Chapter 111
Cruz and I reached Justine within minutes of her call. The four-lane roadway was jammed to the sidewalks. Traffic cops were rerouting the rush hour surge, and the two southbound lanes were cordoned off with squad cars.
Cruz and I abandoned our car and walked through the cordon. I counted eight cruisers, twenty uniforms, and assorted other cops surrounding Nora Cronin, who had her small foot on the neck of a man who was lying facedown on the ground. Cronin was reading him his rights.
Justine stood a couple of yards away, wearing an expression I’d have to call rapt. She barely glanced at Cruz and me, kept her eyes on Cronin as the lieutenant grabbed the guy up off the ground and got him to his feet.
“I want to call my lawyer,” said the guy with the glasses.
“Call all the lawyers you want, asshole,” Nora said.
Four cops piled on and threw the guy across the hood of a squad car and cuffed him behind his back. The guy looked benign and, more than that, unworried.
I said to Justine, “That’s Crocker?”
She looked up at me, said, “Yeah, that’s him. Did he kill anyone? I don’t know. Maybe someone will get us that warrant now so we can collect his freakin’ DNA.”
News choppers materialized overhead. A BMW, a Ford sedan, and a TV satellite van came up the street.
Chief Michael Fescoe got out of the Ford. I couldn’t believe he was here already.
DA Bobby Petino got out of the BMW.
The two of them converged, talked briefly, then came over to where Cruz and I stood with Justine.
“What happened to you?” Bobby said to Justine.
She looked down, saw blood streaks from her elbow to her wrist. “It’s not mine,” she said. “It’s Crocker’s.”
Her face flamed-but why?
She turned away from Bobby as Fescoe said to me, “The one Cruz assaulted. Eamon Fitzhugh. What happened to him?”
I said, “In brief, we learned that he and Crocker were going to commit a murder tonight. Nothing we could verify. We tailed Fitzhugh, caught him getting into something hinky with a fifteen-year-old in the parking lot at Ralph’s.”
“He’s at the hospital, dislocated shoulder and contusions, shouting about police brutality,” Fescoe said.
Cruz said, “He was going to kill that girl-”
“So you say,” Fescoe interjected.
“So I say,” said Cruz. “All I did was tackle him with conviction. He’s a bantamweight.”
Fescoe’s eyes were wild with anger when he looked at me. “Jack, this is crap. You’ve got unnamed sources. Putting guys in the hospital. Arrests without cause. I want you in my office in half an hour. Bring Cruz and Smith. If this disaster isn’t explained to my satisfaction, I will be pulling your license.”
As he walked off, I asked Justine, “You say that blood is Crocker’s?”
She nodded. “Yep.”
There was shattered glass all over the seat of the Sienna. Before the uniform could tell me not to, I put on a latex glove, picked up a few shards with blood on them, and folded the pieces into another glove. I handed the impromptu evidence bag to Justine along with the keys to my car.
“Get this to the lab, pronto. I’ll meet you in Fescoe’s office. Should be fun.”
Justine didn’t exactly smile, but her look softened. “Thanks, Jack.”
Chapter 112
Chief Michael Fescoe’s office smelled of yesterday’s lunch.
The blinds over the interior glass walls were opened halfway so that Fescoe could see the squad room. The smudged windows peered onto Los Angeles Street, where cars rushed by like phantoms in the dark.
The tension in the room was electric and not in a good or positive way.
There wasn’t a person sitting there who could say with confidence that as a result of today’s operations, he or she wouldn’t be sued or fired or jailed-or all three.
As Private’s sole proprietor, I would be the first to face the firing squad. I was just a contractor. Private would be blamed for everything in the first round. We were guilty of using electronics that would be illegal except that laws against this advanced technique for remote wiretaps hadn’t even been written yet.
On our say-so and at our urging, Lieutenant Nora Cronin had arrested a man who’d been injured by one of our operatives during the arrest, and our evidence against Rudolph Crocker was based solely on the five-year-old memory of a teenage girl who might not be willing to testify.
True, Fitzhugh had left DNA on the clothes of the murder victim five years before, but DNA on an ankle sock wasn’t proof that he had killed her.
If we didn’t prove a connection between Crocker and Fitzhugh and the deaths of any of the schoolgirls from Borman through Esperanza, their lawyers would get them out of jail free.
Petino and Fescoe both had a lot at stake, but the police chief in particular had his cajones in a waffle iron. One of his cops was involved. As Fescoe uncapped his coffee container, Petino paced at the back of the room. Because of his relationship with Justine, he’d brought Private to Fescoe and had vouched for us all. If we went down, Bobby Petino would never eat lunch in this town again-let alone become governor of the state.
People took their seats. Nora Cronin sat between Fescoe and Justine. Justine sat to my right, Cruz to my left.
“I want to go over all of it,” Fescoe said. “But keep it simple. Justine, you first. Let’s cut through all the bullshit-at least inside this office.”
Justine used her most professional voice, but I knew her well enough to see and hear her fears. She held it together as she told Fescoe about Christine Castiglia, the witness to Wendy Borman’s abduction, a claim that had been borne out by the results from our lab.
“Two single-source DNA samples were recovered from Wendy’s clothing,” she said. “One of those samples absolutely matches Eamon Fitzhugh. The other sample doesn’t match anyone yet. But from Castiglia’s eyewitness report, Rudolph Crocker was the second boy who hustled Wendy Borman into the van.”
Fescoe asked how Wendy Borman linked up with the Schoolgirl killings, and that’s where it got dicey. I jumped in eventually and explained that the MOs were similar if not identical. “We think Wendy Borman was the first victim.”
“If not the first victim, certainly an early one,” said Justine.
I explained that Crocker and Fitzhugh hadn’t made any substantial mistakes until Fitzhugh recruited Jason Pilser, possibly to raise the stakes of the game.
“We intercepted Pilser’s electronic footprints. This bastard was bragging to his virtual friends about a club he was inducted into called the Street Freeks. And that the Street Freeks were doing killings in real life.”
“You’re losing me a little bit,” said Fescoe.
“You asked for the simple version, Mickey. The point here is that we intercepted messages from Crocker to Pilser, and again from Crocker to Fitzhugh, describing a plan for them to kill another girl tonight. The girl he named was the girl Fitzhugh was talking to when Cruz brought him down.”
“I see dots all over the place and zero connections,” said Fescoe. Storm clouds were forming in his eyes. “Everything you’ve told me is either circumstantial or inadmissible or too damn obscure to convince a jury of our inferiors. I want murder weapons. I want forensics that match up. I want eyewitnesses who weren’t eleven years old or who didn’t jump or get pushed off their terraces to their deaths.
“Do you people understand me? Beri Hunt is going to represent Crocker. If we don’t button this up, this case will never even go to trial.”
“You have to keep Crocker and Fitzhugh apart,” I said. “We need a little time to run Crocker’s DNA against Wendy Borman’s clothes.”
