The Deceiving Look (Shepard & Gray), page 14
“You got any plans for the weekend?”
She sighed. “I need to find someone to finish my sleeve and all the tattoo artists here suck. I’m gonna have to go to Vegas just to get anything done.”
“So?” Sherri said, taking out a bottle of lotion from her locker. “Let’s make it a girls’ trip. I know this club down there with the hottest male dancers you’ll ever see.”
“No, thanks. I don’t need greasy strippers rubbing on me. But a girls’ trip sounds kick ass.”
Mazie took her hairbrush and walked to the sink and mirror. She was lost in thought about the shooting and how odd it was to actually fire her gun, when a soft creaking sound broke through the silence. It was a tiny noise, something like a metal scrape, but it was loud enough to make her pause and take notice.
Slowly, she turned to face the source of the sound. Her eyes scanned the room, looking for any sign of movement or disturbance.
As her gaze fell back on the mirror, she noticed a faint glimmer of movement behind her. There was a vent up above the door, and it seemed to be the source of the sound.
“When was the last time you went to Vegas?” Sherri said as she began to dress.
Mazie approached the vent, her eyes glued to the flicker of light that seemed to be coming from within. It was as though something was moving behind the metal grate, casting shadows that danced in the light.
She grabbed one of the thick plastic garbage bins and dumped out its contents.
“What are you doing?” Sherri said.
Mazie flipped the garbage bin upside down and stood on it. Sherri appeared and grabbed her legs like she was about to tumble over Niagara Falls, and it unbalanced her so that she had to jump off.
“Holy shit, Sherri!”
“I was trying to help you.”
“I’m like two feet off the ground. I think I’d live if I fell.”
“What are you doing anyway?”
“There’s something in the vent.”
She climbed back onto the garbage can. The vent had two screws, one on each side. “Hey, Shers, do me a favor and grab my keys, will ya?”
Sherri hurried off and came back with the keys. Mazie opened the pocketknife she had and lifted the flathead screwdriver.
“You have a screwdriver on your keys?”
“No, I have a multitool knife on my keys. The knife has a screwdriver.”
She unscrewed the cover and lifted it off the wall.
Mazie’s eyes were immediately drawn to the thick black wire that was coiled inside the vent. Then, her gaze landed on something else, something that made her blood run cold. At the end of the wire was a small cylindrical object with a glass sphere at the end. The sphere was reflecting the lights of the locker room in small sparkles of light.
It was a camera, and it was pointed straight at the showers.
With Sheriff Gray out, Mazie had no choice but to notify Assistant Sheriff Dobbs. He was a man of average build and height, with a receding hairline and an unassuming demeanor. He listened carefully as Mazie explained the situation, but his response was characteristically passive. He was a man who didn’t want to make any decisions because he would be responsible for the consequences. Mazie was grateful that he at least got the IT department to begin looking into it.
Mazie stood in the locker room a little later, watching a technician from the IT department analyze the camera that had been found in the vent. Meanwhile, another tech was running down where the camera led to, tracing its path back to its source.
Mazie stood with her arms folded. Sherri, who had been standing nearby, was visibly shaken by the discovery. She had almost broken down in tears and had to leave the room to collect herself.
“Well?” Mazie said.
The technician, a skinny guy with an oval head and brown hair, said, “Looks like they ran it from the next room over. What’s there?”
“Storage room.”
“Well, let’s go check it out.”
Together, Mazie and the technician made their way to the storage room. As they entered, Mazie scanned the shelves and noticed something. There, behind one of the shelves, she spotted a wire. Someone had gone to great lengths to conceal it, drilling a small hole to thread it through the wall.
Mazie’s heart sank as the technician followed the wire to its source. It was connected to a small, inconspicuous device that was likely either recording or transmitting footage of the locker room.
“This is pretty low-tech stuff. The kind you’d buy online for like fifty bucks. Not a sophisticated peeper.”
“How long?” Mazie asked.
