Dog Tags

by David Rosenfelt

  According to the diagram, the two closest victims to the bomber were Iraqi bureaucrats. Next in order were a French businesswoman, a German businessman, and then Stanley Freeman and his protégé, Alex Bryant. Had the bomber chosen to, she could have gotten considerably closer to the oil minister, but she did not.

  I’m far from ready to say that any of these people were the targets, but it’s something interesting for me to follow up on.

  Once I’ve finished with the file, I still have about half an hour until Santiago’s expected arrival with Marcus. I use that time to do an abbreviated trust session with Milo.

  It seems to go well; they always seem to go well. But pretty soon I’m going to put it to the test, and then we’ll know if I’ve been wasting my time.

  “What’s the story, Milo? You been playing me for a sucker?”

  Milo just stares at me, stone-faced and noncommittal. He’s playing it close to the vest, no doubt a tactic he learned at the police academy. I look over at Tara, who stares right back at me, defiant and still not about to give up her friend.

  I’m locked with the two of them in a serious battle of the minds, and I’m coming in third.

  MARCUS CALLS AND TELLS LAURIE THAT HE AND SANTIAGO ARE ON THE WAY. I was afraid the man would take one look at Marcus and decide he’d rather be back in the war zone, but that apparently is not the case. It’s not a great early sign; if he’s not afraid of Marcus, it’s unlikely I’ll scare him into submission.

  Marcus pulls the car into my garage, and he and Santiago come inside. Santiago’s a big guy, at least six two, 220 pounds, and he has an air of confidence about him that surprises me. It’s hard to reconcile with Laurie’s comment that he had sounded very frightened on the phone; he’s obviously used the intervening time to compose himself.

  Santiago and I go into the den, with Laurie and Marcus staying behind. Laurie and I have discussed this, and we think I’ll have a better chance of getting something out of Santiago one-on-one.

  Santiago wastes no time on chitchat. “Billy didn’t do Erskine,” he says. “No chance.”

  “Do you know who did?” I ask.

  He nods. “I don’t know who pulled the trigger, but I know who paid for the gun and the bullets.”

  “Who might that be?”

  He answers a question with a question; never a good sign. “You find Jason?” he asks.

  “Greer?” Jason Greer is one of the two soldiers we’ve learned nothing about in our investigation.

  “Yeah. You find him?”

  “Not yet,” I say.

  “Then I’m your only chance. Because they would have gone after him first.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they think he’s the only one who knows. But it ain’t true. He told me.”

  “Told you what?”

  “I want full immunity, and guaranteed entry into the witness protection program.”

  “I’m not a government official,” I point out.

  “So make it happen.”

  “You need to give me something; that’s the only way I can help you. There are some things we know, but—”

  He interrupts me midsentence, which is just as well, since I wasn’t sure how to finish it. “You know nothing,” he says. “And you have no interest in helping me. You want to get your client off the hook, and I can do that for you.”

  I decide to go at this from a different direction. “Who was the target that day?”

  “In Baghdad?”

  “Yes. Who was the target of the bomber?”

  “I don’t have the slightest idea, and I couldn’t care less.”

  “So what was your job?”

  “To make sure she got in. Once we made sure of that, whoever she went after was way, way above my pay grade.”

  I keep running into walls. “What do you want immunity for?”

  “For the eighteen people who died that day. If I talk, the shit is going to hit the fan, and I want to be well out of the way.”

  “What about money? Nobody gets rich in witness protection.” Since we know that the other two soldiers left large amounts of cash behind, I’m fishing to find out if Santiago has similarly enriched himself.

  “Money’s not a problem; don’t worry about it.”

  I nod. “Okay, here are my terms. I’m going to get you protected by the state police; the judge has already ordered it. Once you’re safe, I will try to get you immunity. It’s not going to be easy, because generally a person in your position needs to reveal a part of his future testimony as a sign of good faith.”

  I expect him to rebel against the idea of state police protection, but he does not. Maybe he’s not as confident and unafraid as he appears. He accepts my terms, which is not exactly a triumph for me, since those terms have been dramatically scaled back from my original goal. I’ve learned nothing, and according to Santiago I know nothing.

  Business as usual.

  I call Captain Dessens, who has disliked me for a very long time. We’ve had run-ins on a few cases, and he makes no effort to conceal his disdain for me. Therefore it gives me some pleasure to be able to give him his marching orders in this case, and I tell him that Santiago is ready to be picked up.

  It takes Dessens’s officers about twenty minutes to get here, during which time Santiago and I sit in fairly uncomfortable silence. The frustrating part for me is that I believe him when he says he has the answers to my questions, and the logical extension of that is he probably can get Billy acquitted.

  That is my primary goal, of course, but this situation has also become intellectually personal for me. If Billy were to get off tomorrow on a technicality, I would stay on this case, trying to find out the truth, for two reasons.

  I don’t want whoever killed eighteen people to get away with mass murder.

  And I’m sick of being in the dark.

