Guilty Minds

69

Art Garvin called me back about an hour later.

“All the MPD has on Tom Vogel is a PO box.”

“Where?”

“Thurmont, Maryland.”

“Shit. No street address?”

“No. Nothing. Buddy of mine who used to hang out some with Vogel says he built his house himself. He’s some kind of gifted carpenter. It’s big — he called it a compound. It’s out in the woods, sort of a remote location.”

I thanked him and hung up. Half an hour later, I met Balakian at a hipster coffee shop on H Street in a part of Northeast called the Atlas District. Indie rock on the speakers, exposed brick, and not a lot of seating. He was already at a table drinking something light brown in a bottle. I ordered black coffee, which seemed to disappoint the bearded barista, who probably wanted to draw a fern pattern in the foam of a cappuccino.

“Kombucha?” I said with a smile as I sat down with my coffee. I could smell the skunky odor of rotten oranges wafting from his cup, and I wrinkled my nose.

“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,” he said. He was wearing a tweedy checked jacket with a vest and a dark blue shirt and a scarf around his neck. “So, dude, I owe you an apology.”

“Oh yeah?”

“We found a print.”

“Where?”

“On a piece of broken glass.”

“The wineglass?”

He nodded. “I went back to the MCL and asked them to look for prints, just in case. So they took the broken pieces of the wineglass from the bathroom and processed them in the superglue fuming chamber. Pulled up a couple of partials and ran ’em through NGI.” NGI, for Next Generation Identification Program, was the turbocharged successor to the old national criminal fingerprint database, IAFIS.

“And you got a match.”

“Right.”

“Who?”

“One of ours. A retired MPD sergeant named Richard Rasmussen.”

I shrugged. I’d never heard the name before. “Let me guess. He works for Centurion Associates.”

He scratched his little beard and sipped his drink. He said nothing. My phone vibrated in my pocket.

“You have a print on what could be the murder weapon,” I said. “Isn’t that enough? Did you bring him in for questioning yet?”

“I think it’s enough. I wrote out an affidavit. It’s on my lieutenant’s desk.”

“When does it become an arrest warrant?”

“The lieutenant has to approve it, then it goes to the US attorney’s office, then it goes before a judge.”

“So you might not get an arrest warrant after all.”

“Might not. Anyway, I’m still circling. Part of the reason why I wanted to talk to you.”

“What do you want to know? I mean, I don’t know the guy — never heard his name before.”

“You’re doing sort of a parallel investigation. What’s your take on how it went down?”

“My take? The girl was paid to make a false accusation against Justice Jeremiah Claflin. To claim they had a sexual relationship.”

“Paid by the Centurions?”

“That I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Then paid by whom?”

“I’m working on that. She said it was an ‘organization of businessmen’ that paid her, that’s all she knew.”

“Go ahead.”

“I think the Centurions were brought in at first to protect her, to keep her from talking to anyone. Then to deal with her. First they tried to get her out of Washington, but I got in the way. They were afraid she’d start talking to me, I assume. She’d become a problem that had to be eliminated.”

“So why did she start talking in the first place?”

“I asked her questions. That was how it started. And she was scared. Maybe she felt bad about what she’d done. She had a conscience. Or maybe it wasn’t conscience at all. Maybe she was just scared she’d been caught in a falsehood. Whatever the reason, she started talking, and she had to be silenced.”

“And they staged it to look like a suicide.”

“Not too badly either. It convinced you for a while, right?” My phone kept vibrating. “Any luck on the call she placed from the room phone?”

“Yeah. She called a friend. I guess she just wanted to talk. She was scared.”

“And when she opened the door, at nine thirty-six?”

“Who knows. Rasmussen, probably. Maybe he said it was hotel security. Or the night manager. Or any of a number of things he could have said to get her to open the door. But open it she did. Then he left at ten twenty-five, when he was done.”

He took another sip of the vile brew. I pulled out the phone and glanced at it. Mandy.

“If you have Rasmussen’s print,” I said, “why are you still circling? Why not at least bring the guy in for questioning?”

“Frankly, because I’m getting heat.”

“From...?”

“My bosses. My sergeant wants this case closed — he doesn’t want me to keep stirring it up. He doesn’t want another murder on the books. I’m facing a lot of ridicule for persisting.”

“So why are you?”

“It’s... something just doesn’t feel right about this case.”

“Is that why you wanted to meet outside police headquarters?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know how... extensive the Centurions’ reach is.”

“Within homicide branch.”

He nodded, looked away for a beat. “There’s a reason why I caught this case. And just me, solo.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I’m a novice. They didn’t expect me to push too hard. They knew I wouldn’t make waves. And they could hang me out to dry if it came to that.”

“And who’s ‘they’?”

He shook his head. “I know how it sounds. Paranoid or something. But... here’s the thing. Somewhere between the lab and evidence control at the property division, the evidence got ‘misplaced.’”

“The shards of glass?”

“Right.” He opened both his hands, turned them up. “No one can locate it.”

“How often does that happen — that crucial evidence gets ‘lost’?”

“Once in a while.”

“Not very often, I expect. Does that screw the case?”

“It’s a problem, but not devastating. The shards were photographed on the scene and the fingerprints were recovered and kept separately. If it goes to court, the defense will probably raise a stink, but it shouldn’t make a difference.”

“So why are you still pushing? Didn’t you get the memo? The case is closed. It was a suicide.”

He shrugged, shook his head. “It’s not right.”

“You know the name Thomas Vogel?”

“Of course. The Centurions.”

My phone vibrated again. I took it out. It was Mandy. “Do you mind?”

“Go ahead.”

I answered it. “Hey, Mandy.”

“Heller,” she said. “I’ve got something.”

I heard traffic noise in the background. “Where are you?”

“Southeast. Anacostia. I just talked to that old cop.”

“Mandy, I told you, I don’t want you out there—”

But she spoke right over me. “Remember the retired police detective in Southeast? This old guy who says he covered up a homicide years ago?” I remembered: the story she was investigating just before the Kayla story broke, about some big-name Washington player. “Well, you were right. And now I understand why I had to be discredited. With that phony Claflin story.”

“The homicide — who was it?”

She told me.

“Holy shit,” I said.

“Hey,” she said, her voice suddenly loud and sharp. “Excuse me, what do you think you’re—?”

“Mandy, you okay?”

“Hey!” she shouted. The phone made funny jumbled, crunchy sounds, as if it was hitting the ground.

“Mandy? Hello?”

But there was no reply.