Probable Cause

by Ridley Pearson

  That phone call from the snitch further added to his problems. It had followed a drink, and he had screwed up. Snitches were as unpredictable as women. The guy had seen him, that much was clear. He should have arranged a meeting and reminded him who was in charge. Handle him. But was he a snitch, or was he the one missing a heavy bag of soda?

  The thing about it was, he had to keep himself straight. There was opportunity here. Just like the old days.

  He did, however, owe himself a deep one. It was 10:30 P.M., but it felt like 3 A.M. He’d been up over eighteen hours. He tipped the bottle slightly and let the vodka run sensuously into the glass. He had poured it a little short the night before, had been unable to keep it down, and had slept restlessly through hellish nightmares of the swirling fumes… the blue-gray skin….

  He wanted to drink it slowly, but he didn’t. The moment that taste touched his tongue, he opened his throat and poured it down luxuriously.

  Five minutes later when the phone rang, he was praying to the porcelain god on hands and knees, wishing to hell the drink had stayed down and done its job. He felt betrayed by his best friend. Nothing remained loyal forever, not even vodka.

  He rose up painfully, wiped his mouth on his shirt sleeve, and answered the phone. “Yeah?”

  “I saw you again this morning.” The same voice. “I can help you, you know?”

  “How?” Lumbrowski asked.

  “We can help each other.”

  “How?”

  “You’re not hanging up this time, are you? That’s good.”

  “You want what I have?”

  “I told you last time,” the other man said. “You want what I have.”

  “You’re pissing me off. I’m gonna hang up on you again if you don’t stop pissing me off.”

  “Don’t hang up! You’ll be sorry. I saw you, don’t forget.”

  “Yeah? You saw me doing what, buddy?”

  “I love the beach in the morning, don’t you?”

  Lumbrowski felt it coming up again, boiling like fire. He slammed the receiver down and ran to the toilet. Some blood this time. Hell of a world. No loyalty whatsoever.

  7

  Dewitt stood at the doorway to Anna’s hospital room. Like returning to a childhood home so many years later, he saw the room through the eyes of a stranger—in this case, Clare O’Daly. He had been thinking of Clare much of the evening. I’d like to introduce my daughter, he could hear himself saying. Would another person recognize that fetal-poised body with its wafer-thin arms and cotton-candy hair as his daughter? It was a body, and barely that, its spiritual inhabitant long since vacated. Its! He realized that he no longer thought of it as her, Anna, his daughter. This body was a stranger. A revelation: His daughter was gone.

  He stepped closer to the body, impressed by the effect a single day had had upon him. She looked more like one of the victims than his daughter. He knew there existed a specific temperature where ice turned back to water, a day on the calendar when winter ceased to exist, an exact minute that marked the passage of night into day. The ice was no longer ice; the wind no longer cold; the sky no longer dark; the body no longer his daughter. So radical was this thought, so apparently sudden his acceptance of it, that he first began to laugh and then to cry. He squeezed his daughter’s frail hand, as fearful of the future as he was of the killer who still eluded him.

  8

  District Attorney Bill Saffeleti didn’t like to kowtow to anyone, much less a golf pro in psychedelic plaids. He had kowtowed for too many years, earning the confidence of the voters, pressing the flesh, wooing the judges, winning the cases. He didn’t need to be told how to do his job—not by anyone. He picked at a piece of stray lint on the sleeve of his dark gray wool suit, finally pinching and extricating it. The suit cost $780, the wing tips—a pair of goddamned shoes!—$233. Then today, he’s in a hurry, and he’s feeling both generous and guilty, and he lets some homeless guy shine his shoes and the guy uses some kind of oil by mistake and leaves this permanent blotch dead center on the toe of the left shoe. Ruined. They looked like some cat had pissed on them.

