The Disappearance (19 page)

Nothing wrong with her brain, Doug thinks. It’s one of her attractions, all the contradictions in her personality. Along with her blunt directness.

“Yes,” he agrees, “that would be a strategy a good lawyer might take.”

She drinks some Coke, crunching a piece of ice in her teeth. “It’s hot today, isn’t it?” She smiles at him. “Can you account for all your time that night?”

He stares at her. “Yes,” he says slowly, “I can account for my time that night.” He pauses. The unspoken hangs between them like a sea-soaked net, an onerous veil. “Yes, I can.”

“Are you going to be okay with that? Keep it quiet?”

“I can account for my time,” he repeats firmly.

“Then all you have to worry about is making sure Joe Allison gets convicted.”

“That’s not all I have to worry about, but that would solve most of my problems,” he agrees. “And bring closure to Emma’s memory,” he says with genuine sadness.

She pulls him to her, his head jammed against her breasts, his mouth grazing the salty nipples, which brings an involuntary shudder from her. “That’s gonna happen,” she tells him with assurance in her heavy Bronx patois. “There will be closure for your daughter. For Emma.”

Sitting in the living room, the windows thrown open to catch the end-of-the-day breeze, Luke and Riva watch the tape of Joe Allison’s interrogation by Detective Terry Jackson of the Santa Barbara P.D. Luke takes notes, pausing the tape when he wants to write down a salient point.

“So he admits to a mutual attraction, but no sex,” Riva says. Luke has filled her in on his session with Allison. “I hope he isn’t sandbagging you.”

He turns to her. “So do I, sweetness. So do I.”

“Well, it makes him a crummy person, but not a murderer.”

Luke nods. “He isn’t on trial for being a crummy person.”

“But you wish he were squeaky-clean.”

“Yeah. Defending men like him doesn’t make me particularly happy. But someone has to.”

After watching the tape twice, all the way through, Luke clicks the VCR off. “This is a pretty slippery interview,” he remarks.

She looks to him for clarification.

“They never told him they suspected him of anything other than drunk driving,” he explains. He has the transcript of the interview on his lap.

“But wasn’t that the point of the questioning? That they thought he was involved in the kidnapping, because they found the key ring in his car?” she asks.

“Exactly.” He thinks for a moment. “I need to find out if the cop out in the field explained that to him, when he gave him the Miranda warning. I’ll bet the farm he didn’t.”

“What does that mean?”

“They misled him. They lied to him, actually. As soon as you suspect someone of a crime, you have to warn them of that. From what I’m seeing”—he holds up the transcript and points to the blank television screen—“they didn’t. They violated his rights in a very fundamental way.”

“Could they have told him before they brought him into that room for questioning?”

Luke shakes his head. “You saw the tape. Allison didn’t have a clue.” Brandishing the transcript, he adds, “He had no idea they were connecting him to Emma Lancaster’s murder. None. They didn’t even tell him it was her key ring.”

He gets up and goes to the refrigerator for a beer. “Want one?”

She shakes her head.

He twists the cap off, licks the rim, starts pacing the room. “This is bullshit. Ray Logan was there. What the hell was he thinking?” Shaking his head, he says, “I know exactly what he was thinking. He wanted the goods on Allison and he didn’t want to fuck things up with a warning. He was afraid Joe would clam up and they’d lose the moment.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I have to go to the judge on this. I’m going to interview that cop, Jackson, and Sheriff Williams too, but there’s no acceptable explanation for this. You have to inform a suspect of his rights, that’s basic.”

“If it turns out they violated his rights, what happens?” she asks. She can feel his agitation and excitement. It energizes her, seeing him in this mode, the professional on the job.

“I’m not sure,” he says. He sits on the edge of the couch guzzling some beer. “Technically, their whole justification for arresting and charging him is tainted. They can’t use any evidence they got from him.”

Her eyes widen.

“It
should
be thrown out,” he says vehemently. “But I can’t see any local judge doing that, can you? Ewing’ll look for any wiggle room he can find.” He smiles sardonically. “Can you imagine the screaming that would rise if this were thrown out on a so-called technicality? There’d be a mushroom cloud ten times the size of Hiroshima.”

“So what are you going to do?” she asks.

