Right as Rain

33

That evening, the suicide of Eugene Franklin made the six o'clock news.

A resident in the apartment next door had heard a gunshot around noon and phoned the police. They found Franklin upright on the couch. His eyes were bugged from the gas jolt, and his nose was blackened and scorched. Blood and bone and brain matter had been sprayed on the walls and the fabric of the couch. His service weapon lay in his lap. A letter written in longhand had been neatly placed on the coffee table before him.

On the eleven o'clock news, Franklin's suicide was eclipsed by the discovery of a mass homicide on a wooded property at the east-central edge of Montgomery County. Six bodies had been found in various stages of decomposition. The police had been alerted by a friend of one of the victims, a woman named Edna Loomis. The friend, Johanna Dodgson, had not heard from Loomis for days and had called the local cops when her concern became great. After two bodies were discovered in the barn, and another in the house, police found three additional bodies, including the corpse of Edna Loomis, in a tunnel underneath the property. Johanna Dodgson had mentioned the existence of the tunnel in her initial call to the police.

The Out-County Massacre, as it was immediately dubbed by the press, dominated the news for the next three days. A rumor surfaced that one of the victims was a D.C. cop, and then the rumor was publicly confirmed. Drugs and large amounts of money were said to have been found at the scene. Another rumor surfaced, alleging that the suicide of Officer Eugene Franklin was somehow related to the Out-County Massacre, but this rumor remained unconfirmed. Police spokesmen promised a speedy resolution to the case, claiming that an announcement regarding the findings was 'imminent.'

Strange went to work daily and kept to his general routine. He followed the news reports closely but did not discuss them, except with Ron and Janine, and only then in passing. He phoned Quinn and spoke to him twice, and on both occasions he found him to be uncommunicative, remote, and possibly in the grip of depression. He visited Leona and Sondra Wilson briefly and was pleased with what he found.

It was a tentative time for Strange, and though he picked up a couple of easy jobs, mostly he waited. By the end of the next week, he welcomed the phone call that he knew with certainty would come. The call came on Saturday morning, when he was returning from a long walk with Greco, as he stepped into the foyer of his Buchanan Street row house.

'Hello,' said Strange, picking up the phone.

'Lydell here. You ready to talk, Derek?'

'Name the place,' said Strange.

Oregon Avenue, south of Military Road, led into a section of Rock Creek Park that contained a nature center, horse stables, and miles of hilly trails. A huge parking lot sat to the right of the entrance, where people met to train and run their dogs on the adjacent field. The parking lot was a popular rendezvous spot for adulterous couples as well.

Strange and Lydell Blue sat in Strange's Caprice, parked beside Blue's Park Avenue in the lot and facing the field. Blue's hair had thinned and it was all gray, as was his thick mustache, which he had worn for thirty years on his wide, strong-featured face. His belly sagged over the waistband of his slacks. He held a sixteen-ounce paper cup of coffee in his hand, steam rising from a hole he had torn in its lid.

Over a dozen large-breed dogs ran and played in the field, all of their owners white, well-off, and dressed in casual, expensive clothes. At the far end of the lot, near the tree line, a middle-aged man and a younger woman necked in the front seat of a late-model Pontiac.

'You shoulda brought Greco,' said Blue, looking through the windshield at an Irish wolfhound and a white Samoyed sitting side by side on a rise, a woman in a Banana Republic jacket telling them to hold from fifteen feet away.

'Greco's not a dog lover,' said Strange. 'Right about now, he'd be barin' his teeth at those two.'

'Wouldn't want to bust on all these folks' perfect day.'

Strange looked over at Blue. 'Tell me what you got, Lydell.'

'You gonna be up front with me if I do?'

'How long we been knowin' each other, man?'

'Okay, then. Okay.' Blue ran his thumb along his mustache. 'The cops who found Eugene Franklin found a suicide note at the scene. More like a confession, really.'

'You see the note?'

'Got a copy of it from a friend over in Homicide. Written with an ink pen on a plain white sheet of paper. Handwriting was clean and precise, like he was under no kind of duress when he wrote it. Signature on it matched the signature of Franklin we had on file.'

'What'd the note say?'

'Franklin admitted that he and Adonis Delgado were on the payroll of that drug lord, Cherokee Coleman. He detailed his role in the Chris Wilson shooting. How Wilson had gotten onto him and Delgado, and how Coleman had ordered a hit on Wilson. They used Ricky Kane, who was a drug dealer to the restaurant trade, not the clean-cut suburban boy the papers had made him out to be, to get Wilson out there in street clothes and make him look wrong. Franklin was supposed to shoot Wilson. But his partner, Quinn, who Franklin claimed was clean, shot Wilson first.'

