Playing the Game (22 page)

            Finishing the article, I let out a low whistle. Surely the timing of this story couldn’t be entirely co-incidental, could it?

            ‘Save’s us a job at least’, Charlie smiled.

58

            Paul McCrane had been enjoying a leisurely breakfast with his family; a truly great way to start the day. He and his wife, Melissa, sat together at the table, enjoying a cooked breakfast, prepared by the housekeeper of course. His days were usually so hectic that he had long ago made the decision that breakfast time was family time. No calls taken and no interruptions.

Around them, their three children rushed around, readying themselves for school. Anna aged seven, Lucy aged eight and the oldest, Paul Junior, ten, all hurried around various parts of the house, looking for clothes, books and various other bits and pieces whilst the housekeeper kept telling them to hurry up; their lift would be here any minute.

            Although one of the most powerful men in the state, Paul McCrane liked to keep the common touch in his everyday life. The kids all went to the same public school as he had gone to; The Clover Avenue Elementary School. True, it was pretty much the top rated public school in Los Angeles, but it was a public school nevertheless. This was a fact not lost on the residents of Los Angeles, who held him with such high esteem and affection. His public persona as a tireless worker for several charities further endeared him and his Sunday mornings spent coaching Paul Junior’s school softball team was the icing on the cake. As far as the state was concerned, he could do no wrong. If only they knew!

            Finishing off his breakfast, he heard the doorbell ring and realised the housekeeper was now upstairs trying to keep the madness in some semblance of order. His wife rose out of her seat, but he stood up, kissing her on the forehead as he did so. ‘I’ll get it darling, you finish eating’. Never hurt to bank some brownie points!

            He made his way out of the kitchen and down the hallway, opening the front door fully expecting to see Paula Martin, the mother of Anna’s best friend, who was doing the school run that week. He certainly wasn’t expecting a member of the LAPD to identify himself as Will Harlow and then read him his rights.

            ‘Paul McCrane?’ Harlow asked, although he would have been an idiot not to already know that.

            ‘Of course’, McCrane answered, caught off guard in a major way. What could this be about?

            ‘I’m arresting you on suspicion of fraud and obtaining funds under deception. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense’.

            Unfortunately for McCrane, the arrest was word-perfect. Over the years he had seen so many cases dismissed simply because the arresting officer had misquoted the Miranda Warning, or missed bits out, or in some cases, not even used it.

            The irony of the government offering to provide a District Attorney with a lawyer was not lost on him, and judging from the smile on Harlow’s face, it wasn’t lost on him either.

59

            We picked up Barnes, who had unbelievably been pouring his first drink of the day when we got there, and brought him back to the station, leaving Captain Williams to delve further into McCrane’s arrest. We just needed a standard statement from Barnes, nothing more, so it was a fairly quick process. At least we had him on record stating that Sarah Caldwell had definitely been incarcerated at San Quentin and that he had definitely seen McCrane in Tassiker’s office. For all that was worth; I knew any defence lawyer in the country could discredit anything Barnes would have to say in any courtroom when they discovered the magnitude of his drink problem.            

            Just as we were about to find Williams to see what the state of play with McCrane was, my cell rang again. Seeing a familiar number come up, I told Charlie to go on ahead. ‘Hey’, I said, answering the phone.

            ‘It’s me,’ came the familiar voice of my ex-wife, Vikki. We’d been married for nine years and divorced for three, but had been together for fifteen years or so in total. It had been pretty amicable, more or less, the divorce. By that time, it hadn’t come as much of a surprise to either of us. I’d been working long hours for years, and by long hours, I mean
long
hours. Sometimes the cases I’d been working on demanded that. What was I supposed to do? Leave on time every day, regardless of where we were up to with a case? I think that was what I had been expected to do, but found that I just couldn’t do it. I’d become immersed in a case, and would give it a hundred percent until we caught whoever we were chasing at the time or the trail went stone-cold. I think that was the only way to do my job and I hadn’t even tried to change. That, without a doubt, cost me my marriage. Vikki had told me that if I paid as much attention to her as I did the various murderers, rapists and attackers I was chasing, I’d be the world’s greatest husband. I’d returned early one morning after another sixteen hours day to find her gone, belongings and all. She’d even taken our only daughter, Katie, who’d been fourteen at the time. In the fairly quick court hearing that had ensued, she’d gotten the house and full custody of Katie. That was pretty understandable given my line of work, and the hours I’d been doing, so it hadn’t come as much of a shock. As it was an amicable split and my agreed payments were received by her on time, every month without fail, she allowed me as much access to Katie as I wanted as long as it was agreed with her prior to that. That had been good of her; she didn’t have to do that. Again, due to work, it wasn’t as much as I’d like but I got to see her every other weekend and maybe four or five nights a month and I treasured every minute.

