The Heights Page 7

  “Not funny,” he grumbles.

  A stout man in bomb gear ambles our way. He slides back the face shield on his helmet. “You in charge?” Brown, his name tag says.

  We both nod.

  “Someone was banking on stupidity,” Brown says. “Bomb that size would have taken out anyone who tried to open the door, but it’s not big enough to have hurt anyone more than ten feet from the vehicle. Lucky someone spotted that wire. We’re gonna tow it out of here in a few minutes.”

  “Is it disarmed?”

  “No, but if you want to take a look at the outside of the vehicle, that’s fine. Just don’t fuck with the door handles. I’ll get prints for you.”

  “Ten-four,” Goran says.

  “Loop Micalec in,” I say to Brown, and he nods.

  We move to the Acura and photograph it from various angles. I take note of gravel lodged in a tire then slide an evidence bag out of my pocket and secure it. The tires are big and knobby. The outside of the vehicle doesn’t tell us much, but maybe the evidence gods will smile upon us and the tread pattern will match what we found at the scene.

  “You want to catalog this evidence while I dig in a storm drain?” I ask my partner.

  He nods. “I’m sure as hell not crawling on the ground. Go for it.”

  I chuckle as I make my way to the storm drain.

  I kneel on the ground in front of it and hear footsteps behind me. Gomez asks what I’m doing.

  “Witness says she saw a man throw something in here.”

  “Let me get that,” he says. “You’re going to ruin your clothes.”

  I stand and thank him, and he gets down on his belly and looks in the drain.

  “Something shiny in there,” he says. “Maybe a necklace chain? And over there, looks like car keys, maybe? And what’s that, some kind of remote control?”

  “Don’t touch anything,” I reply. “We need to get a photo first.”

  I hand him my phone, and he snaps several pictures before handing it back to me.

  “Thanks,” I tell him.

  Colby is standing near her zone car about twenty feet away, and I gesture for her. She trots over, and I point at the drain as Gomez stands. “Let’s get that evidence bagged and over to Micalec in the crime lab.”

  They both nod.

  I take note of the grime on Gomez’s uniform then clap him on the arm. “Thanks, man.”

  He smiles, and I walk back to the Charger. That could have gone very badly, and I say a silent thank-you that no one was hurt. I slide into the driver’s seat and flip through my notebook. “Big white dude with lots of clothes on” doesn’t give us much, but it’s better than nothing.

  I pull up the photo on my phone of the objects in the drain and make a sketch of the general layout, wondering what that transponder—Gomez called it a remote control, but it doesn’t have any buttons on it—is for. I narrow my eyes and make a mental note to ask Sims, our tech guy, what he thinks.

  CHAPTER 8

  We get to the squad room about an hour later, and I start digging through records on Heather Martin while we wait for the other guys to get back from lunch. There are enough databases these days, both inside and outside the department, that this could take all day, so I make a list of what I know already and work backward from there. I know that her name was Heather Marie Martin, nee Acker, and that she was fifty-one. Public records check says she married Eric Michael Martin when she was twenty-three, and they had their first child, a son named Julian, two years later. I click over to the prosecutor’s records—she prosecuted cases right up until she had him and went back to work a month after he was born. Second kid, a daughter named Elise, came along when she was thirty, and she was back to work within a month again.

  There’s another hit, one that’s more interesting, which suggests that Heather Martin has a police jacket. She was a cop for a very short time, for about two years before she married Eric. Of course, her jacket is sealed, and it’s impossible to unseal a police jacket unless the NSA is involved, but being a cop means more potential enemies, even all these years later.

  I hit social media to try to find the kids. According to a career website, Julian is a civil engineer for the state of Michigan. Facebook tells me that Elise is a sophomore at Ohio State, where she’s in a sorority. Her profile is semiprivate, though, so I don’t get a lot.

  Then I check cell phone records for their numbers and call each of them. They don’t answer. I leave an identically obscure message on each voicemail.

