Deadline (68 page)

Entering apartment 34, I stepped from hallway to crime scene. There he was, sprawled out in a classic death pose—Jimmy Ross, two shots to the head. Physical evidence all over the place, with a bonus: a sealed Ziploc bag of ecstasy, and a half-spilled bag of meth.

While I was taking a mental photograph of my first view of the scene, Foley’s partner poked his head in. He introduced me to the apartment manager, who assured me Ross lived alone. No wife, live-in girlfriend, brother, cousin, friend, or boarder. Foley confirmed that the neighbors agreed, but said there was a lot of coming and going. The manager appeared shocked, as if he never suspected one of his renters was a drug dealer.

Since most murders are done by family, that’s where you look first. Domestic arguments normally begin in the living room, where there are few available weapons. Then they migrate to the kitchen, where there are many available weapons, or the bedroom, where there’s often a gun, which has a way of ending arguments. This argument, if there was one, had stayed right in the living room. There was no sign the killer had been anywhere else in the house—only between the door and the body. It didn’t fit the domestic-murder profile. It had been an outsider.

Foley told me the paramedic who’d come twenty minutes ago had pronounced Jimmy Ross dead. I looked at what used to be him. Yeah. He was definitely dead.

The medical examiner, Carlton Bowers—who I’d seen at a dozen other homicides—showed up ten minutes after I did. Most MEs ask you to call them when you want the body removed, after the crime scenes been cleaned and detailed, and photographs have been taken. So unless time of death is a big unknown, the ME may not arrive until three or four hours later. But not Carlton Bowers. Every time I’d worked with him, he’d come immediately.

Bowers was a number two pencil, head as pink and bald as an eraser. He had a nicely fitted suit, but a poorly fitted face. His pointy chin wasn’t a good match for his pale bloated cheeks. He looked like there’d been too much chlorine in his gene pool.

I gazed down at my Wal-Mart jacket, over my flannel shirt spotted with yesterdays Tabasco sauce. I considered my rumpled slacks, pockets likely containing Tuesday’s Taco Bell receipt, and possibly a packet of hot sauce. Then I looked again at the ME’s tailored suit.

“Tuxedo at the dry cleaner’s?” I asked him.

His smile came quick and left quicker. I’d have preferred no smile at all. This guy wanted to be home watching Quincy reruns. I wanted to be home sleeping it off, or if not, seeing Jack Bauer interrogate an uncooperative terrorist.

“Blood spattered here,” he pointed to the wall. “Isn’t that interesting?”

I nodded, though it really wasn’t. Furthermore, he was the ME, not one of the CSI techs, who report to me and quietly do their jobs collecting evidence, not interpreting it. The ME’s specialty is the state of the body itself, cause of death and time of death.

“Probable cause of death was gunshots to the head,” he said slowly, as if he had drawn on years of training to come up with this. Never mind that any kindergartner on Ritalin could have told me the same.

“Another splatter here. Don’t you find that interesting?”

“Isn’t that what you would expect with two head shots at close range?” I asked.

“Perhaps. Still, it’s interesting, don’t you think?”

“About as interesting as last month’s cricket scores.”

It was a full five minutes before he used the word interesting again.

Two CSI guys, one dressed in his forensic bunny suit, arrived. One vacuumed, while the other followed carefully behind him taking pictures. They collected blood samples, carpet fibers, and anything that might contain DNA fragments. I was making a sketch of the scene with my pencil on yellow pad, thinking that Picasso might have liked my sketches better than I like his. I supplemented my sketch with photos on my digital camera.

“Chandler?” The loud voice startled the ME. My partner, Manny Rodriquez, wiry and short and snippy, barged in the door.

“You look terrible,” he said. “I mean, worse than usual.”

Manny is grumpy at 10:00 a.m. At 3:40 a.m. the difference isn’t noticeable.

“What have we got?” he asked.

“It’s interesting,” I said, eying the ME.

Manny and I spent ten minutes discussing the one thing that really was interesting—the small bloodstains by the door that weren’t splattered from the victim. By then the ME declared Ross had probably died one to two hours ago. Good estimate, since the gunshot ninety minutes ago had woken up most of the apartment complex.

