Chapter Five #2
“The woman’s name is Amy Turnblat. She’s thirty-five and works as an executive chef at La Belle Vie in Potomac.
I tailed him over a week, and he spent three nights with her and four at home in Columbia Heights.
” Cam put more pictures on the desk, all of them taken from Facebook.
“He’s been married to Marlene Ramsey for thirty years, and they have four adult children. ”
“Holy bombshell,” Sam said, her mind racing with thoughts of how they could use this info to force Ramsey to back the hell off.
“I’m incredibly impressed, Cameron,” Jeannie said.
“It was kind of fun,” Cam said, smiling. “Nothing like catching a scumbag being a scumbag.”
“How do we use this to get him off our backs?” Freddie asked.
“I was trying to figure that out myself.”
“If I may suggest something?” Cam said.
Sam waved her hand to give him the floor.
“Send the photos in an interoffice envelope with a note that says something like, ‘When you dig for shit on your colleagues, they do the same.’ Nothing more, nothing less. Just that.”
“I love that,” Jeannie said.
“Let’s do it. Type the note on plain white paper and wear gloves so there’s no evidence to trace this back to us.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Cam said.
“Are we all in agreement?” Sam asked.
Freddie hesitated. “I worry about making it worse somehow.”
“How can it get any worse than him basically ruining Gonzo’s career?” Sam asked him.
“I don’t know, and I’m not sure I want to find out.”
“If we don’t do something to put him on notice that what goes around comes around, he’ll continue to make our lives a living hell in every way he possibly can,” Sam said. “We have to do something.”
“I don’t disagree with that. I’m worried about what his next move might look like.”
“If he makes another move, we send the pictures to his wife,” Sam said. “He’ll understand that without us having to spell it out.” To Cameron, she said, “Do it. Just like you said.”
“Will do.” He handed her another stack of pages. “I split up the McLeod investors list by locals and out-of-towners, figuring we’ll start local.”
“He’s showing us all up,” Jeannie said when she leaned in for a closer look at the lists.
“He certainly is,” Sam said. “Pass them out, and let’s get to it.”
“You’ve got the FBI meeting at eight,” Freddie reminded her.
“Shit, fuck, damn, hell. Why do I have to go to that stupid meeting?”
“Um, because the chief asked you to?”
“Whatever.” Despite her hatred of meetings that got in the way of real work, Sam welcomed the FBI probe into the department.
The recent spate of lawlessness within their ranks and the accompanying press coverage had led to the inquiry.
At least with Avery Hill overseeing the investigation, they would get a fair shake, but attending that meeting was the last thing Sam wanted to do when she had a fresh homicide to investigate.
“Hopefully, it won’t take long,” Freddie said.
Sam gave him a withering look. Meetings always took too long.
A minute was too long, and this one was sure to be longer than that.
“Start digging into Brett Haverson, the investor who tipped the FBI. We’ll start with him after the meeting.
The rest of you hit the street with the other investors. Call in any updates.”
When she was alone in the office, she reached for the clip on the desk that kept her hair out of the way when she was working and put her hair up.
The FBI meeting had been looming for more than a week now, and it still made her feel sick to think about the reasons for it and her involvement in the criminal prosecutions of three high-ranking members of the department, all of it far too close to her for comfort.
Former lieutenant Leonard Stahl had recently been convicted on charges of attempted murder and kidnapping stemming from the day he’d taken her hostage, wrapped her in razor wire and had nearly succeeded in setting her on fire.
A renewed investigation into the unsolved shooting of her father had led, shockingly, to Deputy Chief Conklin, Skip Holland’s close friend.
The kicker had been discovering Patrol Captain Hernandez had known about Conklin’s involvement and covered it up.
The uproar had been fierce and relentless, thus the FBI inquiry.
Since the District wasn’t a state, there was no state police to lead the investigation, so the Feds had been called in by the mayor. On the plus side, Sam trusted Avery Hill to oversee a fair process.
She grabbed her notebook and pen and headed for the conference room attached to the chief’s suite of offices.
The office next to the chief’s that had once belonged to Conklin was now dark and the door closed.
A fresh wave of grief assailed Sam when she recalled her father occupying the deputy chief’s office, next door to his best friend, Joe Farnsworth.
Grief was such a weird thing, attacking as it did out of nowhere, on a perfectly ordinary Monday morning, nearly five years since that office had belonged to her dad. She stood in the hallway staring at the closed door, the buzz of voices from the conference room in the background.
“Sam.”
She blinked and turned to look up at the chief, the man she’d called Uncle Joe as a child.
“Are you all right?”
“I, ah… Yeah. I’m fine.”
“I still look for him in there, too. Even when Conklin was deputy, I’d walk in there expecting to find Skip.”
“It was such an inconvenience to me that he was deputy chief.” Sam offered him a small smile as she recalled the early days of her career. “Everyone assumed I got special treatment because he was my father, when he went out of his way to avoid anything that smacked of favoritism toward me.”
“He always held you to a higher standard than anyone else.”
“Believe me, I know. And then I’d walk into O’Leary’s to meet him for a beer after work, and he’d hug me and kiss me and call me ‘baby girl’ in front of the guys.
I wanted to stab him.” As she laughed at the memory, her eyes filled with tears that she refused to allow at work.
She blinked them away and took a deep breath, determined to push through the way she always did, even when her heart was broken.
“He loved you so much and was so damned proud of you.” He kept his voice low so they couldn’t be overheard. “That goes for both of us.”
“Means a lot. Thank you—and P.S., back atcha.”
He glanced at the conference room. “Let’s get this over with, shall we?”
“Yes, please. I’ve got a new vic that needs me.”
“Heard about that. The woman who scammed her friends and family.”
“Yep, and left me with nearly five hundred people with motive, not to mention their families and friends. Good times.”
“I have no doubt you’ll get to the bottom of it.”
“We shall see. Please make this ordeal as short as possible.”
“Wish I could, but it’s not my meeting.” His gaze shifted to Avery Hill as he approached them. “Morning, Agent Hill.”
“Chief, Lieutenant, how are you this morning?”
“We’ll be better after this meeting,” Sam said.
Avery laughed, which made the handsome devil even more so. “Duly noted. Shall we?”