Known Dead (9 page)

‘‘Nope.’’

‘‘Okay.’’

‘‘Sorry, I just can’t concentrate, that’s all.’’

‘‘Oh, you can concentrate all right,’’ she said. ‘‘Just not on that.’’

I grinned. ‘‘Yeah.’’

‘‘Why don’t you go out in the yard and poison some more ants.’’

Not a bad idea, really. We’d had ants in the house that spring, and I’d sort of made a crusade out of getting rid of them in the yard. Just walk around looking for hills in the grass, and ‘‘bombing’’ them with Diazinon crystals. ‘‘Death from Above,’’ as they say. I was losing the battle, but it was relaxing just the same.

‘‘Good idea.’’

‘‘I’ll call you for lunch.’’

I must have walked around our little yard for thirty minutes, absently bombing an anthill now and then, and thinking about the case.

Nothing. We had nothing. What was really bothering me, though, was that I didn’t know if my lack of progress was due to a simple absence of evidence, or if the narcotics people were withholding on me. It sure wouldn’t be atypical. Since I was working a homicide, I theoretically had access to everything that impinged on that case. The only problem was, how in the hell could I know what I didn’t know? Especially if the ones holding back were federal narcotics people. Or the FBI. Or the IRS, for that matter. I didn’t know anybody who could find out that information, and the only people I could try to ask were the ones who would be holding back. If, indeed, they were holding back at all.

I gained a little on the ants. It was a good cause.

Tuesday, and more of the same. I finally called the office. Nothing new. I called Hester. She was on an enforced day off too. But there was one item of interest. The Feds were having a meeting at our office on Wednesday, the 26th. Tomorrow.

Speculating will drive you crazy. But I was hoping that I was going to have an opportunity to get some information. They had to have something to give on this one.

We had some neighbors in Tuesday night, for a light supper and conversation. Everybody was thinking about
the case,
naturally. Nobody could talk about it, except to say the routine things like ‘‘It was horrible,’’ and ‘‘I really feel sorry for his family,’’ and stuff like that. Nothing of substance. Other than that, I had a pretty good time, as the conversation turned to gardens, which eventually took us to ants . . . If not one kind of case, then another, I guess.

As Sue and I were cleaning up afterward, it occurred to me that I had needed this. I felt pretty relaxed, and kind of pleasantly tired.

‘‘Wed., June 26, 96,’’ I wrote at the top of my yellow pad. ‘‘1028 hours. Meeting at S.O. w/Fed Narc Grp.’’ Lamar, Hester, Al, myself, and several assorted Feds including George of the Bureau, were assembled in the jail kitchen. Volont was noticeable by his absence. In his place was a man named Nichols, of the DEA, who was the principal speaker.

‘‘We have,’’ said Nichols, ‘‘an operative theory, and it goes like this . . .’’ He spoke in a clipped, forceful voice that kept your attention. He didn’t really need vocal technique to do that, but it was nice.

‘‘The majority of the sinsemilla marijuana in this country is grown in California. The northern part, to be more precise. It is very highly prized because of its high THC content. It is also very time-consuming to produce.’’

He looked us over carefully, mainly to reassure himself that a bunch of nonnarcotic cops would be able to comprehend this, I guess. So far, no trouble.

‘‘Sinsemilla means no seeds. And no seeds means that you have to be very, very careful not to let the plants pollinate. Marijuana plants are of both the female and male varieties. The pollen pops out of the male plants, is carried on the wind, and fertilizes the female plants. The most valuable plant is an unfertilized female. If she is fertilized, boom, you have seeds. Seeds reduce the THC content. So you have a much less valuable plant.’’ He looked around. ‘‘Okay so far?’’

We all nodded.

‘‘Good. Because of the investment in time and effort, and the considerable reduction in value if anything goes wrong, growers are sensitive about these plants, and will actually live in the patch for a week or so, around fertilization time. When that is depends on when they were planted, when they were moved outside, and the weather conditions since the move. Guesswork, in other words.’’

He looked at the group again, and must have been satisfied that we were with him.