  CAPTAIN ROBERT DESSENS WAS PISSED OFF. That would by no means qualify as breaking news; after twenty-one years on the job “pissed off” had become his natural order of things. But the situation he was now finding himself in kicked it up to a new level of annoyance.

  First there was having to deal with Carpenter. As far as Dessens was concerned, defense lawyers placed just above pedophiles on the low-life scale, and Carpenter was the worst of the bunch. Dessens fully understood that defense lawyers had their job to do; he just would rather they did it on a planet other than earth.

  He was not opposed to all possible dealings with Carpenter. For instance, he would take great pleasure in arresting him. But having to wait for Carpenter’s phone call, and then having to take his instructions on when and where to pick up the witness, was asking too much.

  Then there was the witness himself. Dessens didn’t know Santiago, in fact knew almost nothing about him, which was precisely the point. The Erskine murder was a case that Dessens’s state police were not involved in, not even peripherally. They had more than enough on their plate already; to have to use manpower to protect Santiago was a drain that contained no upside.

  As if all of that were not enough to drive Dessens nuts, he was being forced to deal with the feds. Almost as soon as Judge Catchings issued the order, Dessens received word from the state chief of police that FBI and US Army investigators wanted to question Santiago the moment he was taken into protective custody.

  If Dessens were more introspective, he might have seen the irony. It was commonplace for him to be resentful at what he saw as intrusion by the feds in his cases. In this situation, he was experiencing the same feeling even though it wasn’t his case, and in fact he was resentful about being involved himself.

  So Dessens found himself sitting in room 242 at the Marriott hotel, adjacent to the Paramus Park shopping center. With him were Special Agent Wilbur Briggs and US Army Captain Derek Meade. The room was what the hotel considered a junior suite, and sat at the far end of the hallway, flanked by two adjacent rooms that the state police had also taken over for their officers.

  “You going to question hi
m separately?” Dessens asked Briggs and Meade. Ordinarily he wouldn’t care what they did, except for the fact that he was under instructions from his chief not to leave until they were finished with their interrogation.

  “No,” Briggs said. “And it won’t take long, because he won’t say a word without immunity.”

  Meade nodded his agreement. “It’s jerk-off time.”

  Dessens checked his watch. Twenty minutes since his officers picked up Santiago from Carpenter’s house. They should be showing up anytime. With any luck Dessens could be heading home in an hour, in time to watch the Yankees game from the West Coast.

  While the men in the room did not expect Santiago to say anything when he arrived, the officers transporting him to the hotel couldn’t get him to shut up. Maybe it was nervous energy, but Santiago was waxing semi-eloquent on baseball, politics, police procedure, and women, not necessarily in that order.

  Occasionally the two officers would make eye contact with each other in the front seat, conveying their common feeling that they would be quite happy when they deposited Santiago and got the hell out of there.

  They pulled up to the front of the hotel, where another two officers were waiting. The two in the front seat got out of the car, while the two waiting scanned the area for any sign of danger. Seeing none, they opened the door, and Santiago got out.

  The moment Santiago’s head rose above the car, it ceased to exist. A bullet crashed into it, entering through the right temple and exploding on impact.

  The officers dove for cover. None was attempting to protect Santiago; they were not Secret Service, and he was sure as hell not the president. One look at him would have dissuaded them anyway; unless he had a spare head in the trunk, protecting him would be as futile an act as one could imagine.

  M had used a silencer, and therefore the men in room 242 had no idea what happened outside. It was three minutes before the officers at the front of the hotel decided that the killer was no longer a present danger, and at that point they called Captain Dessens and told him what had happened.

  Dessens immediately called homicide, which would come in with a full team. He, Briggs, and Meade rushed downstairs, but by that point there was nothing to be done.

  Dessens knew that, just as certainly as he knew one other thing.

  He was going to miss the Yankees game.

  JUDGES DO NOT CALL ME AT HOME. Not ever. There is more of a chance that the president of the United States will call and invite me to a state dinner, or that Tom Coughlin will call and ask me to quarterback the Giants.

  A judge would view such a call as somehow crossing a line that judges have no interest in crossing. If they have something to tell me, and I happen to be at home, they have the court clerk call and summon me to their office.

  So when I hear Judge Catchings’s voice on the other end of the phone, at ten PM, I immediately get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I hate stomach-pit feelings, so I gird myself for the worst. I’m in bed with Laurie next to me, and I sit up leaning on one elbow, which is my preferred girding position.

  When I say, “Hello, Your Honor,” Laurie sits up, knowing that this must be something important. Tara and Milo are at the end of the bed, but they seem considerably less concerned.

  “Mr. Morrison is on the call with us,” the judge says, referring to Eli. Eli stays quiet; he’s here primarily to listen. “Raymond Santiago was shot and killed a little over an hour ago. His killer has not been apprehended, and at this point his identity and whereabouts are unknown.”

  My initial reaction to the news has nothing to do with the case. Instead I have what seems to be a surreal comprehension that the young man who was in this house a few hours ago, whom I was talking to and whose protection I arranged, is no longer alive.

  Intellectually, I understand that these things happen, but when they do, they still don’t seem quite real or possible.

