The Big Exit

by David Carnoy

  The victim’s house is on a street called Robert S Drive, a cul-de-sac lined with very pricey homes. A block to the north, on the other side of Valparaiso, is the even wealthier enclave of Atherton, where plenty of properties fetch $5 million and higher. But Menlo Park’s Robert S rivals Atherton in terms of affluence and exclusivity. For years the same families lived on the block and turnover was rare. But the Great Recession reached even this moneyed patch and Madden had heard that a couple of homes had gone up for sale in the last few years. This must have been one of them.

  The McGregor-Hill property, like some of the neighboring homes, has a gate that controls access to the driveway. Madden has ordered that it be kept shut and that no one be allowed through the door to the right of the driveway without his approval. Passing through the little checkpoint at the door, he reminds the officer at the gate, a freckled, red-haired guy named John Frawley, to keep off his radio. The longer they can keep the media away, the better.

  The McGregor-Hill home has a bit of French country flair to it, with a stucco exterior, small balconies on the upper-floor windows, and a high-pitched gray slate roof. Even at nighttime, Madden can see the property is heavily landscaped. He hadn’t really considered the house’s size before, but now he guesses it’s probably a good six to seven thousand square feet, and that doesn’t include the detached three-car garage (with a second-floor guest room), where they’d found the body.

  The garage isn’t right next to the house, but a bit behind it and off to the side. Down at the end of the driveway, standing in front of a twelve-foot-wide blue privacy shield that’s been erected in front of the entrance to the garage, he sees Greg Lyons looking down at his Black-Berry, tapping out a message with latex gloves on his hands. He’s in his late thirties, a fit-looking guy who wears his longish blond hair in a ponytail.

  Madden always marvels that if you were to see Lyons sitting at a coffee shop your first thought would be that he’s some sort of artist, a guise perpetuated by his smoking habit. You’d never guess he was the San Mateo County chief deputy coroner in charge of the Investigations and Pathology unit.

  “Well, if it isn’t Mr. Minimum Wage Madden himself,” Lyons greets him in his navy blue windbreaker with the Coroner’s Office logo on the front. “Looks like you folks caught yourself a big one. The hits, they just keep coming, don’t they?”

  “Apparently so,” Madden says, feeling his face redden.

  The new nickname comes courtesy of an article written about him in the Almanac, a small local paper, about his decision not to retire. Under the state and city’s “3 at 50” pension formula for public safety employees, cops who were hired before 2010 could retire as early as age fifty and receive 3 percent of their highest annual salary for each year they’d worked for the city, up to thirty years. That meant Madden was eligible to retire and collect 90 percent of his current salary for the rest of his life. The article’s headline asked, WHY IS THIS MAN WORKING FOR MINIMUM WAGE WHEN HE DOESN’T NEED TO?

  It was a good question, one he should never have agreed to answer. He ended up sounding like a Boy Scout, gushing how he was grateful to have been given the opportunity to serve his city in the capacity he had, even though earlier in his career some people thought his handicap might be a liability. “I happen to love my job,” he told the reporter, “I worked hard to get here, and I’m not ready to retire, even if many of my peers have left the force. So, call me stupid but I’m happy to work for minimum wage to give back a little to the community that’s given me so much.”

  After Billings saw the article, he told Madden he hoped he was running for office or that someone had slipped him some Prozac, because that was just about the goddamn hokiest thing he’d ever heard. “Christ, man, I know you think this is Mayberry, but Andy Griffith wouldn’t have read that if it was in the script.”

  As a kid, they’d called him Chester after that character on Gun-smoke who had a limp. Now he’s Minimum Wage. Not exactly an improvement. Looking at Lyons now, Madden wonders whether he’s taking a jab at him or just giving him a little good-natured ribbing.

  “Well, one thing’s clear,” he hears a woman’s voice say from behind the screen. “Guy had good taste in his vehicles. That this year’s model, Mr. Lee?”

  “Last,” says Vincent Lee, the diminutive crime-scene photographer.

