False Accusations Read online

  Jennings looked up and saw that Moreno was talking to the man the officer had brought over: a witness. As he made his way toward his partner, he rubbed his gloved hands together to bring blood and warmth to his numb fingertips.

  “What’s the deal?” he asked as she flipped her notepad closed.

  Moreno nodded at the man to her left. “This is Clarence Hollowes. Says he heard a big bang around eleven-thirty, ran out into the street, and saw a car leaving the scene.”

  “I don’t want to get involved with no po-leece,” Hollowes said, jawing on a piece of gum. He was dressed in clothing that was even more wrinkled than Saperstein’s. He was unshaven and his hair was peppered with gray.

  “Why not?” Jennings asked. “Got something to hide?”

  “Po-leece mean trouble. That’s just the way it is. You get involved, you get in trouble.”

  “We’re not going to cause you any trouble, are we, detective?” Jennings glanced at Moreno, who frowned at him. More fallout from having called Saperstein. He turned back to his witness. “What can you tell me about the car?”

  “Well, as I was telling this lady here, it was dark colored. A fancy one, real shiny, kind of like a Mercedes.”

  “Was it like a Mercedes, or was it a Mercedes?”

  “I’m not an expert or nothing on fancy cars, but it was a Mercedes. I’m pretty sure.”

  “He got a partial plate,” Moreno said.

  “Oh. You saw the license plate, sir?”

  “Yeah, like I told her, I saw two numbers. A two and a C.”

  “Did you get a look at the driver?”

  “Looked like a white guy. Wearing a baseball hat.”

  “Did you see a logo or anything on the hat?” Jennings asked.

  He hesitated a moment. “Maybe there was something on it, I don’t remember.”

  “What’d the driver look like?”

  “You know, a white guy.”

  “Old or young?”

  “Neither.”

  “Beard?”

  “Uh, no beard, I don’t think.”

  “Any distinguishing marks? Scars, moles—”

  “Just a white guy, ya know? Didn’t see no face. Drove by me real fast.”

  “Did you see what color hair he had?”

  Hollowes shrugged. “Nah, too dark. Too fast.”

  “What about the car? Any dents, broken lights or windows?”

  “Man, I don’t know. It happened fast, you see? Bang, boom, I ran over and saw the car leaving. Then I saw them bodies in the street.”

  “I’m gonna give you my card,” Jennings said as he pulled a wallet out of his jacket pocket. “Call me if the car comes by here again, or if any of your friends say they saw something, okay?” He looked at Moreno. “You got his address?”

  “Ain’t got no address,” Hollowes said.

  Jennings had already guessed the man was homeless—which made the detective grateful for the information Hollowes had provided. In his experience, the homeless tried not to get involved, preferring to function outside of society,

  “In that case,” Jennings said, “call us collect.”

  Hollowes took the card and studied it.

  “Oh,” Jennings said. “One last thing. Did you touch the bodies?”

  “Touch them?” Hollowes asked, looking down at the ground. “Now why would I do something like that?”

  “You know, to get some change, a buck or two for food.”

  “I just took the cash, that’s all. Gotta eat, you know?”

  “Did you take anything else?” Jennings asked. “It’s important that we know.”

  “You see? Talk to the po-leece, get in trouble.”

  “No trouble, Mr. Hollowes. We’re not gonna arrest you. It’s just that we have to know if you took a wallet, or anything like that. We’d need the identification to tell us who these people are.”

  “No. Just the money. There was eight bucks in his wallet, twelve in hers. They were dead. They ain’t gonna miss it.”

  “Did you move the bodies in any way?”

  “No. I didn’t touch no dead bodies. Just took their money.”

  Jennings nodded. “Thanks again for your help. We’ll be in touch.”

  “They good people,” Hollowes said.

  “Who are?” Moreno asked.

  Hollowes indicated the bodies with the wave of a hand. “Them.”

  “You know who they are?”

