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Mac made deadline — again — and so did Janet. It was close, but then it had been all week. A lot of breaking news pieces from the previous weekend — and some things that didn’t make it into the newspaper might have been the most important. Heresy, he knew, and wisely didn’t say it out loud. They were all doing double duty trying to stay on top of the breaking news and still get the package of stories ready about McBride’s look-away program. It was going to start on Sunday; Mac felt pretty good about the stories. His coworkers might need some sleep before he felt good about them.
Joe had come by the house on Queen Anne Sunday night to fill them in on what happened. Mac had spent the day replacing the door — frame and all. It was now a steel door. The other had been historically accurate — Mac wasn’t sure how old it was. It might have been original to the house. He’d upgraded locks when he’d moved in with his aunt, but she had drawn the line at changing out perfectly good doors. He bought two new ones — he’d replace the back door when he had time.
Shorty had shown up just as he was finishing up. “Told Angie to buzz me when you were done playing handyman,” he said cheerfully. He had a six pack of beer. “Joe is coming over too. I want to hear what happened out there last night.”
Angie was on the couch with her leg propped up, watching him install the door, and she looked unrepentant with her role in that. “Stop grousing about his lack of help. You didn’t really want anyone involved in it, and you know it.”
Probably true. When Joe showed up, he had Sherry Grant with him. And pizza.
So they crowded around the dining room table, ate pizza and listened to Joe and Sherry tell what happened. The more Mac listened the more bizarre the story got.
Joe had been leaning over Sherry’s desk, talking about how to divvy up the remaining officers. “Abrams came in. We weren’t expecting him, not really,” Sherry said. “He doesn’t work Saturdays usually. But we were really struggling to make the shifts work.”
Abrams had Captain Rourke with him.
“And I lost it,” Joe admitted. “I mean, what the fuck? He had no business being there, and I called him out for it. And I may have said a few things to Abrams.”
Sherry rolled her eyes, and Angie giggled. Joe smiled ruefully. “Probably not one of my finer moments.”
“What was Abrams thinking?” Mac asked.
Sherry shrugged. “They go way back — I think they went to the Academy together. Abrams said they were just there to get a file that Rourke needed.”
Mac stilled. “What file?”
Joe met his eyes, and he nodded slowly. “Good question. That got lost in all the hubbub. So, I’m right in Rourke’s face. I’d had enough, and yes I lost it. But I didn’t make the first punch — Rourke did. And it felt calculated — so I didn’t swing back, which obviously surprised him. I was supposed to, I think. So he kept punching, and I kept dodging, and then the lights went out. Sherry grabbed my hand and dragged me back into one of the restrooms.”
“Abrams and the mouthy officer who shot at Angie disagreed on which restroom,” Mac said sourly. “And which woman you had grabbed, for that matter.”
“Mouthy is Tate Booth,” Sherry said. “He’s not the brightest bulb in the box — but he’s a loyal part of McBride’s fan club.”
“So we’re in the bathroom — the women’s bathroom — and it gets very quiet. They evacuated the building,” Joe said. “I’ve never been in a woman’s bathroom before, and it was too dark to even see anything!”
“You’ve never slipped in and checked one out?” Sherry asked incredulously. He shook his head.
“Have you gone into a men’s room?” he countered.
“Well, duh,” Angie answered. “But those urinals are nasty. I can’t believe men just stand there next to each other and pee.”
Shorty was laughing so hard, he was in tears. Mac looked at Joe. Not touching this one, Mac thought. Apparently Joe agreed. “Moving on,” Joe said, laughing too. “So we wait, and we’re going to leave, and then there’s a voice whispering. About how he’s going to kill me and collect the bounty. And he’ll enjoy every minute of it — calls me the n-word. He fires a shot at one point, and it got serious.”
Mac thought it was telling that Joe hadn’t thought it was serious well before that. He and Joe needed to have a long talk — or maybe a short talk that ended with Joe getting therapy. Look at him, all in touch with his feelings, he mocked himself.
“So I’ve got the door blocked,” Sherry said. “Used a garbage can under the door handle. Whoever it was couldn’t get in. That’s when he fired a shot, I think. But we couldn’t get out either.”
