CHAPTER FIVE
“Ah, Jesus, Darnell. You can’t wait until the morning?”
“In the morning, Judge Harmon will be in,” Darnell explained.
“And she’s going to spend most of her day dealing with discovery for the Braxton trafficking case.
That’s going to be a clusterfuck because Braxton’s lawyer is Annalisa Stanhope.
Stanhope’s going to throw up enough roadblocks to flip an Abrams tank, and by the time Harmon finishes removing them, she’s going to be madder than a hornet. ”
“She won’t be madder than a hornet in the morning.”
“She will be if you start her day by asking to waive authorization for a records release.”
The man on the other end of the phone sighed.
He would hem and haw again, probably two or three more times, but in the end, he’d get Darnell what he wanted.
Darnell had spent a decade patiently building that relationship, ensuring that he always gave a little more than he took but always took another little piece of the big, beautiful puzzle that eventually left him with the ability to make the lives of minor functionaries throughout the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas miserable.
It was a brutal way to do business, but that was life in the jungle. Darnell hadn’t made a name for himself in the Bureau by being meek.
One of the analysts waved at Darnell as she went home for the night.
Darnell waved back, waited for a pause, then said, “Look, Grant, we can dick around all night, but the bottom line is that I need those records to solve a murder. You might not want your name next to a headline that reads, ‘Court employee aids FBI with sealed records’ but you definitely don’t want it next to a headline that reads, ‘Court employee stalls discovery, more victims discovered.’”
“All right, all right, Jesus, Darnell. I’ll talk to Judge Faro. Don’t expect him to be any more generous than Harmon would be, though.”
“Faro’s a sweetheart,” Darnell said. “He’ll sign.”
Grant sighed heavily. “Yeah, but my name will still be on the transfer paperwork.”
Darnell smiled. “Thank you, Grant.”
“Yeah, yeah. You’re buying on Saturday.”
“Of course. I’ll even let you drink top shelf.”
He hung up and leaned back in his chair, staring thoughtfully up at the ceiling.
Kate Valentine and Marcus Reid. The Dynamic Duo.
The Belles of the Bureau Ball. Their reputation had preceded them, of course.
Kate was widely regarded as having the potential to be the next great investigative genius the Bureau had.
She was just as widely regarded as squandering that potential because of her obsession with one serial killer.
Of course, that serial killer and his lackeys happened to be the most prolific and dangerous killing family in the United States, and Kate also happened to be a large part of the reason they hadn’t killed a lot more people.
AD Winters, Kate’s supervisor, was known as the Ice Queen for her sternness and lack of emotion.
She was also known for her political savvy.
She had ambitions for Director within the next ten years.
She must believe in Kate staunchly to stand by her side despite the apparent risks to her career.
Reid didn’t enjoy quite the same sensationalism surrounding his name as Kate did, but he was known as the perfect distillation of the hardboiled gumshoe.
No incredible leaps would be made in the mind of the streetwise New Yorker, but if someone knew something about anything, Marcus would find out who that person was and how to find them, find them, and get them to tell him everything they knew.
He was like a bloodhound that way. Much like Dick Tracy or Archie Goodwin.
Kate, with her preternatural intuition and, frankly, her tremulous mental health, was a perfect analogue for a female Sherlock Holmes.
Darnell fancied himself more like Nero Wolfe. He didn’t hunt for knowledge like a bloodhound tracking a boar, nor did he make grand intuitive leaps. What he was good at, what made him an outstanding agent, was sifting through the noise and finding the nuggets of gold in a sea of silt.
So, what nuggets could he find in this noise?
Gerald Mace’s murder was obviously connected to his career as a court clerk.
But how was his career connected to Elijah Cox?
He was confident that this would, as Kate and Marcus suspected, turn out to be a legitimate Commandment Killing.
The only copycat thus far had been an exceedingly poor one, and while Kate seemed uncertain about aspects of the cipher, the MO was precisely what Cox would expect of one of his acolytes.
The fact that the killer was angry and still staged the victim and wrote the entire cipher was strong evidence that they were acting on Cox’s orders.
So how was Gerald Mace connected to Elijah Cox?
That was the part everyone was missing with the Cox case.
The why. He wasn’t choosing victims based only on the fact that they broke commandments.
If that’s all it was, then Cox could park his ass in any major city, sit on his balcony and people watch, and find people to kill every day.
There was something else going on here. If they figured out what that was, then not only would they find this latest Commandment Killer, they’d find Cox.
And this time, they’d know how to stop him for good.
The phone rang. He picked it up. “Yes, Grant?”
“It’s on its way,” Grant said. “Please try to not need me for at least six months. I need to at least have some room between these requests, or people start looking at me funny during staff meetings.”
“Sure. Hey, do me a favor. You see any murderers, ask them to cool it off for six months. That way I don’t have to prioritize taking them off the streets over your job comfort.”
“Fuck you.”
“Yeah, have a good one.”
Darnell hung up just as the email notification popped up on his computer. He opened the attachment and read.
At first, Gerald Mace’s career appeared uneventful.
His recruiter noted that he had a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, something forty percent of candidates possessed, so barely even worth mentioning, in Darnell’s opinion.
He serves nineteen years, working his way through Philadelphia’s municipal court system before winding up in the Court of Common Pleas for the last eight years of his career.
He was being considered for a position at the Third Circuit court of appeals when he retired abruptly in 1997 at the age of forty-one.
