Sam Kincaid 01 - The Commission

Kate, this break-in has a real amateurish feel to it—not the kind of job a pro would do.”
    “I had the same thought. It looks like the kind of random property destruction we see when juveniles pull burglaries and destroy lots of property merely for the hell of it.”
    While McConnell headed upstairs to inspect the second floor, I wandered back into the study and sat down in front of the computer. I know just enough about computers to get myself into trouble. I didn’t see any CD-ROM s; so I went straight to the hard drive. Nothing much out of the ordinary. There were several letters, mostly sent to family members; Vogue’s resume, and a number of routine parole board e-mails sent by the victim to various members of his staff. When I hit the icon for Quicken I discovered that the Vogues tracked virtually all spending in that program. I would remind Kate to arrange for a police computer specialist to download all the family financial records for review.
    I joined Kate in the upstairs master bedroom. The upstairs looked much the same as the main level—trashed. Mrs. Vogue had an expensive collection of fine jewelry. Some of it was stored in jewelry cases inside drawers that had been opened, with the contents left untouched. Several pieces were displayed in plain sight, on jewelry trees, located on top of one of the bedroom dressers.
    “I don’t get it. Why would a thief walk out of here and leave all the expensive jewelry behind?” said Kate.
    “Maybe Vogue interrupted the burglary before the suspect had time to gather up the valuable stuff.”
    “Possible, I suppose, but my gut tells me that when this thing finally shakes out we’ll discover that the burglary was a ruse designed to cover a planned hit—and quite possibly a hit carried out by one of your ex-cons.”
    One of my ex-cons!
    “Getting a little ahead of yourself, don’t you think, Lieutenant?”
    “Maybe. So indulge me for a minute, Sam. Parole board members decide the length of the prison sentence for each inmate, correct?”
    “That’s right.”
    “I would think that would make some inmates angry enough to want to do bodily harm to the parole board member who dished out the lengthy prison sentence.”
    “Possible, yes, but not very likely. Listen, Kate, parole board members occasionally receive verbal threats from inmates. That comes with the job. But we’ve never had an incident where a threat resulted in an attack on a board member. That’s never happened in Utah or anyplace else that I’m aware of. That said, there’s a first time for everything.”
    “Do I get the feeling you want to turn this investigation away from the offender population in the Department of Corrections?” Her tone betrayed just a tinge of suspicion.
    We’re certainly getting off on the right foot, I thought.
    How not to sound caustic, a weakness of mine? “I’m not trying to steer this investigation in any particular direction, Kate, but I think it’s important to consider all the possibilities. Of course I hope the perp isn’t someone under our jurisdiction. We’ll have a serious public relations problem on our hands if the killer ends up being somebody recently paroled from the prison.”
    “Okay. Hypothetically then, tell me how this thing might have gone down if the perp was somebody from the prison population?”
    As I spoke, I considered the possibility that the killer might well be someone directly or indirectly connected to our offender population. “If the killer was one of ours, it could be a former inmate acting solo, purely for revenge. Or it could be some nut case with big-time mental health problems. We certainly have enough of them floating around. It might even be gang related.”
    “The gang possibility intrigues me,” said Kate. “Tell me more.”
    “If a prison gang was involved, it could have gone down in a couple of different ways. It might have been a called hit from a gang leader who is either in or out of prison. Or, one or more renegade gang members could have taken it upon themselves to exact revenge on a member of the Board of Pardons because they don’t like the lengthy sentences currently being handed out to gang leaders. It might even be part of an initiation ritual in which a gang member wannabe was ordered to do the killing as a part of being ‘jumped in’ to a particular gang. Those would be the most likely scenarios.”
    “Thanks. That was enlightening,” said McConnell.
    I couldn’t tell if she really