Acquainted With the Night (19 page)

“Of course, Chief,” she said calmly.

He grimaced at her tone and said, “Look, Alex…”

“Is this conversation about to become personal again?” she asked.

“Yes,” he sighed. “I owe you an apology.”

“I agree,” Alex responded dryly.

“Jesus, you sound like Betty,” he mumbled. “She tore me a new one when I told her what I said to you.”

“I’ve always respected Betty’s opinion,” Alex said, but she relaxed her tone a little.

“I shouldn’t have said anything about St. Clair to you. I was out of line.”

“I agree with that, too,” Alex said. “Whether you approve of my relationship or not is really irrelevant to me at this point in our lives, but I want you to remember that CJ is my wife. I need for you to respect that. I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt because I know you really care about me. Let’s forget about it, all right?”

He paused, gazing at her uncertainly. “Betty says you haven’t called her,” he said finally.

“That’s true,” Alex admitted. “I’ve been busy. But I’ll talk to Nicole and call her tomorrow. You can tell Betty that.”

* * *

Chris poked her head into Alex’s office just after lunch. “Hey, Captain. Just wanted to tell you I’m going out to work on that background check on Bradford’s new squeeze, Sue Davis.”

“You have an address?”

“Yeah, she’s got one of those pricey condos over in Greenwood Village. She’s renting, looks like.”

“Do you have a Colorado driver’s license on her?”

“Nope. I’m hoping to get a look at her rental application and get ID information, maybe a prior address. I know she’s not registered as a certified financial planner, and she doesn’t have a broker’s license.”

“Okay. Good luck and be careful.”

Chris grinned and said, “Always.”

The rain was still hanging around this afternoon, splattering irregularly against Alex’s window, a random counterpoint to the clicking of keys on her keyboard. When her telephone rang, she scooped up the receiver without her eyes leaving the monitor.

Rod Chavez said, “I am really, really good.”

“I’ve heard rumors about that, but I’ve got no proof yet,” Alex retorted. “What’s up?”

“I think I’ve found your guys,” he announced.

“What?” She felt her heart rate spike suddenly. “The shooters? You’re kidding.”

“I am not. I’m sending you an email now. Look at the attachments and call me back to tell me how brilliant I am.”

She opened his email, read the documents on her screen, arrest reports and booking information, with an increasing sense of incredulity. She finally punched in Rod’s number at the sheriff’s office and when he picked up, she said, “Oh, my God.”

“I know. Is that not amazin’?”

“What’s amazing to me is how obvious it is,” Alex said ruefully. “I should have looked for this days ago.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,
chica,
” Rod said reassuringly
.
“Like a lot of what we do, it’s only obvious if you know exactly where in the haystack to look for the needle.”

Alex scanned her screen again. “Assault with a deadly weapon, auto theft on suspect one, weapons charges and two assaults on suspect number two. They were even arrested together, so clearly they’re associates.”

“Cousins, actually,” Rod said. “Arrested last February twenty-first. Deferred prosecutions were entered July seventeenth. Not even a guilty plea and suspended sentence, Alex, deferred pros. Jeez. They stay out of trouble and in a year, their records are clean as a whistle. And the cases were solid against them, there was no reason for the deferred prosecutions. This stinks really, really bad, Alex. They were arraigned and out on bail in plenty of time to get a nice offer from the DA. They’re arrested just three weeks before your car accident, and the prosecution deal is entered less than two weeks after David’s murder.”

“My God, this must have taken you hours to come up with, Rod.”

“Nah, not that bad. So what’s next?”

“As soon as my detective comes back from an interview she’s doing, I think it’s time to pay our two suspects a visit,” Alex said.

She looked at the faces of the two men on her screen, and wondered which one of them had actually fired the bullet that had pierced David Castillo’s heart.

Chapter Nineteen

Alex was waiting for Chris Andersen when she got back. “How did it go?” Alex asked her.

“I don’t know much yet. I did manage to get a copy of Sue Davis’s apartment application, so my plan is to run down the information, prior address and the rest. Why?” Chris asked, suddenly looking at Alex squarely. “What happened here?”

Alex replied, “Rod Chavez, my friend at the Roosevelt SO, may just have come up with the lead we were looking for.”

