Accused (3 page)

3

“No, he’s no friend of mine.” Carly seethed, peering into the backseat of a patrol car at the handcuffed minor. “He’s a friend of my mother’s.”

“Your mom hangs out with gangbangers?” Drake raised an eyebrow.

Carly sighed and tried to control her temper. The rain had stopped and she threw back her hood. “No, she’s naive. She counsels kids like him at her church and is friendly with his mother. This kid stayed at her house last summer. She insisted he was
saved
—you know, some kind of born-again Christian—and on the straight and narrow. His name is Londy Akins.”
A thug!
The argument with her mother over the boy still made her wince.

Kay Edwards’s words echoed in Carly’s mind.
“He needs a chance. How is he ever going to get back on his feet if someone doesn’t give him one?”

He got a chance all right, and he took his chance to kill the mayor!
Carly’s stomach churned at the thought that it could have been her mother’s body in the trunk of a car.

“You okay?” Drake asked.

“Yeah, I was just thinking. I mean, my mother let this kid stay in her guest room for heaven’s sake.” She pressed her palms into her temples. “I told her he was bad news, not to be trusted.”

“If you don’t really know him, why would he ask for you?”

“I have no idea. He’s certainly getting no sympathy from my corner.” She shook her head, face crinkled with disgust.

“Why don’t you ask him what’s up?”

“What would I say? He conned his mother and my mother, playing along like he planned to clean up his act, going to church, singing a few songs, all the while pulling the wool over their eyes. And now the mayor is dead.” Realizing her frustration was getting the better of her, Carly took a deep breath. It was Drake who helped calm her.

“Relax.” Drake put a hand on her shoulder and patted. “Our folks always do stuff to push our buttons, don’t they?”

“Yeah, they do. I’m sorry.” Carly felt her composure returning. “It’s a big sore spot with me. My mom’s a Jesus freak, and she has the idea that God can change anyone.” She looked from Tucker to Drake. “You guys know as well as I do—once a dirtbag, always a dirtbag.”

“I hear you,” Drake said with a firm nod. “Do you know what the kid has been arrested for?”

“He was on probation for car theft until about a month ago. And he’s a known gang member, been in and out of trouble since he was twelve. I think he just turned seventeen.”

She shot Drake a rueful smile. “Mom threw a big party for him when the probation officer released him. Supposedly he was going to go back to school to get his diploma.” She pinched the bridge of her nose as a headache bit with sharp teeth.

“Do you know anything about the other suspect, Darryl Jackson?”

She frowned. “Name doesn’t ring a bell.”

Carly brooded about her mother’s blind faith. It rubbed like a recurring blister, never healing and often swollen to bursting. According to Kay, church fixed everything—criminals, broken marriages . . . everything. Yeah, right.

Her father had been the same way: faith no matter what. Cancer took its toll on her dad, and Carly’s faith withered and died along with him. No God stepped in to fix him. She decided at his funeral that people made their own heaven or hell on earth. There was no all-powerful being running the show. God was a myth to delude the naive.

And faith in God left her mother wide open to a con artist like Londy Akins.

Peter Harris brought the coroner’s investigator to the car. Carly watched as the examiner bent over the trunk to do his job recording facts, inventorying property, and preparing the body for transport. Tucker and Drake joined them, asking questions from time to time.

She wondered what evidence might be wrapped up with the body. A coroner’s assistant wheeled a gurney close to the car. Carly looked away and took a minute to survey the rest of the area taped off as a crime scene. Her gaze traveled right to the face of her ex-husband, Nick Anderson. He was standing about forty feet away, on the perimeter, watching her thoughtfully.

Carly jerked her gaze away, feeling scalded by his eyes. She focused on Alex Trejo, haranguing the public information officer.
What else can go wrong today?

After a few minutes, Drake, Harris, and Tucker left the coroner and walked to where Carly stood, hemming her in.

Peter Harris began. “Look, we understand how you feel, but we need you to forget your personal attachment to this for a minute.”

“Let me lay out the situation for you.” Drake picked up from Harris like a zone-defense player, putting Carly in the middle of a full-court press. “So far we don’t have a lot of physical evidence—no murder weapon, no blood. We’re not even sure how she died. The adult demanded a lawyer, so we can’t talk to him. The juvenile
wants
to talk to you. A confession would go a long, long way.”

