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Eleven

LET ME TELL YOU, you get a case like this one, where it’s going nowhere, for no good reason, and you get a little paranoid. Hester and I spent hours on the telephone, or at our office, going over everything. Every last detail. Many, many times. Then we got a little further afield. Like they say, eliminate everything you can, and what you have left is likely to be what happened. Right.

The rumors, both within the law enforcement community and in the community in general, began to fly. One of the best was that Howie, a.k.a. Turd, had been hunting for mushrooms, and accidentally got shot by an officer. Howie’s estranged mother heard that one, and promptly took it to an attorney. He, just as promptly, began a wrongful-death suit against the county. Normally, since he wouldn’t have access to any investigatory information at that stage, we would have simply picked up the phone and, as a courtesy, let him know what had happened. At which point, he would probably not have filed the suit. Unfortunately for him, he went public instantly, called a press conference, and generally became a pain in the ass. We didn’t call. We felt it would be better if he found out later that he didn’t have a case. Especially since Howie’s estranged mother didn’t have a dime, and he had to be doing the work on speculation, as it were. Also called a contingency fee. It did tell me a bit about Howie, though. How many people have ‘‘estranged’’ mothers?

With rumor and speculation floating about all over the place, nobody was immune.

Hester and I even began to wonder whether or not there had been a DEA surveillance going, and there had been a horrible mistake and people got shot and they were covering it up. That sort of thing happened years ago, and there was no reason to think it couldn’t happen again. Then again, there was no evidence to indicate they’d ever try to cover something like that up. We checked everything, and talked to everybody who might have known. No evidence to support it. No evidence to deny it either. That’s the problem with conspiracy theories. Can’t prove, can’t disprove. But it shows you how far we were reaching.

Theories were great. What we needed were facts, and we didn’t have any. In a case like this one, when you run up against a wall, you drop back and start all over from the beginning. If you’ve done it correctly in the first place, you should be able to retrace your steps, see where you went wrong, and move on in the right direction. Sure. Both Hester and I spent long hours going over the physical evidence, the scene diagrams, the interviews. There were a lot of people I wish we’d been able to pin it on, but none of the evidence put them in the right place at the right time. Actually, it never put them anywhere near the right place at even close to the right time.

I hate excuses as much as the next cop, but we did have a problem we weren’t able to do anything about, and it didn’t originate with us.

Ever since the narcotics people had started in on the case big time, we hadn’t known exactly what to do, or where to do it. Let me explain. Hester and I and the General Criminal investigation didn’t know who the undercover cops were who were working the case for DEA and DNE. Johnny Marks, for all we knew, could be an undercover Fed. That was the first narcotics-related problem.

The second was who they were looking at. We didn’t know that either. The ‘‘connections’’ they were saying existed in Nation County were, in my opinion, tenuous at best. But the last thing Hester and I wanted was to stick our noses in and maybe screw up the DEA’s case.

George of the Bureau wasn’t any help either. There was a lot he hadn’t been told. Well, at least he assumed there was a lot. As he told me during a telephone conversation: ‘‘There’d better be a lot they’re not telling me. If there isn’t, they don’t have shit.’’

So who was to know?

We talked with both Lamar and Al about it. Both said to do what the federal narcs had requested. That wasn