Shakedown

Chapter Sixty-four

I headed north on Tomahawk Creek Parkway to College Boulevard, then east to State Line Road, and north again into Kansas City, Missouri, no destination in mind, satisfying my need to keep moving as if that was progress.

Kansas City weather had more mood swings than a teenage girl. Today was cool and getting cooler, the sky a salty seabed, the air tasting like copper rain. A few of the trees had given up, their leaves already brown. I’d blinked and missed the color.

I was used to working out the kinks in a case with my team, sometimes brainstorming until someone shouted out something that made the pieces fit. We’d sit in the center of the war room, surrounded by whiteboards filled with names and dates, questions and answers. Maps, photographs of the crime scene and other physical evidence, forensic reports, and witness statements would be pinned to the walls or spread out on the tables. When we got stuck, we’d walk around the room like we were taking a tour of the murder display at the Museum of Crime, a place that existed only in our minds to catalog the grim work people practiced on one another.

We would challenge each other with theories, shredding some, elevating others to the realm of the possible, even likely. Eventually, patterns would emerge. Explanations that couldn’t possibly make sense would become obvious and inevitable.

For me, it was a team sport. I didn’t claim to be the best and the brightest, but I prided myself on recruiting a team that was just that and I needed them now.

I was?opping around, bogged down in a quicksand of emotions about my wife and daughter that proved that Ben Yates and Troy Clark were correct in kicking me off this case because it was too personal. It didn’t help that I might be falling in love with a woman whom I had almost gotten killed when I let my professional judgment become clouded by my personal feelings or, as my father would have said, when I was too busy thinking with my little head instead of my big head. Toss in an undiagnosed but undeniable movement disorder that could make me collapse quicker than the old Boston Red Sox in September, and I was a mess.

This much I knew. Colby Hudson and Thomas Rice were in business together and they had used the same method of protecting their wives from the risks of their criminal enterprise. That didn’t mean their wives were innocent of what was going on. Jill Rice admitted that she knew her husband was dealing drugs. It only meant that their husbands had insured them against that risk.

I had to stop at that. Thinking of Colby and Wendy as coconspirators, let alone husband and wife, was too disorienting. But there it was. I hung on to to the unlikely prospect that Wendy had been too naive, too in love, or too stupid to have known what Colby was doing.

Thomas Rice had supposedly given up his sources as part of his plea bargain. It looked like the U.S. Attorney had made a bad deal, because Rice plainly hadn’t given up his real supplier. It was likely that Rice, Javy Ordonez, and Marcellus Pearson worked for the same person or persons unknown. He, she, or they had been the real target of my investigation of Marcellus and when I got close enough to shake their tree, bodies started falling out.

They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. I had no choice but to test the definition and shake a few more trees. I started with a phone call to Marty Grisnik.

“What’s the latest, big man?” Grisnik asked.

I had pulled into the parking lot at the Ward Parkway Shopping Center.

“Still snipe hunting.”

“Catch any?”

“Getting close, but I could use some help.”

“That’s what I like about you, Jack. You don’t hesitate to ask people to waste their time on wild goose chases.”

“You might want to go along on this one. The geese are friends of yours.”

“How’s that?” he asked, his voice tightening.

“Tanja Andrija and her brother, Nick.”

Grisnik laughed, deep and long. “You are bullshitting me, right?”

“I hope I am. I just need to be certain.”

“The Andrija family has been on Strawberry Hill longer than you and I are likely to live. I spent half my life growing up inside Petar and Maja’s house. You drag them down for no reason, you’ll answer to me. You got that?”

“Wouldn’t want it any other way.”

“I assume you’ve got something solid that ties them in to the bucket of shit you’re trying to climb out of.”

“Colby had a thing for Tanja. I don’t know if that gate swings both ways. Last night, I stopped at the bar to ask her if she’d seen him. She said no and told me to get lost. I said I’d go out the back and she got real nervous, couldn’t wait to show me the front door.”

“You’re willing to ruin a family over that?”

“Not long after I left, Nick showed up driving a pickup. They loaded it with boxes and garbage bags. They were fighting the whole time.”

“You know what would happen you take that pile of crap to my D.A. or your U.S. Attorney? They’d laugh your ass right out of the room.”

“There’s one other thing, but it’s between you and me. Agreed?”

Grisnik sighed. “Agreed-and don’t forget the secret decoder rings.”

“I thought she was hiding Colby in the back of the bar but I was wrong. He was at her parents’ house. I think he broke in, probably looking for something. They caught him and he ran out. Happened just after I drove by. I caught up with Colby a few blocks from there. He didn’t implicate Tanja, but he put it out there between the lines.”

“So what happened to Colby?”

“He got away.”

“That’s it? He got away?”

“That’s it.”

“You still got nothing, but I know you won’t leave it alone until you put the parents in the ground. Tell you what. I’ll go with you to see them. I’m on my way to my kid’s soccer game. It’s my weekend. I gotta call their mother, piss her off about having to break her date with the?avor of the month. I’ll call you later. Don’t do anything stupid without me.”

“Don’t worry. I do stupid a lot better with you.”

My cell phone rang a moment later, the caller ID display showing that it was Ammara Iverson. I grabbed her call like it was lifeline.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Eighty-fifth and State Line. What’s up?”

“Can you come in? Ben Yates and Troy want to talk to you.”

It can be hard to tell the difference between a lifeline and a two-hundred-pound test line with a giant steel hook until you’ve been snagged. I’d been asked, ordered, and threatened to stay away from this case. Now I was being invited back in. I felt the hook anchor deep in the?esh between my ribs.

“Any news on Wendy?” I asked.

“No, but we’re doing everything we can.”

“Then what do they need me for?”

“They want to go over some loose ends with you. They’ll be in the war room.”

Forget about the hook. This was a harpoon. Troy must have finally complained to Ben Yates that I was stepping all over his investigation. Yates had the manual tattooed to the back of his eyelids. If Troy had convinced him that I’d become that big of a problem, Yates would forget about my sick leave and suspend me without pay until I learned to sit at home and watch reruns of Celebrity Poker. If he knew that I was withholding information about Colby, he’d have me fired and go after my pension.

I was amazed how little I cared.

“Twenty minutes,” I said and hung up.