Black Cat Weekly #89

Chapter 5-3

Back in the office, they both go online again, trying to fill in some of the lacunae—gaps—in the police report.

“OK,” she says. “Mitt wasn’t kidding. Regina’s on f*******:, Twitter, i********:, t****k, and Snapchat. I’ve found her accounts on all of them. She’s got a few local buds, too. I found pictures.”

“Local? Let’s get in touch with them.”

“Tanya Rios seems to be her BFF. They’re all over i********: and t****k together, lots of pictures.”

Tanya’s smile shows teeth that look even whiter against her olive complexion, a round face made even rounder because she wears her hair pulled back. She stands a few inches taller than Regina, who holds a glass of wine in the picture. A mirror and bottles stand behind the two women, but nothing distinguishes the bar from hundreds of others in the area.

“Birthday two months ago,” Teague comments. “Doesn’t give her age, but I’d say, what, early twenties? Just out of college?”

“Regina was 25,” Jody says. “She’s probably about the same.”

Tanya is a physical therapist. She doesn’t mention a relationship, but she likes puppies and hip-hop. She’s heavily into Game of Thrones and Downton Abbey.

Game of ThronesDownton Abbey“Anything special about her you noticed?”

“She spells and punctuates correctly, if that means anything.”

“You find addresses for any of them?”

Jody shakes her head. “Just online. I’m messaging the others, too, but Tanya sounds like our best bet.”

Teague closes the police report, such as it is. “Chudzik’s notes don’t give us anywhere else to go, especially since the cops are doing so little. Where else do we look until Regina’s friends get back to us?”

“Maybe Mitt again? He didn’t give us names before, but without that pinstriped buzzsaw hovering over him, he might spill something else.”

“Maybe his editor, too,” Teague adds. “Maybe get a look at the whole picture.”

“Perfect,” Jody fluffs her hair. “News guys like minority chicks like me. We make them feel even more civic-minded.”

They both don their jackets again even though the heat was hot enough to fry eggs on a car’s hood.

“He’s probably an old white guy,” Jody continues. “He’ll appreciate a shapely young tush when he sees one.”

“Think we can find one somewhere?”

Jody flips him off. Outside, Teague holds Jody’s door again.

Edward “Ned” Howard at the Messenger has a glassed-in office barely large enough to accommodate his desk with the computer and two filing cabinets covered with post-it notes and magnetic clips full of faded notices. A small flowerpot with a dead plant stands atop one of them. Teague feels like he’s in a goldfish bowl.

MessengerHoward himself looks surprisingly young, but his pallor suggests he’s a vampire. He’s well over six feet and thin as a blue pencil, with light brown hair. His modulated tenor makes Teague jealous.

“Mitt’s a pit bull on a story,” Howard says. “Gets his teeth into something, he won’t let go. Got a fantastic nose for news.”

Jody waits until he runs out of clichés before she speaks again. She takes the lead since Howard does seem to like the minority chick. Teague doubts it’s strictly out of civic duty.

does “Did you know his girlfriend?”

“I met her at a party last Christmas time. Pretty, type-A like Mitt. That’s about all I remember.”

“Could he have killed her?”

Howard runs his tongue over his lips and listens to the hum of activity outside his fishbowl.

“He never mentioned any problems or fights. And they’d been together long enough so they figured out how to be together.”

“Which means you don’t think he did it.”

“Don’t put words in my mouth.” Howard’s thin forearms are covered with dark hair. “But it’s hard to believe. Most of the others, they agree. Mitt’s a tough reporter, but he’s a nice guy. Remembers people’s birthdays, kid’s names, stuff like that.”

“No enemies around here?”

“Nope. And this place is stress twenty-four-seven, so if someone had a bug up his a*s, I’d know.”

“So, you don’t have any other ideas.” Jody looks through the window at people sitting at computers, drinking coffee and looking like they want a cigarette. It looks like the Homicide squad room minus the guns.

“Mitt have any enemies because of his stories?” Teague asks.

Howard leans back in his chair. “Well, he’s stirred up a few people over that shooting last winter.”

“Which shooting was that?”

Howard rattles the information off as if he covered the story himself.

In February, Stonebury police raided the house of Henry Langloise, who was in bed with his girlfriend, Christine Ferris. They heard someone kick in a door, and he went to investigate. She heard voices and went to join him. Somehow, a fight broke out and shots were fired. One shattered Chrissie Ferris’s pelvis and damaged her lower spine. At 31, she was still—and probably permanently—paralyzed from the waist down. Langloise suffered a broken nose, a broken arm, and a mild concussion. The police had a search warrant to look for firearms and illegal substances but didn’t find either one.

While surgeons worked fourteen hours to extract the bullet from his girlfriend’s lower back, Langloise talked to Mitt in the hospital. He said neither he nor Chrissie owned a g*n. The police produced a .38 revolver with the serial number filed off, which they claimed Langloise fired at them.