“And then I come waltzing in, calling for Joe,” Angie said ruefully. “I thought there was someone in there, but when Sherry called out, nobody stopped me. Nobody stopped us from leaving. Until Officer Meathead shot at me.”
“Was it McBride?” Mac asked. “He was there — I saw him just before ‘Officer Meathead’ pulled his pistol.”
Joe considered that. “Could have been,” he agreed. “Could have been a lot of people, Mac. The list is long and getting longer. I heard what Tate Booth said — how he knew that was Angie he was shooting at. He was going for the bounty — the gold.”
Mac nodded. If he ever saw Booth around Angie, Booth was a dead man. His hands itched just thinking about it. He still wasn’t sure he shouldn’t have killed him — send a message, you come for Angie Wilson, I will kill you.
He was surprised they didn’t already know that.
Monday morning, they barely made deadline. Mac apologized profusely for taking so long with the story of the situation at the north precinct, and Janet bit his head off for apologizing. “Jesus, Mac, if we weren’t so short-handed, I’d put you on leave to regroup — you and Angie both. Let’s meet and plan out that package of stories. Then you can take the day off.”
Mac had shaken his head. He needed to work. He’d had nightmares last night. Nightmares that he’d been too late and hadn’t knocked Booth’s aim off — at least that was the consensus, Sherry told him. She was up at the north precinct building, notifying staff and officers to report downtown. The police chief had been serious about closing it down. “He’s calling it for repairs,” Sherry said. “But everyone knows. We don’t have enough officers left to staff it. Not trustworthy ones.”
“Does he trust you? Sounds like he does,” Mac said.
“Apparently,” she said. “I’m now Sgt. Grant — a field promotion, he called it.”
“Congratulations,” he said sincerely.
After laying out the idea for the story series, and showing the safety reporting team the ID images, Mac went back up to north Seattle. He found one of the earliest addresses, a house in a posh neighborhood just north of Green Lake. And the man who answered the door was the same as the ID photo, a few years older, a bit grayer. Retired now, he said. He listened to Mac’s introduction, shaking his head. “We don’t have to use your name,” Mac said, and the man hesitated.
“All right,” he said. “No harm to talk about it. Five years ago, my son got a DUI, celebrating his graduation from U-Dub. That’s a felony, right? And it closes a lot of doors, including the law school he was supposed to start that fall. But with enough money, you can hire a good attorney, and get it reduced to a misdemeanor, usually with community service. It’s not cheap, but the bigger problem was the timeline. My son would have to delay starting law school — Yale. So I was grousing to some friends, and one of them pulled me aside. Go buy Josh Hill a drink, see what he can do for you.”
So he’d done as he was told, bought Josh a drink at the Boar’s Head after work, and Josh had quoted him $10 grand. “Truthfully, it would have cost me that much or more to hire an attorney,” the man said. “I told him go ahead.”
The breathalyzer evidence got misplaced, and the case was dismissed. “What does your son do?” Mac asked.
“He’s an attorney,” the man said. “He thinks he just lucked out. But he takes on what he calls the young and dumb cases as pro-bono work to pay a bit back, he says.”
Mac wondered if those young and dumb were well-to-do white boys like this man’s son, or if he took on cases like Mac and Toby? He didn’t ask. It didn’t matter. He thanked the man for talking. It was a good story to start the series with, he decided. People could relate to a father wanting to do what was best for his son. But it raised all kinds of questions about privilege and wealth. For $10 grand, you don’t have to have a felony on your record and you can go to law school.
With a felony? No law school. Even the military probably wouldn’t take you. A lot of doors closed. Thoughtful, Mac checked in with others in the database, and found a lot of them were just like this one — rich people who could afford to buy their way out of the consequences of their actions.
Tuesday, though he discovered the look-away people. A businessman who set off all the alarms in Mac’s head was very sly about what he was willing to say. But Mac was pretty sure that his competitor’s store burning down wasn’t noticed in a timely fashion because he’d paid for the cops to stay away from that part of town that evening. Arson. The cops didn’t commit the arson. They might not have even connected the two events. “Best $50K I ever spent,” the man said with a laugh. “And knowing that I could ask for favors? What does the ad say? Priceless.”
