Above the Law

by J. F. Freedman

  “And when Juarez did escape, Jerome was in the lead. You didn’t see anybody in front of him.”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  My final witness for the day was the gun-store owner, Ralph Harrison. He gave a wink and a nod to a few of the jurors as he took his seat—it’s a small county, people know each other, especially a man with an essential business such as Harrison’s. His testimony was brief and to the point: He sold Sterling Jerome a box of full-metal-jacket bullets for his Glock 17 gun less than a week before the raid on the compound. Jerome had never been in his store before, or since, nor had any of the other agents in his task force. Over John Q.’s objections, and with the help from my friendly judge, I elicited from Harrison his expert opinion that it was strange for an agent to buy ammo, stranger to buy the kind Jerome bought, and stranger still to drive three hundred miles round-trip to do so.

  John Q. went after Harrison hard. “Why is it unusual for someone to buy this kind of ammunition?” he blustered.

  “It isn’t,” Harrison answered easily.

  “You testified that it was.”

  “I said given who was buying it, it was.”

  “Did you know at the time that Mr. Jerome was a DEA agent?”

  “No.”

  “So his buying it, in and of itself, was meaningless.”

  “In a vacuum, you could say that. But, you know, you have to look at it in its totality.”

  “So from the few minutes or less that Agent Jerome was in your store, you were able to ascertain that he was a federal agent, he was buying ammunition that was unusual, and that he’d driven all the way across the county to do so.”

  “I figured it out later on. When I’d heard what had happened.”

  “All by yourself.”

  Harrison shrugged. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure something like that out.”

  John Q. walked over to the defense table, leaned over to Jerome, whispered something in his ear. Jerome shook his head. John Q. walked back to the podium.

  “Did Mr. Jerome identify himself as a federal agent?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Did he identify himself at all?”

  Harrison thought for a moment. “No, I don’t think he did.”

  “How did he pay for his box of ammunition, Mr. Harrison? Credit card, check, cash?”

  “He paid cash.”

  “Cash. You’re sure?”

  “Yes. Later on I looked up his receipt, to make sure. He paid cash.”

  “So he never told you who he was, his name, or gave you anything, like a credit card or a check, that would indicate who he was, what his name was, or what he did?”

  “No, sir.”

  “How much ammunition do you sell a year, Mr. Harrison?”

  Harrison laughed. “A lot. That’s what we do.”

  “On a daily basis, how many boxes of ammunition do you think you sell?”

  “It depends on the time of year. Hunting season, we sell more. Other times, not as much.”

  “When Mr. Jerome bought his ammunition from you, was that during hunting season?”

  “Yeah. It was at the beginning of it.”

  “So you were selling plenty of ammunition that day. Is that correct?”

  “We sold a lot around then, that’s right.”

  “Your store was pretty crowded?”

  Harrison nodded. “There were a goodly number of customers.”

  “Did you wait on all of them?”

  “No, I couldn’t handle that amount of traffic single-handed. I had my usual staff on.”

  “How many employees do you have working for you at that time of year?”

  Harrison furrowed his brow. “I think I had four on that day.”

  “Four including you.”

  “Yes.”

  “And all day long, people were coming in and out of your store, buying ammunition, hunting licenses, other gear, is that right?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Did you take time to talk to all of them, chew the fat so to speak?”

  “The ones I know, yeah. But when it’s busy, you know, you’ve got to keep going. Customers are waiting to be waited on, get their stuff, move on out.”

  “So it was more or less strictly business. A customer asked for something, you sold it to him, he paid you, end of transaction.”

  “More or less, yeah.”

  “Besides buying a box of ammunition, did Mr. Jerome buy anything else?”

  “Not to my recollection.” He hesitated. “No, he didn’t buy anything else.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “He bought one box of bullets.”

  “One box, right.”

  “He didn’t ask to look at a rifle, or a pair of boots, or anything else.”

  “I don’t remember that he did, no.”

  “One box of bullets.”

  “Yes.”

  “Let me picture this in my mind if I can, Mr. Harrison. You’ve got a busy store. This was on a weekend, wasn’t it, if I’m not mistaken?”

  “It was a Saturday, that is correct.”

  “Your busiest day of the week?”

  “Usually. It was then.”

  “People buying this and that, trying things on, checking equipment out, the usual.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So here’s a man walks into your store on a busy day. He says to you I want to buy a box of nine-millimeter shells for an automatic pistol. What do you do?”

  “I ask him what kind he wants.”

  “And then what?”

  “He tells me, I get them.”

  “Full-metal jackets. Is that a particularly unusual request?”

  “Not really. We sell a decent amount of them.”

  “So by itself, there’s nothing suspicious about that.”

  “By itself, no.”

  “He pays you with cash?”

  “In this case he did.”

  “And you give him his bullets, and his change, and his receipt, and he leaves. Is that right?”

  “That’s how it went, that’s right.”

  “So all in all, given that your store is busy, it’s a small purchase, you have other customers who want to be waited on, he isn’t someone you know so you don’t take a few minutes to ask him about his family, how much hunting he plans on doing this year, did he buy a new truck, nothing like that.”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  “How long did this entire transaction take, Mr. Harrison? From the time Mr. Jerome walked into your store until the time he left with a box of bullets? Five minutes? Ten minutes? Half an hour?”

