Above the Law (54 page)

“It was,” Dutton replied softly.

“So from a career point of view, Agent Jerome had everything to lose and nothing to gain by killing Juarez.”

“Everything,” Dutton concurred. “Which is what has happened.”

No one in the courtroom was feeling the oppressive heat now. Everyone was engrossed in Dutton’s exculpatory testimony; except me, and I wasn’t sitting in the jury box.

John Q. waited a moment to let that point sink in deep, then he continued, “There has been testimony given in this trial that Agent Jerome had a personal vendetta against the drug dealer Juarez. In your opinion, knowing Agent Jerome as you do, and having worked with him for as long as you have, could he have let personal feelings supersede his professional accountability?”

I was on my feet, but before the word could leave my lips, Dutton had answered.

“Never,” he said firmly.

“Objection!” I called out, a second too late.

“Sustained,” Judge McBee said immediately. “Strike question and answer,” he instructed the court reporter, and to the jury he said, “That is a conclusion from the witness, not a fact. You are to disregard that answer completely.”

Sure they will, I thought sourly. Score one for your side, John Q.

The old jurist turned to the bench. He knew to quit when he was ahead. “No further questions, Your Honor.”

I glared at Dutton from the lectern.

“Agent Dutton. You’ve just testified that your orders from the Justice Department, as relayed to you by Agent Jerome, were to apprehend the men who were inside the compound, to capture them alive. That they were not to be killed. Is that correct?”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“None of the men…or Reynaldo Juarez, specifically?”

“He was the focus,” Dutton admitted grudgingly, “but we didn’t want to kill any of them.”

“Okay. You didn’t want to kill any of them, but you
really
didn’t want to kill Juarez. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“You went into the compound expecting to make a clean sweep, correct. You’d been assured their security was down, which would enable your forces to stroll right in and arrest them all without incident, is that right?”

“You don’t stroll into a drug bust. It’s a dangerous situation.”

“People get killed, don’t they?” I asked, stating the obvious.

“Sometimes.”

“But in this case, you thought you’d catch them by surprise, and escape unscathed.”

I could hear his breath exhaling. So could the jury. “Yes,” he admitted reluctantly.

“That was based on information supplied to you by an informant, is that right, also?”

He gave a curt nod.

“You have to speak up,” I admonished him. “Was it or wasn’t it?”

“Yes. It was.”

He was becoming hostile again, now that it was me questioning him, instead of kindly old John Q. Jones.

“Which turned out to be wrong information, didn’t it?” I asked. “They were lying in ambush for you.”

Another deep breath, another deep exhale. “Yes, they were.”

“With guns ablazing.”

“Yes.”

“You and the others in your party were caught in a tremendous firestorm that you weren’t prepared for, isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“Some of the agents were killed, weren’t they? Butchered.”

He closed his eyes, reliving the horror of that night. “Yes.”

“Good friends of yours. Men you had worked with, shoulder to shoulder, for years.”

He shuddered. “Yes.”

“Others were wounded.”

Another involuntary shudder. “Yes.”

I left the lectern and walked right up to him. Talking quickly now, I asked, “And when that happened, Agent Dutton—when you were unexpectedly fired upon with great force, what did you and the other agents do?”

He looked over at the defense table, then stared at me without answering.

“Answer the question, please,” Judge McBee ordered him.

He looked at me hard. “We returned their fire.”

“You shot back at them.”

“Yes.”

“With everything you had.”

He nodded grimly. “Yes.”

“To protect yourselves.”

“Yes.”

“And to kill them.”

“Yes…” He caught himself. “To protect ourselves.”

“And to kill them, so that you
could
protect yourselves, isn’t that right? You weren’t aiming to miss, were you? You were aiming to hit them. To stop them.”

“Yes.”

“To kill them!” I said, my voice rising.

His voice rose to meet mine. “Yes!”

“And you did kill some of them, didn’t you? Didn’t you kill some of the men inside that compound?”

“Yes,” he snapped righteously. “We killed some of them.”

“Did you know who you were killing when you started returning the enemy’s fire?”

He stared, not immediately following me.

“When you started shooting at the men inside that compound with everything you had in your arsenal,” I asked, “did you say to yourselves, ‘We can shoot at him and him and him, but not
him,
because
he
might be Reynaldo Juarez?’ Did you make that distinction, Agent Dutton?”

