Chapter 43
Puccinelli had stared at the wall for several hours, the anxiety beginning to take over his imagination. The sergeant already had been by. When the sergeant reviewed the forensic reports he caught that O’Hara’s prints were on the shell casing. The sergeant was taking that to the lieutenant and the lieutenant would take it to Sheriff Bekin. So far everyone was assuming that O’Hara had been at the crime scene and contaminated evidence by picking up the casing. Nobody was connecting the dots to O’Hara’s print being on the casing because it came from O’Hara’s Walther.
Sooner or later somebody was going to ask the right question. When the sergeant pointed out that O’Hara had screwed up their investigation, Puccinelli simply repeated word-for-word what Ernie told him. After that he kept quiet and let the sergeant talk, chew on him for O’Hara’s screwup and for not doing a better job of controlling the crime scene.
It was three in the afternoon before Ernie called Puccinelli. “You in your office? I forgot to give you all my reports.” Now Ernie was telling him that he hadn’t given him all his reports? He finally asked, “What reports?”
Ernie was guarded, his voice muffled. Nobody was around to hear him but this was no time to take chances. He whispered but bit down on each word for emphasis. “My reports from the crime scene. What I saw, what I did.” Ernie’s voice dropped down even more. “What O’Hara did. My reports. I’m sorry, I’ll run them over. Anybody ask anything, yet?”
“My sergeant’s already been in here,” Pooch reported. “He took a bite out of my butt about O’Hara picking up evidence.”
Ernie let out a derisive cough. “Well, O’Hara should have paid better attention. My report makes it clear that he was walking around the crime scene. I don’t know anything about whether he picked up a casing, but he was there for a few minutes, so maybe he did. He’ll have to deal with that. He just wanted a look, and then he left. I don’t know what the hurry was, but he didn’t hang around. Not like O’Hara.” Ernie waited to see if Pooch registered what he was saying.
It took Puccinelli less than a minute, but he caught on. “So your report says that O’Hara was at the crime scene for a short time and left?”
“That’s right.” Then Ernie asked rhetorically, “Didn’t you have him sign the crime scene log? That’s going to get your ass in trouble with the sergeant.”
Puccinelli let out a long and loud breath. It all came together. Ernie’s report would put O’Hara at the crime scene, which meant O’Hara would have had the opportunity to pick up the casing. Pooch realized his own report wouldn’t reflect seeing it happen because he could say he never saw O’Hara do it, and he could say he forgot O’Hara was there during the investigation and inadvertently left it out of his report.
Puccinelli felt a small stab of guilt. Ernie was stepping up big time, putting much more on the line than he was. Ernie’s report would put O’Hara there, not his. It wasn’t Ernie’s job to keep track of who was at the crime scene. It was his. But he didn’t have to make any report changes. Just acknowledge that if O’Hara was there, he should have made him sign the log. It might be enough. He answered Ernie. “And O’Hara?”
Ernie had obviously thought about it. “Well, O’Hara is just going to have to file a report and admit he screwed up. He shouldn’t have picked up that casing.” Ernie let that thought hang in the air. “Are we good?”
It was a risk. Puccinelli knew it. But who was going to question it? Report screwups happened all the time. Both Pooch and O’Hara would get written up. Ernie would file his report that bridged the gap. There weren’t a lot of choices. “Yeah, we’re good, but somebody may remember that O’Hara carried that Walther all the time. What if they want to see it?”
Ernie kept his voice level. “You know, I’m sure O’Hara’s Walther won’t match the extractor marks or firing pin impressions on those casings. Matter of fact, I’m positive. But I’ll ask O’Hara if he still has that Walther in case somebody wants to check.”
Puccinelli processed Ernie’s comments. In so many words, Ernie was telling him that if O’Hara had any brains he wouldn’t still have the Walther. “You do that. You talk to O’Hara.” He put the phone down. If anything went wrong, it wasn’t just Bill O’Hara that would go down. Both he and Ernie would go down too for a cover-up. There would be no way around that if this all fell apart.