  “Can’t remember their names. They help us get a place to stay on nights like this when the cold go way down to your bones.”

  “You mean they did this for the homeless, like it was their job?” Moreno asked.

  Hollowes nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Is there anyone who’d want to hurt them?” Jennings asked.

  “None of us, that much I can tell you. They been good to us.”

  Moreno nodded. “If there’s anything else you think of, please give us a call.”

  Hollowes turned to walk away. “Them rich people think they can flash them fancy cars in our neighborhood...” he said as he walked off out of range of the streetlight’s glow and into the shadows of a nearby tree.

  “I was wondering the same thing,” Jennings said to Moreno. “What the hell is a white guy doing driving a Mercedes in Del Morro Heights at eleven-thirty at night?”

  “Taking a shortcut?”

  “A shortcut on life, you mean. The guy’s lucky they didn’t catch him.”

  “They?”

  “The neighbors,” Jennings said as they walked back toward Saperstein. “It would’ve made our job easier.”

  “How so? We’d have three murders to write up.” They exchanged a smile as Jennings fastened the top button of his overcoat.

  “You know, this could’ve been personal,” Jennings said. “Something related to their work with the homeless.”

  Moreno bobbed her head. “Possibly.”

  “Detective,” yelled an officer who was jogging down the street toward them. “We just got a call from someone with a partial plate on the car.”

  “Another witness?” Moreno asked.

  “Don’t know,” said the man, who was heaving mouthfuls of vapor into the air. “It was an anonymous call. The desk sergeant thinks it was a female voice. She said she saw a dark Mercedes sports sedan,” he said, looking down at his notepad, “with a license of two, C, and O or U. Couldn’t see the driver’s face. Driver was wearing a baseball hat, and was weaving a bit about a block away from where we found the victims.”

  “Did she say where she witnessed it from?” Moreno asked.

  “No.”

  “Have them run a voice print analysis. I want to know more about this caller,” Jennings said. “Anonymous tips are bullshit.”

  “Can’t get a voice print.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Call didn’t come in on the 9-1-1 line. She called the division directly. They don’t record incoming calls. She was in a real hurry to get off the line. Didn’t want to get involved.”

  They headed back toward the bodies as a light rain began falling.

  “So what’s the story?” he asked Saperstein, who was placing a couple of plastic bags filled with specimens into a nylon duffel bag, out of the drizzle.

  “Hit-and-run. The car left with a broken left headlight.”

  “That’s it? A broken headlight?” Moreno shook her head. “I already knew that.”

  Jennings, ignoring Moreno’s comment, reached into the male victim’s coat and removed a wallet. “What about the speed of the car?”

  “Judging by the damage to the bodies and the tire marks down the street, the driver must’ve been accelerating. He came off that curve,” Saperstein said, nodding to the area down the street, “and brought it up to, oh, about fifty, maybe sixty, would be my preliminary estimate, at the time of impact.”

  Jennings looked over at Moreno, as if to say You wouldn’t have known that.

  “What else can you tell us?” Jennings asked, moving o
ver to the woman’s purse and examining its contents. “It doesn’t appear as if the windshield was broken,” Saperstein said. “But I bet there’ll be clothing fibers on the wipers, and probably on the bumper or fender area.” He tipped his head back. “We should be able to get a partial tire print for you off the blood around the male victim.”

  “What about the woman?”

  “Judging by the position of her body, it appears that she was thrown onto the hood of the car. Probably died from internal hemorrhage.”

  “Are there any other tire marks in the street?”

  “Aside from the one around the male and the one down the block, none that I’ve seen, but I haven’t had a chance to survey the entire roadway yet. Judging by the bloodstain patterns around the male victim, I’d expect to find some blood on the underside of the suspect’s car, near the left front wheel.”

  “So it doesn’t look like the driver made any attempt to avoid them,” Jennings said.