  Madden walks past Lyons and looks behind the screen. Lydia Ramirez, one of Lyons’s investigators, wearing orange goggles, is examining something on the pavement just outside the garage, he can’t tell what exactly, near the front wheel of a metallic blue BMW M6, as Lee snaps pictures of the spot. Ramirez is short and muscular, a workout fiend. She’s generally quiet and brooding but has a passion for restoring sports cars from the eighties.

  Mark McGregor’s body is positioned exactly as it was when Madden saw it earlier. It’s lying in the middle of the garage next to a black Porsche Cayenne parked on the right. What’s interesting is that both the M6 and the wife’s Mercedes SUV are parked outside. Inside, the garage is neatly in order, with tools and gardening items either put away in drawers or hung on the wall. He makes a mental note to ask Hill about whether they usually left the cars parked outside the garage or pulled them in.

  McGregor’s body is mostly on its stomach, though the right arm is tucked awkwardly underneath so the chest and torso aren’t completely flush with the cement floor. However, his head—or rather the right side of his face—is pressed against the floor, resting in a pool of blood that’s six or seven feet in diameter and stretches all the way to the wall of the garage. His nose and cheekbone appear to have taken the brunt of one blow and a huge gash is open on the right lower portion of the neck just above the clavicle. Three additional deep gashes—one on each side of his upper back, the third about eight inches down on the right side—are plainly visible.

  What a goddamn mess, Madden thinks again. However, the clinical giddiness he felt when he initially encountered the body is gone, replaced by a more uncomfortable feeling he can’t quite pinpoint.

  McGregor was twenty-nine when Madden first encountered him eight years ago, a programmer turned entrepreneur who later got a big payout when his online-payments company was swallowed up by an enterprise firm. He vividly remembers McGregor sitting there on the grassy embankment by the side of the road, his head in hands, muttering to himself, still in shock after the vehicle he was in ran a red light and T-boned another vehicle, killing a young woman driver and badly injuring her friend and coworker. McGregor was the passenger in the vehicle that caused the accident. However, the following day McGregor’s friend, Richie Forman, insisted he wasn’t driving, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Thus began the saga of the Bachelor Disaster, which would play out over the following thirteen months and end with a jury siding with McGregor.

  Looking at the guy now it’s hard to tell how the years between had treated him. Judging from the minivilla on at least an acre, the Rolex on his wrist, and the three high-performance German cars a few feet away, he seems to have been doing just fine—financially anyway. Beyond the mortal wounds, his body shows some signs of more mundane wear and tear; his slicked-back hair is flecked on the sides with gray and has receded an inch or so. He seems heavier, too. Not fat, but his face, the part that isn’t smashed in anyway, seems fuller and his body thicker than Madden remembers.

  “Bit of a mixed message, don’t you think?” Lee says, turning his lens on a wallet that’s lying several feet away from the body, splayed open with a couple of credit cards half out of their slots. Not far from the wallet, someone has scrawled a single word on the garage floor using what appeared to be the victim’s blood: HACK.

  “On the one hand,” Lee goes on, “our killer made a halfhearted attempt to make it look like a robbery gone awry. On the other, we have what appears to be the word ‘Hack’ written on the ground near the victim. That would seem to put the crime in a new context. Of course, ‘hack’ could mean a few things, couldn’t it?”

  Madden takes a step
forward and goes down to one knee, keeping his back straight as he descends. If he’s not careful, sometimes his lower back locks up with spasms. A visit to an orthopedic surgeon and an MRI machine had revealed two bulging discs and some stenosis, which apparently was pretty typical for “someone your age.”

  “Don’t forget the watch,” he tells Lee. “Billings says it’s a Rolex Daytona. A collector’s item. Fifteen grand easy.”

  “First thing I’d take,” Lee agrees.

  He’s a small guy who wears his hair in a crew cut and has a diamond stud in his left ear. He and Madden went to the same high school, Woodside—or Weedside, as locals sometimes called it, deferring to the 1970s nickname. Lee, in his late thirties, like Billings, graduated twenty-five years after Madden.

  “Rolex never did nothin’ for me,” Ramirez remarks as if Rolex were a perpetually broke ex-boyfriend who had erectile dysfunction.

