Apparently, the guy they’d pulled from the culvert had fled the house by diving headfirst through a window. Jennifer led Thorpe to the back of the house, into a bathroom, and pointed at an incredibly small opening. On the bottom portion of the lifted window dangled a tuft of black curly hair, flesh, and blood.
“He dove out of that? So that’s how he got the gash on his noggin. I thought Thor had bit his head.” Thorpe told Jennifer of the large wound on the back of the suspect’s scalp.
“He was a determined little shit. I’ll give him that.”
Just then Tyrone called Thorpe on the tactical frequency. “I’ve got some good news and some bad news. Which do you want first?”
“The bad.”
“First, our little prisoner is going to need a lot of staples.” That meant officers would have to babysit him at the hospital for hours before booking him. Why they were called “emergency” rooms made no sense to Thorpe. In the time it took to finally be seen by medical personnel, the guy would lose enough blood to satisfy a sex-starved covey of teenage vampires.
“The other bad news is our little dog treat here is only seventeen.” Great, after babysitting him at a hospital for hours they’d just end up releasing him to a guardian. He’d be back slinging dope before Thorpe’s squad even finished their paperwork.
“You said something about good news?”
“Yeah, we found a sack under his sack,” Tyrone answered, referring to a baggy of crack cocaine hidden under the suspect’s scrotum.
“How much?”
“Looks like about ten grams, definitely trafficking weight.”
“He got a record?”
“Couple of stolen cars and a marijuana arrest.”
“Maybe juvie will take him then.” Since the suspect possessed trafficking weight and had priors, JBDC might actually accept him. Like its adult counterpart, The Juvenile Bureau of the District Court was understaffed and overcrowded. Thorpe knew even if the suspect was admitted, he wouldn’t be kept long. Such was the job. Everyone screamed for the police to do more but it was the judicial system, no truth in sentencing, and the lack of prisoner space that was failing miserably. The proof could be found in any newspaper. Nearly all articles covering a homicide or serious crime included a variation of “ten years ago the suspect was sentenced to thirty years in prison for an unrelated charge of ….” Then why the hell is he out murdering people when he should be incarcerated for two more decades? It was damned ridiculous.
The search wrapped up with trace amounts of cocaine being recovered from the toilet bowl. Before imitating Superman by flying out the bathroom window, Clark Kent had apparently flushed some of his kryptonite down the commode. Three suspects were booked on various charges. Two were transported to the hospital before being taken to the county jail.
While the rest of his squad guarded prisoners in hospitals and tackled the hours of paperwork, Thorpe excused himself under the guise of completing administrative chores for The Walrus.
Monday
February 5
Late evening
MIDNIGHT NEAREDASTHORPE WALKED through SID’s web of desks to a separate section that housed the equipment officer’s space and most of the division’s toys. There, he retrieved night-vision goggles and a handheld thermal imaging device much like the FLIR on the helicopter. Thorpe didn’t bother signing out either item; he planned on having both returned before the equipment officer arrived in the morning.
Leaving the building and walking into the parking lot, he took a plastic bag from his assigned truck before borrowing one of the extra undercover vehicles. He chose a red Chevy short bed confiscated from a local drug dealer. Like all the other cars in SID’s fleet, the license plate was not registered with DPS. Because the plates came back as “Not on file,” SID’s undercover investigators were routinely pulled over by patrol officers. These encounters could be a real problem when the UCs had a bad guy in the passenger seat and a uniformed officer walked up and said something like, “Shit, Sergeant Thorpe, I didn’t know it was you,” marking the end of an operation. The Training Academy taught recruits not to show recognition when they crossed paths with an undercover, but those instructions were sometimes forgotten.
Having detached himself from the rest of the unit, Thorpe’s first objective was to scout the residence of Dwayne Foster, aka “L.A,” a drug dealer from New Orleans who had been displaced by Hurricane Katrina. How Foster got the nickname “L.A.” was a mystery; as far as OGU could figure L.A. had never lived in California, let alone Los Angeles. Whatever, it didn’t really matter.
Despite the fact that both men were Hoover Crips, L.A. and Marcel Newman were sworn enemies. They had purportedly fired rounds at each other on several occasions, not once hitting their intended target. Thank God bangers held their weapons sideways in an attempt to look cool. They never acquired a site picture and rarely hit what they were aiming at.
When Thorpe instructed Marcel to write L.A.’s initials in the dirt of the barn, Marcel smiled. He’d figured out what Thorpe was planning: L.A. was going to take the fall for Marcel’s murder.
On the floorboard of Thorpe’s borrowed Chevy sat the plastic bag. The bag contained a pair of boots. The boot’s distinctive soles would match imprints left in the dirt around Marcel’s abandoned carcass. The dirt on the soles would match the barn’s floor. The blood splatter on the boots would be linked through DNA to Marcel Newman. The hair Thorpe had placed on the duct tape binding Marcel Newman would be matched through DNA to L.A. Thorpe had retrieved the hair from a comb during an earlier search warrant they had served at L.A.’s residence. This physical evidence would be discovered during search warrants served after Marcel’s body was found with the initials “L.A.” written in the dirt by the victim’s own finger.
The discovery of the boots wasn’t a necessity, and if Marcel’s body had already been discovered, Thorpe wouldn’t risk planting them. But if he could get the footwear in place, the evidence would be insurmountable. It didn’t matter how many witnesses L.A. could come up with who would place him elsewhere at the time of the murders. Today, when juries think CSI Miami is the real deal, physical evidence—especially DNA—is king.
L.A. lived near 5th and Lewis Avenue in a shithole neighborhood where Vice had an easy time snatching up whores and street-level drug dealers. The area, a mix of old, low-rent apartment buildings and decaying homes, was inhabited by a blend of races and ethnic backgrounds. Even a few Middle Easterners resided there. The blighted neighborhood adjoined the grounds of the University of Tulsa; expensive and private, it was nationally recognized as one of the premiere universities in the nation. Yet a couple of blocks away you could get curb service for a blowjob, crack cocaine, marijuana—whatever your particular vice might be.
Geographically, Tulsa’s land area was as large as San Francisco, Boston, Pittsburgh P.A., and Minneapolis—combined. If you placed all the city’s arterial streets and highways together end to end, they would stretch from New York City to Los Angeles, back to Tulsa again and beyond. The Tulsa Police Department employed roughly 800 sworn officers and was in desperate need of more. There was just no way to be proactive enough to make the city as safe as needed with the limited amount of personnel.
The current mayor represented the latest in a long line of trust babies. Every Tulsa mayor in recent history had been the son, daughter, wife, or husband of a multimillionaire. Not one had earned their fortune on their own. Just once, Thorpe would like to have a bona fide leader who hadn’t bought his or her office. Empty promises, especially in regard to public safety, grew tiresome. In just a few short months the current administration had decimated the department, systematically reducing its ranks. Meanwhile calls for service went unanswered for hours. Thorpe wasn’t sure who he disliked more, politicians or criminals.