The Disappearance (47 page)

Ewing looks at them. He’s already seen them, as has Logan. “Yes,” he says heavily. “This does have bearing on the events and how they transpired.” He ponders Luke’s request a moment more. “At this point, I’m not going to rule on your point,” he tells Luke. “Meaning I’m unofficially denying it, but if subsequent testimony or evidence, such as this”—he brandishes the pages Luke gave him—“is found to be relevant, I’ll revisit the issue.”

“Officer Caramba.” Luke’s at the podium again, the pages he’s just shown Ewing spread out in front of him. “You were parked on Coast Village Road, the defendant drove by you, you started following him, you suspected him of driving under the influence, you pulled him over. Is that essentially the way it happened?”

The policeman nods. “That’s how it happened,” he attests.

“Was he speeding?”

“I didn’t follow him long enough to check that out. That wasn’t why I went after him.”

“It was the erratic nature of his driving.”

“Yes. I’ve already said that.”

“He was weaving all over the road?”

“He was not driving in a straight line.”

“But was he out of control, as you followed him, or just weaving a little, momentarily?”

“He crossed the double yellow line,” Caramba says, not wavering in his story. “We’ve had fatalities on that stretch of road. Our watchword is to be overly cautious. A saved life is worth any amount of extra caution.”

“Agreed,” Luke responds. “But one crossing of the yellow line, when he isn’t speeding? He could have been looking down at his radio for a minute, or been otherwise distracted. Shouldn’t you have followed him longer, to make sure?”

“It’s a judgment call. In my judgment, his driving warranted my pulling him over.”

“To give him a field sobriety test you never gave him,” Luke says with heavy sarcasm. Before Logan can object, Luke puts up a hand. “Only kidding, Officer. You were going by the book.”

“Yes, I was.” The policeman’s mouth is set in a tight, thin line.

Luke turns to the bench. “Your Honor, at this point, I would like to place three documents in evidence.” He’s holding the papers he brandished in the judge’s chambers.

Ewing nods. “So ordered.”

The documents are marked for identification.

Luke hands one copy of the pages to the clerk, who moves them into evidence. Holding a second copy, Luke approaches the stand. Handing the three pages to Officer Caramba, he asks him to look them over.

“Do you recognize these?” Luke asks. “All of them?”

Caramba looks at them carefully. “Yes.”

“The first one is your hand-written report of you detaining Mr. Allison on Coast Village Road, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“And the other two are police logs of telephone conversations, aren’t they? This one”—he taps the page the officer is holding in his right hand—“is between the dispatcher and officers in the field, and this second one is between the police switchboard and outside callers. Is that correct?”

Caramba makes a show of studying them. “That’s what they look like.”

“Have you ever seen these pages before? Besides the one you wrote yourself.”

“Yes.”

“When did you first see these pages, Officer?”

Caramba stares at them. “A month or six weeks ago. I don’t recall exactly.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Luke says dismissively. “Who showed them to you? Someone from the D.A.’s office? An assistant D.A., someone from that office?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” He moves in close to the officer. The cop is wearing Canoe, and too much of it. He hasn’t smelled Canoe on a man since college. Moving upwind ever so slightly, he points to a specific spot on one page, then the other. “I’d like you to look at two entries, Officer. But before you do that,” he backtracks, “do you notice the dates, listed on the top of each page?”

The officer looks at the tops of the pages. “Yes, I see them.”

“They’re the same date, on both pages, is that correct?”

A nod. “Yes.”

“One page lists outside calls coming in, the other page is dispatcher calls to and from the field. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“The date on both these pages—this is the night that Mr. Allison was arrested, isn’t it? The night you stopped him for suspicion of a DUI.”

Another tight nod. “Yes.”

“With your permission, Your Honor, I’d like to give a copy of these pages to each member of the jury, so they can follow along with us.”

Ewing nods. “So ordered.”

Luke hands the clerk two stacks of pages. She crosses to the jury box and crisply hands them out, one of each, to the twelve men and women, returning to her seat in front of the bench. Luke waits a minute for the jurors to look them over, then goes on.

“On the switchboard sheet, we have a call from an anonymous citizen. Correct?”

