Alan Jacobson: False accusations

“How so? We’d have three murders to write up.” They exchanged a smile as Jennings fastened the top button of his overcoat.

“You know, this could’ve been personal,” Jennings said. “Something related to their work with the homeless.”

Moreno bobbed her head. “Possibly.”

“Detective,” yelled an officer who was jogging down the street toward them. “We just got a call from someone with a partial plate on the car.”

“Another witness?” Moreno asked.

“Don’t know,” said the man, who was heaving mouthfuls of vapor into the air. “It was an anonymous call. The desk sergeant thinks it was a female voice. She said she saw a dark Mercedes sports sedan,” he said, looking down at his notepad, “with a license of two, C, and O or U. Couldn’t see the driver’s face. Driver was wearing a baseball hat, and was weaving a bit about a block away from where we found the victims.”

“Did she say where she witnessed it from?” Moreno asked.

“No.”

“Have them run a voice print analysis. I want to know more about this caller,” Jennings said. “Anonymous tips are bullshit.”

“Can’t get a voice print.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Call didn’t come in on the 9-1-1 line. She called the division directly. They don’t record incoming calls. She was in a real hurry to get off the line. Didn’t want to get involved.”

They headed back toward the bodies as a light rain began falling.

“So what’s the story?” he asked Saperstein, who was placing a couple of plastic bags filled with specimens into a nylon duffel bag, out of the drizzle.

“Hit-and-run. The car left with a broken left headlight.”

“That’s it? A broken headlight?” Moreno shook her head. “I already knew that.”

Jennings, ignoring Moreno’s comment, reached into the male victim’s coat and removed a wallet. “What about the speed of the car?”

“Judging by the damage to the bodies and the tire marks down the street, the driver must’ve been accelerating. He came off that curve,” Saperstein said, nodding to the area down the street, “and brought it up to, oh, about fifty, maybe sixty, would be my preliminary estimate, at the time of impact.”

Jennings looked over at Moreno, as if to say You wouldn’t have known that.

“What else can you tell us?” Jennings asked, moving over to the woman’s purse and examining its contents. “It doesn’t appear as if the windshield was broken,” Saperstein said. “But I bet there’ll be clothing fibers on the wipers, and probably on the bumper or fender area.” He tipped his head back. “We should be able to get a partial tire print for you off the blood around the male victim.”

“What about the woman?”

“Judging by the position of her body, it appears that she was thrown onto the hood of the car. Probably died from internal hemorrhage.”

“Are there any other tire marks in the street?”

“Aside from the one around the male and the one down the block, none that I’ve seen, but I haven’t had a chance to survey the entire roadway yet. Judging by the bloodstain patterns around the male victim, I’d expect to find some blood on the underside of the suspect’s car, near the left front wheel.”

“So it doesn’t look like the driver made any attempt to avoid them,” Jennings said.

Saperstein removed his glasses. “Based on what I’ve seen so far, I’d say he wasn’t trying to get out of their way. If he had, we’d see tire marks consistent with a swerve or intense braking. No, your driver either never saw these people step off the curb, or-”

“He meant to hit them.”

“Exactly.”

Jennings nodded, thanked him, and asked for his report as soon as possible.

As they walked away, Moreno was the first to speak. “I still don’t see his conclusions helping us much.”

“We’ll see. We know more about what happened now than we did before,” he said. “Maybe the fact that the guy was accelerating and there are no skid marks supports the theory that it wasn’t an accident. Let’s do a background check on the vics. Could be there was someone who had something to gain if either of them wound up dead. Maybe there’s no homeless connection at all. Maybe one of them had a kid in a rival gang. Maybe the driver never did see them until it was too late, and it was just an accident.”

“All right, all right,” she said, followed by a slight pause. “Maybe Saperstein was helpful.”

Jennings walked over to his car and spoke to the desk sergeant via radio, requesting assistance on locating the Mercedes with the partial license plate they had obtained.

“I also need a background check on two people.” He opened the victims’ wallets. “An Otis Silvers, and an Imogene Pringle.” He removed a piece of paper and studied it. “Pringle was carrying around a pay stub for the Homeless Advocate Society. It’s possible Silvers was with them too. See if we’ve got anything on this homeless group while you’re at it.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah, which judge is on call?”

The sergeant leafed through some papers on a clipboard. “You’re not gonna be happy.”

“Don’t tell me it’s Ferguson.”

“I hear he’s a bear when he gets called in the middle of the night.”

“Just find me the owner of the car and I’ll worry about the damn warrant.”

Jennings hung the mike on its receptacle in his car and turned to Moreno. She threw a hand up to her mouth to stifle a yawn.

“Oh, c’mon, these hours can’t be worse than Vice,” he said.

“No, Vice is worse. A couple all-nighters a week. But I haven’t been on Vice for three months. My body’s not used to it anymore.”

“Better snap out of it. It’s gonna be a long night.”

At 4:12 A.M. on the morning of December 2, all was quiet in the pristine pocket of rural Carmichael where long driveways wound their way up to five-thousand-square-foot mansions built out of brick, granite, and cedar. One of the older sections of Sacramento, the area had made a gradual transformation from small one-story ranch houses built on one-acre lots to an affluent person’s dream: rather than erecting a large home on a small plot of virgin dirt, it provided them the opportunity to raze an old structure and replace it with a luxury-filled two or three-story centerpiece on acreage studded with ancient, large-trunked, wide-canopied oaks.

Four speeding police cruisers suddenly appeared, screeching around the gentle curves of the narrow streets. The cruisers’ tires violently kicked up dirt and loose rocks, shattering the serenity of the lush green lawns and intricately shaped shrubbery. Their swirling red-and-white lights threw splashes of color onto the tall hedges and stone walls that lined both sides of the street.

As the cars converged on the home of Dr. Phillip Madison, the officers and deputies exited their vehicles, the chatter of the police radios creating a primitive form of multiple-speaker stereo surround-sound. A few barking dogs could be heard in the distance.

Bill Jennings climbed onto the hood of his Ford and looked over the hedges and beyond the stone wall. After a quick scan of the grounds, he jumped down off the car. “Seaver, take two men and search that semi-detached garage to the west of the house,” he said, pointing off to the left. “I’ll take the others and hit Madison with the warrant. Connor, grab a muzzle in case he’s got a dog.”

Six men ran in tandem toward the house like a small contingent of Marines just landing on shore. A KMRA-12 news helicopter was approaching in the distance, its spotlight trained on the ground below.

Jennings looked up at the approaching chopper. The radio. They heard it over the damned police radio.