Fractured Justice

by James A. Ardaiz

  Right. Better sometimes not to ask, Jamison thought. Law enforcement was something of a subculture of barter and exchange that traded in information and favors. Everybody kept a mental list and was expected to collect at some time and to reciprocate when needed. The only rule was that you didn’t take advantage and you didn’t burn your source. If there was heat, then you took it yourself.

  The house was in an upper-income residential area, with large, mature trees on spacious lots. Jamison looked around to see if anybody was outside the home. This was the kind of neighborhood where their cars would attract attention very quickly. O’Hara parked down the street away from the home, right behind Puccinelli, who was waiting for them.

  “What we got?” Pooch asked as he climbed in the back seat of O’Hara’s car.

  “Here’s what,” O’Hara replied. “We know there’s a history between St. Claire and Garrett and we also know that according to her parents he’s done something like this before. We haven’t got time for a warrant so either we get in by bullshitting St. Claire or get in the hard way, straight through the door, and let the result be the justification.”

  Jamison’s expression was impassive as O’Hara continued outlining the rest of the plan to Puccinelli. “My thinking is that I go to the door and see if he answers. I’ll try to get him to talk and get some sense of his reaction.” O’Hara’s directions to Pooch were specific. “You go look around the side of the house and see what there is. If he has her in there maybe you can see something.”

  Pooch nodded, accepting the plan. But he stated his reservations. “If St. Claire’s got that girl in there, I don’t know how he could do it without somebody seeing something or hearing something, especially in this neighborhood. I’ll look around the back, but I’m betting he isn’t there.”

  “Understood,” said O’Hara. “But we got nothing else so we go with this.”

  “You think we should try the phone?” Pooch asked.

  There was a split-second pause. “No phone,” O’Hara replied. “Unless he doesn’t answer the door, then I think we try the phone.”

  Jamison experienced a sinking feeling that all this was taking too much time. A furtive peek at his watch told him it was already past 2 p.m. They were going around in circles that they couldn’t seem to close. “You guys do what you have to do. I’ll wait in the car.” Jamison knew that was the best place for him to be.

  As O’Hara walked up to the house, he instinctively reached behind his back to adjust the automatic he had pulled from his briefcase and pushed inside his belt at the small of his back. He wasn’t overly worried about a physical confrontation but neither was he certain how this situation would develop. Because St. Claire was a doctor, unless he panicked, there was a strong chance he would use his brain first. But if St. Claire opened the door to a gun-holding O’Hara, everything could quickly go to hell.

  Nobody answered his knock on the heavy front door. O’Hara waited and knocked again. The drapes and windows were closed and there was nothing to indicate anybody was home. Out of the corner of his eye he caught Puccinelli slipping down the side of the house. He knocked again. No answer. O’Hara walked across the yard and saw Puccinelli heading back to the driveway. “Anything?”

  “The whole place is closed up tight. All the drapes are closed. I couldn’t see anything. It doesn’t look like anybody’s in there, Bill.”

  O’Hara hurried back to his car and shook his head in response to Jamison’s questioning expression. After he spoke with the dispatcher, he told Jamison, “The thing that’s giving me an itch is this doesn’t make any sense. This guy’s a doctor but nobody really knows where he lives, and nobody seems to be able to reach him except through a medical exchange. That tells me this SOB doesn’t want anybody to know where to find him. Everything’s now telling me for sure that when we find him, we find her.”

  “Bill?” Jamison’s expression showed his question before the words came out.

  O’Hara knew the younger man was thinking about how much time they had left. His voice softened slightly. “Matt, in this business you do the best you can. You use your gut and your sense of smell and whatever else tells you to react; then you hang on to your ass and go. We go with what we got. Everything else will happen or not happen in a matter of minutes or seconds when the shit hits the fan.”

  He had been there before, and O’Hara just didn’t want to be there again like those other times when he had been too late. In his gut he could feel that the too late hour might already have passed.