Chris leaned over her shoulder as Alex pulled up the information Rod had sent her on her computer. “Jesus,” Chris murmured as she read. “These guys look awfully good for this.”

“I thought so, too,” Alex said, feeling her excitement return.
We’re getting closer, sweetheart.

“I think my next job is to find out where these two fine citizens might be and go out and have a little chat with them,” Chris said happily.

“I agree, but I don’t want you going out alone. Grab somebody else to go with you, or come and get me if you can’t get anybody else. I don’t want you going out there by yourself. These guys are dangerous, and more importantly if they are involved in David’s murder and the attack on me, they don’t have a lot to lose. Are we clear?”

“Very clear, Captain,” Chris responded solemnly. “Don’t worry, I have no desire to become a martyr.”

“Glad to hear it. Keep in touch.”

* * *

On the plus side, Alex thought, at least the sun is shining today, the rain having finally moved east to bless Kansas. On the less positive side, she had been stuck in a command staff meeting for two hours now, listening to Chief Wylie drone through PowerPoint slides about some new federal grant for anti-gang activities. That the chief had scheduled the meeting for three o’clock in the afternoon had compounded the boredom factor.

Alex shifted uneasily in her chair at the conference table. Gangs were certainly a problem in the more concentrated urban areas of Denver, and activities had spread to some of the suburbs like Aurora, but the topic wasn’t very relevant to their day-to-day policing in Colfax. Her counterpart in charge of the Patrol Division, Captain John Robards, was concentrating his attention on Chief Wylie so completely that Alex knew for certain that John was bored out of his mind. Paul Duncan, at the other end of the table, had been fiddling with his pen for the last half an hour.

She had her eyes on the screen, but her mind was far away. She’d been mentally rearranging the pieces of the case all day, trying to see beyond the obvious.

It has to be Tony
, she kept thinking.
I don’t know why, exactly, but it has to be.
The deal cut with the suspects was too obvious for anything else. If Chris came up with something, anything tying the two suspects Rod Chavez had identified to the attacks, it
had
be Tony. But what was his motive? He certainly had plenty of animosity toward CJ that he hadn’t kept secret, but before CJ left it had seemed to Alex that CJ and Tony had finally come to some kind of truce, mutual tolerance, at least. Why would Tony do this now? She continued to ask herself the same question. And for all of the difficulties surrounding their divorce, and Alex’s later relationship with CJ, she’d never in her wildest imagination thought that Tony would try to kill her.

Their marriage had been a brief and unhappy one. Alex married him because he seemed to genuinely love her, but it hadn’t taken long for her to discover that he viewed her primarily as an important asset to his budding career. “Married guys look more stable, more like promotion material,” he’d explained to her once. For her part, Alex admitted that she’d been trying to do the right thing by marrying him. Well-raised Catholic girls were supposed to get married. To men.

But it hadn’t worked. Tony had been deeply unhappy when she asked for a divorce after only two years together. The higher her rank in the department, the more he seemed determined to convince her that she’d made a mistake, that they still belonged together.

Then she’d met CJ and everything changed. To describe Tony as unhappy about her relationship with a woman was an understatement. He despised CJ, hated their relationship, and had since had several attempts at breaking them up.

If this is Tony he would have gone after CJ, Alex thought. Not me.

Maybe she wouldn’t know the motive until they finally put the case together and interrogated him. The only reason for the timing she could think of was the appearance of his new girlfriend, Sue Davis. That had to be it, somehow, she thought. The girlfriend’s involvement must somehow have triggered Tony’s desire to take more drastic steps. But why?

She hadn’t heard yet from Chris about her follow-up on Davis. She sneaked a glance at the clock on her phone, carefully set on silent, and saw that it was just about five. She also saw two missed calls from Chris.

Wylie seemed to be winding down, thank God. As soon as he finished, Alex made her farewells, and went into the hall to call Chris.

“What have you got?” Alex asked.

“Good news and bad news,” Chris began.

Alex had stopped in the hallway since she couldn’t get cell phone reception in either the elevator or the stairwell. Now she paced up and down as she talked. “Give me both barrels,” she said to Chris.

