Russell Atkinson's Blog, page 106

GUT SHOT – Episode 15

Gut Shot – Episode 15

© copyright Russell Atkinson 2015

Bert called me again about two o’clock with some good news. The prison had called him and approved me as a visitor. I could visit Woody on Saturday between ten thirty and eleven thirty. I thanked him and finished up the afternoon with some more records checks and planning.

That evening Ellen fixed an experimental tuna casserole for dinner. It was a disaster, but I ate it down like it was haute cuisine. When I told her I would be going to see Woody tomorrow I could see something was bothering her. Finally I just came out with the question.

“I can see something gnawing at you. What is it?”

“I know I told you it was okay for you to be working all week while I’m taking care of Tommy by myself, but you promised me you’d take care of Tommy on the weekends. I’m glad you’re helping Woody, but I really need some time to get things done without him. I haven’t been running all week. There’s some shopping I can’t do with a baby in tow. My clothes don’t fit and …”

“Okay, I get it. You’re right, but this is important to get the real story early before everyone’s memory starts getting cloudy or influenced by what others are saying. I was going to say no, but you encouraged me to help him. I’m not going to do a half-assed job.”

“Sweetie, I’m sure this can wait until Monday. I’m going bonkers here. I need, … I,” and suddenly she started to cry. She’d been doing that more and more lately. I knew about postpartum depression, but this was probably the first moment I realized she could be experiencing it. I also knew that when she used the word ‘sweetie’ I was in deep kim chee.

“Whoa, everything’s going to be fine,” I cooed, holding her tight. On cue, Tommy started crying. She broke away from me and picked him up from his crib. She’d fed him only minutes before, so she flipped a diaper over her shoulder and put him position to be burped. “Let’s do this,” I said. “Why don’t you come with me? You can go running in the morning while I watch him. We don’t have to be out there until 10:30. You can come out there with me and, while I’m inside, you can take Tommy in the stroller and pick up some geocaches out that way. I know you haven’t been out geocaching for awhile, either. Pick me up at 11:30 and we’ll have a nice lunch. I’ll babysit the rest of the day.”

She didn’t reply immediately. Tommy was obediently spitting up on the diaper and she was dabbing at his mouth as he finished. She nuzzled him gently before putting him down again. “That would be nice. I’ve never gone caching out that way,” she replied. “I can put him in the Snugli and I think I can do it. He’s not heavy yet and he’s always peaceful in that thing. It would be a lot easier than with a stroller.”

“Okay, then. Problem solved.” I gave her another squeeze and this time she returned it. “Just be sure to leave me some milk for Tommy for the afternoon.”

She nodded agreement and went off to get her kit to express some milk. She was fortunate that she’d had no trouble with that, either. Ellen is no prude. To say she’s affectionate in the bedroom would be a huge understatement, at least before Tommy arrived, but for some reason, she was shy about expressing milk. She didn’t like me to see, so she went in the other room. By the end of the evening she was in a better mood and apologized for her crying jag. We watched the late news again, but there was nothing new on Woody’s case.

All men profess honesty as long as they can. To believe all men honest would be folly. To believe none so is something worse.   John Quincy Adams

Chapter 8

The next morning I woke up early. This was not by choice. Tommy was crying at five thirty and by now Ellen had made clear my duty was to get up and bring him to her so she didn’t have to get out of bed to nurse him. The same thing had happened at one and three thirty, but who’s counting.

I got up and fixed myself a bowl of cereal while Ellen went back to sleep. She was up by seven and ready to go on her run. As soon as she was out the door I flopped down in my recliner with Tommy in the Snugli on my chest. We both fell asleep and slept the entire time she was gone. Neither of us woke up even when she got home, all invigorated from her run. She snapped a picture of the two of us and laughed when the flash woke me. I have to admit it turned out awfully cute.

Ellen had already loaded a bunch of geocaches into her GPS unit, so it didn’t take us long to get ready to go. We got Tommy into his car seat and headed out. We pulled up to the prison right at ten thirty on the dot. I got out and Ellen took the car to do her geocaching.

This was my first time at the prison. You’d think FBI agents would be visiting prisons all the time, but in fact it’s rare. By the time someone’s been incarcerated, the FBI’s job is done. I’m not saying it never happens, but it had never happened to me. The entry process was pretty intimidating for someone not used to it. There’s a lot of stuff you can’t bring in, like cell phones or recording equipment. Even though Dublin’s a low-security prison, it’s still a prison and they don’t fool around.

Since I was an attorney, the rules were different for me. I got scanned by some drug detector-device like the others, and went through a metal detector, too, but I was allowed to bring in my laptop. They told me I couldn’t use it to do audio or video recording, but I was allowed to use their equipment for that.

There was a big sign on the wall describing the prohibited apparel for visitors: tank tops, see-through blouses, mini-skirts, shorts, spandex, or halter tops. I guess the inmates are horny enough without additional provocation. I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be inciting any additional lust in my lawyer suit. Khaki clothing was also prohibited since that looked like prison garb. Visiting hours had started at 8:00 AM for regular visitors, but since I was an attorney and needed a private meeting room, they’d had to schedule me in. The guard made it abundantly clear that I was inconveniencing them by scheduling a visit on a weekend when all the regular visitors were there. He made reference to “the order” and then I realized that Bert had gotten the magistrate to issue an order that I be admitted on Saturday; otherwise I would have had to wait until Monday.

I went through so much process I was half-expecting a rectal exam, but after completing enough paperwork to file a tax return I finally was shown into a small visiting room. Woody was already sitting there wearing khaki slacks and a matching long-sleeved shirt. A name tag was sewn on the shirt with his last name: Braswell. I had been expecting an hour, but it was already eight minutes to eleven.

“Cliff, I can’t thank you enough,” he gushed. I held out my hand to shake, and he grabbed it with both hands. His wide receiver’s grip was impressive, but not crushing. We sat.

“Woody, I wish I could say it’s good to see you, but not in this circumstance. We don’t have much time. I thought it would be a full hour. Why don’t you just tell me the whole story.”

“Sure, but you have to believe me, Cliff. I don’t think anyone else does, even my lawyer. Gina told me he’s good, but … I don’t know.”

“Bert Breen is top-notch. Trust him. I’ve worked with him. Now just tell me the story of what happened. We’ll have more time later, but I want to get going on my investigation to help you. I’ve only agreed to one week so far.”

“Yeah, okay. So it was a firearms day for instructors and the front office. The SAC and two of the ASACs were there on the regular range with an instructor or two. The PFI took the rest of us over to the barracks. We were doing an arrest scenario with three arresting agents and two violent fugitives inside. We were supposed to learn the scenario so we could run agents through it at regular firearms. Bobu split us up and gave separate instructions to the agents and to the bad guys, so neither of us knew what the others were going to do.”

I interrupted at this point. “Did you volunteer to be a fugitive or did he assign roles?”

“He did. So I don’t know exactly what he told the arresting agents but he told us that one of us – me – was going to try to escape if given the chance. I was supposed to comply at first, but then escape if he screwed up. The other bad guy was to be compliant but that if I got free he could join me in resisting or trying to escape.”

“Who were the others in the scenario?”

“Jermaine, of course. He was one of the arresting agents, along with Ricardo and Bobu himself. Rodney Watkins was the other fugitive with me.”

“So Watkins was to be compliant and you were instructed to try to escape.”

“Right.”

“That’s Ricardo Garcia?.”

“Garcia, right. He’s pretty new. I forgot his last name until you said it. I’d seen him around once or twice, but that was the first time I’d ever worked with him.”

“Okay. Go on.”

