Every Kind of Wicked (A Gardiner and Renner Novel Book 6)
Every Kind of Wicked: Chapter 27

Monday 3:20 p. m.

They had her write a statement, then insisted she do it over after she noted only that Evan Harding had concerns about certain money exchanges and his workplace and left out every other detail of her testimony.

In the meantime, they needed some expert advice. And, for once, not from Maggie.

After asking around, Jack and Riley were directed to Manuel Rodriguez in the white-collar unit. The detective did, indeed, have a white collar, set off by a navy silk tie and what appeared to be “skinny” jeans. Or perhaps they only seemed that way because Manuel Rodriguez reached six feet three without topping two hundred pounds.

He tapped at a keyboard, absorbed in his screen, apparently unaware of their approach until they pulled up a pair of his coworkers’ vacated chairs. Then he stopped typing, glanced at them, and waited.

Riley explained that they needed some advice about a call center. Rodriguez forgot his screen, pushed his keyboard aside, and rested his elbows on his desk. “A call center here? Local? Totally cool. Most are overseas.”

“Right here. Problem is, we have no proof. This girl isn’t giving anything up. Like, nothing. We think it may be involved with a couple homicides but can’t begin to guess how. Our question is—”

“What’s the scam?”

“She claims to be an IRS agent—”

“Ah, yes.” Rodriguez grinned, his head bobbing up and down so fast it made his black hair splay over his eyes. “I love getting those. They want you to call back so they use the same number for twenty-four hours—usually the scammers spoof a new number with every call so caller ID doesn’t do you any good. But those, I spend the rest of the day dialing it to tell them their mothers were whores—” He clapped a hand over his mouth, wide eyes scanning the area for any females within earshot. “Probably shouldn’t say that. But they tick me off. And I figure if they have any sort of a conscience at all, they’ll burn out after a couple of weeks. If I can guilt one scammer into quitting, then I’ve done my daily good deed.”

“But how does it work?” Riley asked.

Long fingers sketched the air as he talked. “These groups—usually overseas, but not necessarily—steal people’s IDs, then use them to fill out a generic gift card, held by a physical person here. No money has gone anywhere yet. Then, when the call center gets some dumb schlub like me to give up his credit card number, they use it to load funds on the gift card that’s ready and waiting. The runner—the physical person with the gift card—takes it to one of the money stores or goes online and buys a money order with it. The money order is deposited in an account. Offshore, of course. It seems weird, like these numbers are going back and forth over the ocean, but that way the connection between me and my credit card and them and their bank account is completely severed.”

“It’s worth it? That many people believe the IRS is calling them?”

“Never underestimate Americans’ fear of the IRS. And if it doesn’t work, then maybe your grandson calls and says he’s been arrested and needs bail money. Or there’s a new government plan for health insurance, or medical equipment, or, my personal favorite, pain meds. Or they want to lower your credit card interest rates—I still get that one twice a day.”

Riley said, “How come—”

“The government can’t stop it? I get asked that at least three times a day, five if I do any socializing outside video games. Because a phone call is a pretty ephemeral thing. Do Not Call lists don’t work because fraudsters spoof the number. Phone services like RoboKiller can cut it down but can’t catch everyone. We’re starting to see text scams—I’m sure those will be all the rage in another year, if not in another month. Like any business, they adapt to changing conditions. Having a Junk folder decimated the Nigerian prince e-mail scams—so now they seem to come from Amazon and Apple thanking you for your purchase of something bizarre that you know you wouldn’t buy, so you click on that handy link to dispute the charge. Your bank wants you to confirm your account. Your credit has been frozen due to some problem, click on the link to fix it. Don’t ever,” he warned them, his face momentarily as grave and solemn as a tangible eulogy, “click on the link.”

Jack spoke quickly. “Can we get a search warrant for the call center? Based only on this one guy’s testimony?”

Full stop. Rodriguez straightened up as if someone had pushed his elbows off the desk. “Thaaaaat . . . might be difficult, a raid on a place like that, if they say they’re customer service or tech support . . . then there’s the practical difficulties. You’ve got a room full of phone routers and computers, right? You’d have to collect all of it, the router, the server, the computers, the files. We’d leave them with some empty cubicles, that’s all. Depending on the intranet setup, we might only need the servers and not each individual PC, but even if so, then the desktops are probably useless on their own. Either way, you’re gutting their business for an indefinite period. How big of a place are we talking?”

