Vertical Coffin (2004) (25 page)

She didn't respond for a long moment, then finally nodded her head. "Lemme think about it. I'll get back to you."

She reached over and scooped up all of her background material on Smiley and handed me half the stack.

"Wanna get started?"

She still seemed shaken, but she had a lot of will power, just like Alexa, and I knew she wouldn't break again.

"Sure. What's this?" I said, pulling the top sheet off the stack.

She glanced at it and said, "It's a bank payout to Vincent Smiley for four hundred and eighty thousand dollars. I'm guessing it's the Firemen's Fund Life Insurance policy for Edna and Stanley Smiley. Stanley had a one-truck plumbing service, Smiley, The Happy Plumber. Both he and Edna died in a car accident in 'ninety-five. Insurance premiums were fifteen thousand a year."

"So that's where the house came from."

"Exactly."

"Fifteen thousand a year?" I said. "Isn't that a pretty big premium?"

"Why?" she wondered.

"I don't know. Guy's a plumber with one truck, pays fifteen grand in life insurance premiums? Sounds kinda high. How much life insurance would that buy?"

She scribbled a note. "I've got a friend who sells insurance. I'll check it out."

"Can't you just call the broker who handled this policy?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"You don't want to know."

I frowned. "Don't tell me you hacked this bank's computer to get this."

"Ve haff our veys," she said, using a corny German accent. "I have a friend in computer sales who doesn't mind skating the edges, and she knows how to write spaghetti codes. I'll get her to hack the insurance company's computer. Because of the medical file, all this life insurance stuff is confidential."

"Shouldn't we just serve a warrant on Fireman's Fund?"

"Smiley's dead, so whatever we find now can't hurt him. This isn't going to end up in court, anyway. You want to waste time we don't have getting a no-recourse warrant that we can't file until Vincent is buried?"

"Probably not. What else?"

She reached over and picked up more printouts. "Here's everything I could hack and track on Smiley from the county and municipal sites. Most of it's probably useless, but at least it's a start."

She divided the stack in two. "I've arranged it chronologically by date, starting with county health records, preschool, middle and elementary, his GED in 'ninety-five, on through to the shoot-out statements and death certificate. Couldn't find his birth records. What do you want, Smiley in short pants or Smiley in Kevlar?"

"Smiley in short pants."

She handed me one of the stacks. We spent the next hour reading and making notes. At midnight we were both cranking off yawns, but we had a record of his life as far as county and municipal records took it.

"I'm shot," she said. "Wanta meet first thing for breakfast? Work out a doorbell schedule?"

"Yeah. My brain is fuzzed." I closed my notebook and got to my feet. She followed me to the door. I was just starting to leave, when she reached out and took my arm, stopping me. It was the first time that she had actually touched me.

She looked earnestly at me for a moment, then let go of my arm and cleared her throat. "Listen Shane, you say you used to be a loner, that you didn't let people in, but now your personal life is richer. Exactly how did you change that? No matter how hard I try, I'm afraid to trust anyone."

"It was pretty easy once I got the knack," I said, and she leaned forward as if I was about to give her the secret of life.

"When you don't like yourself, it's damn hard to have much of a relationship with anybody else. All you've gotta do is start finding things to like about yourself. Once you learn what they are, find somebody you care about and give those feelings away. What it boils down to is: In order to get, you've gotta give."

"That sounds like New Age bullshit," she replied skeptically.

"Some of the best answers are the easiest," I said. "But at the same time, the easiest answers can be the hardest to understand."

Chapter
32

MATCH
ES

Doctor gouda called Jo at 8 a
. M
., just as she was leaving her house to meet me for breakfast. She called me and we changed our plans. It was a little after nine when we walked into the print bay of the sheriff's old lab. Doctor Chuck E. Cheese was bent over, studying two enlarged blowups of a fingerprint through a magnifying glass the size of a hotel ashtray.

"I think I got something," he said without turning around. "Enough, at least, to have a serious talk with this guy." He straightened up, hefting his big belly off the table. This morning he was decked out in a tent-sized dashiki large enough to camp under.

"This is the comparison print we rolled at the sheriff's SWAT house yesterday afternoon." He handed Jo a blowup of a right index finger. "We think it belongs to a guy named Pat Dutton. I
t m
ore or less matches that partial on the three-oh-eight you guys found. Dutton's one of the long guns on the SEB Red team out there."

"The Red team?" I looked over at Jo, surprised that it wasn't someone on Scott Cook's Gray team.

"How sure are you of this match?" Jo asked, holding the blowup and examining it carefully. She had regained her composure from last night, and looked fresh in a crisp white blouse, black slacks, and a blazer.

"As I told you before, this is not a great latent." Doctor Gouda picked up a second photograph, which was of the partial taken from the casing we'd found across the street from Greenridge's house. He laid it next to the photo of the print they'd rolled yesterday, then started pointing out similarities.

"These two tented arches are pretty good matches. Here's half a central pocket whorl that's pretty much on the money. This isle ain't a bad match. Would I take it to court? Probably not. Would I make an investigatory judgment based on it? You bet."

Gouda looked up. "That footprint you plastered was identified by the grunts in soles and holes," referring to the footprint and gunshot lab. "Follow me," he said, and waddled out of the fingerprint bay into the room next door.

The GSR lab was a windowless room given over to several large electron microscopes, used for breaking down and reading barium and antimony, the chemicals used to determine gunshot residue. There was one long table for identifying footprints. The three young criminalists working on the equipment sat, heads bowed, eyes pressed to various viewfinders.

"Hey, Ruben, you got that bootprint from Mission Street?" Gouda asked.

An African-American criminalist rose up from a microscope and handed Gouda a photograph from a stack on the footprint table. Clipped to the back of the footprint photograph was some catalogue material from the Danner Boot Company.