  Okay, so Heather Martin. Criminal defense attorney. Partner at Sellers, Martin & Fairbanks, a big-deal downtown firm. Used to be a cop. Former prosecutor who put a lot of bad guys away in the nineties, at least based on the Plain Dealer’s records. According to CDP records, she’s registered four separate threats since ’96, from three men, one of whom threatened to “beat her skull in with a baseball bat,” and one woman. I write their names in my notebook to cross-reference against the prison database—if they’re still inside, they’re less likely to be involved, but every lead is worth checking. Sometimes people are stupid enough to do what they say they’ll do, and it ends up cut-and-dried.

  The irony isn’t lost on me that Martin was a big deal in the prosecutor’s office, and now, her partner Jeff O’Connor works for a lot of cops, including John Grimes. I heard two things about him through the grapevine this morning: one, everyone thinks there’s a fifty-fifty chance that Grimes will be acquitted, and it looks like the jury will deliberate later this week. Two, the rookie who shot Freddie Perkins just put a ten-thousand-dollar retainer down for O’Connor’s services. Just in case. I take a deep breath and refocus on the investigation. There’s no point in worrying about what-ifs when there’s a homicide to solve.

  It’s possible that Martin and O’Connor had a beef. Maybe she hated that he took those kinds of cases, and she put up a fuss with the other partners. I’ll have to look into this. Anyway, all of the high-profile prosecution stuff died down in the late nineties when she joined Sellers and they opened a practice in 2000.

  Anything is possible, and good detectives remind themselves of that all the time. The cases we don’t close are sometimes because the cops involved are on such a single-minded mission that they miss something or screw something else up. It’s just a reality—one that I’m aware enough of to keep O’Connor in the far back of my brain as I keep moving forward, because he probably didn’t kill his boss. I might think he’s a first-rate A-hole, but that doesn’t mean he’s a murderer.

  Defense attorneys piss people off all the time. And if I’m a betting woman, whoever beat Martin to death was pretty pissed off. I make a note to get a list of cases she lost, in case one of the creeps she couldn’t get off is out of prison with a vendetta.

  I click back onto her profile on the firm’s web page. It says she graduated from Michigan Law and worked for the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office until she, and I quote, “realized that justice could best be served if she represented the unfairly accused.” I scoff at this because she may have represented the unfairly accused, but everyone knows that defense attorneys also represent the guilty, and sometimes the guilty walk away.

  Her financial records don’t tell me much beyond the fact that she had a hefty retirement account, with her kids as beneficiaries, a joint checking account with her husband that looks as though it’s only used for household bills, and a savings account at a local credit union with about half a million in it. It looks like they own their house outright, and I see no evidence of car payments. They’re financially comfortable, which could provide motive: money.

  Social media doesn’t tell me much of anything about Heather Martin. Her Twitter and LinkedIn accounts are all work-related, and it doesn’t look like she has a Facebook account. I can’t find her on any online dating sites, Tinder, or the like. She has a squeaky-clean online profile—it’s almost too clean, and it makes me wonder what she was hiding.

  I send Julia Becker a text message that says I need
what she can get me on Martin’s days in the prosecutor’s office, just following a hunch. She won’t like it—she’s awfully rule-abiding most of the time. But we’re sort of friends these days, or at least we’re not enemies, and she might want to help me out with this one.

  “OKAY, WE NEED TO WORK fast,” Fishner says for the second time in two days, in our afternoon conference-room briefing, after Goran and I review everything we know—and don’t know—with the rest of the squad. “Eric Martin is on his way here now. Roberts and Sims, head out to the lab and see what Micalec has going with the physical evidence from the crime scene, especially the phone. Boyle and Goran, I need to talk to you in my office for a minute about the bomb situation.”

  I’m squinting at the crime board and trying to figure out why the hell someone would set up a bomb in Martin’s car, leave it in that neighborhood, and throw evidence, including the keys to the vehicle and some sort of weird transponder, into a storm drain. At least the bomb squad disabled the bomb. That could have been bad.