  Pooch’s car pulled next to theirs within a minute. “What now?”

  They needed to put somebody on the house to watch it in case St. Claire showed up, or in case he was actually in there and tried to leave. But O’Hara didn’t think either one was going to happen. Nothing about the house told him that it was used on a regular basis. They could insist that St. Claire be called through the medical exchange but that wouldn’t assure a response, and then St. Claire would know that police wanted to talk to him.

  “Put somebody on the house to watch it, Pooch.” O’Hara pulled out, with Pooch right behind him.

  They drove to the nearest convenience store two blocks away to confer on what to do next. Before leaving the car O’Hara called Ernie, filling him in and asking him to make a call to somebody whose name Jamison didn’t recognize. Then O’Hara removed his little book from his coat pocket, quickly scanning through phone numbers, addresses, and notations crammed on the sides and tops of each page. When he found what he wanted he got out of the car and made another call on his cell phone. Jamison could see him speaking rapidly and gesturing while talking. Whatever he was asking it was clear by his body language that he wasn’t getting it easily. Then he visibly relaxed and returned to the car.

  “This is going to take a minute,” he told Jamison.

  As soon as his cell phone rang, O’Hara was out of the car again. Jamison could see him writing furiously in his little book while he kept the phone jammed between his ear and his shoulder. He then made another quick call and stashed the phone back in his pocket. Puccinelli was standing next to the open passenger window talking to Jamison when O’Hara returned waving a piece of paper.

  “Ernie called in a marker at the power company. I just talked to his contact. We got an address for our boy and it’s out in the country. He may not have to tell anybody where he is, but if you want electric lights you got to tell the power company where to put the plug.”

  Obviously, Ernie and O’Hara had gone through a back channel and gotten billing information that was usually confidential. Every cop knew other cops who had retired and took specialized security jobs. But contacts were maintained and information was traded freely by the underground blue fraternity that surreptitiously bypassed legal impediments they considered irritating. Jamison had a momentary flush of guilt that he was so easily willing to overlook how the information was obtained.

  O’Hara slid back into the driver’s seat. “Okay, we got a house and I’m betting it’s going to have a lot of room around it. Ernie will meet us.”

  Puccinelli was right behind them as O’Hara pushed his way into traffic, popped on his blue flashing lights in the back, and turned the side red light on. It didn’t mean people would pull over but most of them would get out of the way of two cars with flashing lights.

  Jamison tightened his seat belt as O’Hara began taking hard corners, slowing down only enough to check for oncoming traffic. He was waiting for O’Hara to say something about backup but O’Hara stayed off the radio. He was confident of O’Hara’s judgment but still felt compelled to ask, “Bill, are we going to call for backup officers?”

  “Look, Boss”—O’Hara didn’t take his eyes off the road, but Jamison could feel them boring through him anyway—“we don’t know if that girl is with him or even if he’s the guy we want. We call for backup and the press is going to be right behind them. You ramp up an assault on the house and you ramp up the possibility of somebody getting hurt, and that includes
the Garrett girl. So we aren’t going to do that. We can’t prove he has Garrett without finding her, and we can’t do that without finessing this asshole doctor out.”

  He stole a quick glance at Jamison and went on. “We can wait an hour for a bunch of SWAT boys to dress up in their little black ninja suits so they look good going in, which gives us one less hour if somebody else has that girl, or we try to control one man before he can turn it into a hostage situation and everything turns into a shitstorm.”

  Jamison was aware of O’Hara’s notorious contempt for people who had to dress up before they did their job, which meant that SWAT was constantly fodder for his jibes. O’Hara was old-school. “You go in and you kick ass, period. You don’t need a special uniform to do any of that.” With that, O’Hara reached for another cigar.

