“Joe’s really not as bad as he seems,” she said, making a case for her husband. “He just gets worked up sometimes when he drinks. He don’t mean nothing by it. He loves me in his way, and let’s be honest about it, I’m no catch anymore. A forty-three-year-old woman with a seventeen-year-old son who hates the world.”
Jesse had heard this same sort of thing many times when he was in uniform in L.A. and occasionally in Paradise, battered wives making excuses for their abusers. It was one of the reasons why answering a domestic call was so dangerous for cops. The women who had called for them often feared their husbands’ reprisals. There were hundreds of incidents each year when domestic disturbance calls turned violent, even deadly, for the responding officers. It wouldn’t do any good for Jesse to try to talk her out of it, so he didn’t bother.
It was then that Joe Walters came through the front door, crazy-eyed and smelling of scotch.
“Get the fuck outta my house!” he said, charging right at Kathy. “What the fuck did you let them in here for?”
Jesse stepped between husband and wife. Jesse held the warrant out to Joe Walters. “We have a warrant to search the premises.”
Walters grabbed the warrant and ripped it in half. “Fuck you and fuck your warrant. Get outta my house.”
Jesse didn’t budge.
“Why didn’t you call to tell me about this, you stupid bitch?” Spit flew out of Walters’s mouth as he yelled at his wife. “Instead I gotta get a call at work from Larry next door, telling me there’s cops over at my place.”
“I wouldn’t let her call you,” Jesse said. It was a lie, but he figured it was worth a shot.
“Bullshit! You can’t stop her from making a call. This is her house. She ain’t under arrest, and all you’re doing is executing a search warrant.”
“You know a lot about the law,” Jesse said. “You a real lawyer or a jailhouse lawyer?”
That didn’t go over well with Joe Walters.
“Fuck you! Who do you think you are?”
Jesse had had enough. “Sit down, Mr. Walters.”
“And what if I don’t?”
“Unless you took a cab here or walked, I’ll arrest you for DWI.”
Walters sat down, but Jesse knew it was only a matter of time. He could see Walters was seething, and seething drunks can control themselves for just so long.
“Jesse, you better get up here,” Peter Perkins called from upstairs.
“In a minute, Peter.” Jesse turned to Kathy Walters. She was on the verge of panic, because she also knew about seething drunks and what awaited her the minute the cops left. He wagged his index finger at her. “You come with me. You, Mr. Walters, stay right there.”
“It’s all your fault,” Walters said, his voice getting louder and louder as he worked himself up. “You and that mutant brat. He’s poison, that fucking kid. He caused all of this. You shoulda smothered him in his crib.”
When he was done with his rant, he charged. Jesse stepped around Kathy Walters and threw a forearm into Joe Walters’s face. His nose broke in a spray of blood and mucus. But Walters was a tough guy and didn’t go down. He came at Jesse again. This time, Jesse planted his foot in Walters’s crotch. Nobody was tough enough to shake that off. Walters crumpled to the floor, bloodied and breathless.
Jesse knelt down beside him and spoke loud enough so that only Walters could hear him. “Listen to me, you piece of crap. I’m going to make you my personal business from now on. I come by here and see one mark on your wife or your stepson, what I did to you just now will be nothing. Stay down and stay down here. I hear you on the move, I’m charging you with DWI and assaulting an officer. Nod your head if you understand.”
Joe Walters nodded.
Upstairs, Peter Perkins pointed toward the door on the far right and held up an evidence bag containing a nine-millimeter pistol. “Loaded. Found it in the master bedroom in the nightstand.”
Jesse asked, “Your husband have a permit for that?”
She shook her head.
“I didn’t think so.” Jesse could see in Perkins’s expression that he had something to say out of Kathy Walters’s earshot. He turned to her and asked her to wait in her bedroom. She walked into the bedroom, zombielike. Her world was coming apart at the seams, with no sign that the seams would hold.
Perkins walked toward Chris Grimm’s room. Jesse followed him in.
“Beside the swag,” Perkins said, “there’s a passbook account with thirty-five grand in it. I found a few keys, business cards, and slips of paper with phone numbers on them.”
“Any drugs?”
“None.”
“He probably kept them somewhere else,” Jesse said. “Okay, I’ll send Gabe over to help finish the search. In the meantime, I’m arresting the husband on weapons charges. Come downstairs and witness the Miranda. I don’t want this guy slipping through our fingers.”
Thirty-one
After the arrest, Jesse had Gabe Weathers take Joe Walters to the hospital to get his nose reset and have him checked out. The last thing Jesse wanted was to give a belligerent abuser like Walters a way to game the system and hand him a get-out-of-jail-free card. So it was all by the book.
“Stay with him, Gabe. He doesn’t leave your sight until we book him and put him in a cell.”
Jesse drove back to the station and asked Molly to come into his office. She sat opposite him. Jesse explained what had gone on at the Walterses’ house and what they’d found in the kid’s room.
“So you think Chris Grimm was Heather’s connection?” Molly asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“But you didn’t find any drugs in the kid’s room.”
“None, but that just means the kid wasn’t stupid.”
“He was stupid enough to keep stolen property in his room.”
Jesse smiled a sad smile.
“What’s that smile about, Jesse?”
“I’m smiling because I heard your voice in my head, Molly.”
“And what did my voice say?”
“It said that Chris Grimm wasn’t stupid, he was just being a kid.”
“A kid selling drugs.”
“I didn’t say I thought he was a saint or that he was even a good kid. My guess, he pawned a lot of the stuff he got in trade for the drugs and held on to the stuff he thought was cool, like the stolen bass and the Rolex. We have to remember, this is a kid with a kid’s sense of the world. A pro wouldn’t have kept any of it, would have unloaded it immediately for ten, twenty cents on the dollar if necessary. One thing I can say, there did seem to be something between Heather Mackey and him.”
“Yeah,” Molly said. “The kind between a user and a dealer.”
“It was more than that. Why else would the kid show up outside the funeral home and at the cemetery?”
“Fear. Guilt.”
“Maybe. Doesn’t matter now.”
“I guess we’ll find out when we get him.”
Jesse shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
Molly was confused. “He’s a seventeen-year-old kid scared out of his mind. Where’s he going to run? We’ll get him or the Staties will.”
“My guess, the kid’s already dead. He was working for someone else.”
“Who?”
“You tell me, Molly. But he wasn’t a criminal mastermind. He must have been recruited for the job. He was the school-level connection. There’s always layers of insulation between the real supplier and the users.”
Molly didn’t love hearing that. It reminded her how easily her own daughters might have come in contact with Chris Grimm or someone like him.
Jesse said, “First thing we have to do is go through the stuff we collected at the kid’s house. When Peter gets back and logs in the evidence, I want you to carefully go through it and call all the phone numbers on every slip of paper and every business card. Most will be dead ends, but maybe not all. I need you to individually catalog every piece of jewelry we found so we can put it up on the PPD website. And I need you to pull the reports on the theft of the Fender guitar and a Rolex.”