Mysterical-E

He Said, She Says

TWO SEARCH WARRANTS

By David Phillip Bennett

Blackberry vines snaking across the gravel path to the front door made it difficult to walk. Sergeant Darla Savage skipped and hopped over them, the search warrant clutched in one hand.

The door stood ajar. It needed painting. She peered into the house. Beyond the door, a dusty hallway receded into the distance. Cobwebs dangled from the ceiling.

“Mr. Pictou,” she shouted. “Police. I have a search warrant for your house.”

No answer. Darla heard a backup car move into place behind her Jeep Patriot. She pushed the door. Hinges creaked. It jammed half way open.

Two doors on the left stood open. On her right, another door was shut. Dusty stairs led to the upper storey. A chipped red, white, and blue rubber ball sat on one tread.

Darla moved inside. “Hello. Mr. Pictou?” Her voice echoed. No answer. She felt sweat forming under her body armour.

She paused at the first door on the left. Living room. Small TV on a table under the window, facing a sagging recliner. A tipped over beer bottle lay on a table by the chair, another one on the bare wood floor leaked amber liquid. More cobwebs dangled from the light fixture in the ceiling.

The next room was dark. Darla groped around the wall to her left for a light switch. She flicked it on. Nothing happened. She shone her flashlight around.

The light revealed an unmade single bed. A three-drawer dresser stood against one wall, its drawers pulled out. Opposite, a closet crammed with an anonymous collection of stuff. Dusty heavy curtains covered the window.

She heard a footstep in the hall behind her. A uniform stood there. She pointed at the closed door with her Sig Sauer P226 automatic. The uniform drew his own gun and twisted the doorknob. More squealing hinges. The open door revealed another bedroom. A skinny black cat jumped up on the stained double mattress when the door opened. It blinked yellow eyes at them. A gust of warm wind swept in through a broken window. A double-bitted axe with a broken handle lay on the floor. Brown stains surrounded the metal.

The uniform shrugged and turned towards the stairs. The treads groaned under his weight. Darla followed, sticking close to the wall.

“Mr. Pictou,” she called. “We know you’re here.”

The uniform reached the landing and stopped.

“Yes,” he said. “He’s here. Better call the meat wagon.”

* * *

Darla hated going into the police station some mornings. Especially when she had to face Superintendent Snagg.

“So, what have you got?” he asked. The open window behind him threw his round head into a silhouette. Deputy Chief Griffiths leaned against the wall behind her.

Darla shrugged. “Someone offed Pictou with a shotgun. We have the original murder weapon, the axe. But now we don’t know if Pictou used it, or someone else. No fingerprints. I don’t know. It just doesn’t feel right, the way the axe was tossed into the room.”

Snagg slammed forward over his desk. “Why did it take you so long to get to Pictou?”

Darla jerked back. “I had to wait for the search warrant.”

“Why? If you had enough evidence, it should have been easy. Did you take too long getting to the judge?”

“I took what I had as soon as I knew,” she said. “The judge wasn’t easy to convince.”

“And what did you have?”

“Eye witness statements that identified Pictou. He was there. No doubt about it.”

“Oh, come on,” Snagg snapped. “Witnesses have been mistaken before. You know that.” The sunlight bouncing off his bald head made looking at him confusing, just like she often felt talking to him.

“Yes, sir,” Darla said, squinting. “But I trust these witnesses. They’re security guards, trained to observe and report.”

Snagg snorted. “Yeah, sure. What are they? A couple of East Indians? Don’t make me laugh.”

Darla felt her cheeks reddening. “That isn’t fair, is it?” she said.

“What? You going to rely on witnesses like that on an important case like this?”

“Why not? Did you want me to find a priest or something? Someone who wasn’t there, who’d tell a lie for us? They’re all we’ve got and they’re good enough for me.”

“Right.” Snagg sat back. He had the grace to blush. “Well, what else have you got?”

She dragged in a deep breath. This time she wouldn’t be in trouble for talking back. “The axe is definitely the weapon used on Maudit. The blood on it matches, and we found the broken half of the handle beside the body. The science guys think they have a match on some skin tissue. Pictou had psoriasis and there are flakes of skin around the body.”

“Where’d the axe come from? Pictou take it into the washroom with him?”

“I think it was taken from one of the mall’s fire stations.” The red handle supported that idea.