            ‘Hi Vikki’, I replied. ‘How are you?’

            ‘I’m fine’, she said, although I detected just a note of panic in her voice.

            ‘What’s up?’

            ‘Have you heard from Katie? She didn’t some home last night’, she asked expectantly.

            ‘I’ve not spoken to her since last weekend’, I replied, unsure how to take that news. ‘Have you tried all her friends?’

            ‘Of course I have’, Vikki said ‘You think I wouldn’t have tried that?’ I hadn’t meant to have sounded patronising.

            ‘Well she probably has some friends we don’t know about’, I placated. ‘She’s around that age isn’t she, maybe a boyfriend we don’t know about?’

            ‘You may not know your daughter very well, but I do’. Yep, she had to get that one in, didn’t she? ‘If she had a boyfriend, I’d know about it. I’m sure she tells me everything’. Although I didn’t doubt the bond between Katie and her mother, I doubted she told her everything. I certainly hadn’t told my parents everything when I was seventeen, and I didn’t think Vikki had either.

            ‘Look, I’m sure she’s fine’, I tried to calm Vikki. ‘She has probably lost track of time and got carried away somewhere!’

            ‘She’s never done anything like this before though’.

            ‘Well maybe she’s scared to call you then. She’ll know you’re bound to be angry’.

            ‘I’m worried, I’m not angry’.

            ‘I know you are. I’ll have her school checked out’, I told her. ‘I bet you an extra child support payment she’ll be there by the time the bell rings’.

            ‘I hope so’, she said. She sounded like she was fighting back tears. ‘Can you check now?’

            ‘Of course I can’, I reassured her, as Charlie reappeared. ‘Look, I gotta go’, I said noticing Charlie’s expression was ashen, and his eyes were wide with surprise. ‘I’ll call you when I know’.

            ‘Hey man,’ I turned to him. ‘What’s up?’

            ‘We’ve had another fax’. For the first time, I noticed he was holding a piece of paper. We had been expecting game number four to start anytime, and it looked like it had, although I’d been holding out for the slim possibility that The Chemist would have mercifully stopped and simply disappeared back under whatever rock she had crawled out from.

            ‘One minute Charlie boy’, I said. ‘Have to make a call first. Just had Vikki on the phone’, I offered by way of explanation.

            ‘No man’, Charlie took my arm. ‘We need to start this now’. He thrust the fax into my hands, not quite knowing what to say.

            I read it once, and fell to the ground as my knees buckled, feeling vomit rise from my stomach. My head was spinning and I felt like I’d just been hit with a sledgehammer. As I knelt on the ground, the fax which I had dropped upon reading landed on the floor, face up. It contained just five words this time. ‘Patton, I have your daughter’.

60

            ‘We’re sure this is The Chemist and not just some copycat winding us up?’ Williams demanded. Upon hearing about the latest fax, he’d dropped what he was doing with Will Harlow and rushed back down to us.

            I sat, almost unable to move, back at the table in the incident room; I’m pretty sure that Charlie had helped me up and had steadied me after I’d read the fax. I didn’t know why I hadn’t thought that Katie might be a target. As soon as I’d figured out why Sarah Caldwell was targeting me, I should have let Vikki and Katie know. And there-in lay another problem; should I tell Vikki now? After considerable deliberation, I decided I had to. But I would see what I could get out of McCrane first.