  “Maybe it was a setup all along,” I mutter. “The bomb. Maybe that was the point, to blow up cops. She was collateral damage.”

  All five of them turn and look at me. Goran raises an eyebrow, and Fishner leans forward onto her hands.

  “You know what I mean?” I stand. “It failed, but still, there’s a possibility that the bomb was the primary crime and Martin was an unlucky victim.” It’s not likely, given the extent of her injuries, but we have to consider the possibility. “Even so, Goran, we need to go get a warrant for her house. For her office. We need to talk to her kids—”

  “My office first,” Fishner says.

  I turn to Roberts and Sims. “Did you get anything more on anyone who was at the cemetery the day her body turned up? Who is checking her phone?”

  Roberts nods. “Everybody’s clean except Anders Andersen.” He laughs, but no one else does. “And here’s something—he was a bomb expert in the Marines. Can’t find a clear connection to the vic, though.”

  “Micalec and I will look at the phone today,” Sims says. “There’s a guy over there who’s real good.”

  I add “Talk to Anders Andersen” to my list. “See if Micalec or your guy has anything on the transponder-slash-remote control from the storm drain.”

  Sims nods, and Fishner dismisses him and Roberts. Goran and I follow her to her office.

  The door squeaks closed behind us. Fishner puts on her fake smile, so I remind her that we sent the necklace chain, the weird transponder that looks like it automatically opens a garage door or something, the gravel, and the prints from Martin’s SUV to the lab, that Micalec knows the guys are on the way, and that she’s prioritized the case.

  “What now, L-T?” Goran asks. “Nothing on the inside of her SUV. It was wiped clean. The bomb guys said they were glad they could tow the vehicle, since it wasn’t somebody’s first bomb. They had to use the robot.”

  “Motorcycle jacket,” I say. “We need to ask Eric Martin if he has one.”

  “A lot of people have motorcycle jackets,” he replies. “And what’s more interesting is that transponder.”

  “Yeah, and that weird key. Looked like a key to a gym locker,” I reply.

  “A part of why you’re Special Homicide,” Fishner begins, “is because you’re genuinely good cops.” She sighs and slides down into her chair. I feel Tom glance at me. “Another part is because you know how to handle high-profile people and high-profile cases. This is one of them, especially given the bomb.” She stares at me then at Goran. “Heather Martin has received a lot of threats over the course of her career,” she says to him.

  “Yeah,” he replies.

  Fishner makes her rat face. I don’t mean it that way—I just mean that sometimes she does this thing with her eyes and lips that makes me think of a rodent. “Get on it. Tread carefully.”

  Tom shifts on his feet, but we both stay quiet for a beat.

  I break the silence. “I’m gonna keep digging into her life, look into these threats, and figure out who her enemies were. We need to search her office, and we need to talk to her husband and all of her associates. We’ve already wasted too much time. The car thing was on the noon news, and it’ll be on again at six, since people love bombs, and they’re already on the homicide like bugs on a light. I have a plan. We need to—”

  “Let me talk to Eric Martin,” she says. “He has very good lawyers, obviously, and I want to get a read on him before we move forward. If he’s guilty, we need to charge him sooner rather than later. Carrothers will be here any minute to meet with us. He’s probably downstairs now. Do what you can from your desks until I give you the green light. As I said, tread carefully.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” I ask. “And why is Captain Carrothers directly involved in this?”

  “Boyle.”

  I breathe and try to temper my irritation. “Since when is the captain involved in questioning a suspect? I thought his whole big thing was to play wizard behind the curtain and just take credit for all of our hard work. When was the last time he worked a case?” I want to ask her directly about how she recognized Martin’s wedding ring, but she doesn’t leave room.

  “You’re right that it’s atypical,” she says. “Close the door on your way out.”

  We walk down the hallway in silence and stop at the vending machine.

