Above the Law (22 page)

He was pretty high up the food chain. I’d checked him out—his reputation was one of professionalism and incorruptibility. Which didn’t mean he wasn’t biased in favor of his own people. It’s hard not to be.

“Agent Kim is in a meeting.”

I didn’t sit down, as she’d asked me to. She looked up at me, peeved.

“Please let him know Luke Garrison is here. Special Prosecutor Garrison. We have an appointment.”

Kim didn’t keep me long, less than five minutes. Early fortyish, slicked-back black hair, sharp shantung-silk suit. Tailored, from the way it draped him.

“How was the drive down from Santa Barbara?” he asked after we’d introduced ourselves and exchanged cards. His first name was Winston; his accent sounded East Coast, Philadelphia maybe. We’d never met, except over the phone, but he knew why I was here. Not a task to his liking.

“Easy. No hassle, as long as you aren’t fighting rush hour.”

“One of my favorite towns.”

Santa Barbara’s one of everyone’s favorite towns.

“My wife and I drive up for a weekend and eat at Citronelle. Do you like that restaurant?”

“Yes,” I said. “Great views.”

He gave me a good look-over. “I saw you on TV, last fall. Hairy situation. You handled it brilliantly.”

I didn’t answer, there was no call.

He fingerprinted us in, the heavy metal-reinforced door shutting behind us. I followed him down a hallway that was decorated like a Bakersfield Sheraton. Pastel carpets, seascape prints on the walls. As we passed by various offices, I could see but the plate-glass windows to the city, the Hollywood Hills. To the west, the Pacific.

“Great views.”

“Perk of the job. In lieu of better pay.” He smiled, quick, tight. “I thought you were a defense lawyer now. You haven’t been a prosecutor for what, four years now?”

He’d done his homework on me. “Five. I still am. This is a onetime thing.”

He escorted me into his office, closed the door behind us. He had a cherry space, southeast corner, views clear to the ocean, without the direct heat of the afternoon sun. We sat facing each other across his desk, which was clean of paperwork. He didn’t offer me a beverage.

“Your letter is disturbing,” he said, getting down to business. He pulled it out of his middle desk drawer. “Uncalled for, unnecessary.” He dropped it in the center of the desk. “Insulting, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“I don’t mind. I can understand your taking umbrage.”

The letter was our initial calling card, sent by Nora, informing his agency that Muir County was going to investigate the Juarez killing, independent of the DEA and all federal agencies. That I’d been hired as a special prosecutor to run the case. I could have told Kim that it wasn’t my call, this was the decision of the D.A. of Muir County, California, and the attorney general. But I didn’t. I was the man now—all the light refracted toward me, for better or worse.

The letter was nonaccusatory, but the DEA wasn’t going to take it that way, it was a shot across their bow. They’d done their investigation, their people had come across clean, who was this chickenshit county to question them? I would have felt the same way if our roles were reversed.

“You won’t get anywhere, it’s a waste of your time. And their money.” His arm sweeping toward the grand view, the great people of the Golden State.

“We’ll find out. It’s my job, I’m taking it on, I’ll do the best I can.”

A distasteful look came across his face, which wasn’t at all inscrutable. “You want to make us look bad. Pick on Washington. The national pastime.”

I wasn’t going to rise to his bait. I pulled the DEA investigation report from my briefcase, the one Nora had shown me in Blue River.

“Can we go over this? I have some questions.”

“It’s all there.”

“I was a D.A. for ten years, Agent Kim,” I said, the report dropping on his desk with a thud. “It isn’t all there, it never is.” He wanted to fire some high hard ones, fine by me. I’d start swinging for the fences. “I’m going to subpoena every agent who was there, if I have to. I’ll subpoena you, if I have to.”

“Try it.”

The lines were being drawn fast, too fast. Neither of us wanted this; we weren’t adversaries, just two men on opposite sides of the desk with difficult jobs to do and turf to protect.

I sat back, affecting conciliation. “You don’t want that, and neither do I. Look, Kim …do you mind if we use first names?”

“No.”

“Winston…a man was murdered.”

“We don’t know that.”

