Chapter 3

Sergeant Miller, a twenty-two year police officer and the supervisor of the Fresno Police Department's A rotation of the homicide detail knew something was funny before he even responded to the scene. The on-call homicide team, both basic patrolmen rank policemen, were usually able to handle the routine homicides which took place at night, which was when most homicides in the City of Fresno occurred. However, due to the stature of the victim (even though it had yet to be established that he even was a victim), Miller's pager went off shortly after Brentwood and Wilson had received the details of their latest case. The telephone number printed in the screen of his pager he recognized immediately as that belonging to Detective Wilson, the senior investigator of A team. Cursing to himself, he rolled out of bed where his girlfriend, a young dispatcher, was snoring away, and picked up the phone. He dialed the number and was quickly filled in by Wilson.

"Chad Buckingham?" he said, predictably. "No shit?"

"No shit," Wilson responded. "Apparently there's no reason to suspect a homicide at this time. Patrol wants us to come out and take a look at the scene. I talked to Sergeant Oakly, the nightwatch supervisor. She says it looks like he was smokin' some rock and drinking some booze in a motel room tonight. Fire found him dead on the floor and transported him over to Saint Mary's. I called them a few minutes ago and they told me they pronounced him dead not too long ago. They say there's no signs of trauma except for some cuts on his arm. Oakly says there's broken glass all over the place in the room, like he smashed a couple glasses or something. She also says that somethin' don't look right in the room."

"What does she mean?" he asked.

"She couldn't say," Wilson replied. "She said it was nothin' she could put her finger on but she wants us to check it out. She's got the room sealed and CSI is on the way. I thought I'd let you know since he's, you know, famous and all and the media's bound to pick this up before too long."

"No problem," Miller assured him. "Get over there and check the place out, I'll be out shortly."

"Right," Wilson said, hanging up.

Miller set the phone down and sat there for a moment, thinking. Like many cops, he was an avid golfer, playing whenever he could get the chance. And, also like most cops, he preferred to spend his off-duty time with other cops. Two weeks ago, during a brief break in the miserable San Joaquin Valley winter weather, he had played eighteen holes at a local course with three of his departmental acquaintances, one of whom being a former trainee of his from his patrol officer days that now worked in the Sex Crimes bureau: Rick Clarkson. During the course of the round, Clarkson had filled them in on the details regarding a crime that they had previously heard rumors about; namely the rape of a Marshall County patrol sergeant's daughter by the infamous Chad Buckingham. Fuming at the shitty state of the American criminal justice system, Clarkson had explained how the handsome quarterback was going to get away scot-free, again. They had all commiserated for a few moments with the plight of their unknown brother law enforcement officer, sodomized by the very system that he was a part of.

And then Jentz, a burglary detective, had asked Clarkson, "How did he take it when you told him? I mean jeez, can you imagine havin' your daughter raped and then being told that nothin' is gonna be done about it?"

"It was weird," Clarkson had said, shaking his head. "It seemed like he kinda expected it. He didn't blow up or rant or anything. But he had this weird look in his eyes. You know, it wouldn't surprise me if that fuckin' degenerate had himself an accident before too long."

"That'd be great," Jentz said, smiling and taking a swig out of his seventh beer. "Sometimes you just gotta create your own justice."

And the other three had muttered enthusiastic encouragement with this statement, not really believing that anything of the sort would really happen.

Except now, something of the sort had happened. And it was his job to investigate it.

When he arrived at the motel twenty minutes later, Miller found everything being done by the book. A thirty-yard perimeter in front of the motel room was roped off with yellow crime-scene tape that was attached to two white patrol cars. The white crime scene investigation van was parked just outside the tape, its two-officer crew presumably inside gathering any evidence that might be found. Sergeant Oakly and two patrol officers were standing around out front, keeping the throngs of curious onlookers, which now numbered approximately thirty or so, outside the yellow tape. Brentwood, he saw, was talking to several of the onlookers, undoubtedly pumping them for any information that they might or might not possess. Wilson was nowhere in sight. Miller figured he was probably inside the motel room with the CSI team, trying to get a handle on exactly what had happened in there. He was grateful to see that no media had arrived yet, although he knew it wouldn't be long.