  “No, not nearly that long.”

  “How long?”

  “Five minutes, I guess.”

  “From the time he walked in the door until the time he walked out the door—five minutes.”

  “About that.”

  “How much of that five minutes would you estimate he was actually standing at the counter in front of you?”

  Harrison thought about that. “One or two minutes.”

  “One or two.” John Q. turned and looked at the jury. “So in one or two minutes, on a busy day, you figured out that he was a federal agent, that he was buying ammunition when he shouldn’t have been, that it was a suspicious kind of ammunition to buy, and that he was trying to hide something.”

  Harrison shook his head. “No, it wasn’t like that.”

  John Q. stared at him. “You just told us that it was. How was it different?”

  “Later,” Harrison said. “It was later, after I heard what had happened and saw his picture, that’s when I thought about it.”

  I was watching this intently. This wasn’t going so well. Information was coming out I didn’t know about. And I was starting to think that Harrison hadn’t been totally straight with me. Not a comforting feeling, with your own witness.

  John Q. was going strong now. “You saw Mr. Jerome’s picture? Where did you see it? In the new
spaper? On television?”

  “I saw it on television.”

  “Okay. I see.” John Q. paused for a moment. “Did you see it anywhere else before you saw it on television, Mr. Harrison?”

  Harrison fidgeted in the witness chair.

  “Mr. Harrison. Did you see a picture of Mr. Jerome anywhere else before you saw it on television? Or after, for that matter?”

  Harrison nodded slowly. “I did, yeah.”

  “And where was that?”

  Harrison looked at me, at the back of the room, at the ceiling. Then he looked at John Q. “In the store.”

  “In your store? How did you come to see it in your store, Mr. Harrison?”

  “Somebody showed it to me.”

  “Somebody showed it to you?” John Q. asked, his voice easy, relaxed. “I see. And might I ask who that somebody was?”

  I didn’t know what Harrison was going to answer, but I knew it wasn’t going to be good.

  “Sheriff Miller showed it to me.”

  I asked for a ten-minute recess before my redirect.

  “Why in hell didn’t you tell me about that?” I yelled at Harrison. We were in one of the small rooms off the courtroom, where lawyers meet with clients and witnesses. The rooms aren’t soundproof—I’m sure my voice could be heard all over the courthouse. Not that I cared, I was boiling.

  “I didn’t think it was important,” he whined. “You never asked me.”

  “I shouldn’t have had to ask you, you moron.” A sudden thought hit me. “Did Sheriff Miller tell you not to tell anyone that he’d been to see you and had shown you Jerome’s picture? Including me?”

  Harrison was squirming like an ant on a hot griddle. “Not in so many words.”

  I was outraged—not at Harrison, he didn’t know any better, you don’t go up against the sheriff, not when he’s a load like Tom Miller and you’re in the gun business. My anger was for Miller, for what he’d done with the identification after the fact of Jerome, which could be construed as witness-tampering (it was, as far as I was concerned), on top of that for warning Harrison to keep quiet about it, and most of all, for keeping me in the dark. We were supposed to be partners. I’d brought him into this, when I didn’t have to. And now here I was, with a compromised witness.

  Well, fuck Miller. He’d already testified, that was the end of my dealing with him. I’d talk to him about this, though. As soon as I was finished here for the day.

  This in and of itself was not a big deal. Jerome had bought the bullets, he had gone out of his way to do so. My bigger concern was for what Miller might have done in other areas that I didn’t know about. If this trial degenerated into a pissing match between Jerome and Miller, we could get bogged down in personalities instead of facts and lose the focus. I remembered what Curtis Jackson had said, about Miller and Nora carrying a grudge against Jerome and the DEA because they’d been shut out on their own turf. Everything Jerome had done was documented, but could Miller have been throwing extra salt on the wounds behind the scene, to insure Jerome’s indictment and subsequent conviction? Small-town sheriffs can develop an overinflated sense of their importance.

  I wanted to talk to Miller about this before I went back into the courtroom with Harrison, but he couldn’t be found—he wasn’t in his office, and he wasn’t answering his pager.

  It would be all right—the facts weren’t in dispute, just how they’d been arrived at. But I was going to track Miller down and have a stiff heart-to-heart with him tonight. This shit would not do. I had to know everything he’d done in connection with this case. Before I got any more egg on my face, not after.

  The redirect went okay. I didn’t take long. Harrison stood by his earlier testimony, which was not in question: Jerome had bought the bullets. That was the important thing. It didn’t appear to me that John Q.’s breaking Harrison down had been given much credence by the jury.

  I was still solid. But I had to make sure.

  I caught up with Miller after court had recessed for the day. He was waiting for me in my office when I got there.

  “I’m sorry I was out of touch, but the battery went out in my pager,” he said, taking it off his belt and giving it a hard whack against his thigh. “Damn modern technology.”

  I wasn’t smiling. I was fuming, and I wanted him to see it.