After CSI went over Ross’s cell phone, I looked through all the names in its directory. I jotted down the numbers of the last five incoming and outgoing calls. I checked his messages, then had Manny listen to all four of them. He contacted two of the callers, on a middle-of-the-night fishing expedition: Meanwhile, I talked with the sort-of witness in apartment 36.

She’d been taking a walk at 2:30 a.m., up and down the hallway.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I had rats in my legs.” She gave a detailed description of a tall guy with lots of hair and red sweatpants who’d been in the hallway five minutes before she heard the shot. He’d scared her. She pretended not to look at him and walked back to her room.

Within twenty minutes, Manny and I determined it was a case of drug dealer blown away by a competitor, probably over a turf dispute. We found one of the bullets embedded in the floor, probably the second shot. Apparently the other bullet hadn’t exited. Fingerprints with blood traces were on the doorknob and the table. I called headquarters to see if we could get the lab to do a rush on the three good fingerprints collected.

About the only things missing were the killer’s name, Social Security number, Blockbuster card, and a confession written in lipstick on the bathroom mirror.

Murder is never convenient. But solving a murder is sometimes routine. This one had routine written all over it.

While Manny canvassed the apartments, knocking on doors, waking up the select few who hadn’t heard the gunshot or had fallen back asleep, I went to the end of the hallway and stepped outside on an old fire escape. I opened my mouth wide, gulping air, tasting life, trying to wrest myself from the death grip squeezing the room of Jimmy Ross.

It seemed so easy. Fingerprints and DNA and a good description?

That’s when I should have suspected something was wrong.

Napoleon said—I heard this on The History Channel—that in every campaign there’s ten or fifteen minutes in which the battle will be won or lost. Sometimes it’s that way in an investigation. Looking back at it, the ten or fifteen minutes in which I botched that investigation were right when everything was falling together so perfectly.

Things moved quickly. By 6:00 a.m. we found the other druggie, tall, big-haired Lincoln Caldwell, asleep in his room, red sweatpants hanging on his bedpost. His gun, in the top dresser drawer, had been recently fired. And—surprise—as I looked at the four rounds left in it, I didn’t need ballistics to convince me the gun would prove a perfect match for the round that went through Ross. His cell phone confirmed he’d called Jimmy Ross six hours earlier.

He denied it, of course. They always do. We arrested him and took him to the precinct.

It was gratifying, but not. Sort of like a crossword puzzle champion looking at a puzzle with answers so obvious there’s no point writing them down. I’m a Sherlock Holmes fan. I like to follow bread crumbs, not six baguettes leading me to someone standing twelve feet away who hands me a business card saying “Murderer.”

Still, I couldn’t argue with the bottom line. Two drug dealers for the price of one. One dead, the other off the streets for however long the court decides. Never long enough for me.

Sometimes the bad guys help out the good guys by doing what we can’t—blowing each other away. Kill a killer and you may save a half-dozen lives. Kill a drug dealer and you may save a couple dozen. Okay, that’s what cops say to each other off the record—and cop to cop is always off the record.

There weren’t many details requiring attention in the Jimmy Ross case. Too bad, I thought, since often the devil’s in the details.

I once cracked a case based on my discovery that one Monday morning a woman had ordered a grande white chocolate mocha. Remarkable for one reason: Every weekday for at least four years she had gone to the same coffee shop and ordered a regular skinny latte. Something had to account for her celebratory mood. Well, I was checking on her because her husband had died of “natural causes” on Saturday. The white chocolate mocha tipped me off that she might have contributed to those natural causes.

It took me a whole baseball season to prove it, but by the time the Yankees took the field for the first game of the World Series, I nailed her. No prize. No bonus. No street named after me. No letters of gratitude from husbands whose wives were on the verge of ordering their first white chocolate mochas. But that’s okay. I don’t do it for the thanks. I do it because it’s my job, my one contribution to a world that is truly—and I mean big time—a mess.

I’m saying this because the Jimmy Ross murder didn’t require turning over rocks to look for details. Everything that mattered fell into place. When they processed the fingerprints and the weapon and the blood DNA, it was a trifecta, a perfect triangle of independent evidence. Together they were irrefutable. The murder was open and shut. Lincoln Caldwell was our man.

