Quid Pro Quo (Champagne Challenge #118) -- PG-13
Posted: Wed Aug 18, 2010 8:24 pm
Disclaimer: No infringement intended, and Beth and Carl, basically not mine.
Thanks as always to my beta, for help, support, and general amazingness.
Quid Pro Quo
Cops have an old saying. “Cherchez la femme.” It translates, roughly, as “watch out for the woman.” Most of the time it means, in an awful lot of crimes, there’s a woman involved somehow, and that can help you solve it. But you know, English is a funny language, and for me, “watch out” can mean “be careful of” as often as it means “look for.” Or as my first partner used to say, “broads are dangerous.” Yeah, not so politically correct, and his non-PC mouth finally got him an earlier retirement than he’d planned on. I always figured he had a few not-so-flattering things to say about black people, too, but he never did it where I could hear. Besides, sometimes when we’d had a few after our shift, he’d come up with some sloppy sentiment like, “Carl, when it comes to the force, there ain’t no black and white. We’re all blue.”
Still, I have to wonder what he’d have said about bulldog-stubborn, perky little blonde reporters. Yeah, I’m talking about Beth Turner. Who else?
It was 2005 when I met her. I’d never heard of BuzzWire back then. Never thought of the Web as a news source, not really. I mean, sure, CNN had a site, and so did the LA Times. But that was all rehashed news from TV and the papers. Not real reporting, if you know what I mean.
Not that I was ever all that crazy about reporters of any kind. They have a tendency to cause more problems than they solve, when it comes to criminal investigations. When I first made detective, I tried to work with reporters. Got burned, once or twice, before I learned my lesson. After that, all I said to a reporter, voluntarily, was “No comment,” or more often, “Get out of my crime scene.” Simple. Direct.
Then we had this case come up. The 710 Freeway Shooter. Some sicko taking potshots off overpasses into traffic on a major freeway. We think the perp made a few practice shots before the first big one, but we were never sure. Then there was a nice spring evening, about 6 p.m., when a lot of innocent commuters were making their way home. From what we pieced together later, an unknown subject, shooting from above, had sent a round through the windshield of an SUV, fatally wounding the driver. As far as the coroner could tell, the driver was killed instantly, and his SUV, out of control, caused a 28-car pileup.
The EMTs said later it was a miracle there were only four fatalities. But with so much carnage, and the need to extract and treat the living, no one realized what we had was a crime scene, and not an accident. By the time we did, the scene was compromised.
Like everyone else on the force, I was hoping it was a one-time thing, I guess. We’d been discreetly surveiling that overpass for three weeks when the shooter struck again. Five miles down the road, and this time during morning rush hour. Seven dead, that time. And the freeway blocked for hours. I think it was about then my captain started looking harassed—the mayor may seem like a nice guy in his tv ads, or when he’s shaking hands with Boy Scouts, but from what I’ve heard, you don’t want to piss him off. After a third shooting—and a fourth—without so much as a spent shell or a decent lead, “pissed off” didn’t begin to cover it.
We’d made arrests, sure—three different men caught loitering suspiciously at overpasses on the 710—only to find out they were vigilantes who wanted to take out the shooter themselves. One civic–minded individual said he figured he could work the fame into a reality show contract. And people wonder why cops are cynical.
So we had nothing but a pile of tv and news reports with headlines like “Terror on the 710” and “Cops Miss Freeway Shooter—Again.”
I’d seen the blonde at several crime scenes, always scribbling in a notebook or muttering into a digital voice recorder. She looked too young to be with a big paper, so I figured she was probably a stringer for one of the suburban weeklies—a newbie looking for her big break. Didn’t pay much attention to her. At least, not as a reporter.
Then she showed up one day in the squad room, while I was going through a stack of worthless tips. Nothing was panning out—the guy was a ghost. And I felt like one myself. I hadn’t gotten more than four hours’ sleep a night in what was starting to seem like years. Living on vending machine cuisine and police department coffee. By the way, everything you’ve seen on tv about coffee in police stations? It’s true.
Anyway, in marches the cute blonde, an enormous purse hanging off one shoulder, and sticks out her hand.
“Detective Davis?” she said, “My name’s Beth Turner.”
I didn’t want to talk to her, but the department has us pretty well drilled on public relations, these days. So…
“Yes, ma’am. How can I help you?” Although I’m betting my body language wasn’t displaying much interest.
“I’ve been investigating the 710 case,” she said.
“Yeah?” I replied. “And you work for—?”
“BuzzWire.” At my blank look, she continued. “It’s a website. A news website.”
