Michael Mcgarrity - Slow Kill

Pino knew that a successful interrogation never happened unless you had enough information to pursue the facts by asking the right questions. Was Griffin afraid of somebody? His marijuana supplier perhaps? Or was there another, larger issue at stake that had caused Griffin to cave in so readily?

Ramona didn’t think Griffin was stupid, which meant she had to try to get a handle on his motivation before questioning him again. She stopped her unit near the on-ramp to the interstate and thought about what he might be hiding. Nothing came to mind. She decided to make some phone calls to other law enforcement agencies in the morning to see if Griffin’s name rang any bells.

Commuter traffic on the interstate had eased up. Ramona glanced at the dashboard clock, sighed, put her car in gear, and headed toward the office. Her shift had been over for hours and there was still reams of paperwork that had to be done for submission to the DA in the morning.

Sometimes she wondered why she liked her job so damn much.

K erney woke up stiff and sore. He’d worked on the garden wall until dusk, removing stones from the trench and expanding it so he could lay in a wider foundation as Joe Valdez had suggested. After a good hot soak in the shower, he dressed and drank a cup of tea at the breakfast table. Before he’d been gut shot by a drug dealer, Kerney had been a heavy coffee drinker, and sometimes he still missed the aroma and taste of it.

Always an early riser, Kerney watched dawn break through the French doors that opened onto the pergola. A thin layer of clouds on the horizon, washed pink by the first light, faded into pale ribbons as the sun bleached color from the dark blue morning sky, foretelling a still, dry day.

Across the pasture, peppered with dull green rabbitbrush and bunches of bluestem grass withered by drought, he could see the horse barn, sunlight now reflecting off the slant of the metal roof. It had stood empty since a day last summer when he’d found Soldier, a mustang he’d bought and gentled some years back, brutally slaughtered by a man who’d then tried to kill Kerney’s family.

Behind the barn at the top of the hill stood an ancient pinon tree. He’d buried Soldier in its shade and placed a boulder on top of the grave.

The tree was dead now, a victim of drought and bark beetles, the bare branches rising and jutting at odd angles against the skyline. He’d lost a lot of trees on his 1,240 acres and had cut most of them down, especially the dead thickets that dotted the land and posed the greatest fire danger. But the tree on the hilltop he’d let stand in Soldier ’s memory.

After rinsing out his cup, he walked into the living room and gathered up his keys, handheld radio, and cell phone. He took his sidearm from the locked gun cabinet, put it in a clip-on holster, and attached it to his belt. Today, he wore civvies, jeans, boots, and a white western-cut shirt, for his trip to Taos. But that would come later. First he’d stop by the office to see where things stood with Griffin and Dean, and make a call to the Taos PD to let them know he was coming and what he was looking for.

He glanced around the room. Sara’s sense of style was everywhere. The matching soft Italian leather couch and love seat were arranged to give a view through the picture window to the canyon below. Cherrywood end tables held handsome pottery reading lamps, and under the glass coffee table a Tibetan area rug picked up the warm color of the Mexican tile floor. On the walls Sara had hung two western landscapes, the larger one an oil painting of his parents’ ranch on the Tularosa Basin done by Erma Fergurson, his mother’s lifelong friend and a renowned artist. Upon her death, Erma had bequeathed it to Kerney along with a parcel of northern New Mexico ranchland that had made him a rich man.

Right now, having money was the furthest thing from Kerney’s mind. He was lonely for his wife and son and weary of seeing them so infrequently. He counted the days until he left for Arlington. He’d be with Sara and Patrick for two solid weeks, commuting to the FBI Academy at Quantico to attend an executive development seminar and teach several classes.

He would fly east on Friday, and the time couldn’t pass quickly enough.

Day shift started at 6:30 in the morning and radio traffic on his handheld picked up as officers began broadcasting their call signs and reporting in. As he left the house he heard Sergeant Pino announce her arrival at headquarters. He’d ask her for a briefing as soon as he’d finished scanning the reports and paperwork.

It was midmorning before Ramona Pino found the time to call other cop shops to ask if Mitch Griffin might be the target of a probe or a person of interest in an ongoing case. She came up empty, which wasn’t surprising. Queries about suspects ate up time and often resulted in dead ends. But going through the exercise narrowed the focus and usually enhanced the investigation.

Unwilling to let her suspicions about Griffin’s motives drop, Pino put in requests to federal, state, county, and municipal agencies asking for a records search of his name in all appropriate databases. The bureaucrats she spoke to warned that it would probably be several days before she heard anything back.

She pulled into the public parking lot at the county jail just in time to see Barry Foyt, the ADA who’d secured Griffin’s voluntary permission to search, get out of his car. She honked the horn to get Foyt’s attention, and he waved and waited for her at the front entrance.

“Did you get my evidence report on the Griffin house search?” Ramona asked as she approached Foyt. At five-three, she could almost look Foyt directly in the eye. He stood no more than five-six and was seriously balding, which made him look much older than his thirty-something years.

Foyt nodded. “It was a good haul,” he said. “Congratulations. Let’s hope we can use it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Griffin lawyered up after we talked to him. He hired Patricia Delgado as counsel. Last night she got a court order to take a urine sample from Griffin for drug and alcohol screening by a private laboratory. The results should be in anytime.”

“What does that do to us?” Ramona asked.

“If it tests positive, Delgado will likely argue that Griffin’s permission to search should be excluded because he was under the influence and therefore not coherent at the time to make a rational decision. The same applies to Griffin’s waiver of his Miranda rights.”

Ramona shook her head. “He was coherent, dammit. Did you argue against Delgado’s request?”

Foyt scowled humorously. “No, I let Delgado walk all over me. Of course I did. But the judge saw no reason not to sign the order. Under Miranda, any waiver must be knowing, intelligent, and voluntary. The judge would’ve been foolish to disallow it.”

Foyt shifted his briefcase from one hand to the other. “If Delgado can make a strong case that both the Miranda warning waiver and the voluntary permission to search occurred while Griffin was mentally debilitated due to drugs or alcohol use, we could lose all the evidence you seized.”

“The fruit of the poisoned tree,” Romana said.

“Exactly. But we’re not there yet. Pretrial discovery will require Delgado to show the results of the test and provide an expert opinion about the findings before asking the judge to exclude Griffin’s confession and the evidence.”

“I think Griffin rolled over on himself because he’s hiding something or protecting someone.”

“Like who or what?” Foyt asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, get a handle on it, Sergeant,” Foyt said, “because this case might need all the ammunition we can muster.”