Sam Kincaid 01 - The Commission

the residence until she was apprehended.
    ***
    Carol Stimson nursed a cup of coffee and a BLT sandwich in a restaurant inside the downtown Salt Lake Sheraton Hotel. Fortunately, she had received the warning call not to return home just moments before she turned down her street. She did a quick about face and jumped back onto I-15, ending up at the Sheraton. She carefully weighed her options. Even if she wasn’t criminally indicted, which now seemed likely, her career as a corrections officer was over. Moreover, going back to the little house she rented in Lehi was now out of the question. Kincaid and his cop friends would have the place under surveillance. That angered her, because some things she desperately wanted to take with her were stored in the house.
    She’d become a liability. She knew it, and so would they. She had no intention of ending up like Vogue, Watts, and Milo Sorensen.
    She decided to spend the night in a quiet, out-of-the-way place. The next day, she planned to take care of some unfinished business with Kincaid, and then leave Salt Lake City far behind. She hated the man—hated him because he had nearly gotten her fired and because he destroyed her reputation in the department. But most of all, she hated Kincaid for what he represented: someone who used his considerable power to protect stinking inmates at the expense of prison staff. It was his fault, and she intended to make him pay, and pay dearly. Cops didn’t do this sort of thing to other cops—it should have been like family. Street thugs and convicts were the bad guys. You never turned on a fellow officer. Somehow Kincaid had never learned this.
    She intended to teach him a lesson. And the best way to do that was to strike at what Kincaid held most dear—his family.
    Her first instincts about him had been correct. They should have killed him at the very beginning. Now things were starting to unravel. How had Kincaid connected her to Sorensen and the forged suicide note? She had taken a calculated risk by changing the time on the disciplinary ticket she’d given Sandoval. Had he figured that out too?
    It hadn’t been difficult gathering information about him. Department gossip described Kincaid as a guy with inherited wealth who lived with the rest of the highbrows in affluent Park City. He was divorced and apparently had sole custody of a young daughter. A few hours spent on surveillance revealed the presence of an elderly woman in the home. She had even determined which elementary school Kincaid’s daughter attended. A hit would be cake.
    ***
    Salt Lake County Sheriff’s detectives maintained the surveillance at Stimson’s home on the outside chance that she might still show up. Turner and Marcy Everest remained on surveillance at Allred’s home. He’d left the Board of Pardons shortly after five, driven straight home, and hadn’t moved since. The surveillance plan was the same as the previous evening: remain outside the house until certain Allred was tucked in for the night and then return early the next morning.
    Kate, Terry, and I sat cloistered in the conference room outside my office. It was after seven o’clock. We were poring through six months of Bill Allred’s telephone records. The department employs over six hundred people at the Utah State Prison. The daunting task before us was how to identify department employee home and business telephone numbers that showed up on Allred’s phone records. There had to be a computer program that could do that for us, but I wasn’t aware of one, and neither were Terry or Kate. If we’d had more time, the department’s computer support people could probably have created a program for us.
    Each of us worked with two months of phone records. We began by eliminating all out-of-state calls as well as those outside the Salt Lake Valley that would have been beyond the reasonable commuting distance of our employees. We took the remaining calls and generated a list of any number called more than once. That narrowed things down significantly. The first break occurred when we matched four calls during the six-month period to Stimson’s phone. Why would a Board of Pardons member to be calling the home of a low-ranking corrections officer assigned to an inmate housing unit?
    Next, we took the list of North Point employees who were on duty and, hypothetically at least, on our list of possible murder suspects. It was here things really fell into place. Allred’s phone records revealed