Both detectives pleaded with their eyes. Carly looked from one to the other, wondering how she could sit in the same room with Akins and talk to, not strangle, him.

“This is a huge case, Edwards,” Sergeant Tucker said. “When I talked to Sergeant Altman in juvenile, he assured me you’d do a good job. If you get a cop-out, it might even be your ticket out of juvenile.”

Tucker pushed the right button. More than anything Carly wanted a release from juvenile exile, and her supervisor, Altman, knew it.

“You guys know this will be hard.”

“Yep, we do. Just like interviewing a child molester. You hate the puke, but you gain his trust so you can hang ’im. You’re the only one who can. He doesn’t want a lawyer; he wants Detective Carly Edwards.”

About an hour later, the drab coroner’s wagon loaded up its cargo and headed for Los Angeles, where the county coroner would conduct the autopsy. By then, Carly had finished gathering all the information she could from the officers involved in stopping the Lexus. Drake and Harris were right; there wasn’t much physical evidence, not even of a robbery. The coroner found Teresa’s purse, cash untouched, beneath her body.

The detectives speculated that Londy and his buddy carjacked Teresa for the Lexus, but why kill her and leave her money? The autopsy might yield some evidence, but Carly knew the case could be sealed tight with a confession.

She watched the crime scene break down around her. The officers who’d arrested Londy left immediately after the coroner. Those with Darryl were just now pulling out. With the main players gone, the media filtered away, as did the onlookers. The last patrol officers on scene rolled up all the yellow tape while a tow driver hooked up Teresa’s Lexus.

Captain Garrison stood, arms folded, deep in conversation with Drake, Harris, and Tucker. Briefly Carly wondered if she really could change Garrison’s mind and be sent back to patrol.

Despite the media’s attempt to paint Carly as corrupt after the shooting, she’d been exonerated and cleared for full duty. Yet the captain wouldn’t release her from juvenile. What was he afraid of?

Carly sighed. Every question brought with it another question. She made her way to her car, happy with one small victory: Trejo was nowhere to be seen. She’d successfully avoided being savaged by him again.

“Hey, Edwards!” Sergeant Tucker caught her attention, calling to her as she opened her car door.

“Yes?”

“I forgot—Altman says happy birthday.”

4

Time to interview a murderer.

As Carly left the scene, she recalled being in a similar situation years earlier. Then she was a wet-behind-the-ears rookie, and a man who’d shot his wife to death walked into the station, handed her his gun, and confessed. The interview was short but damning, and afterward the killer stopped talking on advice of counsel. The jury convicted him and sent him to San Quentin, where he still resided. She felt proud of her part in seeing justice served for the victim. But that was a long time ago.

She took a deep breath and expelled it forcefully, tuning out a small voice that said she was rusty, out of practice, not up to the task of this interview. Big cases were few and far between, and her most recent huge event had been the shooting.

The shooting. Potter. Rivas. Trejo.
Her thoughts tumbled, unstoppable, back to the incident that sent her to juvenile, and suddenly it was that night and she was trying to stop Potter from reloading his gun. In an instant she’d seen that the man she fired at was no longer a threat. She could see the shiny object he’d dropped was not a gun, and that fact hit her like a hammer. She froze.
What have I done?

Potter jammed a fresh clip into his gun.

“Derek, stop! He’s down!” Carly leaped to Potter and grabbed his arm.

He looked at her as if she were an alien and shoved her away. Panic threatened, but sirens and headlights of approaching patrol cars gave Carly something to focus on. Training took over, and she stepped in front of Potter, yanking the radio from her belt to inform dispatch there’d just been an officer-involved shooting.

“1-Adam 7, 998, suspect down. We need an ambulance to the rear of our dispatch location.”

Assisting officers approached. Potter glared at Carly, but he holstered his weapon. The entire area quickly flooded with blue suits and strong flashlights, stopping one nightmare, but the aftermath of the shooting started another for Carly.

As she remembered that night, Carly would always reflect on the fact that she knew she and Potter were destined for trouble. The night had been shredded by Santa Ana winds, hot gusts that fanned tempers and blew irritation under people’s skin like sand. They began their shift assisting another beat with a bloody domestic disturbance call. Potter almost made a bad situation worse by treating the victim as if she were the suspect. Thankfully the beat unit defused the situation and Carly and Potter went back into service.

But it seemed to Carly as though Punch-Drunk was spoiling for a fight. More annoying than the wind, he bugged her. The way he talked to people, the way he tried to hotdog calls, and the way he kissed off minor stuff—all of it grated on her nerves.

