by Randy Alcorn
“Another splatter here. Don’t you find that interesting?”
“Isn’t that what you would expect with two head shots at close range?” I asked.
“Perhaps. Still, it’s interesting, don’t you think?”
“About as interesting as last month’s cricket scores.”
It was a full five minutes before he used the word interesting again.
Two CSI guys, one dressed in his forensic bunny suit, arrived. One vacuumed, while the other followed carefully behind him taking pictures. They collected blood samples, carpet fibers, and anything that might contain DNA fragments. I was making a sketch of the scene with my pencil on yellow pad, thinking that Picasso might have liked my sketches better than I like his. I supplemented my sketch with photos on my digital camera.
“Chandler?” The loud voice startled the ME. My partner, Manny Rodriquez, wiry and short and snippy, barged in the door.
“You look terrible,” he said. “I mean, worse than usual.”
Manny is grumpy at 10:00 a.m. At 3:40 a.m. the difference isn’t noticeable.
“What have we got?” he asked.
“It’s interesting,” I said, eying the ME.
Manny and I spent ten minutes discussing the one thing that really was interesting—the small bloodstains by the door that weren’t splattered from the victim. By then the ME declared Ross had probably died one to two hours ago. Good estimate, since the gunshot ninety minutes ago had woken up most of the apartment complex.
After CSI went over Ross’s cell phone, I looked through all the names in its directory. I jotted down the numbers of the last five incoming and outgoing calls. I checked his messages, then had Manny listen to all four of them. He contacted two of the callers, on a middle-of-the-night fishing expedition: Meanwhile, I talked with the sort-of witness in apartment 36.
She’d been taking a walk at 2:30 a.m., up and down the hallway.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I had rats in my legs.” She gave a detailed description of a tall guy with lots of hair and red sweatpants who’d been in the hallway five minutes before she heard the shot. He’d scared her. She pretended not to look at him and walked back to her room.
Within twenty minutes, Manny and I determined it was a case of drug dealer blown away by a competitor, probably over a turf dispute. We found one of the bullets embedded in the floor, probably the second shot. Apparently the other bullet hadn’t exited. Fingerprints with blood traces were on the doorknob and the table. I called headquarters to see if we could get the lab to do a rush on the three good fingerprints collected.
About the only things missing were the killer’s name, Social Security number, Blockbuster card, and a confession written in lipstick on the bathroom mirror.
Murder is never convenient. But solving a murder is sometimes routine. This one had routine written all over it.
While Manny canvassed the apartments, knocking on doors, waking up the select few who hadn’t heard the gunshot or had fallen back asleep, I went to the end of the hallway and stepped outside on an old fire escape. I opened my mouth wide, gulping air, tasting life, trying to wrest myself from the death grip squeezing the room of Jimmy Ross.
It seemed so easy. Fingerprints and DNA and a good description?
That’s when I should have suspected something was wrong.
Napoleon said—I heard this on The History Channel—that in every campaign there’s ten or fifteen minutes in which the battle will be won or lost. Sometimes it’s that way in an investigation. Looking back at it, the ten or fifteen minutes in which I botched that investigation were right when everything was falling together so perfectly.
Things moved quickly. By 6:00 a.m. we found the other druggie, tall, big-haired Lincoln Caldwell, asleep in his room, red sweatpants hanging on his bedpost. His gun, in the top dresser drawer, had been recently fired. And—surprise—as I looked at the four rounds left in it, I didn’t need ballistics to convince me the gun would prove a perfect match for the round that went through Ross. His cell phone confirmed he’d called Jimmy Ross six hours earlier.
He denied it, of course. They always do. We arrested him and took him to the precinct.
It was gratifying, but not. Sort of like a crossword puzzle champion looking at a puzzle with answers so obvious there’s no point writing them down. I’m a Sherlock Holmes fan. I like to follow bread crumbs, not six baguettes leading me to someone standing twelve feet away who hands me a business card saying “Murderer.”
Still, I couldn’t argue with the bottom line. Two drug dealers for the price of one. One dead, the other off the streets for however long the court decides. Never long enough for me.