There was no sound on the other end but Ernie could tell O’Hara had picked up the phone. “Bill, you there?”
There were a few more seconds of hesitation before O’Hara responded. As usual, there were no pleasantries. “Anything?” His voice sounded harsher than usual and Ernie could sense that O’Hara had spent a rough night, one that included a lot of bourbon.
Ernie bit his tongue. Anything? “Yeah, it seems that one of your fingerprints ended up on a shell casing from the gun that killed St. Claire.” He waited for a response. There was only silence at the other end of the line. “Listen, Bill, and I want you to just listen.” There was still no response. “I told Pooch that you were at the scene for a few minutes and I guessed that you didn’t sign in. I had to tell him that I figured you picked up a casing. So you’re going to need to make a report. You got it?”
Finally the silence broke. “You told him I picked up one of the casings at the scene?”
“That’s right. I had to. We needed an explanation. I told him that was what I figured happened. You picked up a casing. One of the techs ran the print, and guess what? Your print, or at least a partial of your print, showed up.”
“And that’s what you told Pooch?”
“Pooch said if you filed a report about being at the scene and picking up the casing that he would get it in the file, but it’s your ass for not signing in and for not wearing gloves at the scene.”
O’Hara dropped back into silence for a few seconds. “And Pooch’s okay with this?”
Ernie dropped his voice. “We both decided that must have been the way it happened. How else would your prints have gotten on that casing?”
Ernie could almost hear O’Hara thinking at the other end. “Tell Pooch I’m sorry. I’ll file the report.” O’Hara was silent for a moment. “What about Jamison?”
Ernie hadn’t really thought about that. It was a bridge he would cross later. “I’ll handle Jamison.
O’Hara seemed to be able to process that before asking one more question. “Ernie?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m not going to let anybody take a fall for me.”
“St. Claire was a prick. Just file the report.”
Ernie hung up the phone. He could feel himself breathing deeply. Now all of them were over the line. It wasn’t the first time he had crossed the line, but in the past he had just nudged past it a little. There was no way back from this. He thought about it for a moment. He wasn’t sure why O’Hara fired when he did, but he knew one thing. A cop like O’Hara wouldn’t have used his backup gun unless he had a reason and O’Hara’s reasons for doing things had always been good enough for him. He pushed it to the back of his mind. Maybe O’Hara would tell him and maybe he wouldn’t, but Ernie knew one thing—he wasn’t going to ask. And if the situation was reversed, he knew O’Hara wouldn’t ask him.
Bill O’Hara put his phone down on the desk in his den. The sun had gone down and the natural light in the room was fading with the dusk. He hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights; the darkness matched his mood. It was hard for him to accept Ernie’s help. He understood the line Ernie was crossing. He also understood that Pooch was doing the same thing. He hadn’t asked them to do it but he knew he would do it for them. The difference for him was that he would never ask any man to help him. It just wasn’t in him. It was how he saw himself. And now he would never see himself the same way again.
O’Hara wasn’t the kind of man who made excuses and he hadn’t spent his life accepting excuses. He was responsible for his own behavior. He knew it. All his life he’d been in control of himself. Now, after the last twenty-four hours,
he had lost that control. For the first time in his life he felt adrift, cut off from the confidence that had always been his lifeline when others around him were uncertain. As soon as he fired his Walther at St. Claire he realized that his better judgment came a trigger pull too late.
O’Hara rubbed his hand over his face. He hadn’t showered or shaved. He hadn’t done much of anything—except drink. The Walther was on the coffee table. It wasn’t registered and it wasn’t traceable. He had thought about it during the long nights he spent seated in his car, waiting for St. Claire to appear at the school, just as he knew St. Claire would. And St. Claire did.
