I sat in a secure viewing room in the bank, reading the printouts the senior vice president had given me. My hands were shaking.
I read the papers several times. Then I placed them in a manila folder, sealed it, put it in my briefcase. The vice president was mailing me a duplicate, certified mail, for protection. Exiting the room, I thanked him for his help and his time, went outside into the piercing Florida afternoon sunshine, got into the taxi the bank had called for me, and went directly to the airport, where I flew nonstop to Los Angeles, hugging the briefcase firmly to my chest the entire trip.
My state airplane took me to Blue River. I drove to the condo. Bucky was already in bed, asleep. I gave him a soft kiss on his warm forehead, then joined Riva.
“Did you have a productive day?” she asked.
I told her what I’d found. I tell her everything, we’re not one of those marriages that separates work from the rest of my life.
“That’s incredible. What are you going to do now?”
“Bring Jerome into the grand jury. See if he has an explanation for this.”
“What explanation could he have?”
“His mother died, he won the lottery. I don’t know. I can’t prejudge the man, I’ve got to give him a chance to explain it.
She laughed. “And then you’re going to hang him.”
“No, honey. He’s going to hang himself.”
“Did my information help you?” Sheriff Miller asked.
“Immeasurably.”
We were in my office again. He always came to my office. He was a stickler for protocol; I was senior to him in this, even though he was almost twice my age and had more experience.
“Here’s something else for you.” He gave me the name of a business owner in the county who’d had transactions with some of the DEA agents around the time of the raid.
“I’ll talk to him. This sounds good.”
“That’s another reason you should be using me,” he said, pleading his case forcefully. “Local knowledge. None of your people know anyone here. Folks here aren’t going to talk to you, you’re outsiders, like the DEA was. But they talk to me, because I’m one of them. They seek me out. I listen to them, and I take them seriously.”
He got up to go.
“These people here are unsophisticated, I’ll be the first to say so. I know; I’ve lived in both worlds. But they aren’t stupid. Me, either,” he zinged me.
“I don’t think you’re stupid, Tom. You’re smarter than I’ve been on this. You’re making my case for me.”
“Then make it official.”
What could I say to that? He was right on.
“You’re on the payroll. Officially.”
We shook hands.
“Is it too late to offer an apology for cutting you out?”
His old face creased with an ear-to-ear smile. “It’s never too late for that. Besides, you don’t owe me one. You don’t owe me anything. I have to earn my stripes, like any other man.”
“You’ve earned them, Sheriff. You’ve more than earned them.”
“State your name for the members of the grand jury, please.”
“Ralph Harrison.”
Harrison was sworn in, took his seat. He was of medium height, built like a beer keg. I’d heard he was a committed iron-pumper. He looked like one; he had severe acne, one of the bad side effects of heavy steroid use. His truck, festooned with NRA bumper stickers, was parked outside. Someone had pointed it out to me as I entered the building. It was a massive old Ford, with three gun-racks mounted behind the seat, each supporting a powerful hunting rifle.
I ambled over to him. He was a friendly witness, this wasn’t going to take much time. But it was another brick, an important one, in the wall I was building.
“Would you tell us what line of work you’re in, Mr. Harrison?” I began.
“I’m the owner of Harrison’s Gun and Supply, in Southridge.”
Southridge is a one-block town in the northern part of the county. Once you get past Southridge, you’re in national forest and wilderness area. Some of the reservations are located nearby, also. If you’re going hunting, you go through Southridge. And you buy your ammunition and other supplies from Harrison’s.
“Are you the largest gun and supply store in Muir County?”
“One of them. Blue River Gun and Supply, in town here, is pretty big, too. We both do good business.”
“Do you recall an incident in the area of Muir County known as the compound in the fall of last year?”
“You mean that shoot-out?”
“Yes.”
“Sure, I do. Everybody round here knows about that. That was big news, for us.”
“And later, did you meet any members of the DEA Internal Affairs team that was investigating that incident?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What were the circumstances of your meeting them?”