  “I don’t like this,” Tom says as he punches a code into the machine. “I mean, why the hell is Carrothers here? Why didn’t the L-T answer your question?” He pulls a can of sparkling water out of the machine and thrusts it at me.

  I watch his jaw flex and hold out my hand to take the can from him. “Are you all right?” I ask when he’s quiet.

  He puts more money into the machine. “Yeah.” He retrieves a Diet Coke for himself.

  We stand across from each other in the hallway and sip our respective beverages. “What’s going on, Tom?” I lean my shoulders against the wall, my patented blank-faced-cop mug in full effect.

  “Don’t look at me like that.”

  I keep staring at him.

  He crinkles his nose as if there’s a bad smell.

  “Is it work or personal?”

  He grunts.

  “Goran.”

  “I just don’t like Carrothers being involved in this, especially given Martin’s police jacket.”

  “You’ve seen her jacket?”

  “No, but this whole thing brings up bad times in the department. Things that I don’t want to think about anymore.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “What things?”

  “Just things. Don’t worry about it. I don’t want you to get involved.”

  “Goran, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m already involved. If these ‘things’ can get us closer to finding out who killed our vic, I’m gonna be super pissed that you didn’t share them with me.”

  He shakes his head. “Not connected. Water under the bridge. I promise.”

  I make a conscious choice to believe him then push off the wall, and we head down the hallway.

  “You write the warrants, and I’ll look more deeply at financials,” I say. Follow the money. It often leads somewhere.

  He grunts again.

  “It’s not my fault that you hate computers,” I chide. “And quit pouting like a sad little kid.”

  He tosses our Nerf football my way without looking at me, his way of telling me he’s over it. “Yeah, okay.” He opens his laptop, and I do the same.

  I’m wading through the rest of the financial records that I can see without a warrant—not many, other than Eric Martin’s campaign finances for the last city council election—when Carrothers and Fishner walk by with Eric Martin, whose good cologne wafts around us.

  “Afternoon, Detectives,” the captain says.

  Goran, whose palpable disdain for brass is even stronger than mine, rolls his eyes, and Fishner shoots me the look that means they’re going to talk to him in her office with the door open, so we should stay c
lose by and eavesdrop. I walk over to the filing cabinet outside her door and pretend to be looking for something.

  Everything about Eric Martin screams money. The suit surprises me: guys in their fifties don’t usually go for European-cut suits, but he wears it well because it’s tailored for his slim frame. He probably does triathlons. The shoes have to be Gucci or Armani. The haircut was probably a hundred bucks. The watch is a Breitling Chronomatic—I know this because I’ve lusted after that very watch. I’d never wear it, though. A seven-thousand-dollar watch is too much to risk on the job every day. I would just keep it in its box and look at it from time to time.

  Fishner asks him to take a seat at the table for four that sits on this side of her desk, and he does, but not before asking if he should close the door. He makes eye contact with me and holds it for a second too long. I’m not intimidated by powerful people in the way some folks are, so I don’t look away. And what I notice is that he doesn’t look very sad that his wife is dead.

  “Oh no, Eric, it’s fine,” she says. Her voice sounds strange. It’s as though they’re familiar, as though they talk all the time. Fishner is one hell of a good actress, though, so maybe she’s playing a role.

  I catch Tom’s eye then ask in a loud voice where the report is for the Koslonski case. I feel Carrothers watching me down the impressive span of his nose.

  There is no Koslonski case, so Goran grabs a folder off his desk and heads my way. “Is this it?” he asks as he approaches.

  “Have you seen him before?” I whisper out of the corner of my mouth.

  He bends down and pretends to tie his shoe. “Yeah, maybe. He looks familiar. But he’s city council, right? So he’s probably been around.”

  I open a drawer and pretend to look for another file. Fishner is still talking to good old Eric as if she knows him and they go way back. Tom slides into Sims’s chair, which is closest to where I stand, and acts as though he’s looking at the murder book he just opened.