“The good news is that I think Chavez’s suspects really are our guys, for a variety of reasons I can tell you about later, including the fact that they suddenly had some extra cash after the traffic incident in March.”

“Did you talk to them?” Alex demanded impatiently.

“That’s the bad news. I couldn’t.”

“You can’t locate them?”

“Oh, I can locate them, all right,” Chris said, and Alex heard unhappy resignation in her voice. “They’re dead, Captain.”

Alex stopped pacing. “What?”

“They found both of them shot on July twenty-seventh last year,” Chris reported unhappily. “In a vehicle, dead on the scene. Sherill Heights caught the case. I talked to the primary detective on the case. He put it up to a drug deal gone bad. No witnesses, and no suspects.”

“Oh, my God, Chris,” Alex exclaimed. “Our perp hired them, and after David’s murder he or she made sure they couldn’t talk.”

“That’s my read too, Captain. Our guy didn’t need them anymore, since he’d gotten rid of St. Clair by then, so he made sure to cut loose the deadweight.”

Alex’s mind was racing. “Any information on the weapon used?”

“Twenty-two, not a known gun. But I checked, and District Attorney Bradford owns a Colt twenty-two caliber revolver. You don’t think he’d be stupid enough to use his own gun, do you?”

“Hell,” Alex said forcefully. “We have to get a warrant now.”

“I thought you’d say that. Do we have a clue where the gun might be?”

Alex thought a moment. “He keeps it at his house, at his desk. Or at least he used to. I just wish I knew why—” She stopped suddenly for a moment, then said softly, “Oh, my God.”

“Captain?” Chris asked into the silence.

“Chris,” she said abruptly, “did you check out the background information on Tony’s girlfriend yet?”

“No, I’ve been running down Chavez’s two guys all day.”

Alex told her what she wanted her to do. Chris said, “I’ll go over there now. It’ll take me a little while in rush hour traffic.”

“Call me on my cell as soon as you get anything. I have an appointment with the district attorney in ten minutes.”

“What?” Chris demanded sharply. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Captain. He’s looking pretty good as our perp.”

Alex said, “He called me this afternoon as I was getting ready to go into this meeting and wanted to talk about the charges against soon-to-be former Detective Fullerton. Don’t worry. I’m meeting at his office, not his house.”

“Yeah, but it’s after hours,” Chris still sounded unhappy.

“Chris, relax. He’s not going to shoot me himself, and certainly not in his office. Maybe I’ll get some information that will help us. Call me as soon as you know something, I mean it. I’ll take the call even if I’m still with him. If I don’t pick up, then you can worry, all right?”

“If you say so,” Chris grumbled. “I’ll call you soon.”

As Alex walked across the street to the DA’s offices, she tested her earlier moment of insight with logic. She hoped that Chris might be able to confirm her suspicions very soon.

It frustrated her that there was a clue she should have seen from the beginning, the one CJ had given her if she’d only known what she was looking at when she saw the note.

Or, rather, the envelope.

Still deep in thought, she took the elevator to Tony’s office, on the fourth floor. He had the corner office and his door was open. She stepped into the doorway and saw him at his desk, sitting as if he were waiting for her.

He looked up and said stiffly, “Alex.”

She took another step into the office, and the door was pushed shut behind her. She turned to look into the barrel of the gun aimed at her chest. Tony’s twenty-two, she thought, momentarily light-headed from shock. She lifted her eyes from the gun to the woman holding it.

“Captain Ryan,” the woman said. “So nice of you to join us. Put your gun on the floor, and do it very, very carefully.”

Alex eased her Glock from her holster and put it flat on the floor.

“Good,” her captor instructed. “Get up, Tony.”

“Why are you doing this?” Tony demanded, his voice was shaking.

The woman snapped her eyes to Tony before returning to watch Alex. “Shut up and get over here.”

He got up and came around the desk, and she backed up a couple of steps to keep them both covered.

Alex glanced at Tony. He was pale and sweating.
She’s had him here for a while,
she thought. His call to her had apparently been a setup to get Alex to the office.

“Put your handcuffs on him,” the woman ordered Alex. “And do a good job, because I’ll check.”