I spent more time on the paperwork than the investigation. When two and two add up to four, you don’t try to refigure it six different ways to see if it can come out three or five. You tie a bow around it, give it to the district attorney, and move on. You hoist a beer or two and watch a football game. Case closed.

I’m a pretty broadminded guy, but I have a low tolerance for murder. I take my murders personally. Whether or not they know it, killers dare me to take them down. Nine out often times that’s exactly what I do. And when my mind wanders at a ball game, it lands back on the tenth.

You know that somebody’s out there thinking they’ve gotten away with murder. And you just can’t stand that. Your purpose in life is to show up on their doorstep some day and say, “Gotcha.”

“You take this too personally,” a police psychologist told me in the first of three mandatory sessions I did everything to avoid—short of bungee jumping off a bridge without the bungee cords. The last time I’d gotten in trouble, four months ago, my punishment—cruel and unusual—was seeing this shrink.

“That’s the way I’m wired,” I told him, using language I hoped would make the shrink see that I understood and respected his world, that we were fellow travelers on the road of life. Maybe, I hoped, as two self-actualized men, we could just pass on this counseling thing.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” he said. “Whatever comes into your mind.”

“Okay,” I said, trying to appear cooperative so I could cut a deal to reduce my counseling sentence. “If someone gets away with shoplifting, I don’t like it. But if they get away with murder, I can’t stand it. I’ll do anything to nail a killer. I admit, like my file says, not everything I’ve done is strictly legal. But when it comes to murder, I have no problem with doing what it takes to put the killer out of business. To me, there’s only one thing as bad as murder: getting away with one.”

This is about as deep as I went, because I could see by his nods and understanding looks and the notes he was feverishly writing that if I didn’t shut up soon, I’d be spending a mandatory hour a week with him until I retired. I’d rather walk the Green Mile.

What I didn’t tell him, but I’ll tell you, is that of my 204 murder cases, I’ve solved 177. That’s 87 percent. But who’s counting? The rest, cold cases, still burn hot, deep in my gut. Every year or two, sometimes on my vacation, I solve one of those oldies, in my quest to raise my batting average to .900. Of course, if I ever make that, I’ll want more.

If the shrink heard me say this, he’d think I was an obsessive-compulsive passive-aggressive dysfunctional codependent enabler … what we used to just call a jerk.

But what I really held back from telling him was that I once sent a man to jail for a double murder he didn’t commit. Bradford Downs. I know his face well. Three witnesses, at least two of them completely credible, offered convincing testimony to back up some physical evidence. Naturally, he claimed he was innocent, but his criminal record made that hard to believe. After ten years of appeals he was executed by lethal injection. Turned out that two of the witnesses were the real killers. We’d never have known if the one who was dying hadn’t confessed, and offered us proof … three years after an innocent man had been put to death.

See why I didn’t tell this to Dr. Freud-face?

Maybe there is something as bad as murder and getting away with murder—being murdered for a murder you didn’t commit. And because I put him away, that makes me an accessory to murder, doesn’t it?

I don’t need more reasons for sleepless nights. Bradford Downs wouldn’t be my first choice for a face to fill the back of my eyelids every time the lights go out.

So why am I telling you what I wouldn’t tell the shrink?

Because what I didn’t realize that morning as I breathed fresh air on the fire escape outside Jimmy Ross’s apartment—what I didn’t realize until just a little while ago—was that nothing was as it appeared. That case was open and shut all right … it had been set up to open and shut on a conclusion that was dead wrong. I fell for it. And that makes me mad. It makes me even madder that it was only fate or circumstances or luck or providence—whichever you believe in doesn’t matter to me—that made me realize it. Otherwise, I could have been seeing Lincoln Caldwell’s face every night, alongside Bradford Downs.

There are five teams in Portland homicide, so my partner Manny and I get every fifth murder. It was our next murder, the one two weeks and three days later, that pulled the rug out from under me. Eventually it woke me up to a shocking truth that radically revised the story of Jimmy Ross and Lincoln Caldwell.

That next murder turned me, my job, and my friendships upside down. It shook all the change out of my pockets. It threatened to bring down an entire police department, end my career, and place me inside a white chalk outline with some other homicide detective trying to figure out who murdered me. (Even now, I’m not convinced it still won’t.)