What She Found (Tracy Crosswhite #9)(97)

“I’d be lying if I said your comment last night about not getting all of the members of the Last Line wasn’t at the forefront of my mind.”

Dan stood from the bench. “I’ll go dance with our daughter while you two talk.” He walked over and picked up Daniella. The two girls also followed him onto the dance floor.

“You said I was going to miss one.”

“That’s right. One wasn’t on the task force but was really the most important person.”

“Why?”

“If you’re going to be rolling drug dealers coming out of bars you need a good contact, someone who can provide you information on which bars, who the dealers are, where they’re going to be and when.”

“And you know who that person was.”

“Yep.”

“How?”

“Because we grew up together in this neighborhood. Our fathers knew each other.”

“And this person supplied the task force information and in exchange received what? Money?”

“A big cut of the take,” Jones said.

“Why would the Last Line trust this person?”

“Because she grew up just around the corner. She knew all of us.”

“Was she a drug dealer?” Tracy asked.

“Oh, hell no. Her daddy would have never allowed that. He was a police officer.”

A cloud lifted. Tracy’s thoughts fell into place like the last pieces of a puzzle and she could suddenly see the picture. “Chief Weber.”

Henderson Jones nodded. “Around here she’s just Marcella.”

“Why?” Tracy asked, hearing the incredulousness in her tone.

“Why would she do it?”

“To answer that question, you have to do some research. Her father was a Seattle police officer. There aren’t a lot of black officers now; there were fewer then. You think there’s institutional racism?

You should have been there in the seventies and eighties.”

“He was discriminated against?”

“More than that. They set him up.”

“How?”

“He and his white partner responded to a homicide at one of the apartment complexes over on Holden Street. They inventoried the crime scene and found close to twenty thousand dollars in shoeboxes in one of the closets. Weber’s partner thought it was found money. The resident was dead. He stuffed close to ten thousand dollars in his pocket and told Weber the rest was his.

Weber didn’t take the bait. He told his partner to put the money back or he’d report him. They got into an argument, but the partner put the money back. Weber thought that was the end of it.”

“Clearly it wasn’t.”

Jones shook his head. “A week later, Weber’s captain calls.

They want him to come in. He thinks they’re going to ask him about the money. Instead, they tell him his partner and another officer, another white officer, claimed Weber stole twenty thousand dollars.

Apparently, the victim had a roommate, and the roommate said there wasn’t twenty thousand dollars in cash, there was forty thousand dollars, and that he saw Weber stuffing his jacket.”

“They took the money and blamed him.”

“Uh-huh. Now it’s two white officers and a black resident testifying against a black officer at a crime scene. How do you think that went?”

“What happened?”

“Weber’s father was dismissed from the force, but the prosecutor declined to bring charges when the two officers refused to testify against one of their own.”

“That was big of them,” Tracy said, her anger building.

“Weber worked nights as a security guard at a building around here. On the drive home one night, he walked into a gas station convenience store robbery, intervened, and caught a bullet. It lodged against his spine and put him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

Marcella took care of him. He convinced her to make a difference, fight for change, eliminate racism and bias.”

“Her platform.”

Jones nodded. “She was a rising star; a competent, black, female police officer. The department couldn’t promote her fast enough.”

“How’d she get involved with the Last Line?”

“Back in the late eighties and early nineties, they were setting up task forces all over the state, a couple dozen of them. I knew about them because that was my business then. Marcella did a stint in narcotics as they groomed her. She had a good sense about what was going on and ways officers could skim busts. They set up a force in Seattle.”

“The Last Line.”

“Marcella and Rick Tombs were close. They’d worked together in narcotics. He knew her background and she knew his. Marcella had a public persona, but she had never lost that chip on her shoulder about what happened to her father. This was the opportunity to get what she believed her father was owed.”

“She tipped the task force to the dealers and the bars.”

“No one on the street could figure out how this task force had so much information. How they knew all the dealers and all the bars where they were dealing.”

“But you knew.”

“I suspected it was Marcella. Had to be someone on the inside.

Pretty soon we all suspected.”