“Check it out. Put them on notice that I won’t tolerate it. File a motion for dismissal at some point, if I have to.” He gets up again, paces around the room—he thinks better on his feet. “I have to put them on notice that they can’t do this.” He pauses, taking another hit from his bottle of Sierra Nevada. “I don’t want to get drawn into Allison’s paranoia, but there’s some fishy stuff going on here. You can make a case out of anything if you twist stuff around enough. I need to dig deeper into this, going back to why Allison was even stopped in the first place.”

He finishes his beer, obliviously pokes his pinky into the bottle’s neck. The bottle swings from the end of his hand like a swollen appendage. “You don’t bring a charge like this by taking shortcuts. This thing ought to stand on its own merits, clean as a whistle. Otherwise, the whole structure crumbles.” Realizing his finger’s stuck in the bottle neck, he pops it out. “And I’m starting to get itchy to throw a stick of dynamite into the middle of their celebration.”

Luke’s meeting with Jackson is frustrating. It’s obvious that the detective, under a veneer of civility (a thin veneer), loathes Luke, the turncoat prosecutor. It’s not because Luke’s now working the other side of the aisle; that’s a common enough occurrence in both directions that it is no cause for latent animosity or disdain, although it is a rare thing for the head man to make that move. It’s who, in the eyes of this policeman and of everyone else who knew him when he was Luke Garrison, county district attorney, he has become. It’s the air of hostility that Luke emits unconsciously, the attitude, which to Jackson’s antennae preceded Luke into the room, that all the people who used to make up his professional and, to a great extent, social world are out to screw people over, that’s their secret agenda, and only he and a select few others, who know the real truth about how the law works and the innate corruptness and rottenness of the legal system, can expose it and make it right. And have the courage to do so.

Luke senses this feeling. He’s encountered it before. It’s ridiculously overblown and simplistic and he doesn’t agree with it, not too much of it, but he acknowledges that it’s part of his makeup now. It pisses him off to be stereotyped that way, but he knows it’s useful. It puts people on the defensive, off balance.
This guy is crazy, you don’t know what he’s going to do.
Unpredictability can be a powerful weapon.

“Did you inform Mr. Allison of his rights?” Luke asks, jumping right in. “The right to remain silent, the right to have a lawyer, that anything he said could be used against him? Did you tell him those things?”

“He’d already been Mirandized,” Jackson says smoothly. “The officer in the field did that. It’s on record.”

“I know. But did you tell him the reason you brought him in was because he was a suspect in an unsolved murder? He thought he was in here under a DUI.”

The cop shrugs. “I’m not a mind reader, sir. I don’t know what he thought.”

“Fine. But you thought he might be connected to Emma Lancaster’s kidnapping and murder.”

The cop shakes his head. “Not initially.”

Luke stares at him. Jesus, what chutzpah! “Your people found her key ring in his car, he was brought in here, you questioned him for over half an hour, but you didn’t consider him a suspect? I find that hard to believe, Detective.”

Another practiced shrug. “I said not initially.”

“Then what did you think?”

“That he might have some information that could help us.”

“What kind of information could that have been?”

“If someone had given him those keys, and he could remember who it was, that might have been the killer, or someone who knew the killer. That was my initial reaction.”

Luke smothers his incredulity at the answer, and at the man’s audacity in giving it. “Not that Joe Allison was involved, but that he might know someone who was involved,” he repeats Jackson’s assertion, wanting to make sure he’s hearing this right.

“That’s correct.”

“Then why didn’t you tell him that?”

“Tell him what?”

“That the keys belonged to Emma Lancaster,” Luke patiently says, “and you were hoping he could remember how they got in his car so you could find out who killed her. Wouldn’t that be the logical approach?”

He waits for a response, an involuntary reflex reaction. There is none.

“Unless he was a suspect in your mind, and you didn’t want to give the game away,” Luke continues.

“I question people my way,” the detective answers. “You might prefer a different approach. That’s how I work.”

This is going nowhere, Luke sees that clearly. The man isn’t about to budge off his story.

“When did Allison’s status change from that of an innocent party who might know something that could help your investigation to that of the prime suspect in the investigation?” he asks.

“When we found additional evidence pointing at him.”