“How long what?”
“How long has he been recording the women’s locker room, dipshit.”
“Oh,” he said, somewhat flustered at her anger, “um, I don’t know. I’ll have to get into this and see what’s there.”
Mazie’s frustration boiled over as she left the room, shaking her head in disbelief. As she faced Dobbs in the hall, he looked up at her with his typical air of passive detachment.
Mazie didn’t say anything right away, waiting for Dobbs to respond. But he just stood there, staring at her with his blank expression. Finally, she couldn’t contain her anger any longer.
“Well?” she demanded. “What are you going to do about it?”
Dobbs seemed taken aback by Mazie’s outburst. “We need to look into this further,” he said with uncertainty in his voice. “We need to figure out what steps to take next.”
“Um, how about we find who did this and arrest them?” she said with heavy sarcasm dripping in her voice. “That sounds like a plan to me.”
“Just calm down, we don’t have enough information yet to know what we should or shouldn’t be doing.”
Mazie stepped toward him. “Fix this, Dobbs.”
“I’m doing everything I can until the sheriff gets back.”
Mazie’s attention was momentarily drawn away from Dobbs as she noticed two deputies, Aaron Watkins and Dave Garcia, out of the corner of her eye. They were standing a dozen feet away, huddled together and snickering, trying to stifle their laughter.
Mazie’s eyes narrowed as she turned her gaze toward them. Aaron and Dave quickly averted their eyes, trying to act casual. But Mazie saw right through them.
“What’s so funny?” she demanded.
Aaron and Dave exchanged a glance before bursting out laughing, unable to hold it in any longer. They turned and walked away, their laughter echoing through the hallway.
Mazie’s mind drifted back to her high school days, when a group of boys had taken pictures of her in the locker room. They had done a lot of things to the loner tomboy who had to get free lunch because her parents got divorced and her dad was a cop with two mortgages and alimony. Mazie thought she had grown past all that. It had taken her hitting rock bottom to do it. In an alcoholic haze at just sixteen, she had used a fake ID to get into a bar and hit another woman so hard it fractured her jaw.
The bartender, a friend of hers, shuffled her out the back, but the police were waiting, and she was arrested. Only because her father was a sergeant on the same police force was she not charged with a felony. She got a misdemeanor with an agreement that her case would be sealed when she turned eighteen.
It was then her father sat her down on the steps of their porch and read her a poem. It was written on a laminated index card and was folded and stuffed into his wallet.
Good and evil, they’re like two folks dancin’
One’s got the light, the other’s romancin’
Both of ’em inside us, makin’ us choose
For one to win, the other’s gotta lose
He had asked her what she thought that meant, and she said she didn’t know.
“It means,” he said in his deep, calm voice, “that between good and evil, for one of them to win, the other has to lose. Do you understand? It has to lose. So, you need to make a choice. Which one are you gonna let win in this world?”
She didn’t totally understand why it had impacted her so much, because looking back on it, she was a stupid sixteen-year-old kid who didn’t know anything and didn’t want to know. But for some reason, her father, the most heroic man she had ever met, had this look in his eyes while he spoke to her that day that she never forgot. He wasn’t angry, but ashamed.
She had never seen it before and never saw it again, but her father was her entire world, and it had cut so deep into her that she just wanted to crawl into a bottle and never come out. But she did come out. It took three years of relapses, particularly after her father was shot and killed on duty, but she was eventually able to get sober, and when she turned twenty-one, she applied to be a cop at the same precinct her father had worked at.
Mazie’s eyes flicked to a nearby cubicle where she spotted a mug of steaming coffee. Without a second thought, she grabbed the mug and stormed after Aaron and Dave, who were now a few steps ahead of her. She reached them and dumped the scalding liquid on both of them, not caring that some of it splashed back on her own hand. Aaron and Dave yelped in surprise and anger, but Mazie didn’t stop to look back at them as she stormed off.