‘‘Right. Now, because it’s worth two to three thousand dollars a plant, it is frequently used to trade for methamphetamine. Almost like a currency. Meth is pretty much controlled by outlaw motorcycle gangs, and they can get violent if they have to. You all know that.’’

Yup.

‘‘If they’ve advanced some meth on speculation, and that speculation involved sinsemilla plants that were either devalued by accident or otherwise nonavailable at the proper time, somebody could get killed.’’

I didn’t have any problem with that, and I don’t think anybody else did either.

‘‘We think that this Johnny Marks had promised sinsemilla to one of the controlling cycle gangs in either Milwaukee, Madison, or Minneapolis. We think Johnny Marks has enough enemies that they were trying to screw with his plants, to get a cycle group to kill him. Thereby doing their dirty work for them.’’

Oops. They’d lost me on that one. I mean, it was neat, I’ll say that. Cool, almost. But they’d left some stuff out, creating a large gap.

‘‘We know, then,’’ I asked, ‘‘that Marks was for sure dealing with one of the cycle gangs?’’

‘‘It’s safe to assume,’’ he said.

‘‘Which one?’’ asked Hester.

‘‘I’m not at liberty to tell you that at this point,’’ said Nichols. He sounded like he really wanted to.

‘‘Well, then, do we know who was mad at him?’’ asked Hester.

‘‘Not yet,’’ Nichols acknowledged. ‘‘But we feel we’re close.’’

‘‘Mmmmm.’’ That came from Lamar.

‘‘It’d be slick if that’s what happened,’’ I said. ‘‘How much can you give us when you know? I mean, if we know, and can’t take the right connections into court . . .’’

‘‘We’ll be able to give the killers,’’ he said.

‘‘Well,’’ asked George, ‘‘are you assuming that the killers were members of the cycle gang, or that they were the ones who were trying to screw with the plants, or . . . ?’’

Good question.

‘‘We aren’t certain yet,’’ said Nichols. ‘‘I hate to assume, but I don’t think that it was members of the cycle gang who did it.’’

‘‘Why’s that?’’ asked Lamar.

‘‘Not really their style,’’ said Nichols. ‘‘They don’t generally hang out in the woods.’’

Now, both Lamar and I, for sure, knew that wasn’t true at all. So, I believe, did Hester, Al, and George. We’d had members of a cycle gang cooking meth in a cabin in the woods several years before, and the cabin they used was owned and lived in by several members of a local cycle group that was affiliated with them. From Texas, for God’s sake.

‘‘Oh,’’ said Lamar. ‘‘That right?’’

I thought a little less charitably than that. DEA was obviously making an effort on our behalf, and maybe it was just that Nichols was so anxious to help that he’d just jumped the gun a little bit. Whatever, it wasn’t looking really good at that point. A reach was one thing . . . speculation was another. I knew, in my mind, they were probably right about Marks and his connections. He’d have no market at all for that much top-quality grass locally, and crystal meth did sell well here. Good business, trading. Especially when good-quality meth was a high-risk manufacturing enterprise. To have somebody pissed off enough at him to kill him certainly wasn’t a reach. But for them to be well enough connected to get this done . . . yeah. That was the problem. And for them to be certain that Marks would be the eventual target of the gang . . .

‘‘You might have a couple of weak points in the theory here,’’ I said.

Nichols actually laughed. ‘‘Tell me about it,’’ he said. ‘‘But I think there’s a really good chance that we’re right.’’ He grinned. ‘‘And, no, I can’t tell you everything, and you know that.’’

Hester grinned back. ‘‘True. But I’ll go on record as thinking you’re wrong on this one. Just because it’s too hard to arrange that way . . .’’

Hester’s background in narcotics was, by the way, impeccable. She’d worked undercover for about five years, and very successfully. They transferred her into General Crim. Only when it became apparent that she’d busted too many people in too many places to go unrecognized anymore.

‘‘That’s fine, Hester,’’ said Nichols affably. ‘‘But my information’s just a bit more current than yours.’’ He grinned again.