He wasn’t sorry about St. Claire. As far as O’Hara was concerned St. Claire was a monster. St. Claire was going to hurt Garrett. He was convinced of that, but he should have yelled at him; he should have waited a moment longer. All he saw was a murderer coming at a victim. He was so intent on making sure that St. Claire never hurt anyone ever again that he didn’t wait. But O’Hara was a victim of his own brutal honesty. He knew he didn’t wait because he didn’t want to wait. O’Hara looked at justification in terms of the result, not the means getting to it.
He hadn’t spent the last twenty-four hours feeling sorry for himself. But he was sorry that he left the scene. When he saw Garrett hold St. Claire after he went down, O’Hara instantly knew that the least that would happen to him was that he would lose his badge and his pension, and the worst that would happen was that he would sit in the defendant’s chair where he had put so many other men. He admitted it to himself. He had panicked and taken off.
The realization that he had done what he had so often disdained in other men had been difficult to take. The hardest part was the realization that he was more like other men than he had ever admitted to himself.
Most of the last hours were a blur because he had downed more than a fifth of bourbon. He got up and took his glass and the second bottle of liquor to the sink. He watched the last of the brown liquid swirl down the drain. He never thought of himself as a man who needed a crutch. He had spent some of those blurry hours staring at the Walther. As he looked at the gun, the thoughts that crossed his mind were a crutch too. O’Hara straightened up. He would wait it out, but no matter what, he wasn’t going to take anyone down with him. It had been his decision alone and he knew it when he pulled the trigger.
After talking to O’Hara, Ernie studied the photographs on his desk that he and Puccinelli found in the manila envelope in Garrett’s car. Garrett’s face stared back at him. Some looked like high school pictures; one looked like a college yearbook photograph. There was also a picture of St. Claire. Something about that one set Ernie’s senses tingling.
He couldn’t keep the photographs for long, but he needed to take a closer look. He hadn’t been able to put his finger on it when Puccinelli showed him the pictures, but they triggered something at the back of his mind. Ernie leaned back in his chair. He put the photographs back in the packet. He decided to look at the location where the picture used in court had been taken, the one that Garrett testified she had not known St. Claire was taking.
Late in the afternoon Puccinelli picked through the pile of paper on his desk. He was rereading all the reports, trying to find the thread his instincts told him was there. But he was so tired his mind had begun to drift. The ringing phone startled him. It was Faxon in the forensic lab. He sounded agitated, at least more agitated than usual. “Pooch, we need to talk.” Faxon gave him a short explanation.
Puccinelli hurried out of the office and headed for the stairway—that was faster than waiting for the elevators. When he came back up he would wait for the elevator and rationalize his walking downstairs as his exercise for the day.
Faxon handed Puccinelli the rough draft of the forensic report. There it was. There were makeable prints on the aerosol can from St. Claire’s car—St. Claire’s and some unknowns. Faxon waited until he was through reading. “I ran St. Claire’s prints first. He handled the can but he wasn’t the only one. There are other makeable prints on it and they don’t belong to St. Claire. Any thoughts?”
“Not at the moment.” Puccinelli decided to keep his thoughts to himself, at least for the time being. Something was coming together in his mind, but it was just gut thinking and he needed to roll it around in his head some more.
“Okay, we’ll keep working on it.” Faxon nodded. “Right now the criminalist wants to talk to you. I haven’t seen him this excited since they found a way to test DNA. He’s in his office.” Puccinelli asked Faxon to burn a quick copy of the draft report for him. He would pick it up after talking to the criminalist.
Andre Rhychkov was a first-generation Russian American who liked to be called Andy and wore loose-fitting Hawaiian shirts, jeans, and expensive sneakers that were perpetually stained with things nobody wanted to ask about. He had grown up on American cop shows and at an early age had made it his goal to be a crime scene analyst. But he was more than a crime scene ant who combed over carpets and bodies looking for lint and hair. He was one of those guys who worked with computers and DNA. When Puccinelli entered his office, the expression on Andy’s face reminded him of a teenage boy who had just gotten a peek at his first Playboy foldout.
