Murder Inside the Beltway - Margaret Truman [55]
“I’ll try,” she said.
“Try hard, Micki. When can I expect to see you?”
“There’s things I have to do here and—”
“Take a train tomorrow,” Jackson said. “You have my cell number. I’ll expect to hear from you by five o’clock.”
He clicked off his phone in the midst of her protest.
“She’s coming?” Mary asked.
“She’d better,” he said, the steel not quite gone.
Their conversation was interrupted by Hatcher, who appeared with Craig Thompson. The two men said nothing to each other as Thompson, who looked like someone who’d just been given a death sentence by a doctor, left the room, his head low, his eyes averting others.
“How’d it go?” Mary asked Hatcher.
“He’s scum. He admits seeing her a few weeks ago, claims he wanted to try again to convince her to stop turning tricks.” A crooked smile formed on Hatcher’s lips. “He’ll have to get that suit cleaned. He sweated buckets.”
“But he denies seeing her the night she was killed?” Jackson asked.
Hatcher shook his head and frowned. “No, he gave me a play-by-play of how he did it, drew me a picture. Get real, Jackson.”
They went to an unoccupied office, where Jackson and Hall filled in their boss on their trip to Beltway Entertainment, and their conversation with Billy McMahon. Jackson decided to include Micki Simmons in the discussion, and did.
“How come you let her skip town without getting a formal statement?” Hatcher asked, overtly displeased.
“She was on her way home to South Carolina. I didn’t see any need to—”
“Did you tape it?” Hatcher asked.
“No, I—”
“Where’d you interview her?”
Jackson drew a breath before answering, “In my apartment.”
“Oh, that’s cozy,” said Hatcher. “What’d you do, get a freebie?”
“Hatch!” Mary said.
“No written statement, no tapes,” Hatcher said, sneering. “Jesus! You bleeding-heart types make me laugh.”
“I did what I thought was right at the time,” Jackson said. “Anyway, she’s coming back to D.C.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow, I think.”
Hatcher turned to Mary. “He thinks! What about Patmos, over at the Senate?”
“I was about to call when you and Thompson arrived.”
“Do it. Don’t take any excuses from him. I want him interviewed this afternoon. Understood?”
They nodded, and he walked away.
Mary saw the anger on Jackson’s face. She touched his arm and said, “Don’t let him get to you, Matt.”
“I notice he doesn’t talk to you that way.”
“Sure he does.”
“Well, I haven’t seen it much. You calling Patmos?”
“Yes.”
“I need a walk. Be back in a half hour.”
He left the building, crossed the street, and ordered an iced tea from a fast-food place on the other side of Indiana Avenue. He took his drink outside and sat in a wobbly plastic chair at a wobbly plastic table. From there he could see the imposing building that housed the Washington MPD, his home away from home since joining the force five years ago.
His initial assignments, while arduous, had been fulfilling. As a uniformed cop he’d soon encountered the breadth of the human condition, drug dealers and users, irate tenants in public housing, domestic situations in which murder was on the mind of a husband who’d been cuckolded, or a wife whose addiction had drained every cent out of the family budget. The most wrenching were cases in which a child was involved, beaten or starved, neglected like a discarded teddy bear. Of course, there were more uplifting experiences, too, mediating a dispute between two otherwise friends, greetings from shop owners who appreciated his uniformed presence on their block, helping find a youngster who’d strayed from his mother’s side in a park, even directing traffic at a busy intersection after a power failure had knocked out the lights.
He thought about these things as he sat and sipped his drink, and realized he’d grown misty.
Hatcher!
Jackson had been paired up with a variety of cops before joining