The Heights Page 18

  Fishner walks over to the crime board and puts a check mark after Anders Andersen’s name, meaning that he’s no longer a suspect. Roberts must have gotten ahold of the neighbors. Then she steps back to survey the board for a minute.

  “Hello?” Julian Martin asks.

  I swivel in my chair so that I can better watch what Fishner is doing. “Do you talk to your sister much?”

  “Maybe once every couple of weeks,” he replies. “And if you want to know if I talk to my dad, the answer is no. He can’t deal with the fact that I’m gay. I’m, quote, not his son anymore.”

  Answering the unasked question. Interesting. This guy must really need to talk if he’s doing all this sharing with a faceless, at least to him, Cleveland detective.

  Sounds like it’s gonna be a fun funeral. “When was the last time you spoke with your mother?” I ask.

  A car door slams. “About two weeks ago,” he replies. “She called and said she and my dad were getting divorced, that she was filing soon but he didn’t know yet. Fucking philandering asshole. She just wanted me and Elise to know first, I guess.”

  I sit forward in my chair and ask him a few more questions, but he doesn’t know anything else. When I lean back, Fishner is in her office with the door closed.

  “There’s something I want you to know, though,” he adds as we’re wrapping up. “She was a really good person. I mean, we might not have talked all the time or been what some would call a normal family, but my mom was a good person. I have the letters to prove it. When my dad disowned me, she wrote to me all the time.” He chuckles sadly. “I never could figure out why she wrote me letters instead of emails or texts, but it always meant something to me. And now I never get to tell her that. At least I still have the letters, I guess.”

  I wonder what was in those letters. “Can I see them?”

  “Um... I’d rather you not, unless you really need to.”

  I don’t really need to.

  “She was a police officer a long time ago. You know that, right?”

  I nod even though he can’t see me. “Yes... Uh, yes.”

  “Well, she left the department after she was sexually assaulted—gang-raped—by a bunch of other cops. She’d always wanted to go to law school, and she figured that was her opportunity.”

  Goddamn it. Sexual assault by a bunch of other cops is not what I want to be investigating. And why is he telling me this? Maybe he needs to get it off his chest.

  “Anyway, she worked at the prosecutor’s office—I’m sure you know all of this, so I’ll skip ahead. When she and Max Sellers started their defense practice, she did it for noble reasons. It wasn’t to make money. But when she ended up being really good at it—so good that Elise and I barely saw her—she made a lot of money, which my asshole father spent most of. My mom lived surprisingly frugally, at least she did when I last saw her.”

  I let him keep talking, hoping he gives me something to go on and simultaneously wondering why it is that he’s telling all of this to a stranger.

  “It always upset her, at least according to the letters, and I should reiterate that all of what I’m telling you came from the letters, that Sellers turned into such a slimeball. Honestly, he’s the reason why I didn’t go to law school—I didn’t want to become a greedy bastard like he did. They ended up bringing other slimeballs into the practice, and it always upset her because she really cared about doing the right thing. That was one thing I learned from her: just do the right thing, no matter the cost.”

  I shiver a little and expel a breath. I could get a warrant for the letters, but maybe we don’t need them. Still. They’re there if we do.

  I tell him to call me if he thinks of anything and thank him again for getting back to me.

  Regardless of Fishner’s insistence that we leave him alone, or her weird riddles from before, it’s time to go talk to Eric Martin. I hope he’s still at work. That way, we aren’t being directly insubordinate—we won’t be “bothering him at home.” Does Fishner know about the divorce?

  When I stand and swing on my jacket, I notice that my boss is on the phone with her office door closed, so I grab my gun from my locker and head out. I text Goran and tell him to meet me at the car.

  My phone starts to blow up as soon as I slide behind the wheel. Julia Becker, Fishner, Goran. They’re all calling at the same time. Cora sends me a text message telling me to call when I have a minute. What the fuck?

  I answer Goran. “Get down here,” I say. “We need to go talk to Eric Martin. Now. I just found out from the son that our vic was filing for divorce.”