They’d only made it halfway through the shift when they got the call that ended in the shooting.

Like stinging burns placed under cold running water, the images faded, without disappearing, from Carly’s thoughts. She slowed her car and swerved to pull into the drive-through of a fast-food restaurant, her grip on the wheel so tight she broke a nail. She waved a sheepish apology to the motorist behind her, who acknowledged her abrupt turn with a honk. The past was shelved in favor of the present. The rumble in her stomach reminded her she’d missed breakfast and lunch.

Carly fiddled with the broken nail while she waited for her order. It was easier now to shut out the images, but the feelings associated with the shooting would never fade. Powerlessness, anger, and guilt sometimes drenched her psyche like sweat.
I should have stopped Potter that night. He didn’t need to empty his gun.
Potter’s nickname went from “Punch-Drunk” to “Psycho,” his rep shoddy, and like being hit by the spreading ooze of a hazmat spill, Carly couldn’t help but be stained by his actions.

A picture of George Rivas on the ground in a puddle of blood sizzled in her mind’s eye. The shiny object in his hand was part of a crutch sharpened to a point for collecting aluminum cans. Eventually, the autopsy showed Rivas was hit twelve times; two of Potter’s rounds killed him. The rest merely did damage and inflamed the community. Both of Carly’s bullets struck Rivas in the right thigh. As to the original call, if there had been a man with a gun at the address, he disappeared with a hot Santa Ana gust.

The public saw an unarmed man shot multiple times. Accusations and ugly insinuations flew. Carly and Potter were, as a matter of routine, given different duty assignments pending the outcome of the internal investigation. Reporter Alex Trejo led the media attack, suggesting Carly had panicked. “Unarmed Man Dies in Hail of Police Bullets!” He blasted the department and both officers every time he had a chance. Because of the media circus, Potter claimed to be too stressed to work. He hired a lawyer and was off on paid stress leave while his attorney and the city fought. Carly had seen fights like that go on for years, with the city eventually agreeing to a stress-related retirement. But gossip about Potter said he was spinning his wheels and would eventually be fired. As for Carly, she wasn’t stressed; she was angry. She wanted to tell the press her story, distance herself from Potter, but an order from Captain Garrison to remain silent stilled her protests.

The transfer to juvenile, a low-profile, quiet detail, was set up for her own good, Garrison insisted, but to Carly it was punishment, a tacit admission she was a broken cop. On top of everything, Rivas’s family sued for wrongful death.

But Carly knew from her last conversation with the lawyers that the family was ready to settle and be done with it. In fact, time moved most people on to other things. Even Trejo backed off. His short attention span bounced him to the next juicy story. Only Garrison wouldn’t relent. Could getting Londy Akins to cop to murder really be the ticket?

Carly collected her hamburger and fries and continued to the station. She wolfed down her meal in the parking lot. When she finished, she looked up at the police station in front of her. The six-story blue-gray public safety building stood like a bland and imposing sentinel. She studied it for a minute, as if somewhere in the structure an answer was hidden. When nothing was forthcoming, she got out of her car and headed for the back steps.

“Hey, Edwards!”

Carly turned at the sound of her name and saw the public information officer jogging her way. “Soto, what’s up?”

“I guess your career is what’s up. I hear you’re talking to one of the mayor’s murderers.” He reached the back door as Carly keyed it open. Together they walked to the elevator.

“Yeah, it seems the kid knows me and wants to talk.”
Even Soto sees this interview as my chance.

“It will make a great press release, you know—‘Juvenile Detective Seals Fate of Mayor Burke’s Killers.’ I’ll write it pretty. Everyone will be impressed by the quick closure; I bet the chief will let you write your own ticket then.”

They reached the elevator. Carly punched the fourth-floor button; the PIO’s office was on the second.

Carly’s spirits rose faster than the elevator. “You can bet I’ll do my best. The kid won’t know what hit him.” A smile stole across her features, and she felt the frustration of earlier evaporate at the thought of making a true criminal pay. Good cops put bad people in jail.

Soto stepped off on the second floor and flashed her a thumbs-up. “Good luck. I’m off to punch out the press release.”

The elevator doors closed and Carly hummed to herself. James Brown’s “I Feel Good” crossed her mind, but she decided a high-pitched squeal wouldn’t be appropriate. She floated from the elevator to the juvenile investigations lobby. It didn’t even bother her that no one manned the desk and she had to ring the buzzer.