Personally, I was with Hester. Current information aside. I was also developing the uneasy feeling that Nichols was relying on the FBI for his theory. It sure explained the gaps.

After the meeting, Lamar hauled Hester and me into his office and locked the door.

‘‘That’s all bullshit,’’ said my boss.

‘‘Probably,’’ I said.

‘‘Not probably, it’s bullshit plain and simple. Nobody blows smoke up my ass in my own office. I don’t want you two to back off at all, and I don’t want you to go along with what they say if you don’t agree.’’

That was fine with me.

‘‘I know the bikers don’t shy away from the woods,’’ he said, ‘‘but it doesn’t make a bit of difference. They’re already holding something back, somewhere, and I don’t like it.’’

Neither did Hester. Neither did I.

‘‘You,’’ Lamar said, looking right at me, ‘‘have my permission to look into anything you want. Don’t worry about steppin’ on no toes. It’s my county, and we by God do it my way. Only toes that can get stepped on are mine. Nobody else’s count.’’

‘‘Okay,’’ I said with a chuckle. ‘‘Just be sure to tell the Feds that.’’

‘‘No problem. And one more thing, Carl. You too, Hester.’’ He positively grinned for the first time. ‘‘I just want you to know that between the two of you, you’re about as smart as any Fed.’’

That was about it. That day. That week. And for what seemed a long time after that. We had nothing. Oh, we had a lot of physical evidence. A phone call to Dr. Peters’s office gave us some preliminary autopsy data and some ballistic information. We finally established that there were likely only two shooters, and that they were the only ones who apparently hit anything that day. Lots of shell casings, MRE debris, some partial prints, a quarter of a bootprint we had finally found that may or may not have been involved. Two dead bodies. The usual thorough autopsy reports were promised. Two failed suspects. And a lot of people, including us, who couldn’t figure out why we couldn’t get any further on a scene as messy as that one was. DCI had started pulling off the extra help after the third week, as there was absolutely nothing for them to do. They were remarkable in having stayed after the first week, to tell the truth. That left Hester, primarily, as the case officer. DNE remained active, we thought, but since they wouldn’t tell us what they were up to, we couldn’t be sure. Probably just as well, as I’m sure they’d have to kill us if they told us. Johansen had taken a leave of absence, but I was betting that he wouldn’t be back. That meant we were two officers short. Everybody had to work an extra day each week to fill in. We were all getting tired, tempers were getting a little short, and all the normal crap continued unabated.

Eleven

LET ME TELL YOU, you get a case like this one, where it’s going nowhere, for no good reason, and you get a little paranoid. Hester and I spent hours on the telephone, or at our office, going over
everything.
Every last detail. Many, many times. Then we got a little further afield. Like they say, eliminate everything you can, and what you have left is likely to be what happened. Right.

The rumors, both within the law enforcement community and in the community in general, began to fly. One of the best was that Howie, a.k.a. Turd, had been hunting for mushrooms, and accidentally got shot by an officer. Howie’s estranged mother heard that one, and promptly took it to an attorney. He, just as promptly, began a wrongful-death suit against the county. Normally, since he wouldn’t have access to any investigatory information at that stage, we would have simply picked up the phone and, as a courtesy, let him know what had happened. At which point, he would probably not have filed the suit. Unfortunately for him, he went public instantly, called a press conference, and generally became a pain in the ass. We didn’t call. We felt it would be better if he found out later that he didn’t have a case. Especially since Howie’s estranged mother didn’t have a dime, and he had to be doing the work on speculation, as it were. Also called a contingency fee. It did tell me a bit about Howie, though. How many people have ‘‘estranged’’ mothers?

With rumor and speculation floating about all over the place, nobody was immune.

Hester and I even began to wonder whether or not there had been a DEA surveillance going, and there had been a horrible mistake and people got shot and they were covering it up. That sort of thing happened years ago, and there was no reason to think it couldn’t happen again. Then again, there was no evidence to indicate they’d ever try to cover something like that up. We checked everything, and talked to everybody who might have known. No evidence to support it. No evidence to deny it either. That’s the problem with conspiracy theories. Can’t prove, can’t disprove. But it shows you how far we were reaching.

