Читать книгу Hands Through Stone - James A. Ardaiz - Страница 11
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“We have a triple …”
Friday, September 5, 1980
8:30 P.M.
Fresno, California
By September, the nights in Fresno can move quickly from the daytime heat of the waning days of summer to the growing evening bite of autumn chill. This happens more quickly than the shortening of the days. When the pager on his belt buzzed, District Attorney Investigator Willie “Bill” Martin grabbed his jacket. He immediately called his supervisor, the chief of homicide in the district attorney’s office, at his home. That was me, Jim Ardaiz; I was the chief of homicide. My given name is actually James, but I only use that in court—more impressive sounding. Before you ask, my name is Basque and it’s pronounced Ar-daiz, with a long “i” and a silent “a.” It rhymes with “lies,” but that’s a defense lawyer joke that I never thought was very funny.
If you don’t know who the Basque people are, then I will tell you that they are the indigenous people who inhabited the Pyrenees Mountains between Spain and France long before there was a Spain and France. They speak Basque, a language without a Latin root. You hear about them now and then, particularly when certain rebellious Basque factions blow up things or people on either the Spanish or the French side of the border. Anyway, that’s what I am on my father’s side. Besides that, I am a little over six-feet tall and I have green eyes. However, at this particular moment, my attention wasn’t focused on what defense attorneys called me, but on the reason I had received an urgent call from the sheriff’s office.
“What do we have, boss?” It was an affectation Bill cultivated, calling me “boss.” I was his supervisor in title and pay, but we both knew that Bill was the more experienced investigator. I, the “boss”, was the legal mind. I treated Bill as an equal out of respect. Bill treated me as an equal out of deference—as for equality of respect, he was getting there. Ours had proven to be a mutually beneficial relationship, with me, the young prosecutor, learning from the older homicide investigator. Over time, we had grown in respect for one another’s abilities, and our friendship had grown after the many nights we shared, standing around at murder scenes, spending weeks and sometime months sifting through evidence and, later, savoring beers with other detectives at our favorite bar after we had finally brought our man down. In some aspects, our job was like that of hunters, but our prey walked asphalt and concrete and usually carried a gun.
“We have a multiple murder at Fran’s Market. Just got the call from sheriff’s dispatch. Get on the horn, Bill, and find out what’s going on. They didn’t seem to know much, just asked for us to respond.” We knew Fran’s Market was a small rural market, located on the outskirts of Fresno. We had been there before, almost three years before, during another murder investigation. I knew Bill would call in and then fill me in the details on the way.
“I’ll pick you up, boss.”
“I’ll be outside, Bill. We have to move.”
I knew what Bill was thinking as soon as he put down the phone. Like the kid needs to say “we have to move.” When do we not? We always have to move when we get a call. Bill put down the phone and walked into his home office to get his service weapon, a nine-millimeter automatic. He never carried it anymore unless he was going to a homicide scene or to an arrest. Most people think cops carry their service weapons all the time. Some do, usually the young ones and always the ones in uniform, but with detectives, the older they get, the more most of them just put it in the glove box when they are driving or they use a small revolver or automatic that can be carried in an ankle holster or, more comfortably, in the small of the back.
Bill always laughed at the television cops who pulled out some cannon they carried in a shoulder or hip holster. You only had to sit in a car with a gun stashed somewhere on your body to realize how uncomfortable it could be. Besides, a gun on your hip or in ruined your clothes. And Bill liked his clothes to look good. “For the ladies,” he would say. As for the shoulder holster, we had all heard stories about the guy who pulled his gun out of his shoulder holster and shot his partner standing next to him as he swung the gun around. Bill would leave the shoulder holster to Dirty Harry. But this was a homicide—Bill’s service weapon would be with him at all times on his hip, as would the .380 Walther PPK in his ankle holster. Bill always carried a backup when he went into the field. Old habits die hard. “So do cops who don’t carry a backup,” Bill would add with a small smile.
“In my forties,” Bill liked to say if someone asked. A tall, African-American man, he looked younger than his years, and he was definitely older than he would admit. He would never tell his exact age. Bill had coffee-colored skin and a well-formed mustache that he liked to rub when he was thinking. His given name was Willie, but nobody called him that except guys with whom he had ridden patrol with as a young man. Now he was “Bill.” For some reason, the younger guys hadn’t liked calling him Willie. It seemed to make them uncomfortable, political correctness being what it was, even back then. They assumed that his given name was William rather than Willie, so they just made him Bill. He knew they were trying to be respectful and had grown accustomed to Bill. If you asked him his name, he would size you up and decide whether he was a Willie or a Bill. Although I had reached the point where I could call him Willie, I called him Bill.