“A bunch of ’em were going hunting up in the Fremont National Forest. They stopped in the store to buy their licenses and some other stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Ammo for their rifles. One of ’em bought a pair of boots. Knives and some other equipment for field-dressing their deer, if they got any. Hats, sunscreen. The usual stuff hunters buy.”
“Any guns? Rifles?”
“No. You can’t buy guns over the counter in California. There’s a ten-day waiting period.”
“Even for federal agents?”
He shook his head. “The law applies to everybody. No exceptions.”
“But not to ammunition. Bullets.”
“No. You can buy them right off.”
I assumed everybody in the room knew this; hunting and fishing are the biggest recreational sports in the area. I was laying my groundwork, for the record.
“Were you in the store when they came in?” I asked.
“Yes, I was.”
“Did you sell them their goods?”
“Yes.”
“So you got to know them.”
“They introduced themselves. We talked about how the hunting was going. A good salesman is polite and attentive to his customers.”
“Did they ask you about that incident at the compound?”
“No.”
“Nothing about it?”
“I knew they were investigating it. I asked ’em if they’d come up with any leads.”
“What did they say?”
“They were working on it, but they couldn’t talk about it.”
“Did you draw any conclusions from that, Mr. Harrison?”
“That they hadn’t found anything.” He paused. “Let me put it another way. They weren’t going to tell me anything, was the way it seemed.”
“You didn’t think that was out of the ordinary, though, did you? The police don’t normally talk to civilians about investigations in process, do they?”
“Around here they will sometimes, but that’s ’cause everybody knows everybody, small towns don’t hold secrets. But I wouldn’t expect some federal agent who’d never met me before to walk into my gun shop and start blabbing off the top of his head.”
“So as far as you were concerned, they were acting normally.”
“Yeah. They were going after their deer and they were looking forward to it.”
“You said you sold them ammunition for their rifles.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you sell them ammunition for their handguns?”
He laughed. “You don’t use a pistol to kill an elk. Least not around here. Maybe in the movies.”
“Okay. I want to make sure I’m clear on this. They didn’t talk to you about the investigation they were in the middle of.”
“No. They did not.”
“Did they ask any questions?”
“About their investigation?”
“Yes.”
“No. They didn’t ask me anything.”
“They didn’t ask if you’d seen, or noticed, or heard anything out of the ordinary, or suspicious, around the time of that raid?”
“No, sir.”
“Okay.”
I walked back to my desk, consulted my notes for a moment, returned to the witness chair.
“Well, Mr. Harrison, I’m going to. I have some questions for you about certain things you observed during that time.”
“Fire away,” he said with no consciousness of irony.
“Did you meet, or get to know in any fashion, any of the agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration who were on that raid?”
“Yes. I met one of them.”
“Do you remember when that was?”
He nodded with certainty. “Yes, I do.”
“When was that?”
“Four days before that raid.”
“Four days. Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“You remember the date that well.”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
“Why is that?”
“Because what he asked for was…kind of unusual.”
“Unusual how? Did he want to buy something?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“Ammunition.”
“What’s unusual about buying ammunition in a gun shop?” I turned to the grand jurors. They were paying attention and seemed puzzled, like me.
“He wanted to buy ammunition for an automatic pistol. Nine-millimeter. Full-metal jackets.”
“So?”
“Well, there were a few things that seemed weird to me. I had him pegged for a law officer of some kind. I didn’t know federal, state, whatever, but I figured federal, state cops don’t have the broomstick so far up their…” He glanced over at the women in the grand jury box. “Up their behinds. In my business you gotta know these things, ’cause sometimes they’ll set you up. You know, like send somebody in underage, or try to talk you into selling them a gun on the spot, without waiting the ten days the state requires, things like that. You learn how to read people. And I read him to be a cop.”
“Okay,” I said. “I still don’t understand what’s unusual about a law enforcement official buying ammunition for an automatic pistol. They carry them. Why wouldn’t they want to buy bullets for them?”