  Earlier there hadn’t been much light in the garage, but Lyons’s team has set up a couple of portable forensic light source units with multiple blue-and-white LEDs in them so the area is brighter. Depending on what color filter you use, the lights are designed to reveal certain types of trace evidence, everything from hair and fibers to finger-and footprints to bodily fluids.

  Madden checks out the watch again. It’s got a black face and stainless-steel dial and band. An attractive watch, but Madden has no idea what makes it special.

  “His hands looked okay to me,” he says, referring to the victim. “I didn’t see any defensive wounds.”

  “I don’t think the guy ever knew what hit him,” Lyons says. “I think he must have turned around and wham, that was it. Could have gotten something out of the Porsche there and then got jumped.”

  “Weapon?” he asks.

  Lyons: “You got about a five-inch gash there. Looks like the killer came almost straight down. So I gotta say hatchet—or something like it. But the wounds to the face were made with a blunt object.”

  “I was thinking the same thing.”

  Lyons says that a cursory analysis of the bloodstain pattern—the most noticeable streak at least—suggests the guy was hit mostly from the front, and the killer, if he had to guess now, was probably right-handed because more of the wounds were on the victim’s left side. Madden knows that once they complete all their measurements, photos, sketches, and sophisticated computer analysis, they’ll have a pretty precise picture of exactly how McGregor bought it. They’ll definitively be able to determine if he was struck by a right- or left-handed person and approximately how tall that person is.

  Madden turns his attention to McGregor’s pants pockets. The one closest to him—the left pocket—doesn’t seem to have anything bulging out the side but it’s hard to tell if anything is inside.

  “You find his cell phone yet?”

  “Yeah. Chin’s back at the truck working on it. Android model. Password protected. Should have something for you shortly.”

  Not too long ago, if you found a cell phone at a crime scene, there wasn’t much you could do with it. You were supposed to take pictures of where it was found, but after that, you really weren’t supposed to mess with it. If the thing was on and not locked, you could take a look at what was on the home screen, but if you started pressing buttons and accidentally ended up deleting something, you could potentially make everything inadmissible in court. Any information from the phone was evidence that had to be handled properly, which meant sending it over to the forensics lab and having them do the extraction and burn all the data to disc. At best, it could take several hours; at worst, several days.

  Recently, however, the coroner’s office came up with the dough for a mobile field toolkit that included a laptop, some really expensive software, and a whole bunch of connectors that fit just about any cell phone, PDA, or tablet out there.

  “Got something else you might find interesting,” Lyons says.

  Madden stands up, ascending cautiously. He watches as Lyons pulls out a clear plastic evidence bag from his coat pocket. Inside, he sees a small gold-colored rectangular object that he thinks for a moment is a fancy USB thumb drive—but it looks bigger than a thumb drive.

  “Ramirez found it on the ground just outside the garage,” Lyons said, handing the bag to him. “There’s an inscription on it. Lifted a couple of pretty good prints from it. Going to run them shortly.”

  Nearsighted, Madden raises his glasses, propping them up on top of his head. Then, holding the bag by the top and letting the object dangle there in front of him, he takes a closer look at what he now realizes is an old-school cigarette lighter. On the side facing him, there’s a stamp in raised gold cursive letters that reads, “Thanks, Sinatra.” The last name appears to be Frank Sinatra’s signature.

  “Inscription’s on the other side,” Lyons says.

  Madden flips the bag around. The inscription is an actual engraving etched into the lighter in tiny letters. With the reflection of the light and the plastic, he’s having trouble making out the words.

  “You know where that’s from?” Lyons asks.

  When Madden doesn’t answer right away, Lyons starts humming a few bars, mixing in the lyrics, to give him a clue.

  Your love for me has got to be real. For you know just how I feel …

  “Buddy Holly did it first,” he says. “Nineteen fifty-seven. But the Stones did it better. Their first hit in the U.S. The Dead covered it, too. Heard it many a time. ‘Not Fade Away.’”

  Just then Madden finally realizes what he’s looking at, the words coming into focus.

