by Mike Markel
“Where is he?” I shouted.
“He’s in a back bedroom. He’s pushing furniture against the door.”
“Get out of here.” I pulled my phone out of my jacket pocket, called in Officer Down and requested backup at Jared Higley’s address.
I went over to Ryan. His breathing was short and rapid, and his eyes looked glassy. He wasn’t focusing on me. His left hand covered the wound in his abdomen, but blood was seeping out between his fingers. His pistol was in his right hand.
“How’d you know he might take a shot at us?”
“Amber’s at his house, she might have told him we got his sneakers.”
“I’m going in,” I said.
“No, don’t, Karen.” He was trying to shake his head, but he could barely keep it from flopping to the side. “Backup will be five minutes, tops.”
“He killed Maricel, just shot you.”
His voice was a hoarse whisper. “That’s one dead already. You go in, one or two more … going to die.”
I smiled at him. “You’re such a pussy.”
He tried to smile, but I saw his eyelids starting to droop.
His left hand was slipping away from the wound. I pushed it back in place. “Stay with me, Ryan. Just one more minute.” I heard the sirens coming in from a couple of directions. A man and a woman from the block had materialized on the sidewalk in front of Higley’s yard. “Get back in your houses, now,” I shouted to them. “There’s a gunman in this house. Go, now.”
Ryan’s eyes were dull. I had my coat off and was holding it against his midsection. “Here comes the backup and ambulance. Hang in there, partner.” He reached for my hand and tried to squeeze it, but he had the strength of a baby.
“One more minute, Ryan,” I said into his ear. I was losing it. I couldn’t see through my tears. I felt for a pulse on his neck. There was nothing. I held his nose closed with my left hand and tried to breathe into his mouth but I couldn’t even get my own breathing under control.
I didn’t hear the ambulance come, but I heard a voice. “We got him, Detective.”
An EMT, a big, broad guy in a green uniform, put his hand on my shoulder and pulled me away. “Let us get in there, Detective.” I fell over on my side. I was crying out of control now, and I tried to crawl away from Ryan so the EMTs could get to him. I bumped into a bicycle, which fell over onto me, but I didn’t feel it.
One EMT was hunched over Ryan. Another one was yanking a gurney up the steps onto the porch.
Things went black. When I came to, maybe a few seconds later, I was on the ratty couch on the porch. I saw the chief’s big Buick blocking the street, and a couple of squad cars, their lights blazing.
The chief was bent over the gurney, saying something to Ryan. The EMTs had him on some kind of drip suspended from a metal pole on the side of the gurney. They strapped the belts on the gurney and started to carry Ryan down the steps toward the ambulance.
The chief came over to me. “You okay?”
“Is he gonna make it?”
The chief shrugged his shoulders, but his expression said he just didn’t want to say no.
The uniforms on scene had already cordoned off the block and surrounded the house. There must’ve been ten squad cars on the street. You put out a call that an officer’s down, every squad car within ten miles hits the siren and descends on the address. It doesn’t matter which cop is down; they don’t know and don’t care. We just really don’t like it when someone shoots a cop.
Our policy is to bring in the SWAT guys whenever we know someone is armed and holed up in a building. Since we were making so much noise, with all the sirens and the bullhorns telling people to stay in their houses, I imagine Jared was shitting bricks in that back bedroom, and we probably could’ve talked him into walking out with his hands up in a couple minutes. But the chief made the decision not to make contact with Jared until the SWAT guys arrived. Which was probably smart since this was a residential neighborhood: better to keep Jared bottled up until the SWAT team could neutralize him quickly.
One of the uniforms told me that there was a screen missing on the window in the bedroom where Jared was holed up. So I intercepted the SWAT guys when they arrived and told them about it. It was a piece of cake: they busted the window and tossed in a tear-gas canister. He came running out in a couple seconds. I was there to greet him, the barrel of my pistol up against his face. He didn’t look any the worse for wear.
