Dennison’s residence is a rusty tin box of a trailer set atop a hill with a dead pine tree in the front, a yard that’s gone to weeds, all of it surrounded by a chain-link fence that’s slowly being pulled down by honeysuckle. An old Honda Civic with bald tires squats in a narrow driveway that’s more mud than gravel. I park behind the Honda, my tires sinking in too deep, and step out. I check the fenced area for a dog, then let myself in through the gate, keeping one eye on the window as I take the trampled path to the raised from porch.
Opening the screen door, I knock. “Kelly Dennison?”
No answer. Stepping back, I glance at the window, but the curtains are drawn tight; I can’t see inside. Using my key fob, I knock again, louder this time. “Hello? Kelly?”
I’m thinking about going around to the back when I hear the snick of a lock. The door squeaks open and I find myself looking at a pretty young woman with wavy blond hair and last night’s mascara smeared beneath large, crystalline eyes. She’s wearing a Detroit Red Wings T-shirt and cut-off denim shorts.
Looking as if she was forcibly dragged from her bed, she gives me a not-so-friendly once-over. “Who are you?”
“I’m Kate Burkholder, chief of police down in Painters Mill, and I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes,” I tell her.
She looks past me to see if there’s anyone else around. “About what?”
“The incident two and a half years ago with Deputy Wade Travers.”
A quiver runs the length of her. She opens her mouth, but doesn’t speak. Then her face goes cold. “What are you? Some kind of reporter or something? I wish you people would leave me the hell alone.”
She starts to close the door, but I put my hand against it and stop her. “I’m not a reporter.”
“Yeah, well, I still don’t want to talk to you,” she says dismissively. “Now get the fuck off my porch, man.”
“I need your help,” I tell her. “It’s important.”
“Do I look like I care?”
“After what happened to you? You should.”
“I lied about that. Made it all up.”
“Kelly, I know you don’t know me. You have no reason to trust me. But this is extremely important. I need to know the truth about what happened that night.”
Her raccoon eyes narrow. “Who are you?”
Now it’s my turn to hesitate. This is where things get tricky. “Look, I’m a cop, but I’m off-duty so this is sort of an unofficial visit.”
“No offense, but I’m not a big fan of cops. They don’t like me much either. That’s all I got for you, lady.”
She starts to close the door, but I put my foot in the jamb.
“You’re a persistent bitch, aren’t you?” she snarls.
“You have no idea.”
A tinge of amusement melts some of the ice in her eyes. “Why would I even give you the time of day?”
“Because I don’t think you lied,” I tell her. “I think someone persuaded you to change your story. I think you were willing to do jail time to protect yourself.”
She gapes at me and for the first time I see a sliver of vulnerability beneath the brass. I pounce on it. “I’m trying to get to the bottom of … something else. Another case that may be related. If you help me, maybe I can help you, too.”
“What do I have to lose, right?” Bad attitude back in place, she swings open the door. “Welcome to FUBAR. Want a beer?”
* * *
A few minutes later we’re seated in a small living room with threadbare carpet and curtains the color of mustard. I’m sitting on a sofa that smells of cigarette smoke and mold. Kelly Dennison sits cross-legged in a recliner that looks relatively new. An old REO Speedwagon song about rolling with the changes wafts out from somewhere down the hall.
“So, you’re a cop?” she asks, digging a cigarette from a pack.
“I’m not here as a cop,” I reply. “I’m here as a private citizen.”
“And I should know what to make of that?”
“Look, all I can tell you at this point is that whatever we discuss here today is off the record, okay?”
“Whatever floats your boat.” She follows up with an I-don’t-give-a-shit shrug.
There’s a playpen in the corner. A baby bottle half full of something red on the counter in the kitchen. A child’s plastic key ring on the floor at the mouth of the hall.
“You have children?” I ask.
“My daughter’s three.”
“She’s sleeping?” I ask.