  “You haven’t heard.” There’s something in his voice that I don’t recognize.

  The call goes dead as he opens the passenger door. His face is tense and worried. My phone keeps vibrating in my lap.

  “What?” I ask. “Grimes?”

  He pulls the door closed behind him. “Acquitted.”

  “Ah, shit. Okay.” My stomach turns into a cold lead ball. I close my eyes and take a deep breath before starting the car. “Think it’s ever gonna stop raining?” I ask as I turn right on Euclid. I feel him watching my profile, but I don’t turn to make eye contact with him.

  “Liz.”

  He’s hoping that I don’t lose my shit like I used to have a tendency to do. I won’t. Not anymore.

  “Julian Martin says his mom was planning to divorce Eric Martin. We need to ask some questions about that, given the goddamn fucking dead-end shit show that this case is turning out to be.”

  “Grimes won’t be reinstated,” Goran replies. “The department is going to make an example of him. Especially with the DOJ stuff.”

  Shit, right. I forgot I’m supposed to talk to that guy tomorrow. I brake behind an old woman in an old Honda. “There are gonna be riots,” I say. I finally look at him, and whatever he sees must upset him, because he reacts as though I’ve said something truly screwed up. “What?”

  “You don’t have to pretend to be okay. We’ve been through this before. You can just cut it out, all right?”

  I turn back to the road. “Fine. I’m not okay. I’m not okay for a lot of reasons. But I’m also not going to worry about being gang-raped, if we want to return to his little threat, and I’m not going to obsess over this. He’s a dick. He lost his job. The end.” I accelerate into the left lane to pass the old woman. Heather Martin was gang-raped by other cops, or so she told her son.

  “Are you surprised?” he asks.

  “Surprised by what? Surprised by the acquittal? Fuck no. People never convict cops.” I slap the steering wheel. “But the fact that most of the department seems to have my back, that no one has—at least yet—acted like an asshole? That, I’m surprised about.” Heather Martin became a prosecutor because she couldn’t be a cop anymore afterward.

  He stays quiet.

  “You know I wouldn’t have testified, right? I never would have said anything.” I guess maybe we should have talked about this before now. Heather Martin became a defense attorney because she believed in doing the right thing.

  He takes a breath. “It’s not like it used to be,” he says in a soft voice. “Twenty years ago? This never would have happened, because we weren’t that kind of department then.”

  “Oh, come on, Tom. We both know we’ve always been that kind of department. It just used to be hush-hush. What about all that shit that happened in the nineties with the female cops?” These days, especially with the MeToo stuff, it would be all over the media, in the same way the Grimes case has been. Hashtag rapegate or something. I don’t know a lot about it, but I do know that there was a band of older, male cops who used their rank to intimidate, harass, and sometimes assault female ones. No one ever came forward—it’s just department lore. Heather Martin never came forward about the assault.

  He cracks his window in spite of the rain. “Yeah, okay. I guess you’re right.”

  “What’s different is that people are done putting up with that shit,” I say. “We’re under a mi
croscope, and problem is? We deserve to be.”

  “Ah, c’mon. Let’s not go that far. You know how much more paperwork we’re gonna have to do now, just if somebody thinks we looked at ’em cross-eyed?”

  I nod. “Yeah, and it’s too bad for cops like us, and I’m sure as I’m alive that I’ll bitch my ass off about it when it happens. But maybe it’ll get us to think twice, you know?” I stop at a traffic light and turn to look at him. Just do the right thing, no matter the cost.

  He doesn’t look like he wants to have to think twice. He chomps his gum then rolls it through his mouth to the other side then back again.

  “You know what I’m saying, right? This isn’t some kind of treason thing. I’m a fan of the blue wall of silence or whatever it’s called these days. But guys like that have to be stopped.” I roll my shoulders back against the seat and notice how tense they are.

  “What’s the deal with Eric Martin? Did you tell Fishner what we’re doing?”

