Authors: Michele Martinez
Melanie fell into one of the cushy leather chairs and took a load off. Her eyes were burning and her head pounding; she could use a few minutes to catch her breath. When the agents were done diagramming and photographing, she gave them a copy of the warrant that listed the items they were allowed to search for. Melanie wasn’t supposed to touch anything herself; she was present only as a legal adviser. Judging from appearances, these two needed one.
Both agents pulled on rubber gloves. A long credenza sat beneath the far windows beyond Welch’s desk. It was covered with files. Ryan walked over to it and lifted the top one.
“Should I read every page of every file, ma’am?”
“Call me Melanie. No, in fact, if a folder contains medical records, you shouldn’t read it at all. Medical records are privileged. But if you find something else, let me know.”
Every file on the credenza contained medical records, so the search went quickly. The same was true of every file in the four cabinets lining the adjoining wall. But when the agents got to Welch’s desk, things got interesting.
“All three drawers on the right-hand side of the desk are locked,” Ryan announced.
Melanie, whose head had been drooping onto her chest in the comfortable depths of the chair, perked up instantly. It was a basic tenet of her profession that the presence of a lock usually indicated
something worth hiding. And something worth hiding was generally worth finding.
“The warrant allows you to search locked areas,” she said. “Do what you have to do to open the drawers. Obviously, try to keep the property damage to a minimum.”
Ryan opened a duffel bag and pulled out a tool case, taking from it a tiny screwdriver. He jimmied the top lock easily. Melanie saw his eyebrows shoot up as he reached in with rubber-encased hands.
Brandon moved in, blocking Melanie’s view. “Yes!” he crowed, pumping his fists as if he’d just scored a touchdown.
“What have you got?” Melanie asked.
“Sparkle,” Ryan said. “Jenny Crank. Redneck heroin. Hillbilly crack.”
“Huh?”
Brandon laughed. “Ryan means methamphetamine. You know how the Eskimos have fifty different words for snow? Well, the Bureau dug up Ryan working narcotics in Milwaukee. Meth’s the only drug they got out there in East Blowhole, unless you count sniffing gas. He has a million names for it.”
Ryan snorted. “Stop making fun of things you don’t understand and grab me a few of them plastic evidence bags and the heat sealer.”
Melanie came around the desk and watched as Ryan laid out a hefty haul of glassine envelopes on the fancy leather desk blotter. Each glassine held a small amount of a substance that had the consistency and appearance of sea salt.
“Look how transparent it is,” Ryan said lovingly. “This is highly pure and very expensive meth. I counted. We’ve got fifty-seven doses here, more than half a G-pack. You want me to field-test one before I seal ’em all up for transport?”
“Definitely,” Melanie said. “Welch is getting arraigned tomorrow morning. His lawyer is sure to spend the whole bail hearing talking about what a reputable member of the medical community Welch is.
I’d love to fire back with the dangerous narcotics he keeps hidden in his office drawer, but I need to confirm this is really meth first.”
“No problem. One field test, coming up.”
Melanie watched Ryan break the seal on a fresh field-test kit labeled with the chemical name for meth. Slowly and carefully, he assembled his tools and pipetted a tiny amount of crystal from one of the glassines into a test tube. He squirted in a clear solution from a plastic bottle, swirled the mixture around, and set it to stand in a tray.
“This’ll take a minute to react,” Ryan said.
“I know Welch had a meth habit,” Melanie said as they waited. “But this is a lot of drugs. Do you think he was selling as well as using?”
“He was doing both,” Ryan said.
“How do you know?”
“I know these drugs are for personal use because there’s a pipe in the drawer, see?” Ryan reached in a gloved hand and pulled out a glass pipe with a visible layer of gunk in the bottom.
“It’s got obvious residue,” he continued, “so we know the pipe was used, if not by him, then presumably by someone else in his presence since he kept it locked in his desk. The reason I say the baggies were also meant for sale is that no icehead could smoke this much crank within sell-by date without going belly-up. Drugs go bad just like food. Any discerning junkie is gonna care how many days out of the lab his product is, and he won’t pay top dollar for anything older than a week. With shit this pure, I’d say if you’re doing two or three bags a day, that’s a pretty intense habit. Any more, and you’re incapacitated and can’t hold down a regular job. More than that, you’re dead. So what’s here is way too much for one man to use, at least if he wants it fresh.”