Before he became a D.A. investigator, Bill had been a member of the sheriff’s department homicide unit. After a while, he realized that working nights and weekends was taking a toll on both his marriage and himself. That’s why he had come to the D.A.’s office, for regular work hours and weekends free. But that had its downside, too. It could get pretty boring just interviewing witnesses. When he was offered the chance to work the D.A. homicide unit as primary investigator, he jumped at the chance, although it meant he still had to work some nights and weekends. But it was a good compromise. And I knew he had decided I wasn’t bad to work for. Actually, he thought I was pretty good for a young guy. At least that’s what he told others behind my back. He also said I was a little cocky—all right, a lot cocky—but with cops that fit right in. Anyway, I didn’t think I was all that cocky. I did think I was good, but that was different. At least, I thought it was different.
Bill pulled the heavy automatic from its holster. He dropped the clip and pulled back the slide. He always carried one in the pipe and a full clip. The chambered-round ejected. He slipped the clip back and chambered another round. Then he dropped the clip and loaded the round that had been ejected and shoved the full clip back in the butt of the automatic. He opened his briefcase and checked for his extra clip, his cuffs, and his flashlight. He was ready. He already knew it was going to be a long night.
Bill pulled up, watching me pace back and forth in my driveway. He would have been disappointed if “the boss” wasn’t outside waiting. He knew there was no point in telling me to wait in the house until he got there; I would never do it. I was always outside pacing and looking at my watch.
Bill smiled. It was a homicide. The victim would be on the floor waiting for us. He or she wasn’t going anywhere. Besides, there would be homicide investigators at the scene when we got there. The D.A.’s job was to assist the homicide investigators at the scene. We weren’t the primary investigators. Still, there was always a little adrenalin surge when you rolled into a homicide scene.
The first time Bill called me “boss,” I laughed. I knew what he thought of me. When I first arrived at the D.A.’s office, I didn’t know anything, just like most young deputy district attorneys fresh out of law school. But I listened and I learned.
I remember the first time I went down to the Identification Bureau. The “I” Bureau we called it. These days, there are whole television shows built around the people at the “I” Bureau. They call them “Crime Scene Investigators” or “CSI.” I guess “CSI” sounds more exciting, but as far as I’m concerned it’s the “I” Bureau. If they had a television show called the “I Bureau,” people would probably think it was about the local department of motor vehicles. I can hear it now, “I work for the ‘I’ Bureau,” and people will wonder if they can get their driver’s license photo fixed. I told one of the “I” Bureau techs, Jessie, to “run the print for a match.” She had a big stack of fingerprint cards, a magnifying glass, and a latent print card with the unknown perp’s prints. That was how they did it back then; they would take out a stack of print cards with some common characteristics and compare them by hand and eye to the latent print lifted at the scene. I remember that Jessie looked at me and smiled the way you do at a child who still believes in Santa. “Well it might take me a little while—what did you say your name was again?” That’s the first time I realized I had made an ass out of myself with seasoned investigators. Lesson learned. This wasn’t like television.
Things were different now. The difference for Bill was that now I was no longer fresh out of law school. I still listened and I knew I still had things to learn, but I also had come to know things he didn’t know, and he tolerated that. There was even his grudging concession that took me by surprise one morning when over a mug of coffee he observed that for a lawyer I might not be totally useless. When I told him to do something, it was usually after he had either politely and obliquely suggested it or we had discussed it. In a way, it had become a game between us—I would occasionally say the right thing before he suggested it, and this was happening more and more frequently. We had become a team. In law enforcement parlance, “a team” means that you take turns buying donuts, but it also means a lot more: like the unwritten rule that the other guy is the one who watches your back and you watch his.
Becoming chief of homicide for the district attorney was my dream. It was the top of the line for a trial prosecutor. Oh, you might be the district attorney, but when you were the chief of homicide you were at the top, as far as trial prosecutors were concerned. You got the biggest cases and you tried the toughest ones. And, while you always represented “The People,” who you really spoke for was the victim.
As far as investigators were concerned it was the same thing. “Homicide Investigator” was more than a title; it was the top of the line for cops. It was where all the other cops wanted to be. Whoever watched a show on television about the burglary division?
For me, well, I was never the high school quarterback, but he never became the chief of homicide either. Besides, my stories were a lot better. So, to put it mildly, I liked my job. After I graduated from law school, I briefly considered going to work at one of the big law firms. A lot of money was out there if you did it right. But me? I wanted to be a real trial lawyer. I wanted to try cases all the time. I didn’t want to sit in an office listening to some client pissing about what had been done to him or what he wanted to do to somebody else or how much it was going to cost in legal fees. No, I wanted to be exactly what I was. There was that one moment at the beginning of a big case when the judge would slowly look at everyone gathered, all of those who waited pensively, the jury, the defense team. Then the judge would focus on me. That was my moment at which all the nervousness disappeared, the great beginning when the curtain went up and I was alone on the great stage of human drama. I liked standing up and saying, “Ready for the People.”
Bill flipped on the dome light and got on the radio. He wanted to know which investigators were at the scene. He lowered the window on our undercover car. I always laughed at the idea of his car being undercover. Who drove a blue Dodge with a whip antenna except cops? Of course, that was back then. Nobody has a whip antenna anymore, but the blue Dodge hasn’t changed. It still looks like a cop car and doesn’t fool anybody, especially since the blue color is one that nobody would really pick for a car, and there were also the cheap hub caps to always give it away. I think automobile makers must have a selection of paint just for police undercover cars, or maybe it’s just the paint that is left over after all the other colors are picked.
“Boss, it’s a triple. We got some witnesses and I guess a neighbor tried to play John Wayne with the shooter. Got himself shot in the ass. You ready?”
“Yeah, yeah.” I slid into the front seat beside him. A triple? Not “three dead,” not “three people murdered”—we called it a “triple.” If it had been two, it would have been a “double.” If it was a single, it was a “dead guy” or, depending on the part of town where the homicide occurred, “a stiff.” When you said it, everybody in the business knew what you meant; “I worked a triple last night.” That was enough. Besides, when you said it, you didn’t need to swagger. Those on the inside knew what you did and those on the outside just knew that you must do something special. Bill gunned the engine. He never did that in his own car, a Cadillac. Oh, well, it wasn’t his gas.
“What else we got?”
Bill glanced over and frowned. “Three down in what looks like a robbery, but Kenny says there’s something not right.” Kenny was Kenny Badiali, the on-scene sheriff’s detective.
“Not quite right? How?”
“They got some woman who was at the scene when the first officers rolled up. She was in the bathroom, covered in blood and hysterical. They took her to the hospital. Ross Kelly talked to her. Kenny thinks there’s a connection. Said she wasn’t hurt and she looks like she’s loaded, maybe on meth. Says he doesn’t want to talk more over the radio. Too many people are listening.” Kelly was another on-scene investigator. He was built like the stereotype version of a truck driver: curly, reddish hair, thinning in the middle of his head, with the rest of him spreading out around the gut. A really good guy.
“Kenny spends too much time worrying. Wired too tight. Tell him that we need to draw blood from her at the hospital and run a drug screen,” I said.
“Well, wired too tight or not, he knows what he’s doing. He says we need to get there yesterday. If Kenny says something’s wrong, then something’s wrong. And, I’ll bet he’s already asked for the drug screen.”
“Just make sure, Bill. I want that blood before she starts to realize something’s going on.”
Bill didn’t give me his usual comment about the investigators knowing what they were doing, which meant he wasn’t sure either. He got on the radio while I sat back and stared out the window. I had a bad feeling. Not something I could put my finger on—it was just a bad feeling. Years before, I had handled another murder that came out of a burglary at Fran’s Market. I had gotten to know the owners, the Schletewitz’s, good people, Ray and Fran. I hoped they weren’t lying dead in the market. It may seem kind of crass of me to hope the bodies in the market weren’t my friends, because whoever was lying there was somebody’s friend or son or daughter or husband or wife. I guess I have been to too many homicide scenes. After a while, you get kind of jaded. The victims stop being human beings, lying on the floor or on the street or in the dirt, their aspirations unfulfilled and their dreams ended. They become pieces of evidence.
That wasn’t true for me if the victim was a kid. I still couldn’t handle the kids. You kept thinking that they had a whole life ahead of them and some asshole had stolen that away from them. And if it was a woman, well, I guess there is a double standard. It still bothered me more if it was a woman and, especially, if it was a woman who had been raped.
For a while, I had been in charge of sexual assault crimes and crimes against children. I couldn’t handle it. Sometimes, you get to the point where you start to hate the “perps.” When you get to that spot, you don’t have any objectivity. You can’t step back. I just couldn’t handle those middle-of-the-night talks to women spitting blood out of holes where their teeth used to be, or trying to get some little kid to tell me what some pervert had done to him. No, homicide was the right fit for me. For some reason, murder never became as personal with me as did sex crimes. I guess it had something to do with the fact that I never got to really know the victim. Maybe that says something about me, maybe not.
Bill was moving fast. There was a red light that we could put on top of the car, but it wasn’t an emergency and we didn’t need it. Even in an unmarked car, a cop will always take liberty with the traffic laws. If you don’t get stopped, no problem. If you do get stopped, the traffic officer will see our exempt license plate and know it is another cop.
It was almost 9:30 P.M. when we got to the scene. I hadn’t been to Fran’s Market for over three years, not since the earlier homicide investigation. The long, rectangular cement block building looked the same, a quasi-country market, painted paper signs in the window advertising whatever was on sale, a beer sign glowing. Fran’s wasn’t far enough outside the city to be in the “country.” In fact, its location was just right—if you were a robber. Sheriff’s officers’ cars filled the lot, and the obligatory yellow crime scene tape was already up. People had gathered around to look. Sure, some were there out of concern, but most just came to gawk. Blood and death always draw people who want to see it and then tell everybody how awful the scene was. That’s why traffic always slows down as people drive by an accident. Everybody wants to see the horror and then shudder when they describe to their friends just how terrible it was.