Aaron got the worst of it down his neck and started jumping around like a grasshopper while shouting profanity.
“Deputy Heaton!” Dobbs shouted.
Mazie, her temper cooling as she realized it might not have been the best idea to assault two cops inside a police station, stopped and turned to face Dobbs, her arms folded over her chest.
Sheriff Gray came around the corner just then, her coat speckled with snow.
“What’s going on?”
Mazie breathed out and closed her eyes.
Oh shit, she thought.
27
Billie sat at her desk, frustration washing over her. She had important things to do: prepare for Dax’s protective order hearing, work Dennis’s and Roger’s murders, and understand why a lunatic was hunting Solomon. But she was stuck dealing with what some of the deputies were calling “Coffee-gate.”
She spent a couple of hours interviewing everyone involved, trying to get to the bottom of who set up the camera in the locker room. Finally, when she had everything she needed from the witnesses, she invited Mazie into her office.
“Shut the door, please,” Billie said.
Mazie did.
“Sit down.”
Mazie sank into the plush oversize chair in front of Billie’s desk, her fingers drumming on the armrests. Her wide, doe-like eyes darted around the room, avoiding direct eye contact with the sheriff as though she were a scolded child. Despite her obvious agitation, she tried to maintain a calm facade, but her tapping fingers betrayed her.
“Deputy Watkins has first-degree burns on the back of his neck. He’ll be fine, but there might be a scar. Are you aware that an injury that leaves a scar is enhanced to a class A misdemeanor? The level of misdemeanor that a police officer could be fired for. Or at the least, have an IAD investigation and suspension.”
“Yeah,” she said softly, glancing to the floor. “I know.”
“What would possibly make you think you should dump hot coffee on him?”
“Are you freaking kidding me? They were recording us showering.”
“And all you had to do was text me and I would have been right there. I would have had them disciplined, fired, and then arrested for voyeurism. Now he’s going to file a lawsuit against the department, and the lawyers will have to negotiate a settlement, and you can bet getting fired isn’t going to be part of the settlement. So tell me, Deputy Heaton, what good exactly came from your burst of anger?”
She shook her head and mumbled “Bullshit” under her breath.
“Excuse me?”
Mazie held her gaze but was silent.
“You can speak freely,” Billie said.
“I said it’s bullshit. Ma’am.”
“How so?”
Mazie’s voice was filled with frustration and anger as she spoke. “You hired me because I stood up to that scumbag who was groping female cadets for months, but now that I stood up to some pervert recording us in the shower and recording our conversations and thoughts . . . it’s like no one cares. And if they actually recorded something and have footage, they could put it online at any time . . . I feel like . . .” She paused, her hands shaking.
Billie sat quietly, taking in Mazie’s words, waiting until she was done before speaking.
“Do you think I don’t understand, Mazie? Hmm? Guess what, I use those locker rooms, too. If there are videos, I’m on them, too. I feel violated, and ashamed, and so angry I actually put my gun in my drawer rather than having it in my holster while I interview everyone. But guess what? I will stay calm. Because being calm gets things done efficiently. Being angry only makes things worse.”
Mazie remained quiet.
“You can’t be a good cop if you can’t control your temper. You’re the face of the law, and it would take only one bad interaction for a civilian to never trust another police officer again. Add up a career’s worth of people like that, and one police officer’s anger can hurt an entire community.”
Mazie swallowed and looked down to the floor. “I . . .” She shook her head. “I know. It was just a reaction. I just felt so . . .”
“I know,” Billie said softly. “But I’m going to have to discipline you. Four-week suspension, without pay.”
She nodded, running her tongue along her lips. “I understand.”
“Good.”
Her intercom buzzed and the receptionist said, “Sheriff, Deputy Watkins is done with EMS.”
“Send him in, please.”
She looked at Mazie, her face steely cold. “You’re excused.”
The door opened, and Deputy Watkins came in with some gauze on the back of his neck.
Mazie brushed past him, and the two gave each other a frigid stare.