“I wonder if Welch was selling to patients,” Melanie said, her mind racing. “But a really bad personal meth habit. That makes sense, too, you know? I mean, if Welch is the Butcher.”
“What do you mean?” Ryan asked.
“The murder we’re investigating was very brutal. That’s why the press came up with the nickname ‘Butcher.’ The victim was raped and stabbed so many times that one of her breasts was severed. The killer carved ‘bitch’ on her stomach with a scalpel. The crime was
so
ugly that I’d almost have trouble believing Welch committed it, despite how creepy I find him. Unless he was high on meth.”
“The Scooby snacks mess with your head big-time,” Ryan said, nodding. He picked up the test tube. The liquid inside had turned cobalt blue. “And we have a yes! The substance has field-tested positive for the presence of methamphetamine, and I’m prepared to swear to that in court.”
Ryan and Brandon went to work cleaning up the field test, sealing the glassine envelopes and the pipe into clear plastic evidence pouches and filling out the labels.
“This is great evidence for our narcotics charges,” Melanie said. “But what I’m really looking for is evidence about the murder. I have the Butcher e-mailing from this office, but I also have three well-known plastic surgeons claiming Welch was with them in a fancy restaurant at the time of the crime. I refuse to believe Welch is innocent. Maybe the doctors are lying or maybe he had an accomplice. Either way, I need a trump card, something powerful enough to give the lie to his alibi.”
Ryan picked up the small screwdriver he’d used to jimmy the top lock. “Time to find out what’s behind Door Number Two.”
Melanie and Brandon watched as Ryan worked the screwdriver and eased open the middle drawer. Simultaneously, they all made noises of disappointment. The drawer appeared to be filled with…
trash
.
“Garbage?” Melanie asked.
“Well, now at least we’ve learned the guy has a serious Milky Way habit,” Ryan said, reaching in and pulling out a candy wrapper and
tossing it over his shoulder. He pulled the drawer out wholesale and got ready to turn it upside down and dump the contents into the wastebasket next to the desk.
“Wait!” Melanie commanded. “What are you doing? Lay everything out on the desk and go through it carefully.”
“Ma’am, I can assure you that habitual methamphetamine users, if they eat at all, eat primarily candy and ice cream. This is exactly what it looks like—a bunch of grubby old garbage left over from his binges, with junkie cooties on every last piece.”
“Agent, when you’re on the stand getting cross-examined by defense counsel about the manner in which you conducted this search, do you plan to testify that you picked up a pile of potentially valuable evidence and threw it in the trash without looking at it because you were afraid of a few junkie cooties?” she asked.
Ryan stopped what he was doing and gazed at her. “No, ma’am.”
“Then inspect each item, please. You’re wearing rubber gloves, anyway.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Ryan dumped the pile of trash out onto on the desk blotter. As Brandon began picking carefully through candy wrappers and crumpled Cheetos bags, examining each one, Ryan bent down to replace the drawer. He stopped in midflight.
“What? Do you see something?” Melanie asked.
Ryan fitted the drawer back in place, then reached in and removed a plastic baggie that had been Scotch-taped way at the back. The baggie had been invisible under all the trash.
“Okay, you were right,” Ryan said, grinning at Melanie sheepishly. “But I have a good excuse. This is way more finesse than you’d ever see from a crankhead in Milwaukee. They’re all too wrecked to think about hiding evidence.”
“Life in the big city. Even the junkies outclass Ryan,” Brandon said.
“Blow me, Mills,” Ryan said.
“Yo, keep it polite, dude. Ladies present.”
“Let me see that.” Melanie held out her hand, her voice husky with excitement. She took the baggie and raised it up to the light. The small white rectangle inside was crusted with dried blood, but not so much that Melanie couldn’t make out Suzanne Shepard’s smiling face in the lower left-hand corner.
“What is it?” Ryan asked.
“The victim’s driver’s license. It was taken from her wallet by the Butcher as a sort of grisly souvenir. Gentlemen, everybody who said three respectable doctors would never lie was mistaken. We’ve discovered evidence proving that Benedict Welch murdered Suzanne Shepard. He
is
the Central Park Butcher.”