“So I was positioned in the kitchen. It’s not really a kitchen they just call it that. There’s no appliances …”

I held up a hand to stop him. I had been jotting notes on a pad of paper as Woody had been talking, but now I made a rough sketch. The barracks buildings were old wood frame structures dating back to World War II. This whole area had been part of Camp Parks, a base originally built by the Seabees in 1942, and later transferred to the air force and then the army. It still exists as an army reserve training area, but in the 1950s it was downsized with much of the land transferred to Alameda County Sheriff’s Office and to the federal prison authorities. I’d participated in some arrest scenarios myself in those barracks as an agent. They were better described as four-room shacks than housing. There was no glass in any of the windows and no doors in the interior doorways, just empty frames. There was no furniture in any of them, but the kitchen area had a rusted out sink, some drawers, and a countertop. I drew a rectangle with a hallway in the middle that ran directly from the front door to the back door. When both doors were open you could look all the way through the house from the front yard to the back yard. All four rooms opened onto the hall. At the front were the living room and one bedroom and at the back were the kitchen and the other bedroom. Those were what we called them, anyway.

 

I showed him my sketch and asked if it was accurate. He nodded. “Okay, just tell me what happened.”

“Uh, sure. Watkins was in the front room. We heard Jermaine yell ‘FBI, come out with your hands up.’ He sounded like he was out front. I peeked out the kitchen window in the back and I saw Ricardo there behind a wooden barricade they’d set up there. I ducked back  out of sight, but he saw me when I looked and he started yelling at me. My name was Jones for this scenario. He was yelling ‘Come out, Jones, I see you.’ So I came out with my hands up like I was instructed. He came out from behind the barricade, his gun on me.”

“Back up. Were you armed? What were the instructions before you started about guns?”

“No, man. I was unarmed. We were supposed to be taken by surprise, but my weapon was in a kitchen drawer. Watkins was supposed to be the violent one, the guy named Smith in the scenario. He had a gun in his hip holster. So we all brought our service weapons, but mine was in the drawer the whole time in a holster. Before the exercise we all unloaded our rounds into an ammo can and locked the slide back. We showed our gun and empty magazine to the guy on our right then the guy on our left so everyone could see that all guns and clips were empty. The same as always. You’ve done that before, I’m sure.”

“Okay, so you went out the back door with your hands up, is that right?”

“Right. I walked toward Ricardo, but he ordered me to stop as soon as I got a couple of steps from the door. I don’t know exactly what was happening in the front of the house but I could hear Jermaine yelling commands at Watkins.”

“Where was Bobu?”

“He was on the side, neither front nor back. He was behind a barricade watching the other two arresting agents, and covering them with his weapon.”

“His was unloaded, too, I take it?”

“Of course.”

“And all the weapons were regular service weapons, Sig Sauer pistols?”

“I think so. I didn’t pay that much attention to the specific models. There could have been Glocks or something, but definitely no revolvers, if that’s what you’re asking. Not when we were all showing each other our unloaded weapons.”

“All right. So what happened next?”

“Ricardo had me turn around and told me to lie face down, like he was going to cuff me. The back door was wide open and I could see down the hall. Watkins was standing in the hallway with his hands up, walking backwards toward the front door, with Jermaine right behind him. I could see that Ricardo couldn’t shoot at me because, one, I was unarmed, and two, he’d be shooting right down the hall in line with Rodney and Jermaine. So that’s when I bolted back inside.”

“And that was what you were instructed to do, as you understood it?”

“Yeah, it was. Well, Bobu never told me exactly when or how to escape, just if I got the chance to do it. I thought I had a chance at that point. See, I think Ricardo made a mistake in stopping me so close to the door. If he’d’ve brought me out farther and had me lie down while my back was still to the door, he could have come around and cuffed me.”

“Go on.”

“So I ran into the house. I was going to turn left into the kitchen to get my gun from the drawer, but as I looked over my left shoulder I could see that Ricardo was running to the kitchen window. I thought that he could get to the open window before I could get into the kitchen and open the drawer. If he saw me in there reaching into the drawer, he’d shoot me. So I made a right instead. There was a bedroom there. I was planning on jumping out a window on that side, but when I got into that room I could see out the window that Bobu was right there with his weapon trained on the window. So I looked around and there was the SWAT bag on the floor. I figured it was put there as part of the scenario.”

“SWAT bag? Your SWAT bag?”

“No, man, not mine. Just a SWAT bag. I don’t know whose it was. They all look alike. You’ve seen ’em. The big, bulky ones for all the protective vests, boots, ninja suits, billy clubs, extra magazines, big flashlight, flex cuffs, the whole works.”

This gave me pause. This was the first I’d heard about a SWAT bag. Bert had told me that Woody had spied a gun in a bag, but I hadn’t realized it was a SWAT bag. I knew Woody had been on a SWAT team earlier in his career and I’d seen him with his SWAT bag when I was working in the San Jose office, but I also knew he wasn’t on one any longer. If Porillo was right that Woody had killed Jermaine with his own gun, then I would assume the bag that he pulled it from was his bag, too. I didn’t see how Woody could have pulled his own gun from his own bag without knowing it. I decided not to ask him about that yet as I wanted the story straight as he remembered it before I gave him any hard questions.

“Sure, Woody, I’ve seen them. Go on.”

“Well, those bags have an end pocket, a smaller zippered section separate from the big section. I could see the outline of a gun in the end pocket, so I just unzipped it and reached in. There was a gun, a small revolver. I grabbed it and ran back toward the hallway. Just as I got there I heard scuffling and shouting in the hall just outside the door. I flattened myself to the left of the open doorway.”

“You were still inside the bedroom?”

“Right. Then I could hear Watkins and Jermaine right outside my door. Watkins must have bolted down the hallway when he saw me make my escape, but Jermaine caught up to him fast. He can outrun anyone in the division, I think, including me. So I could hear them thumping against the wall right on the other side from where I was standing. They didn’t know I was in there, I don’t think. I could hear Jermaine order Watkins down on his knees, then I heard him cuff ’im. I could actually hear the ratchets as the cuffs went on. Then Jermaine ordered Rodney to stand, and they started to walk back toward the front, past the bedroom doorway.”

At this point I stopped him again and asked him to indicate on the diagram where everybody was. He drew a small circle to indicate Bobu on the outside and a question mark in the back yard by the kitchen window, explaining that he thought that’s where Garcia was at that point, although he might have moved. Then he drew three tight circles representing Jermaine, Rodney, and himself. He neatly penciled in ‘JL,’ ‘RW,’ and ‘SB,’ his own legal name being Sherwood Braswell. Watkins was in the hall right at the open doorway and immediately behind him was Jermaine Logan. Woody was just on the other side of the wall from Jermaine, neither able to see the other. I nodded for him to continue.

“So as Watkins passed the doorway, I reached my gun hand, that’s my right hand, around the door frame, pushed it into Jermaine’s body and pulled the trigger. At the same time I yelled ‘Take that, sucker.’ That’s when the gun went off. It was so loud in there. We didn’t have ear protectors on because there was no need. I just remember my ears ringing and people yelling. I know I dropped the gun out of total surprise. Jermaine was slumping to the floor and I couldn’t understand what was happening. Bobu came rushing in, I think. Watkins was down next to Jermaine. I didn’t see any blood, but I could smell the gunpowder. I knew I’d shot him, but nothing made sense. Somebody, Bobu, I think, grabbed my arm and walked me into the front bedroom away from everything and told me to stay there, then he went back to try to help Jermaine. I could hear him telling Ricardo to call an ambulance, I think, but I couldn’t see what was going on and my memory is all hazy after that. I remember sitting down on the floor there and putting my head in my hands, wondering what I’d done. After a while more agents came over from the other area, where the front office brass were shooting. I could hear the SAC’s voice outside talking to Bobu and some voices on cell phones. Then there was an ambulance and some paramedics. The next thing I knew Bobu and another agent were arresting me. They said the SAC ordered it.”

“Did you make any statements? Did they question you?”

“Bobu read me my Miranda warnings without questioning me. I just kept asking if Jermaine was going to be okay but they said they didn’t know. I said something like ‘It was an accident, I swear,’ but Bobu told me not to talk, just to shut up and get a lawyer. He was trying to protect me, not get a confession or anything. I think I stopped talking when he put the cuffs on me, but in the car I might have been saying something, babbling about it being an accident. I just don’t remember exactly now. They took me to the Oakland R.A. for fingerprinting and photo. They let me walk in without the cuffs so it wasn’t too humiliating, but everyone already knew what had happened by that time. Nobody talked to me except when they gave me instructions to place my hands for the prints or where to stand for the photos. Then they took me over to the city jail on a courtesy hold.”

“You keep saying ‘they.’ Who were the other agents with Bobu?”

“There was only one, George Mossberg. He was one of those who came over from the range, one of the instructors running the front office personnel through qualifying.”

I jotted Mossberg’s name on my pad. I remembered him slightly, but I’d never worked closely with him. That’s one more person I’d have to interview, if he’d let me.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you liked Gone Girl you’ll love this one, too. A young woman goes missing. Is she dead? You think you know who the bad guys and good guys are, but then you’re not so sure. The story is told through multiple characters’ viewpoints. The suspense is ratcheted to unbearable levels. You have to read the next chapter, then the next.

The primary narrator of the tale is Rachel, a self-deluding alcoholic divorcee. Although she was fired and is now jobless, she continues to ride the train into London every day so her flatmate/landlady won’t find out. Tom, her ex-husband, is now married to Anna, the beautiful blond estate agent who has given him the child Rachel couldn’t.

Rachel fantasizes over a lovely young couple she sees from the train every day, Scott and Bridget (although she has her own fantasy names for them). She wishes her life was perfect like theirs. They live very close to her old house, the same neighborhood as Tom and Anna. Bridget, in fact, used to babysit for Tom and Anna. But then Rachel sees something that shatters her illusions about the young couple. A tall dark stranger kisses Bridget, who then goes missing. Tension builds and builds.

As we hear from Tom and Anna and all the other characters, we find that all is not as it seems. The story is written with panache and acted superbly by the voice actors, especially the one playing Rachel. I devoured it. It’s great to be able to give five stars to a number one best-seller. Sometimes they actually deserve it.

I haven’t read any other reviews, but I imagine a few will complain that the ending is too convenient and predictable. It is that, but by that time you will just be so anxious to find out for sure who dunnit (and what happens once it’s revealed) that you won’t care.

View all my reviews

Rube Goldberg machine

What the heck. I don’t have much to say today. I’ll post a fun video:

 

GUT SHOT – Episode 14

All babies look like Winston Churchill.

Edward R. Murrow

 Gut Shot – Episode 14

© copyright Russell Atkinson 2015

Chapter 7

Ellen was delighted to learn I was going to take the case, even if only for a week. She was convinced Woody had to be innocent. She’d worked with him closely on a couple of cases and felt she knew his character. He wasn’t the kind of person who would do such a thing. To me she sounded like those women interviewed by news reporters when their sons are arrested for murder or some other heinous crime who insist he couldn’t have done it. Most of the time she was right there with me, scoffing at big Mama, but today we were on opposite sides. I didn’t point this out, though. I admired her faith in the people she knew, but the flip side of that coin was that she was expecting me to prove Woody was innocent. At that point, I would just as soon she had a little less faith in me. That’s a hard expectation to meet when someone is guilty.

I played with Tommy for a few minutes, which consisted of staring at him as he lay there in his crib doing his Winston Churchill impersonation. Ellen and I used to take turns fixing dinner since we both worked full-time, but Ellen was determined to do the cooking now that she was staying home. The only problem was, she was too exhausted from childbirth, child care, and lack of sleep. She managed to put together dinner consisting of pre-packaged grocery store soup with some cooked chicken breast cut up into it for body, and a rudimentary green salad. It all tasted pretty good, but I had to sneak in a peanut butter sandwich afterward to up the calorie count.

After dinner I checked my email and the social media accounts I had set up. To my surprise, I had a reply already from Bubo, the firearms instructor I had asked about barricades. He had replied directly to the phony email account I had set up for Huntress, the fictitious moose-killing Canadian woman with the big rack. I’m talking about the antlers of the moose, of course. He advised her, that is, me, that he worked for a big agency that ended up making its own barricades out of plywood and two-by-fours because it was afraid some of the commercial ones bore too much risk of ricochets. He said in their course shooters sometimes began back at the fifty yard line and moved forward, shooting from behind barricades at the twenty-five yard line under time pressure. Sometimes when they were shooting from the fifty, stray shots hit the forward barricade. They made sure there were no nail heads facing backward. Bullets would penetrate the wood, but not bounce back. That was the big danger. He didn’t identify himself or his department any further.

The sender’s email address was at hotmail and didn’t tell me anything about him. I checked the IP address in the header of the email. It was assigned to AT&T U-verse and located in Concord. The description in the email of the agency and its firearms course matched the FBI exactly. I couldn’t be certain, but I’d be willing to bet that “Bubo” was Chris Bobu. I pulled out Ellen’s office phone list while she wasn’t looking and verified that Bobu lived in Concord. I put the list back before Ellen could notice it was gone. Now I was sure it was Bobu. I wasn’t sure how I would use this new connection, but I replied, thanking him for the information and praising the good advice about ricochets. I reread it to make sure I wasn’t laying it on too thick. I toned it down a notch and hit send. That was all there was, so I logged off.

When the late news rolled around, we watched, but didn’t learn anything significant. The reporter showed a clip of an interview of one of Woody’s neighbors who described him as a nice guy who always said hi. That’s real informative. Then a picture of Jermaine in a military uniform was shown. Jermaine’s parents were also shown leaving their house, a nice suburban one-story somewhere back east. The father was a manager at Walmart and she was a librarian. They had no other children. They wouldn’t respond to questions. The reporter finished by saying that Logan’s organs had been donated. I wondered which ones made it through in good enough shape to be donated.

The next morning, Friday, I went into work as usual and checked all the email and Internet sites I’d set up. There was nothing new. Maeva registered with the race site, paid by credit card online, and printed out the receipt. She brought this in to me, considerately including a reimbursement check from my business account already made out to her for my signature.

At 10:30 I got a call from Bert. He’d just gotten out of the motion hearing. Bert had requested that a list of everyone present at firearms that day, all FD-302 reports, and all photos taken by the FBI, whether the agents with their smart phones or the crime scene team that came in later that day, be produced immediately. Sheila had opposed all three requests. She’d said that the 302s were still in the process of being dictated or reviewed and hadn’t been filed yet, so they weren’t official documents. Her argument against the photos was that the official ones were still being processed and she had no way to collect the ones from agents. As for the list, she said that no such list existed, but that she would request one be compiled.

Bert was familiar with the way 302s were handled by the FBI and knew Sheila was probably right on that one. The judge had accepted the AUSA’s word and said she would have to produce them once they were approved by supervisors and filed. Bert had pointed out that photos no longer had to be “processed” since they were all digital and could be immediately copied and provided. Sheila had countered that the FBI still used film because it had better resolution. The judge had asked her to explain why an FBI photographer had recently testified in another case that he had taken digital photos. Sheila, unabashed, had replied that they used both and that she had never said they only used film. The judge had not appreciated the misleading argument and had ordered her to provide all digital photos by investigating agents or official photographers to the defense by the end of the day or face sanctions, and to produce any film ones as soon as they’ve been developed and printed. He held off on ruling on photos the on-scene agents themselves may have taken until it could be determined whether any existed. He accepted Morrissey’s argument that they probably didn’t bring their phones into an arrest scenario. Bert had been able to refute the argument about the roster, thanks to me, and Sheila had said perhaps she had been “misinformed” and would check to see if the roster or scoresheet existed. The judge had ordered it produced promptly when and if it was determined to exist.