“Shut the door, Deputy,” Billie said coolly.
He did, and then ran his fingers over the bandages on his neck as though reminding Billie that he’s the real victim here.
“How’s your neck?”
“Hurts. I have to go to the hospital after this just to be sure I’m not going to get an infection. She’s crazy. I think she should be—”
“Shut up.”
Aaron looked shocked. “What?”
Billie leaned forward, holding his gaze while swallowing down her fury. “I said—shut. Up.”
She took a deep breath. “Why, Aaron? Well, I know why, but why would you think you could get away with it?”
He shrugged. “It was just a prank. We’re always messing with each other. Hatfield the other day put shaving cream in my—”
“Have you ever put a camera in the men’s locker rooms?”
He didn’t say anything.
“Who else was involved? I assume Dave?”
Watkins folded his arms.
Billie fixed her gaze on him and leaned back in her chair, putting her arms casually on the armrests. It was a subtle gesture, but one that conveyed confidence and fearlessness.
“Where are the recordings?” Billie asked.
“There aren’t any. It was cast live.”
She sighed. “Aaron, listen to me, I’m going to have you arrested when you walk out of here—”
“What the hell are you talking about? Because of that bitch’s—”
“Say one more word and I swear I will mace you in the face.”
The blip of rage had slipped out of a facade she usually carefully kept in check. She regretted it instantly, but by the reaction on Watkins’s face, he at least understood now that this wasn’t a situation he was going to talk his way out of.
“As I was saying, I’m going to have you arrested. The question is, am I going to have you arrested for misdemeanor unlawful surveillance, or am I going to have you arrested for felony voyeurism? Or maybe you intended to upload those videos for some sort of financial gain? Maybe interstate distribution of unlawful pornography would be a fitting charge? Ten years minimum and registration as a sex offender for the rest of your life.”
The sheriff sat quietly a moment, seeing what reaction he would have. The best way to hear what someone was really saying wasn’t to ask questions, but to sit quietly and force them to talk to break the silence.
“Yeah, I recorded them as a prank. So the hell what? They’re grown women. No harm, no foul. But she burned me. She physically attacked me and tried to kill me.”
Billie grinned. “You have to know how stupid that sounds.”
He inhaled deeply and said sternly, “I’m calling my union rep, and we’re gonna file a lawsuit so big—”
“What you’re going to do is give me those recordings. Every last copy. Along with every computer, iPad, and phone in your possession. Then you’re going to plead no contest to unlawful surveillance as a misdemeanor, with an agreement that you will not serve jail time but you will never wear a badge again.”
She leaned forward, locking her eyes with his as he seethed with rage.
Billie’s voice was stern as she spoke. “If you don’t cooperate, I’ll personally arrest you, parade you through this office in handcuffs, and lock you up in the holding cell until your arraignment. And if you’re convicted, you won’t be sent to jail, you’ll be sent to prison with the worst offenders out there, some of which you probably put in there. You better hope the guards don’t go on their lunch break at the wrong time, right, Aaron?” She paused for a moment and leaned back in her chair, her arms crossed. “So, what’s it going to be? It’s up to you.”
His eyes narrowed, and she could feel the tension radiating off him. He opened his mouth as if to say something, but then thought better of it and swallowed heavily. She could see the effort it took for him to rein in his anger and respond with a curt nod.
“Smart choice. Turn everything in to Lisa, and tell Deputy Garcia to come in here. I have an offer for him, too.”
28
Solomon’s heart raced, and his breaths came in short, quick gasps, his body feeling weak and unsteady. With shaking hands, he’d been clutching the phone tightly for what seemed like an eternity, willing himself to steady his breathing. He closed his eyes, trying to focus on the darkness behind his lids and the feeling of the cold wall against his back. Slowly, he drew in a deep breath, held it for a few seconds, and then let it out. He repeated this process, feeling his racing heart begin to calm as he regained control over his breathing.