Sometimes the bad guys help out the good guys by doing what we can’t—blowing each other away. Kill a killer and you may save a half-dozen lives. Kill a drug dealer and you may save a couple dozen. Okay, that’s what cops say to each other off the record—and cop to cop is always off the record.
There weren’t many details requiring attention in the Jimmy Ross case. Too bad, I thought, since often the devil’s in the details.
I once cracked a case based on my discovery that one Monday morning a woman had ordered a grande white chocolate mocha. Remarkable for one reason: Every weekday for at least four years she had gone to the same coffee shop and ordered a regular skinny latte. Something had to account for her celebratory mood. Well, I was checking on her because her husband had died of “natural causes” on Saturday. The white chocolate mocha tipped me off that she might have contributed to those natural causes.
It took me a whole baseball season to prove it, but by the time the Yankees took the field for the first game of the World Series, I nailed her. No prize. No bonus. No street named after me. No letters of gratitude from husbands whose wives were on the verge of ordering their first white chocolate mochas. But that’s okay. I don’t do it for the thanks. I do it because it’s my job, my one contribution to a world that is truly—and I mean big time—a mess.
I’m saying this because the Jimmy Ross murder didn’t require turning over rocks to look for details. Everything that mattered fell into place. When they processed the fingerprints and the weapon and the blood DNA, it was a trifecta, a perfect triangle of independent evidence. Together they were irrefutable. The murder was open and shut. Lincoln Caldwell was our man.
I spent more time on the paperwork than the investigation. When two and two add up to four, you don’t try to refigure it six different ways to see if it can come out three or five. You tie a bow around it, give it to the district attorney, and move on. You hoist a beer or two and watch a football game. Case closed.
I’m a pretty broadminded guy, but I have a low tolerance for murder. I take my murders personally. Whether or not they know it, killers dare me to take them down. Nine out often times that’s exactly what I do. And when my mind wanders at a ball game, it lands back on the tenth.
You know that somebody’s out there thinking they’ve gotten away with murder. And you just can’t stand that. Your purpose in life is to show up on their doorstep some day and say, “Gotcha.”
“You take this too personally,” a police psychologist told me in the first of three mandatory sessions I did everything to avoid—short of bungee jumping off a bridge without the bungee cords. The last time I’d gotten in trouble, four months ago, my punishment—cruel and unusual—was seeing this shrink.
“That’s the way I’m wired,” I told him, using language I hoped would make the shrink see that I understood and respected his world, that we were fellow travelers on the road of life. Maybe, I hoped, as two self-actualized men, we could just pass on this counseling thing.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” he said. “Whatever comes into your mind.”
“Okay,” I said, trying to appear cooperative so I could cut a deal to reduce my counseling sentence. “If someone gets away with shoplifting, I don’t like it. But if they get away with murder, I can’t stand it. I’ll do anything to nail a ki
ller. I admit, like my file says, not everything I’ve done is strictly legal. But when it comes to murder, I have no problem with doing what it takes to put the killer out of business. To me, there’s only one thing as bad as murder: getting away with one.”
This is about as deep as I went, because I could see by his nods and understanding looks and the notes he was feverishly writing that if I didn’t shut up soon, I’d be spending a mandatory hour a week with him until I retired. I’d rather walk the Green Mile.
What I didn’t tell him, but I’ll tell you, is that of my 204 murder cases, I’ve solved 177. That’s 87 percent. But who’s counting? The rest, cold cases, still burn hot, deep in my gut. Every year or two, sometimes on my vacation, I solve one of those oldies, in my quest to raise my batting average to .900. Of course, if I ever make that, I’ll want more.
If the shrink heard me say this, he’d think I was an obsessive-compulsive passive-aggressive dysfunctional codependent enabler … what we used to just call a jerk.
But what I really held back from telling him was that I once sent a man to jail for a double murder he didn’t commit. Bradford Downs. I know his face well. Three witnesses, at least two of them completely credible, offered convincing testimony to back up some physical evidence. Naturally, he claimed he was innocent, but his criminal record made that hard to believe. After ten years of appeals he was executed by lethal injection. Turned out that two of the witnesses were the real killers. We’d never have known if the one who was dying hadn’t confessed, and offered us proof … three years after an innocent man had been put to death.
See why I didn’t tell this to Dr. Freud-face?