Theories were great. What we needed were facts, and we didn’t have any. In a case like this one, when you run up against a wall, you drop back and start all over from the beginning. If you’ve done it correctly in the first place, you should be able to retrace your steps, see where you went wrong, and move on in the right direction. Sure. Both Hester and I spent long hours going over the physical evidence, the scene diagrams, the interviews. There were a lot of people I wish we’d been able to pin it on, but none of the evidence put them in the right place at the right time. Actually, it never put them anywhere near the right place at even close to the right time.

I hate excuses as much as the next cop, but we did have a problem we weren’t able to do anything about, and it didn’t originate with us.

Ever since the narcotics people had started in on the case big time, we hadn’t known exactly what to do, or where to do it. Let me explain. Hester and I and the General Criminal investigation didn’t know who the undercover cops were who were working the case for DEA and DNE. Johnny Marks, for all we knew, could be an undercover Fed. That was the first narcotics-related problem.

The second was who they were looking at. We didn’t know that either. The ‘‘connections’’ they were saying existed in Nation County were, in my opinion, tenuous at best. But the last thing Hester and I wanted was to stick our noses in and maybe screw up the DEA’s case.

George of the Bureau wasn’t any help either. There was a lot he hadn’t been told. Well, at least he assumed there was a lot. As he told me during a telephone conversation: ‘‘There’d better be a lot they’re not telling me. If there isn’t, they don’t have shit.’’

So who was to know?

We talked with both Lamar and Al about it. Both said to do what the federal narcs had requested. That wasn’t much of a help, as they had pretty much said to go on about our business. We’d tried that, but were getting spooked by lack of information. They knew full well they were hindering us, of course. But telling us to go ahead and do our thing was just the conventional thing to do.

Anyway, what it did was pretty well shut Hester and me down for a good week. We had to restrict ourselves to reexamination of the physical evidence and rereading initial interviews. I don’t know if it cost us much or not. But it sure as hell frustrated both of us.

Then, on Thursday, I got assigned a child-neglect case from one of the smaller towns in our county. Fewer than a hundred people, in fact. With three of them involved; one a victim, one sort of a victim, and one a perpetrator, I was dealing with a crime that involved a little over 3 percent of the population. It gives you an interesting perspective when you look at it that way. It helps rationalize the prying attitude of the rest of the community as well. I mean, in Los Angeles, if you had a crime that involved 3 percent of the population at the same time, the uproar would be incredible. Just a matter of scale.

In this case, a man who earned minimum wage, Hank Boedeker, insisted that his wife, Kerri, work as well. She’d hired out to clean chickens for a farm woman who sold them two days a week in Maitland. She worked four to five hours a day. Her husband, with considerable mathematical precision, told her that because of the payments on their satellite receiver they couldn’t afford a babysitter for their eight-month-old daughter. Consequently, she would leave the kid in the trailer when she and her husband were both gone. After about two weeks of that, we got a call.

When I got there, Kerri was just home. She looked to be about twenty or so, very thin, with long, straggly brown hair. It was about a hundred degrees in the trailer, but it would have been whether or not she was there. No air conditioning. The kid had a hell of a heat rash, the place smelled like a combination gym/nursery, and the kid was totally quiet. That bothered me. I called for Human Services, opened what windows I could, rearranged the two fans to get real ventilation, and waited with the mom. She was terrified, afraid for her daughter and afraid her husband would beat her when he came home and found that the cops had been there. It seemed he’d been in an especially bad mood lately, since his friend had been killed, and his dope source had dried up. No shit?

Was Turd his friend? Sure was. Who was his local dealer? She didn’t want to say. Wasn’t sure. Didn’t really remember. Between the heat, the guilt, and me, she was just about a goner. I didn’t press too hard. The kid came first.

I found out where Hank worked: Russell & Company, a small-time pork processor, family-owned. His job was cleaning up the floors after they were done eviscerating the pigs. After Human Services arrived at the mobile home, I went to Russell & Co. to talk with Dad.