“Be out in a second” came a voice from behind the barrier.

Carly leaned against the reception counter and continued humming while she waited.

The heavy barrier door separating the elevator foyer from the offices and information desk was a remnant of an earlier time. Thirty years before, the floor had served as a jail facility, but the cost of running a jail rose too high and the city cut back. The fourth floor was decommissioned, most of the iron cell bars removed, and those that could not be removed camouflaged; but the repressive atmosphere of confinement could not be covered up. Juvenile investigators nicknamed the floor “San Quentin South.” Today, however, the place seemed a little brighter.

“Oh, it’s you, Crash. Having a good birthday?” Sergeant Altman smiled as he stepped out of his office to the counter. Howard Altman was an old-timer, like most of the personnel in juvenile investigations. A big man with a bald head and a face whose features belied his amateur boxing career, first in the Army and then in the police games, he could look scary, but more often than not there was a smile on his face. He’d been born and raised in Mississippi but came to California with the Army. Altman said he stayed because of the weather, and though he’d been on the coast for thirty-plus years, his baritone still sang of the South. The sergeant was a good guy to work for and about the only bright spot in juvenile. He hit the lock release to let Carly in.

“I think my birthday is going a lot better now than it was a few hours ago,” she said as she pushed the heavy door open and entered juvenile investigations.

“You lucked out with this interview,” Arnie, a day-watch detective, said as he stepped out of the hallway that led to juvenile detention. Arnie had the rep of being the best interviewer on the floor. He looked more like a CPA than a cop, but he was the go-to guy whenever anyone had a hard case. Carly had learned a lot from him during her tenure. “I was just back there checking out the rocket scientist you get to talk to.” He rolled his watery blue eyes, gaze going to the ceiling and then back to Carly.

“Do you think he’ll talk? Or invoke?” she asked. The death blow to an interview was the bad guy invoking his right to a lawyer. It wouldn’t hurt to have insight from Arnie on how to proceed to keep that from happening.

Arnie shrugged. “Move quick. My advice is to go straight for the jugular. Ask him why he killed her.”

“Relax, Crash.” Altman stepped to where she stood and squeezed her shoulder with a big hand. “You’re good at this; you’ll do fine.”

“Thanks,” she said as she turned toward her office. Altman always said the right thing.

“Maybe throw in the fact that the mayor’s husband is downstairs,” Arnie suggested. “That might put some fear into the kid.”

“What, is the mayor’s husband here?” She stopped her progress and turned back to the counter.

Arnie opened a newspaper and regarded her with reading glasses perched halfway down his nose. “Downstairs in the flesh. He and a couple of attorneys are in the chief’s office waiting to talk to Tucker and Garrison. Papa-doc is in there too.”

Papa-doc was a nickname given to the department’s psychologist, Dr. Floyd Guest. Big cases always rated the attention of the shrink. He tried to be everyone’s benevolent “papa.” No cops trusted him. She’d been ordered to speak to him after the shooting.

“On second thought, the kid probably doesn’t have anything to worry about,” Arnie continued with a shrug. “Burke’s probably glad his wife is gone. Now the limelight is all his.”

“Oh, come on, Galen Burke would be nowhere if it weren’t for his wife,” Altman protested. “She turned this city around, as well as Hubby’s sorry construction firm. Galen Burke is nothing more than a hanger-on, a gigolo.”

Arnie slapped the paper down. “You’ve got that reversed! Hubby was the brains; Teresa was just a pretty face.”

The two men continued the good-natured argument back and forth.

Carly entered her office and tried to tune them out as she formulated her questions. Arnie, like Altman, had twenty-plus years on, the average for detectives assigned to juvenile, except for Carly. Like most cops, they loved to argue and gossip.

Carly laid out the Miranda form that Londy would have to read and sign before she began her interview. She checked the batteries in her digital recorder and got out a notebook for handwritten comments. Though the interview would be taped, she liked to take notes on body language and other signs a voice recorder wouldn’t necessarily pick up. After placing a chair in position across from her desk, she walked back to detention to collect Londy. She paused at the detention door and dried sweaty palms on her pants. Londy would see only steel law enforcement resolve, not a woman feeling as though her entire life hinged on the next few minutes.

Time to prove to Garrison she wasn’t a broken cop.