  Truth was, what O’Hara said made sense to Jamison. If Elizabeth Garrett was in there, St. Claire would keep the girl to trade, and that would allow them to regroup if indeed they had a hostage situation. With Ernie Garcia on the way that would give them three investigators with guns to handle the situation until backup arrived, but it wouldn’t look like an army.

  He was only window dressing, and that was fine with Jamison if it helped to lend credibility to their story that they needed information about drug interaction and Gupta had recommended St. Claire as the source.

  They hadn’t figured out the explanation for how they got his address, but they were counting on their appearance putting St. Claire enough off-balance that he wouldn’t ask that question until after they had gotten the situation under control. Still, Jamison worried. “Bill, what happens if it turns into a shitstorm?”

  O’Hara turned his face from the road momentarily to look straight at Jamison. “Then we call for backup if we have time, and if we don’t have time, then we do what we have to do to make sure that girl doesn’t die.”

  “And if we’re wrong?”

  “Matt, sometimes there’s no right or wrong, there’s just now. You make a decision and nobody’s going to care about why until it’s all over. They’re only going to care about the consequences. There’s always somebody who thinks they would have done it differently, but they never seem to be somebody who has ever actually done it at all.”

  O’Hara paused. “The moment you pull a trigger it’s always when you have the least amount of time to think. After you pull the trigger, everybody has a lot of time to think. The difference is that you’re the guy that has to pull the trigger. You’ll never know if it might have turned out differently if you had only waited another second. The people who think you should have waited longer are almost always people who don’t have to do the waiting.”

  Neither man said anything else the rest of the way.

  The man turned back toward Elizabeth when her body movement rustled the bed she was lying on. He stared at the nude woman stretched on the bed before him, his eyes flat pebbles of obsidian as he took in the cream-washed smoothness of her skin and the frame of long hair he had so carefully arranged en tableau. He held a camera in his hand that he seemed to be adjusting. An empty camera tripod was standing several feet from the foot of the bed. He smiled tenderly.

  “Would you like some water? You must be thirsty.” He fastened the camera to the tripod. “I’ll get you some water, and then we can begin. I’m almost ready now.”

  He reached out and slowly ran his hand up her naked thigh, the touch so light that she could only feel the transfer of heat from the tips of his finger on her cool flesh. It was the caress of a lover. He leaned down near her, sensing the tension as she stared at him. His voice a whisper. “Life is enough of a solitary journey for people like us, Elizabeth. We should be grateful our paths have crossed again.”

  Chapter 11

  O’Hara drove past the house belonging to St. Claire according to the power company records. They needed to get a sense of what they were up against. The small wooden farmhouse had seen better years, the wooden siding in need of paint, the Valley sun having relentlessly bleached the color into a dry memory of what it had once been. It had very little around it except high grass in an unused pasture. A dark blue Lexus O’Hara recognized as registered to St. Claire stood parked near the front entry. There was a garage attached to the two-story structure. The long access driveway made it difficult to approach the house without being heard and seen. It couldn’t be helped.

  They regrouped a quarter mile away to decide on a plan. Ernie Garcia rolled up behind Puccinelli and joined them. Ernie pulled his stocky frame from his unmarked car, giving a quick nod to the waiting men.

  Quickly formulating a strategy to approach the house, O’Hara understood it was a bad situation because they were facing so many unknowns. It could be nothing or it could be a mess. They could end up with a dead victim and everything they did would be questioned. But if they did nothing and ended up with a dead victim, everything they didn’t do would also be questioned.

  He began giving directions. Puccinelli would wait at the front of the gravel driveway where he could keep an eye on the house and block any attempt at escape as well as act as backup. Ernie would come across the pasture area from the side while O’Hara and Jamison approached from the front. O’Hara would distract St. Claire while Ernie tried to look in through a window. There was no time for a more sophisticated approach. If Garrett was alive inside this house every minute was critical.

