Dewitt took the visitor’s chair. It wasn’t terribly comfortable.
“I never wrote about Julia. I should have,” Ramirez apologized. “Damn shame.”
Dewitt shrugged. “This isn’t a social call. You only wear a tie when you’re on business.”
“Always the observant one.”
“The Manny Roth golf tourney and fund raiser? I thought you were a Democrat.”
“Not that thing. A quick errand is all. Got to be back in Sacramento by nine tonight.”
“It must be something good, or you wouldn’t drag it out this long, would you, Sam?”
“I had to speak with Saffeleti about the Sanchez case. Goes to trial Monday morning. Both of us are putting assistants on it and we wanted to iron out some details. I’m also playing delivery boy. These are the records you requested… all vehicular asphyxiations over the last five years that resulted in criminal charges. Everything from baby brothers trapping their sister inside the family car, to raging lunatics. It’s all yours.” The pile was thick and Dewitt realized immediately that he would have to pass along the task of searching these files for similarities to their two homicides. Someone like Nelson could handle it. “But this,” Ramirez said, hoisting a manila envelope, “is the real prize.”
He tossed the folder across Dewitt’s desk to him. “You can thank O’Daly over at the Salinas lab. Some A-hole poured coffee all over an original document that’s needed on the Sanchez case: test results of the quarter ton of coke they pulled from the hull of that trawler. You shoulda heard Parker. Christ, he was squirting Hersheys over this thing. Seems no one had thought to make a copy of the test results, no one in the Monterey office, that is. So, for some reason, it was channeled through us… through Sacramento DOJ. And, of course, we didn’t have the damn thing, so we passed the request on to Salinas, who had done the initial testing. So, this afternoon, a couple hours before I’m scheduled to fly down here, I get a phone call from that hairpie in Salinas saying that if I give you the ALPS runs on the prints from McDuff’s truck, she thought she might be able to locate the document we’re looking for. Get a load of that, will ya? Some freshman split-tail turning the screws on yours truly! I nearly popped a hemi.”
Dewitt opened the envelope and withdrew the many pages of the computer printout. “What do we have here, Sam?”
“Like I said, a gift.”
Dewitt looked up. “You’re going to make me read through all this?”
“This O’Daly had sent us thirty-five separate latents, including fourteen partials from wires beneath the dash. Tricky partials, I might add. Very few whorls and loops. Photos show ’em one through fourteen,” he explained. “You know how the ALPS works: Computer searches the data base for similar patterns to the prints we scan in. Partials like this means we tie the sucker up forever; computer has to work its brains out. The one you’re interested in is labeled number seven.” Dewitt sorted through and found it. “All the others proved a wash. No hits. A couple proved to be McDuff’s.”
“Number seven has priors?”
Ramirez directed Dewitt to a photocopy of an arrest record near the bottom of the pile. “Marvin Wood is your man. Presently living in Seaside. Out on probation on grand theft. A sheet of priors a mile long. Seems he likes to lift car stereos. Sound familiar?”
Dewitt eagerly fumbled through the pile of papers and finally located Wood’s paper-clipped file. His mug shots showed a black man with wide-set eyes, a gentle face, and a flat profile. He was listed as six-foot-one, 210. Single. Arrested nine times. Convicted twice. Probation both times. He had been on probation for most of the last three years. Probation report listed current employment at the Shell station in Carmel.
“We can prove Wood was inside McDuff’s car,” Ramirez explained. “We can prove he handled the wires that led to the car stereo. You read up on him, you get the idea Wood’s not exactly Fulbright material.”
“Any of the other prints his?”
“No, not a one.”
“So you’re on the stand. How do you explain prints on the wires but none anywhere else in the cab?” Dewitt asked. It was his responsibility to troubleshoot, to think three steps ahead.
“Hey, you got some smudges, don’t forget. Those could be his. Or he coulda remembered to wipe down the hardware but forgotten about the wires. Or he coulda slipped out of his gloves to feel for the wires. That’s fairly common.”
“I’d buy that.”
“Thank you, Mr. Prosecutor. Listen, I can put Wood inside that car. The rest is up to you and yours.”
“No prior assaults,” Dewitt noticed, reading Wood’s arrest sheet. “Nothing violent in his past at all. That doesn’t fit very well with a killer.”