“What about at Pictou’s house? What have you there?”

Darla handed over the folder she’d been holding. “It’s all in there. Forensics have some DNA evidence that’s not Pictou’s … mostly hair, I think … and some footprints in the dust in the hallway. Look at the photos.”

“That’s it? What about ‘witnesses?’ Any more ‘trustworthy’ East Indians?”

Darla gritted her teeth. “The man across the street, Mr. Biddle, saw Pictou go in around 3:30, about an hour before we got there. Then Biddle went out. No other people home in the neighbourhood. So nobody heard the shot that killed Pictou. As far as we know. We’re still taking statements from the neighbours we can find.”

* * *

Darla parked the Jeep in front of Pictou’s house. She saw a couple of uniforms trudging from house to house, trying to find people to talk to. In this poor lower class neighbourhood, she thought, they had their work cut out for them. Most people would be at work, or making themselves scarce rather than talk to the police.

She went up to the front door of the house across the street. The door jerked open before she got to the steps.

“Whadya want now?” The man in the doorway glared at her. His pale blue eyes bored into hers, never blinking. She’d noticed that before. Un-nerving.

“Mr. Biddle, just a few more questions.”

“Ain’t got no more answers.”

“Perhaps. You said you went out after Mr. Pictou came home.”

“Right.”

“How soon after?”

“I dunno. Maybe half an hour.”

“Where did you go?”

“Whadya wanna know that for?”

“So we can double check your movements.”

“Why ya need to know my movements? I ain’t done nothin’.”

Darla sighed. “So we can pin down the times. If we know when you arrived at wherever you went, then we’ll know better when Mr. Pictou was shot. And maybe then we can find somebody who saw the shooter.”

“You ain’t gonna find nobody who’ll tell ya anything. Good riddance, Pictou.”

“Why is that, Mr. Biddle?”

“He was a loner. Nobody liked him. Never spoke to him, myself. Neighbours didn’t like him.”

Odd, Darla thought, for someone with a reputation as a mover and shaker in the Metis community.

“Perhaps he was just very private,” Darla said, trying to lead him on.

“Nah. He’d throw rocks at the cats. Shout at the kids. Kept their balls if one went in his yard. Never mowed his grass. I mean, look at his yard. We might be poor around here, but we got our standards. You see a mess in my yard?”

Darla turned to study the yard. Biddle had a point. His grass, though patchy and yellowed in places, looked neat and tidy compared to Pictou’s.

“I see what you mean,” she said. “So, you talk to your neighbours a lot. You know them all well.”

“Wouldn’t say that. Everybody has their private stuff they don’t talk about.”

“No. Do you own a shotgun, Mr. Biddle?”

“Me? Where’d I get a shotgun?” He stared right at her. Damn. Why didn’t he ever blink?

“Do you know if any of the neighbours own one?’

“Couldn’t say.” His eyes shifted to the right and actually blinked.

“Couldn’t say? Or won’t say?”

He shook his head. “Don’t know.”

She sighed. “Thank you, Mr. Biddle. If you think of anything more, please let me know. My phone number is on this card.” She handed over her business card with the office phone and her extension on it.

When she reached the street, she heard a loud altercation coming from a house several doors along. She jogged in that direction.

One of the uniforms was grappling with a small boy. The kid flailed at the officer’s stomach and screamed. The officer held the boy off with both hands on the kid’s shoulders. He glanced up at Darla and shook his head.

“Sorry,” he said. “The kid seems to think I’m here to arrest his mother.”

The front door jerked open. A petite black-haired woman strode out onto the porch.

“Timmy!” she said. “What on earth is going on here?”

“Sorry, ma’am,” the uniform said. “Your son seems to think I want to arrest you.”

The woman came down the stairs and pulled Timmy away, hugging him against her chest. Soon, the boy’s shrieks faded down to wracking sobs.

She looked up at Darla and the officer and shook her head. “I’m sorry. Ever since his father was arrested, he doesn’t understand that when a cop comes along, he’s not going to arrest me. He’s scared he’ll lose me, too.”

Darla wondered what the boy’s father had done. Obviously, the woman didn’t seem too upset at her loss.

The mother stood up and kept the boy tight against her side. “What can I do for you?” she asked.

“We were wondering if you heard or saw anything yesterday afternoon,” Darla said.