  “What happened to the protection?” I ask. It’s a pretty ridiculous question, but the only one I can think of in the moment.

  “He was in the process of being protected when he died,” Judge Catchings says, drily.

  Turning my attention to the trial, I would assess this news as an almost total disaster. I qualify it with “almost” because, while the loss of Santiago’s information and testimony is devastating, his murder will surely compel the judge to let us put this line of defense in front of the jury.

  “Your Honor, the jury needs to hear this.”

  “I agree. I’ll be issuing a ruling to that effect in the morning.”

  “Your Honor,” Eli finally says, “our objections to this have not changed.”

  “Noted.”

  “And we would like an opportunity to be heard once again.”

  “Denied. Anything else?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I would like to go down to the scene of the crime as soon as I get off this call. I’ll need permission to be arranged for Laurie Collins and me to be allowed in.”

  “Mr. Morrison?” the judge asks, the implication obvious.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Eli says.

  “Good. See you tomorrow, gentlemen.”

  As soon as I hang up, I tell Laurie what has happened. We watch television as we dress. The news coverage has begun, and reporters are on the scene with camera crews. Santiago’s name has not yet been released, and the reporters are obviously not aware of any connection between him and the Zimmerman case.

  Laurie and I get in the car and head to the crime scene. The officers manning the periphery have been alerted, and we are let in, though cautioned not to interfere with the forensics people doing their work.

  We look around, and not surprisingly Laurie sees the events from a cop’s perspective, speculating on how the killer could have known where Santiago was going. “He had to have information,” she says. “There’s no way he could have followed him and pulled that off. He had to be in position, waiting for him to arrive.”

  “Where was he?” I ask.

  She points. “I would say in either of those buildings. Probably in an upper-floor window. They’ll be able to pinpoint it pretty easily. But the shooter didn’t just show up; this was all set up in advance.”

  “Maybe Santiago told the wrong person,” I say.

  She shakes her head. “Not possible. Santiago didn’t know where he was going; he didn’t even know he was going into custody until you told him tonight.”

  I start to wonder out loud if I could have given it away to someone, but Laurie correctly points out that I didn’t know where Santiago was to be held, either. “The leak had to be with the police,” she says.

  We walk toward the lobby of the hotel, which has been set up as a police command center. Captain Dessens and I see each other at the same time.

  “Oh, shit,” he says. I often bring out that reaction in people.

  “Well, if it isn’t the great protector,” I say.

  “What do you want, Carpenter?”

  “I want to know who shot my witness.”

  “You’ll be the first one I tell when we find out. So…”

  “What are they doing here?” I ask, pointing to a uniformed army officer, talking to a man whom Central Casting would send in if I were looking for an FBI agent. I’m surprised they’re here, and very surprised that the army could be here this soon.

  “They were waiting to question your boy.”

  That really pisses me off, since Santiago was to be my witness. The fact that the feds were going to take first crack at him is both annoying and now moot. I try to talk to them about it, but they wave me off.

  As we’re leaving, I walk up to Dessens and say, “See you next week.”

  “Where?”

  “You’ll be on the witness stand, and I’ll be walking around in front of you. Should be fun.”

  TODAY IS SCIENCE DAY, and Eli starts the morning court session by bringing in his forensics witnesses. The first is Police Sergeant Roger Halicki, a seasoned veteran who has no doubt spent more d
ays in court than I have.

  Halicki and Eli go through the rehearsed testimony without missing a beat, and the jury pays complete attention for the two hours it takes to go through it. Billy had gunpowder residue on his hand and blood on his shirt, both of which are thoroughly incriminating.

  By the time I get up, I don’t know whether to cross-examine him or change our plea to guilty.

  “Sergeant Halicki, in the diagram you showed, am I wrong in thinking that the gunpowder residue was concentrated on the right side of the right hand of Mr. Zimmerman?”

  “You’re correct.”

  “Is that normal?” I ask.

  “I’m not sure there is a normal. But it could be explained by various factors; for instance, the victim was shot at close range. He could have been grabbing for the gun as the trigger was being pulled.”

  “Did you find residue on the victim’s hand?”

  Halicki shakes his head. “No.”

  “But if he had such residue, that would have been a possible explanation for the pattern found on Mr. Zimmerman?”

  “Yes.”

  “So if someone else was holding the gun along with Mr. Zimmerman, that would help explain it?”

  “I’m not aware of anyone else who was holding the gun at the time.”

  I nod. “So therefore you didn’t test anyone else.”

  “Correct.”

  I’ve gotten as much as I can out of this, which isn’t much, so I change the subject. “You said there were two shots fired, one of which hit and killed Mr. Erskine. Where did the other shot go?”

  I let him use the diagram of the scene that Eli employed, and Halicki shows that the other bullet was found down and across the street.

  “So it was fired in a completely different direction from where the victim was standing?”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Any idea why?”

  “Again, if the victim were wrestling for the gun…”

  “Excuse me, Sergeant Halicki, but is this the same wrestling match we’ve already determined you have no evidence of ever happening?”