Powers of Arrest (Will Borders: Cincinnati Casebook 2)

“I don’t have any money. I’m over my head with student loans. You’ve got to believe me. I didn’t kill them.” After a long pause, he spoke again. “Do you believe me?”

“Yes.” Cheryl Beth felt the lie burning her throat.

Chapter Eight

The press conference began at five minutes after four at Cincinnati police headquarters on Ezzard Charles Drive. The city was under a tornado watch. When Will had reached the station two hours earlier to brief the brass, the air was thick with humidity and

enormous thunderheads were advancing over the Western Hills. Kristen Gruber’s parents had retired to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and the chief had called them personally, hoping to reach them before they heard about the murder from the media. Now the briefing room was bright with television lights whatever the sky outside had to say. All the local stations were there, plus a crew from Indianapolis and a freelance team. Half the room seemed to be sneezing and sniffling. Sinus Valley.

The chief stood at the center of the podium flanked by the lieutenant colonels that commanded different bureaus in the department. All wore black mourning bands on their badges. All were in full uniform, including the dark dress jacket. This was a good thing in Will’s mind, not only because the white uniform shirts of CPD overly reflected light and drove the television people crazy, but also because they made the cops look like ice-cream men. That, at least, had been Cindy’s joke. Will’s ex-wife had disapproved of his career choice with increasing intensity as their marriage went on.

White shirts and television lights. Will had learned about such arcana when he was sent to a special school for law-enforcement media officers. He had been drilled in how to handle the parry and thrust of difficult press conferences. Still, he felt ill at ease before the cameras, and today especially he was happy to stand off to the side of the brass, the only one in a suit. He gripped the edge of a chair with his right hand, subtly he hoped. His body was exhausted from the day and standing now was taking all his effort. Chest up, shoulders back, lats pulled down, diaphragm tight, all the things he had been taught. Still, his left leg was reliably thumping every eighteen seconds. You could set a stopwatch by it. He desperately wanted to hyper-extend the leg and let all the pent-up energy out, but he had learned the hard way that doing this would cause him to be in danger of falling down from the resulting spasm. So he put weight on it hoping the leg would calm itself.

He badly wanted to sit down.

The chief had served his whole career in the department. Like most officers, Will’s opinion of him was complicated. What was not in question was that he was very much a Cincinnati product: coming from old German stock west of the “Sauerkraut Curtain,” a graduate of Elder High School, and a cop who came up through the ranks. He stuck to his roots by bowling in a league at Heid’s Lanes. His trim figure looked good in a uniform, his sandy hair combed precisely into a style out of the early 1960s, his face still youthful for fifty-eight. Now he faced the cameras and gave a stoic account.

“Officer Kristen Gruber was found dead on a boat tied up on the Licking River this morning. We’re working with our colleagues at the Covington Police Department and the Kenton County Sheriff and treating this as a homicide. I can tell you she died of multiple stab wounds. I’m not going to go into details…”

Will knew the details. He stared into the lights and recalled the photos he had seen in Covington. Kristen had been handcuffed, hands behind her, and placed on a bench in the cabin of the boat. The assailant had used a knife to rape her. The genital mutilation was the worst Will had ever seen. At some point in the attack, the femoral artery in her right leg had been slashed and she had been left to bleed out. It appeared that bleach had been poured around her genital area, perhaps to corrupt DNA testing. Her face was untouched. Had she screamed out there? Would anyone have heard it? The blood volume was so high that it was still pooled when the first cops came aboard.

“…We intend to expend every resource in the department to find the vicious killer of a Cincinnati Police officer…,” the chief went on.

The boat was tied up on a deserted tract of the Covington riverbank. A kayaker had found it early this morning. The time of death was sometime between Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning; the medical examiner would narrow it further. The kayaker had been home with his wife during that time. Tracing ownership of the boat was easy: it belonged to Kristen. Other than the blood, the crime scene appeared surprisingly tidy. No bloody footprints or fingerprints were immediately found. Crime-scene techs from both CPD and Covington were still there when Will drove back downtown. The adjacent riverbank showed no recent tracks. Whoever killed her had probably come from the river.

Will heard a thunderclap from outside as the chief kept talking.

“…We will spare nothing to capture the killer or killers. We definitely want them badly…”

No knife was found on the boat. Divers had spent the day searching the river bottom, although Will was not optimistic. The lead diver told him what he’d heard before when evidence was being sought in the Ohio River: You can’t even see your hand in front of you down in that water. A search a mile above and below the crime scene along the riverbank hadn’t turned up anything but garbage, especially beer bottles.

The chief continued: “…I’ll take some questions now, but I’ll warn you that we won’t discuss details or anything that might jeopardize the case. I’ll close with an appeal to anyone who might have been on the Licking River on Saturday night or Sunday morning and might have seen anything suspicious, or seen this boat, to call us at this number on the screen behind me.” He read out the phone number, too.

Will was astonished that the first question was what would happen to the new season of Lady Cops: Cincinnati?

After the chief called an end to questions, the reporters obediently filed out one door, the commanders another. Cincinnati was that kind of town. People still played by certain rules. Will finally sat in the blessed chair, careful as always to make sure he was really centered because he couldn’t feel every part of his butt. The light returned to its normal unhealthy fluorescent glow, the four walls containing nothing but silence. His right leg jumped up violently. He forced it down with his hands and shook it, like someone with nervous leg syndrome instead of a spinal cord that had been chewed up by tumors and surgical instruments. He dry-swallowed his five p.m. Baclofen pill, tried to generate some saliva, swallowed again. Within a minute, the right leg settled down.

He felt the hand on his shoulder.

“How you feeling, Will?”

“Good, chief. I’m okay.”

The chief pulled up another chair and sat, an alert posture with his back straight and his hips near the edge of the seat. Will was finally full-back in his chair, grateful for the furniture under him, the weight off his legs, and a stable surface beneath him.

“How are our friends in the Commonwealth treating you?”

“Good. How can you not love a department who has a lieutenant colonel named Spike Jones?” Receiving not even a hint of a smile, he hurried on. “They have six detectives on this, between Covington and the Kenton sheriff. But they understand we’re going to want a big role. The dive team’s been in the river all day. I’ve sent crime-scene over to work with them. We should know more about the boat by tomorrow.”

“Good, good.” He nodded, looking Will in the eye. “You’ll tell me what you need from us? Resources, manpower. I talked to the mayor and city manager, and overtime won’t be a problem.”

Will nodded. He kept his own doubts and fears to himself. He wasn’t in good enough shape to be the lead detective, certainly not on such an important case. But he didn’t dare say no, didn’t dare show weakness. The city was struggling with budget cuts and Will knew he was lucky to have a job. He intended to keep it.

“Gruber was a good cop,” the chief said.

“Yes, sir.”

Will hesitated. “We’re going to need to talk to her boyfriend, if she has one. Ex-husband. The usual. I can coordinate all that. I’ll get a timeline of her past few days, see how often she went out on the boat and with who. But I also want access to her emails, work and home, phone records. She was on national television. She might have had stalkers. The other officers on the show, you might want to give them an extra heads-up. This might be a one-off killing, but you never know.”