He ducked under the tape and approached Sergeant Oakly, who, if protocol were being followed, would be keeping a log of who had entered and left the scene.

"How you doing, Gary?" she greeted him as he approached. "Sorry to have them drag you out at night for what's probably nothing but what it seems, but..."

"It's okay, it's okay," he assured her. "All part of the job. You did good callin' us in on this one, even if it is on the up and up. Is Wilson inside?"

"Yeah," she told him. "He got here about ten minutes ago, right behind the CSI guys."

"Cool," he said. "I'm gonna go have a chat with him for a few minutes and see what's up."

"I'll log you in," she answered, pulling a notebook from her pocket.

He stepped up to the red door with the black plastic 47 printed on it and pushed it open with his elbow, stepping carefully inside. Inside he found Wilson, dressed in the standard garb of detectives responding to after hours calls: blue jeans, tennis shoes, and a sweater that was tucked in to reveal the gun and badge clipped to the belt; standing near the doorway watching the two evidence technicians, who were kneeling on the carpet examining something. Next to Wilson was a stack of video equipment, which had probably already been used, and a frightfully old 35mm camera with a flash attachment.

"Hi, Gary," Wilson greeted him tonelessly, as was his nature. "Glad you came out."

"Oh?" he asked, raising his eyebrows. "Is something wrong here?"

Wilson chuckled cynically. "This crime scene, and that's what I'm callin' it now, stinks to high heaven."

"How so?"

"I'll tell you," he replied, looking around as he talked. "At first glance everything looks on the up and up here." He pointed to the carpet where the two technicians, oblivious to the discussion going on around them, were using scissors to clip a piece of carpet fiber. "Over there is where the stiff was found. I talked to the fire captain when I got here. He says Buckingham was lying on his side in the middle of a bunch of broken glass. On the nightstand there next to him is more broken glass, some of it with blood drops on it. You can see the rock pipe and the half empty bottle of rum and the crack vials, two of them empty, one unopened. I checked with dispatch and they say they got a 911 call from this room at 2141 hours by a male stating he was not feeling well. They heard the phone drop to the ground and about a minute later the sound of breaking glass. Nothing else until the fire crew made entry. Just the sort of scene you'd expect to find, isn't it? Tells a nice little story about a hero, college student quarterback that got himself a motel room, probably with some floozy as a companion, and overdosed himself on rock and booze therefore causing his premature demise. Right?"

"Yeah," Miller agreed. "On the surface that's what it appears."

"Uh huh," Wilson went on. "But when you take a closer look and apply a little thought, there's a couple things that just don't add up."

"Such as?"

"Well, first of all," Miller explained. "What was he doin' sittin' over there by the TV? You can't watch it from there and the thing wasn't even on. It looks like the chair, when it fell, was facing the wall. Would someone sit in a room, facing the wall all night, drinking booze and smoking out? And the telephone," he pointed across the room to where the handset was still laying on the carpet although the other end had been unplugged at some point. "If the guy gasped out his last words on the phone and then collapsed, why didn't we find him over by the phone? We're supposed to believe that he walked back across the room, sat down in his chair, broke the two glasses, and then fell over sideways?"

Miller nodded. "What else?"

"Only a couple other things inside the room. It took me a few minutes to figure it out but it looked wrong from the second I walked in. It goes back to the chair there. Take a good look around the room and you'll notice that it's amazingly clean. The bed, except for a little ruffling of the covers, is still made up. The other chair is sitting nicely in its accustomed spot. There's no mess in the sink, there's no garbage, except for what the paramedics left, anywhere on the floor or in the garbage bags. The shitter has still got the little sanitary wrap on the seat. Would you expect to find a room that a little sex and cocaine party had been thrown in to look so neat?"

"No," Miller said.

"And then there's a few other things that don't have to do with the room. Parked out front is a nice, one-year-old, Mercedes convertible. I ran the tag and it belongs to our victim. The doors are all unlocked, the pull out stereo is still in place. And then there's the matter of the keys. They are nowhere to be found. They're not in the room anywhere and the patrol guy I sent over to the hospital to babysit the body says they're not in his clothes. I took a quick look through the car and they're not in there either. The same goes for the motel key. So where have these keys mysteriously gone?"

"Good question," Miller agreed. "Have you checked with the manager yet?"

"I have," Wilson confirmed. "Actually I got the night clerk who was able to tell me that the room was rented for one night to a "Charles Beaking". Mr. Beaking paid cash for the room and listed his address as..." He paused for a moment, pulling a notebook from his pocket and reading from it. "2700 Smith Lane in Snodgrass, California. I ran a check on that address. There is no Snodgrass, California, the zip code he supplied does not exist and the phone number he supplied uses a prefix that is only used on the east coast and an area code that only exists in Seattle, Washington. He listed a California license plate on the register that has one too many numbers in it. At that point I had him contact the manager. He's the one that rented the room. A nice enough guy who just might be able to think his way out of a paper bag if he's given enough time. After some prompting, he was able to remember the gentleman he signed into the room. Says he was about five-eight, Caucasian, one fifty or so, wearing dirty blue jeans and a pullover brown sweater. Brown and brown, missing a few teeth, and unshaven. Says the guy stunk like he hadn't had a shower in a while. In short, a typical customer of this place and completely unlike our victim."

"Okay," Miller sighed. "It looks like we probably got ourselves a homicide. Let's comb this room carefully and tag everything that might even remotely be of value. This is gonna be a high profile case so let's not screw anything up."

"You got it, Sarge," Wilson said. "You think that maybe this is a vigilante thing?" He of course knew of Buckingham's reputation.

"Yep," Miller agreed. "And if I'm right, the person who did it would've been extremely careful."

"The cop?" Wilson almost whispered. "The one who's daughter he..."

Miller nodded, his heart torn in two directions. One the one hand, Whitecoff was a fellow cop and a fellow father. Being the father of a teenaged daughter himself, he understood completely the impulse that the man must have felt. A part of him cheered the removal of a person such as Buckingham from society. On the other hand, he was a homicide detective and this was a homicide, and a future high-profile one at that. He would have to pull out all of the stops in his investigation and make sure that the officers under his command did the same. There would be no look-the-other-way here. Too many people would be watching.

The landscape between the southern suburbs of Fresno and the northern suburbs of Maldonado consisted of about twenty miles of farmland; vineyards on the north, tomato fields on the south, both stretching from horizon to horizon. Returning from their mission of justice that night, Jason and Janet took the offramp for Road 114, a two lane county road that ran east-west near the county lines. Jason headed west on the badly maintained rural road, coming eventually to the San Joaquin River levee road. He turned south here, driving on the twisting, elevated surface with the rain-swollen river on one side and the endless expanses of farmland on the other. A ten-minute drive brought them to what they were looking for.

Jason pulled the car into a large turnout on the river side of the road. At the far end of the gravel surface stood a small stand of willow trees. He parked the car behind them, effectively concealing it from view by anyone passing on the road. Once at a stop and satisfied with the vehicle's positioning, he shut down the engine and popped the trunk. Inside were the large canvas bag that contained the instruments of their mission and the paper bag that contained much of the garbage. Jason, donning another pair of gloves for the operation, stuffed the paper bag inside the canvas one, leaving the latter unzipped. For the next ten minutes, he and Janet walked around near the levee, gathering up large rocks, which they carried over and placed in the bag. When it weighed close to a hundred pounds, he zipped it up and closed the trunk. Two minutes later they were back on the levee road heading south.

Another ten-minute's drive brought them to a bridge that crossed the river. Turning right onto the iron span, Jason stopped the car in the precise center. He took a quick look around, seeing no other vehicles in sight and no one fishing on either side of the river. Satisfied that they were unobserved, he popped the trunk again. Moving quickly, he stepped out of the car, lifted, with some effort, the heavy canvas bag from the trunk and walked to the nearest edge of the bridge. He muscled it over the side and watched as it landed with a loud splash in the murky, fast moving water and sank immediately from sight.