I must’ve let my skepticism show in my voice. “I’m very busy, Ms. Turner. I don’t have time for interviews.”
She smiled, and if the subject hadn’t been so serious, I’d say she was mischievous. “Oh, I didn’t come here for an interview. I came to give you information.”
“Assuming you have any, what’s the quid pro quo?”
“What?”
“You give me something, what do you want in return?”
“Oh.” She dimpled. “That interview—after you make the arrest.”
I thought for a minute. Chances of her having anything useful were pretty slim. But if she did, and I ignored it…I nodded. It was worth promising an interview. “Okay, what’ve you got?”
She reached into that purse of hers—over time, I’d learn it was a magician’s bag of tricks—and pulled out a dossier. She had places, times, details pieced together better than what we’d done so far. It was impressive, both the information and the organization.
I looked up after studying the papers for a few minutes to find her watching me intently. “Should we be looking at you for this?”
She laughed at that, and played along. “Me? I’ve got solid alibis, thanks. And if it was me, I wouldn’t be giving you this.” She slid a piece of paper out of her purse. It was a map, with an overpass marked. She tapped a finger on the mark. “I think the next shooting is going to be here.”
“This isn’t on the 710.”
Beth shrugged. “I think the 710 is getting a little hot. What I hear is, the shooter figures this is safer.”
That made sense, but… “Ms. Turner, if you’ve got all this, why not just give me a name? Tell me who we’re looking for. And how you came to this conclusion.”
“What does your profile say?”
Yeah, I shouldn’t have let her know the FBI had done a profile for us. But she’d already figured out they had. “Now, why should I tell you that?”
There was that smile again. “Like you said. Quid pro quo.”
She had me there. “The FBI says it’s a male, probably Caucasian, mid-to-late twenties. He’s targeting SUV’s—they think he’s unemployed, probably lives with his parents. Taking out his frustrations on anonymous strangers.”
Beth shook her head. “From what I’ve learned, they’ve got a lot of it wrong.”
We fenced a little back and forth after that. I wanted to know her source, she refused to give it up. Standard reporter stuff.
Finally, she told me, “Look, if I told you how I got this, and who I think it is, you’d laugh me out of here. The less I tell you, the more likely you are to follow up, and stop this.”
“That doesn’t make sense. What are you hiding?”
She hesitated a little, deciding, and said, “We don’t have a lot of time. If I’ve got the pattern figured right, the next shooting will be tonight.”
“Then you’d better quit stalling, and tell me who you think it is.” I didn’t tell her our experts thought the next event wouldn’t be for two days.
Beth told me a name. And I laughed at her, just as she’d predicted.
“That can’t be right. Our experts…”
She frowned. “Yeah, and no one thinks a woman could be a serial killer. That’s why it took so long to catch Wuornos.”
Well, she did know her stuff on that. “Okay, you’ve got a point. I can’t make any promises, but I’ll follow up.”
She left a little later, and I’d probably have thrown her info into the trash, but something about her seemed so sincere, so—I don’t know, competent. And in the end, I couldn’t take the chance she was right, and know that I’d done nothing.
So I guess everyone in L.A. knows how this came out. There was no arrest. I was able to talk my captain into sending me with a team to the overpass Beth gave me. It turned messy, and the shooter, a 35-year-old housewife with five kids and a husband in the NRA who spent every evening and weekend either at the range or hunting with his gun buddies, ended up blowing her own head off.
In private, I got reprimanded for letting the standoff go south. In public, I was a hero, with a commendation and everything. Funny how it works that way sometimes.
When Beth turned up for her interview, I didn’t really want to talk to her. The image of that desperate woman with her husband’s rifle, pretending every time she was taking out the husband she could never quite bring herself to kill, was too fresh. Beth didn’t understand that. Not then.
Her first question was an invitation to lie. “Detective Davis, how did you figure out who the shooter was?”
“You tell me, Ms. Turner,” I replied.
“Hey—“
“I mean it, Beth. Off the record. Where did you get that information? How did you know who she was, and where she’d be?”
She didn’t want to tell me, but eventually I learned that she’d gotten a tip from the younger sister of a college friend. A girl who’d been babysitting during each one of the shootings. Beth could have just broken the story, but she was a little too moral to do it that way. She came to me first.
I guess it wasn’t all altruism, though. She did tell me, a couple of years later, that the 710 case was what first got her editor to take her seriously. Anyway, when we got back on track with the interview, she just said, “Come on, Carl, can’t you just say you got a confidential tip?” And tossed her blonde hair back over her shoulders, impatient.
“Sure. Whatever.” A tip that led to me seeing a woman’s brains explode into red mist against the backdrop of the spring sky. I guess, though, it was a tip that saved a lot more lives than it took.