  Mayor Manny Roth paced by the windows of his lavish Carmel-by-the-Sea home. Roth was a former PGA golfer who had gained more fame for his TV commercials than for his tournament wins; his trademark was nauseating color combinations. Today, he wore plaid in Sanibel lime and Nantucket pink, with yellow socks and red leather shoes. He was a bald, ferret-faced man with moon eyes and Dumbo ears. A comic! Saffeleti considered the man part fool, part genius. With an iron, he was deadly; a wood, unparalleled. At a city-council meeting, he was less than convincing. But the voters loved him for his ribald humor and willingness to depart from prepared text. After Clint Eastwood’s departure, Roth had easily parlayed his celebrity into the Carmel mayoral office.

  His recently redecorated home reflected his seven-figure earnings for the past several years. If he kept his approach shots in control, he had a chance at the hall of fame. The one thing Manny Roth lacked was a wife. He had tried five—used them up like wooden tees—the most recent having left him only two months earlier for, it was rumored, a sports promoter out of L.A. As a result, Roth, who had this pent-up-energy syndrome, was pacing the floor like an expectant father. What he needed was a night in the sack with a paid professional. There were rumors circulating about that, as well.

  “I’m meeting with them in the morning, Bill. I’d like to know the do’s and don’ts,” Roth said.

  “I wouldn’t meet with them directly, Manny. Use Tad, for Christ’s sake. The city administrator can stick his nose into this kind of thing.”

  “I want to handle this myself.”

  “This is an active police investigation. Guys like Clarence Hindeman and Dewitt take that very seriously. A person like Capp, that’s a different story. He’s old school. You’ve got to watch yourself, Manny. You can tell them how this case affects your side of things, but you can’t tell them how to run their show.”

  “But the evidence?”

  “The evidence is weak so far. But there’s a lot of work yet to be done.”

  “Enough to call it murder? That word scares the hell out of me. You know what it could do to this town?”

  “From what you’ve shown me here—and I won’t ask how you got these files, Manny—it’s circumstantial There’s no real case here, not yet, although the implications are obvious. Dewitt is probably the best forensics man I’ve ever met. If he gets a bug up his ass… I know this guy. I trust his instincts. On paper, we’ve got a couple of suicides with some coincidental evidence. Have you ever seen the inside of the Salinas lab, Manny? You ought to pay them a visit sometime. One case we had, Dewitt finds traces of pollen in a victim’s earwax, for Christ’s sake. No shit. It proved enough to swing the jury and win a conviction. A triangle of motor oil may look like nothing to you and me—”

  “You’re saying you do or you don’t have a case, based on what you’ve read here?”

  “Manny, it’s not that simple—”

  “Do, or don’t?”

  “Don’t.”

  “Ah! So it would be premature to call it murder at this point, Mr. Prosecutor?”

  “Homicide.”

  “Whatever.”

  “No way to call it suicide unless you know it’s suicide,” Saffeleti reminded.

  “Damn it all, Bill! It’s suicide until we can prove it’s murder.”

  “Not technically, no, it’s not. Technically, Dewitt has ruled that circumstantial evidence suggests suspicious causes—”

  “I hate that term—”

  “…which puts the case into a middle ground of indecision until all evidence can be judged for its probative weight.”

  “As long as we take this ‘no comment’ approach, we’re sitting ducks. The press is free to speculate.”

  “You asked for my opinion, so here it is. Dewitt is handling this well. He’s being patient, despite Jessie Osbourne’s involvement.”

  “Who said anything about her?” Roth a
sked indignantly.

  “No one has to,” Saffeleti responded. “One thing I should tell you, Manny, as a friend.” He hated to kowtow, yes, but Bill Saffeleti knew how to use the ropes as well as the next guy. If the Republicans swept the area, then Saffeleti might win another term on Roth’s coattails alone. Teamwork was the key. “These copies,” he said, referring to the Osbourne file in front of him. “Cops follow strict procedures for copying active files. This copy is undocumented and therefore illegal to have in your possession. What I’m saying, Manny; I wouldn’t go pulling this out of my briefcase if I were you. And just so you and I have things straight,” he said, standing and locating another piece of stray lint, “you want to play these kind of games, that’s your business. But I never saw this file.”

  “Agreed.” Roth began to pace again. “I didn’t know how it worked. Thank you, Bill.”

