco and the gal have been inside the station the last half an hour. Maybe they're interrogating him, but I have no way to know.”

“A homeless guy?” Marjorie said again. “But they picked him up from an apartment building?”

“Maybe he was loitering around the building, sleeping in a stairwell or something. I don't know.”

Then Marjorie had a horrible thought: What if the homeless guy was a witness to Johnson's murder? What if he'd seen Murdock leave Johnson's house after he killed her? That would not be good. But if he were a witness, why would they arrest him? None of this made sense. “Find out who he is, Heckler, but stick with DeMarco.”

A moment after she'd disconnected the call with Heckler, Bill walked into the office. He'd shown up for work at ten that morning, looking hungover and as if he hadn't slept much the night before. To give him something to do, she'd sent him over to the state capitol to take the temperature on a bill that was winding its way through the senate. She was pretty sure the bill would pass—which was what Curtis wanted—and she'd told Bill to go see if it looked like they still had the votes.

“How are you doing?” she asked him.

“Fine,” he said. “And everything's on track with the bill.”

He went on to tell Marjorie who he'd spoken to over at the capitol and the number of votes it looked like they had for the bill. He seemed to be okay—not all mopey and listless like he'd been this morning—and from what he was saying it sounded as if he did his job the way he was supposed to. Still, making him take a vacation might be the best thing for both of them right now.

About five minutes after he spoke to Marjorie, Heckler watched the raggedy-looking barefoot guy come out of the police station. He stood on the curb, hoping from one foot to another like his feet were cold on the concrete. He appeared to be waiting for someone. A few minutes later an old Mazda sedan with a dent in the left front fender, driven by a woman with wild-looking blond hair, pulled up next to where he was standing and he got into the car. Heckler jotted down the license plate number.

Heckler called a guy he used in the DMV to find out who the car was registered to, but his DMV guy didn't answer his phone. Heckler left a voice message giving the license plate number, said he pay the usual amount, and asked the guy to get back to him as soon as possible.

A short time later, DeMarco and the good-looking FBI agent came out of the police station and got into the agent's car. Heckler let them get a one block lead on him before he pulled out of his parking place. Marjorie would be pissed if he lost DeMarco but he didn't care. He didn't like the idea of following an FBI agent at all.