Internal Affairs (14 page)

These questions had only just entered his mind, when he heard a faint
click
and a lamp went on his bedroom.

Rafe crouched, raised the Glock, then froze.

His sister, Kate, was sitting in the armchair he kept in the corner near the bed.

What the heck?

“Nice entry, little brother. But I had you for two or three milliseconds when you stepped into the doorway. You should’ve killed the hallway light first.”

Rafe stood up, his heart pounding. “What is this?” he barked. “What are you doing here?”

Kate gestured. “You want to put the weapon away?”

He’d almost forgotten he was pointing it at her. He lowered it, tucked it into his waistband and said, “That doesn’t answer my question.”

Kate got to her feet and approached him. He noticed now that she was holding a manila folder with a department tab on the side. A case file.

“Why don’t we start with your answering a couple of mine?”

Rafe frowned. “What’s going on here?” He gestured to the mess. “Did you do this?”

She shook her head. “But I know who did.”

“Who? Sloan?”

She shook her head again and waggled a hand toward his small two-seater dining table. “Let’s talk, all right?”

Moving to the table, she dropped the manila folder on top of it and sat, waiting for him to join her. He crossed to it, scraped the second chair back and sank onto it, feeling the Glock pinch at him. He pulled it free and laid it on the table.

“Okay,” he said. “Start talking.”

Kate nodded. “I have to say, little brother, I’m disappointed in you.”

“About what?”

She stared at him a long moment.

“Well?” he said.

She drummed her fingers on the folder. “You mind telling me where you were at around 3:30 today?”

Rafe felt his gut tighten. All at once he knew what this was about.

He’d been made.

He didn’t know how, but Kate wouldn’t be here if she didn’t suspect, or know for certain, that he’d been at Azarov’s apartment this afternoon. That
he
was the one she’d been chasing.

“I guess I don’t need to tell you that,” he said. “Because you already know.”

Her fingers went still and she slid the manila folder across to him. Rafe stared down at it, saw that the label read CASE 13-2257. HOMICIDE.

He flipped it open and found a photograph inside. One taken by a traffic cam as a car passed through the red at an intersection.

The car that had nearly hit him.

Rafe hadn’t even noticed the flash of the cam, but there he stood in living color, dodging that car, his face presented directly to the camera. Identification wasn’t iffy, it was crystal clear. The guy in the hoodie was, without a doubt, Rafael Franco.

“You care to explain?” Kate said.

Rafe lowered his head, could barely look at her. Kate had always had this uncanny ability to make him feel small. In her presence he was the screwed-up younger brother who couldn’t get anything right.

It was an unfair characterization, sure. But he felt it, nevertheless. Even though he knew she loved him fiercely and with all her heart.

What he always saw in her eyes at times like this was disappointment.

He finally looked at her again. “I was trying to get a lead on the killings,” he said. “I know I was out of line, but I was hoping to find a connection to Oliver Sloan.”

“Because of the ex-wife? Lisa?”

He nodded. “I need that guy put away. I don’t want him going near her again.”

“Sounds like you’re letting a certain part of your body do your thinking for you.”

“Yeah,” Rafe said. “My heart. I’m still in love with her, Kate. And I don’t want that creep terrorizing her.”

“Are you sure that’s all it is?”

He furrowed his brow at her. “What do you mean?”

She gestured to the folder in front of him. “Look at the next page.”

Rafe moved the photo aside and stared down at a department ballistics report. He quickly read through it, saw that the techs had found a match between the bullets found in the bodies of the Russians to a SIG Sauer that had been recovered in a search.

“You found the murder weapon?”

“Yes, we did.”

“Where?”

Kate was again silent for a long moment. Then she said, “I think you already know the answer to that.”

Rafe was at a loss. “I do?”

Kate nodded and hooked thumb toward his bedroom doorway. “They found it under your mattress, Rafe. Pretty stupid place to hide it.”

Intense heat rushed to Rafe’s face and his stood up, feeling his heart start to pound all over again.
“What?”

“Sit down, Rafe.”

“I don’t know what it is you’re accusing me—”

“Sit
down,
Rafe.”

Big sis again.