  “Look, Luke, about that picture of Jerome—”

  “How’d you hear?” I asked, cutting him short. “If you were out of communication?” I sat down, but he remained standing.

  “I ran into one of the newspaper reporters on the way over here. He told me.”

  “Great. Tomorrow’s lead story,” I groused.

  “No,” Miller said, trying to reassure me. “It was one of the local reporters. It meant nothing to him. He said the jury wasn’t even paying attention. All he talked about was you, how well you’re doing.”

  “We’ll see about that,” I said. “Tell me about that picture. What were you doing with that?”

  “It’s not what you think,” he protested.

  “Well, explain it, then. Because it doesn’t feel right to me, and I’m sure you know why.”

  “It was nothing.” Miller sat down across from me. “I was in Harrison’s gun shop a month or two after the raid. The DEA Shooting Incident Team had been in there a few days before, he was telling me about them. Offhand, I asked him if he’d met any other agents before. Making conversation, you know? He said he thought he might have, but he wasn’t sure. So he described a guy who’d been in the store a few days before the shooting, and it sounded like Jerome to me. So I went and found a picture of Jerome and showed it to him, and he ID’d him. That’s all, believe me.”

  I looked at Miller across the desk. He didn’t look like he felt guilty, but he did look like he was sorry.

  “If I messed up any part of this investigation, Luke, I’m truly sorry. You know I want this to be perfect. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt things. I’m on your side. You know that.”

  I wasn’t convinced. “Why did you tell Harrison not to mention to anyone that you’d showed him the picture?”

  Miller stared at me. “I never said that. Did he say that?”

  “He strongly intimated it.”

  “Well, I never told him that,” Miller said firmly. He cracked the knuckles on his old, twisted hands. “I thought you knew about it.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “I guess I should have said something. I didn’t think it was important.” He looked at me. “I still don’t. But I didn’t tell Harrison not to tell you. I might have told him not to volunteer anything, but I never told him to lie. That was when the DEA people were swarming all over us. I knew they would try to figure out how to exonerate their own people. I wasn’t about to help them do that. So that’s why I might have talked about it that way with Harrison.”

  What could I do? Everything he’d said sounded plausible.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s drop it for now. There isn’t anything else, though, is there?” I asked forcefully. “I don’t want any more surprises, Tom, not a one.”

  “No, Luke,” he promised ardently. “There aren’t any more surprises. You have my word on that.”

  Shortly after Miller left, Kate dropped by. “How’d it go?” she asked, flopping down on the small couch in the corner. She groaned as I reprised the Harrison-Miller screwup.

  “Frigging amateurs. They think they’re helping and all they’re doing is making life more complicated.”

  “Miller’s no amateur, don’t sell him short,” I cautioned her. “This is about which cock controls the barnyard. What he did won’t influence the outcome, but I’m keeping him on a short leash.”

  I stretched—I needed exercise, after being cooped up in the courtroom all day. Maybe I’d take a run when I got home. Jerome could join me, I thought mordantly, he’s in incredible shape. “Got anything new that’s hot and spicy?”

  “I’m running some leads down. Nothing concrete yet, but there’s interestin
g stuff out there.”

  “Nothing that’s going to derail us, please.” I didn’t need any more surprises, not until I’d processed this latest one.

  “Muir County is a weird place. These backwater locales hide sinister secrets. Too much inbreeding or something.”

  “Since when did you become an elitist? I thought you were blue-collar all the way.”

  “I call ’em like I see ’em.” She grinned at me.

  “Give. I’m bushed, I’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Okay, but I need to get my head straight about where we are first.” She flipped open her notebook.

  “This is the case against Jerome, block by block.” She started ticking items off on her fingers. “He went ahead with the raid when he shouldn’t have, even though by doing so he blew a chance to catch Juarez’s gang with the goods and break up their entire ring. The way things stand now, there may not be any convictions to come out of that, which means the drug ring can go on.”

  Second finger. “Then we find out this is more a personal vendetta than a conventional drug bust, because of what happened with Juarez and Jerome’s sister. So far so good?”

  I nodded.

  Third finger. “After Juarez is killed, half a million dollars is deposited in a secret bank account that we’ve traced to Jerome. Our smoking gun.” She looked at me for confirmation. I nodded in agreement.

  Fourth finger. “Suspicious buying of unusual ammunition, right before the raid. In and of itself, no big deal, but as corroborating material, meaningful.”

  She cocked her thumb, item number five. “Curtis Jackson’s testimony about the street rumors that Jerome had been paid by a rival gang to take out Juarez. Put it all together, it spells prime suspect.”

  I agreed with all that and told her so.

  She put her notebook aside. “You don’t see any contradictions?”

  “Like what? We’ve got a sweet little case going here, Kate, don’t start mucking it up with harebrained speculations.”

  “I know, and I’m not, it’s just…”

  “Just what?” I was getting impatient with this. You can overanalyze anything to death. Particularly in any case like this one, where you don’t have a direct eyewitness to the crime, there are loose ends that aren’t tied up in a neat bow. But I’ve always subscribed to the notion that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and has feathers, the odds are good it’s a duck. Plenty of my cases were made this way when I was a D.A., and they were solid cases.