Above the Law (60 page)

Thinking back to the trip to the compound the night before with Kate, I again read the autopsy report: shot at close range through temple, high-caliber 9mm automatic, full-metal-jacket bullet, no ballistics. The killer could still be Jerome—he had the weapon and the bullets. He could have caught up to Juarez and assassinated him in cold blood before any of the others reached the scene—his prowess as a runner bolstered that scenario. His dodging and lying on the stand had reinforced that possibility for me—if he could lie so brazenly about his own sister’s abortion, and about the kidnapping and beating he and his brothers had given Juarez, he could certainly have faked his dismay upon finding Juarez’s body that night.

All the stuff with Miller and Nora and Juarez and the Indian tribe bothered me greatly; but it was still possible that they weren’t related to this killing.

The other possibility, of course, which is what I believed in my gut now, was that they were. But how, precisely? What real evidence was there?

So far, I hadn’t found it.

Again, I read the autopsy report. Nothing new jumped off the page. Something about it, though, was tickling the back of my brain. It was trying to speak to me. But what was it trying to tell me?

I couldn’t come up with anything, so I put the folders back in the file cabinets and went home.

Jerome might have been able to put on a show of looking comfortable yesterday, but he couldn’t pull it off today. He was clearly nervous—he’d shot his wad during his examination by John Q. There was nowhere to go now but down, and he knew it.

“Agent Jerome,” I began.

He looked at me sullenly.

I stood still at the podium, arms folded across my chest, staring at him. I did this long enough that he started fidgeting, looking from me to John Q., to the back of the room, around the room. I could feel Judge McBee watching me, waiting for me to get on with it.

After what was to Jerome an interminable wait, I leaned over the lectern toward him. “How many DEA agents were on the scene that night?”

“Sixty-two, counting myself.”

“Isn’t that a large force for a drug bust?”

“Not for one this size,” he answered. “This was going to be one of the biggest takedowns in the history of the department. You can’t have enough men on an assignment like that.”

“Would it be correct to say that your group was ample for the assignment?”

“There were enough of us to do the job.”

“The job being to intercept a huge shipment of drugs and arrest the people involved.”

“The orders were to…” He caught himself.

I walked over to the evidence table and picked up a document. Showing it to Judge McBee, who nodded, I crossed to the witness stand and handed it to Jerome.

“Do you recognize this?”

He looked at it. “Yes.”

I took it from him, walked it over to John Q., who gave it a quick glance and waved it away. Taking it with me to the lectern, I said to the jury, “This is the federal warrant that was issued for that arrest. It’s been stipulated to by all parties, meaning we all agree it’s what it says it is.”

I turned back to Jerome. “This warrant is to seize drugs, isn’t it?”

“To seize drugs and arrest the dealers.”

I looked at it again. “But it doesn’t say to arrest the purported dealers if there aren’t any drugs, does it? How can you prove they’re drug dealers if they aren’t dealing drugs?”

He stared at me, his lips, chalk white, tightly pressed together.

“One element is dependent on the other, isn’t it? No drugs, no evidence of dealing. No evidence of dealing, no arrest. That’s why the warrant required the drugs be present before you could raid the place, isn’t it?”

He shook his head, but he didn’t reply. I looked at the bench.

“Answer the question,” Judge McBee ordered Jerome.

“Technically, that’s correct,” Jerome gave it up.

“Technically?”
I echoed.
“Technically?
There’s no such thing as
technically
when it comes to warrants, Mr. Jerome. What does that mean—if it’s only technically, it really doesn’t count? You don’t have to obey it?”

“You have to abide by the conditions in a warrant,” he grudgingly agreed.

“Whether you like them or not. Whether you
agree
with them or not.”

He nodded, muttered, “Yes.”

“But you don’t always abide by the provisions in your warrants, do you, Agent Jerome? Sometimes you decide to make your own decisions, with or without the warrant.”

“I obey the law as much…” He caught himself.

“As much as you can? As much as you want to?”

“I do the best I can, under the circumstances.”

I shook my head in disgust. Partly it was for show, for the jury, but I truly felt it. This man believed he was above the law.