Quid pro quo.
Thanks as always to my beta, for help, support, and general amazingness.
Quid Pro Quo
Cops have an old saying. “Cherchez la femme.” It translates, roughly, as “watch out for the woman.” Most of the time it means, in an awful lot of crimes, there’s a woman involved somehow, and that can help you solve it. But you know, English is a funny language, and for me, “watch out” can mean “be careful of” as often as it means “look for.” Or as my first partner used to say, “broads are dangerous.” Yeah, not so politically correct, and his non-PC mouth finally got him an earlier retirement than he’d planned on. I always figured he had a few not-so-flattering things to say about black people, too, but he never did it where I could hear. Besides, sometimes when we’d had a few after our shift, he’d come up with some sloppy sentiment like, “Carl, when it comes to the force, there ain’t no black and white. We’re all blue.”
Still, I have to wonder what he’d have said about bulldog-stubborn, perky little blonde reporters. Yeah, I’m talking about Beth Turner. Who else?
It was 2005 when I met her. I’d never heard of BuzzWire back then. Never thought of the Web as a news source, not really. I mean, sure, CNN had a site, and so did the LA Times. But that was all rehashed news from TV and the papers. Not real reporting, if you know what I mean.
Not that I was ever all that crazy about reporters of any kind. They have a tendency to cause more problems than they solve, when it comes to criminal investigations. When I first made detective, I tried to work with reporters. Got burned, once or twice, before I learned my lesson. After that, all I said to a reporter, voluntarily, was “No comment,” or more often, “Get out of my crime scene.” Simple. Direct.
Then we had this case come up. The 710 Freeway Shooter. Some sicko taking potshots off overpasses into traffic on a major freeway. We think the perp made a few practice shots before the first big one, but we were never sure. Then there was a nice spring evening, about 6 p.m., when a lot of innocent commuters were making their way home. From what we pieced together later, an unknown subject, shooting from above, had sent a round through the windshield of an SUV, fatally wounding the driver. As far as the coroner could tell, the driver was killed instantly, and his SUV, out of control, caused a 28-car pileup.
The EMTs said later it was a miracle there were only four fatalities. But with so much carnage, and the need to extract and treat the living, no one realized what we had was a crime scene, and not an accident. By the time we did, the scene was compromised.
Like everyone else on the force, I was hoping it was a one-time thing, I guess. We’d been discreetly surveiling that overpass for three weeks when the shooter struck again. Five miles down the road, and this time during morning rush hour. Seven dead, that time. And the freeway blocked for hours. I think it was about then my captain started looking harassed—the mayor may seem like a nice guy in his tv ads, or when he’s shaking hands with Boy Scouts, but from what I’ve heard, you don’t want to piss him off. After a third shooting—and a fourth—without so much as a spent shell or a decent lead, “pissed off” didn’t begin to cover it.
We’d made arrests, sure—three different men caught loitering suspiciously at overpasses on the 710—only to find out they were vigilantes who wanted to take out the shooter themselves. One civic–minded individual said he figured he could work the fame into a reality show contract. And people wonder why cops are cynical.
So we had nothing but a pile of tv and news reports with headlines like “Terror on the 710” and “Cops Miss Freeway Shooter—Again.”
I’d seen the blonde at several crime scenes, always scribbling in a notebook or muttering into a digital voice recorder. She looked too young to be with a big paper, so I figured she was probably a stringer for one of the suburban weeklies—a newbie looking for her big break. Didn’t pay much attention to her. At least, not as a reporter.
Then she showed up one day in the squad room, while I was going through a stack of worthless tips. Nothing was panning out—the guy was a ghost. And I felt like one myself. I hadn’t gotten more than four hours’ sleep a night in what was starting to seem like years. Living on vending machine cuisine and police department coffee. By the way, everything you’ve seen on tv about coffee in police stations? It’s true.
Anyway, in marches the cute blonde, an enormous purse hanging off one shoulder, and sticks out her hand.
“Detective Davis?” she said, “My name’s Beth Turner.”
I didn’t want to talk to her, but the department has us pretty well drilled on public relations, these days. So…
“Yes, ma’am. How can I help you?” Although I’m betting my body language wasn’t displaying much interest.
“I’ve been investigating the 710 case,” she said.
“Yeah?” I replied. “And you work for—?”
“BuzzWire.” At my blank look, she continued. “It’s a website. A news website.”
I must’ve let my skepticism show in my voice. “I’m very busy, Ms. Turner. I don’t have time for interviews.”
