First Offense (12 page)

Abrams was already rising out of his chair.

“Please, Noah,” Ann said, “let me finish. When I saw the door wasn’t completely closed, I just walked in. Then right before I left, I decided to check the refrigerator and see if he’d stashed his drugs in there. There were these pickle jars…” She stopped. They were all looking at her strangely. Suddenly she realized how bizarre this must sound. She glared at the other two detectives and continued in a flat, firm voice. “In one of the pickle jars were five severed fingers. Women’s fingers. I saw nail polish on the nails.”

“Do you have them?” Reed said.

“I dropped the pickle jar, and it broke and the fingers fell out on the floor,” Ann said, her face burning in humiliation. Why had she dropped the jar? “I didn’t want to disrupt the crime scene any more than I already had,” she quickly added, trying to save face, “so I left and came straight here.”

Noah Abrams rushed back to his desk for his jacket. Snapping his shoulder holster into place, he said. Let’s go before he gets rid of them.”

Stop right there,” Reed said. He was the sergeant. If they made any mistakes, it would all come down on him. “We can’t just run out there half cocked and barge into this guy’s house. Let’s think of the legalities here.”

“Right, Reed,” Abrams barked, “while he flushes the evidence down the toilet or grinds it up in the disposal.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Reed yelled. He turned to Ann. “Look, you’re a sworn peace officer. We might have a problem with search and seizure.”

“He has active search terms,” Ann quickly responded. “Aren’t we in the clear here?”

“No,” Reed said, shaking his head, thinking the matter over. “They’re not general search terms if I remember right, they’re drug terms. You can search for drugs, Ann, but nothing else. Fingers are not drugs.”

Ann threw up her hands. “This is ridiculous.”

“Hey,” Reed said, “I don’t write the laws, I only enforce them. What you just found out there could be excluded as the fruit of an invalid search. Inadmissible, you know?”

Ann had not given thought to these issues for years. Being in investigations was totally different from being on the street as a cop. All the same, she felt certain her actions were within the law. “I think it’s legit, Tommy. It should fall under the plain view doctrine.” Both the exclusionary rule and the plain view doctrine were legal mandates that governed an officer’s right to search and seizure. If an officer saw something in plain view, like a gun on the seat of a car, it was admissible evidence. But if the gun was hidden under the seat and the officer searched for it anyway, without the benefit of a search warrant, the gun would constitute evidence ultimately excluded and inadmissible in a court of law. That they were even having this discussion exemplified the absurdity of the criminal justice system, as if a person’s rights could be violated when he was slicing off people’s fingers.

“I think we should run it by the D.A.,” Reed said. “Opening someone’s refrigerator isn’t exactly finding something in plain view.”

The other detectives, though, were getting restless. “Let’s just pop the bastard, get the fingers, and find the body,” Abrams said. “Let the D.A. sort through the legal shit.”

Reed nodded and stood up, anxious to get the show on the road. Then he sat back down, clearly frustrated. “Call Hopkins and run this by him,” he told Ann. “Shit, he was right about this guy.”

“That’s for sure,” Ann said. She grabbed the phone, and once she got Glen on the line, she recapitulated the details of the case. The line was silent for quite some time.

“I think you’re clear here,” Hopkins finally replied. “You weren’t going out there as a police officer. It wasn’t a search. You made a home visit to a probationer and just stumbled onto the fingers.”

Ann was listening carefully. She’d been in situations like this before. Glen was coaching her, telling her what to say if the case ever got to court. If she said her intent was to search, they might be in trouble without a warrant. But she had been searching for drugs in the refrigerator. That meant she’d have to lie under oath.

The detectives were staring at her, waiting for an answer. Ann would do anything to make a case, but perjury? “Maybe we should go for a warrant then,” she told him. “That makes it clean. With something like this, why take the chance?”

“Fine,” Glen replied. “Give me what you’ve got, and I’ll write it and walk it over to Judge Madsen. When he signs it, I’ll fax you the copy and head that way with the original. Shouldn’t take more than fifteen or twenty minutes if you give me the information right now.”

Reed was already up and making calls at Abrams’s desk, advising the lieutenant and captain. Then he arranged to get some officers from patrol. Ann, in the middle of dictating the information for the search warrant to Glen, stopped and looked up at Harper. “Please go to my car…the black Jeep in the parking lot. It isn’t locked. Get the case file. I need it.”

