Slow Kill - Michael Mcgarrity [59]
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