when I found the set of bank statements, that got my attention. If somebody starts keeping financial records at work instead of at home, what does that usually mean?”
“That he’s got something to hide,” I replied. “And most likely he’s hiding whatever it is from his wife.”
“Exactly,” Kramer agreed. “So when I stumbled on the file folder with all the loan applications in it, I was already on point, already looking. It didn’t take me two seconds to figure it out. There are four separate bank loans all together, four different banks, and four different names, but all the cosigners share the same home address which also happens to be Ben Weston’s address. What does that say to you?”
“It does raise a question or two, doesn’t it?”
Kramer glared at me. “More than one or two, if you ask me. Several in fact. I’ve got Sue Danielson checking for rap sheets on the other three names. I turned up Russell’s on my own.”
“What about the schools?”
“Schools?” Kramer asked. “What schools?”
“Don’t student loan applications indicate where the student is enrolling? Have you checked with the registrars to see whether or not those students are actually there?”
Kramer didn’t answer, an omission which was, by itself, an admission. No, he hadn’t checked.
“Shouldn’t you?” I prodded. “If the students on the applications are actually enrolled just the way the form says they are, then maybe there’s no fraud involved, after all.”
By then, I was parking the car in the Public Safety Building parking garage. Kramer shot me a withering look as he reached to open the car door. “Believe me,” he said, “they won’t be registered anywhere. This is the real world, Beaumont, not some kind of never-never land. Knuckles Russell is a two-bit thug with a rap sheet ten feet long. I’ll lay you odds the others won’t be any different. The only institution of higher learning these guys will ever land in is a federal pen.”
On that congenial and uplifting note, we headed upstairs. I think Kramer expected to lose me in the fifth floor maze, but I was determined to see copies of Ben Weston’s loan applications. I followed Kramer on down the hall. When we turned into his cubicle, the whole place was a shambles. Multiple boxes, some opened and some closed, were stacked against the wall. A half-emptied file cabinet with the top three drawers opened stood in the far corner. I waded through the boxes to a chair, removed a stack of folders, and made myself at home.
Kramer began shoving file folders into one box. “Looks like you’re moving,” I said.
He glanced up and seemed surprised to find me sitting there. “Down the hall,” he mumbled, “so I can be closer to Watty. We’ll be working together closely on this one, you know.”
“Right.”
He stared at me in what could only be described as a clear-cut invitation to leave, the old here’s-your-hat- what’s-your-hurry-type stare. I didn’t take the hint. “What do you want?” he asked finally. “Don’t you have work to do?”
“This is work. I want to see Ben Weston’s student loan applications.”
Grudgingly, he picked up a file folder from a stack on his desk, extracted a sheaf of papers, and shoved them across the desk in my direction, but before I had a chance to glance at them, Sue Danielson appeared in the doorway and looked at us across the disarray.
Sue, a single mother with two teenagers at home, is a recent transplant in Homicide. She started out years ago as a 911 dispatcher and has gradually worked her way up. Gravelly voiced, she along with Janice Morraine down in the Crime Lab are two of the Public Safety Building’s unrepentant smoking holdouts. They both go downstairs and stand outside in all kinds of weather to have a morning and afternoon smoke.
Sue nodded briefly in my direction, but her real message was for Detective Kramer. “You called that shot,” she said, “four for zip. Every last one of them has a sizable rap sheet, and they’re all BGD, or at least they were. They’ve all dropped out of sight in the last three to ten months.”
“You’re sure they’re not in jail someplace?” Kramer growled.
“Not that I can find so far.”
“Maybe they’re dead then. Maybe Weston had someone knock them off.”
“Maybe you should check with the schools,” I suggested.
Kramer glowered at me while Sue Danielson looked genuinely surprised. “What’s this about schools?”
“What if those students are actually enrolled there?” I continued. “Maybe the applications are just exactly what they say they are and these kids are all back in school.”
“Like hell they are!” Kramer said, exasperated.
But Sue Danielson had been paying attention to me, not to him. “That’s a good idea, Beau,” she said. “I’ll do some checking on that, if not tonight, then for sure in the morning. Bye.”
Waving, she backed away from the door before Kramer had a chance to say anything more. Pissed, he went on pitching file folders into boxes while I glanced through the set of loan applications.
That’s what they were-student loan applications. Despite the rap sheets, these kids were really that-kids, with the oldest barely twenty-two. The largest loan amount was for two thousand a semester for Washington State University over in Pullman. One applicant listed his school of choice as Central Washington with the required loan amount of a thousand dollars per quarter. The third, for the same dollar amount, listed Western Washington in Bellingham. The last one, for an Ezra Russell, was only partially completed. It didn’t list a school at all.
If his amount was similar to the others, that would bring the total indebtedness up to around twelve or thirteen grand a year. For a cop with a family of his own to support, thirteen thousand dollars a year would be one hell of a financial burden if one or more of Ben Weston’s cosigners defaulted on the loans, but in the drug-dealing world that these gang members formerly inhabited, thirteen thou was small potatoes, not even one night’s take-on a slow night. What the hell was going on?
I put the papers back down on Kramer’s desk. “Don’t you think these ought to be turned over to Internal Investigations?” I asked.
That got Kramer’s attention about the same way a red flag grabs a maddened bull. “I don’t think anything of the kind, and don’t you go leaking one word of it. Crimes have been committed, Detective Beaumont. Murders to be exact. That already takes this case well beyond the scope of the guys upstairs. I don’t want one word of this to go to the Double I’s,” he said. “This is first and foremost a homicide investigation. Understand?”
I understood all right. As per usual, Detective Kramer wanted to play with all the marbles again, and he didn’t want any interference and/or help from anyone else. Regardless of field of endeavor, that’s the way it is with fast-rising stars. They can’t afford to share the limelight. They’re also scarce as hens’ teeth when it comes time to take responsibility for something that goes wrong.
“You do whatever you want to, Kramer,” I told him, “but if I were you, I think I’d talk this over with Watty before making too many unilateral decisions. He’s the one who’s really in charge of the task force, you know. He should be consulted.”
Kramer stopped loading files into the cardboard box. “You do your job and I’ll do mine, Beaumont. Incidentally, I haven’t seen any reports on the Adam Jackson end of the investigation. If I were you, I wouldn’t show up at that meeting tomorrow morning empty-handed. That would be a real shame.”
So the battle lines were drawn. I headed for my own cubicle with my jaws clenched as well as my fists. Paul Kramer has the unerring capacity for bringing out the very worst in me.
Back at my desk, I dialed my voice-mail code and had a message to call Big Al, but when I returned the call Molly said he wasn’t home. Just the way she said it sounded funny, as though the words didn’t quite ring true.
“Tell him I called,” I told her. “I’m here at the office working on paper. I’m due to be home around six. If he misses me here, he can try there.”
I started in on the reports, but I kept nodding off. Twice I fell asleep with the pen on the paper and had to start over again to get rid of the stray line of ink that trailed cornerwise across the bottom half of the page. I was out like a light, drooling, with my chin resting on my chest and probably even snoring when the phone woke me up.
“The killer was wearing gloves, yellow rubber gloves,” Big Al announced without preamble. “Junior didn’t remember that until just a little while ago. I thought you should know. It’s got to be somebody in the AFIS files, somebody we could find for sure if we just had a set of prints. Otherwise, why screw around with gloves?”
The Automated Fingerprint Identification System is a new, computerized system that can nail crooks to the wall as long as there’s enough money in the budget to feed the file prints as well as the requests for matchups into the system. Big Al almost got me. I was so struck by the presence of gloves on the killer’s hands that it took me a