He took a breath, sat back down, waited for Kate to explain.

“I’ve known you all your life, little brother. You were never a stupid kid, and you’re certainly not a stupid man. Your work in the field, until now, has been exemplary, and I’m pretty sure you were on the fast track to Homicide. I don’t know that for sure, but there was talk about it.” She paused, reached across the table and tapped the ballistics report. “But this doesn’t look good, Rafe. As soon as Eberhart saw the photo and we realized who we were chasing this afternoon, he went straight to Internal Affairs.”

“What?”

“I tried to talk him out of it, begged him to give me a chance to speak to you first. But you know Charlie. Always by the book, and he never has liked you.”

“No kidding,” Rafe said.

“Internal Affairs tossed the apartment, found the gun, then rushed through the ballistics report.”

“This is complete nonsense,” Rafe said. “That gun isn’t mine.”

“Maybe so, but as I said, they found it under your mattress. And that isn’t all they found.”

Rafe furrowed his brow again. “I’m listening.”

She took hold of the ballistics report and flipped it aside. Beneath it was a printout of some bank records, the name RAFAEL FRANCO and his account number referenced at the top of the sheet.

Kate tapped one of the entries. “There’s a new deposit this morning. You want to tell me where you got that kind of money?”

Rafe zeroed in on the entry. It read $10,000.

He swallowed hard, his heart pounding again, not quite believing what he saw.

Where the heck had this money come...?

Then it hit him. Sloan. Oliver Sloan. The creep wasn’t coming at him with his ineffectual goons. No, that was too obvious, and likely to get Sloan in trouble.

This was a frame job, pure and simple. Sloan was framing him for the hit on the Russians.

Don’t think you’re gonna get away with this, hotshot.

“I’m being set up,” he said.

“Believe me, I tried to tell them that, but the boys in Internal Affairs aren’t buying it. They think you were paid to do the hit and were probably in Azarov’s apartment trying to plant evidence, pin it on Sloan.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding me. So, what...is IA in Sloan’s pocket, too?”

Kate shook her head. “They have to go where the evidence leads, Rafe. You know that. We all do. And right now it points to you.”

Rafe closed his eyes. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

“It took everything I had to convince them to let me talk to you first. That’s why I’m here.”

“You know I didn’t do this, right?”

Kate nodded. “I know you’d never hurt anyone. Not like this. Not unless it was necessary force. You were raised under the code, just as I was.”

He studied her eyes and knew she was being sincere. Not that he’d ever doubt her.

“So what happens next?” he asked.

“You know the drill. You’ll be booked and interrogated, unless you lawyer up. And I’d advise you to lawyer up.”

“I can’t say anything incriminating if I don’t know anything.”

Kate sighed. “Come on, Rafael, I know Ma didn’t raise an idiot. I’ll make some calls, get an attorney for you.”

“And then what?”

“What else? We fight this thing.”

“We?”

“You may be a bonehead, little brother, but you’re my blood. And blood is everything.”

She gathered up the photograph and ballistics report, returned them to the file, then closed it and stood up.

“Are you handling the arrest?” Rafe asked.

“Nope.”

“IA?”

She nodded, then took her cell phone from her pocket, dialed a number and murmured a few words into it.

As they waited for IA to arrive, Kate said, “By the way, you almost gave me heart attack this afternoon with that little running stunt. It took me ten minutes just to catch my breath.”

“Sorry about that.”

“Just do me favor,” she said. “Next time I yell at you to stop, do what I say, okay?”

Chapter Nineteen

The boys in Internal Affairs were a humorless bunch. But then Rafe figured it was hard to have a sense of humor when 90 percent of the department despised you.

They put him in an interrogation room and fired questions at him, using the usual IA bulldog approach, trying to intimidate him, wanting to know who had ordered the hit and why. But Rafe took Kate’s advice and immediately lawyered up.

In his experience, a perp who called in an attorney right away only made himself look more guilty to the people investigating him. But at this point, Rafe didn’t care what they thought. If he started flapping his mouth, they might misconstrue something he said as evidence of his involvement in the crime, or even an outright confession.