“What time?”

“Between three and four o’clock.”

She shook her head. “Sorry. I was out, getting Timmy home from school.”

“Do you know if any of your neighbours own a shotgun?”

“No, I don’t. My husband had one, but I sold it after he was arrested.”

“Who to?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I never bothered to get the guy’s name. I gave him a receipt to prove he hadn’t stolen it, but all I was interested in was his money.”

“Do you remember what he looked like?”

“Yeah. He was a big guy, like your partner here. Had a really round head with not much hair. Oh, and he drove a black Ford.”

“It was a Crown Victoria,” the boy said.

“Ah, you know about cars,” Darla said.

He nodded and blushed, turning away.

“Had you ever seen him around here before?”

“No,” she said, moving the boy behind her. “It was a yard sale. You know, lots of people came around, most of them I’d never seen before.”

“He was here before,” Timmy said, peeping around his mother’s waist.

“Oh? When was that?” Darla asked.

“Don’t know. But he was. When Daddy was arrested.”

“He was a policeman?”

“Don’t know.”

* * *

The rest of the interviews up and down the street yielded little information. Darla left the uniforms to try interviewing people when they came home from work and returned to the office.

She looked up the details on Timmy’s father. It turned out “Daddy” served as a biker gang enforcer. He’d gotten carried away with one job and the victim died. Arrested the spring of the previous year, he now occupied a cell in the local prison and would remain there for the next twenty-odd years, with luck.

Darla went over the whole file carefully. She knew, or knew of, most of the officers involved in the case. None of them fitted the description of the man who bought the shotgun. She wondered if maybe one of the gang members had bought it. The description could even fit Snagg.

She talked to a couple of the officers involved. As far as they knew, none of Daddy’s associates in the gang fitted the purchaser’s description.

Probably a wild-goose chase anyway, she thought. The chances of the same gun being used to kill Pictou seemed remote. Still, the coincidence of the gun’s presence in the neighbourhood bothered her.

“What progress?”

Darla looked up from the file folder on her desk.

“Sir?”

“What progress on the Pictou thing?” Superintendent Snagg said.

She sighed. “We have a possible, a very remote possible, ID on the gun.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. One of the neighbours sold a shotgun to a big bald guy driving a black Crown Victoria about a year ago.”

“And?”

“That’s it. A vague description.”

“Hell, that description could fit me. And probably a dozen others in this town. Too bad the First Nations are raising a stink about Pictou. Otherwise, I’d say forget it. He’s no loss, even to them. It’s all political.”

He was a human being, she thought. Nobody deserves to go out like that. Of course, neither did the first victim. “Yes, sir. I’ve contacted the vehicle registry office for all the black Crown Victorias within a hundred miles. Yours is one of them.”

“Well, I’ll leave you to it. I’m glad I’m not a suspect.”

“No, sir.”

“What?” He spun around and stared at her.

“I mean, no, you’re not a suspect.” Not yet, anyway, she added to herself. God, couldn’t she say anything right to the man. Anyway, he was unlikely in the extreme, but, oh, it would be good to get rid of this prejudiced jerk. Even if he … she clamped down on her thoughts. She’d known Snagg too well for too long. He might be prejudiced, but he’d never done anything like this. He fitted the image of “good cop” all too well.

“You can do better than that, Sergeant,” he said and stalked away.

Next day, she took the two shopping mall security guards through it all again.

“No, I’m sure we saw Pictou right at the time,” one of them said.

“That’s right,” the other one agreed.

She couldn’t shake them on that.

But neither of them agreed with Pictou being right there in the mall washroom at the time the murder happened. The forensic evidence said Pictou likely was there. And all that proved was that Pictou needed to use the toilet where the murder took place.

The office emptied as the day shift drifted away, leaving Darla a few minutes of quiet time to review the little evidence available.

“Sergeant Savage. How’s it going? Making any progress?” She looked up at the soft voiced query to find Deputy Chief Griffiths standing by her desk. His round face looked drawn and tired, haggard.

She shook her head. “Not much, sir. A possible description of Pictou’s killer and his car. But like Mr. Snagg says, the description could fit him equally as anyone else.”

Griffiths grimaced. He said nothing, but Darla wondered if he’d like it to get rid of Snagg just as much as she did. Nothing could be that easy though. The place certainly wouldn’t be same without him. How many cases had she worked with him, learned how to investigate a crime?

