Lansing turned to Eve and he could see that Burnside was right. “This won’t be good. Go on.”
“There was an inside man, someone who smoothed the way in and out of the gated communities for Green and picked the homes to be hit.” Eve went to her laptop computer on the coffee table, opened it, and displayed a photo of Green’s soccer team. She pointed to one of the teenage players. “Grayson Mumford.”
Shaw squinted at the screen and shook his head. “Just because Mumford was on the same soccer team as the three dead assailants years ago doesn’t make him part of the robbery crew. By that logic, we should arrest the whole team.”
Duncan said, “But the rest of them aren’t working as floating front gate security guards at every community that was hit.”
Eve tapped a few keys on her laptop. “I’d like you to take another look at the video of the grocery store shooting.”
The video and sound from the confrontation played out from various camera angles on her laptop screen.
Colter charged into the grocery store and went straight for the liquor aisle, Grayson tracking his movements on a parallel course.
“It was no accident that Colter is here,” Eve said. “He’d just walked into a trap and saw two of his friends get killed. He blamed Grayson for it. Colter carjacked a vehicle and fled. But when he realized that there was no chance of escaping, he veered into the shopping center and decided to use his last moments of freedom to confront him.”
On the screen, they could see Colter at the end of the aisle, holding a vodka bottle in one hand and his gun in the other, half turned away from Eve toward the back of the store, where Mumford was hiding.
Colter said, “I know you’re here. Show yourself. Don’t be a coward.”
Eve, on the video, stepped into the aisle and said, “Here I am.”
Colter turned toward her and that’s when Grayson stepped out and shot him.
Eve paused the video.
“It wasn’t me that Colter was calling out. It was Grayson. I distracted Colter for a split second, and Grayson saw his chance to save himself. He executed Colter to keep him from talking.”
Lansing said, “And that’s the guy I chose as the first civilian in history to get our Medal of Valor. What a fucking mess.” He stood up and looked at Shaw. “Eve did the right thing calling this meeting and briefing us all at once.” Shaw held his hands up in surrender, but Eve was sure he’d still hold a grudge. “Let’s set aside, for the moment, how this looks for the department.” Lansing shifted his gaze to Burnside. “Do we have a case?”
“Against Green, yes,” Burnside said. “But not against Mumford.”
“He gunned down Colter,” Duncan said.
“To save Eve,” Burnside said. “You can’t prove Colter was calling out Mumford and not the relentless cop who’d chased him from Vista Grande.”
“Okay,” Eve said. “So we arrest Green and get him to flip on Grayson in return for a lighter sentence.”
Burnside shook her head. “There’s still no case. Mumford’s attorney will argue that Green is lying in a flagrant and despicable attempt to reduce his sentence and tarnish the reputation of a true hero. The sheriff gave Mumford, a civilian, the Medal of Valor, for God’s sake.”
“No need to rub it in,” Lansing said, pacing in front of Shaw’s desk.
“The defense attorneys and the media certainly will,” she said, “so you might as well get used to it.”
Shaw cleared his throat to get everyone’s attention. “There’s another alternative.”
Everyone looked at him. “We arrest Green and tell him his only hope for leniency is if he gets Mumford to implicate himself.”
Lansing stood in front of Shaw’s desk and looked at him. “You want Green to meet with Mumford and wear a wire?”
Shaw leaned back in his chair. “We have nothing to lose.”
Eve thought about it a moment, then said, “We don’t know who else at Green’s company is involved in the robberies. What if Grayson gets word that Green has been arrested from someone in his office or among his landscaping crew?”
“We raid Green’s Greenery tomorrow,” Shaw said, “when they are closed and his crew isn’t around, and we arrest him at home. We make the deal and have Green set up the meet right away.”
“And if he doesn’t take the deal?” Eve asked.
Burnside answered before Shaw could. “He’ll take it. Guaranteed.”
Lansing turned and addressed the room. “It was all an elaborate charade.”
Eve said, “With all due respect, sir, I think Grayson was improvising as he went along.”
“I’m talking about the Medal of Valor ceremony,” Lansing said. “That’s how we explain it. We say we suspected Mumford was involved in the robberies from the start. But if we hadn’t acknowledged his heroism, he would have suspected we were onto him. It was all a charade on our part. We wanted to lull him into a false sense of security, and the Medal of Valor did that spectacularly.”
Burnside chuckled. “Do you really think the media will believe that?”
Lansing glared at her. “Do you have a better idea, Counselor?”