Sam Kincaid 01 - The Commission

day at board headquarters in South Salt Lake and wouldn’t finish until late in the afternoon. That gave him sufficient time to set up surveillance. He planned to follow Allred from work and stay with him until he was home for the night.
    Burnham was afraid that asking too many questions about Allred’s future parole hearing schedule would arouse suspicion. He had managed to learn that Allred was scheduled to conduct hearings at the prison the next morning from eight-thirty until noon. He arranged for Marcy Everest to cover Allred’s home early the next morning when he left for work. Burnham planned to cover the afternoon and evening shifts himself.
    Terry had also managed to contact a representative from the phone company who was busy pulling a record of Allred’s home telephone calls for the past several months. The phone records would be ready the next day. The cell phone presented a different problem. He hadn’t been able to determine which service provider held the contract for the Board of Pardons. If Allred was involved in something illegal, as Sam suspected, the cell phone records might prove to be important.
    Allred left the Board of Pardons a little before six o’clock and drove directly to a sports bar not more than ten minutes from where he lived. Burnham observed him sitting by himself at the bar, engaged in small talk with one of the bartenders. Allred emerged from the bar about an hour later and drove home, making one brief stop at a convenience store. where he purchased a newspaper and a half gallon of milk.
    From what Burnham had learned, Allred was divorced with grown children. He lived alone in a small, older home, in an affluent neighborhood in southeast Salt Lake County. Burnham circled the block twice before parking several houses up the street, hoping none of the neighbors had spotted him and called the cops. He would remain until satisfied Allred was in for the night.
    ***
    The Sheriff’s Department crime scene crew was busy processing the area around the victim’s body while Webb and Gill began the laborious task of interviewing inmates and prison staff. The prison employees who worked in the plant with Sorensen had all clocked out and gone home prior to the discovery of the body. Webb asked me to call each of them at home and learn whatever I could. I borrowed the tiny office adjacent to the furniture production area, secured an outside telephone line, and had just begun dialing my first number when Kate walked in and closed the door. She looked concerned. I set the phone down.
    “So, when are you going to tell Webb and Gill?” she asked.
    “Tell ’em what?”
    Sounding genuinely annoyed, she said, “Cut the crap, Sam. You know what. You’ve worked with Webb and Gill before. You know you can trust them. They’re going to figure this out. They know we’re looking for the guy who forged the suicide note. It made it into the newspapers, for Christ’s sake.”
    “What if I’m wrong? It might be premature to say anything,” I said. It sounded lame to me even as I said it. After almost a full minute of awkward silence, with Kate looking at me like I was a couple of cards short of a full deck, I asked the obvious question.
    “Tell me what it is you think I think?”
    Exasperated, she said, “You believe the hit on Sorensen is part of a broader conspiracy in which somebody paid Slick Watts to murder Levi Vogue, and then killed Watts, arranging his death to look like a suicide. They’d planned to kill Watts all along. The same people who killed Watts also killed Sorensen, who forged the suicide note. Watts and Sorensen had to go because they provided a direct link to the conspirators. And the part you can’t stand to say to anyone but yourself is that the conspirators are a group of dirty employees working for the Department of Corrections. And that’s why you’re putting round-the-clock surveillance on William Allred. You think he’s involved too. So, how’d I do?”
    Bingo. She’d gotten it all correct except for a couple of things even I was unsure about. If the Watts suicide-fabrication story had held together, the conspirators might have left Sorensen alone. Once the suicide story fell apart, it became necessary to move against Sorensen quickly, before he got scared and turned himself in, or before we found him. The second point I found even more troubling. Assuming Sorensen had forged the suicide note, how had he gotten it out of the prison? There were three