“Okay. A man was
killed.
A federal prisoner who had been in the custody of your agents, who was supposed to be brought in alive. You know where the order came from. And you know she isn’t happy about the way it turned out.”

He was listening—reluctantly.

“Somebody
may
have broken him free, and somebody
definitely
killed him. The same person, maybe, or persons? Juarez was a federal prisoner at that moment in time, but he was also a California citizen.”

“He was a piece of shit. Worse than shit. You know that, Garrison.”

“That’s not the issue. Someone killed him, probably murdered him, that’s one thing I hope to find out, and who did it, and why. And how did he get loose, and why? How does this all tie together?”

I put the documents back in my briefcase. “We’re not working together, and I’m not asking for your cooperation. I don’t even want it, it would cloud the issue. But if you have raw information, I’d like to see it.”

I stood up. “I’m not looking to hang anyone. But when an agency investigates itself, it leaves them open to disturbing questions. Nothing to do with anyone’s personal honesty, it’s institutional—you know that.”

He gave me a blank stare—the old bureaucratic stoneface. Screw this, I thought.

I turned to leave. “I can find my way out.”

He put up a hand to stop me, as I’d hoped he would.

“Sit down. Garrison.”

“Luke.”

“Luke. Come on, sit down.”

I sat down.

“You want a Coke?”

“Sure.”

He took two cans out of a small refrigerator, handed me one. I popped the top. He did the same. Then he went to his filing cabinet and took out several thick file-folders, carried them back to his desk, set them down.

“All our interviews. Everyone who was there that night. They’re complete.”

“Can I see them?”

“Not on the record. Invasion of privacy, the laws are strict.”

I knew that. I thought maybe he’d bend them, in the spirit of cooperation. If I wanted to see them, I’d have to get warrants. I might have to, I thought, somewhere down the line.

“I can summarize them for you.”

I didn’t know how much good that would do without seeing the raw data. “What about the Shooting Incident Team report?”

“That I can give you. I don’t have a copy here, it’s back in D.C., but I’ll get one for you. The bullet went right through Juarez’s head and lodged three inches into a tree. The impact from that stripped the casings. We couldn’t get a ballistics match.”

“If there had been,” I said, “we probably wouldn’t be having this discussion.”

“It’s a bitch.” He shook his head at the incredibleness of it all. “We’re still working at it, though.”

That was a surprise to me. “You have people up there currently?” Nora hadn’t said anything about that.

He shook his head. “Not officially.”

“But unofficially?” An agent prowling around up there could foul up my investigation. Not that I could stop them.

“This isn’t a dead case, not by any means. We have some irons in the fire. Which is another reason I wish you wouldn’t do this.”

“Give me a reason not to,” I said. “Give me a name.”

“I can’t. But we’ll have something, sooner or later. I can’t say more now. In the meantime, you could mess us up badly. I really wish you’d reconsider this.”

He wasn’t going to give me a name, or anything else. Shutting the state and Muir County out, once again.

“Sorry,” I said. “We’re moving ahead.”

“None of our people did it,” Kim said. Not defensively; with certainty, and anger.

I hate it when people insist on their rightness. “What makes you so sure?”

“Because it would have been too hard to contain.” He hefted the interviews, a heavy bundle. “Every agent there was questioned, each one individually. We really grilled them, this wasn’t patty-cake. The questionnaires alone took a couple hours to fill out. We had to do this right, we don’t want to cover anything up.” He pointed to the report Nora had given me. “You know what we think.”

“One of his own? I can’t buy that, it’s preposterous.”

“You don’t live in that world. It’s totally dog-eat-dog, cutthroat. Don’t forget, Juarez had a huge bounty on his head. That supersedes any loyalty, not that there is any, nada, zero.”

He finished his Coke, three-pointed it into a trash can near the door. Nothing but net.

“But we’ve given that one up,” he admitted.

“Oh?”

“It didn’t pan out. But something else came up that was much more plausible.” He took another file out of the case, handed it to me. A thin document, half a dozen pages. “This you can look at, but you don’t have to now, you can take it with you, examine it later. I’ll tell you what it is.”

He opened it. “Somebody infiltrated his gang. Someone from another gang, probably another Mexican gang. He was waiting for the big buy to go down, but when we kiboshed that, he took Juarez out instead.”

