David Ellis - The Last Alibi

The best lies, in Kolarich’s experience, had some truth interwoven. There had, truly, been programs like that in the past, sponsored by the city police department. Most people had heard of them, presumably Marshall included. Bring in your gun, we’ll take it off your hands, you walk away, no hassle.

But it wasn’t called Operation Safe Streets.

Rivers scratched at his face. “Should I get a lawyer?”

“That’s absolutely your right,” said Kolarich. “Might not be a bad idea. You want a lawyer to look at it, no problem.” He checked his watch. “Shit,” he said.

“What?”

Kolarich tapped his watch. There was a clock on the wall as well. “This time of night, there isn’t a public defender around. You can sleep in a cell downstairs and they’ll have one for you, maybe, noon tomorrow. Another twelve, thirteen hours. It’s absolutely your right,” he repeated. “Plus. . well. .” Kolarich grimaced.

“What?”

“Well, the coppers again.” Kolarich leaned his head on a hand. “Can I just say this? Cops are a pain in the ass.”

“What about ’em?”

Kolarich sighed. “The two cops that pinched you, they have to stay here until this is closed. They’ll have to stay here all night. I’m just worried that, if I make them wait, they’re going to say to me, Why not just charge Marshall so we can all go home? For them, that’s the easiest outcome. They just want me to sign off on a charge of unlawful use of a weapon so they can go home.” Kolarich sighed again. “Which, I suppose, is the easier thing to do, now that I’m thinking-”

“No, no.” Rivers waved his hands. “I wanna go home, too, right?”

Kolarich shrugged. “Yeah, we all do. But you definitely have the right to a lawyer-”

“Nah, nah. I get what this says. I get it.”

Rivers picked up his pen and started writing. He signed it in both places, next to Kolarich’s signature on the prefatory language and at the bottom after his written statement.

“Great,” said Kolarich after reading the statement. “You’ll be out of here in ten minutes, Marshall.” He extended a hand, and Rivers shook it.

“Appreciate that, man. Y’know, all of this.”

“No worries.”

Kolarich left the room with the piece of paper and walked into the squad room. Walking out of the kitchen was Steve Glockner, the assistant public defender assigned to the station house, holding a cup of coffee.

“Hey, Jason,” he said. “What’s up?”

“Not much. You?”

Glockner sighed. “Busy night. Sometimes I wish some of these mutts wouldn’t invoke.”

Glockner was prone to the occasional off-color remark about his clientele, but deep down he was a true believer in the Bill of Rights. Working inside this station house on a crazy multiple-day shift like Kolarich, but on the other side of the equation, he mainly wanted to make sure suspects didn’t confess without speaking to him first. But first they had to invoke, they had to utter those magical words: I want a lawyer. Until then, a public defender had no role in the process.

Kolarich put a hand on his shoulder. “The right to an attorney is inviolate,” he said. “Sacred. Cherished.”

Glockner gestured absently toward the interrogation rooms. “I heard someone came in on an attempted kidnapping?”

Kolarich made a face. “Didn’t pan out. Dropping that charge.”

Glockner put his face in the steam of the coffee. He was just as tired as Kolarich. “Score one for the bad guys,” he said.

When Glockner left, Kolarich looked around the squad room and had no difficulty finding his man. He looked like a bank manager in his suit.

“Mr. Kolarich?”

“Agent Drew?”

Special Agent Frank Drew was working the late-duty shift tonight for the FBI. He extended a hand to Kolarich. “Romie says you’re good people.”

Kolarich shook it. “What did he really say?”

Drew laughed. “He said he owes you.”

Patrick Romer was an assistant United States attorney who had worked with Kolarich on a joint state-federal drug operation last year. Kolarich had helped him beyond what was necessary, including helping a recalcitrant witness modify his attitude.

“This guy, Rivers, has one prior gun violation,” said Drew. “We usually want more than that for Safe Streets.”

Operation Safe Streets was a program launched by the U.S. Attorney’s Office that scooped eligible firearms cases from local law enforcement so that the cases could be prosecuted in federal court, where the penalties for repeat gun offenses could reach the double digits in years. Typically, they found offenders with multiple gun violations on their records and put them away for ten to fifteen years in federal prison.

“This is his third time using a gun,” said Kolarich. “He pleaded down the first one, so he only shows one gun violation. But it’s really two. Tonight is his third.”

“Only counts as two. You know that.”

“He’s a bad guy, Agent Drew.”

“Still.”

“Still, what? He attacks women. He’s evil, this guy. And anyway, is this your call?”

Drew smiled. “You know it’s not.”

“Romie authorized this,” said Kolarich. “He said if I got a confession, he’d authorize it. Well, I got a confession.”

Gun-toss cases could be tricky, Patrick Romer had told Kolarich over the phone. It’s one thing to find the gun on his person, another to find it on the street and say that you saw him toss it. A gun toss and only one prior gun conviction? he’d said. But Kolarich pushed the matter hard, and Romer finally got tired of listening to him. Get me a confession, Romer had said. You get me a confession, and we’ll prosecute.

“Romie authorized it,” Drew agreed. “I’m just saying, you won’t get fifteen years for this. Maybe ten, more like six or seven if he pleads-”

“Yeah, and we prosecute him in state court, it’ll be, like, two or three, probably. This guy attacks women, Agent Drew. This is his third victim. I’ll take six years over two any day.”

Drew wagged the file in his hand. “Speaking of women. What about this witness? Caridad. . Flores?”

Kolarich shook his head. “Dead end.”

“Dead end? Let me talk to her. She saw the gun.”

“No,” said Kolarich. “The cops saw the gun.”

“It says in this report she saw the gun. It says he stuck it in her baby’s face.”

“The report’s wrong. She didn’t.”

Drew didn’t look satisfied.

“You have two cops that saw the gun toss, Agent. And now you have a signed statement. That’s more than enough.”

“Where is Caridad Flores?” asked Agent Drew.

She was about twenty yards away from them.

“She’s in the wind,” said Kolarich. “She’s worthless. Isn’t really sure what she saw. You don’t need her, anyway.”

Drew’s lips bunched up. He read the statement and looked up at Kolarich. “By any chance would you know the immigration status of Ms. Flores?”

“Didn’t ask,” said Kolarich. “But I’ll tell you this, Agent Drew: If she’s undocumented, then she was pretty damn brave to run to the cops, wasn’t she? I’d call that heroic, wouldn’t you?”

Agent Drew studied him, maintaining that poker face they teach at Quantico, before releasing a sigh. “Fine,” he said. He removed a pair of handcuffs from his belt. “So where’s our guest of honor?”

“Better he hears it from me,” said Kolarich. “Give me one minute, then come in.”

Kolarich unlocked the interview room and found Marshall Rivers with his elbows on the table, his feet tapping a beat. He used the key to unlock the handcuff that tied Rivers’s wrist to the table.