P Deutermann: The Cat Dancers

Guthridge started to get back up, and Cam winced when the gavel banged down yet again. The young detective slapped his notebook down on the table and subsided. Klein, who had also started to get up, sank back down into his chair.

“Mr. Klein, your principal evidence was tainted and is not admissible. Your probable cause was a Kleenex. Good enough for Judge Barstow, maybe, but not good enough for me. You want to appeal my ruling, you go for it, but in the meantime, I want these defendants released.”

“Your Honor, these are career criminals,” Klein protested. “They are most definitely flight risks. They-”

“They are released. The charges are dismissed. Evidence, Mr. Klein. That’s what we’re all about in here, in case you’ve forgotten.” The judge swept the courtroom with those snapping eyes, as if daring anyone to challenge that principle. She saw Kenny Cox sitting in the back and glared at him. “You should have sent Sergeant Cox there. At least he knows how to rig an arrest report.” She paused for a moment as Kenny met her eyes, then banged the gavel again. “You don’t have any evidence, Mr. Klein. Now, like I said: We’re done here.”

The judge left the courtroom and Cam rubbed the side of his face as he sat there, considering the disaster. He deliberately did not look at Kenny, not after the judge’s last remarks. Almost three years ago, Kenny had been accused of playing fast and loose with an arrest report to cover up a similar error, and the accuser had been Bellamy. The facts regarding the incident had been murky, but Bellamy had forced the sheriff to suspend Kenny for three months without pay, in return for not charging him with evidence tampering and maybe even perjury. It had been nasty in the extreme, and if today’s case hadn’t been so high viz, Kenny would never have shown up today, and certainly not in front of Bellamy. Kenny’s hatred for Bellamy was palpable, and Cam could just about feel his sergeant’s anger radiating.

His cell phone trembled in his pocket. That will be Himself, he thought, and now comes the fun part. He saw Will Guthridge talking earnestly to Steven Klein as some excited media types were shouting questions at them from the press box.

“Okay, let’s go,” he said to Kenny. “See if we can unscrew this mess.”

The major Criminal Apprehension Team was a unique organization for a metropolitan Sheriff’s Office. It consisted of four senior detectives, a sergeant, and a lieutenant who ran it. Their job was simple: Once one of the local criminals rose to a position of real prominence in the county’s outlaw society, whether as a major drug dealer, an enforcer, or a gang chieftain, the captain who headed Major Crimes would hand MCAT his name. They would then spend all of their time and effort busting the guy’s chops until they either provoked him into making a major mistake, one that could lead to real prison time, or made him so radioactive among the rest of the rat pack that they would take care of the problem. MCAT had essentially unlimited access to all of the resources of the Sheriff’s Office, which were considerable. The sheriff was intimately familiar with the federal criminal asset forfeiture and seizure program, giving the Manceford County Sheriff’s Office every modern law-enforcement toy out there.

What MCAT did was to direct all of those bells and whistles against one badass at a time. The team worked off the clock and around the clock if necessary. They followed the subject, wiretapped him, pulled in any and all of his close associates again and again, searched his crib and haunts, came up to him in public restaurants and bars to thank him noisily for his cooperation, planted false leads in the papers implicating the guy in the successful prosecution of someone else, and generally made his life miserable. All of this was done with appropriate court orders and warrants, of course. Most of the judges, if only in chambers, positively licked their judicial chops.

Cam’s job was to provide adult supervision. With a license to run outside the normal checks and balances of the field operations forces, the MCAT cops were under constant scrutiny to ensure they didn’t become the modern-day version of the Untouchables of the 1920s. Cam made sure they had court papers backing up everything they did, and the sheriff interviewed the entire squad frequently, both to keep up to speed on what they were doing as well as to assess their level of professionalism. He once told Cam that they were his armored cavalry, substituting speed, surprise, and aggression for the more plodding nature of criminal investigation.

Sheriff Bobby Lee Baggett was on the phone, his back to the door, when Cam knocked and went into his office. The room was spacious, and the walls were covered with memorabilia of famous people or famous arrests made during Bobby Lee’s nine-year reign as sheriff of Manceford County. Parked against the back wall were three silhouette targets from the gun range. The sheriff took great pride in the fact that he, too, qualified once a month, just like the rest of them had to. Cam dropped into one of the two enormous leather chairs stationed directly in front of the sheriff’s desk and waited for him to finish up.

The sheriff, at forty-nine, was five years older than Cam. He was in his third term as an elected official, having come to Manceford County from the governor’s personal staff in Raleigh, the capital of the Old North State. Once upon a time, he’d been a Marine Corps aviator, and he’d apparently never gotten over it. He was six one, hatchet-faced, leanjawed, buzz-cut, extremely fit, and all business all the time. He addressed everyone under his command by their rank, and sometimes they all wondered if he knew anyone’s first name. In turn, everyone on his staff was cordially invited to address him as Sheriff. Cam couldn’t say that he liked the man, but he did respect him. He’d whipped the outfit into becoming the foremost Sheriff’s Office in the state any way you wanted to measure it.

The sheriff hung up the phone and swiveled around in his chair. “So WTF, Lieutenant?” he asked in his gravelly voice. “They just walk ?”

“What happened was that those two went to the minimart to rob the place,” Cam replied. “It went wrong somehow, and now three people are dead and, yes, the do-er’s are free to go.”

He gave Cam his commanding officer look. “Your detective failed to Mirandize these suspects?”

Cam wanted to say that Will was hardly his detective, but he knew that Bobby Lee would simply look at the organization board, and there would be Will’s name, most definitely parked in the MCAT block. “Detective Guthridge went in behind the SWAT front line,” Cam said. “They did their usual monster mash. A Sergeant McMichael from District Three went eyeball-to-eyeball with the white kid, Simmonds, asked him if he did the minimart. Mutt said yes.”

“While dangling from his dick, no doubt.”

“SWAT, what can I say?” Cam replied. “We don’t ask them to be nice. We do ask them to be professional.”

“And where was Detective Guthridge during this interrogation?”

“It was hardly an interrogation,” Cam told him. “They had the perps on the floor, and McMichael literally got down in Simmonds’s face, popped the question. By the time Guthridge came through the doorway, it was all done.”

“So SWAT hooked them up, not Guthridge?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And did so without reciting their rights? I find that hard to believe.”

Cam sat back in his chair and tried not to sigh. “I wasn’t there, Sheriff,” he said. “And I find it hard to believe, too. You click the cuffs, you say the magic words. But apparently no one on the SWAT team is willing to swear that he did in fact give the warning.”