21. Under the Bus
TWENTY-ONE
Under the Bus
Harry
L ater that afternoon, Harry was standing outside the county morgue, waiting on Rus to show.
He was also texting the twins.
At the same time, he was structuring dual investigations in his head. One that went after answers for Muggsy Ballard’s family, and the other that would hopefully find justice for Sonny, Avery and Lillian.
He had responsibility for an entire county. Though it wasn’t anywhere near overpopulated, they had a lot of tourist traffic, and considering the state of human nature, once the Ray Andrews deal happened, that tourist traffic ratcheted up significantly, and on top of all that had gone down since, it hadn’t diminished.
This was good for the town of Misted Pines. It was bad for law enforcement.
In other words, his deputies didn’t twiddle their thumbs.
But he only had one investigator, outside himself, and that was normally all right, considering it was Rus, and he was literally one of the best in the business.
Now, though, Harry also had thirteen other cases they needed to run shit down on.
Wade had never made any murmurings of sitting the detective’s exam, but Karen and Sean had.
Wade had been on staff the longest, and Harry trusted him with his life.
But he needed to carve out some time to encourage all of his deputies to look toward future advancement.
Harry could see it would be tough to think about that when the person you’d be working with was a decorated ex-FBI agent who had closing some seriously high-profile cases on his resume.
For some, it was in their nature to compete, and that worked for a department when the win was closing cases. However, you never wanted to set yourself up to lose, and being a newbie going up against the best would be daunting even for the most competitive person.
For others, imposter syndrome could take hold, and you had to be too on the ball when investigating to doubt your every move and decision.
But they were in the thick of it and would be for a while.
He needed to promote somebody.
This was his thought when he saw Rus walking up the sidewalk.
When Rus met him, Harry asked, “Find Roy?”
“Left work early with a migraine. No one answered at home.”
Goddamn it.
“Dern called him,” Harry bit off.
“Dern called him, and worse, Harry, the guy ghosted when he did.”
“So we don’t think this is hinky, it just fucking is,” Harry summed it up.
Rus looked to the building behind Harry. “I sure hope Pfeiffer isn’t involved in this shit.”
Harry did too. As far as he knew, Dr. Theresa Pfeiffer, Fret County Medical Examiner, was a straight arrow.
But Harry sadly didn’t know everything.
They went into the building and directly to Pfeiffer’s office.
She was sitting at her desk, eating a sandwich.
Harry had no clue, with the smell of this place and the work that was done in it, how she could eat there, but again, he didn’t know everything.
She looked up when she noticed them in the doorway. “Hey, boys. Come in.”
They moved in, took seats across from her, and Harry set the Ballard file he’d brought with him on his lap.
Sandwich still in hand, she adjusted stuff on her desk until she pulled out her own file. She flicked it open and scanned it.
“Clifford Ballard, right?” she asked.
“Yeah. Suicide. But—” That was as far as Harry got before Theresa’s gaze shot to his.
“Suicide?” she asked.
Harry looked to Rus to see Rus’s eyes on him.
He turned back to Theresa. “Suicide.”
“I didn’t determine suicide. I determined suspected homicide. Strongly suspected homicide.” She closed the file, picked it up and tossed it several inches so it plopped in front of Harry. “There was trace GSR on him, but only because the man was shot. No significant GSR on his hand that would indicate he pulled the trigger. We all know how GSR works, so that doesn’t mean he didn’t. But with the trace GSR, either he was around another gun or guns that were discharged, or the gun was not in his hand when the bullet went into his brain.”
Harry felt chills creep over his skin as he reached for the file.
He opened it leaning toward Rus so they both could read it.
But he didn’t have to read it. He could see immediately that it wasn’t what they had in their file.
Harry took his department’s file and tossed it in front of her.
“Our report reads differently,” he told her.
She kept hold on his gaze a beat before she opened it.
It didn’t take long before her face got red. Very red. Pissed red.