            ‘We’ll get her back, man’, Charlie did his best to comfort me. ‘We got Stella back didn’t we? I’m convinced we’d have found her anyway and we’ll find Katie in time, man, you mark my words, we’ll fucking find her’.

            I knew one thing for certain, whether we did or we didn’t, Sarah Caldwell had just taken this way beyond personal, and she would face the consequences of that when we met; and we would meet eventually. I was sure that Caldwell wouldn’t be satisfied with just Katie, surely she would want me as well? I just had to suffer enough first.

            ‘We’re sure it’s The Chemist’, Charlie replied to the Captain. ‘Katie is missing’. Not that we hadn’t been given everything we needed to assist us in the investigation thus far, Williams turned to me.

            ‘Whatever you need on this one, you’ve got it’.

            Despite the thought of Katie trapped somewhere similar to Stella, or worse, I knew that the best chance of getting her back was to remain focussed, and try and get whatever I could out of our good District Attorney. ‘Thanks Captain. That means a lot’, I noted. ‘What’s Harlow said?’

            ‘He woke this morning to an anonymous tip-off, including a file with all the pertinent material delivered to his house. You’ve read the story in the Times, it’s all there. McCrane and Jameson Burr, who we haven’t managed to pick up yet, it seems have pocketed around two hundred grand from a housing fund. There was more to incriminate McCrane than Burr, that’s why Harlow went for him first’.

            ‘Fuck the housing fund’, Charlie exploded. ‘We need to question him about Caldwell’.

            ‘I agree’, said Williams through gritted teeth. There was a knock on the door, and Harlow walked into the room.

            ‘Hey Cap’, he addressed Williams. ‘We’re about to start with McCrane’. He paused, noticing Charlie and I at the table. ‘Hey Patton, look I’m sorry about Katie’, he offered, looking genuinely upset. The news had obviously travelled fast. ‘If there’s anything I can do man, you got it’.

            ‘As a matter of fact there is’, I stood up. ‘I need McCrane before you have him. We think he knows who The Chemist is. We think
we
know who The Chemist is. We need to know what he knows’. Harlow for a minute looked like he wasn’t going to give us McCrane quite that easily but I think one look at my face told him that I wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

            ‘As soon as we’re done with him, man, he’s all yours’, Charlie added for Harlow’s benefit. Knowing he didn’t really have a choice in the matter, Harlow had to concede.

            ‘Let me know when you’re through with him’, he nodded. ‘I still want to take him down for fraud’. I reached out to shake his hand as a mark of my gratitude. It’s never nice when you make an arrest, only to have the suspect taken off you for whatever the reason, no matter how extenuating the circumstances.

            ‘Thanks a lot Will, I owe you one’. I cast my eyes down once more to the LA Times that still lay there from before; front page and story proudly displayed. Seeing the name of the journalist who broke the story, another thing occurred to me; and again it was something I should have already thought of. ‘Paul Britland-Jones’, I announced to the room.

            ‘What about him?’ Harlow asked.

            ‘I’m sure that was the reporter who questioned me after Andrew Caldwell’s death’. Not knowing the back-story, Harlow’s face was blank but Charlie and the Captain looked like they might know where I was going with this. ‘After Caldwell, Andrew Caldwell that is, was killed, he ran a story on it a couple of days later. It strikes me that a reporter doing research on that story would do some background on his family’.

            ‘Makes sense’, Williams affirmed. ‘Let’s bring him in then, see if he can give us anything to help the investigation’.  Seeing the despondent look on Harlow’s face, the Captain continued. ‘You can have him just as soon as we’re done with him Will’.

            I opened the door, ready to go and question McCrane. ‘Just one more thing Captain’, I turned back to Williams.

            ‘Like I said, Patton, anything you need’.

            ‘Turn the cameras off in the interrogation room McCrane is in’.

            ‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that’, if Williams was shocked at my request, he wasn’t showing it. ‘You know I couldn’t possibly do such a thing’, he added. ‘However’, he turned to Harlow. ‘Detective Harlow, would you be so good as to check that the door to the monitoring room isn’t open, and if it is could you please lock it? Wouldn’t want anyone beating Patton and Holland to interrogation three and turning off the cameras now would we?’