Strange digested what Blue had told him. 'The news-people been talkin' about these rumors, that Franklin is somehow connected to the Out-County thing. If he was hooked up with Delgado-'

'Franklin put it all in the note. Him and Delgado were sent by Coleman out to that property to make a drug transaction, and also to kill the two wholesalers, Earl and Ray Boone. Somethin' about makin' it right for Coleman over two Colombians the Boones had murdered out there. That part checks out; two men were found in a tunnel on the property, their death date much earlier than the date of death on the Boones. They've ID'd the corpses as two Colombian brothers, Nestor and Lizardo Rodriguez, who were recently reported missing down around Richmond.'

'What about the Boones and Delgado? Who killed them?'

'Franklin claimed that he did. Claimed he had a crisis of conscience and had to end the whole thing the only way he saw fit. He and Delgado fought over it in the house, they went at it, and he killed Delgado. Then Franklin went down to the barn and shot the father and son. He left the drugs and the money sitting in the barn and drove back to D.C. Ate his own gun the next day.'

'There was a girl found in that tunnel, too.'

'Edna Loomis. Died of natural causes. That is, if you call a woman having a stroke at thirty years old "natural." Methamphetamine will do that to you, you ingest enough.'

'Hell of a story,' said Strange.

'Yeah. Trouble is, it doesn't check out.'

'What's wrong with it?'

'Plenty of things. Start with the crime scene, out at the barn and the house. Okay, so Franklin says he had a change of heart, and he and Delgado got down to it. Why was Delgado naked, then? And Delgado was stabbed. Why wouldn't Franklin just go ahead and shoot him like he did the others?'

'I don't know.'

'They found a boot print tracking out of Delgado's blood, too. Size twelve, I believe it was. Franklin wore a ten.'

'What else?' said Strange.

'The Boones were killed by the same type of gun, a Glock seventeen. But it was two different Glock seventeens that killed 'em. The markings on the slug found in the body of the son and another bullet found in the wood of the bar were inconsistent with the markings of those found in the father and those found around the father. The trajectory angles were inconsistent, too. There were two shooters that night, Derek. Had to be.'

'No fingerprints, nothin' like that?'

'No prints other than those of the deceased, Franklin, and another, unidentified woman.'

'A woman, huh?'

'They found vaginal fluid and pubic hairs in the same bedroom where they found Delgado.'

'The Loomis girl?'

'Didn't match. But if there was some kind of phantom woman there, it explains why Delgado died in his birthday suit.'

'Sounds like y'all got a genuine head-scratcher.'

'Uh-huh.'

Blue turned his head and stared at Strange.

'Why'd you call me here, Lydell?'

'Well, Derek, I'll tell you. I got an anonymous package in the mail, no return address, mailing label out of a printer just like any thousand printers in this city. Had Chris Wilson's investigation detailed in a notebook, and photographs of Franklin and Delgado headin' into Coleman's compound.' Blue took a sip of coffee. 'That was you sent me that, right?'

'It was,' said Strange.

'Didn't take a genius to figure it. You had called me and asked me to run the numbers of Delgado's cruiser, remember?'

'I do.'

'So tell me how you came to get all that information.'

Strange shrugged. 'I was hired by Leona Wilson to try and clear her son's reputation. Among other things, she wanted his name etched onto that police memorial they got downtown. I started by interviewing Quinn, and then Franklin, and the natural progression was to follow Ricky Kane and see what he was all about.'

'Okay. What'd you find?'

'Same thing Wilson did. Kane led me to Coleman, and that was when I noticed the same Crown Vic cruiser patroling the perimeter of the operation on two separate days. I called you and got Delgado's name. I found Wilson's notebook and the photographs and mailed them off to you. See, I saw that this thing was bigger than me, Lydell. I thought if y'all could connect the dots, Wilson's story would naturally get told. I didn't give a goddamn about no conspiracy thing, man, I was only trying to do what Leona Wilson had hired me to do.'

'A couple of cops came forward, said they saw you and Quinn talking to Franklin down at Erika's.'

'That's right.'

'They're gonna bring you in for questioning, man. They're gonna bring Quinn in, too.'

'You tell them I mailed you the information?'