“Well,” Griffiths said. “Carry on. Something will turn up. It always does. Good night.”

Why did he look so … so distraught, she wondered.

* * *

“Forensic evidence is okay, as long as there’s someone to tie it to,” Darla said, addressing a small staff meeting next day. “What we have just isn’t conclusive. Anyone have any ideas?” She dropped the folder with the details of the two murders in it on the desk.

“I was thinking,” one of the men started to say. He ran his hand over his crew cut. “Why didn’t we try to find anyone else who was in the mall? I mean, anyone noticeable. Did your guards see anyone else? There must have been hundreds of people there. Other witnesses.”

“Security cameras,” someone else said.

“How many of them are there?” the first man said. “Any focused on that area?”

“We’ll find out,” Darla said. “Good idea.

“Should have been the first thing we checked,” she added, grimacing. But with all the outside pressures from the First Nations and Snagg on her back, she’d overlooked it.

“How about intersection cameras in Pictou’s neighbourhood?”

The second man laughed. “If there were any, they’d probably be stolen or trashed.”

“Yeah. Anyway, it’s not busy enough to warrant them in that area.”

“Are we getting anywhere in finding a connection between Pictou and Maudit?” someone asked.

“We know Maudit was a dealer,” Darla said. “Pictou was a loner as far as we can find out. Nobody has come forward to claim the body. He wasn’t a user, so if there is a connection, we haven’t found it.”

“If Maudit was a dealer, why was he running around free?” the youngest member of the team asked.

“You need to be able to prove it,” Darla said. “He’s been pretty careful.

“Anyway, let’s go back to Pictou’s neighbourhood and see if anyone else has turned up we haven’t talked to yet. I’ll get back to the security guys and see what the cameras turn up.”

* * *

“You can’t keep dragging this out, Sergeant,” Darrell Gabriel said. “Our people are getting angrier by the day. Mr. Pictou was an important man to us.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Darla said. “I believe we’re narrowing down the hunt, but it takes evidence to get a conviction.”

“So you have a suspect?”

“I believe so. On another note, were any of your people involved with Maudit?”

“No, of course not.”

She thought the First Nations chief looked evasive. On the other hand, that didn’t have any bearing on the case, she thought.

“How important was Mr. Pictou to your people?” she asked.

“He was an authority on our culture, a mentor to our youth. He wrote a book that’s used in our schools.”

She frowned. “That doesn’t seem to jibe with we’ve been told about him. That he was a loner, lived by himself, was mean to the kids in the neighbourhood. Didn’t take care of his house.”

Gabriel shook his head. “The kids in the neighbourhood are white. Need I say more? And he was far too busy with his work for us to bother about the other stuff.”

“And why hasn’t anyone come to claim the body?”

“I’ve been in touch with his father. The body will be claimed as soon as you people are done with it.”

“And you can’t think of any connection between Mr. Pictou and Mr. Maudit?”

Gabriel looked away for a long moment. Then, “Look, there are drugs on the res. We all know it. Pictou was trying to get rid of them and I think he was looking at the suppliers. If he found out Maudit was involved, he might have confronted him.”

“Was Mr. Pictou a violent man?” Darla asked.

“Not really violent. He did have a temper. But it was mostly triggered by frustration. We’re all frustrated, you know. Things are not good for us. The drugs are only part of it. There’s no incentive for the kids to better themselves. They get into trouble, and the drugs are only part of the problem.”

“So, if Mr. Pictou found out Maudit was the supplier, he might have done something about it?”

“Probably.”

“Why not inform the drug squad?” Darla thought she knew the answer to that.

Gabriel shrugged. “There isn’t much trust between our people and the police.”

* * *

The DVDs from the mall security cameras arrived while Darla and the crew hunted for witnesses in Pictou’s neighbourhood. Eight shiny round discs sat on her desk when she got back to the office.

“Oh, great,” she groaned. “I bet there’s hours and hours on each one.”

“You gonna take ‘em home and watch,” one of the men asked.

“Beats sitting here all night, I guess.” Besides, Ted, her husband, might phone from wherever his business trip took him this time.