Harper did as she asked and returned carrying a manila file folder. Ann immediately started reading the particulars off to Glen: Sawyer’s name, the case number, the address on Henderson Avenue.

As promised, within twenty minutes the fax machine in the detective bay beeped and started spilling out the search warrant. Ann and Reed almost collided as they both raced to the machine. Tommy met her gaze, showing her how he felt about Jimmy Sawyer as he ripped off the fax. This was the man who had shot her. Ann knew it now, and so did Reed. If Jimmy Sawyer was still in the country, even if he was thousands of miles away by now, Reed was going to find him.

They formed a caravan. Ann rode with Tommy Reed in his department-issued bronze Chrysler. Behind them were four black-and-white police units, an evidence van, and the unmarked cars of Abrams, Harper, the lieutenant, and the captain.

“What if Sawyer came back to get the car?” Ann said, voicing a question that had been bothering her for the past half hour. “When I left, he could have come back and seen the pickle jar shattered. If he’s smart, he’d dump those fingers in the ocean, and then we’d have nothing.”

Reed’s car fishtailed as he took a fast right and headed to the house. He glanced at Ann and then back at the road. “We should have gone in without the warrant.”

Ann gulped and swallowed. He knew. They all must know, she decided. “I made a mistake, didn’t I? I should have gone along with the program and not insisted on the warrant.”

“You have to do what you feel is right, Ann,” Reed said, stomping on the gas and pulling ahead of the other cars.

When they reached Henderson, the cars parked at the end of the block, and officers piled out. The lieutenant stepped to the front of the group. “Hilgard, Evans and Baumgarten, take the front of the house,” he said to the uniformed officers. “Harper, Abrams, and Reed, head toward the back. The car’s still here. He could be inside. The captain and I will take a position near the neighbors’ fences where we can see on both sides. If he tries to split in our direction, we’ll handle him.”

Ann was left standing, her arms dangling by her sides. She didn’t have a weapon. Suddenly she felt like an outsider, and her shoulders slumped.

In another minute. Reed keyed the portable radio and asked if the officers were in position.

“Affirmative,” they replied. “Ready and waiting.”

While the men in front rang the doorbell and announced themselves. Reed leaped over the fence and scrambled toward the back of the house, where a U-Haul truck was pulled up to the curb, its rear doors closed.

Ann, still standing in front, heard noises in the house and the sounds of a scuffle. Then one of the uniformed officers stuck his head out the back door and yelled to Reed, “We’ve got Sawyer here. He’s alone.”

Reed and the other detectives entered from the rear. The officers who had been waiting outside now rushed through the front door. In no time most of them were jostling elbows inside the small living room.

She could move in now, Ann thought. Just as she started up the front steps, Glen pulled to the curb and leaped out, the original warrant in his hands. Right behind him was Ray Hernandez, a man Ann recognized as an investigator from the D.A.‘s office.

Glen glanced at her. “What’s happening?”

“They have Sawyer inside.”

The three of them stepped through the door and into the crowded living room. Out of the comer of her eye, she saw Harper leading a handcuffed Jimmy Sawyer out the back door. Glen quickly followed after them.

Over the sea of men Tommy yelled at her, “Where’s the fucking fingers?” His face was red and he was perspiring. It was like an oven inside even without all the policemen. Realizing this, he started shoving people aside. “You,” he said, pointing at one of the men, “and you…and you, get out of here and give us some breathing room.” Finally he made his way to the front door. “Where did you say these fingers were?”

“The kitchen,” Ann said. “I left them on the floor in the kitchen.”

“There’s no fingers on the floor, Ann,” Reed said, a look of annoyance on his face.

The teeming mass of humanity now shifted in the direction of the kitchen. “Over there,” Ann said, standing on her tiptoes to see over the men’s heads. “I got the jar out of the refrigerator and then dropped it. When I left, the fingers were all over the floor. There were five of them.”

Pushing and shoving the men aside. Reed and Ann made their way to the refrigerator. Reed started removing the beer cans and slamming them down on the kitchen cabinet. Then he saw a pickle jar and stopped. “This it?” he said.