Caramba’s nod is one inch. “Yes,” he answers in a pinched voice.

“This stellar citizen—the log doesn’t say male or female, and the caller doesn’t ID him- or herself—has seen someone driving a car towards the vicinity of Coast Village Road, a few minutes after midnight. Anonymous stellar citizen tells the switchboard operator that the driver of the car appears to be intoxicated, is that correct?”

Looking at the sheet, Caramba answers, “Yes.”

“This wonderful person was aware enough to record the make, model, color, and license plate of the car in question, is that also correct? On a dark, cloudy night.”

“Yes.”

Luke now holds up the second sheet. “Now this is the record for that same time frame—shortly after midnight, the night Mr. Allison was detained by you—of calls made by the central dispatcher in the police department to officers in the field. Which at that time included you. Is that also correct, Officer Caramba?”

Caramba nods, almost imperceptibly

“Please answer vocally,” Ewing reminds him.

Like sucking a lemon: “Yes.”

“According to the time code on these pages, that call was broadcast less than a minute after the anonymous tip was called in to the switchboard, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“You were the responding officer. You were, fortunately and coincidentally, smack dab in the path the driver was taking.”

“Uh-huh.”

Luke turns to the jury box. “That’s a yes.” Turning back to the witness, he now says, “So when Mr. Allison came into view, driving down Coast Village Road—at an acceptable rate of speed, I might add, you’ve testified that he wasn’t speeding—you were waiting for him. You were primed to go after him, regardless of how his driving appeared to you objectively. You were going to pull him over, and then figure it out.”

Caramba shakes his head in denial. “He was weaving on the road. I would have pulled him over if I hadn’t gotten the call.”

“I’m sure you would have, being the wonderful policeman that you are—” Luke says.

“Objection!”

“—the protector of society—”

“Objection, damn it!” Logan, on his feet, is pounding on his table with his fist.

“Sustained!” comes the judicial lion’s roar. “Stop attacking this witness like this, Mr. Garrison!”

Luke steps back. “Sorry about that, Your Honor. But there’s a point where the truth gets bent so badly and recklessly that a reasonable man and conscientious lawyer would be derelict if he didn’t call attention to it.”

“Objection!”

“Sustained!”

Luke puts up both hands in a gesture of supplication. Almost backing away, he declares, “I’m sorry. I won’t do this again—with this witness, who I’m done with.” He looks at Caramba. “I’m done with
you
—for now.” Then rudely turning his back on the man, he says to Judge Ewing, “I am now, again—”

Ewing interrupts him. Looking down from his perch, he tells Caramba, “The witness is excused.”

Stiffly, the police officer gets up, walks down from the stand, and strides out of the room. The judge turns to Luke, then to Logan. “Approach the bench.” They stand at the judge’s post. Luke speaks quietly so the jury won’t hear.

“I am again asking the court, given this clear evidence that Officer Caramba did not stop the defendant because he looked like he was driving under the influence, but because of an anonymous telephone call that smells suspiciously like a setup to me—”

“Objection!” Logan says immediately.

“Sustained. Please save your editorializing for your summation, Mr. Garrison.”

“Given the circumstances surrounding the initial search and seizure of Mr. Allison and his vehicle, I ask that any and all material and information gathered from said search and seizure be declared inadmissible in this trial.”

Ewing stares at Luke even as Logan once again strenuously objects. Then he shakes his head. “No. I’m not going to do that.”

Luke nods. This is the only ruling Ewing can make. For him to do otherwise would be grounds for a mistrial. No superior court judge in this world would have the guts to do that. Judges live in the real world. But Luke’s deflated, nevertheless.

“Receiving a tip is not grounds for dismissal of an otherwise legal search and seizure,” Ewing tells Luke, almost apologetically.

Luke knows the judge is in turmoil over this. The judge knows he’s making a good case.

Judge Ewing turns and checks the ornate wall clock situated high behind his head. “We’ll break for lunch until one-thirty,” he notifies the assemblage. To Ray Logan: “Have your next witness prepared to take the stand.”

Logan’s direct of Detective Terry Jackson is meat and potatoes. Jackson ingratiates himself with the jury, which makes him a good witness. Luke, watching the examination, can see that the jury likes the man, and believes him. Logan doesn’t tarry on anything, so in a little more than an hour, not much longer than the actual interrogation itself took, he’s turning Jackson over to Luke.