“Just leave her out of this, and get to the point,” she snaps.
“I need to know what happened that night in Chardon two and a half years ago.”
She lights the cigarette and takes a long drag. “Jesus.”
I wait.
“I’d been out with one of my girlfriends.” She slants me a hard look. “Yeah, I’m gay. Bi really. I have girlfriends and boyfriends. So what?”
She’s trying to shock me; it doesn’t work. “You were on your way home?”
“Yup. Karen and I went to dinner and hit a couple of bars in Cleveland. I think I had three or four drinks. Dropped her off at her apartment and started for home around two thirty A.M. I was out in the middle of bumfuck when a Geauga County sheriff pulls me over.”
“You were alone?”
“Yup.”
“Where exactly?”
“I don’t know. Some lesser road off Caves Road. I’d been drinking so I took the back roads, thinking that would keep the cops off me.” Her smile is bitter. “Didn’t help.”
“What happened?”
She glares at me, letting me know her discomfort is my fault for bringing this up. “He started out all professional like. Asked me how much I’d had to drink. I told him one beer.” Another hard smile. “So he gives me a Breathalyzer. He asked me to get out of the car and gives me a field test, you know where I had to walk the line. I thought I’d passed.” Shrugging, she falls silent and concentrates on her cigarette.
“Did he arrest you?” I ask.
“He handcuffed me. Said he was going to call for a female deputy. Then he put me in the backseat of his car.” She stubs out the cigarette and lights another. “By then I was upset and crying. I figured I was going to jail for DUI. I’d have fines and a lawyer to pay, neither of which I could afford.” She makes a sweeping gesture that encompasses the interior of the trailer. “As you can see, I don’t have a lot of money. So, yeah, I was upset.
“Anyway, after a few minutes he gets me out of the car. I knew something was up because he was … different. Not quite as professional. He was being, like … nice. He started asking me all kinds of questions. I told him where I worked. That I had a daughter. He let me smoke a cigarette. The whole time I thought he was trying to keep me calm while we were waiting for that female deputy.” She shrugs. “It wasn’t until I told him I was gay that he … I don’t know, he got kind of … excited.”
“What did he do?”
“He asked me if I liked oral sex and then he told me if I gave him a blow job, he’d let me go home.” She sucks hard on the cigarette. “Gotta be honest with you. I was tempted. I seriously couldn’t afford a DUI. But the thought of … I mean, I didn’t exactly handle it right, but how the hell do you handle something like that? Anyway, in the end I said no.
“It didn’t go over very well. I mean, it was like someone flipped a switch in that dude’s head. He got all pissed off. Started pushing me around. The next thing I know he throws me over the hood of his car, slams my face down, and starts yanking down my pants.”
The young woman shrugs as if she’s immune, as if remembering that dark moment doesn’t affect her. But I wasn’t born yesterday. Despite the bad attitude and foul mouth, I see the rise of humiliation, fear, and rage.
“He must’ve had a rubber with him. I don’t remember him putting it on. But he just … clamped his hand over the back of my neck, bent me over the hood, and stuck it in. Started humping me and grunting like some kind of animal.
Lasted a minute maybe and he was done.”
A wave of revulsion grinds in my gut. Sexual assault is a hideous crime. In this case, the ugliness is made even worse because it was perpetrated by a cop. A cop who has never been punished.
“He told me if I told anyone he’d hunt me down and kill me. He’d kill my family.” Her voice falters. “My little girl.” Her face splits into that bitter smile again. “Then he let me go.”
“What did you do?”
“I went home. What else would I do? I was a fucking mess. I called Karen. She came over and picked me up. She told me to go to the hospital, but I’m like … fuck that. So she took me back to her apartment and I spent the night. The next day she talked me into calling the newspaper.”