  I fill him in, complete with the “No, I didn’t tell Fishner anything” part of the answer. She can be pissed about it later.

  I glance at the dash clock. It’s 4:25, and I vaguely wonder whether Eric Martin will still be at work. My phone doesn’t stop buzzing the entire way to his office in Mayfield Heights.

  CHAPTER 17

  Arbor Health is housed in a nondescript concrete-and-glass building off Mayfield Road. I pull into the parking lot and immediately notice two things: one, almost all of the spaces closest to the door are marked as reserved, and two, no one has done landscaping here in a long time. “This place is a dump,” I mutter.

  Goran keeps looking at me as if he wants to say something. I swing the Charger into a reserved space near the door and kill the engine. I grab my phone from the console but don’t look at it. I shut it off.

  He reaches for my arm. “Boyle.”

  I make eye contact. “Don’t look at me like that. Please don’t look at me like that. We have a job to do here. Our only agenda is to talk to Eric Martin and figure out whether he killed his wife—or had her killed. This isn’t about me, and it isn’t about you. C’mon, Tom. I really need you in the game here. You’ve been a shit for a week now. Enough’s enough.”

  He blinks, and I swear I see tears, but he wills them away. He removes his hand from my arm. “Okay. Back in the game. Sorry about all of that. You know how it is. I mean, it’s Lowell. It’s Sims. It’s the whole thing.” He looks at his own phone. “We have Martin’s credit card records,” he says.

  I unbuckle my seat belt and shove my door open, and he follows suit. He stares at me across the top of the car. “Please stop looking at me like that. I’m not gonna ask you again.”

  He blinks, and we round the front of the car and walk to a side entrance. “What’s the plan?” he asks.

  “Follow my lead.”

  In the generic lobby, I locate the directory. Arbor Health is listed as occupying the top two floors of the five-story building, with the main office on the fourth floor.

  Goran hits the button for the elevator. When it arrives, several suits get out and push past us, and when we get in, I’m hit by the smell of strong perfume. “You’d think it would wear off during the workday,” I mutter.

  “Huh?”

  “The perfume. Do you smell it? It’s atrocious. It’s giving me a headache.” I squeeze the back of my neck then roll my head from side to side. As the elevator doors slide closed, I catch a distorted glimpse of myself in the shiny metal and realize my shoulders have risen about two inches. I take a deep breath and roll them back and down before turning to my partner. “Julian Martin said, not in so many words, that his dad is a complete asshole. Serial philanderer, homophobe, general stupid rich white dude. Our vic filed for divorce two weeks before she was killed.”

  “He wasn’t on the list of Andersen’s blackmail victims.”

  “No, but she was. Maybe she was cheating too.”

  The elevator dings, and the doors open to reveal a hallway with two glassed-in suites at either end. The one to the left is in frosted glass, and the one to the right is in clear glass, which reveals what looks to be a reception desk behind the double doors. I head right with Goran at my side.

  Once in the lobby of Arbor Health, I put on my best friendly-cop act for the young woman and man behind the desk. “Hi there,” I say in my Candy Cooper voice.

  “Hi, how can we help you?” the man asks.

  The woman presses a button on her phone headset and turns away.

  “We’re here for an appointment with Eric Martin. Is he in?” I don’t stop smiling.

  “Huh,” the guy replies. “It’s just about time for him to leave. Let me see.” He taps a button on his phone headset. “Mr. Martin, your appointment is here. Oh, I see. Okay. I’ll find out.” He turns to me and pushes up his rimless glasses. “What is your name?”

  “I’m Detective Elizabeth Boyle, CDP. But I’m here because I just got an inheritance and am interested in investing in Arbor Health. My boss, Lieutenant Jane Fishner, suggested that I talk to Mr. Martin directly.” Shit, now she’s gonna be really mad.

  He repeats the information, waits for a beat, and stands. He points down the hall and at the corner office. “Mr. Martin is right in there. You and your husband go ahead and help yourself to a bottled water on the way.”