“Cliff, I owe you on that one,” Bert told me.

“Glad I could help. What about the FBI order not to talk to the defense?”

“Right. Sheila didn’t even oppose that motion. She knew it was a lock, and opposition would just make her look bad with the judge. I got an order that the SAC must inform all FBI personnel immediately that they’re free to talk to the defense. He didn’t say anything about the press. The judge made clear that ‘immediately’ meant by one o’clock today. He understood that I wanted my investigator to get started interviewing witnesses over the weekend. Afterward Sheila asked me who that was so she could inform the SAC. I didn’t give her your name. I just said I would probably have several different investigators working on it.”

“Good thinking. I’d just as soon my name isn’t broadcast to the whole division yet.” I explained to him what I’d done with the social media and how I wanted the weekend to see who allowed me to connect with or friend them. I asked about visiting Woody on Monday as he had previously mentioned. He told me he expected to hear from the prison later today that I was cleared.

As soon as I hung up with Bert I called Gina Nguyen, Woody’s squad supervisor in San Jose. I had to sit on hold for an eternity, but when I was put through I told her about the judge’s order that it was now okay to talk. She told me the word from the SAC hadn’t come down yet, but that as soon as it did, she’d call me back. That happened at 12:58.

“Cliff, I just got the official word,” she began, and I could tell from her tone there was a story there. “The SAC sent out an all-employee memo by email saying employees were free to talk to defense investigators if they chose, but then followed that saying that didn’t mean they were required to talk to the defense. He underlined that part and went on to say it was conventional for defense attorneys to obtain information from law enforcement witnesses on the stand.”

I was disgusted, but not surprised by this. “Great,” I said. “He’s telling everyone they can talk but to keep their mouths shut if they know what’s good from them.”

“That’s not a problem for me, you know that. Woody’s a good agent and a good friend. I’ll talk to whoever I have to to get him a defense. So you’re the investigator, then?”

“For now. I only agreed to do it for a week. I can’t get in to see him at the prison unless I’m hired on, so I did that much. I want to hear the story right from him. Don’t tell anybody about me yet, though.”

“Okay, so what do you want to know? I wasn’t there.”

“For starters, can you tell me who was?”

“The way I heard it, the people in the shooting scenario were Woody, Jermaine, Rod Watkins, Chris Bobu and Ricardo Garcia. Woody and another agent were playing the bad guys and the others were the arrest team.”

“Was this an all-instructor day? I know everyone but Garcia is.”

“He is, too. He’s new since you retired. It was all instructors in the scenario, I guess, but I think there was a special shoot going on for the front office over on the range. There were some instructors there with the SAC and ASAC.”

“A special shoot, as in poke as many holes in the target with your pen while scoring so you qualify?”

“Look who’s talking. Remember, I’ve been to firearms with you before.”

“Fair point,” I conceded. Even when younger I was never a good shot and more than once I had to reshoot in order to qualify. I was in no position to be casting stones. “So Fitzhugh himself was at the range?” Theodore “Trey” Fitzhugh III was the Special Agent in Charge of the San Francisco Division.

“So I hear, but not anywhere near the barracks where the scenario took place. I don’t think you’ll need to interview him, thank God.” Gina knew that Fitzhugh and I had had our run-ins in the past and it wouldn’t go well if I tried to interview him.

“No point. He wouldn’t talk anyway. Anyone else you know of out there?”

“Dawson.”

Carl Dawson was the Assistant Special Agent in Charge, or ASAC, with the oversight of the San Jose R.A. He’d been there only eight months or so, so I’d never worked with him. I’d met him at the Christmas party the FBI throws every year for special friends, but didn’t know much about him. “Will he talk to me, you think?”

“After today’s memo, I doubt it,” she replied, “but he liked Woody, and may feel under pressure to defend any agents who work under him.”

“Alright, thanks. How about Woody’s guns? Do you know what he carried?” I knew that many agents carried personally-owned weapons, although they had to be Bureau-approved.

“Yeah, he carried his Bureau-issued Sig on his belt. I think he owned a couple of personal weapons, too. I don’t know what he was carrying at the time of the shooting.”

“Do you know what his personal guns were?”

“He had a little five-shot revolver he carried in an ankle holster for backup when he went out on dangerous arrests. I think he had a .357 magnum, too.”

“Do you know anything about the scenario itself?”

“Not really, except what I told you. It was in the barracks. The PFI was running it.” That was Bobu.

“How about the scuttlebutt? What are people saying?”

“Around here most of them are saying it must have been an accident. They all know Woody and don’t believe he’s a murderer. But up in the East Bay and San Francisco, I think it’s leaning the other way. They know Jermaine better. No one’s talking about the shooting itself, other than it was a contact shot to the abdomen and Woody called Jermaine a cocksucker right before shooting him.”

“Yeah I heard about that. Have you heard anything about the medical situation? Did he die there at Santa Rita or in the ambulance, or what?”

“The SAC must have gotten a preliminary report from the doctors. He told us supervisors the shot went through the large intestine and the liver and severed an artery somewhere inside. He bled out at the hospital within minutes after arriving.”

“Do you know if he said anything to the doctors or ambulance staff before he died?”

“I have no idea. That’s good thinking, though. I knew you’d be the right man to help him.”

This was very frustrating. The last thing I needed was one more person with unrealistic expectations of me.

“We’ll see about that,” I responded. “Can you tell me anything about Connie, the girl he was seeing? Was the relationship solid?”

“He doesn’t talk to me about his love life. I saw them biking together once on a weekend maybe three months ago. I just happened to pass them while I was out running errands. If it weren’t for that, I probably wouldn’t even know they were seeing each other. He came alone to the Christmas party.”

“Has he ever mentioned Jermaine or Connie?”

“Not to me. I haven’t heard anything second hand.”

“Okay. That’s all I can think of right now. Is there anything else I should know?”

“Not that I know of.” Gina sounded frustrated that she didn’t know anything else that was more helpful.

I thanked her and hung up. I checked my Internet sites again and found that Connie Jefferson had “connected” with me on LinkedIn. I’d already seen her profile there, but I got a little more information about her after connecting. None of it was useful. It was mostly the sort of résumé padding you’d expect. I guessed that she only did it because I was ex-FBI and now was practicing law in Silicon Valley. Her profile made clear she was looking for a better position with a big company. LinkedIn is all about professional networking. She’d also accepted my friend request on Facebook, either because we had some mutual FBI friends or because she wanted that same networking connection. I looked at her profile and timeline there. She didn’t post much. There were a few photos of her races and triathlons. She had a sister who posted a lot of pictures of her dog on Connie’s page. I checked the profile section about relationships. All it said was “Ask.” I considered clicking that ask button, but figured that would just seem creepy to her since she knew I was a retiree.

GUT SHOT – Episode 13

Gut Shot – Episode 13

© copyright Russell Atkinson 2015

Bert Breen replies…

“Cliff, I can take a no answer, but Woody can’t. If you’re going to turn him down, do it to his face. Don’t make me tell him you weaseled out.”

“Your guilt trippin’ won’t work. You told me I couldn’t see him.”

“He’s being held out at FCI Dublin. You aren’t a relative or his lawyer. He can put you on a visitor list as a friend, but it’ll take a week for the prison to clear you and you can only visit on weekends. If you’re his lawyer, you can get in sooner. Sign on as co-counsel for a week and take a retainer, then you’ll be approved. It only takes one day for the prison authorities to check out lawyers and we can visit during the week. It takes longer for family. You wanted to talk to Woody. Here’s your chance.”

