Shakedown

Chapter Fifty-five

At eleven o’clock, I walked out to the nurses’ station and asked a nurse if she could update me on Kate’s surgery. She started to say no but then I began to shake and she said she’d be right back. I hate pity, but I’m not above exploiting it.

She returned a few minutes later and told me that Kate’s surgery would last at least a couple more hours and that she would be in recovery for another two hours after that before I could see her. I thanked her and went back to the waiting room, sat down, and stopped shaking. If only it were that easy all the time.

I thought about the photograph of Latrell and the unidentified woman. Marty Grisnik believed that it made the case against Latrell for the Ordonez murder. That’s what we were supposed to think, but I couldn’t make it fit. If the woman were Latrell’s mother, it definitely wouldn’t fit. Their age differences ruined that scenario. The photograph had to have been planted by the killer to set up Latrell.

I thought again about Kate’s explanation of how we read faces. We manipulate our voluntary expressions, choosing honesty or deceit as it suits us. Our micro expressions are honest precisely because they are involuntary, beyond our powers of manipulation. Both are there to be seen, but we settle for what is easier to see, oblivious to what we need to know. Like the person with face blindness, we don’t recognize what we’re looking at.

The photograph of Latrell and the woman was just one example. If I accepted its presence in Javy’s car as proof of a connection between him and Latrell, I wouldn’t bother to ask if it made sense. I had to reject at face value everything that had happened since the drug house murders, challenge the assumptions I had made, and disregard my instinctive reactions to the evidence. I had to slow everything down to a freeze-frame and dissect it like it was a micro expression.

Troy Clark had assumed that someone on my squad had leaked the existence of the surveillance camera in Marcellus’s house. He seized on Colby Hudson’s failure to appear for his polygraph as proof that Colby was the source of the leak. That was the easiest explanation for him and it turned out to be wrong. Latrell Kelly was the killer.

Colby must have had another reason to duck his polygraph. Maybe he was afraid of being asked about his purchase of the car and the house or Thomas Rice’s death. Maybe he’d gotten in over his head and was hiding out or had been killed.

Colby had told me his version of buying the house and car, but I preferred the version told by Jill Rice because it fit with my bias against Colby and the intelligence Grisnik had picked up from his penitentiary sources. I was already concerned that Colby had been working undercover so long that he couldn’t remember which side he was on. Even if he was telling the truth, I didn’t like that he’d taken advantage of Jill Rice’s efforts to piss off her ex-husband. And, as much as anything else, I didn’t like that he was sleeping with my daughter.

When Colby disappeared and when drugs and cash were found in his house, I saw what Troy saw-an agent that had crossed the line and taken Wendy with him. It was no different than when Joy went looking for our son Kevin in Frank Tyler’s house after Tyler had picked Kevin up at school. When Joy called and told me that Kevin was missing and that she had found Tyler’s collection of child pornography, I was certain about what had happened and I was right.

The discovery of incriminating evidence in Colby’s house was dramatic and timely, fitting Troy’s suspicions and mine, but it could have been planted there just as the photograph of Latrell and the woman had probably been planted in Javy Ordonez’s car. Though I had considered the possibility of a frame-up when Ammara first told me about the drugs and cash, I rejected it because I preferred what I saw on the surface.

Troy had reacted in a similar way to my shaking, my body’s involuntary expressions, as proof that I couldn’t be trusted. He was wrong about me. Perhaps I was wrong about Colby.

If we believe too much too easily, we don’t ask the right questions. I realized that I had made that mistake with Colby’s story. He had said that Jill Rice had called our office looking for someone to buy her husband’s car, but no one had checked our phone records for that incoming call. I called Ammara Iverson.

“How’s Kate?” she asked.

“Still in surgery. Is anyone working late tonight?”

“Everyone is working. There is no late.”

“Have someone check the records of phone calls made to the office in the last six weeks for any calls originating from a land line or cell phone belonging to Jill Rice.”

“Not that it matters since you’re doing such a good job staying out of this case while you’re on medical leave and all, but why?”

“Colby says that he took a call from Jill Rice and that she was looking for someone to buy her ex-husband’s car. Jill Rice says she never made that call. We need to pick a winner in that liar’s match.”

“You have a favorite?”

“I wish I did.”

“I’ll call you when I know something.”

“Who did you find buried in Latrell’s basement?”

“Black female in the fresh grave. We’re checking her prints, but it’s probably Oleta Phillips. There were two skeletons in the second grave, one on top of the other.”

“One of them is probably Latrell’s mother. Anything else interesting turn up?”

“It looks like he was preparing for the end of the world.”

“How’s that?”

“He had enough candles and?ashlights to last a lifetime,” she said.

“What about bottled water, canned goods and dried fruit, stuff like that?”

“Now that you mention it, we didn’t find any. Maybe he was just afraid of the dark.”

“Marty Grisnik stopped by the hospital. Says he saw you at Latrell’s.”

“Yeah. He wasn’t too happy that he was late to the party, but that’s the way Troy is playing it.”

“You bring him up to date on what’s been going on?”

“Sure. Figured that was the best way to get him on our side, but don’t tell Troy.”

“Not a chance. By the way, you say anything to him about Wendy?”

“Yeah. Grisnik asked for her name and a description. Said he wanted his people to help find her. Why? Is that a problem?”

“No. We need all the help we can get.”

“I’ll get back to you on the phone records,” she said and hung up.

The waiting room felt like it was getting smaller. The walls weren’t moving and neither was I. Waiting for Kate to come out of surgery while hoping that my cell phone would ring with good news was a suffocating prospect.

I left my cell phone number with the nurse, who promised to call when I could see Kate. I didn’t know where to look for Wendy, but I was certain that if I could find Colby, I would find her.

If they were being held against their will, I could spend the rest of my life combing the city inch by inch and never find them. If they were hiding, at least one of them would have to come out for food, money, or air. That was likely to be Colby. He wouldn’t go to his house or to Wendy’s apartment because he’d know that the FBI was watching both of those locations, as was anyone else they might be hiding from. Colby would reach out to a friend and I could only think of one person who might qualify.