“So you think one of the murdered police officers was working with my dad on this?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Which one?”
“We don’t have much pointing to either Terrence Witherspoon or Brady Torres, two of the other officers killed. They stirred up trouble on their own. But it’s the odd man out in this situation, Clay Johnson, who might be the one we’re looking for.”
Libney raised her head when she heard Johnson’s name. “Who?”
“Clay Johnson,” I said. “He was a police officer with the Rockville force. Do you happen to remember him?”
She asked Paul something in Spanish. He shrugged and replied. She turned to me.
“He’s a big man? Black?”
“Yes.”
“He and Danny used to be frien’. Years ago. They met at the academy.”
“Did they stay in touch afterwards?”
“A few year,” she said. I was looking at her, but out of the corner of my eye, I could see Paul staring straight down at the floor. “Danny went undercover and then we never have friends over or see anyone.”
I stood and walked over to the TV stand. “Paul, the last time I spoke with you, there was a picture here, taken years ago. It seemed like your father, Bob Caldwell, and someone like Clay Johnson having a good time at a picnic. But you told me that you didn’t know any of the other victims when I asked.”
His eyes flicked up to meet mine. He didn’t say anything.
“The picture isn’t here now,” I said, and paused. “Is there anything you want to tell me?”
“No, sir,” he said, staring back at me. A change had come over him as my line of questioning had become obvious. He had straightened up where he sat and his face became impassive. Excessive formality—the unbreakable, millennia-old protection of the foot soldier—now enveloped him like a shield.
“No one’s going to dishonor your father's memory, or hurt you or your mother, Paul,” I said. “But I can’t say the same about anyone else. For all I know, the killer is planning on murdering another cop, maybe another officer that worked with Danny in this off-hours stunt. If you know anything, son, you have to tell me.”
“Sir, I don’t know. I was very young when my father knew these people—”
“You were almost a teenager,” I said.
“—and I don’t remember the picture you’re talking about.”
“You don’t remember it?” I said. “Or saying how that had been the last of the good times?”
He looked at me, his eyes flat. “No, sir.”
I returned his stare, giving him the chance, willing him to say something. When he didn’t, I nodded. “Well. Maybe we’ll be in luck and no one else will get hurt. My colleague is planning a raid on the gang’s headquarters. I just hope it’s soon enough to save anyone else who they may have targeted.”
Libney seemed about to say something, but Paul made a small motion with his hand and she went silent. When he spoke, his expression was tense. “When is this raid supposed to happen, Mr. Singer?”
“I don’t know, exactly,” I said. “Soon. If everything goes well, I’m sure Detective Bloch will be in touch to get your help with the prosecution. And to ask you some other questions.”
“Will you make sure to tell us anything you know? We’d like to know when my father’s killer will be apprehended. And punished.”
“I’ll do my best, Paul,” I said. His gaze held mine for a moment, then he nodded. There wasn’t anything else to say. I thanked them and left, taking my time walking out to my car, giving them every opportunity to stop me and tell me what they were hiding.
Chapter Twenty-Six
I called Bob Caldwell from my office. I hadn’t heard from Bloch, but I knew there wasn’t much time before his raid and, having been blown off by the Garcias, I was hoping maybe Caldwell would be willing to tell me something—anything—about Danny’s after-work hobby of taking out drug dealers on the q.t.
The phone rang about ten times before his voice mail came on and I hung up. I waited five minutes and tried again. I let it go eight times and hung up. I had done some doodling on a scratch pad while waiting for him to pick up. I had written
Danny — moonlighting
and then
partners?
next to it. Below those I’d jotted down
Felix Rodriguez
and drawn two arrows to each of the other words. In my boredom, I’d traced the words a half-dozen times and put small stars and squiggles radiating outward. So many, in fact, that there was no way I could use the paper to take notes, so I ripped that off and wrote everything down again. I tapped my fingers on my desk. I’d decided to call one last time when it rang in my hand. It was Caldwell.
“You wanted to get a hold of me?” he asked, his gravel-rock voice coming over the line along with the background noise of the waterfront.
“I’ve got a few more questions for you, thought it would be easier to catch you on the line than having you stick a gun in my face again.”