This offer took me by surprise. I did want to look Woody in the eye and have him tell me he didn’t do it and hear first-hand how he was going to explain away the problems. To my own surprise, I agreed to sign on as his attorney for one week at half my regular rate. I didn’t expect Woody to ever be able to pay it, but maybe I could get back a piece of that hundred bucks I donated if the defense fund builds up.

FCI Dublin is the Federal Correctional Institute in Dublin, a small town in the East Bay where Santa Rita Jail is located, right next to where the shooting took place, at the adjacent sheriff’s gun range. There’s also a bomb range run by the Alameda County Sheriff. The FBI leases training time there from the sheriff’s office for both firearms and bomb matters. So does the television show MythBusters. The whole complex is located on what used to be Camp Parks, a staging area for troops being sent overseas during World War II.

I would have to wait to get on the approved visitor list, but now that I’d agreed to work the case for a week, I asked Bert what he wanted done.

“Can you interview the girlfriend for me?” he asked.

“If she’ll talk to me. Do you have her name and contact info?”

“Um, yeah. Hold on. I’m emailing it now.”

Within seconds I had the email. Connie Jefferson was her name. She lived in San Leandro, not far from the FBI office in Hayward. The phone number wasn’t there. Woody had it programmed into his phone and never dialed it from memory, and unfortunately, the phone had been seized by the FBI. Still, I knew she was the Hayward R.A. secretary and could just call her at the listed number for the FBI there.

“Okay, I got it. What else?”

“Can you identify and interview any witnesses to the shooting?”

“I’ll try, but my guess is they won’t talk to me. I know there are orders out not to talk to anyone. When will you get the 302s?” FD-302’s are the reports agents write when they do interviews or other investigation.

“I don’t know. Sheila isn’t even returning my calls. I think some of the agents are still writing theirs up.”

“More likely they’ve been written up, but the supervisors are reviewing and revising them to conform to the official version of events. There should be other documents you can request. The firearms instructors make up a score sheet for all the agents who were out there. The agents all sign in on it so they have documentation that they qualified. It could serve as a roster. That’s a starting point. How about the names of the people in the scenario? Woody should be able to give you those names.”

“He gave me three names in addition to Jermaine and himself. Rodney Watkins, Chris Bobu, and Ricardo somebody. He wasn’t sure of the last name.”

I thought about this. Watkins and Bobu were both firearms instructors, as were Woody and Jermaine. I didn’t know who Ricardo was, either, but having four instructors in the same exercise had to mean it was training for the instructors themselves. If it had been a general agent training day, the participants would almost all have been non-instructors while the people guiding the exercise and observing would be the instructors. It was likely that Bobu, the Principal Firearms Instructor, or PFI, was prepping Woody and the others to be able to teach agents or police using this arrest scenario.

“Okay, that’s a starting point. We need to find out the names of everyone there as soon as possible. Memories fade. Most agents out there wouldn’t do a 302 or other paper; they’d just wait for the PFI or ASAC to interview them about what they saw or remember. That’s the paper you’ll eventually get and may or may not accurately reflect everything they remember or said. If you can’t get a list from Sheila, with contact information, please make a motion to get that as soon as you can.”

“I like that attitude. I see you’re getting into it. I will. I have a motion hearing tomorrow and that’s one thing I’ve already got on the list. I’m also going to get the judge to order the SAC to notify all personnel they’re free to talk to us. It’s obstruction of justice to deny the defense the right to interview witnesses. That’s a no-brainer, but apparently your SAC is, too. That should be granted and in effect by tomorrow.”

“I’ll testify to that. Look up the word ‘moron’ in Wikipedia and you’ll see his picture.”

“It’ll be a few days at best before I get any medical or forensic stuff. If it comes in before you leave us, I want your take on it.”

“That’s not my area of expertise, but I’ll tell you what I can.”

“Great. I gotta run. I want to get your name to the prison people right away so you can visit Woody promptly. You should be able to see him by Monday, maybe even over the weekend. Thanks again for coming on board.”

“I’ll probably regret it. I’ll be talking to you as soon as I have anything.”

After we hung up I immediately went online. I’ve learned the importance of the social sites for my investigations and I’ve created several personas, sock puppets, for this purpose. I have multiple accounts on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and many others. Today, though, I realized I could use my real identity. I was a Facebook friend with quite a few of my old FBI coworkers, including the support people. I didn’t know Connie Jefferson, but I was sure that we’d have mutual friends if she used any of these sites.

It didn’t take me long. Connie had a Facebook account and was friends with several FBI people I knew, including Woody. I sent her a friend request. I found her on LinkedIn, too. Same deal. The LinkedIn account had more information that was useful to me. Apparently she wanted to get a professional job in her college field, which was business. Her picture told me quite a bit, too. She was quite striking and I could see why Woody and Jermaine would be pursuing her. She was a light-skinned African-American, but obviously had something else in her heritage that gave her an exotic look. When I reviewed her experience and skills I saw that she was born in Thailand and had lived there for her first seven years. She spoke Thai. That meant she was almost certainly the daughter of a black American soldier and a Thai mother, the exact same mix as Tiger Woods. She was just as good-looking as Tiger and apparently as athletic, too. She listed several marathons and triathlons where she was a prizewinner.

I’m no hacker and made no attempt to access any of her accounts or see her timeline or posts. I wanted to see what she had listed for her relationship status but I’d have to wait for her to accept or decline my friend request before doing any more. I did go to the Facebook pages of all of our common friends to see if there were any posts there that involved her. I spent almost an hour and found only one, a picture posted by Woody of the two of them in a posed pre-race shot at the Napa Marathon the previous year wearing running gear and race numbers.

I walked out to Maeva’s desk and told her I’d agreed to do a week working for Woody. She was obviously pleased. I could tell she was silently crediting this decision to herself. Then I told her I was taking her up on her offer to work on it for free. Her smile disappeared for a few seconds before she nodded. She probably never thought I’d let her work unpaid, but the reality was I’d still lose money on the deal and now I had a new car and new suit to buy. I briefed her on what I knew from Bert and from the sites I’d visited then I gave her Connie’s Facebook account link and told her to see what she could dig up. I also gave her the names of the agents, including Woody’s identifiers, and gave her the same assignment for them.

When I retired I was not supposed to take any FBI documents with me, but I’d copied the office phone list. Every agent I know has done the same thing. This list has all the home addresses and phone number of the other agents in the division. It’s revised every three months or so. Mine was rather outdated now, but I knew where Ellen kept her personal copy. She’d be pissed if she knew I used hers, but I wasn’t planning on telling her. Besides, she wanted me to help Woody, and anyway, she was supposed to keep it secure at home. The reality was agents had to contact each other after hours all the time and couldn’t always go through the FBI switchboard so that list was essential.

I looked up the addresses of all the agents Bert had mentioned in my own list. I couldn’t find a Ricardo, but there were addresses and numbers for all the rest. If they hadn’t moved or changed numbers since I retired, I should be able to contact them. Whether they’d talk to me was another matter. I thought about calling some of them right away, or later this evening, but decided it would be better to wait until tomorrow when Bert expected to win his motion forcing the SAC to rescind his no-contact order. The addresses were all over the Bay Area, so if I had to travel to their homes, there would be some miles and time racked up, but I knew that interviews of this nature should be in person. Going the telephone interview route would be cheating Woody. I had to see the body language when I asked the questions.

I hadn’t learned much of use yet, but every little bit helps when you’re just starting out. None of the firearms guys were in my social media circles and I didn’t want to be so obvious as to send them all friend requests at the same time. They’d probably be in contact with each other. If they wouldn’t talk to me, I gave some thought to who might get a better reception. I created a new account on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+ for a woman firearms instructor in a fictitious small-town Canadian police agency. On a hunting and fishing website I found a picture of an attractive thirtyish female holding a rifle as she knelt next to a moose she’d killed. I copied this to use for a profile picture. Then I scoured the web forums for one that was specific to police firearms instructors. I found a couple that looked too hard to join; they claimed to vet members before letting them join. Then I found a manufacturer of firearms training gear like targets, indoor range equipment, and the like that ran a web forum anyone could join.