"Your print came from a Striker CTX Danner Terra Force jump boot, size twelve," Gouda said. "The print was pushed out a little, but it looks like a narrow foot. Maybe a double-A."

Gouda handed it to Jo, who glanced at it before passing it to me. I knew that Danner boots were big with most cops. They came in a lot of styles. Police officers bought them because they were light, durable high-tops with thick rubber soles and good traction.

Gouda took the photo back. "This one looks pretty fresh. Right from the box. No nicks, cuts, or flaws. It'll be hard to make a positive match."

Thirty minutes later Jo and I were standing in the parking lot of the old crime lab watching for Chief Filosiani to arrive. Ten minutes later he pulled his maroon Crown Victoria into the lot. He was talking on his cell phone as he got out, just closing it up as he approached.

"That was Bill Messenger," he said, holding up the phone. "He got an arrest warrant. We're staying off the scanners to keep the news crews away. Gonna meet our SWAT unit out at South Fetterly in twenty minutes and pick up Pat Dutton."

"Chief, we only have four identifiers," I said. "The criminalist inside says this print's probably not going to stand up in court. We need to polygraph Dutton, if he'll sit for it."

"That'll be up to his lawyers," Tony said.

Just then Sheriff Messenger arrived in the passenger seat of a LASD black-and-white. His face was drawn. He had the arrest warrant in his hand.

We piled into our separate vehicles and followed Sheriff Messenger out to East L
. A
.

An LAPD SWAT van and a support SUV, along with three black-and-white escort vehicles, were lined up at the curb across from the public library, a block down from the sheriff's SEB building. LAPD SWAT was organized, more or less, the same as SEB, only each LAPD team had ten guys, instead of eight.

Tony and Bill had elected not to tell the Justice Department about the arrest until after it was over. ATF was the agency investigating William Greenridge's murder, but both chiefs reasoned that emotions were running way too high. If they were notified, SRT would want to serve the warrant. Under these sensitive conditions, that seemed like a really bad idea. Messenger reasoned it would be far easier and less risky for him to arrest his own officer, but to keep the LAPD SWAT in reserve.

After they briefed the LAPD SWAT team leader on how they wanted to serve the warrant, the four of us got into the Crown Vic. We drove up to the corner and parked next to SEB's long driveway. Sheriff Messenger used a cell phone to call the captain in charge of his SWAT house.

"This is Sheriff Messenger," he told the switchboard operator. "Who's on the desk this morning?" We waited, then he said, "Put Captain Otto on please."

A minute later the SWAT commander came on the line and Messenger told him what he wanted.

I took my Beretta out of my ankle holster and jacked a round into the chamber, then repacked the nine on my belt.

"Okay, Captain," Sheriff Messenger said, "I want you to take Sergeant Dutton to the side door. Make sure he's not armed. Stand there with him and wait."

He paused while the captain spoke, then said, "Good. See you in five."

We drove down the winding drive. There were almost twenty sheriff's black-and-whites of all makes and sizes, along with four big SWAT vans, parked in the lot beside a one-story ranch
-
style building.

Tony pulled around to the side door where a middle-aged, dark-haired captain with a Marine's combat bearing was standing next to a freckled, red-haired man about twenty-five who was chewing a wad of tobacco, occasionally spitting juice into a
Styrofoam cup. This was Sergeant Patrick Dutton. He had a confused look on his Irish face.

Tony set the brake and we all got out.

Sheriff Messenger walked over to his SWAT commander and handed him the arrest warrant, then he turned to the red-haired man.

"Sergeant Pat Dutton?" he asked.

"Yes sir," Dutton replied, clearly puzzled.

I looked down and saw that he was wearing Danner Terra Force jump boots laced up over his tan, SEB Weapons Team jumpsuit. But so did the captain and probably two-thirds of the SWAT guys stationed here.

"You're under arrest for suspicion of murder," Messenger said as Captain Otto handed Dutton the warrant.

Dutton's expression barely changed. All that happened was he shifted his tobacco chaw to the other side of his lip, then spit a line of juice into the cup.

"Whatta you kidding?" he said. "Who'd I kill?"

"An SRT agent named William Greenridge," Messenger said.

Dutton looked from me, to Jo, to Chief Filosiani, then back at Sheriff Messenger. An entire new range of emotions now played like a wide-screen movie across his open face: first humor, then disbelief, followed by fear and panic. I knew a split-second before it happened that he was going to bolt.

He lunged away from Captain Otto and headed across the parking lot. I threw myself at him, low and head first, tackling him with a body block below the knees. The move took his legs out and he tumbled over my back. The cup of tobacco juice went flying, but Dutton was a commando and he hit and rolled, coming up to his feet almost immediately.

I've seen fast moves in dojos, seen plenty of black belts working out with each other on police mats, but I wasn't prepared for Sergeant Jo Brickhouse. As Pat Dutton regained his footing
,
he spun and Jo blocked him with her body, then threw three quick blows: A straight-hand finger strike to his neck, followed by a closed fist shot to the solar plexus. The last was a knee to the groin.

Patrick Dutton went down hard, and seconds later Tony and I had him cuffed and in custody.

"I want an attorney," Dutton gasped at Captain Otto. He was holding his balls and must have swallowed the chaw, because he suddenly gagged, leaned forward, and puked it up at our feet.

Chapter
33

THE OTHER
SHOE

The next morning Jo and I were unceremoniously shifted to the backwater of our own investigation.

The ABC news desk had gotten wind of Pat Dutton's arrest. Somebody at SEB or Parker Center had leaked it, along with all of the evidence we had against him. The story about two L
. A
. SWAT teams gone wild broke nationally on Good Morning America.