“His gang-member profile?” Freeman asked.
“You know about that?”
The captain nodded. “I sure do. It’s a good piece of work. Once it’s finished, it’s going to be an invaluable crime-solving tool. Up to now we’ve had no systematic way of following all the strings and seeing how all the various street gangs are interrelated, of knowing who is connected to whom and why.”
“Was he working on anything else?”
“He may have been, but that’s all I know of. Why?”
“Because the morning after his death, between one and three o’clock, someone got into Ben Weston’s secured computer file and opened and closed every single file.”
Sue Danielson stated her case quietly and then shut up, allowing Tony Freeman to draw his own conclusions.
The captain frowned. “It sounds to me like someone looking for something but they weren’t sure if it was there to begin with, and they had no idea what file name it might have been under. You say this was the morning after the murders?”
Sue nodded.
“I wonder if anything is missing,” Freeman mused.
His comment seemed to annoy Sue. “It’s a little difficult to tell what’s missing from looking at the files,” she countered. “If a file had been deleted, it’s just not there.”
Freeman nodded. “What about the floppy disk back-up copy? Everybody’s supposed to keep one of those, and that would have been with Ben himself. Does Property show it on the inventory?”
Sue looked questioningly at me. “I never saw one,” I said. “In fact, now that you mention it, I remember Ron saying something about Ben working on this gang project at home originally, but I don’t remember seeing a computer in his house, either.”
“Ron?” Freeman asked.
“Ron Peters, in Media Relations. He used to be my partner before he got hurt. He’s the one who brought the gang profile project to our attention in the first place.”
Tony turned back to Sue. “All right. Go on.”
“That’s all we have so far,” Sue answered. “It’s not much, but…”
Abruptly, Freeman spun his chair around and sat for several long moments with his back to us, staring out through the still dripping rain at the moldy green-brown facade of the building across the street. Finally, he turned back toward us, reaching for the telephone at the same time.
“Connie,” he said. “Call upstairs and see if the chief’s still here. If he is, ask him to come down. Tell him to use the stairs. I don’t want anyone to see him punching the button for this floor in the elevator. And see if you can reach Larry Powell down in Homicide and Captain Nichols in CCI. I need to see the three of them and Kyle Lehman too. On the double.”
Freeman paused. “Yes, I know damn good and well that Kyle sleeps all day and works all night. Wake him up and tell him it’s urgent. Oh, and bring in some more chairs from the conference room, would you?”
I had expected someone from Internal Investigations to be interested in what we had to say, but Freeman’s prompt calling of a top-level meeting was beyond my wildest expectations. Assuming Sue and I were being dismissed in favor of a roomful of brass, I got up and headed for the door.
“Hey, wait a minute,” Freeman demanded. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Back downstairs. We’ve got work to do.”
He shook his head and motioned me back toward the chair. “No way. We’re having a little meeting here in just a few minutes. You and Detective Danielson constitute exhibits one and two. Sit down. Would either of you like some coffee?”
To be polite, I dutifully accepted a cup of coffee from an acrid-smelling pot on a table in the corner of the room. Sue Danielson remained in her chair.
“Is all this really necessary?” she asked. “Do we really need to be here for the meeting? We’ve already told you everything we know.”
Freeman smiled at her. “You don’t like all this very much, do you, Detective Danielson? Remember, we’re only Internal Investigations, not the Spanish Inquisition.”
Sue kept her cool verbally, but two angry splotches of color appeared on her cheekbones. “Don’t make fun of me, Captain Freeman. I’m new at this job. I still have lots to learn.”
“Sorry,” he apologized quickly. “No offense. It’s just that people often label IIS in their minds and turn it into something it isn’t. All the detectives in the department get cycled through here eventually, including you once you’ve been around long enough. That keeps the unit from becoming a real power structure which, considering what we do, could be dangerous. Our job is to keep good cops from going bad and to find bad cops and get them off the force. It’s that simple.
“I run a tight ship, Detective Danielson,” Tony Freeman continued, “and I run it on the basis of the golden rule-Do unto others and all that jazz. That may sound corny at first, but with detectives rotating in and out of here, it really is a matter of what goes around comes around. Somebody who acts like a jerk when he’s on the delivery end of IIS may very well end up being on the receiving end a few months down the line. That knowledge helps keep everybody honest.”
There was a light tapping on the door. Freeman pressed a button to disable the security lock. The door opened and Kyle Lehman entered the room.
If Captain Freeman is Seattle PD’s straight arrow, Kyle Lehman is its ghostly computer guru. A scrawny, sallow-faced, bespectacled nerd who’s probably thirty but looks nineteen or twenty, Kyle came to Seattle PD years ago to install our computer system and get it up and running. Afterward, he never left. Legend has it that Lehman is listed as a resident in an apartment over on Eastlake somewhere, but he spends most of his time baby-sitting the department’s sometimes temperamental computer system. He sleeps on a cot in his office, showers in the change room, survives on a diet of readily available neighborhood fast food, and spends his spare time playing fantasy quest games on his personal desktop computer.
Not surprisingly, Lehman was the first to show. He arrived dressed all in black-an aging rendition of what teenagers currently call a “bat caver.” He wore a single earring, and his reddish hair flopped crookedly over one eye.
“Morning, Tony,” he said casually to Freeman, although it was well after four in the afternoon.
“I trust this isn’t too early for you,” Freeman returned.
Kyle grinned ingratiatingly. “Naw. Somebody from CCI already woke me up. Mind if I have some breakfast?”
“Be my guest,” Tony Freeman told him.
Lehman took a seat in the corner. At the same time he bit into a mustard-slathered corn dog. An unopened can of diet Pepsi hung out of the pocket of his frayed hounds-tooth jacket.
Up to that point, I had never exchanged a word with Kyle Lehman, but that didn’t keep me from having an immediate, none-too-favorable opinion of the man. I had seen him skulking around the halls on occasion. The only thing that really pissed me off more than his looks was the common departmental knowledge that Lehman made more money than almost any detective on the force. For that kind of money, it seemed to me we could have hired someone who looked a little more like a regular human being and less like something that had just oozed out from under a hard disk drive.
Next, Connie ushered Captain Powell into the room. Larry glanced at Sue and me, nodded curtly, and kept on walking. He greeted Freeman and sat down on one of the three extra chairs that had been crowded in next to the wall on either side of Tony Freeman’s desk.
He exchanged polite greetings with Lehman and then turned to us. “What are you two doing here?” he asked.
Freeman answered before either Sue or I could open our mouths. “Waiting for the rest of our party to show up. Want some coffee, Larry?”
Connie, who evidently was capable of taking a hint once her nails were filed, grabbed the pot along with the rest of its evil-smelling dregs and disappeared into the outer office.
Norman Nichols showed up next. He nodded to Sue as he took a seat next to Captain Powell. Having just helped Sue break into Ben Weston’s computer files, Nichols probably more than anyone had a fairly good idea of