I joined with my new identity, adopting the user name Huntress. All it took was an email address. I had created a new one just for her. Within minutes I was on and could scour the postings there. There was a feature called “Ask the Community.” I skimmed through it and one post caught my eye. A member whose ID was “Bubo” had asked about recommendations for a supplier of barricades. There were two replies mentioning suppliers. Could that be Chris Bobu? A rocket scientist he wasn’t, I knew, and that would be the kind of name change he would think gave him anonymity. I checked his profile and there was a picture of a metallic owl. I did an image search on it and found that it was a picture of a character from Clash of the Titans back in the 1980s named Bubo. His profile identified him as a professional firearms instructor but gave no location or agency. I found the link that allowed one forum member to send a personal message to another and sent him one asking if he had found the best supplier and said I had a similar need for my department. I sent him the links to my newly created Facebook and LinkedIn accounts as well as my female’s personal email address.

As I finished up with this, Maeva came into my office with news. She’d found Jefferson’s name in the registration list for a 10K race happening nearby on Sunday, three days from today. She said she’d be willing to go and try to get some info from her in an undercover capacity if I’d spring for the registration fee. She warned me it would be expensive since the early registration date had already passed.

“I didn’t know you were a runner,” I remarked.

“I’m not. Not the kind that runs in races. I’m more of a Kinsey Millhone runner.”

I laughed. Any fan of crime fiction knows that Kinsey Millhone is Sue Grafton’s private eye heroine who is diligent about daily running, despite finding it arduous or distasteful as often as not. Maeva was about Kinsey’s size, too, five foot six, one eighteen. Maeva, one melanin gene short of an albino, was of Scandinavian heritage and labored daily trying unsuccessfully to keep her red, frizz-ball hair under control. I smiled inwardly as I pictured the contrast between her and Jefferson. “And how would that help?” I replied.

“I can get there early, try to befriend her before the race, you know, while warming up, stretching and stuff. Maybe I can get her talking about guys, find out whether she was dumping Woody. That’s the kind of thing she might tell another woman, especially one she thinks doesn’t know who she is and will never see again.”

“Hmm. It’s worth a try, I guess. How much is the entrance fee?”

“Thirty-five. Most of that goes to the Arthritis Foundation. It’s for a good cause.”

I sighed but gave her the okay. At least that was one I could legitimately expense, and if Woody never paid, I could deduct on my taxes. Maeva beamed. This would be her first solo undercover gig. The only other times she’d been out on an investigation in a UC capacity she’d been there with me just to make us blend in, like at the bowling alley. She’d never spoken to anyone we were investigating.

Normally, in a criminal case, I would start doing criminal checks on all the parties, but everyone was an FBI agent except Jefferson, and even FBI secretaries have to pass a rigorous security screening, so I knew no one would have any significant criminal record. This wasn’t a due diligence investigation. What I really needed to know was whether the shooting was an accident, and if not, why Woody shot Jermaine. Either way there were legal defenses and pitfalls. If it was an accident, there could still be a prosecution for manslaughter, not to mention Woody or someone else getting fired and being sued for big bucks. If it was intentional, it might be second degree, not first.

I put in a Google Alert for any terms I thought might apply to the shooting or the people involved, and I started searching logical hashtags on Twitter, too. At that point, I figured there wasn’t a lot to do. I worked on other things for the rest of the day and went home.

Five Minutes Late by Rich Amooi

Five Minutes Late by Rich Amooi


My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Boy, if you eliminated all the reviews that weren’t in exchange for a free copy, the star rating would drop by about three full stars. I was very disappointed in this book. The author happens to be local to me, and I always like giving good reviews to other writers in my area, but I can’t with this one. The romance is at junior high level, as is the maturity of the characters. The author keeps putting up artificial barriers between the two characters.

Much of the dialog was witty and fun, but then it would be spoiled by excessively crude language. When it wasn’t gross crude it was gross mushy. None of the characters remotely resembles a real person. The lead characters were impossibly perfect – beautiful, handsome, rich, brilliant, yet the woman, a 10, dates nothing but zeroes. The guy doesn’t date anyone until he meets her. The gay buddy in the library is an offensive stereotype. The vindictive cop ex-boyfriend of the woman is an offensive stereotype. About all you can say for the author is that at least he didn’t have any black characters or he’d probably show them shuckin’ and jivin’ or worse.





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Three men in a bar …

A Scotsman, an Englishman and an Irishmen are in a bar…

“As good as this bar is,” said the Scotsman, “I still prefer the pubs back home.  In Glasgow, there’s a wee place called McTavish’s. The landlord goes out of his way for the locals. When you buy four drinks, he’ll buy the fifth drink.”

“Well, Angus,” said the Englishman, “At my local in London , the Red Lion, the barman will buy you your third drink after you buy the first two.”

“Ahhh, dat’s nothin’,” said Patty Sheehan, the Irishman. “Back home in me favorite pub in Galway, the moment you set foot in the place, they’ll buy you a drink, then another, all the drinks you like, actually. Then, when you’ve had enough drinks, they’ll take you upstairs and see dat you get laid, all on the house!”

The Englishman and Scotsman were suspicious of the claims.

“Did this actually happen to you?”

“Not to meself, personally, no,” admitted the Irishman, “but it did happen to me sister quite a few times.”

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Meh. Science fiction without the science.

This was hyped as a post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel and award winner. I found it rambling, pointless, and barely adequate as entertainment. The author used a large number of characters, with no obvious connection to each other, and proceeded to flip from pre-, post- and mid-apocalypse as she told their unconnected stories. It was extremely hard to follow. Time jumping like this is very fashionable right now, in movies as well as novels, but it makes for an unpleasant experience for the reader/viewer. Please just tell the story in chronological order.

I got the distinct impression that the author wanted to write some deep, philosophical novel but got shut down by her agent or publisher who told her that what sells is post-apocalyptic sci-fi, so she rewrote her novel to fit into that mold.

First, let’s talk about the science. There is none. There’s a flu pandemic that kills almost everyone. Okay, that’s a decent start. The classic Earth Abides and many other books have used that. But this happens in the modern day. After that, there is no electricity or gasoline. Why not? Hook a portable generator to a bicycle or a waterwheel and you have reliable electrical power. How about solar panels, windmills? You don’t need the whole grid. People could refine gasoline long before electricity, too. Survivors are mostly using crossbows. There would be thousands of times more guns left around than crossbows and they’re more effective. There would be plenty of ammunition left over, too. It’s a lot easier to make a bullet than a crossbow or arrow. None of the post-apocalyptic world makes any sense technologically. Okay, so the author wasn’t going for plausibility, but her intellectual laziness to do any science or technology research spoils the whole sci-fi part of it. It’s mostly a novel about actors and show business. The story lines collide rather than merge at the end.

This would be acceptable if the story itself was enrapturing or the character development and writing style were riveting, or even if the author had some deep insight to impart about the nature of human existence and civilization. These were all lacking or clunky and unimpressive in my opinion. This book is now on the best seller lists and I am befuddled as to why.

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GUT SHOT – Episode 12

This weekend marks the thirteenth anniversary of my first geocache find. I didn’t realize this until it was too late to schedule an event for this weekend, but I have one scheduled for the following weekend. Geocachers, check it out. http://coord.info/GC6195V.

Gut Shot – episode 12

© copyright Russell Atkinson 2015

Friends show their love in times of trouble, not in happiness.