Some news media reps were already there and the cameras turned on me as I got out of the car. There was a time when I would pay attention. Now, I just moved past them to get to the deputy trying to control the crime scene and keep people out of the area. At the other side of the parking lot, I saw Ray and Fran. I didn’t go over. I was relieved to see them outside the store. But their son, Bryon, also worked there on some nights. As I said, I had a bad feeling.
Kenny was waiting outside the back door to the storage room. I had been in it before when I worked the first homicide, a burglary that turned out a lot worse. There was a certain degree of irony in going into a place on a 187—that’s the California penal code for murder—when you’d been there before on another murder case. There were some places where it seemed like every year we were making a visit, usually a liquor store or the local “stop and rob,” where some poor soul trying to make some extra money was working the night shift and got stuck up. You’d just shake your head every time because the clerk would be dead on the floor, usually with a gun in his hand that he didn’t know how to use. I doubted that was going to be the case this night.
The door was partially closed and a beam of light cut across the parking area. Kenny didn’t wait for me or Bill to say anything. He just got right to it. That was Kenny. All business, but it always seemed like he had too much coffee in his system.
“Jim, Bill, how ya doing? This is bad. We got two kids down just inside the door. A third one is over on the other side of the storage room. There was a fourth victim who the shooter left for dead in the bathroom. He ran out after he thought the shooter was gone. How that kid made it, I got no idea. He was hit pretty bad—shotgun blast almost took his arm off.”
“So who got here first?” Bill asked as he looked around the area.
“Deputy Humann was dispatched....” Kenny looked at his notebook, “at 8:15 in response to a shots fired call. He said he was here within five minutes. There was one man down by the corner over there.” He pointed to a lawn area near the northwest corner of the market. “He says the guy down was a Jack Abbott, a neighbor. I’ll say this for him, the guy’s got guts. He yelled at the first guy he saw and then he saw the second one. He fired a shot and thinks he hit the second guy. But the guy turned toward him and Abbot saw he had a gun, so he started to run for cover, but the shooter got him in the ass. When Humann got here, that’s where he found Abbott, down on the ground. He went inside and found the other victims, a white female and two males.”
Bill was already looking around. “Any description?”
“Not much. Just a white male adult, maybe six feet tall.”
“What about the kid that got out? Anything from him?”
“Yeah, Deputy Mendosa talked to him before the ambulance got here. He ran to a house where he knew the people. He told Mendosa that a white male, about six feet, 170–175, wearing a bandanna on his head, and a white female adult, approximately five feet, five inches, 125 pounds, brown hair, also wearing a bandanna, robbed them. He says the male was the shooter and the female was armed as well.”
“So you think the woman that they found in the bathroom could be involved?” I asked as my eyes were panning the scene, taking it all in.
Kenny shrugged. “Maybe. Who knows. She had blood all over her and she was in the bathroom in hysterics. We won’t know until we talk to her. We’ve asked for the hospital to do a drug screen.” He looked over at me. “Like you asked.”
So Bill had told him that I asked. That’s it, the way it always was; dump it on the lawyer. Cops always stick together. No matter what you do, they never forgive you for being a lawyer. At least I had reached the point where they were willing to overlook it most of the time.
Bill and I headed to the door. “Let’s take a look.”
Kenny slowed me down. “Take it easy. There’s a lot of blood.”
I was used to blood, more used to it than I ever wanted to be, but I wasn’t prepared for this. Just inside the door there were two people, a young man, maybe nineteen or twenty, and a young girl, maybe sixteen or seventeen. There were only a few dry spots on the cement floor. Blood was everywhere, thickening as it began to congeal. On television and in the movies, the blood is always bright red. I guess that’s so you will know it’s supposed to be blood. But in the real world, that isn’t how it looks. It doesn’t take very long before it starts to turn dark red, and by the time it dries it is a dark reddish-brown. Sometimes it is almost black, especially when the sun has dried it. So, when a television program shows the bright-red puddle on the floor, or the guy they find out in the woods three or four hours or even days after the homicide has a crimson stain on his chest—that isn’t what it really looks like.
Right now, less than two hours after the incident, it was just pooled blood that spread out into a dark red stain across the floor, only it was thick and the edges were dark where it had begun to dry. Bill and I moved carefully around the blood. Bright light flooded the storeroom, and we had no problem seeing. The problem came when we had to actually look at what was there to be seen.
The girl was lying on her back, with her head propped against the wall next to what I guessed was the bathroom door. A plastic plug from a shotgun shell and shotgun wadding lay near her head. The boy was lying near her feet. If you didn’t know better, you would think that it was the way two kids would look lying on the grass at a picnic. If you didn’t know better.
