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By Root 1117 0

the imprint date on the back of the photographs. May 2. Jane thought back to specific dates in May and, after counting backward, realized May 2 was a Sunday. It was also exactly one week to the day—Sunday, May 9—before Stover and his family was granted around the clock protective custody along with twenty-four hour house arrest. Jane retrieved her leather satchel from her bedroom and carried it back into the living room. She pulled out the Stover file, along with the various newspaper clippings regarding the case. Jane poured over the fine print in search of dates. Buried within the police report, Jane came up with several insights. By late April, Bill Stover had agreed to testify against the Texas mob in exchange for keeping his cocaine and meth addiction out of the papers. While Stover never disclosed how much he was planning to reveal, there was a notation in the police file that he had “agreed to reveal judicial corruption and drug connections that went to the core of Denver’s influential residents.” Jane had read that sentence ten times and always assumed that Stover was going to spill his guts about fellow entrepreneurs and businessmen who provided laundering fronts for the Texas mob and who possibly lied in court about their actions. That was still a viable possibility. However, Jane ruminated on the possibility that the nefarious trail of corruption started where crimes are supposed to be solved—the Denver Police Department.

Immediately, Ron Dickson’s name popped into Jane’s head. Here was a guy who had constant access to evidence—everything from pounds of cocaine to hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and jewelry. Jane knew that tampering with that evidence was somewhat easy if you knew the ropes. As thorough as the booking process was, there were always the inevitable loopholes that a smart and often desperate evidence tech could use to their advantage.

The process was fairly straightforward. Once detectives logged evidence on the Property Report Form, certain items were then transferred into plastic K-Pak bags. These are thick, heavy-duty, heat-sealable bags that offer the ultimate protection in preserving the integrity of crime scene evidence. When drugs are placed into the K-Pak bag, the bag is weighed. That weight is then notated on the outside of the bag, along with the item number of the evidence, the case number, the date and the detective’s initials. From this point, crime scene items are transported downstairs to evidence where the K-Paks are sealed and stored on one of the many metal shelves that house hundreds of thousands of pieces of evidence. Due to the overwhelming amount and the inherent confusion that can cause, it was not out of the realm of possibility that evidence techs could tamper with items and not get caught.

However, there were two ways their criminal actions could be discovered. First, to get inside the K-Pak bag, the heat seal on the packet must be broken. Resealing the packet and making it look as if nothing was touched is almost impossible. If the K-Pak had to be opened for official business such as court trials, the action was always noted on the outside of the packet, along with the date. It was not worth it for the evidence tech to forge a fake “official purpose” on the K-Pak since that could be easily tracked. Due to the sheer number of items and backlog of evidence from years ago, it was easier for the evidence tech to take the risk, open the K-Pak, reseal it as best he could and cross his fingers that no one would notice.

The second way to discover criminal negligence in the property room was via an audit. Audits could not be done on a whim—there had to be verifiable suspicion for such an undertaking. It had been more than one year since the last audit of the evidence room. The fact that Chris—who was low on the proverbial influential totem pole—was able to convince Brass to audit the property room was a testament to his persuasion. His forthright, choirboy looks didn’t hurt when it came to influencing a department to embark on what could turn out to be a massive internal