The Fallen
- Автор: Паркер Т. Джефферсон
- Год: 2006
- Язык: английский
- Год: William Morrow
- ISBN: 978-0-06-056238-0
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Fallen». Краткое содержание книги:
I’ve fired several of them in my life and found them to be good, solid reliable sidearms, though I believe the nine-millimeter has insufficient stopping power for modern-day law enforcement. I carry the same 45-caliber Colt automatic used by my great-grandfather in the Pacific Theater in World War II. It has stopping power galore. I’ve drawn it only once on duty.
When I had come home that night, I was very disappointed that Gina hadn’t called. After her escape through the rear exit of the salon, I’d hoped that she would want to talk. Sometimes Gina reacts like a particle with the same polarity as me. I reach out and she moves away just ahead of my touch. I used to wonder if that meant we’re too much alike, but I don’t see many similarities between us, which I believe is one of the many reasons I love and am delighted by her.
My throat had tightened as I slowly opened her side of the closet and saw so much empty space.
I especially missed her shoes because they were dainty and chipper and colorful as wildflowers, and some of them were frankly provocative. I stood there wishing I knew what she was thinking.
I opened the floor safe, which is on my side of the closet, and saw that all of her jewelry was gone. I’d never been able to afford lots of jewelry for her, but what few pieces I’d given her had been of good quality and quite beautiful. I shut the lid and spun the combination dial. I felt more fearful, knowing that she’d taken her jewelry.
I had called her cell and left a brief message. It’s hard to sound casual when your heart is racing. I called Salon Sultra but Tammy said she’d gone home for the day and didn’t offer to take a message.
So I sat at the computer with a worried heart, to which the Drug Fire history of the Smith & Wesson Model 39 was a welcome distraction.
According to the FBI, Carl Herbert was a retired Navy lieutenant. He had purchased the gun in May of ’85 and used it in what he described as self-defense in August of the same year. He had fired at a “suspected gang car” that was cruising his street very early one morning. He missed. The car had sped away, but its driver — a young man delivering newspapers — called police a few minutes later. Apparently Mr. Herbert had bought the gun because there had been gang activity on his street and he was fed up with the noise. He was arrested and charged and later pled down to firing a gun within city limits. The nine-millimeter shell casing, however, was recovered by Oceanside PD and logged on to the regional Drug Fire registry. Drug Fire is an FBI database containing a computerized dictionary of casings fired in crimes. It was actually created for gang and drive-by shootings, where often the main evidence is ejected casings. Each casing — like each human fingerprint — is unique, because it displays unique marks from the gun that fired it. A match is a match, one of the most powerful pieces of evidence that can be presented in a courtroom.
Carl Herbert’s Model 39 Smith was quiet until February of the next year, when his Cadillac was broken into and the gun stolen. Herbert reported the theft to Oceanside PD.
About a year later, the Model 39 got hot.
In April of 1987, it was used in a San Diego gang shooting. This was determined by the four empty casings left behind at the scene. Two young men were wounded in the Barrio Logan area of the city, but no fatalities. No arrests were made.
A month after that, it was used again in a National City convenience-store holdup. Two shots fired, no injuries, and no arrests.
In July the Model 39 was back on home turf and used in a drive-by shooting in Oceanside. One dead. No arrests.
Then the gun went quiet for almost two years. Like it had taken a vacation from crime or done time.
But in June of 1989, it was used to kill a drug dealer in Fresno, California. No arrests.
In December of 1994, the Model 39 left behind six casings in an Oakland, California, shoot-out that killed two members of the Mexican mafia. Four arrests were made, but the weapon was not discovered.
In September of 1999, it was used in a Houston armed robbery in which five shots were fired but nobody was hit. Two arrested, but no Model 39 in possession.
In January of 2001, it was used to kill a suspected drug-cartel enforcer in New Orleans. A midlevel cocaine trafficker named Arthur Leder was arrested, tried, and convicted of the murder. Carl Herbert’s Model 39 was a star witness.
After the trial the weapon was impounded and archived as homicide evidence by the New Orleans Police Department, which is where everyone thought it was until our crime lab ran the casing in Garrett Asplundh’s Explorer through Drug Fire.
What a bloody history for a twenty-six-and-a-half-ounce piece of metal. I wondered if there was a deeper, secret history that might contain even more murder and suffering, unwritten because empty casings had been picked up by shooters or overlooked by investigators or recovered but simply never checked against the Drug Fire database. I wondered if Herbert’s Model 39 had ever been used to poke, prod, pistol-whip, or intimidate.
And of course I wondered how it had escaped from the New Orleans Police Department property room and traveled two thousand miles back to its hometown to murder Garrett Asplundh.
I searched the Web for New Orleans PD and found the site. Their “Law Enforcement Only” page offered a professional number and e-mail address to help other agencies, so I left a brief message. As I suspected, there was nothing in the site about the PD property section, so I tried the Web with combinations of “New Orleans,” “police,” and “property” and came up with dozens of real estate offerings. Some of them were reasonably priced for a police officer. I tried the online Picayune and found what I was looking for. The dateline was October 30 of 2001:
In an embarrassing reversal of fortune for law enforcement, New Orleans Police yesterday confirmed that a warehouse used for storing felony trial evidence was broken into over the weekend. Illegal drugs, cash and firearms were taken.
The New Orleans Property Annex on W. 8th St. was entered sometime Saturday or Sunday night. Employees coming to work on Monday were alerted to the break-in when they found a rear entrance door ajar. No alarm sounded, police said.
It is believed that over $12,000 in United States currency was taken. Also believed missing is an undetermined amount of heroin. An unknown number of firearms, mostly handguns confiscated and presented as evidence at criminal trials, is also believed missing.
“We’ve got some egg on our face,” said Sgt. Gordon Mauer of the New Orleans Police Department. “This was a sloppy, hurry-up job. But it shows how determined some criminals can be.”
There have been no arrests in connection with this weekend’s break-in.
Then, three days later:
Two men were arrested yesterday on suspicion of burglarizing the downtown police Records and Property Annex last weekend.
Arrested were Manuel Cisnos, 25, and Ed Placer, 34, both of New Orleans.
Three pounds of heroin, eleven firearms and $14,000 in cash were recovered in one of the suspects’ apartments, according to police. The suspects surrendered without incident.
Police are hopeful that most if not all of the evidence property stolen from the downtown facility will be recovered.
“We’re hoping we got them before they had time to sell the stolen evidence,” said New Orleans Police Sgt. Gordon Mauer. “We still haven’t had time to tally what we found against our list of what was missing.”
Two days later: