The Scarecrow

by Michael Connelly

  “We don’t… uh, view it that way,” he began. “The murder of Denise Babbit only served to focus attention on the problems down there. Our actions today—and the arrests—will help make that community a better place to live. There’s no backlash in that. And it’s not the first time we have conducted sweep operations in that area.”

  “Is it the first time you called a press conference about it?” I asked, just to twist him a little.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Grossman said.

  His eyes scanned the room for another hand from a reporter but nobody bailed him out.

  “I have another question,” I said. “In regard to the search warrants evolving from the murder of Denise Babbit, did you find the location where she was allegedly held and murdered after her abduction?”

  Grossman was ready for that with a pass-the-buck answer.

  “That’s not our case. You will have to speak to Santa Monica police or the District Attorney’s Office about that.”

  He seemed pleased with his answer and with stiffing me. I had no further questions and Grossman scanned the room one last time and ended the news conference. I stood near my seat, waiting for Angela Cook to work her way back from the front of the room. I was going to tell her that all I would need from her were her notes on the police chief’s comments. I had everything else covered.

  The uniformed officer who had given me the handout at the door made his way to me first and signaled me to the door on the other side of the room. I knew it led to a side room where some of the equipment used in presenting the graphics during press conferences was housed.

  “Lieutenant Minter wants to show you something,” the officer said.

  “Good,” I said. “I wanted to ask him something.”

  We went through the door and Minter was there waiting for me, sitting on the corner of a desk, his posture ramrod straight. A handsome man with a trim body, smooth coffee skin, perfect diction and a ready smile, Minter was in charge of the Media Relations Office. It was an important job in the LAPD but one that always confounded me. Why would any cop—after getting the training and the gun and the badge—want to work in media relations, where zero police work was ever done? I knew the job put you on TV almost every night and got your name in the paper all the time, but it wasn’t cop work.

  “Hey, Jack,” Minter said to me in a friendly manner as we shook hands.

  I immediately acted like I had called for the meeting.

  “Hey, Lieutenant. Thanks for seeing me. I was wondering if I could get a mug shot of the suspect named Hicks for my story.”

  Minter nodded.

  “No problem, he’s an adult. You want any others?”

  “No, probably just him. They don’t like running mug shots, so I probably will only be able to use one, if I’m lucky.”

  “It’s funny that you want a photo of Hicks.”

  “Why?”

  He reached behind his back to the desk and brought around a file. He opened it and handed me an 8 × 10 photo. It was a surveillance shot with police codes in the lower right frame. It was of me handing Darnell Hicks the fifty dollars he had charged me in street tax the day before. I immediately noted how grainy the shot was and knew it had been taken from a distance and at a low angle. Remembering the parking lot where the payoff had taken place, I knew I had been in the heart of the Rodia projects and the only way the shot could have been taken was if it had been taken from inside one of the surrounding apartment buildings. I now knew what Grossman had meant by community support and cooperation. At least one resident in Rodia had allowed them to use an apartment as a surveillance post.

  I held the photo up.

  “Are you giving me this for my scrapbook?”

  “No, I was just wondering if you can tell me about it. If you have a problem, Jack, I can help.”

  He had a phony smile on his face. And I was smart enough to know what was happening. He was trying to squeeze me. A photo out of context like this could certainly send the wrong message if leaked to a boss or competitor. But I smiled right back.

  “What do you want, Lieutenant?”

  “We don’t want to stir up controversy where there isn’t any needed, Jack. Like with this photo. It could have several different meanings. Why go there?”

  The point was clear. Lay off the community backlash angle. Minter and the command staff above him knew that the Times set the table as far as what was news in this town. The TV channels and everybody else followed its lead. If it could be controlled or at least contained, then the rest of the local media would fall in line.

  “I guess you didn’t get the memo,” I said. “I’m out. I got a pink slip on Friday, Lieutenant, so there isn’t anything you can do to me. I’m down to my last two weeks. So if you want to send this picture to somebody at the paper, I would send it to Dorothy Fowler, the city editor. But it’s not going to change who I talk to on this story or what I write. Besides that, do the narcs down in South Bureau know you’re showing their surveillance shots around like this? I mean, this is dangerous, Lieutenant.”

  I held the photo up so he could see it now.

  “More than what it says about me, it says your drug team had a setup inside somebody’s apartment in Rodia. If that gets out, those Crips down there will probably go on a witch hunt. You remember what happened up on Blythe Street a couple years ago, don’t you?”

  Minter’s smile froze on his face as I watched his eyes go over the memory. Three years earlier the police had conducted a similar peep-and-sweep operation at a Latino gang–operated drive-through drug market on Blythe Street in Van Nuys. When surveillance photos of drug deals were turned over to lawyers defending those arrested, the gang soon figured out what apartment the shots had been taken from. One night the apartment was firebombed and a sixty-year-old woman was burned to death in her bed. The police department didn’t get much positive media attention out of it and I thought Minter was suddenly reliving the fiasco.

  “I gotta go write,” I said. “I’ll go down to media relations and pick up the mug shot on my way out. Thanks, Lieutenant.”