  Saperstein removed his glasses. “Based on what I’ve seen so far, I’d say he wasn’t trying to get out of their way. If he had, we’d see tire marks consistent with a swerve or intense braking. No, your driver either never saw these people step off the curb, or—”

  “He meant to hit them.”

  “Exactly.”

  Jennings nodded, thanked him, and asked for his report as soon as possible.

  As they walked away, Moreno was the first to speak. “I still don’t see his conclusions helping us much.”

  “We’ll see. We know more about what happened now than we did before,” he said. “Maybe the fact that the guy was accelerating and there are no skid marks supports the theory that it wasn’t an accident. Let’s do a background check on the vics. Could be there was someone who had something to gain if either of them wound up dead. Maybe there’s no homeless connection at all. Maybe one of them had a kid in a rival gang. Maybe the driver never did see them until it was too late, and it was just an accident.”

  “All right, all right,” she said, followed by a slight pause. “Maybe Saperstein was helpful.”

  Jennings walked over to his car and spoke to the desk sergeant via radio, requesting assistance on locating the Mercedes with the partial license plate they had obtained.

  “I also need a background check on two people.” He opened the victims’ wallets. “An Otis Silvers, and an Imogene Pringle.” He removed a piece of paper and studied it. “Pringle was carrying around a pay stub for the Homeless Advocate Society. It’s possible Silvers was with them too. See if we’ve got anything on this homeless group while you’re at it.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah, which judge is on call?”

  The sergeant leafed through some papers on a clipboard. “You’re not gonna be happy.”

  “Don’t tell me it’s Ferguson.”

  “I hear he’s a bear when he gets called in the middle of the night.”

  “Just find me the owner of the car and I’ll worry about the damn warrant.”

  Jennings hung the mike on its receptacle in his car and turned to Moreno. She threw a hand up to her mouth to stifle a yawn.

  “Oh, c’mon, these hours can’t be worse than Vice,” he said.

  “No, Vice is worse. A couple all-nighters a week. But I haven’t been on Vice for three months. My body’s not used to it anymore.”

  “Better snap out of it. It’s gonna be a long night.”

  CHAPTER 2

  AT 4:12 A.M. ON THE morning of December 2, all was quiet in the pristine pocket of rural Carmichael where long driveways wound their way up to five-thousand-square-foot mansions built out of brick, granite, and cedar. One of the older sections of Sacramento, the area had made a gradual transformation from small one-story ranch houses built on one-acre lots to an affluent person’s dream: rather than erecting a large home on a small plot of virgin dirt, it provided them the opportunity to raze an old structure and replace it with a luxury-filled two or three-story centerpiece on acreage studded with ancient, large-trunked, wide-canopied oaks.

  Four speeding police cruisers suddenly appeared, screeching around the gentle curves of the narrow streets. The cruisers’ tires violently kicked up dirt and loose rocks, shattering the serenity of the lush green lawns and intricately shaped shrubbery. Their swirling red-and-white lights threw splashes of color onto the tall hedges and stone walls that lined both sides of the street.

  As the cars converged on the home of Dr. Phillip Madison, the officers and deputies exited their vehicles, the chatter of the police radios creating a primitive form of multiple-speaker stereo surround-sound. A few barking dogs could be heard in the distance.

  Bill Jennings climbed onto the hood of his Ford and looked over the hedges and beyond the stone wall. After a quick scan of the grounds, he jumped down off the car. “Seaver, take two men and search that semidetached garage to the west of the house,” he said, pointing off to the left. “I’ll take the others and hit Madison with the warrant. Connor, grab a muzzle in case he’s got a dog.”

  Six men ran in tandem toward the house like a small contingent of Marines just landing on shore. A KMRA-12 news helicopter was approaching in the distance, its spotlight trained on the ground below.

  Jennings looked up at the approaching chopper. The radio. They heard it over the damned police radio.

  Seaver and his two men arrived at the massive five-car garage and blasted open the side door with their shoulders. Against the wall was a large, midnight blue Mercedes S600.

