Braving the Boneyard

Chapter 6

6

Information on Mr. Rose proved elusive. Unfortunately, he and his mother, Anita Rose, had moved around a lot in recent years, without making much of an impression anywhere. I spent the rest of the day running down leads and going door to door, trying to get a line on Trevor’s mother, grandmother, best friend, mechanic, favorite dog—anyone or anything with a connection to the young man.

I didn’t know Hendersenville well enough to squint for non-existent street signs and house numbers in its sparse streetlights, so around dusk I checked in to a local motel. (Lobby internet only, but interior room entry—my head was not in a good space for fumbling with key cards outside in the dark.) I had an appointment to review the evidence at the Sheriff’s Department first thing in the morning, so I spent the evening reviewing property inventories and witness statements and testimony.

I woke the next morning in bed but with my face on a legal pad, having overslept just enough to force me to skip hair washing and settle on a slice of cold pizza from the night before for breakfast. Brushing a stray crumb from my slacks before throwing them on, I crossed my fingers that nothing would grow on my pants before I returned to Tallahassee (and a dry cleaner) on Thursday.

Fortunately, the Sheriff’s Department was practically down the street, and there were still plenty of parking spots left. The office was housed in a modern building that was probably ugly when it was built in the 1970s, and the ensuing decades had only made it more hideous. I checked in at the front desk and sat on a plastic chair. There was no one else in the little waiting area, but I imagined Tuesday at 8:30 a.m. was one of their quieter times. I stared at the floor, patterned white fake terrazzo designed to mask dirt and wear, and looked for connections between the little spots … a crack here, an imperfection there.

A man entered from the back at 8:45, according to the institutional clock on the wall. (It was only 8:38 according to my own accurate watch; I didn’t wear it enough to bother trying to trick myself into being early.) The dark olive color and cut of his uniform helped mask the beginning of a few extra pounds, and in the field his hat would hide the slow, backward creep of his pale blonde hair. Everything about him—his posture, a gait that was deliberate without swaggering, his countenance—suggested calm authority, and his deep, slightly accented voice was no exception.

“Ms. Brennan, I’m Deputy Matisek. My apologies for keeping you waiting. If you’ll follow me,” he said, and led me through the door and down a long hallway. “We’re a little short on space, so we’ve put you in an interrogation room. Don’t take it personally.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said.

Deputy Matisek opened a door and waved me into a small room. Three banker’s boxes and a box of gloves were stacked at one end of a folding table. The waiting items should include everything the Sheriff’s Department had gathered during its investigation, whether the items implicated Jerome, his co-defendants Kevin Moore and Trevor Rose, or the man on the moon. Everything except, that is, items already introduced as exhibits in Kevin Moore’s trial. Deputy Matisek donned gloves and offered me the box.

“No thanks,” I said, reaching into my bag and pulling out a pair that—unlike the ones he’d offered—wasn’t at least three sizes too large for my hands.

“So you’ve done this before,” he said, and I nodded. “Good. Then we won’t be here all day. Is there anything in particular you want to see?”

“No,” I said, and held up my legal pad and some printed pages. I’d combined the various property inventories into one checklist to streamline the process. “I’d like to do a quick run-through of everything, and then return to any interesting items if need be.”

“All right,” he said. “It’s your show.”

We spent the next hour and a half going through boxes. I say we, but for the most part, Deputy Matisek sat patiently while I did my thing. Most items were kept in clear plastic bags, and I was content to look at them without opening the packaging. However, a few needed a closer look, and some were sealed in opaque envelopes. That’s where Deputy Matisek came in, unsealing and resealing and initialing. He didn’t make idle chit-chat, which helped speed the process, but also felt a little weird, like I was being watched over by a calm, single-minded mastiff rather than a person.

“Aren’t you getting bored?” I asked.

“Are you?” he asked.

Well, there you go. Just two mastiffs, or maybe a mastiff and an Irish setter, doing our jobs.

I’d nearly reached the end of the final box when I came across something I hadn’t seen in the property inventories—fingerprint cards. The State’s examiner had been called by the defense at Kevin’s trial to testify that fingerprints recovered from the gun were Jerome’s prints, not Kevin’s. The examiner had performed the comparison, but he hadn’t actually pulled the prints from the gun. There was no name on the card, but I jotted down the tech’s initials at the bottom. Then I flipped through my summary of the trial transcript. Deputy Matisek leaned forward, and I imagined his mastiff ears perking up.

“Something wrong?” he asked.

“Not exactly. Did you work on this case at all?”

“We’re not a big department, so I’m sure I did, but I didn’t have primary responsibility for anything. Why?”

“The discovery files we have came from our client’s previous attorney, and I’m wondering if our fingerprint examiner’s report is complete. Do you think I could get another copy?”

Of course I could, eventually, but the question was whether I—or rather, Roger—would have to file a formal request through the Assistant State Attorney to do it. And that would mean time we didn’t have. Deputy Matisek considered for a moment.

“I don’t see why not,” he said.

“Good—thank you,” I said. “The examiner testified that he’d compared two fingerprints from the gun against our client’s prints, but there are five fingerprint cards here. The other three were probably unusable, but I’d like to check that off my list.”