“I noticed that, too,” Ramirez admitted. “So people change. How’s your daughter?”
“Emmy?”
“The one who was hurt.”
“That’s Anna. Not doing well. Still in a coma.”
“If I had a smaller shoe, I could just carry it around in my mouth, Dewitt. It would save me sticking it there. Sorry for asking.”
“No sweat. Emmy’s doing great. Fourteen years old going on forty. She’s been great.”
“I hear ya.”
“Your family?”
“Rosita and I divorced about two years ago now. I live alone with a cat named Beans and a color TV named Sony. You still got your exotic fish? You had the goddamned Sea World in your place, didn’t you?”
“Good memory, Sam. No. Sold them off. Place we’re in now is too small. Too many memories. You know.”
“Yeah. Me, I sold our bed in a garage sale. Every time I climbed in the damn thing… I don’t know. I had to sell it. You understand?”
Dewitt nodded. When Ramirez left the room, he reached for the phone.
The first call was to Buford Nelson, the second to Marvin Wood’s probation officer, the third to the Seaside Police Department.
7
Clare O’Daly hurt because the chair was cheap and uncomfortable. They conserved on the chairs, the tables, the salaries, even the building itself, electing instead to spend the public’s money on chromatograph computers, electron microscopes, and portable lasers. It struck her as odd that the tax-paying public would allow the incidence and severity of crime to exist at present rates, when all it required was money to bring it under control. Law-enforcement agencies suffered from being understaffed, often under-trained, and appallingly underfunded. Clare O’Daly was no politician; she shied away from politics; but she lived in constant amazement that the people would choose to live with crime.
The box sat in front of her. It contained all nonorganic evidence collected during McDuff’s autopsy. Organic evidence—tissue and blood samples—was sent over on packed ice in red Igloo coolers. Clare nurdled her way around the contents of the box, searching for something interesting with which to begin her work. Nurdled was her mother’s term for nosing around, and she thought of her mother now, because her mother did not approve of her current lifestyle. Her mother was a Georgia girl, a Georgia lady through and through, and though Clare had managed to shake the slight accent, she would never shake off the stigma of having pursued man’s work. If her mother had had her way, by now Clare would be pregnant, sitting uncomfortably at the kitchen table, probably a soap opera on the tube while something overcooked in the Crockpot. Her mother called every morning asking about men in her life. For the past few months, they had had little to talk about.
The notes concerning the small vial before her read, “Found beneath index and middle fingernails, right hand.” She unscrewed the top and peered inside at the pale substance. The thing about a homicide investigation, she realized, was that a dozen or so people contributed equally, most of them in a thankless fashion and unseen. The exciting element of any investigation was the teamwork. They were a small chamber orchestra—the medical examiner, the forensic investigator, the lab technicians, the, latent-fingerprint experts, the various cops and patrolmen—autonomous, anonymous, and yet
under the confident direction of the investigator who served as conductor. She liked their conductor a lot. They toiled individually, as she did now, taking a sample of the flaky white substance from the vial and preparing it for the chromatograph, a supermachine that overheated a substance to vapor and then computer-analyzed the gasses to determine chemical composition. The resulting graphs, when compared to those in three-ring reference binders, could reveal not only the identity of a substance but often the manufacturer, as well. This graph led her to the area in the notebook labeled SYNTHETIC RESINS. She moved more slowly through these because the graphs were very similar, finally reaching a page that showed an identical graph to the one on the screen. The substance found beneath McDuff’s fingernails was a low-grade Plexiglas manufactured by Phillips Petroleum.
She filed it all according to the strict procedures required by a court of law. One of the first things a criminalist learned was that, far too often, damning evidence was collected and examined, only to be thrown out by the courts because of some clerical oversight.