He closed the trunk, stepped back into the driver's seat, and continued his trip across the bridge, heading for Interstate 5 which was twelve miles to the west and which would bring them back to Maldonado by a back road route.

"Are you sure no one will ever find that stuff?" Janet asked as they cruised along the deserted road at seventy-five miles an hour.

"It's unlikely at best," Jason assured her. He understood the source of her fear, perhaps better than she did. Inside that bag was enough evidence to send them both to death row. "Even during a severe drought, there's still water covering that part of the channel. And if a fisherman ever latches onto it, it's too heavy to pull in, even with the strongest fishing line. The only way it could be recovered is with divers, and even then they'd have to know exactly where it was and it would be a dangerous operation."

She nodded, lost in thought. Finally, she said, "I can't believe we actually did that. We killed someone."

"Me either," he told her solemnly. "But what's done is done. All we can hope for now is that we were careful enough not to get caught."

They entered the Maldonado City Limits thirty minutes later, crossing over the P Street bridge from the west. Just to the south of the downtown area, Jason pulled the car into a self serve car-wash where they would thoroughly wash and vacuum the Volvo, therefore eliminating any lingering forensic evidence. As he reached into his front pocket for one-dollar bills to feed into the change machine, he felt something unfamiliar in there. He pulled it out.

"Oh my God," he exclaimed, scared at the near oversight.

"What?" Janet, alarmed at his tone, asked.

"Look," he said, holding up the keyring that had belonged to Buckingham for her perusal.

It took her a moment to register what he was showing her. When she realized what they were she instantly guessed his state of mind. "It's okay," she assured him. "You found them. Now we can get rid of them."

He shook his head in disgust at himself. "I forgot about them," he said. "I can't believe I was so stupid!"

"Jase, it's okay."

"No it's not!" he countered. "Don't you realize that this set of keys by itself was enough to convict us? Just a simple oversight that could've sent us to prison. What else have I forgotten?"

She had no answer for him.

He tossed the keys into the nearest garbage can, making sure that they sank to the bottom. They washed and detailed the car in silence for the next twenty minutes, paying particular attention to the tires at Jason's direction.

Once done they headed for home.

Sergeant Miller's conviction that Chad Buckingham had been murdered was strengthened when he read the results of the crime scene investigation the next morning. It was not what had been found that interested him but what had not been found.

"Look at this shit," he said in wonder to detective Wilson. "Everything about this crime scene is wrong."

"How so?" asked Wilson, who was leafing through witness statements.

"The crack pipe," Miller read, "contains Buckingham's fingerprints only. Not even a smidgen of someone else's. How is that possible? Even assuming that there was no floozy smoking out with him, some stocker at whatever store that jar was bought at had to handle it. Someone cleaned that glass before Buckingham smoked out of it. The rock vials are the same way; Buckingham's prints only, none from the freakin' dealer that sold it to him. And the rum bottle, and the Pepsi bottle, and all of the broken glass fragments. Same story, Buckingham's prints only. Someone cleaned every single thing before he got to that room."

"Only a cop would've thought of something like that," Wilson, who was uncomfortable investigating another cop never the less felt compelled to point out.

"No shit," Miller said. "And for a switch in the pattern, the telephone handset, where he allegedly made the 911 call, does not have his prints on it."

"Is it clean too?"

"Nope." He shook his head. "We got traces of five other prints from it, undoubtedly from previous occupants of the room. We're gonna have to check previous guests if we can ID them."

"What about Whitecoff?"

"I'm gonna see if I can discreetly get a copy of his prints from DOJ to compare, but you can bet your ass that none of the one's on the phone are his."

"Probably not," Wilson agreed.

"And as for the rest of the report..." He shook his head in disgust. "Nothing. Not a single goddamn thing was found. No hair samples, no skin samples. Blood was found on the carpet where Buckingham went down and we've sent it off to the lab for DNA typing, but it's undoubtedly his."