“You violated a warrant. That is a crime. You are a law officer, you are aware of that, are you not?” I hammered him.

“I…what was I supposed to do, let him go free?” he blurted out.

I stepped back and smiled. Gotcha, pal! “So you admit you violated that warrant.”

“There were extenuating circumstances,” he said doggedly.

“There were? What were they?”

“Juarez was in there.”

“So?”

“I couldn’t let him get away. I’ve already explained that.”

“Who said anything about letting him go? Did I say anything about letting him go?”

He looked at me. He wasn’t following fast enough. He’d used too many brain cells spinning yesterday’s lies.

I answered for him. “You had over sixty agents at that compound. There were no more than a dozen men inside, you knew that for a fact. Sixty crack DEA agents surrounding twelve drug dealers. Those are pretty good odds, aren’t they, sixty crack DEA agents versus twelve druggies?”

He breathed in and out deeply, his eyes closed.

“Are you being at one with yourself, Agent Jerome?” I asked caustically.

His eyes popped open. He was gripping the arms of the chair, hard. I thought of a pit bull at the end of a chain, straining to break loose. The pit bull inside Jerome was dying to come at me. Only the surroundings, the public forum, prevented it.

“The odds,” I repeated. “Sixty against twelve, plus the advantage of surprise. Aren’t those damn good odds? Or are twelve trapped drug dealers more powerful than sixty DEA samurai?”

“The odds were in our favor,” he reluctantly admitted.

“They sure were.” Leaning forward, I asked, “So why go in at all? You don’t have a warrant, given the changes in the circumstances, and you have the place surrounded. Why not wait them out? Where could they go? Where could they hide?”

I looked over at the jury box. One juror in the back row leaned over and whispered something to her companion.
In the freezer,
I’m sure she was saying. Both smiled before turning their attention back to Jerome.

“I couldn’t take the chance,” he said.

“Five to one against them, you’ve got the place completely surrounded, and you couldn’t take the chance this one man might elude you? That doesn’t speak well for your operation, Agent Jerome. Or your opinion of yourself and of your men.”

“Objection.” John Q. lumbered wearily to his feet. “He’s browbeating the witness. Your Honor.”

I put a hand up, signifying I’d back off, even as McBee said, “Sustained.”

I looked at the notes I’d made during Jerome’s direct testimony. “You stated that the purported phone call or calls to the compound could not have been made by your snitch, Lopez, because he was in your sight the entire time. Yes?”

“Yes.” He nodded tightly.

”You were coordinating this raid, correct? You were in charge of everything. You had the big picture in your head, you were the axle, all the spokes were revolving around you.”

“I was the leader, if that’s what you mean.”

“Yes.” A glance at the notes again. “ ‘Lopez was by my side the entire time.’ That’s your direct quote.”

“He was.”

I pursed my lips, looked up at the ceiling, looked at the jurors, shook my head again. “You’re in charge of sixty men, you’re about to raid a drug compound where the man you’ve been stalking for ten years is hiding out—twenty, really, ever since the incident at Stanford—and yet you’re attentive enough to Lopez, whose work was done by then, that you never left him out of your sight. Not for a minute, not for thirty seconds, which is all it would have taken for him to make a call. He was never out of your sight for even thirty seconds. Is that what you are swearing to, Mr. Jerome? You are swearing, under oath, that with all this going on, you never took your eyes off Lopez for thirty seconds? You’re swearing to that?”

Now it was his turn to gaze upward, but in supplication, not disgust.

“To the best of my recollection, he was always…right there.”

I glanced at the jurors. They were shaking their heads.

“Okay,” I continued, “let’s talk about the raid itself. How many of your men were killed on that raid?”

“Three,” he said softly, almost inaudibly.

“Three,” I repeated. “Three good men. They were good men, weren’t they?”

“They were excellent men.”

“Do you feel responsible for their deaths, Agent Jerome? Since you were the one who led the charge of the light brigade? In violation of your warrant, I have to add.”

He nodded. This was becoming excruciating to him. “In some ways,” he acknowledged meekly.