Similarities, she had been taught, are an investigator’s signposts. Coincidence did not exist. Because of this, when she came across another vial marked FIBERS COLLECTED FROM EPIDERMIS, she set it aside and began work immediately. From the evidence room down the hall, she removed a sealed petri dish containing the cotton pills found during the autopsy of John Osbourne. Using a comparison microscope that allowed simultaneous viewing of two different items—one dedicated to each eye—she then examined these fibers side by side with those found on Malcolm McDuff. Discovering them to be similar, she decided to run chromatographies on both these samples, as well. Minutes later, she was thumbing through the loose-leaf binders, her heart beating quickly, for this was the true stuff of forensics that often catapulted an investigation from the puzzling to the solvable. To be part of that process…
She abandoned this reference book and sought another, turning quickly through the pages. Slowing now. Nodding. Eyes jerking between the graphs on the screen and those bound in the notebook. None of the pages offered an exact match, but two-thirds of the screen matched perfectly. Dewitt would certainly be interested in this. He would beg for it! At the top of the page it read:
PERMANENT-PRESS BLENDS
COTTON / POLYESTER % = (60/40)
The rest of the graph remained a mystery to her. A familiar chemical compound of some sort, which she couldn’t place. She located yet another reference book of graphs and began turning the pages.
8
“I don’t get it,” Emmy said from the other side of the dinner table. Lean Cuisine lasagna tonight. “Why don’t you just pick this guy up? You’ve got his prints.”
“Legal stuff. I called his PO, his probation officer, and had him call Wood so I would know if he was home or not. He’s home. That’s a problem for me. California’s got this law called People vs. Ramey. It says you can’t arrest a guy in his own home without an arrest warrant having been issued. Normally, all we need to arrest a guy is a good-enough reason… probable cause it’s called. It’s Friday. A big political weekend here. To get an arrest warrant, I would have to get a complaint signed by the DA and walk the complaint through the system; get a judge to sign it. Next to impossible tonight. Tomorrow’s a different story, though it may be easier just to wait for the guy to leave his trailer.”
“That doesn’t seem fair.”
“If the law is fair to one side, it rarely is to the other.”
“And you have to have a warrant?”
“I could arrest him on probable cause, but because of Ramey, I’d probably lose him in court.”
“You want a bagel?”
Dewitt ate. “Seaside’s got the guy’s trailer under surveillance. If Wood steps foot outside that trailer, he’ll be arrested.”
Rusty, sniffing around with his nose to the ground, discovered some fallen crumbs, lapped them up, and then looked to Emmy for more. “Don’t beg,” she told him.
“You look pretty tonight. What are you up to?”
“Spending the night at Briar’s,” she reminded.
“I mean where are you going?”
“The mall. Clarence’ll drive us over and pick us up.”
“Mr. Hindeman. I don’t want you calling him Clarence.”
“He doesn’t care. Why should you?”
“Em, we’ve been over this.”
“Em, we’ve been over this,” she said, imitating him. “Jeez, Dad, what a lame excuse. Just because we’ve been over something—”
“We’ve been over that, too!” he interrupted. “Sorry,” he added.
“You’re uptight because of this case,” she said. “Chill out. You’re going to get this guy.
“You should leave Rusty tonight. He’s looking a little neurotic. Too much time in the back of your car,” she added, petting the dog. “You’re looking a little stressed-out yourself, Dad,” she said, standing and running her hand gently across his temple and pushing his hair behind his ear.
9
Cops are like game on the Serengeti in September: They return to the same water holes. A veteran like Lumbrowski was likely to be found at one of only four or five places.
At eight o’clock, Dewitt spotted Lumbrowski’s Mustang at The Horseshoe, a Seaside watering hole whose flashing sign could be seen for blocks. Dewitt took a piece of butcher paper from the trunk. Usually used to wrap evidence, it would make a good surface for the oil to hit. He slid it under the Mustang’s engine, anchoring it with stones. How long before a drip pattern would be visible?
He returned to the Zephyr and waited, missing Rusty’s company.
Dewitt tried to envision the kills. Did the killer hide inside the victims’ automobiles, lying in wait in a beach parking lot or restaurant? Did he sweet-talk his victims—as many psychopaths did—and manage somehow to gain control over them with little or no violence? Did he rig their cars to break down and then arrive in a tow truck, seemingly to provide assistance, but actually to kill them?
Evidence remained the key. The evidence should, if properly arranged, tell him exactly how these murders had been committed.
Ten minutes. Long enough? He fished the Mag-Lite out of his coat pocket and returned to the Mustang, shining the light beneath the car and seeing two large drops had fallen onto the paper. Similar, he thought, to the ones found at the crime scenes. One drop to go.