Darnell’s brow furrowed. Forty-one was extremely young to retire for anyone who wasn’t a professional athlete. People only retired that young when they were absurdly wealthy or when they were avoiding a scandal.
Gerald Mace lived in Kensington, and he didn’t make enough as a court clerk for that to be some sort of eccentric choice. Maybe digging into his financial records would reveal some vast degree of hoarded wealth, but Darnell doubted it.
That left scandal.
He looked up the final case Mace served on.
The People vs. Armand Stockton was a grand theft auto case, pretty open and shut.
Security footage showed Mr. Stockton hot-wiring a vintage Lamborghini from the valet parking lot of the Philadelphia Rose, a since closed five-star restaurant in Society Hill.
Nothing there. Darnell leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. Maybe he had money somehow after all. Maybe he was just thrifty and invested his savings until he had a nest egg that could allow him to retire early.
Very early. Early enough that Darnell still had trouble believing it.
And living in a dumpy rowhouse. Sure, court clerk wasn’t the most exciting job, but at forty-one, few single men had an incentive to have nothing to do for the rest of their lives ever, especially if their only option was a small townhome in a bad neighborhood.
If he’d retired for a few years, then found another job, even a part-time gig, Darnell would have bought it, but it looked very much like Gerald Mace was trying to avoid the spotlight.
He looked back through Gerald’s cases one at a time. Something was there. He knew it. People didn’t vanish like that unless they were running from something.
The night dragged on. The Philadelphia Field Office never quite went silent, but late in the evening, activity was light enough that the background noise in Darnell’s office dwindled from a moderate hum to periods of silence interrupted by the occasional clacking of footsteps on the tile floor or the shuffling of papers as another night owl pored over evidence for their own case.
Finally, as the clock rounded the corner into the a.m. hours again, Darnell found something, a 1991 murder trial that was briefly revisited in late 1996 after evidence came out that the prosecution had mishandled evidence.
Darnell still wasn’t sure what that had to do with a court clerk, a job that amounted to little more than secretarial work, but he pulled up the records.
The People vs. Daniel Avery was a homicide trial that enjoyed brief but sensational national attention.
The defendant was accused of killing Narek Tankian, a clerk at a jewelry store in Rittenhouse Square during a robbery gone wrong.
Part of the sensation the case enjoyed was due to the nature of the killing.
Narek was shot three times, once in the forehead, killing him.
The other two shots came before the killing shot. One to the groin, bursting both testicles, and one to the abdomen below the belly button, severing the spine and paralyzing him from the waist down. Forensic examination suggested Narek was alive for several minutes before he was killed.
The two other perpetrators of the burglary disappeared into the wind. Unfortunately, Daniel Avery was caught a mile from the jewelry store with a handgun and blood and gunshot residue on his shirt sleeve. He resisted arrest violently, not discharging his weapon but breaking one officer’s jaw.
Darnell spent the next hour arguing with Philadelphia PD records for security cam footage of the arrest. When he received that video evidence, became clear that this wasn’t a case of police brutality.
Officers tried repeatedly to talk Daniel down, and he repeatedly refused to give up his weapon or submit to arrest. When one officer approached, hands raised, fingers splayed and empty, Daniel stepped forward to pistol whip the man, earning his aggravated assault with great bodily injury charge.
He’d instigated the fight, and he’d resisted continuously, despite the officers’ continued reluctance to use force. They only tased him after a four-minute struggle when he proved to be too much for the other three officers to handle.
That was another part of the sensation. Daniel Avery was a young African American man who, allegedly, after murdering an innocent clerk, violently assaulted arresting officers.
The early nineties was a time when police brutality against African Americans was far more flagrant and just beginning to be talked about in the media.
A case where officers clearly tried hard to avoid violence only to be given no choice by the suspect was a gold mine for police unions trying to prove that it really was the violent Black gangsters who were at fault.
The lack of brutality in Daniel Avery’s arrest wasn’t proof that there was no racism later in the case, of course.
The OJ Simpson trial with the famous accusations of planted evidence wouldn’t occur for three years, and again, forgive Darnell for being cynical, but police forces and prosecutors often chose to fudge minor details to achieve the results they believed appropriate.
After all, the point was to put bad people away.
If they were missing a few crossed t’s, so what?
Well, in 1996, one of those uncrossed t’s came back to bite the Avery case in the ass.
Avery was originally found guilty of the murder and sentenced to forty years.
During his trial, the defense consistently pointed to exculpatory evidence that they claim was unlawfully excluded from the trial.
The judge ruled that wasn’t the case and insisted that the defense had neglected to file the evidence on time.
The judge then denied a motion to reopen the discovery period.
End result, a long stay at the big hotel.
Not very long for Avery. He was killed in 1994 when inmates jumped him in the shower and beat him to death.
Cut to the very next year, and it came to light through means not immediately apparent in the information Darnell had access to that the defense had delivered their evidence in time. It simply hadn’t been filed immediately. Instead, the deadline passed the morning after evidence was delivered.
The case was quietly reopened and the family of Daniel Avery awarded an undisclosed settlement. The week after that settlement was reached, Gerald Mace retired.
Darnell nodded. This was it. This was the motive.
He reached for his phone and called Grant. He wasn’t surprised when the call went to voicemail considering the hour. “Grant, it’s Darnell. I’m afraid six months has come to pass. I need everything you have on The People vs. Daniel Avery.”