She looks down at her cigarette, rolls it between her fingers. “They send out this … college girl. She’s, like, younger than me. But she seemed serious, so I told her everything—every sordid detail—and she writes this huge story. I mean, this girl’s thinking Pulitzer Prize and a promotion. I’m thinking it’s going to get the son of a bitch arrested.”
“What happened?”
“The night after it was published? Prince Charming came to my trailer. I was sleeping. Alone. Just me and my daughter. And he was … furious. I mean foaming-at-the-mouth pissed off. He put a gun to my head. He picked my daughter up by her foot, held her upside down, and put the gun against her head.”
For the first time, she chokes back tears. “He told me if I didn’t tell that reporter and the cops that I made the whole thing up, he’d come back and kill us both. He said he’d get away with it because he’s a cop.”
She turns those blue eyes on me. “I believed him.”
“What did you do?” I ask.
“What do you think? I called the fucking reporter and told her I made it up. A couple days later, the cops came out and arrested me for making false allegations against a police officer. It was a felony, but my attorney got it knocked down to some lesser misdemeanor.” She looks down at the cigarette burning in her hand. “My parents had to mortgage their house to pay for all this shit.”
“Mama.”
Kelly startles with so much force that she nearly drops her cigarette.
I glance left to see a little girl standing in the hall. She has mussed blond hair and cherub cheeks. She’s wearing a T-shirt that’s too big—her mom’s, probably—and dragging a doll by its hair behind her.
“I’m hungry,” she says.
“Come here, baby.” Kelly Dennison opens her arms and the little girl goes into them, snuggles against her.
“Thank you for telling me,” I say. “I know it wasn’t easy.”
Hugging her child against her, she kisses the top of her head and then looks at me. “Why are you asking me about all this crap, anyway?”
“I think this is one of those rare occasions where the less you know, the better.”
“Since that’s the case, try this on for size: You tell anyone what I said and I’ll deny every word. You got that?”
“I got it,” I tell her. “Loud and clear.”
CHAPTER 23
In the years I’ve been in law enforcement, I’ve been lied to more times that I can count. Some people are good at it. Others not so much. I’m no slouch when it comes to discerning one from the other. Kelly Dennison might be rough around the edges; she might even be a capable liar. But I don’t believe she’s lying about what happened the night she was pulled over by Deputy Wade Travers.
The last thing I want to believe about a cop is that he is corrupt. If my suspicions are correct, Wade Travers is a violent sexual predator—and maybe worse. He’s used his position of power to find victims—women in trouble with the law. He assaults them and then he uses his position as a cop to intimidate them into silence. The next logical question is: What else has he done?
I call Tomasetti as I pull out of the driveway and head south. “I have a name for you,” I say without preamble.
“Lay it on me.”
“Wade Travers. He’s a Geauga County dep—”
“I know who he is,” Tomasetti cuts in.
“You know him?”
“I know his father-in-law is the goddamn sheriff.”
“Jeff Crowder?” Shock renders me speechless; despite my foray into the sheriff’s department personnel, no one had uncovered that information. When I find my voice, I say, “That explains a lot of things.”
“It explains why you need to be careful.”
“I’m not wrong about this.”
“Kate, I’m not saying you’re wrong. And I will help you, but I need something concrete before I can pursue this on an official level. You understand what’s at stake.”
“I understand.” My mind spins through everything I’ve learned, the things I suspect, and I struggle to put them in order in terms of provability. “Two and a half years ago Travers was accused of sexual assault.”
“I looked at it,” he tells me. “The victim retracted her story. She was charged and did jail time. Travers was vindicated. Kate, there’s nothing there.”
“There’s nothing there because he intimidated her into keeping her mouth shut.” I tell him about my visit with Kelly Dennison. “He threatened her. He threatened her infant daughter.”
“We need proof.”
“She’s too frightened to come forward.”
“And she has a small credibility problem.”
I think about my trip to the Geauga County Records Department. “What about the purged records?”