“They died because of a decision you made that night.”

One long nod. “Yes.”

“Well, let me ask you this. You were raiding a known drug stronghold, whether there were drugs there at the moment or not. Didn’t it occur to you that these men would be heavily armed, that they would have tight security? Didn’t you think they might try to fight you off? Didn’t you think there was any chance of that
at all
?”

“I…” He worked to regain his composure. “There’s always a chance of that. Of course. But we were working on the best information we could get. Which was that we were going to be able to surprise them.”

“Information provided by a snitch. A Judas. A criminal looking out for himself.”

He shook his head as if to say,
You don’t get it. You weren’t there.

“In fact,” I went on, “you could’ve taken them later. You could have kept the drug transaction alive. The planes could have come in later. It would have been a better choice to take them down during a huge drug transaction, wouldn’t it? When their attention is on the drugs and the money?”

He shrugged. “In hindsight, maybe. I didn’t think Juarez would stick around. That wasn’t his style. He came and he went, he didn’t tarry.”

“So instead, you led your men into an ambush.”

Even the out-of-town reporters, who had migrated back to Blue River for Jerome’s testimony, froze over their pens.

I didn’t need or expect an answer to that. The question was damage enough.

“Let’s get on with this,” I said. “You’ve moved in, you’ve encountered massive fire, you’re under attack, some of your men have been killed and wounded almost instantaneously. What did you do?”

“We returned fire.”

“With every piece of weaponry you had.”

“Once you’re committed, you’re in all the way.”

“I agree, you can’t go at something like this halfway. You and the surviving agents shot into that compound with everything you had.”

“I said that.”

“You certainly did. As have others. That’s my point, Agent Jerome.”

I left the lectern and walked halfway to him. “What guarantee did you have, once you started firing into that compound, that you wouldn’t kill Reynaldo Juarez, the man you were under strict orders to bring in alive? What do you use, smart bullets? Bullets so sophisticated they can differentiate between who to kill and who not to kill?”

“No,” he said wearily. I was beating the shit out of him, blow upon blow. He was actually sagging physically.

“So the whole reason for going in was negated, wasn’t it? You weren’t going to get any drugs, you lost three of your men, and you easily might have killed the man you were under strict orders not to kill. What was the point, man? What in God’s name was the point?”

I walked back to the lectern and took a drink, letting the dust settle. Then I went on the attack again.

“You bought ammunition at Harrison’s because you were out of ammunition. That’s your contention.”

“That’s what happened,” he said stubbornly.

“You were driving a government car? You didn’t have your personal vehicle up here, did you?”

“I had a government vehicle.”

“If you were in a government car, you were on duty. Technically,” I couldn’t resist digging.

He was numbed to insult by now. “I was on duty. On a job like this, you’re never off duty, officially.”

“Uh-huh. So if you were on duty, you had to be armed. You have to be armed when you’re on duty, don’t you?”

“Yes, you’re always armed when you’re on duty.”

“You had your gun with you. Your nine-millimeter automatic.”

“Yes.”

“So either you had bullets on you, in your gun, on your person, in your car, or you were derelict in your duty. Would that be a fair statement to make? I want to be fair here, Agent Jerome. If you aren’t armed when you’re supposed to be, is that not dereliction of duty?”

“Tech—” He twisted in his chair. “I was not derelict in my duties as a DEA agent.”

I’d trapped him. “Then you did have bullets on you.”

“I…”

“You didn’t.”

“No.”

“So you were derelict of duty.”

He bent over, elbows on knees. “Yes.”

Man, was I going to have a field day in my final summation with this. And I wasn’t finished with him.

“You’ve stated you have no idea who opened that bank account in your name. Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“You have no idea who deposited
five hundred thousand dollars
in that bank account. Is that true?”

Again: “Yes.”

“It’s all a mystery to you.”

“I…I don’t know anything about it. That’s all I can say.”

“It’s ail part of a frame-up, is that your contention?” I asked bitingly.

“It has to be,” he whimpered.

“It has to be,” I repeated, using his whining tone. “I don’t think it does have to be. Do you want to know why, Agent Jerome?”