“So what you got, Andy?”
“Two things for which you’ll owe me tickets to the Giants game. I know you have season tickets.”
“No tickets unless you got something that will make this case or get me laid.”
“Making this case is one thing but getting you laid? I can’t deliver the impossible. Anyway, I got the syringe that you took out of St. Claire’s coat. It was filled with succinylcholine. We’ve heard of that before, right? But I got a lot more than that.”
Rhychkov picked up a plastic bag with the can in it, smudges of print powder still clinging to it. “What I got, Pooch, is something nobody’s seen before. First off, it isn’t hairspray.”
Puccinelli rolled his tongue around in his mouth. What was it with all the forensic wonks that made them drag everything out? He shrugged his shoulders. It was annoying but he was used to it. This was their thing. “What is it?”
“Xenon gas with a few other things mixed in.”
“Xenon gas? You mean like the stuff they put in neon lights?”
Rhychkov shook his head. “No, better. I couldn’t figure it out at first, but I realized that thing on the top was some kind of mouthpiece. You put it over somebody’s face and you push, just like pushing on the valve in a spray-paint can releases the spray. That forces the xenon gas into the person’s mouth.
“Most people who aren’t expecting something over their face will immediately inhale, pulling the spray into their lungs. That’s what this is for. They’re using it in Europe for an anesthetic. It leaves no trace. Nothing in the liver. It breaks through the brain barrier and ‘poof,’ you start to lapse into unconsciousness. There’s something else mixed with it that I think is sevaflurane. It’s another type of anesthetic. All very fast acting and metabolizes quickly. We might find a trace of sevaflurane in the liver if we knew what we were looking for and if the person was dead almost immediately. But if they stayed alive it would be gone because it metabolizes so fast. It’s heavier than air. It will knock you out in a couple of breaths. With a smaller person like a woman, she would be disabled almost immediately.”
Puccinelli reached over to weigh the plastic-bag-encased can in his hand. “So how would someone get hold of this shit?”
“That’s the hard part.” He plopped on the edge of a stool near a microscope. “The sevaflurane is pretty standard. Comes in a bottle and you can get it at any hospital, or an anesthesiologist like St. Claire would probably have it on his shelf. But the xenon is pretty expensive. Doctors in Europe have been experimenting with it. I read all about it. Tricky stuff, but the big thing is it doesn’t leave any trace as long as the person is alive for a while to metabolize it.
“So that’s how he did it. Then when he was through with his victims, he would use the succinylcholine and i
t would look just like heart failure. We wouldn’t have found the succinylcholine unless we knew exactly what to look for, and even then we might not have caught it.”
Puccinelli watched as Andy forced the can against his glove, the hiss of gas audible. “See? Really simple. But what’s this the techs said about the prints? There were other prints consistent with somebody else holding the can?”
“I know. I need to go back and talk to Faxon, see what else he can tell me.”
Andy shrugged. “Well I understand the prints came from a person with a small hand.”
Puccinelli’s face froze. He stood up and walked toward the door. “Don’t write up the report yet. Hold it. I’ll call. I don’t want anybody to read it yet. And thanks, Andy. I appreciate it.” His mind already was working like a jackhammer. But like a jackhammer, he was starting to break through.
He was at the door when Andy called out, “One more thing. I got some trace DNA off the mouthpiece. I’m guessing saliva from one of the victim’s mouths. We’re working on it now, but it’s going to take a while to match it up if we’re able to. I have the DNA profiles on the victims but if the DNA is mixed up because saliva is on it from different people, well . . .” Rhychkov shrugged. “As soon as I have it, you’ll get it and I get my tickets.”
“Let me know what you find as soon as you get it.” Thoughts now crackled across Puccinelli’s brain like a lightning bolt. He hesitated for a split-second before pounding on Ernie’s name on his phone. Without saying hello, Pooch spoke as soon as Ernie answered. “We need to talk.”
Fractured Justice Page 36