  To Richie: Love is love and not fade away, xoxo, Hills

  His eyes open wide. “I’ll be damned.”

  Lyons: “That’s what I thought. Gotta be him, right? Mr. Bachelor Disaster. Any idea where he is and what he’s been up to?”

  Madden shakes his head, a little dazed.

  “No idea,” he says, handing the bag back. “But I’m sure as hell going to find out.”

  4/ YOU LOOK CLEAN

  RICHIE’S FIRST DAY AT THE EXONERATION FOUNDATION, LOURDES Hinojosa started Richie out on the mail. Thanks to being down a person, they were behind a good two weeks and an intimidating stack of letters had piled up inside a large box that was tucked under a desk and doing an awfully good impression of a waste bin.

  Hinojosa told him what he already knew: the foundation had strict guidelines for taking on cases and the vast majority of the submissions it received didn’t meet the criteria, much less follow the submission guidelines. Defendants or their representatives were supposed to submit a brief, factual summary of the case along with a list of evidence used against the defendant. “No other documents should be submitted for initial review,” the foundation’s website stated. It also made clear that it only accepted cases on post-conviction appeal in which DNA evidence could prove innocence. No email inquiries, no telephone calls. Other agencies could provide broader legal support. See links below, thank you very much.

  “Brief” and “factual” seemed to be the most challenging concepts for prisoners. Richie had read Nathaniel West’s Miss Lonelyhearts in college, and too many of the letters in the pile were veritable tales of woe that had nothing to do with innocence but instead expressed a more profound form of victimization that was often accompanied by a rant—sometimes a rather eloquent one—against broader societal injustices and inequities. Beyond help, or even sympathy, what they seemed to crave was credit for their pitiable histories. “What can I get for this?” was the con’s mentality. “What you gonna gimme?” It had to be worth something. It had to have some trade-in value.

  Hinojosa told Richie that sifting through the correspondence pile was like panning for gold in a stream that had been panned out years ago. You got a little dust, some flakes here and there, but the nuggets were few and far between. DNA evidence had been introduced to the legal system in 1989 and now, more then twenty years later, the Exoneration Foundation and other organizations like it had managed to identify many of the legacy cases in Califo
rnia where DNA might be a factor in proving a defendant’s innocence. That didn’t mean there weren’t some still out there—and many they still were working on. But the majority of new cases they took on were typically from the last two to five years.

  At around ten he was introduced to a young woman named Ashley Gordon, the second case assistant, who sat down at a desk on the other side of the small room. Petite, with fine, straight dark hair, she was dressed in jeans and a gray Gap hooded sweatshirt and wore nerdy, thick black-rimmed glasses—probably for effect, he guessed. She seemed friendly enough. But she promptly turned her chair away from his, put on a pair of headphones, pulled her hood over her head, and went to work on her computer. As he read and sorted, her back to his, he could hear the faint din of her music leaking out through her earbuds.

  Some time had passed, when he heard a crunching noise. He turned around and saw a Ziploc bag with baby carrots sitting on the desk next to Ashley’s keyboard, and Ashley pondering her computer screen with a half-eaten carrot in her hand. She took another bite and the mini carrot was gone. The sound of her chewing reverberated through the empty room like a trash compactor. When she went to reload, she noticed he was looking at her.

  “Oh, sorry,” she said, lowering her hood and tugging the ‘buds from her ears. “How impolite. Want one?”

  “No. Thanks.”

  “You sure?”

  He nodded, wishing he’d brought his own headphones.

  “How’s the correspondence?” she asked before he could turn back around.

  “Fine. I think it’s been breeding in the box.”

  “Ha, funny. I suppose it’s what you expected. I’ll tell you something, though. We had an intern here last year who used to read them and get shocked. Most of the letters are pretty earnest, right? But every so often you get one that’s really dirty. And this girl—she was still in high school—would open one up and there’d be some guy talking about how he was imagining her reading his letter and masturbating as he was writing it. It got pretty graphic. Of course, he didn’t know she’d be reading it, but if you send letters to enough people, you eventually hit on the person you’re imagining, right? It’s like an odds thing.”