“What do you need?”
“We found some interesting things lately, chasing down some leads on Danny Garcia’s case. I thought you might be able to clear some things up for me.”
Caldwell’s breath came heavy and labored over the phone. “Yeah? Like what?”
“The primary thing is that it’s clear Danny liked to go hunting for scalps in his spare time.”
“What do you mean?”
“Busting dealers off the clock,” I said. “We found a cache of his down in Southeast. Not exactly a little getaway in the Hamptons. A cot, a kitchen, some guns. A med kit good enough for light combat. It looks like he used the pad to stage his side jobs.”
Caldwell whistled low. “You’re shitting me.”
“The thing is, Bob, it was too well-outfitted for a single guy. I mean, you can’t measure these things, but it didn’t look like he was doing this solo.”
“You’re looking for someone who might’ve been running with him?” he asked.
“Yes. Not to bust them, necessarily, though it would be nice if they left things like this to, you know, our legal system. But maybe the guys who knocked Danny off know who these other moonlighters are, you know? If they got it out of Danny before they killed him—and we know they broke half the bones in his body before he died—then there’s a good chance he might’ve given up a couple names. Names of guys they’re going to want to add to the list.”
“Assuming there were others,” he said, his voice even.
“Sure. But it’s safer to go with that than it is to throw our hands up and decide there wasn’t anyone else involved. Because if we’re wrong, then another cop might die.”
“You know who did Danny?”
“An out-of-towner from one of the Salvadoran
maras
is looking good for it. Chillo is his name.”
“Never heard of him. Who ordered it?”
“Felix Rodriguez. Heads up the MLA in these parts.”
He swore. “That piece of shit?”
“Looks like he did two of the others, too,” I said.
“Who else?”
“A beat cop named Witherspoon and an Arlington detective named Torres. In the Gangs unit.”
“They knew Danny?”
“No. Looks like they just got on Rodriguez’s hit list for sticking their noses in it too far. But I’m almost sure that Clay Johnson was mixed up in it.”
“Clay Johnson? Who’s that?”
“Rockville PD. Killed with the same M.O. as the others. I’m surprised you don’t remember him, Bob. I saw a picture from a barbeque years ago. It was of you, Danny, and Clay in the background.”
“You know from when?” he asked. “I don’t keep track of all the parties I go to.”
“This was at Danny’s,” I said. “Maybe ten years ago.”
“I don’t know, Singer. Before he went undercover, Danny and me got together a lot. There were always other cops showing up. Friends of friends. After he got the nod to go undercover, he stopped calling unless it was about business. Guess he got into the role.”
“So you don’t know Clay Johnson?”
“Nope. Sorry.”
“You wouldn’t happen to be the third guy on Danny’s team, would you?”
He laughed, a coarse sound. “You gotta be kidding. You saw me, right? I’m an old white guy with a bum leg and a sixty-pound spare tire. I got thirty-five years in, Singer, and I’m a couple months from retiring. Why the hell would I be running around blowing dealers away after hours when I could be on my boat drinking beer?”
“You don’t have to be an Olympic athlete to pull a trigger or drive a car, Bob,” I said. “You just have to be willing.”
His good humor drained away. “You can get fucked, Singer. Danny Garcia was a good cop, but if he wanted to waste his time capping punks who were going to get aced by their twenty-first birthday anyway by some
other
punk, then that was his business. I got the rest of my life to live and I can tell you the plan doesn’t include dragging ass around Southeast looking to get shot. I’m sorry about those other cops getting killed, but it sounds like you’d be better off running them into the ground instead of giving me a hard time. Now, you got anything else on your mind?”
“That’s about it,” I said, but I only got half my sentence out before he hung up. I put the phone down carefully. It had been a while since someone had told me to get fucked. It was a refreshing twist to the normal, implicit “fuck you” I’d been getting from everyone else.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I was looking at ties at the downtown Macy’s.
It had already been a long day, but I wanted to talk to Bloch. I’d called and he’d asked me to meet him at a noodle house downtown in the Penn Quarter. I told him I wouldn’t be able to stomach the smell, so we settled for meeting at Macy’s instead, where the odor of thirty kinds of perfume lingered in the air, even in the Men’s section. It wasn’t much of an improvement over the noodles.
