The Cop Who Killed a Murder Case

The party headed downtown, ending up at Totally Nude Temptations. The strip club doesn't serve alcohol, so the group split its time between Temptations and the bar next door, the Cigar Box. At Temptations, members of Coombs' party asked the strippers for sex. Someone complained, and the club kicked out Coombs and his friends. Everyone headed back to the hotel — except Coombs.

At three in the morning, Coombs called his fiancée.

"What are you doing?" Simmons asked Coombs. "It's, like, three or four. Don't you have work tomorrow?"

"I'm getting something," Coombs said. "I'm in a shady situation. Pray for me. I'll call you back."

Coombs didn't hang up his phone right away. Listening from their home in Connecticut, Simmons could hear his footsteps bang loudly, as if on a set of steps. "Hey, Black," Simmons heard Coombs say before the line disconnected. Alarmed, Simmons stayed up, waiting for her phone to ring again.

Coombs called back an hour later. Simmons could hear male voices in the background. Coombs told her that he was with some friends in a cab heading back to the hotel. Simmons figured they must be people he'd met at the Cerner training session, so she relaxed and went back to sleep.

By daylight, Coombs' roommate at the Marriot, another Cerner employee, awoke to find that Coombs hadn't made it back. But the roommate didn't report his absence to anyone, figuring Coombs would return eventually. Coombs failed to check out of the hotel and never made his return flight that Monday morning, leaving an expensive laptop and the rest of his belongings unclaimed in his room.

On Thursday, January 23, Simmons and Coombs' mother, Denise Marby, filed a missing-person report with the KCPD. After Simmons told police that he might have been on drugs, she says the cops no longer took the report seriously. The police, she says, acted as though Coombs were an addict who would simply turn up when he was done with his binge. Simmons says she knew it was more serious than that.

"I mean, he partied," Simmons says. "He didn't have a problem. He didn't do crack or anything. It was the party thing — just, like, cocaine or whatever."

Simmons shared a checking account with her fiancé, so she asked the bank to give her the locations of ATMs where Coombs had withdrawn money. His last withdrawal was at the Conoco at 37th and Main.

Simmons and Marby boarded a flight to Kansas City to look for Coombs themselves. They checked in at the Hyatt at Crown Center and took a cab to midtown. Simmons says she expected to see quaint, Midwestern Americana; instead, she saw drug transactions made openly on the street. Simmons grew up in Brooklyn and had seen her share of bad neighborhoods, but she was intimidated.

Simmons and Marby handed out homemade fliers with Coombs' picture to people they passed on Main. They knocked on doors in the neighborhood. They even walked into a crack house to ask about Coombs. The people there said they needed to find the local cop, Danny Holmes. They said that he knew everything and everyone in the neighborhood.

Simmons got a call that day from a detective. According to her recollection of the conversation, the detective wasn't pleased that they had been snooping around. He said he feared for their safety. He said an undercover police informant was building a case against drug dealers in the neighborhood where she and Marby had been searching and that the informant might find Coombs.

Unconvinced, Simmons demanded to speak with Holmes.