Mac felt like he wanted to take a shower after that one.
By Thursday, he’d talked to more than a dozen men, all with similar stories. Evidence disappeared. Police ‘forgot’ things on the witness stand. Routes avoided certain locations at certain times. Petty shit, really, he thought, compared to the high-end events that John Rourke delivered. But he bet McBride was pulling in as much per year as Rourke did — with a whole lot less risk.
Some addresses didn’t pan out, of course. People moved or died. People got divorced. Then on Thursday, he went to talk to Josh Hill’s ex-wife, Carolyn Rogers. There weren’t any real surprises to her story. Most of it was in the lawsuit against the Seattle PD. What wasn’t there, was the limp she still had — always would, she said matter-of-factly. Josh Hill had broken her pelvis. “He was enraged,” she said. “He couldn’t believe I was leaving him, and moreover, I thought I deserved my fair share of the company we’d built together. Turns out, I didn’t know what that company really did. Or rather, I didn’t know what he did. What I did was standard public relations work. And I’m good at it. I had job offers waiting for me when I got out of the hospital.”
“Had he always been violent?” Mac asked.
She shook her head. “No, I thought we had a good marriage — we’d been married 10 years. Of course, I didn’t know about his other life. Maybe that had something to do with it. But he had gotten abusive lately. Not physically, but he was harsher, lashing out. And I’d had enough. I thought he was cheating on me, although he denied it. Then one night, he hit me. That’s when I got the restraining order. The one Sgt. McBride never had served.”
She sounded bitter about that, and she deserved to be. She’d sworn out a report in the hospital, but so far nothing had happened. It was still under investigation, she was told. She showed him the photos from right after her release from the hospital. Holy shit, he thought. She’d nearly died. “He was enjoying the beating he gave me, taking his time,” she said. “He said no one was coming to help me. He’d made sure of it.”
“And then someone did,” Mac said.
“Officer Grant,” Carolyn Rogers said. “She saved me. I would have died if it wasn’t for her. But I hear she got in trouble for it. What kind of justice system do we have if you save a woman’s life, and get reprimanded?”
And that was the question, wasn’t it? Mac started to leave, then asked, “Do you think your husband changed? Do you know why?”
She laughed, a harsh sound, and Mac winced. “Ironically? We started going to church. Valley View. He joined a men’s prayer group. I belonged to a women’s Bible study. It was OK — not the kind of church I grew up in — we went to an AME church. Do you know what those are like?”
“I don’t know much about churches,” he admitted. “Is AME a Black church? I’ve been to one of those.”
“It is,” she said with a smile. “And sometime, I’d like to hear what a white boy like you knows about Black churches.”
“Sometime I’ll tell you,” Mac promised. “But it wasn’t the religion I was there for, it was the music.”
She nodded, unsurprised. “So I thought Valley View was OK. But Josh really liked it. He said he was making all kinds of connections that could really help our business. And no, I don’t know what he meant by that. But he got demanding. Said I wasn’t submissive enough. That kind of thing. So weirdly enough? Going to church changed him for the worse — more than being a petty crook.”
Valley View Community Church. Strange how that name kept popping up.
And then that evening, Mac spent time with Daniel. He was still living in Naomi Fairchild’s basement. “It’s weird, I know,” he said. “But she’s a nice lady, and she’s willing to do it. She’s getting paid for it. That other guy is gone, but I’m still here.”
“Myint?” Mac asked.
“He’s gone,” Daniel said. “But so is the FBI guy. I think she’s glad to have me on the premises. But it’s been quiet. Too quiet. I’ve had too much time to think. Something I should have done much earlier, right?”
“Your wife and kids doing all right?” Mac asked.
Daniel nodded. “My Mom lives in the country out past Issaquah. Different last name, she’s remarried. More than once, truth be told. My kids adore her, and she and my wife get along. I think we’ll sell our house here, maybe move out that way. A bartender can always find work.”
Mac taped his interview for this one. It was long. “You go after more details than the police investigator did,” Daniel observed. Mac paused at that.
“The investigator came here?” he asked.