  “Engine’s still a little warm,” Seaver said, his left hand hovering in front of the grille.

  The other men swarmed around the car. “Left headlight’s busted and there’s a dent on the front fender.” He craned his neck under the car and pointed his flashlight. “There’s some blood, I think...hard to tell.”

  Seaver walked over to view the front end of the vehicle and saw the license plate: 2CUTWEL. He smiled. “Looks like we got our man.”

  At the house, Jennings was pounding on the door; he had already rung the bell five times in frantic succession. The front porch light snapped on. An eye could be seen peering through the lens in the middle of the large, ornately carved wooden door. It opened six inches and a powerfully large black Labrador poked his snout through, growling, fighting against his owner’s knee to get out.

  “Phillip Madison?” Bill Jennings asked.

  Their suspect was a shade over six-foot-two with dark, slicked-back hair and broad shoulders. He was dressed in jeans and a UCLA alumni T-shirt. “What’s going on?”

  “Police,” Jennings said. “Please get hold of your dog and move aside, sir. We’ve got a warrant to search your premises.”

  “A warrant?” Madison slipped his hand under the Labrador’s collar and moved back a step. Jennings entered and Officer Connor, wearing thick leather gloves, grabbed the dog by the nape of the neck and strapped a muzzle on him. The animal bucked and swung his head wildly, slamming into Madison and throwing him against the wall.

  “What are you doing? What the hell’s going on here?”

  Connor slipped a pronged choke collar over the dog’s head and tied the leash to the iron railing outside the front door. The Labrador yelped and dropped to the ground, writhing while pawing at the restraint secured to his snout.

  Three police officers followed through the door and fanned out inside the home. “I have a search warrant for your premises,” Jennings repeated amidst the commotion.

  “For what?”

  “Where were you around eleven-thirty last night?”

  “Where was I? Home, in bed, watching TV. Why?”

  “Anyone else here? Wife, kids...”

  Madison clenched his teeth. “My wife and kids are...away. No one else is here.”

  “So you were alone?”

  “Yeah. Look, what’s the problem? I don’t—”

  “Did you lend your car to anyone today?”

  “No. Would you just tell me what’s going on?”

  As they spoke,
Seaver walked in through the open front door. He nodded to Jennings. “We’ve got him.”

  Jennings stepped toward Madison. He spun him around and placed his arms behind his back, shoving him up against the wall. Snapping handcuffs on his wrists, he said, “Phillip Madison, you’re under arrest for the murders of Otis Silvers and Imogene Pringle. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right—”

  “This is insane! I want to talk to my attorney.”

  “You’ll get your chance. If you can’t afford one, which I doubt judging by the spread you’ve got here, one’ll be appointed for you.”

  Jennings escorted Madison out of his house and down the marble steps, where a police car was pulling up.

  “Get in the car,” Jennings said as he opened the rear door.

  As he placed Madison into the backseat of the cruiser, Seaver took Jennings aside. “We found a busted headlight, a dent in the fender and grille, and probably blood spatter around the left front wheel. Hood’s warm.”

  An officer walked into the hallway and presented Jennings with an empty bottle of 1994 Opus One. “Found it on the table in the kitchen.” He was holding it with a handkerchief so as not to smudge the fingerprints.

  “Mark it and get it to Saperstein for dusting.” Jennings turned to Seaver. “I want a PAS before you pull away,” he said, referring to the Preliminary Alcohol Screening test. “After this many hours, I’m sure everything’ll be out of his system. But do it anyway, just in case. And get me every pair of shoes the good doctor owns. Even though our witness didn’t see it, he might’ve gotten out of his car at the scene, or even a few blocks away. I want the soles analyzed. If there’s anything on his shoes that’s indigenous to that area, I want to know about it. And see if you can find that baseball hat.”

  Madison watched from the car as a couple of officers walked into his house with boxes. He overheard “busted headlight,” and “blood.” He couldn’t hear anything else they were saying, but one thing was clear: he was in deep trouble.