Saturday
Chapter Twenty-six
Lieutenant Fassbinder called an all-hands meeting for ten. Everyone was fueling up on coffee and in a bad mood for being brought in on the weekend. Once again, Will was back on the fifth floor of 800 Broadway, sitting at his old desk. He was the only one not in a bad mood, and the reason, Cheryl Beth, was sitting in the waiting room.
“Ideas, people,” Fassbinder was saying, pacing a trench in the floor. His voice was businesslike, but his hands kept clenching and unclenching. “I need ideas. The brass are on me like white on rice and that means I’m going to be kicking every little turd from them right down on you. Ideas!”
“We need somebody with Cheryl Beth,” Dodds said.
Fassbinder stopped and gave Will a stare so filled with anger that no one would have been surprised if he had started foaming at the mouth. “I think Borders has that covered. Don’t you, Detective Borders.”
Dodds persisted. “Starting Monday, she’s going to be back on the job. She’s a target. Do you want me to replay…”
“No, I don’t want you to replay the goddamned recording. We’ve heard it five times.” Fassbinder stalked to Dodds’ desk and rapped his fist on it. “Do you know how much overtime this is costing?”
“The chief said we could have unlimited overtime,” Will said.
Fassbinder fixed him with the suppressed homicidal look again. “Well, your friend the chief doesn’t cut me that kind of slack, Borders. My old man wasn’t killed in the line of duty. I don’t limp with a fucking cane. It’s a week since Gruber’s death and we don’t have shit. That’s the world I live in. The only thing Covington has is your goddamned son as a person of interest. Your son!”
“John only stepped on the boat,” Will said. “After the murder took place. He voluntarily came forward as a witness.”
The lieutenant ignored him. “Do you know we have eleven open homicides this year besides Gruber and this kid in the graveyard with his cock cut off? Last year, we had seventy-two and half of them are unresolved.” He wheeled back around and continued pacing. “Skeen. You play nurse, starting Monday.”
“I hope it’s as much fun as playing doctor,” she said, but no one laughed.
That gave Will some piece of mind. So did arming Cheryl Beth. He had given her his old backup weapon, a snub-nose .38 Chief’s Special. It was small, lightweight, and lethal. When he handed it to her, butt-first, she immediately opened the cylinder to make sure it wasn’t loaded. Then she hefted it and did some dry-firing. Will had kept it clean and oiled for years, and the mechanism worked like new. She had been taught well by her father. He loaded the revolver and she gently slid it into her purse.
Fassbinder kept talking, “I’m bringing in narcotics and Central Vice to help tail Borders.” Everyone groaned and cursed. There was a long-standing feud between narcotics and homicide. Several years ago, a narc had tossed a firecracker into the homicide office. One of the old homicide detectives, now retired, had fashioned a bomb from a printer cartridge filled with shredded paper and set it off in narcotics as retaliation. It took them years to get the burned paper off the walls and desks. Unfortunately, Fassbinder had come over from narcotics four years before. So no one took it further than assorted “fucks” and “shits,” spoken in the tone of members of the police department’s most elite and seasoned unit.
“What do you want me to do?” Fassbinder said. “I need homicide detectives working this homicide case, not tailing Borders.”
“What if the killer is on the force?” Dodds said. “Whoever wrote that note knew Will was working the case. We need to keep this in-house, inside homicide.”
“No.” Fassbinder said. “What are you still doing on Gruber, Borders?”
“I’m going though her old arrests and I have a disk off her hard drive with twenty-one-hundred photos, give or take.”
“Hand off the arrest records to Kovach,” Fassbinder said. “He’s the new liaison with Covington, too. You’ve got a conflict of interest. Dodds, make sure you have the Gruber casebook from Borders. He can go through the pics while he’s sitting at home.” He wagged a finger at Will. “And that’s what you will do when you’re not on a PIO call. Now, people, listen up: I don’t want to get distracted with this Oxford homicide. Focus on Gruber. What do we know?”
Will said, “Lieutenant, Gruber is connected to the Oxford murders, and sooner or later somebody is going to put this together and it’s going to be public. We have four murders in four days committed by the same guy. Jack the Ripper only killed five in two months, and then he disappeared forever. What if this guy does the same? Covering our asses will be the least of our worries.”
“Oxford P.D. and Butler County have agreed to sit on our story for now,” Fassbinder said. “Nobody’s mourning Noah Smith and calling the media about him.”
“These killings are all connected,” Will said. “We need to go public.”
A long, furious silence sat in the room. Finally Will went through Kristen Gruber’s last twenty-four hours. She had worked day shift out of Central Vice a week ago Friday, made eight routine arrests, nobody resisting or making threats. She went off duty and spent Friday night with her sergeant friend at her condo. They had breakfast at First Watch at Rookwood Pavilion on Saturday morning a week ago. At 2:38 p.m., she
withdrew a hundred dollars from an ATM. Sometime after that, she took her boat out from the marina. Nobody saw her leave. Not one tip had a witness placing her on the water; therefore, they didn’t know who was on the boat with her.
Fassbinder said, “I want something real, and I goddamned want it before Sunday night.” He called out names and assignments, and Will knew springtime weekend plans with families were being demolished.
Will tried to stay in the zone of the previous night, with Cheryl Beth sitting astride him on the sofa and lying beside him in bed. He could still feel her sweet breath on his eyelashes. He said quietly, “I want to bring in Kenneth Buchanan for an interview.”
The room was silent for a good minute. Even the radio monitoring eight police frequencies didn’t make a sound.
Will made his case: the attorney gave a false story about his whereabouts a week ago Saturday night; he was Kristen’s estranged lover who said he was jealous of her other men, jealous enough to fight with her about it. He moored his boat next to hers at the marina, he phoned her on Saturday afternoon, and a middle-aged bald man had stalked one of the Oxford victims. Kenneth Buchanan was a middle-aged bald man.
“Are you out of your mind?” Fassbinder said. “He’d call every city councilman, the mayor, the chief, and have a harassment lawsuit filed first thing Monday.”