Daniel shook his head. “No, that other FBI agent, Agent Warren? He came and got me. Escorted me to the downtown police station. It was all very formal. Took all day Tuesday. I gather it’s not the last time.”
“Probably not,” Mac agreed. So where was Rand Nickerson, then? He didn’t ask. He was beginning to realize he hadn’t allotted enough time for all of these interviews. He wondered if he could get another week to work on the stories.
But everyone else had their sidebar pieces ready to go. They’d done some amazing work, Mac realized at coffee Friday morning. Explanatory articles about the court process from Yesenia. Statistics and illustrations from Mike. Joe Conte had been covering most of the breaking news of the week — and there was a lot of it — since Mac was involved. But he had pieces ready to go too. Suck it up, he told himself, and assured them that he would have the other stories ready in time. “I already have the first one,” he said, and handed out printouts.
It was the lead story of the father whose son had a DUI. Mac had made some additional calls to flesh out lost evidence and officers not showing up for court appearances, especially in DUIs. Quite a few of them. “Be interesting to take a look at the demographics of that,” Mike said thoughtfully. He scribbled some stuff down on his notepad.
Mac had been able to track down the son. He’d called him, a young attorney with a prestigious firm here in town. He was about to make partner. He had no idea what his father had done. “I’m not using names,” Mac assured him. “But the police do have the same database I do. But you didn’t do anything wrong. And even your father is more likely to be called as a witness against the police in question than be charged with anything.”
“I see that,” the young attorney agreed. “And Dad is right — the attorney he would have hired to get the same results would probably have cost him that much, maybe more. Says something, doesn’t it — about what money can buy?”
“It does,” Mac agreed. And he’d closed with that quote.
“Good,” Janet pronounced. And there were nods. “How are the others coming?”
“Carolyn Rogers is hard,” he admitted. “And the sleazy arsonist? I hope the cops nail that bastard.”
“And Myint?” she asked.
Mac sighed. “I’m interviewing him today. Stan has it set up for the FBI offices at 10 a.m.”
“I think you’re going to need to do a first person narrative piece for that one,” Janet said, thinking it through. “We’ll see how much you can document third person.”
Mac nodded.
“Oh,” Joe Conte said suddenly. “I have a funny one for you. You know that series of car break-ins that we couldn’t get McBride or anyone to comment on? Well, they weren’t responding to the university cops either. Low priority, they were told. University police busted the kids on Monday. Apparently it was an initiation to a fraternity, and someone ratted them out. But I’m guessing they were on the look-away list. Some of those frats have very powerful alumni. I think someone got wind of it, made them stop, and saw to it that there wasn’t an investigation.”
Mac rolled his eyes. “Nothing too low for them to make a few bucks off,” he said. “Josh Hill may have formalized the process, but I have a source that says McBride was the fixer for north Seattle for years — probably 20 years. He was matter-of-fact about it — how common practice is that?”
“A good question,” Janet approved. “Go find out.”
Mac snorted, and they all filed out of the cafe. “Mac? Are you going to talk to Josh Hill?” Janet asked quietly.
“I’ve been leaving messages,” he said. “Tomorrow I’m going to go find him.”
“Be careful,” she cautioned.
Mac nodded. Once he would have rolled his eyes at her worry. Not anymore.
The stories started on Sunday as scheduled.
Angie bought two copies at the local all-night grocer down the street and brought them back with donuts for them to read. Shorty was already there when she got back. He was reading it online, while Mac paced. She handed him one copy — and a donut.
Shorty was reading a sidebar about the people behind the Police Defense Fund. “My state rep is in this?” he asked.
Mac shrugged. “Apparently. Yesenia and Joe Conte worked that story. Why?”
Shorty shook his head. “I’ve been approached about running for that seat. The Democrats think they might have a shot at winning it. Guess if the current guy is involved in this mess, they might be right.”
“Are you going to do it?” Mac asked, absorbing this news. Shorty hadn’t said anything about this! Shorty shrugged.
“Dunno,” he said. “I’ve got some time to think about it. Get through these trials next month first. Seems like we say that about a lot of things, don’t we?”
“We do,” Mac said. “We surely do.”