He looked at me askance. “You can’t do that. It’s all happening in a split second, you can’t pick and choose.”

I stepped back.

“Of course you can’t,” I said, toning down my invective. “That’s the point, isn’t it? You don’t know who you’re shooting at. All you know is that you’re shooting at the people who are shooting at you.”

He didn’t respond.

“Isn’t that right, Agent Dutton? It’s dark, you’re pinned down by heavy enemy fire, you can’t see a thing. You shoot at whoever’s shooting you. No distinctions.”

A slow nod. “That’s the way it was.”

“You could easily have been shooting at Reynaldo Juarez, and you could easily have killed him. Isn’t that right, Agent Dutton?”

“Yes,” he said woefully. “It is.”

“So all this gibberish about taking him and the others alive—it flies out the window when the shooting starts. Doesn’t it. Agent Dutton? It did in this case, didn’t it?”

“Yes. It did.”

“It was the luck of the draw that Reynaldo Juarez wasn’t killed in that firefight, wasn’t it?”

Dutton gave me a baleful look. “He was hiding,” he said stubbornly.

“You knew that then?” I asked mockingly. “You and the forty or fifty other agents who were pouring as much fire into that compound as you could knew that Juarez was hiding, that he wasn’t returning your fire? You knew that in advance of going in?” I thundered.

Dutton sat back, rubbing his temples. He was so weary from this.

“No,” he admitted. “We didn’t know that.”

“So I’ll ask it again. You were shooting to kill, including Agent Jerome. And Juarez could have been on the receiving end of one of your hollow-point bullets. Yes or no?”

“Yes,” he spoke in a low undertone.

“So much for taking him alive at any cost,” I said dismissively. “That was all pretense, wasn’t it? Empty rhetoric.” I walked to the stand again and got in his face, inches away. “Sterling Jerome would have been just as happy taking Juarez dead as alive, wouldn’t he have been! Happier! He wanted Juarez dead, and when he couldn’t kill him then—”

“Objection!” John Q. was on his feet, shouting over me.

“Sustained!” Judge McBee yelled, even louder.

“—he killed him later, didn’t he!” I thundered on.

“Objection!”

“He was out to kill Reynaldo Juarez, and he did!”

“Objection!”

“Sustained!” Wham wham wham!
The gavel slammed home.

I stepped back. I don’t know who had the reddest face, Judge McBee, John Q., or me.

“You are out of order!” Judge McBee screamed at me. “You are this far”—he held his thumb and forefinger an inch apart—“from being severely cited for contempt! Do …you…hear…me?”

I stepped away. “Yes, sir,” I said, properly chastened. I turned my back on Dutton and walked to the prosecution table—I’d done my damage, and then some. “I’m through with this witness,” I said over my shoulder. “No further questions.”

Kate was waiting for me outside my office. I unlocked the office. We went inside. I grabbed a beer from the fridge, opened one for her, flopped into my chair. “You got anything for me?”

She opened her ubiquitous notebook. “The architect-slash-contractor they both used was Dean Vaca of Connelly Associates, offices in San Francisco, L.A., Phoenix, Denver, and so forth. He was originally contacted by Nora, who turned him onto Miller.”

I took a hit from the can. “The connection could be through her family in Denver. Her father’s a big deal there.”

“Right.” Reading on, she continued, “Both paid cash. No mortgages. Nora’s raw property cost sixty-five thousand, Miller’s seventy-five. Her house, turnkey, was a tick under two hundred grand. His went for one seventy-five.”

I marveled at the figures. “In Santa Barbara those houses would go for ten times that. Five times, minimum, back when they built them. What a deal.”

“But you’d have to live here,” she reminded me. “No sushi bars, no surfing, cold in winter and hot in summer. Boring.”

“Picky, picky, picky.”

“Anyway.” Back to her notebook again. “By your standards it’s a deal, that’s true, but it’s still a lot of cash to lay out. I’m checking on that. I’m also checking into a few other things, nothing you have to know about now, you’ve got your hands full with the trial. If anything jumps out at me, I’ll ring your bell.”

She put her notebook away. “Was there something in particular you’re looking for? Why do you have me doing this?”