"We're sure not gonna get an indictment from anything in the crime scene," Wilson said. "And nothing from the motel occupants is gonna help either. Nobody was occupying any of the rooms in that wing except for Buckingham. Nobody saw anything or heard anything unusual."

"Well, hopefully something will turn up in the autopsy."

"When are they posting him?" Wilson asked.

"I got them to do it today. In fact they should be starting in about a half an hour or so."

Wilson gave a cynical smile. "Bet they didn't like that too much. Coming in on a Saturday."

"Screw 'em," Miller replied. "It's a high profile case. They can get their asses down and work like everyone else."

The autopsy took nearly three hours, about ninety minutes more than a normal one would have taken. Jean Carmichael, the senior pathologist of the Fresno County coroner's office, laid Buckingham's naked, once handsome form out on the steel table and violated it in ways that would have horrified his surviving family members. She cut his chest wide open and removed the internal organs, inspecting and weighing them. She sawed his skull open, removing the brain, weighing and inspecting it. She combed over every inch of his tanned form looking for cuts, needle marks, bruises, anything that would shed light on what had killed the young quarterback. She took samples of his blood, his tissues, his urine, his hair, and his sperm. Miller, a veteran watcher of autopsies, stood by in the corner of the room, watching impassively as Carmichael and her assistants did their work.

"Nothing," she finally said, stepping away from the body and pulling off her bloody gloves. Her assistants began the work of putting the mess back into a presentable form for release to the family's mortuary.

"Nothing?" Miller asked, raising his eyebrows.

"He was a healthy, twenty-one year old athlete. No signs of heart disease or congenital defects, definitely no infarction. No stroke, no pulmonary embolism, no signs of trauma except for the glass cuts on his arm. His lungs are in perfect shape, no sign of cigarette smoking or habitual rock cocaine use. His liver shows very early signs of alcohol abuse but they're very early, certainly not enough to have contributed to his death. If he used steroids there is no physical damage of any kind from them. He has no needle marks on him except for what the paramedics put there. He has burn marks on his chest but the hospital and EMS reports say that he was defibrillated a total of nine times. In short; nothing."

"Then what killed him?" Miller, exasperated, asked.

She shrugged, stepping over to the sink to wash her hands. "I don't know."

"You don't know?" He was quite unaccustomed to hearing a medical examiner say that.

She shook her head sadly. "It's obvious that his heart stopped beating, therefore causing brain hypoxia which is what killed him. As to why his heart stopped beating, I haven't the foggiest. Nothing that shows up physically is remarkable."

"Could it be a cocaine overdose? Or alcohol poisoning?"

"Well," she said doubtfully, "it's almost certainly not a cocaine overdose. People that die from that die in one of two ways and the physical exam pretty much rules both of them out. They either have a congenital heart defect, which I see no signs of, or they smoke so much of it that they cause a massive cerebral hemorrhage, which I also show no signs of. As for alcohol poisoning, that's probably the best possibility. But from what you tell me, he was alleged to have called 911 just before he collapsed and the paramedics found him in V-fib. Alcohol OD doesn't go along with that particular scenario."

"Oh?" Miller said, his interest perking up. "How so?"

"It's simple," she said. "If he was drunk enough to die from it, he wouldn't have been able to call 911 for help. He would've been passed out on the floor and his respiratory drive would've stopped."

"Great," Miller said. "So what do we do now? Do you think the tox screens will show anything?"

Another shrug. "We'll have to wait until next week when they come back, but like I said, it doesn't look like alcohol poisoning or a drug overdose to me. In short, I haven't the foggiest idea why this young, healthy, athletic man died. For whatever reason, his heart just stopped beating. I can't even rule this as a homicide. It'll have to go down as "unknown" for now."

Miller nodded, lost in thought for a moment. "What about pharmaceuticals?" he asked.

"What do you mean?" she wanted to know.

"The person I suspect of doing this has an ex-wife that's an emergency room nurse. Would she be able to get hold of anything that could stop this guy's heart in this manner?"