  “Okay, Jack,” he said routinely, as if the subterranean context of our conversation had not existed. “Hope to see you again before you go.”

  I stepped through the door back into the press conference room. Some of the cameramen were still there, packing up their equipment. I looked around for Angela Cook but she hadn’t waited for me.

  After picking up the mug shot of Darnell Hicks I walked back to the Times building and up to the third-floor newsroom. I didn’t bother checking in because I had already sent my editor a budget line on the drug sweep story. I planned to make some calls and flesh it out before I went back to Prendo and tried to convince him it was a story that ought to go out front on the home page as well as the print edition.

  The 928-page printout of the Winslow confession as well as the other documents I’d sent to the copy shop were waiting for me on my desk. I sat down and had to resist the urge to immediately dive into the confession. But I pushed the six-inch stack to the side and went to the computer. I opened my address book on the screen and looked up the number for the Reverend William Treacher. He was the head of a South L.A. association of ministers and was always good for a viewpoint contrary to that of the LAPD.

  I had just picked up the phone to call Preacher Treacher, as he was informally known by his flock as well as the local media, when I felt a presence hovering over me and looked up to see Alan Prendergast.

  “Didn’t you get my message?” he asked.

  “No, I just got back and wanted to call Preacher Treacher before everybody else did. What’s up?”

  “I wanted to talk about your story.”

  “Didn’t you get the budget line I sent? Let me make this call real quick and then I might have more to add to it.”

  “Not today’s story, Jack. Cook’s already putting it together. I want to hear about your long-term story. We have the futures meeting in ten minutes.”

  “Wai
t a minute. What do you mean Cook’s already putting today’s story together?”

  “She’s writing it up. She came back from the press conference and said you were working together on it. She already called Treacher, too. Got good stuff.”

  I held back on telling him that Cook and I weren’t supposed to be working together on it. It was my story and I’d told her so.

  “So whadaya got, Jack? It’s related to today’s thing, right?”

  “Sort of, yeah.”

  I was still stunned by Cook’s move. Competition within the news-room is common. I just hadn’t expected her to be so bold as to lie her way onto a story.

  “Jack? I don’t have much time.”

  “Uh, right. Yeah, it’s about the murder of Denise Babbit—but from the killer’s angle. It’s about how sixteen-year-old Alonzo Winslow came to be charged with murder.”

  Prendo nodded.

  “You have the goods?”

  By “the goods,” I knew he was asking if I had direct access. He wouldn’t be interested in a story with police said used as attribution everywhere. He wouldn’t want to see the word allegedly anywhere near this piece if he was going to try to give it a good ride on the futures budget. He wanted a crime feature, a story that went behind the basic news everybody already had and rocked the reader’s world with gritty reality. He wanted breadth and depth, the hallmark features of any Times story.

  “I have a direct line in. I’ve got the kid’s grandmother and his lawyer, and I’m probably going to see the kid tomorrow.”

  I pointed to the freshly printed stack of documents on my desk.

  “And that’s the pot of gold. His nine-hundred-page confession. I shouldn’t have it but I do. And nobody else will get it.”

  Prendo nodded with approval and I could tell he was thinking, trying to come up with a way to sell the story in the meeting or make it better. He backed out of the cubicle, grabbed a nearby chair and pulled it over.

  “I’ve got an idea, Jack,” he said as he sat down and leaned toward me.

  He was using my name too much and the leaning into my personal space was uncomfortable and seemed completely phony since he had never done it with me before. I didn’t like the way this was going.

  “What is it, Alan?”

  “What if it wasn’t just about how a boy became a murderer? What if it was also about how a girl became a murder victim?”

  I thought about it for a moment and slowly nodded. And that was my mistake, because when you start by saying yes, it becomes hard to put the brakes on and say no.

  “It’s just going to take me more time when I split the focus of the story like that.”

  “No, it won’t because you won’t have to split your focus. You stay with that kid and give us a kick-ass story. We’ll put Cook on the vic and she’ll cover that angle. Then you, Jack, weave both strands together and we’ve got a column-one story.”

  Column one on the front page was reserved each day for the signature story of the paper. The best-written piece, the one with the most impact, the long-term project—if the story was good enough, it went out front, above the fold and in column one. I wondered if Prendergast knew he was taunting me. In seven years with the Times I had never had a column-one story. In more than two thousand days on the beat, I had never come up with the best piece of the day. He was waving the possibility of going out the door with a column-one at me like a big fat carrot.

  “Did she give you this idea?”

  “Who?”

  “Who do you think? Cook.”

  “No, man, I just thought of it. Right now. What do you think?”

  “I’m wondering who’s going to cover the cop shop while we’re both running with this.”

  “Well, you both can trade off on it. Like you’ve been doing. And I can probably get some help from time to time from the GA group. Even if it was just you on this, I couldn’t cut you loose completely, anyway.”

  Whenever general assignment reporters were pulled in to work the crime beat, the resulting stories were usually superficial and by the numbers. It wasn’t the way to cover the beat, but what did I care anymore? I had eleven days left and that was it.

