“If he doesn’t, I’m sure your chief will educate him. In any event, Ammara said she reviewed the tapes and didn’t see anybody who looked like a cop.”
Grisnik shook his head. “A cop looks like anybody else when he’s out of uniform.”
I thought about what Ammara had said and realized that I agreed with her. I could pick an FBI agent out of a crowd. “You saying you can’t tell when someone has been on the job?”
“I guess you’re right. Usually I can. I guess if Ammara didn’t see anyone who looked like a cop on the tapes, I should feel better. So how come I don’t?”
“Because you’re like me. You don’t trust people because of how they look.”
“Amen to that. You still think someone at the FBI leaked word of the surveillance camera in the house so that the killer would have known to cut off the electricity?”
“Troy Clark does. He’s having everyone take a polygraph tomorrow.”
“Including your home buyer?”
“Yeah.”
“I take it you’d like to know about the home buyer before the polygraph exam.”
“That would be a good thing.”
“Same question. Why do you care?”
“I’ve got other interests I’m trying to protect.”
“Yours?”
I shook my head. “No, but it’s personal. Leave it at that.”
“You have any proof your home buyer is dirty?”
“Only that it seems strange that he would buy a house at a bargain price that used to be owned by a guy we busted. Other than that, I’ve got nothing.”
“Just one of those gut feelings cops on TV always get?”
“More like the gut fear real cops get,” I said.
“Who’s the buyer?”
“I’d rather not say until I’ve got something hard to work with.”
“Suppose Thomas Rice gives up his name?”
“That would qualify.”
Grisnik had the warden’s number stored in his cell phone. Their conversation was brief. He hung up and pulled a KCKPD ID from his shirt pocket, tossing it in my lap. I was about to become Detective John Funkhouser again.
“How about the neighborhood canvass?” Grisnik asked. “Any eyewitnesses?”
I decided to bounce my memory off him. He’d interviewed enough witnesses to gauge how my story would play.
“Not so far. There is one person who may have seen something.”
“What?”
“Someone, probably male, running from the scene.”
“When?”
“After I got there. He could have been watching from the backyard of one of the houses nearby. If he were, he would have had a view of the rear of Marcellus’s house. The tree where I found the money was roughly in a line between where this guy would have been standing and the back door.”
“Who saw him?” Grisnik asked.
I let out a long breath, looked at Grisnik, then looked away, staring at the highway. “I did. Maybe. I’m not sure. That’s when I started shaking.”
Grisnik grunted. “I don’t like eyewitnesses,” he said.
“Me either.”
“Only thing worse is a lineup. Just read a report that said seventy-seven thousand people go to trial each year because someone picks them out of a lineup. Study said that eyewitnesses get it right in a lineup only about fifty percent of the time. Then they looked at two hundred people who were convicted and later exonerated based on DNA evidence. An eyewitness had identified one hundred and fifty of them, usually in a lineup.”
“Numbers like that, the guy I saw, probably not even worth mentioning,” I said.
“Probably not.”
“Unless I could prove who it was and that person turned out to know something about your case and mine.”
“All that shaking, Jack, and you are still a clear thinker.”
Chapter Twenty-five
“Tell me more about Thomas Rice,” Grisnik said.
We drove past Kansas City International Airport. The Platte City exit was only a few more miles north.
“Rice sold insurance, stocks, bonds-any kind of investment you wanted. Had his own company, a one-man operation. A buddy of his did outplacement consulting. One of his big clients offered early retirement to its employees with at least twenty years of service. A lot of them took the deal, which meant they had profit-sharing accounts they had to roll over.”
“Rice’s buddy hooked him up with the retirees?”
“It was a sweet deal for Rice. Most of these people didn’t know their ass from third base when it came to investing. The stock market was hot so anyone with a series-seven license and a computer looked like a genius.”
“Market cooled off,” Grisnik said.
“It’s called a correction.”
“I remember. I got corrected right up my ass. Put my retirement off by at least five years.”
“Same thing happened to Rice’s clients. Except they hired a lawyer who told them she could get their money back because Rice put them all in high-risk, high-tech stocks that were inappropriate for their retirement plans. They sued Rice and won.”
“Didn’t he have insurance that paid the claims?”
“Yeah, but he lost his licenses to sell investments and insurance.”
“So he couldn’t think of anything else to do except sell drugs?”
“I guess he thought it was just like anything else. Buy low and sell high. He knew someone who knew someone and- boom-he was an instant coke dealer. Really got into the lifestyle, using and selling, got himself a girlfriend. The wife found out and turned him in. Told us that for better or worse didn’t include criminal and stupid. He pled and it was all over pretty fast. His entire career as a drug kingpin lasted all of about eight months.”
“What kind of a deal did the U.S. Attorney make with him?”
“Five years and forfeiture of everything traceable to the money he made selling drugs plus cooperation on other investigations.”
“Which left him with what?”
“A lot. His house was already paid off before he started his life of crime.”
“That all the feds got?”
“Rice helped us make cases against a couple of small-time dealers. Didn’t make much of a dent in the traffic.”
“How was the wife able to hold on to the house?” Grisnik asked.
“Before the lawsuits were filed, he put it in his wife’s name, same for his car, a Lexus. We couldn’t tie her to the drug money, either, so she got to keep it.”
“Was it your case?”
“They were all my cases since I ran the squad, but I wasn’t directly involved with this one,” I said.
“Who was?”
The question threw me. I hadn’t thought about it until Grisnik asked me.
“I assigned two people to every case, rotated the assignments so everybody worked with everybody. Troy Clark and Ammara Iverson ran this one.”
“Either one of them house hunting?”
“Nope.”
“You have squad meetings, talk about all your cases?” Grisnik asked.
“Sure. Same routine as every law-enforcement agency in the world.”
“So your home buyer would have known all about the Rice case. No problem looking at the file, knowing what’s what.”
“Of course.”
“Any reason for your home buyer to have had contact with Rice or his wife while the case was going on?”
There it was. Grisnik was a smart cop. He kept asking the right questions, tugging and tickling a problem until a door opened. Colby Hudson wouldn’t have known anything more about the Rice case than we had discussed at our squad meetings. He wasn’t an investigator on the case; he wasn’t a witness at the trial. He wouldn’t have had any reason to meet or talk to either Thomas or Jill Rice. Neither did I.
Yet Colby claimed that Jill Rice had called the Bureau out of the blue to offer her husband’s car for sale and that he just happened to have taken the call. The house was next. If she had called anyone, it would have been Troy Clark or Ammara Iverson. Even if Colby had taken the call, she would have asked for someone she knew, not offered a sweetheart deal to a stranger.