Euripides

Chapter 6

The next morning Ellen dropped me off at work. My first order of business was to rent a car. Ellen and I could go shopping for a car later. I needed something now for my everyday work and so did she. With traffic once again reaching dot com boom proportions in Silicon Valley, I decided I had to get something with a carpool sticker, either an electric car or hybrid. I settled on a Prius plug-in hybrid. This would allow me to use the HOV lane while driving solo. I made the arrangements by phone and the rental company delivered the car to my office.

I called Bert to give him the bad news, but he wasn’t in and I didn’t want to tell him in a message, so I just told his secretary to have him call me. I went about my regular business for the next couple of hours, reviewing some background records Maeva had dug up on a candidate for an executive position at one of our corporate clients. Woody’s case kept nagging at me, though, and I realized I hadn’t contacted the FBIAA rep.

I found the number for Rick Porillo, an agent in the San Jose Resident Agency. He’d been the FBIAA rep there for at least the last eight years, so I’d worked in the same office with him, but he hadn’t been on my squad. He was nearing retirement, I knew, and I hoped he’d be willing to talk to me. In my experience, FBIAA reps, including Rick, were screw-ups who were in constant danger of being fired. They became vocal reps, castigating the management’s policies and disciplinary actions primarily so that when they did finally get fired or disciplined themselves, they could claim it was for being a whistleblower or for criticizing the management. In addition to being lazy, Porillo had a drinking problem, but at least he was someone who didn’t mind breaking the rules.

I got him on the first ring. We’d never been good friends, since I’d been a squad supervisor, meaning management, but we’d never had any run-ins, either. He was cordial enough when he realized it was me. I decided to be a bit circumspect since I didn’t know how the feelings ran in the R.A.

“Rick, I was wondering if you’re the guy I should talk to about contributing to any funds for Jermaine’s family or for Woody’s defense.”

“You’re a good man, Cliff. I’m running the fund for Woody’s defense. Jermaine was single with no kids and the Bureau’s picking up the tab for the memorial service since he was killed in the line of duty, so there really isn’t much need for a fund for him. His parents don’t need it; they told me to have donations sent to the fossils scholarship fund.”

I knew the “fossils” referred to the Society of Former FBI Agents, better known as “the Society.” Unlike the FBIAA, it was officially recognized and sanctioned by the FBI. It was funded by retirees and had tax-exempt status. I was a member. I thought it amusing that Rick called it the fossils since he would be joining it in another year or less.

“I’d like to contribute to Woody’s fund. I’m sure it must have been an accident. I heard he got Bert Breen as a lawyer. He can’t be cheap.”

“Yeah, I guess. How much did you want to put in?”

“Oh, a hundred bucks or so.”

“Don’t be a cheapskate, Cliff. You hit it big with that lawsuit, didn’t you?”

That’s just like Rick, crass as a Seth Rogen movie. My wife is killed by a drunk driver and he thinks of it as “hitting it big.” I was offended but knew any retort I made would have no effect on Rick. He was what he was. “So what’s the balance up to now?” I asked.

“Not much yet. Some people are worried that giving to Woody would be a betrayal to Jermaine.”

I didn’t doubt his statement, but I was irritated that he didn’t give me a straight answer. “So is it at the Bank of America, like usual? How do I make out the check?” Funds for disasters and such occasions were always at the B of A. There was some sort of ongoing relationship there where the bank made the accounts free for our charitable causes.

“Uh, you can just make it out to me. I’ll see that it gets to the right place.”

Whoa. This wasn’t right. I didn’t suspect Rick of trying to divert the funds for his own use, but there was always a bank account set up. “To you? What happened to the B of A?”

“What are you suggesting? I told you it’ll get to the right place,” he said, taking offense, or trying to sound like it.

“Come on, Rick. I’m not suggesting anything. But I know that’s not the way it’s done. There’s always a bank account.”

He backed down quickly. “Yeah, I know, but here’s the thing. I haven’t actually gotten any money yet. A few of the people in the R.A. have said they’d like to contribute, but nobody’s coming forward until someone else does. I can’t start the account until I have a check in hand to deposit. I think they’re mostly waiting until they can tell if he’s guilty or not. Nobody wants to fund the defense for an agent murderer.”

“What about your own contribution? You think it was an accident, don’t you?” I asked.

An uncomfortable silence followed. “See, that’s it. I’m not so sure it was. One of the guys who was there said Woody stuck his gun right in Jermaine’s gut and yelled, ‘Die, cocksucker!’ as he pulled the trigger. I mean … I don’t know what to think.” I wasn’t surprised the news report had dropped the word “cock.”

“You said ‘his gun.’ I thought they were using red handles.” Red handles were guns that had been retired from service and altered so that they couldn’t fire. The barrel was plugged with molten metal, the firing pins broken off, and the handles painted red so that everyone knew they were safe. The FBI Academy at Quantico used them for exercises such as the one Woody and Jermaine were in, but they were rarely used in the field. There weren’t anywhere near enough of them for all the field offices. From what Bert had told me, they were all using their own service pistols, but those had been unloaded and verified by another agent. Besides, he’d been disarmed during the exercise, according to Bert. I didn’t want Rick to know that I was aware of any of this, which is why I had made my remark about red handles.

“You crazy? Since when has Quantico ever sent us red handles? They were using their own guns. Woody shot him with his backup gun.”

“Seriously? His own backup gun? You got that from someone out there?”

“Cliff, I shouldn’t be talking about it, really. Just send me the check made out to cash so I can open an account. Once people hear you contributed I’m sure some more will be coming in.”

“I will. And I hope you match it. You know guys are always screaming and calling each other names in those exercises. I remember I heard you yell at another agent ‘Hands up, asshole!’ at one of those exercises once. It’s just part of the role playing.”

“Yeah, but you know me. I call everyone asshole all the time. Woody’s a soft-spoken guy. He doesn’t use that kind of language. He sounded like he meant it according to the source.”

I thought about this for a moment. He was right, actually. I didn’t remember Woody cursing much, if at all. I thanked Rick for the information about the fund and told him again that I’d be sending him a check. Then we hung up. I pulled out my checkbook and wrote out the check. This case was costing me more every day.

I’d gotten some new info and it only made things look worse. If Rick was right about the gun being Woody’s, I didn’t see how he could be innocent. How could he have shot his own gun by accident after he’d been disarmed? If it was his backup gun, that could explain how it got into the exercise. Such guns are usually small and carried in an ankle holster or other non-obvious place. Woody could have had it on him the whole time while showing his unloaded service pistol to his neighbor. I suppose he might have forgotten about the gun in his ankle holster during the unloading and then later instinctively pulled it out in the heat of the exercise without thinking about it. Something like that had happened to a BART cop, in the now-famous Oscar Grant case that was made into the movie Fruitvale Station, where he pulled his service gun instead of the taser he meant to pull. That seemed awfully unlikely to me in this scenario. Bert had said Woody had run into another room and grabbed a gun from a bag.

I asked Maeva to step into my office. I briefed her on the bare outlines of the case and explained to her why I wasn’t going to take it. I wanted to let her know that I was still interested in the development of the case and to give calls from Bert Breen high priority, even though I wasn’t going to work it. She seemed very interested and listened to the story all the way through without interrupting. When I finished she began asking questions. I realized this was exciting stuff for her. I’d hired her as my legal secretary after she dropped out of Stanford Law School. Last year she passed the California licensed private investigator exam, but she’d never investigated a criminal case. I’d taken a couple of insurance fraud cases in the early days, which were criminal, I suppose, but we’d just been hired to prove the claim was phony. There’d been no police involved and Maeva wasn’t even licensed then. She’d gone with me to a bowling alley as my “daughter” to bowl right next to a guy who was supposedly totally disabled in an industrial accident. He’d bowled a 217 and rode off doing wheelies on his Harley afterward. We got some good film that time. She’d gotten a thrill from that and I could tell she wanted me to take this case.