Most of the people they brought into these rooms were indeed guilty of what they’d been accused of. But Rafe was one of the exceptions, and much to their frustration, he wasn’t about to give them ammunition against him.

The lawyer was there within an hour of his confinement. A small, compact, athletic guy with short-cropped hair and an expensive suit. And Rafe wondered if he’d be able to
afford
the guy.

But then he was $10,000 richer, wasn’t he?

Sloan had made sure of that.

The next hour was spent being hammered by another round of twenty questions, only this time the lawyer, whose name was Chaplin, shut the investigators down at every opportunity.

They didn’t like him much.

When they realized they were getting nowhere, they hauled Rafe off to a holding cell and let him sit there the rest of the night.

And all he could think about, as he stared at those cement walls, was finding a way to make bail, clear his name—and, most important, protect Lisa and her little girl.

Whatever it took.

* * *

H
E WAS ARRAIGNED
the next morning at 9:00 a.m., sharing the perp bench with an accused car thief and an armed robber. It was ironic to be sitting here in the very same court that Sloan had sat in yesterday—only Rafe, even with his cop family, didn’t have the kind of connections that would spring him.

He was charged with two counts of first-degree homicide and gave the judge a loud and forceful “Not guilty” when asked how he wanted to plea.

Arraignments are by and large a formality in which every defendant pleads not guilty. It’s rare for an arraignment judge to allow any other plea, for fear the defendant hasn’t had a chance to consult with an attorney. Better to take a “not guilty” and accept a modified plea later, should the state and the defendant reach an agreement before trial.

It had always annoyed Rafe when the news media went into a frenzy of outrage over a high-profile defendant who had declared himself not guilty. If they were honest in their reporting, they’d tell their audience that this was standard practice in any criminal court.

Once Rafe pled, the judge said, “As to the matter of bail, what’s the state’s recommendation?”

The prosecutor, a fat man in a thin man’s suit, cleared his throat. “This is a heinous crime, your honor. Two men shot dead in cold blood. So we ask that the defendant be held without bail.”

Not what Rafe wanted to hear, but he wasn’t surprised.

“You’re honor,” his attorney said. “My client is a well-regarded member of the law enforcement community. He has no prior record, no means for flight and is in no way responsible for these two deaths. We’d ask that he be released on his own recognizance.”

“You can set that pipe dream aside,” the judge told him, “but I’m not going with the prosecution’s recommendation, either. Bail is set at $2 million.”

“But, your honor,” Chaplin cried, “that’s as good as setting no bail at all. My client doesn’t have the means for that kind of bond.”

The judge pounded his gavel. “Not my problem, counsel. Next case.”

As they moved aside to let the next attorney and his client step up to the bench, Chaplin said, “Not the outcome I was hoping for, but don’t sweat it. You’ll be out in about two hours.”

“How?” Rafe said. “I don’t have that kind of money. And neither does my family.”

“But you do have an angel on your side.”

Rafe studied him. “Angel? What are you talking about?”

The attorney hooked his thumb to the gallery behind them and Rafe turned, surprised to see Lisa sitting in the back row.

Had she been here all this time?

She was watching Rafe with concern in her eyes. Gave him a small wave.

He waved back, then turned to Chaplin. “Are you saying she’s putting up on the bond?”

“Putting up her
house,
as a matter of fact. Which is kind of ironic, since it was paid for by Sloan.”

“I can’t let her do that.”

“What are you, nuts?” Chaplin said. “It’ll be at least two months before your trial starts. You want to be sitting in a cement room all that time?”

“But it’s her
house,
” Rafe said.

“Relax, Franco, it’s just collateral. She doesn’t lose anything as long as you show up for your court dates. And you don’t strike me as the kind of guy who would skip out on court.”

“Why’s that?”

Chaplin smirked. “You’ve got a family full of cops. Where you going to hide?”

* * *

“Y
OU REALLY SHOULDN’T
have done this,” Rafe said.

They were sitting in back of a cab, headed toward Rafe’s apartment. He noted that Lisa was wearing a gray jacket for the occasion, one he had given her for her twenty-first birthday. It was a bit dated, fashionwise, and he was not only surprised she had worn it, but that she’d kept it at all.