Justin McPhee’s house looked like an old lady had shepherded his interior design. The front door opened directly into the living room. From the looks of things, I was the last person here.
Self-consciously, I stomped my boots on the rug, then left them on a rack by the door.
I took in the spindly dark wood furniture and Tiffany lamps, and I could envision his mom or grandmom writing birthday cards and thank-you notes.
You had to love generational wealth. If I had kids, I’m not sure I’d have anything to hand down besides a couple of mortgages that rental income was barely covering.
Nicole Long and Valerie Dodds were on the white leather living room couch in matching gray sweats, obviously hastily purchased from a discount store.
Logan had texted me last night filling me in on the attack by the Cleveland Heights detectives and the prosecutors’ decision to seek out refuge with the defense attorney. That eliminated any question about whether they were bad cops. Didn’t confirm that Pope was their puppet master, but it was pretty damning.
It had been a good idea, the two prosecutors holing up at McPhee’s place. Going after the defense attorney would have been the act of a desperate woman. Attacking a member of the bar went beyond the pale. I didn’t think Pope was there quite yet. What last night showed, though, was that she was getting too close.
“How are you?” I asked the women as I took a seat in the vintage chair, hoping it would hold my weight.
Long shrugged in response to my question. Dodds looked like she wanted to say something, then thought better of it. I was too scared to keep quiet.
“She knows who we are.” I stated the obvious to let them know that I was starting to get scared. I wasn’t in my twenties anymore, so I took my own mortality a lot more seriously. My sigh was deep. “I am not one to give up on anything, but maybe I’m ready to give up on this. I don’t want to end up dead.”
“Dead?” Justin McPhee looked over toward a pack-n-play I hadn’t noticed. There was a toddler in there who looked like he was blinking awake. I’d have been quieter if I’d been warned. McPhee went to get the kid. I kept talking.
“Pope’s own mother bit the dust,” I said. Then I described what had happened with Anna Moretti. “I’m no spring chicken, but I’d like to live at least another forty years on this earth, even if it’s in snowy Cleveland.” Flakes piled outside on the sill of the window next to my chair bringing home the point.
“You have a gun?” Long asked.
“A gun?” She couldn’t be serious. “No. Do you?”
Long nodded, but as I’d learned on Christmas Eve, she was from the South. I didn’t need to ask Logan or Webb. They were armed right now.
“I don’t,” McPhee said. “Didn’t grow up that way.” He was bouncing a baby on his knee. Somehow I didn’t expect that. The defense lawyer had covert fuck-boy vibes. After years with Woody, it’s something I could spot a mile away. If I were a betting woman, I’d put what little money I had on the probability the gurgling kid wasn’t planned.
“Maybe it’s time to get one,” Long said.
Logan looked away. He knew better than to say anything to me. I’d already shared my views on our founding fathers and the Second Amendment and gun violence. Crime reporting had changed during my tenure at the paper.
What started with looking at the causes of crime and the effects on victims had turned into learning the mechanics of various semi-automatic rifles and collecting mass-shooting statistics. Shootings in America were deliberate or random, scary, unpredictable, and becoming entirely too commonplace.
“So I can increase my risk of death by gunshot by one hundred percent,” I retorted. “No, thank you.”
“If we don’t do something,” Long fretted, “we’re going to end up dead, or worse, on trial.”
I was trying to find a way to frame the problem Lori Pope had created. The issues we’d created for ourselves, and maybe a possible solution. A solution that would probably be unlawful, but would maybe keep us from a trial worse than death. I was coming up empty. Everyone else must have been as well because there wasn’t much talking going on. The loudest person in the room was the gurgling baby.
“Have you ever heard of the concept of chaotic good?” Long asked into the nearly silent room.
“I dropped philosophy,” Dodds said.
“Like the alignment in Dungeons and Dragons?” McPhee guessed. “My brother-in-law used to talk about this kind of stuff. I tuned out, ate more pierogi.”
“It’s the idea of doing what’s right, but not necessarily what’s lawful,” Long answered. To Dodds, she said, “I didn’t drop philosophy.”
“What are you suggesting?” Dodds asked. I could see the younger prosecutor’s mind turning. I imagined she was wondering how in the hell she’d wandered into this hellmouth when all she’d been looking for when coming back to the city was a chance to advance her career. No lawyer imagined themselves on the other side of justice.
“We need to catch a killer. The only way I can think of doing that is to do the same thing Pope has done,” Long said as she punctuated her statement with a fist on her palm.
“I’m not signing up to murder someone.” Dodds’ voice was strident.
“We need to frame the framer,” Long said matter-of-factly.
“For what?” McPhee asked, his breath moving the curls on the toddler’s towhead.
“Murder.” Somewhere along the way, Long had gone somewhere very dark. We’d need to decide if we wanted to follow her.
“Of who?” That question came from Darlene Webb. They were the first words I’d heard her speak since I’d arrived.
“Except for the nun, do we know who she killed and who she didn’t?” I asked.
To Nicole Long, Logan asked, “What’s the biggest unsolved case in the county. Do you have something you took to the grand jury, but they declined to indict?”
“Taneka Parr.”
“I don’t know that one,” Dodds said. The way Nicole Long cut her eyes toward her colleague, I knew there had to be more going on below the surface. Whether that was related to this or something else, I couldn’t figure out. I made a mental note, though, because a weak link could get us all in trouble.
“It happened when Sledge Hammer was active,” Long explained. “She was a pros— she was trafficked. There were some rumors that she was willing to testify against him, give evidence about how he locked her up and forced her to service johns. Our investigators tried to find her, but they were unsuccessful.”
“What’s your thought on this?” I asked the question this time as I tried to see how we could figure a way out of this mess without any more death.
“I think I can find her,” Long said.
“Living?”
Nicole Long shook her head slowly, her usually smooth hair had faint waves and moved around her face. “Unfortunately, no.”
“Then what?” McPhee asked.
“Is this the part where we’re now bound in a conspiracy,” Dodds chimed in. “Feels like a bad law school hypothetical.”
I had the least legal training of anyone in this room, but even I knew that everyone who participated in a conspiracy could be found guilty of the worst crime. We weren’t actually going to kill anyone, but we weren’t exactly innocent either.
“Then I make it look like Pope did it,” Long finished.
“What would be the motive?”
“That Taneka Parr was going to provide evidence that would have exonerated Hammer and his partner. That she was going to take the fall for moving the containers or procuring the girls or some such. That Pope wanted the actual perpetrator put in prison because he was going to skate again.”
“He did skate…twice,” McPhee said. “It was only the feds who finally got him.”
“It could be argued that if Pope had successfully prosecuted the trafficker, it could have launched her to a higher office,” Dodds argued.
“Who was the cop on that?” Logan asked. I had to wonder if he had favors to call in. Ways to get information that others didn’t have. I hoped so.
“It was the FBI.” That came from a new voice in the room. A woman walked in with a baby bag on her arm. She looked familiar. I was sure I’d seen her in the courtroom a handful of times. “Agent Lou Valdespino,” she finished.
“Shit!” McPhee hissed the explicative through tight lips.
“Casey Cort,” the woman introduced herself to us. It clicked then. I’d seen her before, in the courtroom during the Catholic sex abuse trial, and even before in some other high-profile case I couldn’t bring to mind at the moment.
She continued, “I’m here to pick up my son. Now I’m thinking I’m going to have to keep you out of jail, Justin. Wasn’t how I was planning to spend the new year.”
“No worries on your baby daddy,” Long said to Casey. “I’m the fall guy.”