  Goran is my husband. What a riot. “Thanks so much. I didn’t catch your name?”

  “Adam,” he replies.

  “Thanks, Adam,” I say in a singsong voice as we head down the hall.

  Once we’re out of earshot, Goran actually chuckles. “What’s for dinner tonight, wifey?”

  “You wish we were married.”

  He shudders. “Not really.”

  We both laugh, and I’m grateful for the moment.

  Martin’s office door is ajar, but I knock, anyway, to keep up my act.

  “Mr. Martin, hi!” I extend a hand to the tall, slim man. “I’m Liz. My boss, Lieutenant Fishner, suggested that we talk to you.”

  He shakes my hand, and I notice his watch again. It looks heavy, and I wonder whether it’s uncomfortable to wear. He isn’t wearing a wedding ring and doesn’t appear to be particularly distraught. “You want to invest?” All business. What a surprise.

  “Do you mind if I close the door?” Goran asks.

  “Sure, go ahead. Have a seat.” Martin crosses from behind his desk and gestures at a small table with four chairs around it. “Can I get you anything to drink?”

  Such hospitality. The office is completely void of family photos. “I’m fine.”

  “I’m good too,” Goran says.

  “I’m so happy that Jane sent you my way,” Martin says as he sits. He carefully crosses his legs in his chair.

  “Oh, me too,” I reply. “This seems like such a good opportunity.” He doesn’t recognize us from the squad room the other day because he doesn’t pay attention to people who can’t do something for him.

  “Well, it is. Let me tell you a little about our company.” He prattles on for about five minutes, talking up what a great firm his is, and we should really work with him because they’re based in Cleveland, and this and that.

  I make interested noises throughout.

  “I’ve also got some connections on city council—I was elected last year.”

  “Oh, congratulations.” I have to force myself to say it.

  “So how much are you looking to invest?”

  “Why didn’t you report your wife missing?” I ask.

  Goran takes a breath.

  “What?”

  “When did you notice she was gone?”

  His eyes go wide, then he blinks. He starts to cross his arms then apparently thinks better of it. “Wait—what?”

  I have to admit that watching his indignant surprise is satisfying in some sick way. “And why haven’t you talked to your son? He seems awfully distraught, which is kind of what I would expect, given the circumstances of your wife’s death.”

  His fac
e reddens, and he stands. “What is this?” He gives in, crosses his arms, then uncrosses them immediately. “I will not answer any questions about my late wife without my lawyer present. This is preposterous.”

  “Listen, Mr. Martin,” Goran says. “This is completely routine. We just have a couple of follow-up questions from the other day.”

  “If it’s completely routine, explain why I feel so attacked. And why did you lie to me when you came in?”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I say in my witness voice. “I got carried away.” I stop myself from laughing, and it occurs to me that I’m being mean to this guy not because I think he killed his wife but because he oozes privilege, and I’m taking sick pleasure in watching him squirm.

  “I am under advice from counsel not to speak to the police.”

  “Who’s your attorney?” Goran asks.

  “Martin Sellers, of course. We all go way back. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do. I will add that my alibi has checked and that I’m completely innocent. I have done nothing wrong, and I’m sure that your lieutenant didn’t send you here for this. What is this?” He looks as if he might cry. “She won’t like it when I tell her what you’ve done.”

  I stand. “We’re just trying to piece together what happened to Heather.”

  He squeezes the bridge of his nose. “Aren’t we all,” he mutters.

  I glance at his desk, and behind his briefcase sits a transponder that looks a lot like the one we recovered from Martin’s SUV. “What’s that for?”

  He follows my gesture then looks stricken. “Uh, it’s... Uh... I really need to talk to my attorney.”

  A bell rings in the back of my head, and I kick myself when I realize it should have gone off a long time ago. I know what our next move is.

  “Thanks for your time, Mr. Martin. Sorry to bother you.” It wasn’t exactly the outcome I’d been hoping for, but then again, I’m not sure what I was hoping for.

  He makes a couple of noises but doesn’t say anything.