A pensive silence ensues, and then, “If we can come up with something concrete that shows Travers or anyone else inside the sheriff’s department has altered official records to cover up misconduct or corruption or to alter evidence, I can get involved and make this official. Without some proof of wrongdoing … the best we can hope for is the initiation of an audit based on the missing or purged records. I’d prefer not to go that route.”
“An audit now would just give them a heads-up and ample time to cover their tracks,” I murmur.
“Look, Kate, we have to bear in mind here that we’re talking about a man’s life, his character, his career.”
“Or a dirty cop,” I snap.
“We have to be sure.” Another thoughtful pause. “You think a cop inside the Geauga County Sheriff’s Department was involved with Naomi King. You think there was some kind of falling-out between them. You think he murdered her and then framed her husband for it? Kate, do you have any idea how that sounds?”
“I know how it sounds,” I retort.
“We need something substantial before I can begin any kind of investigation. Even then it’s probably going to take some time to get things rolling.”
“I guess I’d better get started then.”
“In the interim, I’ll dig around a little on my end, see if anything pops.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” he says. “We’re a long way from bringing this thing to a head.”
* * *
Vicki Cascioli lives in a Victorian-style duplex just north of Auburn Corners. I’m still mulling my conversation with Tomasetti when I take the steps to the porch and knock.
I hear at least three locks disengage. The door opens and I find myself looking at a striking woman with black hair pulled into a ponytail, a flawless olive complexion, and the cheekbones of a runway model. Dark eyes fringed with sooty lashes and full lips are set into an oval face. No makeup, but then she’s one of those women who doesn’t need it. She’s tall and large-boned with a muscular build. All two hundred pounds of her is packed into snug jeans and a faded Ohio State sweatshirt.
I show her my badge. “Vicki Cascioli?”
“Maybe.” She takes the time to scrutinize it. “What do you want?”
“I’m Kate Burkholder, chief of police down in Painters Mill.”
“Yeah, I can read.”
“I’m not here in an official capacity.”
“Then you probably got the wro
ng house.”
“I want to talk to you about the Geauga County Sheriff’s Department.”
“In case you’re not up on your news, I don’t work there anymore.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
Tilting her head, she looks at me a little more closely. She may not be a cop any longer, but she’s still got the look. Direct gaze with that inherent hint of suspicion. Straightforward demeanor. No-nonsense approach. A little bit of bad attitude thrown in for good measure.
“All right.” She steps aside. “I’ll bite.”
I keep a close eye on her as I brush past. I’m pretty sure that’s the outline of a pistol tucked into the waistband of her jeans. She takes me into a good-size living room with high ceilings and a bay window that looks out over the street. The room smells of paint and turpentine. Country music pours from a set of speakers set up on a sofa table. A half-dead ficus tree in the corner. Threadbare sofa and chair. No TV. A well-used leather punching bag hangs from a hook set into the ceiling. An easel in the next room—the dining room—holds a large canvas soused with oil paints in magenta and purple and blue.
“You’re a painter?” I ask.
“I dabble.” She gives me another once-over, curious now. “All right. You’re in. You want to tell me what this is all about?”
I’m going to have to be cautious. I don’t know this woman. I have no idea where her loyalties lie or what kind of person she is. If she has an agenda that has nothing to do with right or wrong. As far as I know she’s a wannabe rookie cop who couldn’t cut it and now she’s looking for some easy money to pay her rent.
“I was involved in the Joseph King standoff a few days ago,” I tell her.
“Yeah, I heard about that. Tough break. SWAT got him, didn’t they?”
I nod. “I understand you used to be a deputy with the Geauga County Sheriff’s Department.”
“Once upon a time.”
“How long were you with them?”
“Eight months.”
“Were you involved in the Naomi King murder case at all?”
“Before my time.”
“You ever make any stops out at the King farm?”
“Never did.”
Nodding, I turn my attention to the punching bag, the set of gloves lying on the hardwood floor beneath it. “You box?”