FBI agent Lou Valdespino and I were the only two people in the self-described tavern and grille that bordered the federal prison in Elkton. The ninety-five-mile drive from Cleveland had taken two hours in the snow which still fell outside of the restaurant’s window. During that long drive, I’d worked hard to tamp down my guilt over what I was doing, roping in an innocent agent, conspiring to do the wrong thing for a greater good.
Finishing up my vanilla ice cream–topped apple dumpling and coffee, I wondered if I’d regret the treat. I couldn’t eat like I had in my teens and twenties, but I was still surprised to have to keep a bottle of pink indigestion medicine in my glove compartment. Valdespino, wiser than me, had nursed a Diet Coke for a half hour.
“You’re looking for Taneka Parr? Why?” The FBI agent had held his questions while I mowed through the homemade dessert. “Sledge Hammer and his closest associate, Dion Fortune, are in prison for a good long time.”
“What did they get?” I deflected. I had no good reason to be here. Long had finessed this enough to get Valdespino down here, but she hadn’t shared what she’d said to persuade the agent.
“Sledge Hammer, two hundred forty months, Fortune, one hundred twenty,” he answered. I translated the federal sentencing into years in my head. So the mastermind had gotten twenty, the deputy ten. It was respectable for crimes against women. Those usually had the lightest punishment.
I wasn’t unaware that I was engaging in borderline criminal behavior myself, and may soon join those two men, even if it was—to borrow a term from Nicole Long—chaotic good.
“And the second-in-command is going to talk to us? Why?” I asked shifting the subject a few degrees away from my true purpose.
“Guy doesn’t want to be in prison. He turned on his boss to get half the time. If giving up information on Taneka Parr could lower his sentence, then he’ll shout to the rooftops.”
Before Valdespino could ask another question, I put out an inquiry of my own to keep him on the back foot. He seemed like a stand-up guy, so I almost felt bad for using him in this way…almost. I didn’t quite get the chaotic good, but greater good, and the ends justifies the means worked well enough for me.
“Did anyone investigate the whereabouts of this Parr girl when you all got the case?”
“No one asked.” Valdespino’s shrug was almost imperceptible, but I saw that, and the minute change in his expression. He had some guilt around the handling of the case. “He’d let some girls go,” the agent continued. “Grand…that was his street name, said Parr was one of the girls who got away.”
“Did you look for her?”
“Assumed she didn’t want to be found.” He shook his head when the server took my plate and asked if we needed anything else. “When they get out of the life, some girls just want to put the whole thing behind them. Plus we didn’t need her for prosecution. Lori Pope had already lost cases against this guy, twice. It was about putting this monster behind bars for what we could prove. That tape with Tom Brody put the final nail in the coffin.”
“Tom Brody was something else. I wonder where he ended up.”
“Landed on his feet in five-hundred-dollar shoes. Don’t worry. So what’s your interest in all this? I didn’t get much information.”
“My bosses are cleaning up old files. There was an anonymous tip that Parr may have been killed, and that there was a body.”
“By these guys?”
“That’s not the working theory, exactly. We’re looking at a different crime that may have intersected with this one.”
“Pope is still bitter, huh?”
“Maybe. It was a two-time loser for her office. But I’m just a worker bee here.”
“Hmm.” Valdespino’s non-committal response kept me from running my mouth any more. Calibrating deception was hard.
“What kind of leeway do you have?” I asked.
“If we get information that leads to finding the girl and successful prosecution, maybe time served. That depends on prison regs. Bottom line? Cutting one hundred twenty in half to sixty months.”
“You have a prosecutor on call?”
“Miles Siegel. He found the girls in the containers years ago. Took a toll on him while the county had it, bungled it, but he was the one to finally get the conviction.”
Long had judged this one right. The assistant United States attorney still had a dog in this fight.
“We have everything we need, then, I guess.”
I paid the bill and got in his car for the short drive from the diner to the prison. We’d decided to drive past the barbed wire–topped gates together to shorten the vehicle inspection time. After the whole song and dance with the guards shining a mirror under his unmarked, and letting us badge our way through the body search, we were finally led to a room to wait for the prisoner.
Dion Fortune, or Grand, was not what I expected. Though I had to check myself, because what did one expect from a person who sold underage girls to the highest bidder? To keep from arousing suspicion, I hadn’t pulled the Container case paper file from archives. There was zero chance the log wouldn’t end up in the wrong hands, and alert Pope or her minions that we were up to something. Guilty people tended to be paranoid.
Instead I used my partner’s username and password. Walsh kept his login credentials on a Post-it on his desk, not that it took a lot to remember his password, which was the word “password” with the “p” removed. My partner had joked about it over drinks at the Side Car one time too often.
Using his credentials, I’d logged in to the database and read up on the case and the defendants to the extent I could. Police were slow to move to electronic records. The ringleader had only been arrested a few times. Never convicted by Pope. This “Grand” kid had evaded arrest until the ripe old age of thirty. So either he was a mastermind, or he got involved in crime later than his associates.
The slim man who came into the room looked almost boyish. His unfortunately colored greenish khaki uniform pants had a knife crease, his shirt was wrinkle-free, the undershirt underneath so white it looked like it had just come from the package. I wondered how he managed it without an iron and chlorine bleach. No way inmates had access to something that hot and heavy or toxic.