Blue drank the rest of the coffee in one long gulp. He dropped the empty cup at his feet.

'They don't even know I got it,' said Blue. 'The notebook and photographs, they're in the trunk of my Buick, man. Gonna give it all back to you before you leave.'

'You can't use it?'

'How could I explain the fact that it was sent to me in the first place?'

'You couldn't, I guess.'

'Either I'd have to lie or I'd have to implicate you. And those are two things I'm not gonna do. Anyway, the department doesn't need the notebook or the photographs to make the case. Kane's been picked up. What I hear, he's already rolled over, and he's confirmed the background information that was in Franklin's note. They're gonna get him to turn Cherokee Coleman in exchange for some kind of country club jolt. Whether it sticks to Coleman or not, we'll see. Nothin' has so far.'

'Kane say how he got Wilson out in the street that night?'

'Kane said he heard that Wilson had a sister was hooked on junk. He told Wilson he'd found her and to meet him on D.'

Kane heard that Wilson had a sister… Lyin' motherfucker, thought Strange, tryin' to make himself look good.

'You knew about the sister?' said Blue.

'She lives with her mother,' said Strange, with a casual nod. 'Everything that family's been through, I'd hate to see that junkie sister rumor get thrown out to the press.'

'We know what that family's been through. How Kane got Wilson out to the street that night is immaterial. Far as anybody's ever gonna know, the sister's clean.'

'And Chris? What about him?'

'Yeah, Chris Wilson. It's delicate, how the department's gonna handle that. For obvious reasons, they don't want too much play on this bad-cop thing, and they don't want the public to think that what Wilson did – being some kind of rogue enforcer out there – is something they condone, exactly. In the end, I don't know how this will be spun for the general public. But I do know what they're saying about Wilson down at headquarters. He's gonna get some kind of posthumous, low-key commendation from Chief Ramsey.'

'Good,' said Strange. 'That's real good.'

'You stirred the pot, Derek.'

'I guess I did.'

'Funny about that other cop. Quinn, I mean.'

'Yeah. He's not gonna come out of this smellin' any better than he did to begin with.'

'You think he should?' said Blue.

'He made a mistake,' said Strange. 'I've gotten to know Quinn a little, and I can tell you, he's still payin' for what he did. I think he's always gonna pay.'

'Ending a fine young man's life the way he did, that's not just a mistake. And you can't tell me that if Chris Wilson had been white-'

'I know it, Lydell. You don't have to tell me, 'cause I know.'

Strange cracked his window. The afternoon sun had warmed the interior of the car.

'All the good people in this city,' said Blue. 'And all you ever hear about is the bad in D.C. Now you're gonna hear about bad cops, too, when most of 'em are good. And most of the people I come across every day, they come from good families. I'm talkin' about the people in the church, people who go to work every day to take care of their own, good teachers, good, hard workers… and here we are, all these years we been out here, fuckin' with the bad ones. Why'd we choose this, Derek?'

'I don't know. I guess it chose us.'

'If we'd only known, when we were young men.' Blue chuckled, looking over at his friend. 'Lord, I been knowin' you now for nearly fifty years. I even remember the way you used to run when you were a little boy, with your fists balled up near your chest, back in grade school. And I can remember the way you looked in your uniform, as a young man, back in sixty-eight.'

'Sixty-eight,' said Strange. 'That was some kind of year, Lydell, wasn't it?'

'Yes it was.'

A look passed between Strange and Blue.

'Thank you, Lydell.'

'You know how we do.'

Strange shook Blue's hand. 'So the department's gonna be callin' me in.'

'Any day,' said Blue. 'The way you just explained it-'

'What, somethin' about it you didn't like?'

'It was just a little rough, is all. I'd work on it a little, I was you.'

Strange returned to his row house and phoned Terry Quinn. He relayed the conversation he'd had with Lydell Blue.

'I hated to lie to my friend,' said Strange. 'But I didn't know what else to do.'

'I guess Eugene destroyed the original confession,' said Quinn.

'Looks like he did. The one the police found was written on plain white paper. I'm fixin' to destroy some things, too. Gonna lose the clothing I wore that night, my boots, my knife… you need to do the same. Get rid of your day pack and that Glock.'

'It's already done.'

'I don't like the way you sound, Terry,' said Strange. 'Don't do anything stupid, hear?'

'Don't worry,' said Quinn. 'I'm not as brave as Eugene.'

The phone clicked dead in Strange's ear.