She smiled, and if the subject hadn’t been so serious, I’d say she was mischievous. “Oh, I didn’t come here for an interview. I came to give you information.”
“Assuming you have any, what’s the quid pro quo?”
“What?”
“You give me something, what do you want in return?”
“Oh.” She dimpled. “That interview—after you make the arrest.”
I thought for a minute. Chances of her having anything useful were pretty slim. But if she did, and I ignored it…I nodded. It was worth promising an interview. “Okay, what’ve you got?”
She reached into that purse of hers—over time, I’d learn it was a magician’s bag of tricks—and pulled out a dossier. She had places, times, details pieced together better than what we’d done so far. It was impressive, both the information and the organization.
I looked up after studying the papers for a few minutes to find her watching me intently. “Should we be looking at you for this?”
She laughed at that, and played along. “Me? I’ve got solid alibis, thanks. And if it was me, I wouldn’t be giving you this.” She slid a piece of paper out of her purse. It was a map, with an overpass marked. She tapped a finger on the mark. “I think the next shooting is going to be here.”
“This isn’t on the 710.”
Beth shrugged. “I think the 710 is getting a little hot. What I hear is, the shooter figures this is safer.”
That made sense, but… “Ms. Turner, if you’ve got all this, why not just give me a name? Tell me who we’re looking for. And how you came to this conclusion.”
“What does your profile say?”
Yeah, I shouldn’t have let her know the FBI had done a profile for us. But she’d already figured out they had. “Now, why should I tell you that?”
There was that smile again. “Like you said. Quid pro quo.”
She had me there. “The FBI says it’s a male, probably Caucasian, mid-to-late twenties. He’s targeting SUV’s—they think he’s unemployed, probably lives with his parents. Taking out his frustrations on anonymous strangers.”
Beth shook her head. “From what I’ve learned, they’ve got a lot of it wrong.”
We fenced a little back and forth after that. I wanted to know her source, she refused to give it up. Standard reporter stuff.
Finally, she told me, “Look, if I told you how I got this, and who I think it is, you’d laugh me out of here. The less I tell you, the more likely you are to follow up, and stop this.”
“That doesn’t make sense. What are you hiding?”
She hesitated a little, deciding, and said, “We don’t have a lot of time. If I’ve got the pattern figured right, the next shooting will be tonight.”
“Then you’d better quit stalling, and tell me who you think it is.” I didn’t tell her our experts thought the next event wouldn’t be for two days.
Beth told me a name. And I laughed at her, just as she’d predicted.
“That can’t be right. Our experts…”
She frowned. “Yeah, and no one thinks a woman could be a serial killer. That’s why it took so long to catch Wuornos.”
Well, she did know her stuff on that. “Okay, you’ve got a point. I can’t make any promises, but I’ll follow up.”
She left a little later, and I’d probably have thrown her info into the trash, but something about her seemed so sincere, so—I don’t know, competent. And in the end, I couldn’t take the chance she was right, and know that I’d done nothing.
So I guess everyone in L.A. knows how this came out. There was no arrest. I was able to talk my captain into sending me with a team to the overpass Beth gave me. It turned messy, and the shooter, a 35-year-old housewife with five kids and a husband in the NRA who spent every evening and weekend either at the range or hunting with his gun buddies, ended up blowing her own head off.
In private, I got reprimanded for letting the standoff go south. In public, I was a hero, with a commendation and everything. Funny how it works that way sometimes.
When Beth turned up for her interview, I didn’t really want to talk to her. The image of that desperate woman with her husband’s rifle, pretending every time she was taking out the husband she could never quite bring herself to kill, was too fresh. Beth didn’t understand that. Not then.
Her first question was an invitation to lie. “Detective Davis, how did you figure out who the shooter was?”
“You tell me, Ms. Turner,” I replied.
“Hey—“
“I mean it, Beth. Off the record. Where did you get that information? How did you know who she was, and where she’d be?”
She didn’t want to tell me, but eventually I learned that she’d gotten a tip from the younger sister of a college friend. A girl who’d been babysitting during each one of the shootings. Beth could have just broken the story, but she was a little too moral to do it that way. She came to me first.
I guess it wasn’t all altruism, though. She did tell me, a couple of years later, that the 710 case was what first got her editor to take her seriously. Anyway, when we got back on track with the interview, she just said, “Come on, Carl, can’t you just say you got a confidential tip?” And tossed her blonde hair back over her shoulders, impatient.
“Sure. Whatever.” A tip that led to me seeing a woman’s brains explode into red mist against the backdrop of the spring sky. I guess, though, it was a tip that saved a lot more lives than it took.
Quid pro quo.