“So then he became a suspect, and you told him he was a suspect, and informed him of his rights.”

“Exactly,” Jackson says. “As soon as he became a suspect, we told him, and informed him of his rights under the law.”

Luke nods. “But if that’s the case, explain something for me, Officer.”

“Detective,” Jackson corrects him.

“Sorry,” Luke answers. “
Detective
. Explain to me—Detective—why the sheriff’s office searched Mr. Allison’s residence if he
wasn’t
a suspect? How did you get a search warrant if he wasn’t a suspect? What did you tell the judge who issued it—‘we’ve got a guy in custody who isn’t a suspect in a murder case, but we want to search his home anyway because he might be if we find some evidence to prove he is’? That’s kind of ass-backwards, isn’t it?”

He knows what the search warrant said—he’s read it. It was a fine piece of obscurity and double talk—just enough factual information to allow a judge reason to issue it, but not enough to be successfully challenged at some later date, such as now. These guys are pros, Luke knows. They don’t break the law, but they push it as far as is possible. Nowadays, you don’t get convictions if you don’t. At least that’s their thinking—screw the civil libertarians, bad people need to be put away. A good cop figures out how.

The
shrug
again. He must practice that move in front of a mirror, Luke thinks. “It was a precaution,” Jackson says. “To make sure. The judge agreed with us.”

My ass
. “You know what’s interesting?” Luke says.

“What?”

“Caramba, the cop who arrested Allison,
did
think he was a suspect.”

For the first time in their meeting Jackson reacts, shifting his weight in his chair. Subtle, but Luke notices it.

“Who says that?” the detective asks carefully.

“He did.”

“He did?” Jackson seems genuinely surprised, taken aback. “When?”

“When I talked to him about it.”

Jackson thinks about how to react. “I think you misunderstood him” is the answer he comes up with.

“No, I didn’t.”

“A cop in the field doesn’t make those kinds of judgments.”

“It’s what he told me.”

“He was mistaken,” the detective says firmly.

“He was mistaken about his own judgment? How is that possible?” Luke asks.

“He was mistaken about—” Jackson stops. Any answer he gives will be the wrong one. The right answer is no answer. “Whatever Officer Caramba thought doesn’t matter,” he says, changing directions. “It’s up to the detectives to make those decisions. And the brass.” He leans forward, stares hard at Luke. “We did
not
think of Joe Allison as a suspect when we began talking to him. Period.”

Luke leans back. This is as far as he goes today. “One more thing,” he says as a preamble to departing. “What was the result of Mr. Allison’s sobriety test? I haven’t been able to find that.”

Jackson blinks. “I’m not sure,” he says cautiously.

“Didn’t you tell me he was brought in here on a DUI?”

“Yes.”

“Which means he was tested, right? And since you were holding him, he tested over point zero eight, correct?”

“I’m not sure,” Jackson says again.

Luke furrows his brow. “Let me get this straight. You questioned a man about an unsolved murder that had this entire city up in arms last year and you don’t know if he was drunk or sober?”

“I—”

“If he was sober,” Luke continues, curtly interrupting him, “if he passed the test, you had no grounds to hold him, correct?”

Jackson doesn’t answer.

“Legally, you had no grounds to detain Mr. Allison, is that right, Detective Jackson?” Luke asks again, this time with steam.

“Legally …” Again, a shrug.

“But since you were holding him, he had to be drunk, yes? You told him you couldn’t release him until the morning, when he would go before a magistrate. That’s on the tape of your interrogation,
De-tec-tive
.” He draws the word out with scorn.

“So?” Jackson says defensively.

“So was he drunk or was he sober?”

Jackson keeps quiet.

“You don’t know, do you?” Luke stands and gathers his papers into his briefcase. “Because you never tested him.”

As the crow flies, the distance from the Lancasters’ former house, where they lived when Emma was kidnapped, to Puerto Salle Street on the west side is less than five miles; the financial, social, and lifestyle differences are immeasurable and vast, almost two separate countries in the same city. Puerto Salle Street, where Maria Gonzalez, the Lancasters’ former house manager, lives with her husband and four children, is one hundred percent Latino, the average family income is less than twenty-five thousand dollars a year, and some families are on AFDC and food stamps.