  I didn’t believe Prendergast for a moment and was not swayed by his column-one overture. But I was smart enough to know that his suggestion—whether truly his or Angela Cook’ s—could lead to a better story. And it had a better chance of doing what I wanted it to do.

  “We could call it ‘The Collision,’” I said. “The point where these two—killer and victim—came together and how they got there.”

  “Perfect!” Prendergast exclaimed.

  He stood up, smiling.

  “I’ll wing it in the meeting, but why don’t you and Cook put your heads together and give me something for the budget by the end of the day? I’m going to tell them you’ll turn the story in by the end of the week.”

  I thought about that. It was not a lot of time but it was doable, and I knew I could get more days if needed.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Good,” he said. “I gotta go.”

  He headed on to his meeting. In a carefully worded e-mail I invited Angela to meet me in the cafeteria to get a cup of coffee. I gave no indication that I was upset with or suspicious of her. She responded immediately, saying she would meet me there in fifteen minutes.

  Now that I was free of the daily story and had fifteen minutes to fill, I pulled the stack back over to the center of the desk and started reading the confession of Alonzo Winslow.

  The interview was conducted by the lead detectives Gilbert Walker and William Grady at the Santa Monica Police Department beginning at eleven A.M., Sunday, April 26, about three hours after Winslow had been taken into custody. The transcript was in Q&A format with very little description added. It was easy and fast to read, the questions and answers mostly short at first. Back and forth like Ping-Pong.

  They began by reading Winslow his rights and having the sixteen-year-old acknowledge that he understood them. Then they went through a series of questions employed at the start of interviews with juveniles. These were designed to elicit his knowledge of right and wrong. Once that was established, Winslow became fair game.

  For his part, Winslow fell victim to ego and the oldest flaw in the human book. He thought he could outsmart them. He thought he could talk his way out of it and maybe pick up some inside information about their investigation. So he readily agreed to talk to them—what innocent kid wouldn’t?—and they played him like a three-string bass guitar. Dum-de-dum-de-dumb. Getting every implausible explanation and outright lie on record.

  I breezed through the first two hundred pages, skipping page after page of Winslow’s denials of knowing anything or seeing anything pertaining to Denise Babbit’s murder. Then, in very casual conversation, the detectives turned the questions toward Winslow’s whereabouts on the night in question, obviously trying to get either facts or lies on the record, because either way they would be helpful to the case—a fact was a marker that could help them navigate through the interview; a lie could be used like a club on Winslow when revealed.

  Winslow told them that he was at home sleeping and his “moms”—Wanda Sessums—could vouch for him. He continually denied any knowledge of Denise Babbit, repeatedly rejected knowing her or anything about her abduction and murder. He held up like a rock, but then on page 305 the detectives started lying to him and setting traps.

  WALKER: That’s not going to work, Alonzo. You gotta give us something here. You can’t just sit there and say no, no, no, I don’t know anything, and expect to walk out of here. We know you know something. I mean, we know it, son.

  WINSLOW: You don’t know shit. I ain’t ever seen that girl you been talking about.

  WALKER: Really? Then how come we got you on tape dropping her car in that parking lot by the beach?

  WINSLOW: What tape you got?

  WALKER: The one of the parking lot. We got you getting out of that car and nobody else goes near it until th
ey find the body in it. That puts this whole thing on you, man.

  WINSLOW: Nah, it ain’t me. I didn’t do this.

  As far as I knew from the discovery documents the defense lawyer had given me, there was no video that showed the victim’s Mazda being left in the parking lot. But I also knew that the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld the legality of the police’s lying to a suspect if the lie would reasonably be seen as such by an innocent person. By spinning everything off the one piece of evidence they did have—Winslow’s fingerprint on the rearview mirror—they were within bounds of this guideline and they were leading Winslow down the path.

  I once wrote a story about an interrogation where the detectives showed the suspect an evidence bag containing the gun used in the murder. It wasn’t the real murder weapon. It was an exact duplicate. But when the suspect saw it, he copped to the crime because he figured the police had found all the evidence. A murderer was caught but I didn’t feel too good about it. It never seemed right or fair to me that the representatives of our government were allowed to employ lies and tricks—just like the bad guys—with full approval of the Supreme Court.

  I read on, skimming another hundred or so pages, until my cell phone rang. I looked at the screen and realized I had read right through my coffee meeting with Angela.

  “Angela? Sorry, I got tied up. I’m coming right down.”

  “Please hurry. I need to finish today’s story.”

  I hustled down the steps to the first-floor cafeteria and joined her at a table without getting any coffee. I was twenty minutes late and I saw her cup was empty. On the table next to it was a stack of paper turned print-side down.

  “You want another latte?”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “Okay.”

  I looked around. It was midafternoon and the cafeteria was almost empty.

  “Jack, what’s up? I need to get back upstairs.”

  I looked directly at her.

  “I just wanted to tell you face-to-face that I didn’t appreciate you guzzling today’s story. The beat is technically still mine, and I told you I wanted this story because it set up the bigger one I’m working on.”