Chapter 39
“Okay, what kind of shit is this kid in?” Larry Klein said. The chief had called the prosecutor over to headquarters to help us figure out how to charge Jared Higley.
Klein had come to Rawlings about fifteen years ago, from Philadelphia, where he had been some sort of assistant to the prosecutor. He was a little guy, maybe a hundred and forty pounds, mostly gristle and beard stubble. He always looked like he needed a shave, even though he’s told me he shaves twice a day. Once I asked him why he always wore what appeared to be the same black suit, white shirt, and black tie, with a small tie clip. “So you don’t confuse me with Brad Pitt,” he said.
All the cops liked him because he had a really high conviction rate and because he didn’t treat us like we’re stupid or hicks, even when we acted that way.
“Karen, you want to brief Larry?” the chief said.
“The main case is Maricel Salizar, which you already know about. Then there’s two other things that’ve happened since then. First, Higley threw a couple shots at my house in the middle of the night, last week. Nobody hurt. Then, this afternoon, my partner and I go over to Higley’s place to bring him in for questioning, he takes two shots at us. One hits my partner.” I had some trouble getting that last sentence out smooth. “I want this guy to get the needle.”
“Well, let’s see what we’ve got.” Larry shifted in his seat. “He did those things, I want him to get the maximum sentence, too.”
“How do we do that?”
“We start by you telling me the story, and I ask you some questions,” Klein said.
“Okay, Larry,” the chief said. “What do you need to know?”
“Let’s start with the easy one: today’s shooting. He took two shots at you, one hit Ryan. That right?”
The chief looked at me and nodded, telling me to answer him.
“That’s right,” I said.
“Are you sure it was Higley fired the shots?”
“There were only two people in the house: Higley and his ex-girlfriend, Amber Cunningham. She goes to tell him we’re there to talk to him, we hear her scream, two shots are fired, she comes running out of the house. When the SWAT team tosses the tear gas into the room, he’s the one comes out, with a goddamn .45 in his right hand. Yeah, I think that one’s pretty solid.”
“Do you have forensics?”
The chief said, “We’re doing a gunshot-residue test on him right now.”
“Okay,” Larry Klein said. “Do we know Higley knew who it was came to see him?”
“Jesus Christ, Larry,” I said. “You saying he took a couple shots at us because he thought we were Girl Scouts and he doesn’t like cookies?”
“Karen,” Larry said, “I understand you’re upset—”
“What was your first clue?”
“Detective, knock it off,” the chief said, giving me a real nasty look.
“It makes a difference,” Larry said. “It goes to motive. If the girlfriend told him you were cops, we can go with attempted murder of a police officer, two counts. If the girlfriend told him something else, or he understood her to say something else, it could be attempted murder, or unlawful use of a weapon, or a bunch of other things.”
The chief turned to me. “Will the girlfriend testify that she told Higley you two were police officers?”
I let out a big breath. “Shit, I don’t know. She knows he’s bad news. Last week she told us she was breaking up with him, but she didn’t follow through. Today she told us she was over at his house to pick up some things. I ha
ve no fucking idea what’s going on in her head.”
“Karen,” the chief said, “is it possible he thought he was firing at someone else?”
I sighed. “If he was trying to frame Hector Cruz for the Salizar murder, it’s possible he thought it was Cruz at the door. Or some gang bangers from the Latin Vice Lords. Actually, no, it’s not possible he thought that. But I guess it’s possible his lawyer could say he thought that.”
“Thank you, Karen,” Larry Klein said. He smiled sadly. “Now you’re helping me figure out what to do with this guy.” He jotted a few notes on a pad in his lap. “About the drive-by. What have you got on Higley there?”
“We have two slugs we pulled out of my house from last week. From a .45. Today he shot at me and Ryan with a .45. If ballistics matches those rounds, we’ve got him on that.”
“Where are you on the ballistics?”
“The two rounds from Karen’s house have pretty good markings,” the chief said. “We’ll get the round out of Ryan. We’ll do some test firings downstairs today.”