“Idle speculation, I guess. Sometimes coincidences happen and they make you wonder.”

“I’ll keep at it,” she promised. “You want me to stay up here until the end of the trial, don’t you? Just in case?”

“Yes. Just in case.”

The air-conditioning had gone on the fritz, so the courtroom was sweltering. Repairmen were feverishly laboring to get it working, but if parts were needed, they’d have to be brought in from Reno, which wouldn’t happen until tomorrow; another endearing reason for living in the outback. Coats were off—even Judge McBee was in his shirtsleeves. Contentiousness was in the air, waiting for a spark. I hoped I wouldn’t be the one to strike it.

Despite the crummy conditions, Filipe Portillo looked sharp, sitting up on the witness chair, one leg crossed over the other, styling in a sharp pinstripe suit (he kept his coat on), dark blue dress shirt buttoned to the collar, no tie the way they do at the Academy Awards, and hand-tooled alligator cowboy boots, a nice touch, I thought, for up here. A simple ruby earring in his left ear completed his ensemble and made a nice statement, although it was lost on these jurors, I’m sure.

John Q., Portillo’s opposite sartorially, slouched over the lectern.

“Mr. Portillo…” His voice sounded as if he’d eaten an extra helping of gravel for breakfast. “Were you acquainted with the deceased, Reynaldo Juarez?”

“Yeah. Me and Reynaldo were close. Like brothers, man.”

“For a long time?”

“All our lives, practically.”

“You worked together?”

Portillo repositioned himself to get more comfortable. “We did business together, yeah.”

This is great, John Q., I thought. One drug dealer testifying about another. That’s going to help you? If that’s the best you’re going to do, you might as well pack your bags and go home now. I’d been baffled when I’d seen Portillo’s name on John Q.’s witness list; I was still baffled.

“Were you and Mr. Juarez together on the night of the raid on Mr. Juarez’s property?” John Q. asked.

Portillo nodded. “We were together, that’s right.”

“Were there others present?”

“Yeah.”

“About how many?”

“Including Reynaldo, an even dozen.”

“Would you tell us where you were?”

“In Mr. Juarez’s house.”

“Was that here in Muir County?”

“Yeah.”

“What were you and Mr. Juarez and these other men doing?”

“Hanging out. R and R, you could say. We’d been working hard, all of us, we needed to get away and goof.”

“It wasn’t a business occasion?”

Portillo shook his head. “Strictly recreation.”

This was bullshit, as Dutton had explained earlier. John Q., of course, had anticipated the problem.

“You weren’t there to receive a shipment of drugs, as one of the agents who was there has testified?”

Portillo gave him a look of disbelief “No, man. That’s a crock. Did they find this shipment of coke they’re talking about? A ton? I mean, come on. There weren’t going to be any drugs there. Reynaldo would never give anyone like Jerome an excuse like that.”

Which was true, except for this special occasion. But John Q. had raised a little mound of doubt about the entire enterprise by bringing this lie in. What I didn’t understand was the point of it.

John Q. shambled over to the defense table to consult some notes, came back to the lectern.

“Let’s set the record straight. Were there drugs present on the property during that time you and the others were there, Mr. Portillo?”

“No, sir,” Portillo answered vehemently. “There were not.”

“No drugs of any kind.”

“Well, there was booze. Beer, wine, booze.”

“But no illegal substances.”

“No.” Portillo gave the jurors a droll look. “You can get arrested for that.”

“Indeed,” John Q. commented dryly. “So there was nothing illegal going on at Mr. Juarez’s compound that night.”

“Not a thing.”

I thought about objecting to this line of questioning as irrelevant and a waste of time, but I decided not to. I was at a loss as to where John Q. was going with this, but it didn’t seem to be helping his client or hurting me, so I kept my mouth shut.

John Q. nodded, as if this confirmed something important to him.

“Did you have security at Mr. Juarez’s house and grounds, Mr. Portillo?”

“Oh, yeah,” Portillo answered.

“What kind of security?”

“Sensors that detected if someone had come onto the property. Stuff like that.”

“High-tech?”

“The latest and best equipment we could get,” Portillo boasted.

“So you felt safe from intrusion.”

“Felt
safe, yeah.”

“Had there been any intrusions onto this property before that night?”