Nobody looks very good when they are dead and lying on the floor. But she was a pretty little thing—somebody’s baby girl. Somewhere a mom and dad were going to go through the worst moments of their lives and it was going to happen in the next few hours when they learned what had happened to their little girl. I’ve seen a lot of bodies and most of the time I just looked at them and then started to examine them to see what would be important for evidence. But this time I paused for several moments. It was her eyes—they stayed with me. She had gray-blue eyes, and they reflected nothing more than a vacant stare. I can’t describe it any better than that. She just had these pretty gray-blue eyes. One thing you discover about people who have just died is how their eyes look. You can just see those eyes and you know they are dead. The color is there and the shape is there but the shine isn’t there anymore. There is a light in a person’s eyes that tells you they are alive. When they are dead, that light is gone. The light was gone from her eyes. In the movies, when people die, they close their eyes. In real life, when people die, their eyes are almost never closed. They just stare sightlessly. I resisted the temptation to reach down and close her eyes. As long as I live, I will see those gray-blue eyes. She had a large wound to her upper left chest—it looked like a shotgun wound. I remember thinking, so little of life lived; so much of life taken. She was just a kid.
The boy lying near her had his eyes almost closed. He had on a brown knit shirt. There was a hole about the size of a half dollar in his throat—shotgun blast, probably a twelve-gauge at close range. There wasn’t much of a spread pattern, and you could see the powder tattoo on the shirt left by bits of burning powder as they hit him. Sometimes, those burns are on the skin if the gun is fired from a close enough range. This shotgun was fired from very close range, probably no more than two or three feet at most, or else the pellet spread would have taken his head off. These kids knew what was coming after the first shot. So why did they just stand there?
Fortunately, neither the responding officers nor the paramedics had made much of a mess of the crime scene. Usually, they rush in and do what they’re supposed to do, which is save lives. They don’t pay attention to moving things around that might be evidence. That isn’t their job. This time they hadn’t made any quick gestures. They, or the first deputies on scene, had turned the bodies to check for vital signs. It was obvious both kids were dead. The blood from the two bodies spread out all over the floor. It always amazed me how much blood there is in one human being.
Bill was standing behind me. “Look over here behind the shelves. We have another one. Maybe a little older, but still a kid.” Bill had been around a long time but I could tell that even he was shaken. They were just kids and I could hear him muttering “Goddamn” over and over again. When you have your own kids and you see something like this, it really brings it home.
I looked over and could see the feet sticking out from behind the shelving that was along the back wall of a walk-in freezer. The body was lying on its side, the back to a desk along the wall. The room was obviously used as an office area. His face, or what was left of it, was turned in the direction of a small safe. It was a young man in his mid-twenties. Even though the top of his head was gone, I knew him. It was the owner’s son, Bryon. He had been a witness for me several years before in the other murder that came out of a burglary of the store. Now, he was a murder victim. I looked up at the shelf. His brain was sitting up there like somebody had just casually placed it there. The rest of his head, the top of the skull and the hair, was splattered all over the wall. There was a fine mist of blood that had traveled up the wall. Pieces of skull and bloody tissue were splashed on the desktop and the adding machine sitting on the desk. Blood, tissue, and bits of bone were spread over so many places that it was hard to envision the impact of the shot. The shooter had obviously intended to kill the boy. But why? This was just a country store. How much money did the killer think he would find? Besides, these kids didn’t have any weapons. They weren’t a threat.
The crime scene didn’t make any sense. People don’t just stand around waiting to get shot if they have a chance to get away. For some reason, these kids just stood there after the first one got shot. And the shooter’s actions made no sense. Most of the time, a robber will shoot in a panic and then run. They don’t usually intend to kill anybody when they walk in, even though they have a gun. Most robbers just intend to use the gun as a threat. This was an execution. But why? Whoever did this was way beyond being just some two-bit, punk robber. Kenny was right. There were too many questions, and there was something very strange about the crime scene.
When you’ve seen enough homicide scenes, you get a sense of what happened. Most of the time, murder follows a pattern, and so, when something doesn’t fit, you can sense it. Regardless, whoever did this was a really bad guy. Shooting someone in a panic or without thinking is one thing, but pointing a gun at a kid and deliberately killing him or her? For that, one had to be a cold-blooded killer, and those kind of people are a breed apart. Most murders happen because people get angry or panic or are intoxicated. I had investigated a lot of homicide cases, but it wasn’t often that you saw a real premeditated murder, the kind where the killer thought about it in advance and then did it just like he was killing a bug. Those guys are scary, but even those guys usually don’t kill kids. This guy was more than scary. Somewhere out there we had a real killer.
The coroner joined us. Unlike what a lot of people think or what is shown on television, the coroner called to the crime scene is usually not a doctor and is there to check for information and control disposition of the deceased. The coroner looked down at the boy with the head wound and said, sadly, “I pulled his ID out. We’ll need to make a positive identification later. I can’t tell from the ID if it’s him. I hate it when people have to see their kids like this, and I’m always the guy who has to tell them.”