Larry wrote some more on his pad. “Tell me your case for Higley killing Maricel Salizar.”
“We think what happened is Higley got into an argument with Maricel after Amber, his girlfriend, discovered Higley in a three-way with Maricel and her boyfriend, Hector Cruz—”
“Jesus,” Larry said. He winced. “We’re going to put the victim in a three-way?”
“Way I see it, Larry,” I said, “it was Maricel who put herself in a three-way.”
“Go ahead,” he said. “Higley and Maricel get in an argument. How does she end up dead?”
“Higley stabs her.”
“You got forensics or a witness?”
I looked at the chief. He shook his head. “No,” I said. “Not yet. We know the three stab wounds killed her, but we can’t put the knife in Higley’s hands. But we’re gonna toss Higley’s place, right, Chief?”
“Top to bottom,” he said.
“Is Higley extremely stupid,” Larry said, “as in he stabs her and keeps the knife, or just moderately stupid, as in stabs her and tosses the knife?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m afraid he might just be moderately stupid.”
“Okay, there’s no witness. How do you know it was him stabbed her in the first place?”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out his black earring. “Here’s how we know.” I handed it to Larry.
He turned it over in his fingers, a puzzled look on his face. “What the hell is this?”
“It’s the earring from his right ear,” I said.
“All right,” Larry said. He raised his eyebrow like he didn’t quite see how that thing could be an earring. “Good. You got blood, prints, what?”
“No, nothing on it.”
Larry looked at me and put his hands out, palms up, telling me to explain.
“The earring was found in Maricel’s hand,” I said. “She’d ripped it out of his ear when they fought. Then we think he stabbed her, threw her in his trunk, drove her out to the river, and dumped her body.”
Larry looked a little confused. “Okay, so you logged the earring at the scene, but it didn’t have any tissue or anything on it, right?”
The chief was looking at me, wearing a somber expression. He knew what I had to say.
“No, we didn’t log it at the scene.” I paused. “We didn’t discover it until this morning.”
“You’ve had the scene locked down more than a week?”
“No, we got it off of Mark Gerson.”
“Who’s he?”
“He’s the kid, the kid with schizophrenia. Maricel lived in the house with him and his parents. He’s the one we think followed Higley down to the river. He’s the one dunked her in the river.”
Larry leaned toward me, like he was really going to concentrate and try to understand what I was saying. “Now why would he do that?”
The chief said, “We think he was carrying out some kind of LDS baptism ceremony on Maricel.”
Larry Klein adjusted his thick black plastic glasses on his face. “Gerson is baptizing a dead girl? Or is she not dead yet?”
I shook my head and put my hands out in a gesture of confusion.
The chief said, “Like we said, Larry, this kid has schizophrenia, and we think he was off his meds at the time.”
Larry Klein looked at the chief. Then he looked at me. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. “So Gerson came forward with this evidence this morning to implicate Higley?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “Gerson didn’t even know what the earring was. He thought it was some kind of jewelry of Maricel’s. We saw it in his stuff at the hospital.”
“This is not good,” Larry Klein said.
I was starting to feel sick, like Klein was saying that Higley was going to get away with the Salizar murder.
The chief said, “You’re thinking the Salizar case isn’t going to work?”
Larry Klein shook his head. “Not on the forensics, it isn’t,” he said. “There’s a dozen ways to get to reasonable doubt. The defender can say there’s no proof Higley stabbed her. And without a knife in his house—with his prints and her blood on it—he’s right. The earring shows that the two of them got into a fight and she ripped it out. Or it shows that she was really in love with Jared and he gave it to her.” Klein paused, then turned to me. “Did Higley ever tell you what happened to the earring?”
“He told us he took it out because he was stretching his ear too fast and the skin broke and it got infected.”
“There’s another explanation you can’t refute,” Klein said. “Couple of big problems here. You don’t have a witness to tell the story of the earring the way you say it happened. And the kid who has the earring, the Gerson kid—how do I say this diplomatically?—we don’t want to put him on the stand. Even a rookie public defender will say, ‘So, Mark, in addition to finding Higley’s earring, what else did you do with Maricel out at the river that night?’”
