why we were there.
Time passed. Tony Freeman sat gazing serenely at the artwork on the wall behind us as though he didn’t have a care in the world. Kyle munched thoughtfully on his corn dog and sipped his soda while the rest of us waited in uneasy silence. There was no joking or lighthearted banter. The new coffee was halfway through dripping into the pot and Connie had left for the day when the third tap finally sounded on the door. Freeman pressed the button and in walked Chief of Police Kenneth Rankin, flushed and puffing and out of breath.
“Why did you insist I use the stairs for God’s sake, Tony?” Chief Rankin growled. “I was all the way down in the Crime Lab. It’s a helluva long hike up from the third floor to the eleventh, you know. And what’s so damned important that it couldn’t wait until tomorrow morning?”
“Have a seat, Chief,” Freeman said quietly. “We’ll get to it as quickly as we can. Thank you all for coming. Does everyone know everyone else?”
We all did. “Good,” Freeman continued. “I’ve called you here this afternoon to ask for your help and cooperation. It looks as though we have a serious problem on our hands-a rogue cop problem.”
Rankin paled. “Don’t tell me we’ve got another one,” he groaned. “The business with Benjamin Weston is bad enough.”
Lehman, who doesn’t regard himself as a cop and finds no horror in the words “rogue cop,” chose that moment to noisily open a bag of potato chips. Larry Powell looked stricken but sat up straight, paying absolute attention.
“It’s possible,” Captain Freeman said softly, “that this one is far worse.”
“Worse!” Rankin exploded. “How could it possibly be worse?”
“Unless I’m sadly mistaken, Ben Weston may have been nothing but the tip of the iceberg.”
His words grabbed my gut and shook it. Tip of the iceberg? In other words, Tony Freeman was convinced Ben Weston was part of whatever dirty crap was going on. That hurt. It hurt real bad.
“This has something to do with the murders then?” Larry Powell asked after a moment.
Freeman nodded. “Probably. What I’m about to tell you is not to be discussed with anyone outside this room. I’ve just had a very disturbing visit from someone who’s working undercover for Narcotics. Word is out on the streets that the Bloods, Crips, and BGD want to have a summit meeting with someone from Seattle PD. Preferably Chief Rankin here himself.”
That caught me completely flat-footed. After all I thought we were going to discuss something else entirely. And I wasn’t the only one who was surprised. Chief Rankin’s eyes bulged. “With me? All of them at once? What about?”
“About Ben Weston,” Freeman answered. “They say they aren’t responsible for killing Ben Weston and his family. They want to help us find the cops who did.”
You could have heard a pin drop in that room. Sue and I had been gradually collecting our own set of suspicions, but to hear them come ricocheting back at us, uttered with Captain Freeman’s unsmiling, dead certainty, made the hair prickle on the back of my neck.
Chief Rankin was the first to find his voice. “Did you say cops?” he croaked. “You’re saying that a fellow police officer or officers killed Ben Weston and all his family?”
“That’s what they said-cops, plural not singular,” Tony Freeman answered grimly. “That means two or more.”
“And the gangs, all of them together, are offering to help us catch them? I’ve never heard of such a thing. That’s preposterous.”
“I’ve never heard of anything like it before, either,” Tony Freeman agreed. “But that’s the message. They say they’ll help, but only on the QT. Word of this temporary truce is not to go beyond this room, is that clear?”
For several moments we were all too thunderstruck to even open our mouths. I was the one who finally managed to ask a question. “How’s this all going to work?”
“One step at a time,” Freeman replied confidently. “By the way, Larry, as of now and until further notice, Detectives Beaumont and Danielson are working for me.”
Powell nodded his acquiescence, and Captain Freeman turned to us. “Any questions?”
“No, sir,” Sue Danielson replied. “Just tell us what you want us to do.”
CHAPTER 16
I’ve never actually been in a horrible hurricane, but it must be very much like the meeting that went on in Captain Freeman’s office that day as late afternoon changed to evening. In Seattle the Weston family murders dominated the local news. As a consequence, the room was charged with an almost electric tension. Anthony Freeman took control and issued orders to everyone involved, Chief Rankin included. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the commander of IIS was running the show.
Most of the time Internal Investigations deals with specific allegations against specific officers, police brutality in the course of making an arrest being one of the most common, although drug use, domestic violence, and job-related alcohol problems show up with a fair amount of regularity. In all of these instances, the identity of the officer isn’t so much in question as is the propriety of his actions. Here, we were faced with a far more difficult and complicated problem because not only were the identities of the officers and their actions totally unknown to us, there was a reasonable possibility that one or more of them might be actively involved in some aspect of the Weston Family Task Force investigation.
Captain Freeman began the meeting by laying out for all of us the situation as he saw it. “At the moment, there’s no way to tell whether or not what our informant has told us is true and that the gang warlords really will cooperate with us on this. I’ve been around Seattle PD for a long time, folks. So have most of you. Anybody here ever hear of the gangs making this kind of offer? I’d be less surprised if Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy dropped in to pay a personal visit.”
Most of us shook our heads. “It could be a trick,” Chief Rankin suggested.
Freeman disagreed. “I don’t think so,” he said somberly. “I think we’re going to have to operate on the assumption that the intelligence we have been given is correct and that fellow police officers are somehow responsible for the murders of Ben Weston and the others. For a change, the gangs don’t want to be blamed for something they didn’t do.”
Freeman allowed his gaze to wander slowly around the room while the weight of his words sank in. If he was expecting objections, no one made any. Even Kyle Lehman, who was doubtless the least affected, paused for a long moment before biting thoughtfully into an apple which had appeared from the same jacket pocket as the diet Pepsi.
“These people,” Freeman continued, “however many of them there are, constitute a cancer on the body of the Seattle Police Department-a cancer I’m determined to eradicate. How do you get rid of a cancer? By taking it out, by cutting it out, by destroying it before it destroys you. This is the preliminary biopsy stage, that critical time where early detection is the key to survival. We’re going to find out who these people are, and we’re going to take care of them. We’re going to do it the same way a surgeon would-by making the smallest possible incision.
“To that end, my intention is to limit the number of people who actually know what’s going on to a mere handful, specifically to those of us who are in this room at this very moment. If it becomes necessary to add more- and it probably will-those additions will be handpicked by me and nobody else. You are not to include anyone else in this part of the investigation without my express permission. Do I make myself clear?”
This time a response was definitely in order. We all nodded in turn, including Chief Rankin. His was probably the most heartfelt of all. Rankin, one of a vast number of unappreciated and much maligned California transplants, was fairly new to Seattle. Coming from Oakland, he brought along with him a reputation for being both a consummate politician and an ace delegator-two prime prerequisites for being the chief of police in any major metropolitan area. Rumors that he was also a closet racist had followed him to Seattle, but as far as I was concerned, they had yet to be proven one way or the other.
Rankin’s ability to delegate, however, was without question. The people I knew who’d been handed assignments by him respected the fact that Rankin hadn’t second-guessed them. When he put someone in charge, they stayed in charge. I could see that myself as Tony Freeman continued to run the meeting as a one-man