B
ut when Melanie called
Mark Sonschein to crow about her new evidence, he delivered some deflating news. Mark and Dan O’Reilly had been at the hospital showing photographs to David Harris, and they’d showed him the mug shot of Benedict Welch taken earlier that day.
“Please,” Melanie said, squeezing her eyes shut, “don’t tell me Harris clears Welch. I have such powerful evidence on the guy now. I can’t go back to square one, I just can’t.”
“Harris doesn’t actually
clear
him,” Mark said. “What he says is less definitive than that. You see, Harris never got a good look at the Butcher’s face. During the Suzanne Shepard murder, the Butcher wore night-vision goggles. And when Harris was kidnapped, the Butcher was sitting in the front seat of a limo with a tinted-glass barrier between them.”
“So what’s the problem, then?” Melanie demanded.
“He says the hair is wrong.”
“The hair? Give me a freaking break.”
“Look, I know you want this to be over, but we take the evidence as we find it, Melanie. That’s what we do.”
She sighed. “What
about
the hair?”
“Welch has this longish, very yellow hair. It’s obviously dyed, right? Harris says the Butcher was blond, also. But he was staring at the back of his head on the whole limo ride, and he’s very clear that the Butcher has close-cropped, naturally dark blond hair. Virtually a crew cut. And a big, thick neck. Welch is tall but he’s not robust. The descriptions don’t match.”
“We’re talking about a witness who only saw the Butcher from behind! And through tinted glass. That’s meaningless.”
“Would you be arguing that if Harris thought Welch
did
look like the Butcher?” Mark asked.
“Easy for you to say. He’s not after you,” Melanie muttered.
“I’m very cognizant of the threat to you, Melanie. That’s what makes me want to be sure that we’ve got the right man. I’m not saying Harris’s information is definitive, or that we should cut Welch loose. But I think it raises serious questions.”
“There’s a simple way to settle this,” Melanie said, “and if I hadn’t been so busy with these search warrants, I would have seen to it by now. We need to have Welch’s DNA tested.”
The problem was, the only way Melanie knew to get FBI technicians to show up when and where she needed them was to have Dan O’Reilly place the call. Dan was third-generation New York City law enforcement, a local boy. In New York, where circles were smaller than outsiders could possibly imagine, being from a family on the job counted for a huge amount. Cops had their own churches, their own rec leagues and Catholic schools—hell, their own entire suburbs. Dan was savvier than his true-blue, no-nonsense persona would suggest; and when it came to using his connections and pulling strings, he had no rival.
But if she’d wanted to talk to him, she would have returned his phone calls.
“Mark, is Dan O’Reilly still with you?” she asked.
“No, he went back to his office.”
“You should call him and have him get the technicians over to the MCC to swab Welch’s cheek.”
“You do that. I’ve got a conference call in five minutes on another matter, and then I’ve got to get to my mother-in-law’s house for supper. If I’m late—well, let’s just say it won’t be pretty.”
What could she do? Mark outranked her. Besides, she couldn’t very well tell him that she wasn’t speaking to her case agent because they’d had a lovers’ quarrel. How would that play in the front office when promotions got decided?
“Okay,” she said, and hung up.
Melanie was standing with her thumb poised over her cell phone, having trouble making herself dial Dan’s number, when Deputy Marshal Pete Terrozzi poked his head into Welch’s office.
“Ready to go?” he asked. “I saw those two FBI agents hauling evidence out to the car. I got worried about you alone in here.”
“I’m fine. We’re supposed to meet up with them at Welch’s apartment to execute the next warrant, but I need to make a phone call first.”
“No sweat,” Terrozzi said, and plopped into one of the leather club chairs.
“I need privacy,” Melanie said.
“I have a security clearance, you know,” he said, sounding miffed.
“Of course. I trust you completely, Pete. It’s just—well, you wouldn’t want to be called in to testify just because you’d overheard something about my investigation, would you? You could end up waiting around for hours.”
“Okay, good point. I’ll hang tight in the waiting room for a little bit.” And he left, closing the door behind him.
Somehow the threat of Pete Terrozzi coming back in, which he surely would do sooner or later, forced Melanie’s hand. She found herself dialing, and then holding her breath as Dan’s cell phone rang. He picked up on the first ring.