“For doing the right thing?”
“For not handling it in-house. For calling in OPS.”
As if the Office of Professional Standards wasn’t made of cops. But the attitude was common, I’d discovered. Good cops hated dirty cops, but a lot of good cops wanted to deal with the situation “in the family.” Bad cops had many ways to get back at a pushy rabble-rouser, and sticking them with a partner they couldn’t trust was top of the list. Few things chilled a cop’s nerve faster.
“Anyway, they moved her to a new zone, did zippo to Macklin. She and Trey started working together on SWAT. When she learned about the Talbot murder, and how Trey was getting implicated in Macklin’s dirt, she made it her personal mission to take Macklin down. So she got one of her confidential informants to cough up some pertinent leads, including the guy who was his fence, and bam. Macklin’s done.”
“But when Macklin went down, the case against Talbot went with him.”
“Yep. Sank like the Titanic.” Garrity squinched up his eyes. “That could be why the files are so problematic, if they revealed the identity of Price’s CI. Documents that do that are not protected by sunshine laws, pending investigation or otherwise. All kinda illegal there.”
I popped the top on my Coke. I had my own theory, and it had nothing to do with Keesha Price’s confidential informant and everything to do with Keesha Price herself. And if I was right, Trey wasn’t overreacting. But I didn’t dare spill any of this to Garrity, not yet.
He grabbed more chips. “Here’s the thing—CI identities are redacted and coded in any case files. There shouldn’t be a single speck of compromising data in there. So this still doesn’t make sense.”
“Trey said he’d explain.”
“Well, he’d better. He likes to play close to the vest, especially with information that could potentially hurt people. But if those files have CI information, they’re a hot potato, and he needs to relieve himself of them, and fast.”
At the edge of the woods, a trio of crows descended on a piece of trash, squabbling, wings beating. It was the only activity in the lot. The hubbub of highway traffic lay just a few hundred feet away, but in this separate place, the city seemed a distant memory.
“Trey mentioned they suspected a robbery gone bad?”
“Burglary. Yeah.” Garrity chewed thoughtfully. “There was a thief active in the fancier neighborhoods then. They called him the Buckhead Burglar. Always struck during the morning when people were at work or yoga or whatever—get in, go straight for the good stuff, get out, empty house, no violence. The theory was the thief finally screwed up and broke into the house with Jessica still there. She ran, he panicked, and in the heat of the moment, he picked up the handgun lying on the nightstand and shot her dead.”
“This is where Macklin came in?”
“Supposedly. The physical evidence backed up that part of the story—the nine-millimeter Macklin claimed to have found at the edge of the property, the one belonging to Nicholas Talbot, was the murder weapon. Talbot admitted it was his, said he kept it in the nightstand because of the thefts. And after that, the Buckhead Burglar was never heard from again. We figured the guy realized he was suddenly looking at a felony murder rap, so he dropped Atlanta like it was on fire and vanished.”
“But Trey didn’t buy that theory.”
“About the burglar making himself scarce after the killing? Sure. But he always liked Nick Talbot for the murder. Said the scene was obviously faked to make it look like a burglary.”
“And Price?”
“Same theory, different suspect. She was convinced Macklin was the guilty party. He had a gambling habit, a prostitute habit too, plus a temper. He was lazy and sleazy and bad police.”
“If he was such a bad cop, why was he still on the force?”
Garrity shrugged. “Back then, it wasn’t as easy to get rid of a bad apple. OPS had problems. They’ve cleaned their act up. Mostly. But even if Macklin was a skeeze, Price’s theory that he killed Jessica Talbot had one big problem—Macklin was at a traffic stop on the other side of Chastain Park when she died. His dash cam was his alibi. Trey was convinced that video eliminated Macklin as a suspect. Price was convinced he faked the videos somehow, and I gotta admit, it does seem hella convenient that he just happened to have a tailor-made alibi ready to go. Like he knew he’d get suspected.”
“And there was Trey parked suspiciously down the road at Gabriella’s.”
Garrity paused, sandwich halfway to his mouth. “You heard about that?”
“Gabriella told me.”
“Oh. You two are talking?”
“Sort of.”
“Good.” He sank his teeth into the sandwich, chewed heartily. “I mean, Trey wasn’t doing anything but sitting at the curb. But the GPS in his cruiser had him in that same spot for an hour, not patrolling, like he was supposed to be.”
I could see it like a news reel. Gabriella gone. The house empty. Trey sitting there, watching. Stewing. Regretting. And then the call coming in right down the street.
“Did they ever suspect Trey of wrongdoing?”
“It was looking bad for a little while. But then Price went ballistic on his behalf.” Garrity chewed, stared over the dash at the trail head entrance. “Price blamed herself, I think, for the way everything fell apart at the end. Taking down Macklin protected Trey from any taint, for sure, and it nailed shut Macklin’s coffin—literally, as it turned out—but that destroyed the case against Talbot.”
“So case closed,” I said.
“Case inactive. There’s still a warrant out for the Buckhead Burglar, still a profile up for him in the LINX network, but there