Fuck.
“That’s my signature. That even looks like my writing,” she stated, attention still on the file. It lifted to Harry. “But that is not my report.”
She tossed her sandwich on some waxed paper on her desk, brushed her hands together and sat back angrily.
“Honestly, when I pulled this, had a look at it and remembered the case, I got annoyed because I hadn’t heard anything was happening with it,” she said. “But then I remembered Roy was looking into it, and that man could barely find his shoelaces, so it didn’t surprise me he couldn’t find a murderer.”
“So you remember Roy. Did Dern have anything to do with this case?” Harry asked.
She shook her head. “I vaguely remember thinking that poor soul was in trouble because you weren’t on rotation to catch his case, rather than Roy, but by that time, Dern had so divorced himself from any real police work, I don’t know if I’d seen him in my morgue for years.”
“So all you remember is Roy,” Harry pushed.
“All I remember is Roy, Harry,” she replied. “But it was years ago. Still, I can say with some certainty that I didn’t deal at all with Dern on this case. I sent my report to Roy, then I had other bodies to deal with, and I’m afraid to say, I didn’t think about it much, outside feeling sad that obviously Roy hadn’t solved it, since I heard nothing else about it.”
She returned her attention to the file in front of her, bent close to it, then opened some drawers, rummaging through them until she found a magnifying glass.
She took it to the report, inspecting it closely in a variety of places, and her face got red again.
She tossed the magnifying glass on the report testily and stated, “That signature has been traced. You’d have to get an expert’s opinion, but there’s a carefulness to it that isn’t mine and looking closely at it, you can see the outline of my signature underneath. In fact, there’s a carefulness to all the writing. Also, you can see some Wite-Out marks. Someone emptied a copy of another report with Wite-Out, forged this one and traced my signature over the top.”
“Can I?” Harry asked.
She flung an irritable hand to the file in front of her. Harry gave the one he had to Rus and grabbed theirs and the magnifying glass.
Again, he leaned to the side so Rus could follow with him.
The base form was over-copied in the first place.
But with the glass it was easy to see small breaks in lines and ghosts of impressions of words that were there before, which the naked eye wouldn’t see or would identify as a smudge or a bad copy of the original form.
“Son of a bitch,” Rus muttered.
Harry yanked out his phone and made a call.
“You got me,” Polly answered.
“Polly, send two deputies to sit on Roy Farrell’s place. Inconspicuous. I don’t want them made, and Roy might be able to make them. The minute he comes home or there’s any sign of life in his house, they go in and get him. I want him at the station as soon as we can find his ass.”
“You got it,” she said.
“Polly,” he called before she hung up.
“Yeah, Harry?”
“Also put a BOLO out on that asshole.”
“You got that too.”
“And while we’re ratcheting shit up, I want regular drive-bys, day and night, at the Dietrichs’ home and office.”
“Got that as well.”
She hesitated, and when Harry said no more, she hung up.
Harry shoved his phone back in his pocket and returned to Theresa.
“Can we have a copy of the actual report?” he gritted.
“My freaking pleasure,” she stated, rising from her chair.
He handed it to her, and she stormed out.
Harry turned to Rus. “I don’t think Dern knew about this. This was Roy.”
“This was Roy,” Rus agreed. “Roy taking advantage of a chief officer who didn’t pay dick attention.”
“At the same time punting it to him so if anyone asked questions, Dern was the investigator on record.”
“Threw his buddy right under the bus.”
Harry wanted to find some pleasure in the fact that one of Dern’s loyal soldiers set him up like that, but he couldn’t.
Because now he also had a seven-year-old murder on his hands, and he had to find some way to break it to Muggsy Ballard’s mother that his department had wholly failed her and her son in the sense that there was an active cover-up of his murder which no one had noticed until now.
“Shit,” Harry muttered.
“Yeah,” Rus sighed. “Fuckin’ shit .”