His hair had no stray curls. The close-cropped afro was wavy and flat. My ex would have called it fried and laid to the side. Life with my ex-wife and daughter clued me in on black hair care, which was a lot of work outside of prison. I couldn’t imagine what he had to do to keep it that good looking inside. Even his thick-soled black shoes were polished.
“Loren Logan,” I said as I stood and shook Fortune’s hand. He took my hand, nodded, then sat down. He and Valdespino shared a glance in greeting. I imagined they’d met before in a fairly adversarial situation.
“I don’t want to blow smoke up your ass,” I said without any preamble whatsoever. “I’m a homicide detective with the Cleveland Police Department investigating the disappearance or possible death of Taneka Parr. If you can in any way help with that, I would be grateful.”
“How grateful?” His question was smooth, his words unhurried.
“This is why I brought FBI agent Valdespino. He has authority to get your sentence reduced if you give us information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the perpetrator of her kidnapping or murder.”
“Reduce. How much?”
“Thirty-six months,” Valdespino said. He laid his palms up as if that offer was the best he could do.
“Nothing less than time served, and arrest, not conviction. I’ve seen the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s work up close. I wouldn’t bet my freedom on a conviction. They couldn’t even convict me.”
Touché.
“Parr’s location and arrest of the suspect who disappeared her,” I—who had no room or leverage to negotiate—interjected. What I couldn’t say was that we already had a suspect in mind. Arrest was guaranteed.
I kept my eyes trained on Fortune. Despite that, I could feel Valdespino’s eyes burning into the side of my head like hot laser beams were trying to melt my brain.
“I’ll do that deal. Time served?”
“Cut your sentence in half,” Valdespino said. “And that’s really all I can offer. If that doesn’t work, I’m up and out of here and slip sliding all the way home.”
“Deal,” Fortune said. Nodded in emphasis. “I’d take it.”
“Is she missing or dead?” I flipped open a little notebook to record his answers.
“Dead.”
I tried not to let his lack of emotion get to me. It was like Pope, nice and shiny on the outside, hollow and rotten to the core. He’d have made a great Wall Street bro.
“Where?”
“Sleepy Time Motel.”
“East side. Warrensville Center Road,” Valdespino filled in for me.
“There’s a little strip of grass between Sunrise, Sleepy Time, and their parking lots,” Fortune added. “She’s there.”
“Taneka Parr,” I confirmed.
“That’s the girl you’re asking about.”
I tried to imagine how we could place Lori Pope at a motel. I was used to unraveling crime puzzles, not creating them. I’d leave it to Long. That would be her job. Instead, I took some written, but more mental notes to share with the prosecutor later.
“How’d she die?”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. Just because I’m behind bars doesn’t mean I’ve lost all of my constitutional rights. I’m going to exercise the one from the Fifth Amendment.”
I’d gambled with that question. I had to ask though, otherwise Valdespino would have been suspicious. But an answer would have seriously boxed us all in to his narrative. I was happy that Fortune was smart enough to remain silent.
“We’ll get back to you.” Valdespino stood. Signaled the guard. Getting out was nearly as time consuming as getting in. No search, but we had to wait to get through a series of electronically controlled gates, each opening one at a time. Then picking up our weapons from the lockers before we could leave the building. Squalling snow dusted the parking lot’s pavement as we made our way to his car.
“What’s the hotel’s jurisdiction?” I asked while we were making the short drive to the tavern parking lot.
“Warrensville Heights.”
“Shit.” When Valdespino turned to me at a stoplight, I realized I’d said it out loud.
“You’re trying to figure out how to keep the case in Cleveland, aren’t you?”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t figure out what would have been a good answer. Maybe this part was above my pay grade.
“They don’t even have thirty officers in that department,” was what finally came out of my mouth. Felt like a poorly written TV cop battling it out over jurisdiction.
“Any homicide would be handed over to the Valley Enforcement Group.” Valdespino pulled next to my vehicle, shifted into park and left his car running.
“That sounds vaguely familiar. What in the hell is it?”
“Fifteen, maybe sixteen small towns in the Chagrin River Valley have combined resources for SWAT, and complex investigations. Too much economic upheaval. They had to cut budgets for everything. So they got together. Share resources.”
“What you’re saying is that it would be a box of chocolates.” It was a reference to that Tom Hanks movie. With unknown officers, it could be an in-depth investigation, or they could put her in Potter’s Field and dust off their hands.
“Of course, if your higher-ups push for it, they could tie it into the Cleveland police Container case. I’m pretty sure Warrensville Heights would hand it over in a heartbeat.”
And there was my dilemma. I didn’t have any higher-ups to go to bat for me. I’d lied my way through this thing and didn’t have a backup plan or any kind of plan at all. Each one of the six of us was well aware of the problem with conspiracy, so we were operating as silos as much as we could.
“I can’t see trying to convince my lieutenant to add this case to their budget. They’ll definitely want me to turn it over and consider it closed and off our books, if that happens.”
“What about Chief McCormick?”
“Good idea,” I nodded, then curled my fingers around the door handle before I told too many more lies. “I’ll have Nicole Long liaise with him.” Pulled open the door handle and stepped into the snow before giving him a mock salute in farewell. “Good looking out.”