Bill glanced at me. I spoke first. “Don’t bother. I can make ID. His name’s Bryon Schletewitz. I saw his parents outside. I know him. He was a witness in an old case of mine involving this store.”
The coroner looked up. “Do you want to tell his parents or should I?”
He looked relieved when I said I would do it. I had done it before with other parents or husbands or wives. It was never easy, but at least this time it would be coming from somebody they knew and not from a stranger. “The names of the other two kids?”
“I don’t have an ID on the girl yet. The boy’s driver’s license says Douglas White.”
Kenny interjected, “We don’t know yet whether they were working here or just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Right now, we got two witnesses and maybe a third, depending on whether the woman in the bathroom is a witness or a perp. The kid in the bathroom knows what happened I’m guessing, but he’s in the hospital right now. We’ll have to wait on the woman. She’s over at county medical center at the moment, but I got a guard on her.” Kenny stared at me for a few seconds. “You going to talk to the parents?”
“Yeah, Bill and I will take care of it.” I looked over at Bill for moral support. He was shaking his head. He wasn’t happy about being dragged into informing the parents, but he knew it was something that needed to be done and he too had done it many times before.
I stepped back out of the storage room, being careful not to open the door too much. The television camera lights were on and the glare was directly in my face. The cameramen were trying to get the camera eye into the storage room, and I wasn’t going to give them a chance to catch any part of the victims or the blood on the floor. It was bad enough that several parents were going to get the worst possible news tonight about their kids. I wasn’t going to make it worse by having family and friends see their loved ones bleeding on the floor of a storage room. People deserve better than that.
Bill and I walked past the news crews, shouting questions at us. The deputy holding the onlookers back lifted the crime scene tape. He took the lead, putting his arm in front of the lunging cameramen. “Not now, please. Just step back.” We moved around them and for once they didn’t follow. If they had known the family was over on the other side of the parking lot they would have been there trying to wring the last ounce of emotion out of the scene; asking the questions that they themselves would never be able to answer if they were on the other side of the lens: “Is your son in there?” “Do you know if your daughter is alive?” “How does it feel? How does it feel?” What is it about the need for human misery to be portrayed on the news at 11:00? Some moments obviously need to be private, but not much is private anymore. Misery is big, I guess. Decency goes on the afternoon news—must be the family hour.
Ray and Fran Schletewitz watched as Bill and I walked across the parking lot. Fran stepped back as we neared. They both knew me from the previous case and we had seen each other occasionally over the years. Fresno isn’t so big that you don’t cross paths with people you’ve met before. Ray just stood there looking at me. I could tell he knew what was coming. He had already prepared himself. There is no easy way to tell somebody their child is dead. About the only thing you can do is get it over with as clearly and as gently as possible. I reached out to him. As he took my hand, I looked at Fran and then back at him. Bill stood off to my side. Ray was staring directly at me, and it was all I could do to hold his gaze. A man deserves to be looked in the eye when you are about to tell him the one thing no parent ever wants to hear and is never prepared for. I opened my mouth and then closed it, measuring my words and thinking what to say and how to say it. I looked at the mother and father waiting for me to tell them what they already knew but wanting to hold onto that last sliver of hope that they were wrong. There is no good way, I guess. I finally just let it out. “Bryon is in there, Ray, Fran. I’m sorry; he’s dead. I wish there were something different I could tell you.”
Fran started to cry and Bill went to her. A group of women, family friends I suppose, began to gather around her. Ray’s eyes hadn’t turned their gaze from me. He looked at me with an expression on his face that was beyond description. It was like watching a man’s body just drain itself of everything but grief. I recognized the moment all too well: those fleeting seconds of shock and screaming denial when a loved one is caught between the reality of what they are being told and the flood of emotion that is coming. Somehow nothing came. Ray just stood there with age showing in every line on his face.
“Jim, I knew it when I saw you walk over. Bryon wasn’t even supposed to work tonight. We had somebody off. Who else is in there?”
“A young girl, looks to be around seventeen or eighteen, and a young man who has an ID that says Douglas White. They work for you?”
“They both work in the store. They’re just kids. The girl, must be Josephine Rocha, she’s just a kid. Doug isn’t much older. Their parents—this will kill their parents. There was another boy working tonight, Joe Rios?”
“We have another boy that was shot. He got away. He’s at the hospital. We’re sending somebody over right now to get a statement. I’m sorry, Ray. I just don’t know that much yet.”
I know some people think it’s insensitive to ask questions of a person under these circumstances, but solving a homicide is a race against time. You have to ask. If you are going to identify the killer, you probably have your best chance within twenty-four to forty-eight hours. After that, things start to get cold. Some people are initially so emotionally overwrought that they can’t answer your questions. However, it always surprised me how many people are fairly calm. Ray was calm. We needed a statement from him and besides that I needed to protect him from his own parental instincts. All parents are the same. They want to see their child. It’s not something that you can allow, not because of rules or regulations, but for their sake. I knew what he was going to say before he said it.