  “One other thing to consider, Manny. Whoever copied these files for you had to have access, which means he or she did know how the system works. If that person didn’t tell you, well, the motivation behind such an omission is something worth considering. We’re elected officials, Manny. We’re vulnerable.”

  “Understood.”

  “Let me know how it turns out tomorrow.”

  “Will do.”

  They shook hands. Maybe the guy was colorblind. Maybe that explained it.

  4

  FRIDAY

  1

  When the phone rang at 7:30 Friday morning, Dewitt wasn’t too concerned because it was a fairly common time of day to hear from his mother, or even Clarence Hindeman.

  “It’s me. Clare,” she began, voicing immediate concern over calling too early, fears that he assuaged. “I stayed late last night, and I have some good stuff, and since I live in the valley, too, I thought it would be better to deliver it in person rather than explain it over the phone.” She sounded nervous.

  “Coffee’s on,” he said. He offered her directions, hung up, and conducted a speed clean of the living room, an activity that caught the sleepy-eyed attention of daughter Emmy, who observed him from the adjoining kitchen. She held a glass of orange juice in hand. “Get dressed,” he told her. “Someone from work’s coming over.” Seeing her in a tight skimpy T-shirt reminded him his daughter was no longer a little girl but a young woman. The physical changes that had begun two years earlier were manifest now in a swelling of bust, a lengthening of leg, and widening of hips. What made the transition eerie was Emmy’s resemblance to her mother. He was living with a miniature Julia, and he found the experience both disconcerting and welcome.

  He was cleaning the bathroom—while Emmy attempted to use the sink—when Clare knocked on the front door. He tangled up with Emmy while trying to rinse his hands, and it was during this confusion at the sink that she said, “It’s a woman, isn’t it?” She was finding reason for his frantic actions. He couldn’t reach a towel. Refusing an answer, he grabbed her T-shirt and dried his hands on its back. “Get dressed,” he repeated.

  “It is a woman,” she proclaimed.

  Dewitt glared, but his glares hadn’t been very effective in the last few months. Emmy had his number, and it worried him.

  Disobeying, Emmy watched from the hallway as he answered the door. Introductions were made at a distance and he led Clare to the sofa. She carried a briefcase, which she placed beside herself and opened.

  Rusty, wagging full force, approached Clare. She showered him in affection and then he retreated to the kitchen and began eating noisily.

  “Several things here of importance, I think,” she began, “all of which require your immediate attention. With the weekend coming up, I wanted to get as much of this handled as we could. First is that both motor oils match: It’s a ten-forty Pennzoil with identical percentages of ferrous aluminum, indicating engine wear. The same car was parked alongside both victims’ vehicles. It’s as good as a fingerprint. Second, we turned up animal hairs on the inside door panels of both vehicles. Dog hairs… a collie mutt,” she said, eyeing Rusty. “By all available tests—medulla, cortex, cuticle, scales, length, and coloring—they are from the same dog.” She eyed Rusty again.

  “It’s not from Rusty,” he said.

  “I’d like to check that out if I may,” she said.

  “I told you,” he said defensively, “I didn’t touch McDuff’s truck. There’s no way—”

  “Even so, I’d like to eliminate that as a possibility.”

  “So do it!” He threw his hands up. “Who cares? But you’re wasting lab time.”

  She bristled, fished out a folder, and handed him a loose stack of black-and-white photographs. “This is where we go beyond circumstantial,” she explained as he leafed through the pile. “Each photograph shows magnified enlargements of the torn ends of the duct tape used to seal the car windows. In the bottom margins, you’ll see a numbering system and case information. We can connect each piece of tape to the piece from which it was torn. Three pieces of tape used on each window… economical and distinctive. First piece is wrapped around the hose left to right, second and third seal the remaining space in the window. Both McDuff’s and Osbourne’s vehicles were sealed in a similar way.” Identical was a word any criminalist avoided because it had no place in court, no place in the physical universe. No two any things were truly identical.

  “A behavior pattern.”

  “Third photo,” she advised, “is what hangs him. We can match piece three from the Osbourne site to piece one at McDuff.”