Maybe there is something as bad as murder and getting away with murder—being murdered for a murder you didn’t commit. And because I put him away, that makes me an accessory to murder, doesn’t it?
I don’t need more reasons for sleepless nights. Bradford Downs wouldn’t be my first choice for a face to fill the back of my eyelids every time the lights go out.
So why am I telling you what I wouldn’t tell the shrink?
Because what I didn’t realize that morning as I breathed fresh air on the fire escape outside Jimmy Ross’s apartment—what I didn’t realize until just a little while ago—was that nothing was as it appeared. That case was open and shut all right … it had been set up to open and shut on a conclusion that was dead wrong. I fell for it. And that makes me mad. It makes me even madder that it was only fate or circumstances or luck or providence—whichever you believe in doesn’t matter to me—that made me realize it. Otherwise, I could have been seeing Lincoln Caldwell’s face every night, alongside Bradford Downs.
There are five teams in Portland homicide, so my partner Manny and I get every fifth murder. It was our next murder, the one two weeks and three days later, that pulled the rug out from under me. Eventually it woke me up to a shocking truth that radically revised the story of Jimmy Ross and Lincoln Caldwell.
That next murder turned me, my job, and my friendships upside down. It shook all the change out of my pockets. It threatened to bring down an entire police department, end my career, and place me inside a white chalk outline with some other homicide detective trying to figure out who murdered me. (Even now, I’m not convinced it still won’t.)
Not one of those 204 cases prepared me for that next murder, where someone sinister hid in the shadows of a violated house, gazing out at me through a broken window. It was the most radical and unconventional and baffling case I’ve ever worked.
If that’s not enough, my investigation threatened to end the lives of some people I really cared about.
And, ultimately, that’s exactly what it did.
DEADLINE
When tragedy strikes those closest to him, award-winning journalist Jake Woods must draw upon all his resources to uncover the truth about their suspicious accident. Soon he finds himself swept up in a murder investigation that is both complex and dangerous. Unaware of the threat to his own life, Jake is drawn in deeper and deeper as he desperately searches for the answers to the immediate mystery at hand and—ultimately—the deeper meaning of his own existence.
DOMINION
When two senseless killings hit close to home, columnist Clarence Abernathy seeks revenge for the murders—and, ultimately, answers to his own struggles regarding race and faith. After being dragged into the world of inner-city gangs and racial conflict, Clarence is encouraged by fellow columnist Jake Woods (from the bestseller Deadline) to forge an unlikely partnership with a redneck homicide detective. Soon the two find themselves facing the powers of darkness that threaten the dominion of earth, while unseen eyes watch from above.
LORD FOULGRIN’S LETTERS
Foulgrin, a high-ranking demon, instructs his subordinate on how to deceive and destroy Jordan Fletcher and his family. It’s like placing a bugging device in hell’s war room, where we overhear our enemies assessing our weaknesses and strategizing attacks. Lord Foulgrin’s Letters is a Screwtape Letters for our day, equally fascinating yet distinctly different—a dramatic story with earthly characters, setting, and plot. A creative, insightful, and biblical depiction of spiritual warfare, this book will guide readers to Christ-honoring counterstrategies for putting on the full armor of God and resisting the devil.
THE ISHBANE CONSPIRACY
Jillian is picture perfect on the outside, but terrified of getting hurt on the inside. Brittany is a tough girl who trusts almost no one. Ian is a successful athlete who dabbles in the occult. And Rob is a former gangbanger who struggles with guilt, pain, and a newfound faith in God. These four college students will face the ultimate battle between good and evil in a single year. As spiritual warfare rages around them, a dramatic demonic correspondence takes place. Readers can eavesdrop on the enemy, and learn to stave off their own defeat, by reading The Ishbane Conspiracy.
This book is a work of fiction. With the exception of recognized historical figures, the characters in this novel are fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
DEADLINE
©1994 by Eternal Perspective Ministries
published by Multnomah Books
A division of Random House, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Alcorn, Randy C.
Deadline/by Randy Alcorn.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-56262-3
1. Journalists—Oregon—Fiction. I. Title
PS3551.L292D43 1994 94-20108
813′.54—dc20 CIP
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