“Jim—my boy—I want to go in. I want to see my boy.”
That was something I couldn’t allow. First of all, it was a crime scene and he wouldn’t know what to do. More importantly, if I let Ray go in there, he would never get the image out of his mind. He would see it for the rest of his life when he closed his eyes at night, every time he thought about his son. That wasn’t going to happen if I had anything to say about it. Some people resent it, but later most people realize it was the right thing to do.
“Ray, I’m going to tell you something and you need to listen and trust me. There is nothing you can do to bring Bryon back. I don’t want you to remember Bryon the way he is right now. You stay here with Fran. One of the detectives will be over to take a statement. Then you go home with your friends. I’ll have one of the deputies drive you. We’ll call you. Trust me on this, Ray. This is best. I won’t let you go in there. I’m sorry.”
I walked over to Fran. Bill had his arm on her shoulder. She was shaking her head. The sound that was coming out of her was a low, keening moan. What could I say? All I could do was let her know that I cared. “I’m sorry, Fran. There’s nothing else I can say. I’ll let you know things as we figure them out. Right now we just don’t know anything.”
I’m not sure she really heard anything I said. For her, all that was important was said when I told her I was sorry. Her friends looked at me and then surrounded her in a circular compassionate embrace. I saw Ray, standing still and erect, staring at the store. I patted him on the shoulder and walked back toward the crime scene. There was a long evening ahead and I was already emotionally drained.
There is a symmetry to the chaos of a crime scene, especially a murder scene—things that should be there and things that shouldn’t. What is there and what isn’t tells you a lot about the perpetrator. This scene was no different. It just took a little longer to adjust to the reality of it. Even seasoned investigators have a hard time when three innocent young people have had their lives ended so abruptly and so violently. Almost all of us had been to triples before, but they were normally drug shootings or barroom brawls that turned into combat zones. These were kids and they didn’t do anything except be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was going to be hard explaining it to their parents.
Bill and I walked back toward the crime scene tape and started to go under it when a young man grabbed at me. He said he was Bryon Schletewitz’s brother-in-law. He wanted to go inside. I removed his hand from my arm while Bill stepped behind me. The man kept saying that Bryon was in there and he wanted to see what had happened to him. I didn’t have time for this, but I also didn’t want to turn my back on him. I told him “No” as firmly and as gently as I could and then I nodded to a deputy who guided him away. I had done this enough times that I knew if it were me, I wouldn’t have felt any different than these people. I often thought that I probably wouldn’t behave as well. Maybe that’s because I knew what lay ahead and they didn’t. We all depend on the system to bring us justice. The problem is that to most people the only justice in crimes like this—the murder of children they love—is seeing the son of a bitch who ruined their lives taken out and shot. Well, while I knew that wasn’t going to happen, they hadn’t figured it out yet. And even when we got the killer, and I was sure we would, prosecution would be a long, slow grind. That night I had no idea how long it would be. That’s the final part—the long, inexorably slow, grinding process of the law. By the time the perpetrator gets what the law says is coming to him, the system has worn the victims out, worn the attorneys out, and worn itself out. The only one who isn’t worn out is the one who started it all. Those types never seem to wear down.
Bill and I walked carefully back inside. The bathroom door was open and the light was on. The room was divided by a sink on one wall and a door that separated the sink area from the toilet. The back wall of the room with the toilet was covered with bits of flesh and bone, and blood had splattered all over the corner, outlining a blank space where something had blocked the spray of blood and tissue. Kenny offered his thoughts. “I’m guessing the shooter stood at the door and fired at the kid, the one that got away. From what we can piece together, the kid must have shoved himself into the corner and turned away from the shooter. His left arm took most of the blast. The shooter must’ve thought the kid was dead because he left him there. Then, later, I guess the shooter heard him leaving through the storeroom door that led to the parking lot and chased after him.” The bathroom was only a few feet square, and with the toilet in it there wasn’t much room to move.
When you look at a crime scene, you try to visualize what happened. It helps you to think about where evidence might be located, and it will be of invaluable help when the time comes to interrogate suspects or to question witnesses. This one wasn’t hard to figure out. The shooter stood at the toilet room door, pointing the shotgun at the kid. The end of the barrel was no more than three or four feet away when this guy pulled the trigger. The kid must have been terrified, looking at the end of that gun and the face of a man who intended to kill him. In a macabre way, he was probably fortunate. My guess is that he went into shock and collapsed on the floor when he was hit. With all the blood and gore, the shooter figured he was dead and left him. The kid was the lucky one.
When a shotgun is fired, the ejected buckshot spreads in an inverted-cone shape from the barrel. The farther away the barrel is from the target, the wider the spread of the pellets. At almost point blank range, there is a very limited spread pattern, but at three or four feet, there is a noticeable spread. Assuming he has the weapon or knows what weapon was used and the kind of ammo, a forensic expert will look at the spread pattern and be able to determine with fair accuracy how far the shooter was from the victim when he fired. The two kids on the floor showed almost no spread. The shooter was probably no more than a foot or two away, and he was likely three or four feet from the kid in the bathroom. For Bryon, well, that was something that we would have to evaluate later. He had fired at Bryon, but he had aimed high. Whatever the precise distance, this guy was so close that he didn’t have to be careful with his aim.