“We saw at least twenty, and there’s a second floor, so over forty,” Riley said.

“He said he had fifty employees,” Jack said.

“So, conservative estimate, forty terminals. If our tech guys know exactly what to look for, they might be able to do a few per day, if they push all their other cases aside. If you want everything on every computer, that will take longer still. We’ve probably told you how much we hate it when you detectives say you want everything, because you don’t mean everything. Then we hand you twelve Blu-Ray disks full of e-mails and photos and programs and you say, well, I didn’t mean everything. I meant only e-mails and photos. You know what we say then?”

Jack did know. “No.”

“That’s right, we say no. Not our job to sift through your evidence for you. I admit, we get a little testy about that. Anyway, my point is you’ll be shutting this company down for a long time. Months, realistically. You think a judge will give you a warrant based on one guy’s story?”

Again, Jack knew. “No.”

“Probably not, dude,” Rodriguez said. “You asked me for my opinion, and that’s it. But hey, you still got this girl.”

“Do we?” Jack asked aloud.

* * *

This took up an hour while the police chief got Marlon Toner an attorney and assigned detectives to canvas all of West 29^th in order to place him near his sister’s apartment on Friday afternoon. With luck he would erupt in an airtight confession and corroborating evidence would not be needed, but better to check every box. Besides, it gave the cops something to do other than stew. The obvious killer had been apprehended without argument and no urgency existed, yet the boys in blue felt the very normal need to do something after such an upset, and merely sitting around waiting for Toner to sober up only made it worse.

In this general upheaval Jack managed to borrow a few guys from another department.

By this time Shanaya Thomas had finished her statement. Jack handed her the plastic bag with Evan Harding’s property. She took it, signed the form, turned on her heel and left, without a good-bye or a backward glance.

Riley stood at his elbow, and watched the woman walk away. “We’re never going to be counted among her favorite people, you think?”

“She definitely isn’t one of mine. I’m still not sure she’s told us a single true thing.”

“At least she stopped bitching about being late for work.”

Jack said, “That one makes me think she’s either resigned herself to losing the day’s pay, or she’s decided on a career change.”

“The two undercovers in place?”

“I sure hope so.”

“This might get really interesting.” Riley spoke with relish, then added: “Patty wants me in the room with her to question Toner. She figures since we rescued him from what could have turned into an angry mob, he’ll look at me as some sort of protector. Then she can be Bad Cop. If you and Tim are in there, too—”

“He’ll feel like he’s in front of a firing squad and shut down entirely. That’s fine with me. I’ll stick with our girl.”

“You’re going to have the better time, I think. Have you checked on Maggie?”

“Why? Something else happen?”

Riley rotated the coffee cup on his blotter, as he often did when approaching a delicate topic. “No, but”—he checked his watch—“her husband’s on a steel table getting his chest cavity excavated.”

“Ex-husband,” Jack said, more stridently than he had planned to. “Ex.”

* * *

Ex or no, Maggie Gardiner was right then observing Rick Gardiner’s clothing. Denny had brought it back from the autopsy. He spread each item out, noting its description, size, condition, location of any defects left by weapons, taking photos both overall and close-up—exactly as they did for any homicide victim. Maggie stood, listening, watching, remaining a resolute four feet from the exam table. She did not want to contaminate any evidence with her conflict-of-interest status, but in no way would she be shut out and Denny knew better than to try.

He talked to her as he worked, spreading out the T-shirt with its small hole inside a patch of blood about five inches in diameter. “No surprises at the post, as I said. Zero injuries other than the fatal wound, no bruises, not even a scratch.”

“No struggle.”

“The organs were normal. A little hardening of the arteries, but who hasn’t got that?”

“Maybe people who don’t eat fried food at least once a day,” Maggie guessed aloud.

“The weapon went up under the rib cage and directly into the heart. He died almost instantly.” He glanced at her, making sure she heard what would surely be a comfort to any victim’s family: Rick hadn’t suffered.

“Uh,” she said. “Yes.”

Denny took a closer shot of the hole in the chest area of the shirt, then one with a disposable paper ruler under the defect. He measured the distance between the left shoulder and the hole, the left side seam of the shirt and the hole, and wrote these numbers in his bench notes. “The heart stopped pumping, this shirt soaked up most of what did bleed out, then the polo shirt soaked up a little, and the inside of the parka a bit more. So we saw that minuscule amount on the outside of the parka and that was it.” He flipped the shirt over and photographed the back. “Whoever moved the body probably didn’t get a drop on himself. Certainly not enough to attract any attention.”