If the trailer had smelled bad, this place was olfactory hell. Just as hot, much more humid, as he cleaned the floors with high-pressure water, and the smell of guts was so thick you almost had to use a swimming motion to breathe. I asked him to come outside. I explained to him that the money he spent on the satellite dish would likely have been better put toward a window air conditioner; that he could not have his child unattended; and that if I heard he’d ever struck his wife, I’d be on him like stink on his job. His only real question was regarding who had ratted him off. I left him with the thought that whoever it was would probably be able to tell me if he ever hit his wife.

I got back to the office, and before I could call Hester and discuss an approach, I had a request from Human Services for a complete report on the incident. Great. It would take them three weeks to do theirs, and it likely wouldn’t be any more thorough than mine. But they wanted mine now. Probably to copy.

I went up to Maitland General Hospital, where the baby was being examined by my good friend Dr. Henry Zimmer.

Doc Z was his usual self, hearty and cheerful. The kid turned out to be in fairly good shape, a little dehydrated, hell of a diaper rash, but nothing that was life-threatening.

‘‘We’ll keep her for observation for a day or two,’’ said Henry. ‘‘I’d like to keep her longer, but the insurance people won’t let us.’’

‘‘Yep.’’

‘‘You want my report to copy, don’t you?’’

I grinned. ‘‘Well, to include, more like.’’

‘‘Anybody getting charged with this?’’

‘‘Have to be both Mom and Dad, but, yeah, they are.’’

‘‘Can I look forward to court again?’’ he asked.

‘‘No. They’ll plead to a serious misdemeanor. No problem.’’

‘‘Good,’’ said Henry. ‘‘I hate court.’’ He paused. ‘‘You might want the baby’s hair tested for marijuana residue.’’

Grounds for child abuse, if they found it. Smoking dope in the kid’s presence was a hazard. The problem was, it had been declared obligatory to remove the child. No room to negotiate. I hated that. Plus, Human Services would now know that the couple used dope, and the couple’s usefulness as informants or as buyers would be compromised.

What the hell. Maybe Human Services would listen to reason.

‘‘Sure, Henry. Might as well send in a sample.’’

Kerri was at the hospital, but Human Services was all over her. I decided to talk to her again, later.

By the time I got back to the office, Thursday was about shot. I put off the report until Saturday, and thought about our murders. I mean, here I was getting just a little bit excited over the fact that a child neglecter had been a buddy of Turd’s and his dope dealer had gotten really scarce. A lead? Maybe, but probably not. If it was, we’d have to be careful. If it was, we might have independent information in our pocket. I called Hester, but she was out. I thought about the ‘‘lead,’’ and drank coffee. I should have written the report.

Saturday, I started off with my report for Human Services. Took less than an hour to type it up, even including Henry’s summary. While I was doing it, I figured that I could take a cheap shot at Hank and Kerri with the test on the baby’s hair. The county attorney would, if it was positive, have two abuse charges, and surely would sort of lump them together. The neglect charge was the one with the clout. I felt I could use the hair clippings test for THC to push old Hank into telling me who his dealer was.

It was Saturday, so Hester was off. Unwritten rule; don’t contact on a day off unless you really need help.

I got in the car and told dispatch I was doing a follow-up on the neglect case. I was at the little trailer in about twenty minutes.

I explained to them about the hair test. Turned out that Human Services had told Kerri about it yesterday but she’d been afraid to tell Hank. Hmm. Since she’d been told that marijuana smoking in the presence of the kid was what would show up, and was now afraid to tell her husband . . .

After Hank whined, ‘‘Jeez, man, this scares the shit out of me to do this,’’ about five times, he told me his dealer was one Howler. Well. Imagine that. He also told me something else.

‘‘You know who killed Turd and the cop, don’t you?’’

‘‘Not yet, but we will.’’

‘‘Hey, I know. I really do, man.’’ He actually looked around, inside the damn trailer, before he hoarsely whispered, ‘‘It was Navy SEALS, man. They got him.’’