Worried that Lumbrowski might stumble on to him for the second time in one night, he checked through a side window. Lumbrowski was sitting at the bar, drinking. Good.
He kept an eye on the big man, checking the butcher paper periodically. After five minutes, Lumbrowski set the glass down heavily and checked the wall clock. Or was it the pay phone? Nervous. Dewitt could feel the man’s anxiety. Dewitt decided Lumbrowski was about to leave. Why else was he so restless? When Lumbrowski rose from the bar stool, Dewitt made his move for the front door.
By the time Dewitt was inside, Lumbrowski was back on the stool and Dewitt realized he’d only gotten up to tug on his pants. Lumbrowski’s bloodshot eyes rolled slowly in his head as he caught Dewitt in the mirror. “Defective Dimwit,” he called out. “Again? Business or displeasure?” Same smoker’s voice, like truck tires on pea gravel.
Dewitt nodded hello to a couple Seaside cops he recognized in a booth. They were camped around a half-empty pitcher of beer.
“How’s your memory?” Dewitt asked.
“Crystal fucking Absolut-ly clear,” Lumbrowski responded, hoisting his iceless vodka. He didn’t sound a bit drunk, but his slow, protracted breathing gave him away.
Dewitt remained standing, just off to Lumbrowski’s right. Bartender asked whether he could get anything for him. Dewitt declined.
“Not even a milk?” Lumbrowski asked. “How about a chocolate milk for you, Dimwit?”
Dewitt glanced absentmindedly at his watch. How the hell was he going to buy himself five to ten minutes? Keep the man thinking. He said softly, “Brow”—an affectionate term others of Lumbrow
ski’s friends used; this caught the man’s attention—“as one cop to another, I think I owe you this.”
“You’re no cop, Dimwit. You’re a nitpicker. Always will be. You don’t know shit.”
“The way it is,” Dewitt continued, “I’m going to take you in for questioning on these homicides.” He thought it noteworthy that Lumbrowski didn’t seem surprised at the use of homicide in place of suicide.
Lumbrowski returned his attention to his glass and brought it to his lips. “You weren’t on duty, I’d knock your fucking teeth out,” the big man said. “What the fuck do you know about investigating a homicide?”
“You want to talk to me now, then we can play this entirely differently. A person volunteering information is a whole other matter.”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about.” He signaled the bartender with a twitch of his index finger. As with a farmer at a livestock auction cuing the auctioneer, the movement would have been lost on anyone other than the bartender. A vodka was delivered. Again the man checked with Dewitt. Again, he declined.
“You know how this works, Howie—”
“Which is more than I can say for you, Dimwit. Get lost.” He checked his watch and began tapping his foot impatiently.
Dewitt continued, “I make the offer this once. Next time, it gets ugly. Of course, you’re used to ugly, I suppose.”
Lumbrowski came off the stool like a bantamweight, lowered his shoulder, and drove at Dewitt like a bull. Dewitt lifted off his feet and landed back first against a table. The four cops came out of their booth in seconds. They hit Lumbrowski in a team tackle. Even so, the former detective dragged them ahead with him as he closed in on Dewitt. Being on duty, Dewitt was forced to either arrest the man on assault charges or get the hell out of there. With a man like Lumbrowski, fighting back was not a smart option. With Lumbrowski still restrained, Dewitt left.
***
The flashlight confirmed he had stalled long enough: an isosceles triangle of motor oil patterned the white paper. Euphoric, he slipped the sheet of paper out from beneath the car and carried it carefully to the Zephyr. Locating a tape measure in the trunk and exposing a few feet of it alongside the drops of oil, he photographed the triangle to scale for future enlargement, the camera’s flashes punctuating the darkness. He placed a sample of the oil into a small vial and labeled it. This done, he sealed the butcher paper in a large plastic bag. He picked up the radio’s hand grip microphone, but then rethinking, decided against it. It would be too risky to mention over the radio the link between the impounding of the Mustang and the murder investigations. If the press picked up on it, he’d have himself a scene. As a precaution, he blocked the Mustang with the Zephyr and then searched for a pay phone.
Probable Cause Page 8