“Singer.”
“Bloch,” I said, turning from a table of ties.
He stood beside me and picked up a tie, rubbing the material between his thumb and finger. “Four-dollar coffees, seventy-dollar ties. I gotta get out of DC. I can’t afford this place.”
“It’s the same everywhere,” I said. “They keep cops’ salaries a hair under the living wage. Keeps us hungry.”
He snorted for my benefit and we started walking. Just two regular guys, meeting mid-afternoon in a department store to talk about multiple homicides, gangs, and drug raids.
“You said you had something for me?”
I hung back to make room for a trio of twenty-something girls to pass, their eyes glittering with the prospect of shopping. It was never a good idea to get between a predator and her prey. “Yeah.” I explained the Redskins jersey and the picture I’d seen at the Garcias’ house. “I’m no sports historian, but I don’t think there was a number 69 about the time that picture was taken. And, with Johnson’s reputation as a womanizer, it would fit his…ah, juvenile sense of humor. So, it’s not much, but it got me wondering if that was Johnson in the photo. When I asked Paul Garcia and Bob Caldwell point blank if they knew the other victims, though, they both said no.”
“Maybe it was a chance thing. One cop passes another in the hall, says ‘Hey, I’m having a cookout at my place this weekend. Want to come over?’”
“And he runs the grill? And happens to be one of the victims in a serial slaying of cops?”
He made a face, impatient. “It’s strange. So what? It’s not against the law to lie. Doesn’t mean there’s a conspiracy.”
I looked at him. “You seem pretty eager to make excuses for a guy who begged me to look into this thing. What happened to doing the right thing?”
“We
are
doing the right thing. Felix Rodriguez did this and we’re going to nail his ass to the wall. I appreciate what you’ve done for us, Singer, I really do. I couldn’t have gotten anywhere without your help on this. But Rodriguez is our man.”
We’d walked all the way to Housewares. The row after row of convenient household goods, gleaming under soft fluorescent lighting, depressed me for some reason and I made a motion to turn us around. “You’re talking like this is a done deal.”
“Not exactly. But I got some good news today. We got the warrants to hit Rodriguez at home. Full-on raid with complete multi-jurisdictional support. We’re going to clean up that shitbird’s nest and put him and Chillo and the rest of his homies away for twenty to life, times three.”
“You can pin everything on him?”
“Garcia, Torres, and Witherspoon for sure. If a murder weapon turns up that helps us out, then they might go down for Okonjo and Johnson, too. We’re taking this to federal court. They’ll stomp on them with both feet.”
“Sounds nifty,” I said. “What are you thinking Johnson’s connection was?”
Bloch seemed uncomfortable for the first time. “I don’t know. I was hoping your trip to Rockville would let us tack that on top. Maybe he was dirty, like Torres. There’s a connection somewhere.”
“But you’re going to go ahead with a raid.”
He checked his watch. “Twenty-four hours from now.”
“Jesus,” I said. “You can’t wait? If you’re right about Johnson, a little more work and we might dig up the evidence you need to tie that to Rodriguez. Make things airtight.”
“Or Rodriguez might ditch the gun that shot them all,” Bloch said. “Or Chillo might be in a car heading back to Texas. No, I want to move now. We’ve got enough on him to hold him by the short and curlies as long as we need to. We’ll backfill the shaky stuff later or hit the jackpot when we tear his place apart.”
“You mind if I keep digging in my spare time? I still think there’s a connection we’re missing.”
We’d come full circle and found ourselves back in Menswear again. He straightened a crooked Sale sign. “Be my guest. But you might want to reserve a spot on your calendar for tomorrow night.”
My eyebrows shot up. “You want me to ride along on the raid?”
“Really and truly,” Bloch said. “As an observer only, of course. But I thought you might want to see the object of your search up close and personal. I’ll even let you kick him in the nuts if you want. After I do, of course. What do you say?”
My mouth went a little dry. Another chance to play cop a year after it had stopped being a job. “Sure.”
“Great. I’ll let you know where the meet-up is. We’ll fit you with a vest. You can back me up on the briefing. Hell, I should let you run it.”