The surviving witness said the gunman was a man, but it had never occurred to us that the shooter wasn’t a man. Maybe it isn’t politically correct, but there are distinct differences in the way women kill and the way men kill. First, women aren’t usually as violent, at least not as violent in the same way as men are. It is pretty unusual to see premeditated violence from a woman. Oh, a woman will kill, but when they do it they usually are really pissed. I mean, a woman will unload a gun if she’s going to shoot you. She’ll keep firing until she hears the click. A man will usually just shoot you. Another thing, a woman is unlikely to kill kids this way. She might kill her own kids, but then she will usually try to kill herself, or else she’s plain crazy. No, this was a guy. Some things you just know.
Bill kept looking around. “No shells.” He looked back over his shoulder. “Kenny, has anybody found any shells?”
Kenny shook his head. “Nope, haven’t seen any. Of course, they could be under the shelves or somewhere around here. But I don’t think there are any.”
That meant one of two things. Either the shooter used a single-shot shotgun and removed the empty shells each time he fired, or he picked up the ejected shells. When you fire a single-shot shotgun, you need to open the shotgun at the breech, remove the expended shell casing, put in a fresh shell, and then close the breech. Most people who fire once will then turn and run. They don’t stand there slowly reloading and placing the empty casing in their pocket. If the shotgun carried multiple shells and they ejected as rounds were fired, the alternative was that the shooter had picked up the ejected shells, which meant he had the presence of mind to pick up a casing, which would have extractor marks on it from the ejection mechanism or a firing pin impression. Either way, this guy was cold-blooded. But people don’t just stand still and let somebody shoot them. Almost always they’ll fight or they’ll try to run. It’s instinctual. But these kids didn’t run. That meant that most likely there was more than one person involved. It also meant that the second person had a gun on them, too. These kids didn’t move. They knew they had no chance. The boy in the bathroom had been conscious enough to tell us a woman was also involved, but if it was the woman in the bathroom, then the shooter left her behind, and no gun had been found on her. Her being in the bathroom, covered with blood, didn’t fit either. It was too soon to tell for sure who she was, but right now I had stopped giving her the benefit of the doubt. None of it made any sense, except for one thing that was clear: This wasn’t just a robbery.
Bill came to the same conclusion almost at the same time as I did. Probably, he came to it before I did. “The woman in the bathroom, the one they have over at the hospital. The first officer on scene finds her in the bathroom where the Rios boy was. She’s covered with blood and screaming hysterically, so she was in there when it happened and she wasn’t shot.” Bill looked over at me, his eyes narrowing. “She’s the second one or at least one of them.”
The lack of shells on the floor and the fact that there were no bloody footprints where the shooter would have walked to pick up the expended shells pretty much told the story. We could look for shells on the floor, and we would look, but we weren’t going to find any. This guy had used a single-shot shotgun. He had methodically pointed the shotgun at each of the kids, pulled the trigger, and then broke the shotgun open, removed the expended shell, put it into his pocket, and reloaded. All the while, a second and maybe a third person held a gun on the remaining kids while the shooter performed his role as executioner. If Rios, the kid who got away, was coherent enough to give us a straight story, then the second person was a woman and we probably already had her under guard. But we hadn’t found a gun on her. If she had wielded a gun, where was it? And, if the shooter took the gun, why did he leave her behind?
It didn’t fit together. Not only were these just kids, and there was no point in shooting them, but most robbers don’t have the stomach for this kind of bloodshed. This was intentional. This had been contemplated before the killer even walked in the door.
Like I said, I had been to Fran’s Market before. I had been in that back room before. I had also talked to Ray and Fran before and I had talked to Bryon before, and now he was lying on that worn floor and his parents were looking to me for answers. Ray and Fran had once stepped up before as citizens. They cooperated with me and law enforcement to help bring a murderer down. They testified when another parent’s child was a victim and now it was their child who was a victim.
Nobody knew that earlier case better than me; I had been the prosecutor, three years away from the job I held now. Now, these same people were depending on me to do something—to make it as much right as something like that could be made right. The memories of that earlier case surrounded me as Bill and I walked around the store. Yes, we both had been to Fran’s Market before and, yes, we both had made promises to Ray and Fran—and to Bryon, their only son, not to worry, we would take care of them. That case, those promises, were now reflected in the faces of Ray and Fran. I could see them still standing in the corner of the parking lot, surrounded by friends, but I felt like they were looking right through me.
They were calling in the promises I had made in that other case when they had trusted me. And they had every right to do so. I couldn’t help thinking back, and I could tell from his silence that Bill was doing the same thing.