Nobody checked Langloise’s or Ferris’s hands for gunshot residue, so nobody could say they fired the g*n.

Connecticut Inspector General Angela Forrest-Mercado is investigating the case, but the police are stalling her. Five months after the incident, she’s still in court trying to get information the police refused to release.

“Mitt’s talked to the Inspector General a couple of times,” Howard says. “She’s pushing the cops hard, but they’re pushing back. Mitt figures they’ve screwed up somewhere—the warrant, the address, something—and they’re covering their a*s. In the meantime, the woman’s probably crippled for life.”

“That sucks,” Jody says. Teague suspects she remembers becoming a widow herself at 27.

Jody looks through the window again.

“I’m sure Mitt’s got a particular computer here, right?”

“Well, people share all the desktops, but they’ve got separate accounts with passwords. And he’s got his own laptop. He does most of his stuff on that. Everybody does.”

Jody takes a deep breath and Howard leans forward behind his desk. Teague thinks of a guy moving closer to a woman on a bar stool.

“Let me ask you something.” Howard’s voice could lube an 18-wheeler “How does a woman decide to become a PI? You must have had lots of other…options.”

“I always loved guns and blowing stuff up.”

Howard’s eyes widen.

When Jody stands again, she looks a foot taller. She only needs a cape to be a superhero.

“Thank you, Mr. Howard. We will call you if we should think of any more questions.”

Teague expects Howard to roll over and beg.

They enter the chaos and find Mitt holding his cell to his ear with one hand and typing on his laptop with the other. He nods at them, and they wait until he ended the call.

“You’ve got something.”

“Just more questions,” Teague says.

“Oh, well, I guess that’s progress, isn’t it?”

“Is there anything you know that you’ve held back from us? That someone might know?”

“Uh, no. Like what?”

“Your editor says you’ve been pushing the cops on the Langloise and Ferris raid pretty hard,” Jody says. “How about that?”

“Well, the cops got the warrant because a confidential informant tipped them that Langloise was holding. I’d love to know who the CI was, ’cause Langloise’s got no record of any kind. He doesn’t have a registered firearm, either. No record, no g*n, no drugs. The cops aren’t geniuses, but that’s out of everyone’s comfort zone.”

“Howard says the Inspector General is looking into it and the cops aren’t helping.”

Mitt scratches his chin. “She’s trying to go through the courts and get subpoenas, and the police union is fighting every step of the way.”

“Someone’s got something to hide,” Teague says.

Mitt shrugs. “It’s easy to think that, even if you aren’t paranoid. But I’m flying blind.”

“Any ideas?” Jody sits on the corner of Mitt’s desk like one of the guys.

“Well, if there’s a CI involved, he or she talked to someone in the narcotics division. They were the ones on the raid, so it was probably one of them.”

“OK, so that narrows things down.”

“Not much.” Mitt looks at his coffee mug. “The report on the raid only mentions a few cops by name, but there had to be at least a dozen. They kicked both the front and back doors at the house.”

Jody and Teague exchange glances.

“I can see them protecting the CI,” Teague says, “but there ought to be more.”

“Yeah. I’ve managed to get the report, but it’s got more redactions than it has content.”

His lips tightened. “Like Gina’s case.”

He shifts gears.

“You know Martin St. Vincent? At least who he is?”

Martin St. Vincent is a local activist, a black professor at Trinity College in Hartford and very vocal in the Black Lives Matter movement.

“Is he involved in this, too?”

“Yeah, he and I have talked a lot, he’s had an Op-ed in the Messenger and another one in the Courant. He has a lot of credibility and a lot of followers. I like his perspective and try to use it to frame where I’m going. Not that it’s doing any good.”

MessengerCourant.“So could the cops be trying to frame you because you’re stirring up such a fuss?” Teague asks. “Anything else you’re looking at that could upset someone?”

Mitt clears his throat. “Something I’m still trying to track down. Nothing definite, but I’m hearing rumors about cops stealing evidence.”

His fingers dance on his desk.

“Drugs. Money. Things that should be in evidence storage but disappear. One of the assistant prosecutors was telling me a few weeks ago that he had a case fall apart because the stuff he thought they had for evidence wasn’t there. The judge tossed a case they’d been trying to build on a guy for months. Down the toilet faster than you can say ‘flush.’”

Jody sits motionless, staring at him until he breaks the silence.

“I’ve got nothing solid to work with, though. I’m trying to find someone who knows something who’ll chat a little. So far, no luck.”

His face tightens. “I’m not getting anywhere. I’m not a threat. And Gina…”

He closes his eyes. “She was so tiny—she makes you look like a basketball player—and… Some nights, I see her again, and I want to protect her and make her happy, then I wake up and…”

He drinks more coffee.

“I know you said you didn’t hang with her friends much,” Teague says. “Do you know any of them around here? We looked at her social media and got a few names, but if you’ve got better contact info, it might help.”