“Okay, thanks a lot, Larry.” The chief stood. “I hear you saying charge Higley with attempted murder of a police officer, two counts, for the time being.”
“No, I’m saying bring the girlfriend in, get her to state she told Higley they were police officers at that door. If she goes on record with that, then charge Higley with the two counts.”
“And we’ll keep working the forensics,” the chief said, “to try to tie Higley to the drive-by.”
“Once we formally charge him with the attempted murder, that’ll get his lawyer’s attention. I’ll sit down with him and see if we can work out a deal that implicates him in the murder and gets him more time.”
I was feeling woozy, not really able to focus on what the prosecutor was saying. “Larry, are you gonna let this guy walk?”
He walked over to me and took my hand. “Listen to me, Karen.” His voice was low. “I am absolutely not saying that. If you can find gunshot residue on him from this morning, I promise you he will do at least twenty.”
“Even if Ryan is okay?”
“Even if Ryan is okay, which I pray to God he is.” He pulled me in for a hug. His scratchy little stubble felt comforting on my cheek.
“Okay,” I said, and I started to cry.
Chapter 40
I was standing in the hallway between our two interview rooms, looking through the glass into Interview 1. There were three people in the room: the chief, Jared Higley, and a fifty-year old guy, gray hair, who must have been the public defender. I didn’t recognize him. I had hoped Higley would be assigned a pimply kid just out of law school.
It was a couple hours after our meeting with Larry Klein. The chief had told me he had set up the interview for four o’clock. I’d said I’d just as soon he do it without me. I was pretty wrung out, and if I got Higley in a room I might reach across the table and try to strangle him. The chief said he’d be happy to do the interview alone, and how he understood. He had reviewed all the case files in the system and c
alled me to say he was ready to roll.
Looking through the glass at the three of them, I was surprised at how confident Jared Higley looked. Kind of like the first time I’d seen him, when he strolled out of Amber’s bedroom in his underwear, scratching his stomach, gazing at the refrigerator as we told his girlfriend that Maricel Salizar had been killed.
Here he was, cuffed to the bar on the table in Interview 1, but seemingly undisturbed about the situation he found himself in. And healthy. Usually, guys we charge with murder have a couple of bruises on their faces. A busted lip. They’re maybe holding their ribs. There’s this little passageway, right off the main corridor coming in from the rear entrance, where there’s no CCTV. That’s where they usually slip and fall. Guys who shoot at cops, they almost always slip and fall there, sometimes more than once.
The chief must have put a camera in that passageway when I was gone. I know it’s wrong to work these guys over. By which I mean, I understand why it’s wrong—in the abstract. But I’ve never met a cop who thinks it’s wrong. Not when his partner’s lying in a hospital bed, hooked up to a dozen tubes.
Back before the new chief took over, we’d bring the guy in. He’d slip and fall a couple times. When we got him in Interview 1, if he was too stupid to ask for an attorney, we wouldn’t offer. And we wouldn’t record the interview unless we’d already worn him down, gotten him to write and sign a statement. The thinking was that we’d get the confession, bring it to the defender’s office, have him sign off on it, and we’d be able to skip the trial altogether.
But the new chief was a little more by-the-book. It wasn’t that he was a pussy or he thought the guy must’ve had a tough upbringing or any shit like that. It was more that he understood how when you prosecute a guy, it’s not really you against the guy. It’s you against the guy’s attorney. And no matter how dumb the attorney, he was never as dumb as the guy who pulled the trigger. So the chief liked to do everything according to regs. “Prepare for the appeal,” that was what he said. Have everything ready so you can win the case, no matter how many times you have to try it.
He was right, of course. But that didn’t make me any happier. In my new sober state of mind, however, it did help me understand my limitations a little better. So I decided I’d let him and Larry Klein figure out how to work this guy.