“He’d have to be pretty strong,” Maggie noted. “Rick wasn’t a small guy.”

Denny put the T-shirt back into its brown paper bag, and pulled out the parka.

Maggie opened her mouth to say, “We need to tape that,” and then shut it again. Denny knew they needed to tape it. Telling her boss how to do his job did not seem like a great idea under any circumstances, as well as unnecessary.

Ideally it would have been taped at the scene, but with the dusting of snow the tape would only pick up water, if anything at all. Adhesive also lost its sticky quality at such low temperatures—which was why, when they received crumpled-up duct tape as evidence, they would put it in the freezer until it could be unraveled without too much stretching and distortion.

On top of that the contamination from all the other items in the dumpster might render examination of trace evidence pointless, since anything they found might have already been inside the open, publicly-accessible space.

But the victim was a cop, so—dot all i’s, cross all t’s.

Normally, taping wouldn’t come into play with a gunshot, as the cause of death had first appeared. But since the killer had to transport the body up a short hallway and then wrestle it out a window, the trace evidence had been on Maggie’s mind from the first.

Denny pressed the clear tape all over the garment, then flipped it over and did the back. Then he emptied the pockets. A pair of gloves—so Rick had at least taken those off, probably when he entered the building—and a wad of napkins from Subway.

“He always had terrible sinuses,” Maggie said, as explanation.

Two wrapped mints, a quarter and a dime, and a crumpled sticky note with a case number written on it. Maggie recognized it as belonging to the deceased man found behind the West Side Market, the one originally identified as Marlon Toner.

Denny flipped the side of the coat open to see the inner surfaces. A smaller area of bloodstain around the hole left by the weapon, but still much larger than the few drops that made it through the padding to appear on the outside of the jacket. No inside pockets.

“No keys,” Denny mused aloud.

“The killer took them to move Rick’s car.”

“That’s right. He would have had us looking in Euclid for Rick, if we’d only found the car sooner.”

This meant Josh and Amy had the best chance of replaceing helpful evidence, Maggie thought. They would swab and tape and fingerprint Rick’s car. The killer most likely stabbed Rick and disposed of his body in less time than a commercial break. But then he drove Rick’s car out to Euclid and dropped it in a public parking lot, where a snow-covered vehicle wouldn’t be noticed for quite some time. That would take at least twenty minutes. He had to drop a hair or maybe pulled off a glove and then forgot himself, adjusted the radio or the mirror. Josh or Amy needed to bring back DNA and fingerprints and maybe a lost driver’s license, something, anything, to make this task easier.

Or Marlon Toner needed to confess. That would make everyone relax. They’d still have to do the same amount of work—Maggie had seen too many confessees change their minds and their stories by the time the trial rolled around in a year or two or three—but they could work at a more leisurely pace.

“No phone, either,” Denny said.

“Our killer likes phones. He took Jennifer’s, too.”

“But not the wallet—Rick’s wallet. It was in his pants.” He waved at another of the paper bags. “Left the cash, the credit cards.”

“Maybe after seeing the badge on his belt he wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. Or didn’t want to add enough felonies to make a death penalty case. Or,” she added, “he didn’t need the money.”

“But took the cell phone.”

“Not to sell, I bet. He took it to see if Rick had texted or called anyone about being at Jennifer’s. He wanted to know if more cops were on their way.”

Denny said, “The detective at the autopsy said that Will said that Rick had planned to stop by Jennifer Toner’s apartment to have her look at a six-pack of mugs of known pill mill hustlers, see if she recognized any. It should have taken five minutes.”

He always said he had lousy luck, Maggie thought. “What happened to the six-pack?”

“Don’t know. The killer must have taken that, too.”

“I knew he hadn’t killed her.”

“You can say ‘I told you so.’ It’s okay.”

Maggie said, “I told you so.”

She wanted to repeat it a few more times, but not to Denny. Denny had been smart enough not to suggest it in the first place.

Her boss continued to describe articles of clothing, photograph them, and then package each item back in its individual paper bag. He handed the tapings from the coat to Maggie. “There you go,” he said weakly, straining to replace a comforting way to say that since she was their only hair and fiber expert, she would have to do the analysis, conflict of interest or no . . . but also that she should go home if she really needed to. Either was fine as long as she went away and stopped watching him work over his shoulder.

She took the tapings, dredged up a smile for him, and went back to her bench.