“What kind of gun was it, that backup thing?” she asked. “I don’t know anything about guns. Is it like a derringer?”

“No, agents don’t carry derringers. Those are little one-shot popguns that wouldn’t stop anyone. Most of the agents I knew who carried backups were the SWAT guys and fugitive case agents, people like Woody. Most of them had five-shot revolvers, either in an ankle holster or sometimes in a pocket.”

“What was the bag doing there? Was it Woody’s bag?”

“That’s a good question. I’m sure Bert will find out soon enough.”

“Isn’t Woody that agent who helped you that time at the bank robbery, the time you almost got shot?”

“Right. Good memory. That was two years ago.”

“Don’t you think you owe it to him to help him now?”

“That’s hardly the same thing, Maeva. All he did was walk me out of the bank so I didn’t have to be questioned by the police. We’re talking about hundreds or maybe thousands of hours of pro bono work for someone who killed another agent. I knew the victim, too, you know. Who’s going to pay your salary if I take this case?” I smiled sadly, thinking this would be one argument she’d understand. I was mistaken.

“I’ll work it for free,” she replied. “I’ll do the work in my off hours, or if I have to do it during the day, I’ll put in extra hours to get your work done.”

Oops. There went one good excuse I had for bowing out. Of course, I didn’t foresee much investigative work Maeva could do on the case anyway, so her offer wasn’t worth much. The problem was my hours. If I wasn’t getting paid, the income wouldn’t be there to pay her and my overhead.

Before I had time to think of a good rebuff for this offer, the phone rang. It was Bert, I could see from the display, so I asked her to step out again, which she did.

“Bert, thanks for returning my call.”

“You kidding? Thanks for calling me back. I was wondering whether I’d hear from you again after yesterday. I got to see Woody at the jail, finally, and heard the whole story at length. I have a lot more details now.”

“That’s great, Bert, but I have to tell you I won’t be taking the case. Things are looking worse today than yesterday. I talked to the FBIAA rep I told you about and learned some more. The rep’s name, by the way, is Rick Porillo. I’ll email you the contact info. He’s starting a defense fund for Woody, but apparently there’s some reluctance on the part of agents to donate until they’re convinced it was an accident. The fund may not be able to handle your fees, much less mine.”

“Let me worry about my fees. What changed? You said it got worse.”

“The gun that was used is reportedly Woody’s backup gun.”

I heard a sharp exhalation of breath on the other end. “Shit. That can’t be. There must be a mistake. It was a gun in a bag in one of the side rooms.”

“Bert, I hate to say it, but I think Woody’s lying. It looks like he wore his backup gun into the arrest scenario exercise concealed somewhere and when he got the chance he shot Logan. He called him a cocksucker, too.”

“He told me about that. He said they were all yelling and screaming at each other, agents and the ‘bad guys’, the other agent playing a bad guy like Woody. The arresting agents were calling them a-holes and the bad guys were swearing even worse. He said that’s all part of the scenario, to make it seem more real. He said real bad guys in barricaded positions do that pretty often, so he was just trying to recreate the tension. It wasn’t personal about Logan. He said that last year there had been an arrest scenario where Jermaine had been designated a bad guy and he shot the agent and called out exactly the same thing to that guy. Woody remembered that, so he thought it would be funny to use Jermaine’s own words against him.”

“Hmm. If you can prove that about Jermaine using those same words, that’ll help. But it doesn’t convince me to take the case.” I went on to tell him about the incident with the muggers, the dog, and the suit.

“You dumb shit. I would’ve had an associate or paralegal drive you to the BART station.”

“I know. I wanted to take a walk around Lake Merritt. It’s my own fault. I’ve rented a car, so it won’t happen again.”

“Take the case and you can expense it. You were here at my request and needed to see the initial appearance for yourself.”

“Not gonna happen.”

Ice Shear by M.P. Cooley

Ice Shear by M.P. Cooley


My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Pardon the length of this review, but this book deserves a serious critique. Don’t worry, it’s almost all good. I had a lot of fun with Ice Shear in part because of its intrinsically good writing and in part because of happy happenstance.

The author paints word pictures brilliantly. Every scene and setting comes to life – a room, a building, a neighborhood. You feel like you’re right there. The tiny quirks and foibles a character displays are given just the right amount of detail so they seem real, too. Put another way, the author just plain knows how to write!

The story takes place in upstate New York in winter in a small town, once a thriving mill town but now a deteriorating shell subsisting on a meager summer tourist trade. For a Silicon Valley native like me, it seemed rather exotic. I have been there once long ago and it struck me as Deliverance with snow. The author is from there, it seems, and did a great job of conveying the look and feel of the place. It’s also very well edited, with almost no errors of any kind.

Now for the happenstance part. I checked this book out from the Campbell library, a small town bordering San Jose. I saw the author used initials rather than a first name, which to me with mysteries signifies a female author trying to hide her sex. In that genre macho male names sell better. I thought, “Oh no, another chick lit mystery.” So I turned to the back cover to check, and imagine my surprise when I read that not only was I right, but that she lives in … Campbell, She could be in the library standing right next to me. I actually looked around to see if I could spot her. But wait! There’s more! I also noticed that the main character, a woman, is a former FBI agent. So am I. (Former FBI agent, that is, not a woman). So of course I had to turn to the acknowledgments to see who her law enforcement advisers were. One I know to be a former officer with a large agency I worked closely with for years. The other I didn’t recognize. If either had been an FBI agent, I would have known him. That explains why the local police work stuff was very well done and FBI stuff, not so much. (FYI, the proper acronym is ASAC, not ASAIC). Oh, and one last thing: I write mystery novels too. I hope Ms. Cooley continues this series, but she needs an FBI consultant if she’s going to. Maybe she’ll ask me if she can find me.

To be clear, I don’t know the author, those officers, or anyone else associated with this book, directly or indirectly, but this inside connection made the book more fun. There are some “Easter eggs” hidden in there. For example, one major character is an FBI agent named Hale Bascom. The San Jose FBI Office (actually located a few blocks over the city line into Campbell) is located on Bascom Ave.! I used to work there when it was at the earlier location farther north on Bascom. I also liked the “breast fed” line. I hadn’t heard that one before.

Okay, so I had fun with it and no doubt that fifth star comes from my personal connection, but it is a good read. It has its flaws. The plot and characters are quite formulaic, but it is a tried and true formula that seems to work. Don’t look for originality here. The beat cop heroine is a single mom who had to move back to her home town so her lovable but curmudgeonly father can care for her adorable and precociously bright daughter while she makes a living. The slick and smarmy FBI agent “suit” comes barreling into town trying to horn in on the locals’ murder case. You have your outlaw biker gang, the overbearing congresswoman (victim’s mother), the very rich (and therefore total jerk) father, your stolid local cop partner, the District Attorney trying to take all the credit. The plot isn’t much better.

In my view, a good murder mystery is written in such a way that one of two things happens as one gets near the end. Either I figure out from the clues who did it and why and get to feel smug and victorious or I don’t, but the big reveal at the end has me smacking my forehead saying to myself “Why didn’t I see that one coming.” This did neither. The ending had the definite feel of almost a random selection. It’s as though the author and editor got together as the book was almost done and said, “Who shall we make the murderer?” There were no clues that suggested the actual murderer any more than any of the other characters, or perhaps more accurately, there were equal clues pointing to all the possible characters. Of course Agatha Christie did this all the time, too, and look where that got her.

This is no chick lit mystery either. There was no description of the heroine’s cute outfits and name brand shoes or how cut the handsome agent was with his shirt off. There was even a good action scene at the end, although it defied credibility in more ways than I would have liked. The bottom line was that I read through it eagerly and enjoyed the whole thing. Give it a try.





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