“One of them.” It wasn’t the same jar she had dropped, of course, but the contents looked the same. If there were five fingers in one jar, perhaps the remaining five might be in this one. “Yeah, yeah,” she said, unable to take her eyes off the jar. “It was Vlasic…you know, the brand. It was a Vlasic pickle jar. There were two of them. This has to be the other one.”

“Get some evidence guys in here,” Reed yelled. He pulled on a pair of white latex gloves and carefully lifted the jar out of the refrigerator, holding it up to the light.

“Let me see. Tommy,” Ann exclaimed, although the contents looked different from what she had seen earlier. “The juice is cloudy.” She moved right next to him and got up close to the jar. “Open it. I thought they were pickles too at first. I even thought they were stalks of white asparagus or something.”

The room fell silent, and Ann felt dizzy, almost thinking she was going to be sick to her stomach. She waited as Tommy opened the lid and stuck a gloved finger inside the pickle jar. Then she held her breath and stared. Tommy held something in his hand and sniffed it. Leaning back against the counter, he glared at Ann, shoved the object into his mouth, and took a big bite. There was a unanimous intake of breath as everyone gasped.

“Pickles,” Reed said, spitting the piece back out into his hand. “That’s it,” he said. “Everyone except crime scene people clear out. All we got here is some sour pickles. Looks like a false alarm.”

Ann looked down at the floor, too embarrassed to face the men. As she did, she realized it was clean, not filthy as it had been. “There were human fingers, Tommy,” she said without looking up. “I know the difference between a pickle and a finger, for chrissakes. He obviously returned and disposed of them.”

Although Reed didn’t say so, he bad his reservations. Ann had been thoroughly spooked by the shooting and could have simply jumped to an erroneous conclusion. She had been in this house alone, with the advance knowledge that Sawyer was considered a suspect in her shooting. Seeing something that didn’t look right in the pickle jar, she had simply panicked. Reed knew the mind was a strange thing, particularly when it was under stress. He’d seen seasoned officers make serious errors in the heat of a crisis, even made a few himself.

“Listen to me, Tommy,” Ann said, talking fast. “The floor was filthy when I saw the fingers. Look at it now—it’s clean. See, he came back, saw the fingers, disposed of them, and then mopped the floor. Aren’t they even going to search for more evidence? And you know, they should swab the floor. Maybe there are trace elements of blood or something they can identify in the fluid that spilled out with the fingers. Also glass fragments…there could be broken glass fragments that would support my story.”

Reed considered what Ann was saying. The floor was clean, and everything else in the place was a mess. “We’ll comb the place,” he said. “Send a lot of stuff to the lab.” His face softened. “Maybe we’ll find something. Never know. Our guess is Sawyer and his roommates were dealing narcotics, possibly were even cookers.” He paused and gave Ann a sour look. Cookers were individuals who manufactured drugs like acid and amphetamines in homemade labs. Lately these home labs had been springing up everywhere. “When Sawyer was originally arrested, he had a whole sheet of high-grade LSD and an envelope full of Ecstasy. According to narcotics, the streets have been flooded with this stuff lately, and the high school kids are gobbling it up like candy. My guess is this is where it was coming from—this house.”

“A lab?” Ann said, noticing that Glen had reentered the house and was coming toward them.

“As soon as he mentioned Sawyer as a suspect,” Reed said, shifting his eyes to Glen, “we started checking him out. From what we can tell, everything points to a lab.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Ann looked at Tommy and then at Glen, getting angrier by the second. “He was my probationer. And that still doesn’t explain why he shot me.”

“Yes, it does, Ann,” Reed said flatly. “Sawyer must have shot you to keep you from doing exactly what you did today—show up at his doorstep and fall right into his narcotics operation.” The detective stopped and sighed, letting his shoulders fall in disappointment. “Way it looks, they moved the lab. See that U-Haul parked in the back? Sawyer must have come back for the last few boxes, maybe the refrigerator. Bet there’s nothing we want in those boxes either.”

Ann was incredulous. They were talking about drug labs, and she was talking about human life. “What about the fingers? I saw those fingers, Reed. I’m not some moron off the street, you know. I do know what a human finger looks like. I was a cop once myself.” She peered up at Reed defiantly, daring him to challenge her.