Carmichael raised her eyebrows thoughtfully. "Hmm," she said. "A nurse huh? I suppose an emergency room nurse could get hold of a variety of things that would stop someone's heart. A simple injection of potassium chloride would stop someone's heart right in its tracks. But again, there's no sign of needle marks on him."

"How about ingestion?" Miller asked.

She shook her head. "Drinking it wouldn't work. Besides, his stomach was full of what appeared to be rum and coke. That would've had to have been absorbed first anyway."

Miller looked up at the ceiling for a moment in frustration. "Damn," he whispered, his tone quite close to admiration. "How did he do it?"

"I just had a thought," Carmichael said quietly.

"What's that?" he asked, looking sharply at her.

"It's just a thought," she qualified. "Nothing that can be proven or disproved."

"What?"

"Well," she said carefully, "the cuts on his arm. They were made either at or after the moment that the heart began fibrillating. There's slight blood flow from the wounds indicating minimal perfusion when they were made; the kind of weak perfusion that goes along with V-fib. One of the cuts includes a laceration to the medial antecubital vein."

"Yes?" he prompted, not quite picking up the thread of her thought yet.

"Well," she went on, "suppose that someone injected our friend here with a lethal dose of something like potassium chloride. If they knew that such an action would leave forensic evidence behind they might be inclined to obliterate that evidence by cutting over the top of it and making it look like just another laceration."

Miller looked at her with respectful wonder. "Son of a bitch," he said softly. "You may have just hit upon it."

She gave him a doubtful look. "Like I said, it's nothing I can prove or disprove. Wouldn't you think that someone who was smart enough to obliterate the forensic evidence in that way would also be smart enough to know that potassium chloride, or whatever else they used, will be picked up in the tox screen?"

Miller nodded. "That's what you would think," he agreed. "Is there anything that they could use that wouldn't show up in the tox screen? At least in a normal once-over?"

"Nothing," she proclaimed confidently. "If there's anything in the blood or tissues that is not supposed to be there, the lab will find it." She chuckled. "Unless your suspect has discovered a lethal dose of something that is supposed to be there."

"Well he's smart," Miller said, smiling. "But I don't think he's that smart. I think the tox screen is what's gonna nail his ass."

"We'll see next week then."

At ten-thirty the following Monday morning, Sergeant Miller and Detective Wilson pulled their department issued Chevy Cavalier to the curb in front of Janet Whitecoff's house. Having already learned through the Marshall County Sheriff's Department that Jason was currently staying with his ex-wife, they hadn't even bothered trying to reach him at home.

Jason, who had been sipping a cup of coffee while Janet idly folded laundry, saw them coming up the steps. Even if he hadn't recognized Miller from seeing his face at press conferences, he would have known immediately that they were detectives.

"They're here, Janet," he said softly and calmly.

"The detectives?" she said, just as calmly.

"Yep." He nodded. "Remember the plan."

"I will," she assured him. "Stick to the story no matter what and ask for a lawyer if they advise me of my rights."

"Right." He smiled, letting a touch of his nervousness peek through. "You'll do fine."

They went to the door together and Jason flung it open before the two detectives had even had a chance to knock. The two groups of people appraised one another silently for a moment.

"Sergeant Miller, I presume," Jason finally said, pleasantly enough.

"That's correct," Miller affirmed, keeping his own voice pleasant. He pointed to his companion. "And this is detective Wilson. I suppose if you know who I am, then you probably know why we are here too."

Jason nodded. "I was wondering how long it would take you to show up. Won't you two come in?"

Miller thanked him and the two homicide detectives stepped inside, their eyes automatically taking in their surroundings, probing behind furniture and into the line of sight of other rooms.

"Is your daughter at home?" Miller asked.

"No," Janet answered. "She started her first day at her new school today."

He nodded, as if he had already known that.

"Would you like to take a seat?" Jason offered, waving to the dining room table.

"Well," Miller said hesitantly. "The fact of the matter is that we're in quite a hurry. We have to interview the both of you because of, you know, what happened to your daughter recently and the fact that the man who is alleged to have done that do her has turned up dead. We just have to rule you out as," He made quote marks with his fingers, "suspects."