Deputy Matisek pulled a small pad from his back pocket and jotted down a few numbers. Then he leaned out into the hallway and conferred with someone for a moment. “Done,” he said, when he came back in. “Anything else?”

“Not so far,” I said, “and I should be done soon.”

The last box held a few small random objects in the bottom, including a plastic, sandy beach snowglobe, and one big item—the wooden stick Kevin had mentioned. It was the approximate circumference of a broomstick, but a fraction of the length. Still, there was no way it could be mistaken for a gun.

“Shop owner had that?” Deputy Matisek asked.

“Yes,” I said, still feeling its heft.

I handed the stick over to the deputy. In my hand, it did look like a stick, something a bored kid might use to hit a Wiffle ball. In the deputy’s hand, as he adjusted his grip through the plastic bag, it looked like a weapon.

“Probably didn’t know how to use it,” he said. I gave him a blank look. “Short stick. You find it in some martial arts—Japanese and Filipino, probably others. Often you’ll see them used in pairs.”

“So where would you get one?”

He shrugged. “Probably find one in a pawn shop, or a secondhand store. Lot of people sign up for martial arts classes, for themselves or their kids, pay for the uniforms and all the toys, and then don’t follow through. Just like roller blades or anything else. If you don’t have a big enough garage to store all your junk, it’s got to end up somewhere.”

Matisek held the stick out to me, but pulled it back at the last second.

“Did I just fail my green belt test?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “but I might have found the source of those other fingerprints.”

Matisek moved next to me, pulling the plastic away to create some space around the stick and held it up to the light. “That look like print powder to you?” he asked.

I stood on tiptoes and leaned forward, weaving around until I got the angle just right to see a gray smear. “Either that or he used it to stir his cat litter box. Good eye.”

I was scheduled to review the evidence at the clerk’s office at eleven-thirty, and I suddenly realized I was cutting it close. Matisek led me back out to the front waiting room and suggested I drop by after lunch for the fingerprint report.

The courthouse was visible from the sheriff’s parking lot, so I walked instead of risking the midday parking. Well, trotted might be more accurate. I arrived two minutes late (by both their wall clock and my watch) and slightly out of breath. After showing identification, I was led to a table in a large room with several work stations. This time I was left unsupervised, though I was surrounded by employees. And this time, things went much more quickly. I had an exhibit list to check things off, but, unlike at the sheriff’s office, since everything had been offered at trial, I wasn’t looking for things that may have been overlooked. I was just trying to get a feel for what was there, especially the gun.

If Trevor denied supplying the gun (likely, considering his previous testimony), it was his word against Jerome’s, and I didn’t like those odds. I needed to connect the gun to Trevor, corroborating Jerome’s story while preferably keeping Jerome off the stand. Where would Trevor have gotten the gun? There was nothing special about the firearm. The serial numbers had been filed off, and it had probably gone through multiple owners since its original purchase. A ballistics test might be able to match it to unrecovered guns from other shootings, but you’d need the spent casings or bullets from the scenes for comparison. And despite TV shows to the contrary, law enforcement agencies at the local and state level don’t have the resources to maintain a searchable ballistics database.

I’m not a gun person, and I’d forgotten that it was a revolver. The cylinder was open and empty, a common safety precaution for bringing firearms into courthouses, as was the zip tie-looking strap that prevented the weapon from firing. I spent several minutes examining the firearm, first one side and then the other, but an involuntary shiver shook my body when I looked at the muzzle. I told myself I wasn’t dressed for the institutional air conditioning, but there was a thin sheen of sweat on the back of my neck and down my spine. Suck it up, Brennan. Do your job. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and reviewed the trial in my mind.

The only bullets introduced at Kevin’s trial were the misshapen lump recovered from the victim’s shoulder and the two recovered from the counter and wall. I looked at the gun’s cylinder and confirmed that it held six cartridges. So where were the other three, and the casings from the three that were fired? There was no reference to them in the sheriff’s property logs, or the clerk’s exhibit list. It’s possible the gun wasn’t fully loaded when Jerome used it. I doubted Jerome would have noticed, and even if he had, he wouldn’t remember now. Which brought me back to the gun itself.

The revolver wasn’t exactly a gangbanger’s first choice—it didn’t hold enough ammo and it didn’t look particularly badass. The wooden grip showed enough age to make me think it had been tucked away somewhere for years, only occasionally brought out rather than used (or displayed) on a regular basis. In his deposition, Trevor had said he had no siblings and no father in the picture, that he and his mother lived alone. The gun could have belonged to her.

Or it could have belonged to a man in the dark. A man waiting to kill you.

My eyes flew open and I saw the gun was shaking. Correction: my hands were shaking. The gun was just hanging out in them, as guns do, waiting to be used. Another tremor ran through me, one so violent that I dropped the gun on the table. My poor gun handling skills drew a few discreet glances. One heavyset man (whose hair had apparently been cut by a barber as palsied as I was) stared intently, as if he were just waiting to be a hero and take me down. What did he think I was going to do, throw the gun at him? The way my pulse was racing, I just might. I stumbled past a security guard and fled toward the exit.