Luke strides to the podium. He has the transcript of Allison’s interrogation in his hand. “Good afternoon, Detective Jackson,” he says, friendly today. “How’re you doing today? You’re looking good. Fit.”

“Thank you.” Jackson smiles. “You’re looking good your own self.”

“I’m hangin’ in,” Luke says. He opens the folder containing the transcript. “When did you read my client his Miranda rights?”

“I didn’t,” Jackson says without missing a beat. “He was read his rights in the field, by the arresting officer.”

Luke shakes his head. “No, he was not. He was read his rights—as regarding a misdemeanor DUI, not a felony death-penalty murder charge.”

“That’s not my department,” Jackson says with ease. “The man had been arrested in the field, he’d been sitting in a jail cell, me and him talked. I asked him did he want a lawyer, he said no. It’s right there in your transcript you’re carrying around in your hand.”

Luke gives Jackson a skeptical eye. “Terry. That’s not how it was.”

“It sure was,” the detective comes back with vigor. “Read it, man, it’s in the transcript. And the name is Jackson. Mister.”

Luke leafs through a few pages of transcript until he finds the one he’s looking for. For obvious reasons, the district attorney didn’t place the transcript in evidence—so Luke did, before he began his cross-examination. He wants the jury to have it in their hands when they go into the jury room to deliberate.

“You tell him he shouldn’t be in there?”

Jackson nods.

“He was suspected of murder. Why did you tell a suspect facing a murder charge he shouldn’t be in jail?” Luke asks. “That doesn’t sound like good police procedure to me, and everyone knows you’re a good detective.”

Jackson smiles and shakes his head. “Hardly anyone knows who I am, let alone if I’m good at my job or not. But thanks for the plug,” he says, almost laughing. “I’m gonna hit my boss up for a raise.”

“Emma Lancaster’s key chain was found in his glove compartment. Doesn’t that automatically make him a suspect?”

“Of course not,” the cop says. “She could’ve tossed it in there herself and forgot about it,” he says.

Same old same old. “So he was just in there on a DUI charge and you were shooting the breeze with him until his time period for sobering up expired and he could leave.”

Jackson shrugs, but he doesn’t respond directly, because he knows what’s coming.

“Except you told him he couldn’t leave until the morning.”

“It was three, four by that time,” Jackson says. “Morning was right around the corner.”

“Right.” You’re lying through your teeth. “So he wasn’t a suspect until his shoes showed up, the shoes that had the sole print found out at the Lancaster house that afternoon after Emma disappeared, and later where her body was discovered. It wasn’t until they showed up from his house that you decided he was a suspect after all. Is that right?”

“That’s right,” the detective says deadpan. “One built on the other.”

“And that’s when you told him he was a suspect in the Emma Lancaster kidnapping-murder case.”

“That’s when he was notified.”

“And read his Miranda rights as they pertained to that charge.”

“That’s—” Jackson catches himself. “He already had been.”

Luke shakes his head. “You just said he wasn’t a suspect until the shoes turned up to buttress the key chain. So he couldn’t have been read his rights, because there was no reason to, since he wasn’t a suspect.”

Jackson shrugs. “That’s how it happened, Luke. Excuse me—
Mister
Garrison. We got the killer we’d been looking for, and we did it by the book.”

Luke spins to Ewing—he’s furious. “This man’s not the jury. He is not allowed to render an opinion on the guilt or innocence of my client. This testimony is outrageous and has to be struck.”

Ewing nods. “The witness will refrain from stating anything other than known, observable facts.” He swivels around, facing the jury over Jackson’s head. “You are to completely ignore that last set of remarks. They are not going to be part of the record, and you should erase them from your minds,” he says forcefully.

Now royally steamed, Luke continues: “When Mr. Allison was in the jail, Detective Jackson, when was he given a sobriety test?”

Jackson shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“But he was given one, right?”

Another shrug. “I said I don’t know. I don’t do them.”

Luke paces around in the well for a moment, coming closer to the jury box. “We’ve got a conundrum here, I think, don’t you, Detective?”