He sat up straight, ready to take me to school on the subject. I didn’t need the lecture, I knew the reasons he’d felt the way he did, because we’d gone over them. But this was the heart of this testimony, I wanted it dead-on, straight, clear, and strong.
“First of all, officers don’t buy ammunition for their handguns. It’s provided to them. Buying ammunition would be a waste of their money. And they don’t like to waste money. They’re the worst freeloaders in the world.”
“Okay. Why else was this a strange request?”
“He wanted a box of full-metal jackets.”
“So?”
“Federal cops don’t use full-metal jackets. They use hollow points.”
“Could you explain the difference to us?” I checked my jury. They were still with me.
“A hollow-point bullet explodes on impact. The police use them because they do more damage, they don’t pass clean through. You get hit with a nine-millimeter hollow point, you’re down. Maybe not dead, but down.”
“And a full-metal-jacket bullet?”
“It doesn’t explode on impact. It cuts a clear target path, which makes it a less disabling bullet, which is why the police don’t use them, they want the best odds, which makes sense. Don’t get me wrong, a full-metal jacket, especially a high caliber like a nine-millimeter or a .45, is going to do serious damage.”
“Kill someone?”
“Absolutely, it hits the right place.”
“Like in the brain?”
He smiled broadly. “You get shot in the brain with any bullet, you’re dead.”
“Okay, I understand,” I said. “Now, Mr. Harrison—if someone wanted to shoot another person in the brain, let’s say from almost point-blank range, and they
didn’t
want the bullet to be identified, what type of bullet would they use? A hollow point or a full-metal jacket?”
“You mean so the bullet couldn’t be traced back to a particular gun?”
“Yes.”
“You’d use a full-metal jacket, no question.”
“Because…?”
“Because at point-blank range, with a weapon that powerful, the odds are it would be an in-and-out shooting.”
“Meaning?”
“The bullet goes into the target and comes out. It doesn’t stay in the body—the head, in this case, if it’s to the brain.”
I only had a few more questions—he had answered the important ones.
“Did you sell this man the bullets?”
“Yes. I sold him a box.”
“Did he say what he was going to use them for?”
“Target practice.”
“Okay.” I paused, then went on, “Later on, you found out who this man was, is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“Was his name Sterling Jerome?”
“Yes.”
“And you learned that he was in charge of the task force?”
“It was common knowledge around here.”
“After you learned his identity, did anything else about him strike you as being strange?”
“Yes, something did.”
“What was that?”
“The task force was set up on the other side of the county. That’s a hundred and fifty miles away. I thought, why would anybody drive three hundred miles round-trip to buy bullets for target practice when they could’ve bought them right there in Blue River, where they were staying?”
I smiled. “And why do you think he did?”
“The only reason I can figure is, he didn’t want anybody to know.”
One down, two to go. My next witness was coming in tomorrow, under tight security. To guarantee his protection, I didn’t tell anyone his name other than the members of my immediate team; not Tom Miller, my new ally, and certainly not Nora, who I was keeping as much at arm’s distance as I could.
I briefed her on Harrison’s testimony, as a courtesy. She bugged me like crazy for details, but I was deliberately vague; I didn’t trust her. I wasn’t worried about her divulging anything, she wouldn’t—but she might try to work me over, psychologically or emotionally. Staying away from her was the safest course of action I could take.
I did speak to Bill Fishell, over the phone. He was excited—we were getting somewhere, my investigation might have a real payoff. This was extremely important to him. He was getting heavy flak—from the federals, who for many reasons wanted to scotch our investigation, from congressmen who were being pressured by the federals, by state officials who felt that if the U.S. government had conducted an extensive investigation and found nothing prosecutable, why were we wasting state money on one of our own?
“This conversation is confidential, between you and me. Bill,” I warned him in advance.
“Fine.” He paused. “Is there a problem with Nora?”
“No,” I lied. “It’s my policy, blanket. The fewer people who know what’s going on, the fewer the chances for leaks, even if they’re only accidentally.”