So that was their case; I’d figured we’d get there eventually. “Did you get anyone in your raid who fits that description?”

“Not that we know of. But we don’t know if we got everybody.”

I shook my head. “You don’t believe that, so don’t expect me to. You’d find that out. You’d have it on the front page of every newspaper in the country. TV, the works. You’re not an agency to hide their light under a bushel, not with the crap publicity you’ve been getting.”

He didn’t have a comeback to that.

“Has anyone claimed the reward?” I asked.

He laughed. “And get snuffed within twenty-four hours? The informant, Lopez, he’s getting a taste, but shit, no. Two million’s chump change for the size deals they’re doing. We’re talking huge, man. Nine figures. Enough snow to float the world.”

Anything’s possible, I thought, but I wasn’t buying this.

Kim was reading my mind. “There’s only one way, in my opinion, that someone on that task force could’ve done this.”

“What way is that?” Now this was worth listening to, even if I decided it was bullshit or con. It would point me toward the direction they wanted me to go, which would be a strong sign not to. Or watch out for.

“It couldn’t have been one agent. They were too clustered, no one man could’ve pulled it off without someone seeing a piece of it happening, or figuring it out.”

“Two men, then?”

“No. For something like this to work, they all would have to be dirty. Or many of them, most of them. It would have been a major conspiracy, not some spur-of-the-moment rump action. And that could not have happened. There aren’t that many dishonest agents in the DEA, let alone on one strike force. These agents came from different jurisdictions, all over the West. Some barely knew each other. It doesn’t fly, any way you look at it. And…”

Here he paused, too dramatically, I thought, but he wanted me to really get it.

“If somehow, some one-in-a-trillion chance, there had been a conspiracy? It wouldn’t have held. It would’ve been too big. Someone would’ve cracked. Think of the prestige, not to mention the reward—two million. If one of ours had killed Juarez, and another agent fingered him, we’d have paid that reward to the informant.”

That didn’t sound right to me. An agency encouraging agents to rat out each other? Great for morale, not to mention one’s physical well-being. That would’ve been a quick frag, no questions asked.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because we can’t tolerate a dishonest, dirty agent,” Kim said, his voice rising. “If I thought one of ours did this, I’d draw and quarter the motherhumper personally. I mean that. So this idea that we covered up something, or didn’t investigate it as fully as we could, put that notion out of your head.”

“Okay. I hear you.” I was impressed; not at his utter candor, necessarily, but at his conviction.

“But you’re going to pursue your investigation anyway.”

“Of course. No matter what your reports say, someone killed the guy. So what if he deserved it, we’re not the jury, right?” I took the report about the gang wars off his desk, held it in my hand. “Maybe this is how it happened. And maybe I’ll find it out.” I dropped it back on his desk. “We want a suspect, Winston. A living, breathing person. Someone we can prosecute, or at least point to. Not a report, not conjecture.”

He leaned back. “Well, Luke, I hope you find one. But it won’t be one of mine, I can assure you of that.”

If he’d been a friend, I’d have bet him a steak dinner. But we weren’t friends, now or in the future.

“I hope not,” I said truthfully. “I hope it’s a bad guy. A real bad guy, not a dirty agent.” I gathered my stuff. “We’ll be talking again, I imagine.”

“You know where to find me.”

“Thanks for your time.” I got up. “And for seeing me, and for getting me that shooting report you said you’d send. You can mail it to my Santa Barbara office.”

He escorted me out. We said good-bye and shook hands. It wasn’t a warm parting.

I
MET WITH MY
team of investigators at what was left of Juarez’s house, which had been confiscated by the DEA after the raid. They’d flown in from various parts of the country the day before. All of them—two men, one woman—were experienced investigators from various counties in California. I could have brought in people from anywhere, but after giving the matter some thought, I decided to go this way. It would save some money, and it would keep the case where we wanted it—in the hands of Muir County, and the state.

This was a quickie trip, for us to get a feel for each other and check out the lay of the land. The real work, forming a special grand jury, beginning to interview the participants and to investigate everything, would start in the following weeks.