“Let them use their imagination,” she’d said. “I don’t give a shit.”
I greeted her as she made it up the ramp.
“Hi.”
“Hey,” she said. “I thought you were going to be with Billy all day.”
“Didn’t take that long,” I said. “We found the sister and her brother. Made sure the sister was safe, and Billy’s going to see if he can put some leverage together to get the feds in on busting the Medicare scam and get her into a protection program while they do it.”
I gave her a quick rundown on the case. Sherry and I tried not to get too deep into the ongoing investigations in which each of us was involved. It could get dicey sometimes.
“And was that car sitting in my driveway any kind of recompense for making a deal with the brother,” she said, a playful look in her eyes, one that I rarely saw these days.
“Uh, nope, that would be the loaner that Billy gave me while the truck is being fixed,” I said, unable to keep from matching her smile.
“Nice. Reminds me of my daddy’s old prowl car,” she said and rolled up next to me in the wheelchair. “I like the side lights. I used to hear old stories of the boys spotlighting deer along the roadside with those things up in Apopka.”
Sherry rarely talked about her family. Her father had been an old-time sheriff up in Central Florida. She called herself an original Florida cracker, born and raised in an area that thirty years ago was more open field and cattle range than the Disney World spillover it now represents.
“Those old spotlights would catch the deer right in the eyes, and they’d freeze up like statues-easy killing.”
“Cheating,” I said. Spotting game was illegal throughout most of the country. Some considered it an unfair advantage. But then the same folks thought nothing of feeding deer for eleven months out of the year under a tree stand. Then on the first legal day of hunting season, they’ll sit up there with a high-powered rifle and blast away-fish in a barrel. I could never see the challenge in it.
“You didn’t personally know any of these spotters?” I said.
“Considering who my daddy was, I probably kissed one every night after the family dinner,” she said, looking out into the light of the pool. “The law gets interpreted in different ways, even by lawmen.”
There was something on her mind and it didn’t have anything to do with deer hunting. She finally looked over at me and asked, “Could you get me a beer?”
“Sure,” I said, getting up and kissing her on the forehead as I headed for the kitchen.
When I got back with two cold beers, Sherry had gotten out of her wheelchair and moved to the side of the pool. Her foot was in the water, lazily kicking up a soft boil. Her stump was on the edge. It looked uncomfortable, but I suppressed the urge to ask if she wanted a cushion or pillow to put underneath. If she wanted that, she’d ask.
I sat down on the deck behind her, looking in the opposite direction, and matched up my back to hers, and leaned into it. I felt her give her weight back into mine, and we adjusted the balance until it was just so.
“So what did you find out?” I asked.
“About?” was her answer.
“Booker.”
I felt her head turn just a bit.
“Did I tell you I was going to look into him?”
“No. But you did.”
“You know me too well, Max.”
“I try.”
I heard the plop of her foot when she brought it up and let it splash back into the water. I felt a chuckle in her chest ripple and vibrate into my own. I liked the feel of her laughter.
“I pulled the files on his accident, both the initial reports, and the investigative sheets afterward.” Her voice was careful. I knew her well enough to know that this was an effort to be unbiased. Just the fact that she’d started out using that voice let me know it would soon change.
“The woman he was pulling over was a seventy-eight-year-old retiree from Sunrise. When the car rear-ended her, she suffered a whiplash, broken nose, and lacerations from her face ramming the steering wheel on the rebound. She was nearly unconscious when the paramedics got there. She never saw a thing.”
“OK,” I said, letting her start wherever she wanted.
“Her ID and ownership of the car all checked out. She told the investigators she was going to pick up her granddaughter at the airport. That checked out, too.
“The car that hit them was stolen. The owner, some old fiberglass marine worker from Sailboat Bend in Fort Lauderdale, didn’t even know the car had been stolen until the deputies got to his place and woke him up at eight the next morning. He was sleeping with his sixty-three-year-old girlfriend, who said they’d been in bed together all night.
“The guy volunteered to take a blood test for alcohol or drugs or whatever they wanted. The deputies noted that he seemed to be legitimately saddened when they told him what had happened. He didn’t even ask about the car. They checked out his story anyway, and found out he’d worked for the same yacht builder on the New River for more than thirty years, and did old-time car restoration on the side.”
Now Sherry’s voice was picking up, in both emotion and volume.
“When the crime scene guys had the car towed in, they went over the thing with a fine-tooth comb. Found nothing useful-pristine inside. All surfaces wiped clean, no inconsistent fibers: There was nothing inside that didn’t belong to the owner. Clean.”
“Too clean,” I said.
“Way too clean,” Sherry said, and I felt her back shift again.
“So the crime scene guys didn’t find a laundry ticket on the floor belonging to an ex-con car thief, or a soda can in the cup holder with his DNA spit on the side, or a lock of blonde hair with a one-of-a-kind conditioner sold at only one salon in the country?”
I felt Sherry’s head shake back and forth. She knew my predisposition to bitch about the public’s expectation that criminal investigations actually mirror the bullshit they see on television. But I agreed: This wasn’t the time or place.
“Sorry,” I said. She took a minute and a long swallow of beer before continuing.
“I can see a party-time car thief racing down I-595 and rear-ending a parked car; but what kind of guy sees that he’s pinched a cop off at the knees, and then takes the time to carefully wipe down the inside of the car before he books on foot?”
“Someone who isn’t just partying; someone who is very cool in an emergency,” I said. “A pro who does the car thing for a living-a guy who knows how to handle himself when shit goes wrong.”
“That’s some cool customer to be thinking of that while a cop is a hood ornament, screaming and squirting blood all over your car.”
“Jesus,” I said, the vision actually making me shudder. She must have felt it through her back.
“Sorry,” she said.
We took a sip of beer at the same time, our heads lightly thumping together as we both went back to swallow. The slight collision made us both laugh.
“Hard head,” she said.
“Pot calling the kettle,” I said, and then added, “so what did you get when you went to internal affairs?”
This time I felt her turn, and knew she was looking at the side of my face.
“You’re starting to scare me, Max,” she said with a hint of fun, but also a bit of seriousness in her voice.
“Well, if you start to entertain the thought that Booker might have been the target of a pro, you have to find out why some ruthless son of a bitch would do such a thing, right?”
“IA wouldn’t give me anything,” Sherry said. “They wouldn’t say whether somebody he’d busted had a grudge for Booker, or that he’d gotten any threatening messages-nothing. They stonewalled me completely. So I had to go over their heads to a source.”
This was the line in our respective work that didn’t get crossed. I wasn’t going to ask who she used as a source in the department. But I knew that a law enforcement organization is no different that any other office enterprise. People talk. It’s a human trait you don’t give up just because you’re told to. Civilization demands it. Societal living depends on it. It is why I do not believe in government conspiracies. Someone always spills eventually.