This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance by any character or situation to any actual person or event is purely coincidental. All characters presented in this narrative are over the age of 18.
OLD SCHOOL
CHAPTER THREE
NAKED JUSTICE
Saturday morning broke gray and chilly. I woke, naked, and inches to my left lay Kass, also naked, warm beneath my sheets and duvet, still sleeping soundly. The sight of her filled me with joy even as I wondered to myself why this had just happened. The feeling that I had missed something important over the past two decades saddened me. It was as if this should have long since
been
our life. It certainly felt as though it should be life moving forward.
So I lay there, for perhaps half an hour, gazing in wonderment at the auburn-haired angel who had just filled the void in my life that I hadn't been aware of. At least not consciously.
Eventually, however, life intrudes. Bladders, both mine and Ry's, can hold only so much, and Ryder was outside my closed bedroom door, scratching at the hardwood floor, to let me know what time it was. Since it was already well beyond 7:30, my rise-and-shine hour and time for Ry's first piss of the morning, I threw on my bathrobe, walked downstairs, loaded up the coffee maker with enough Gevalia dark roast grounds for two and then turned it on. I opened the back door and Ryder trotted off the deck, onto the lawn and made a bee line over to the boxwood hedge along the privacy fence that rings my modest rear lawn.
On the granite countertop in the kitchen next to the coffeemaker, my iPhone -- still set to silent mode so as not to wake Kass -- was vibrating and making a clatter. The two sustained buzz patterns indicated it was a text message.
What now?
I thought to myself as I tapped in my six-digit pass code to see what awaited me.
The text was from Gene Fassbinder.
Big night, Chief. Call when u can.
I waited for the coffee to finish brewing, filled a mug, walked into the downstairs laundry and hit my speed dial number for Gene, 007. The name "Gumshoe" appeared on my screen as the call connected.
"Fassbinder," came the gruff voice on the other end.
"Morning, Gene. Got your text. Tell me about this big night."
He cleared his throat. His voice sounded tired and I soon learned why. He had been up all night, monitoring a succession of phone calls, emails and texts from operatives in Miami, in Quantico, Virginia, and in Frankfort, Kentucky, he informed me.
"Shyster, we got Burnley red handed. He hit on a Miami-Dade County undercover SVU officer posing as a 16-year-old boy and took him into a cabana in South Beach that he rented and was wired for the occasion. They hauled his ass out wearing nothing but his skivvies and tossed him in a cruiser. He's in the Miami-Dade jail waiting for a bond hearing Monday afternoon," Gene said.
Kentucky's public safety commissioner was promptly notified and suspended Burnley pending a conference in Frankfort on Tuesday, likely to finalize his firing, Gumshoe said.
Simultaneously, FBI and IRS agents executed search warrants in raids on the Ebenezer's Eyes church, on the home of Brother Elmer Brewer and on the homes of several deacons in his church and Burnley's home in Florence. Agents filled vans with boxes of documents and dozens of desktop and laptop computers.
"They're pretty sure Burnley kept his two lives so separate that he even used different computers and mobile phones -- one for the homophobe cop and the other for the closeted guy with a thing for boys," Gene said. "Pretty disciplined about not letting the two sides of his life intersect."
"The FBI is pretty sure, from previous months of online surveillance, that both Burnley and Brother Brewer raked in hundreds of thousands of bucks from across the country that never got reported to Uncle Sam. The IRS got involved after donors, looking to do their taxes, started complaining that they couldn't get receipts for what they were told were tax-exempt donations to the church or from the GoFundMe thing."
"Holy
shit
, Gene," I said, dumbfounded. This was far more damning than I had imagined. Tax fraud and evasion are pretty much black-and-white, a paper trail of documents leading clearly to a conviction and years in prison.
He grunted.
"Chief, I'm looking at all this data coming in from sources at the federal and state level and from Dade County, and... I've never seen anything like it. I've received nearly 150 pages of stuff so far and it's still coming in -- PDFs, spreadsheets, photos, MP3 files. I'll summarize it in a report that I'll have for you early next week, but as the pieces fit together, I wouldn't be surprised if the feds take over this whole mess and charge them as an organized crime ring under RICO," Gene said.
RICO is the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act. It was a sweeping anticrime law Congress passed in 1970 to give the government the power to shut down the mafia by seizing any and all assets and property that they could prove was connected in the operation of a criminal conspiracy. It's what brought mobsters like John Gotti to justice. Gene as a detective and I as a lawyer both knew that this would raise the stakes of this prosecution enormously. Any time a federal prosecutor gets his hands on a RICO case, it can go almost anywhere, and sometimes into places it shouldn't.
"That's great work, Gene," I said after a pause. "Things could get pretty interesting if the U.S. attorneys' offices go with RICO. Know what I mean?"
"Yeah. 'Fraid I know exactly what you mean," he said. "They're going to want to see everything we've got on what Burnley and Brewer were up to regarding your friend and why we were looking into them in the first place. Of course, they'll treat us as friendlies, but being friends with these guys is almost as bad as being their enemy."
I exhaled and took a sip of my coffee. Ryder was at the back door whimpering to get back in and have his breakfast. And I thought I heard water running in the upstairs bathroom, meaning Kass may be stirring.
"Well, let's cross that bridge when and if we get to it, Gumshoe. Lots of shit is going to hit the wall, probably before the day's over, once the press gets hold of this. I have to keep myself and Kass out of it, Gene. If the FBI starts sniffing around, you're covered by attorney-client privilege so you can use that to hold them off for a while. But call me immediately if that happens, OK?"
"Ten-four, chief," he said. "Let me make sense of what I'm seeing and I'll send you a full report soon as I can."
"You more than earned your fee, Gumshoe. Thanks."
He grunted his acknowledgement and hung up.
▼ ▼ ▼
Ryder lunged through the back door as soon as I opened it, sprinted for the stairs and thundered up them to the second floor, hoping he could intercept my overnight guest (and his new BFF) before I could stop him. He was pissed at me for refusing him access to my bedroom with Kass and me the night before, and he'd be damned if I was going to deny him this morning.
"Good morning, Ryder boy!" I heard Kass cooing at him. I could tell from the sound of his claws on the hardwood floor that he was prancing around and jumping up on Kass, and she was doing nothing to discourage it. "You're a sweet, sweet fella. Yes you are. Yes you are."
By the time I made it upstairs, Kass was wrapped in the terrycloth robe I had left hanging on a peg on the back of the door to the owner's suite bathroom that I had left for her. She was on her knees hugging my big, happy galoot of a dog and scratching him behind his soft, droopy ears. And both of them were loving every second of it.
Kass's clothing was either strewn on the floor in my den and bedroom, or in her still-unpacked luggage left overnight at the foot of the stairway.