Robert Tanenbaum - Counterplay

Guma ignored him and wasted no time getting to the backyard where the team reassembled on the cement patio. The butler was sitting on one of the lawn chairs, smoking a cigarette. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“Looking for Jimmy Hoffa,” Clarkson answered, then noticed the strange, pained look on Guma’s face. “Sorry, Ray, bad joke.”

“Fuhgitabowdit,” Guma said, waving him off with a lightness he did not feel. He’d met Clarkson on his trip back to Colorado and after the meeting, they’d gone to have a few beers at El Rancho Historic Inn off Interstate 70 near the little mountain town of Evergreen.

The topic of conversation had turned to the dark sense of humor most of the members of the 221B Baker Street Irregulars, as they sometimes called themselves, revealed when working on cases. Most of us are “civies.” When we got into this, I don’t think we knew the emotional impact working with families of murder victims, as well as the cops and prosecutors who get so involved. I think it’s either we laugh at tragedy or we’d start crying.

Clarkson now leaned over the large aluminum case the two police officers had carried for him like Moses approaching the Ark of the Covenant. He flipped the latches and gently lifted the lid. Reaching in with both hands, he lifted a large red but otherwise almost featureless rectangle on wheels. He placed it on the ground and attached the handles, then plugged a cable into the top of the box. It kind of resembled an electric lawnmower.

“Gentlemen,” Clarkson said as he plugged the other end of the cable into a computer he set on the patio table, “meet ground-penetrating radar, the closest thing there is to Superman’s X-ray vision.”

Guma smiled at the reference. When they went before Judge Lussman for the warrant bearing the photographs and a summary of the case, the jurist had scratched his head and then started asking questions. A Fordham law graduate and former Navy pilot who despite the gray in his crew-cut hair looked like he could probably still fly, the judge was probably the most liberal judge on the bench. But he also ran a tight, no-nonsense courtroom.

Lussman taught law at NYU at night and expected both his students and the lawyers who came before him to be prepared and to avoid wasting his time. That or risk a glare from his cobalt blue eyes that many a young law student or careless attorney had sworn could see through every excuse and attempt at subterfuge.

There were a lot of legitimate reasons why a homeowner might get rid of rosebushes and replace them with a patio and hot tub, Lussman had said after Guma explained his reasoning for the search warrant. But at last he’d conceded that combined with the other evidence there was probable cause to issue a search warrant; however, he was going to make it conditional.

You can go look around, but unless you come up with something stronger than this, I’m not going to let you tear up the man’s house or backyard, Lussman said. Mr. Stavros is a well-known and respected member of the community. He’s still presumed to be innocent and owed the benefit of the doubt in this one.

Guma had started to protest. How were they going to find “something stronger” if they couldn’t dig? But Swanburg, who’d been allowed to attend the meeting to explain how the photographs were taken, leaned over to Guma and whispered.

As he listened, Guma’s frown changed to concentration. Then he’d nodded to the judge and said, No problem, Your Honor, but if I find something stronger, I might be back tonight for permission to dig.

Lussman raised an eyebrow. Well, you know where to find me, Mr. Guma. And ask my secretary to give you my cell phone number in case I’m gone for the day before you find what you’re looking for.

When they left the courthouse, Guma asked Swanburg to explain in more detail what he’d meant by Superman’s X-ray vision. It’s called ground-penetrating radar, or GPR. It works by shooting an ultrahigh-frequency radio wave into the ground through a transducer or antenna. Part of that signal from buried objects or differences between, say, compact soil and loose soil reflects back up to the antenna, which stores them in a digital control unit.

Huh? It was getting complicated for Guma.

Uh…think of it sort of like taking an X-ray of what’s underground, Swanburg had said. When you take an X-ray of your arm, the picture you get back shows the bone as a denser white, while things like ligaments are more a shade of gray.

So we’ll be able to see Teresa’s body? Guma asked.

Well, yes and no, Swanburg explained. GPR produces a cross-sectional profile of what’s under it-a record of subsurface features. It isn’t as exact as that X-ray at your doctor’s office. It could indicate when it’s reflecting off something hard, like bone, but it’s more for finding “anomalies” in the soil-like a pocket of natural gas or looser area soil of a size and shape to indicate a grave.

Seems like a lot of trouble, Guma said. Why not just go in there with a backhoe?

Well, a couple of reasons, Swanburg said. As you just heard, the judge isn’t going to let you go on a fishing expedition and dig up holes all over this guy’s yard without narrowing the search. Another reason is, unless you know exactly where to dig, you could miss a grave by a few inches and never know you were that close-unless you’re intending on bulldozing the entire backyard.

I might, Guma said.

Well, that would be a mistake, Swanburg said. When we excavate bodies, we do so very carefully with small hand trowels and whisk brooms. We try not to miss a single shred of evidence, like bullet casings or pieces of clothing, that could be overlooked from a bulldozer. Also, any human remains might be disturbed, likely damaged, by machinery-sometimes even the position of the bones in a grave can tell us a lot. GPR, while not perfect, can give us a good idea of where to dig.

Swanburg had referred any other questions to Clarkson, who was a geologist working for an oil company “in my real life.” GPR, Clarkson said, was used by geologists to evaluate the location and depth of buried objects-from buried cables to mineral deposits. It was capable of penetrating to one hundred feet in loose soils, like sand, but was more limited in denser soils, such as only a few feet in clay, which is why we asked if you knew the soil composition.

“The question is,” Clarkson said now as he ran the GPR antenna-the red box-over a test area on the patio, “where exactly beneath the cement we should dig?”

“What if it’s under the hot tub?” Guma said.

“Then we’re screwed,” Clarkson replied. “GPR sends its signal straight down, not sideways.”

Swanburg saw Guma look over at the hot tub with concern. “Funny thing, Ray,” he noted. “We’ve done a couple of these-and so have other groups like ours-and for some reason, killers who hide their victims on the property, don’t like to put things like hot tubs or even new rooms or outdoor furniture directly over the graves. Maybe it’s superstitious or disconcerting for their consciences, but they avoid it.”

Over the next two hours, Clark slowly pulled the GPR device over the patio area, which had been divided by Swanburg into grids, as the digital recorder made a printout. Guma looked at the printouts but couldn’t make heads or tails of them-they just looked like a bunch of different-colored bands and squiggly lines.

After they were finished, and the scene secured with a sign NYPD, the ensemble went back to the hotel where Clarkson and Swanburg were staying. Ordering a half dozen beers and ice up to the room, they pored over the printouts.