  O’Hara counted on years of experience and his gut sense to tell him what was going on with St. Claire. He could smell fear and nervousness on a man as it seeped soundlessly from his body. Watching the eyes of a man, the way he talked or moved his hands or sweated, O’Hara would know if there was something there, and in the end, O’Hara would always go with his gut.

  It was risky and they all knew it. O’Hara paused and let what was unsaid sink in. He was willing to lay it on the line using all his instincts, and he was willing to accept the consequences. He wanted to see it in their faces that they were willing to go with his judgment.

  His voice became very quiet as he said, “Matt, you can stay out here with Pooch or you can go with me. If you go with me, then I think you better take that gun out of your briefcase. Don’t shoot yourself, and you better not shoot me in the ass if you come in behind me. And take that badge you’ve got next to your driver’s license and put it out where it can be seen.”

  While Jamison was thinking that he had never learned about this kind of thing in law school, the other men were looking at him, waiting to see how he would respond.

  He looked straight at O’Hara. “I’m with you, Bill.”

  Despite the words he had just uttered, an alarm went off in Jamison’s mind like a church bell. What part of this seems like a good idea?

  He reached in the back seat of the car and opened his briefcase; the blue-black nine-millimeter automatic gleamed dully as the opened lid let in a flash of sunlight. He pulled the weapon out, checked the safety, and pushed in the slightly ejected clip before pulling back the slide and chambering a round. He could sense the others watching him.

  It had always been enough to know that he had a loaded clip but no round was chambered so he couldn’t accidentally shoot himself. Now the only thing between shooting himself or somebody else was the safety on the automatic, which he again fingered to make sure it was on.

  Jamison was scared, but he also knew what he was most afraid of was failing in the eyes of the three men who were with him. He sensed a sour taste rising from the back of his mouth and swallowed several times to force the bile down. The automatic felt heavy as he held it, and then he pushed it into the back of his pants. As the others walked to their cars, Jamison asked O’Hara, “Okay, Bill. What’re we going to say?”

  “I’m going to say that we need to ask him some questions about the effects of heroin and barbiturates on people and that Gupta recommended him. You stay in the car, in front of the house, so he can see you. He wouldn’t expect a lawyer to come out here if we were going to arrest him, so you just smile when he loo
ks out. And keep the window rolled down while I’m at the door. I’ll scratch my head and you’ll know I think he’s got her. I’ll keep talking and you wait. If all hell breaks loose, then you get on that radio.”

  The adrenaline was pumping through his system and Jamison could feel his heart racing. He was trying to listen to O’Hara and at the same time he felt the bulge of the automatic at the back of his pants. This wasn’t at all the same as at the gun range. He had to ask. “Why do I keep the window down?”

  The response was clipped. “So you won’t get glass in your face if somebody shoots at you and you won’t have to shoot through glass if you do need to use that gun you’ve kept stuck in your lawyer’s briefcase.” The older man softened his voice. “Matt, you’re going to be just fine but remember, you don’t have to do this. You can go with Pooch.”

  Trying to sound more confident than he felt, Jamison said, “I’ll stay with you.”

  O’Hara gave a nod of acknowledgment. “Just keep your eyes on me and remember Pooch is back there and Ernie’s on the side. Make sure before you do anything that you know who it is that’s in front of you, and remember, you shoot me with that thing and you’re really going to be sorry.” He wasn’t smiling.

  The tires made a crunching sound on the scattered gravel covering the driveway. Neither man said a word as they rolled to a stop. As O’Hara got out he glanced back directly at Jamison. “Remember to roll down the window.”

  O’Hara walked rapidly to the front door, looked to see if there was a doorbell, and then knocked, quickly stepping back and to the side. He waited and then stepped up and knocked again, calling out St. Claire’s name. “Dr. St. Claire? This is Bill O’Hara from the district attorney’s office. Dr. Gupta said you could answer some questions we have. You here?” He started pounding again on the door. After a moment O’Hara glanced back at Jamison and made a slight head gesture to indicate that somebody was coming to the front of the house.