Sam Kincaid 01 - The Commission

letter to Muller the day before he was killed. A corrections officer had scanned the letter and described it as “a five-page personal letter to a friend.” The officer’s notes didn’t indicate anything suspicious about the letter. Sorensen’s only other recent correspondence was a letter mailed to his brother two weeks prior to his murder.
    I ran a record check on Muller and discovered two prior misdemeanors arrests, both more than fifteen years old. Both involved alcohol violations. Muller lived in Draper, just a few minutes’ drive from the prison. I wanted to see the letter. It would probably be delivered in today’s mail—tomorrow’s at the latest.
    I called his home and spoke to his spouse. Denise Muller explained that her husband wouldn’t return from work until after six o’clock. If the news media had released information about the murder, she hadn’t yet heard it. She expressed shock, but not surprise, when I told her. In a tone sounding more resigned than sad, she told me that Milo and her husband had been friends since junior high school.
    “Lance maintained his friendship throughout the years, despite Milo’s continued scrapes with the law. As far as I know, Lance is the only person who stood by Milo through thick and thin. Even his own siblings stopped seeing him as his criminal lifestyle worsened,” she said.
    Without providing specifics, I mentioned the letter and how important it was that I have an opportunity to read it. She asked me to wait while she went outside to see if the letter had arrived. A minute later, she came back on the line. “It’s here. Would you like me to open it?” I asked her to wait until I arrived. Fifteen minutes later, I was on Muller’s front porch.
    At first glance, the letter looked much like any other written by a lonely inmate with too much time on his hands. Unlike many in prison, Sorensen was literate. He spelled with a modicum of accuracy and managed to put most of the periods in the right places. The rambling five-page letter was hand-printed on lined notebook paper.
    He talked about his family, mostly his children, and how he intended to become a better father this time around. He spoke at length about what he planned to do after his impending release. And he ragged a bit on his old friend for failing to write more often. When he wrote the letter, he had no way of knowing he would be leaving prison for the last time zipped in a body bag, with an identification tag tied on his big toe.
    The single-spaced letter went on like that until midway down the fourth page, when what I read hit me like a fist to the gut. In mid-paragraph, while chastising Muller for not visiting more often, Sorensen abruptly changed direction and wrote the following: “If anything happens to me, tell the cops I forged the suicide note involving Charles Watts. A female hack, Carol Stimson, hired me to do it. Stimson paid me with dope and a better job. If nothing happens to me, say nothing.”
    I had just found our smoking gun.
    Muller, who had been reading the letter over my shoulder, audibly gasped when she read what I’d just read. “Dear God. Are we in any danger?”
    “You’ll be fine. If certain people had known what was in this letter, it wouldn’t have made it out of the prison to begin with, or it would have been stolen from your mail box before you had a chance to read it. But they made a mistake. Several actually. And one of them was underestimating Milo Sorensen.”
    Sorensen had probably heard about the Slick Watts affair from the news or perhaps the inmate grapevine. Rumor and gossip traveled fast among the inmate population. Whatever he’d heard must have made him wary or maybe even afraid. Men who are afraid take risks, and Milo Sorensen had chosen to cover himself by sharing some very dangerous information with a trusted friend. He probably weighed his options carefully before he decided to hide the information in the middle of a letter. The letter provided less risk of detection, with the added benefit of having the whole thing in writing, should something happen to him.
    ***
    I took the letter and hurried back to my office at the prison. A quick check of the shift log revealed that Carol Stimson worked swings from three until midnight. She was currently on her scheduled days off and wouldn’t return to work for two days. It was time to plot strategy. I immediately phoned Kate and conferenced in Webb from the Sheriff’s Office. We had our first