  “Same roll of tape.”

  “There’s your hard evidence, James. They’ve got to be one-eighty-sevens. Same guy taped both windows from the same roll of tape. He also used a similar make and age of garden hose… two different sections cut from the same hose, although we don’t have tool markings to confirm that.” She checked his list. “We’re lacking reference material on that bike tire, but we think Sacramento has it. We’re working on it. You asked about those fibers found during yesterday’s autopsy. We haven’t run all the tests, but visually that synthetic found in Osbourne’s hair matches in both color and length the fibers discovered on his clothing, which, as you guessed, are actually fibers from the carpeting in the car.”

  “And in the trunk,” he added.

  Emmy interrupted, wondering whether she was supposed to take the bus or whether he would drive her. He said he would drive her. Clare seemed anxious to leave. Dewitt kept her for a moment longer, and Emmy wandered back to her room.

  “Fingerprints?” he asked.

  “None on the tape. None on either hose. We developed dozens inside the cab using the vapor technique. I sent them up to DOJ Sacramento for analysis. They run ALPS seven days a week. They get a hit, they’ll pass it on to you.”

  The California Department of Justice’s Automated Latent Prints System—ALPS—contains over six million electronically filed fingerprints. The computer data base is subdivided into felons, state employees, and a third section that contains the prints of all day-care center workers, hospital employees, private investigators, and similar personnel that the DOJ is now required by state law to keep on file. A sophisticated artificial intelligence software identifies a print’s individual characteristics—whorls, loops, and ridges—and then searches the data base at thousands of prints per second, attempting to match the prints. The computer often “kicks” a dozen or more possible prints, and then a human fingerprint expert narrows the field to a single “hit” by manually comparing the prints.

  Dewitt asked, “Will they be willing to run our case?”

  “I may be able to help there. Why don’t you leave that one to me?”

  “You know Ramirez?”

  “No.”

  “I do. He was a narco detective when I was working as an FI up in the city. It’s been a couple of years.”

  “You want to chase after him, or you want me to?” she asked.

  “You sure you don’t mind?”

  “I wouldn’t offer if I didn’t want to do it,” she said, settling bac
k confidently into the couch.

  Dewitt picked up the photographs of the matching ends of tape. “This is exactly what I needed. It’s good work, and about five times faster than I thought we would get it.”

  “Now that the one-eighty-sevens are confirmed, Brian will put more people on it, make it the priority case. We should get through the rest of this fairly quickly. Chances are he’ll approve some weekend overtime.”

  “Obviously,” Dewitt said, “from my end… I need all of it just as soon as you have it. Fiber analysis, the bike tread, the organics from the autopsy. Don’t hesitate to call me here if I’ve left the office. This is a seven-day week for me.”

  She stood and collected the photographs. “What’s it like being on the other end… as a detective, I mean?”

  He considered this and spoke the only word that came to mind. “Overwhelming,” he said.

  2

  It sounded like a gun being shot. Dewitt spun in his office chair, split the Venetian blinds, and peered out into the back parking area that both the unmarked and radio cars shared. There was no smoking gun; it was a smoking car and Dewitt recognized it immediately by the bumper sticker: I BRAKE FOR NOTHING. Howard Lumbrowski’s profile filled the car window as the Mustang turned left. The Mustang was powder blue with a white convertible top, and Dewitt recalled his interview with Anthony De Sica the day before when the man had described just such a car, right down to the loud thunk of the door closing. He flipped through his notebook anxiously, nearly tearing loose several pages. His note read, “Two-tone convertible? Loud bang? Big man.” “Howard Lumbrowski?” he wrote on a fresh piece of notepaper.

  He had no time to dwell on it. The meeting was in three minutes.

  Mayor Manny Roth’s presence affected both Capp and Hindeman. Capp was wearing his sport coat and Clarence had abandoned his authoritative position behind his desk for the more congenial approach. He arranged the gunmetal gray chairs as if the four were in a bridge tournament, without the card table. Roth wormed his hands nervously in his lap. Capp drummed his well-chewed Mongol number two on his thigh.