As she expected, each disc held over two hours of images. Her eyes felt like little sand pebbles hid under the lids after a while. And that after only watching two discs in fast forward. She shut the player off at ten o’clock and went to bed. She’d seen nothing interesting. Ted didn’t call. She could have used his company. Even his voice on the phone would have felt good.

In the morning, she stopped on the way to the office to borrow her brother’s portable DVD player.

“Okay,” she said in the office. “I think we all know what we’re looking for. I went cross-eyed last night staring at these things, so I want you to share. Nobody takes more than one disc at a time. Who’s first?”

Three discs later, the youngest member of the team jerked up straight in his seat. “Hey!” he jabbed at the pause button on the player. “Look at this.”

They crowded around his desk. “Oh, my god,” Darla murmured. “What was he doing there? Quick. Make a note of the time stamp on that one and speed through the others. See where he went.”

“You don’t really think?” the kid said.

“It’s such a long shot, I don’t,” she said. “But I really want to know what he was doing there.” Even if he only went to buy something.

The next disc revealed nothing. On the seventh disc, they watched as the man they were looking for strode through the mall, heading towards the murder scene.

“Time,” Darla said.

“Two-seventeen.”

A moment later he disappeared.

“Nuts,” Darla said. “Where’s the next disc? Let’s hope it shows something more. That’s the time, or near enough.”

“How accurate are the clocks on those cameras?” one of the men asked.

“Find out later. Come on, fast forward. There. Look. He’s right there. Time?”

“Two-twenty.”

“Keep it going. Keep it going.”

“There he is again, coming back. Two-twenty-nine.”

“Get those security guys on the line,” Darla said. “We have to show them this, see if they remember him being there.”

“You really think it’s possible? Why would he do something like that?”

“Why? Who knows? All we need to do is show he did it. The whys are for the shrinks to figure out.”

* * *

This time, Darla had both a search warrant and a lot of backup when she used the wolf’s head knocker on the front door.

“Is he home?” Superintendent Snagg asked. When Darla showed him the evidence, he’d insisted on coming with her.

“Car’s in the garage,” a uniform said.

“What kind?” Snagg asked.

“Black Crown Victoria.”

“Oh, that’s great,” Snagg muttered.

Darla knocked again.

“Fancy place like this, you’d think there would be a doorbell,” one of the constables said.

“He lives alone?” someone else asked.

“Getting a divorce,” Snagg said.

Darla banged the knocker again.

Snagg stepped up beside her and tried the doorknob. The door swung open without a sound.

“Police,” Snagg called. “Is anyone here?”

“Better let us, sir,” Darla said, trying to step around him.

“I think, in this case, Sergeant, it’s my duty.” He stepped across the threshold. An explosion echoed through the house. Everyone dropped to the ground.

“You okay?” Darla asked. God, she didn’t need to lose him like that.

“Yes. It came from the back of the house.”

“Hello?” Darla called. “Anyone there?”

The front door opened directly into a tidy living room. A tendril of smoke drifted through a doorway opposite the entry. They moved towards it, guns out.

“Last chance,” Darla called. “If you’re there, come out with your hands up.”

Nothing. Snagg stood to one side of the door, Darla to the other. She leaned around and looked in, and holstered her gun.

“That’s it,” she sighed. “Finished.”

“What a mess,” Snagg said.

“Yeah. Now we’ll never prove one way or another that Griffiths did it,” she said.

“Not necessarily. There’s the shotgun. There will be traces we can match between Griffiths and Pictou, maybe Maudit. There’s always something. You know that, Sergeant. Find something. You should have cracked this earlier. Now we have a real mess to clean up.”

“That’s what he always said. There’s always something.”

“He was right. Get to it.” Snagg jerked around and went out.

They found a journal in which Griffiths had recorded his thoughts. A recurring theme ran through it, how the justice system was flawed, how the bad guys got off Scott free, how he felt a need to be the nemesis, to administer his own brand of justice. Maudit figured prominently towards the end.

“But why Pictou?” one of the men asked.

“Perhaps … his prejudices were against the First Nations and he saw a way to pin the murder on one of them.” Darla said. “Or maybe Pictou witnessed what happened.”

BIO:
David Phillip Bennett is a retired graphic artist and reporter. His first published mystery story, “The Honus Wagner Adventure,” is in the Mysterical-e archives. He lives near Vancouver, BC, with a skinny cat and a plump wife. He can be found “on the air” from his amateur radio station almost every day.