Double Tap

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Some years ago I came to the conclusion that of all my death-house clients, the worst are the talkers. The unavoidable impulse to chatter is usually egged on by a little absolution and some cheering from the cops who have collared the suspects, who will rattle on, talking with one hand while signing Miranda waivers with the other, conversing on every topic imaginable except the need for a lawyer.

All of this will generally result in enough lurid details to earn your client a ticket on a gurney ride to the gas chamber before you ever arrive at the police station.

There are those who will tell you that such people are simply stupid. Having seen enough of them over the years, I can tell you that this is not the case. Most criminal defendants who hang themselves do it because they want to, or because they have to. Call it an irresistible impulse, a death wish. They do it for the same reason that some fleeing felons commit suicide by cop. In their minds, and in the absence of a good exorcism, they see it as the only avenue of escape for whatever good remains inside of them.

Fortunately for Harry and me, Ruiz feels no such compulsion. Whether you can equate this to a total absence of guilt or a dark spot on his soul that has swallowed the human emotion of remorse, it is becoming clear that when all is said and done, the only person who will ever know with certainty whether he did the crime or not is likely to be Mr. Ruiz. He is tight-lipped, not only with the cops and the jailhouse crowd, but with his own lawyers.

“Let’s talk about this gap in your résumé.” Harry presses this issue with some vengeance. We are back at the jail, confronted by what appears to be a seven-year gap in Ruiz’s life, an apparent blank in his military records.

“All I can tell you is what I told Kendal. There is no gap. I don’t know what to say.”

Harry paws through the papers. “Says here your last posting was Fort Bragg.”

“That’s right.”

“Then there’s nothing, no activity until three years ago.” Harry puts the papers down in front of Ruiz and points at the dates and the brief blocks of print with his finger, some orders where Ruiz’s name is listed with three or four other military types traveling from one base to another.

“So we have a period of more than seven years where your name doesn’t show up anywhere. How is that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You were at Fort Bragg that entire period?”

“Correct.”

“Doing what?”

“Like I say, I was training. Mostly weapons and tactics.”

“You never traveled anywhere? Because if you traveled, they’d have to cut orders. Your name would show up somewhere.”

“Guess I didn’t,” he says. “It was late in my career. Once they post you like that, sometimes they don’t move you around much. It wasn’t like now. We weren’t at war.”

Harry isn’t buying it. “There are no pages missing,” he says. “They’re numbered and dated at the top.”

Ruiz looks at them. Concedes the point. He doesn’t have an answer.

“Tell us what you were doing.”

“I told you: training.”

“I assume this involved some shooting?”

“I told you it did. At the range.”

“Pistols, rifles?”

“Both.”

Like pulling teeth.

I enter the fray. “But you weren’t a drill sergeant.”

“No. It was advanced infantry.”

“Rangers?” I have made some phone calls, done a little research.

“Yeah.”

“How many Ranger outfits were at Bragg when you were there?”

“Jeez. I don’t remember. I know they had a jump school.”

“Did you do jump training?”

“No.”

“Did you get that at the shooting range?” Ruiz is wearing a loose tank top this morning. As he leans over the table in the little cubicle, there is a deep scar visible an inch or so from his right nipple.

Ruiz glances down and adjusts his top a little to cover this. “That? That was an accident.”

“Bullet wound, right?” Harry has seen enough of them over the years, mostly on clients, to recognize it.

“Yeah. Standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“A training accident?”

“You could call it that.”

“We’ve seen the booking report when they brought you in,” Harry tells him. “You’ve been shot at least four times. There’s enough metal inside of you to set off a magnetometer.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that besides the bullet wounds, you’re carrying shrapnel from explosive rounds. Steel,” says Harry. “Fragments from artillery; mortars, maybe?”

“It was a grenade accident.”

“When?”

“I don’t remember. It was a long time ago. I was doing some training with a recruit. He had the grenade. He was supposed to pop the pin and throw it over a wall. Heave it as far as he could. He got nervous and dropped it. I tried to kick it into the sump. It would have gone down a chute and exploded harmlessly. I was a little late.”

“That’s all there is to it?”

“That’s it.”

“This happen at Bragg?” I ask.

Ruiz looks at me, thinks for a half a beat before he answers, then says: “No.” He knows that if he says yes, it won’t square with the military records on the table in front of him.

“The bullet wounds-those are all accidents too?”

“Some of them.”

“What about the rest?” Harry asks.

“What do you mean?”

“Where did you get ‘em?”

“Different places. One in Panama. You remember that?”

Harry nods.

“Can’t remember the other one.”

“There’s three more.”

“You ever been in the military?” Ruiz looks at him.

“Reserves,” says Harry. “A long time ago.”

“When you been in the infantry for twenty years, you pick up things. You don’t always remember where you got ‘em.”

“I think I’d remember where I got shot,” says Harry.

Ruiz shrugs his shoulders and takes a drag on the cigarette he started when he came in. “By the way, I wanted to thank you,” he says.

“For what?”

“For getting them to dispense with the leg shackles when we meet.”

Harry has gone to bat for him with one of the muni court judges. He got an order two days ago directed to the sheriff that Ruiz is not to be shackled when inside the confines of the jail.

“Trust me,” he says. “None of this, the military stuff, has anything to do with the case.”

“We’re just trying to fill in the blanks. You can bet that if we put you on the stand, the DA’s gonna ask the same questions.”

“And he’s gonna get the same answers,” says Ruiz. “Trust me. You don’t want to know.”

That’s enough to pique Harry’s curiosity. “Is that why Kendal dropped the case?” says Harry.

“I have no idea. You’d have to ask him.”

“We have. He’s not talking.”

I shoot Harry a look. This is a sore point with my partner, the fact that Dale Kendal test-drove the case through the preliminary hearing, kicked the tires, and put his head under the hood, only to walk away. Whatever it was that scared him off, Kendal isn’t telling us.

“You’re gonna have to trust me on this.” Ruiz is adamant, so we leave it for the moment and move on to other issues.

Ruiz has had months to meditate on his fate. Alone without family or friends for support, he has had endless opportunities to make his situation worse by talking to the cops immediately after his arrest or by purging his soul in the jailhouse confessional, passing damaging tidbits of information to other inmates in the lockup in return for camaraderie. He has done none of this.

I switch gears. “Let’s talk about the murder weapon. The handgun.”

“What about it?”

“Where did you get it?”

“The military. It’s in the records.” He points to the pile of papers in front of Harry on the table.

“They issued it to you at Bragg?”

He nods.

“Was it a training weapon?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s not a standard sidearm?”

“No.”

“Did they issue you one of those as well?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean a Beretta. Nine millimeter. That is the standard sidearm for the Army, isn’t it?”

“Yes. They issued me one.”

“And where is that? Did you turn it in when you were discharged?”

“I did.”

“But not the forty-five. Why not?”

“Like I told you. That weapon was heavily modified. We used it at the range all the time for special training. You give it back to them, they’re gonna junk it. It’s had too much wear. Changed out the barrel at least twice. The trigger was set for my pull. Would have been worthless to anybody else.”

“So you used the forty-five for training all the time, but you didn’t use the nine millimeter?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you didn’t wear the nine millimeter out?”

He sucks on the cigarette, expels the smoke through his nose. “True.”

“One thing I don’t understand,” I tell him. “Why did you bring the gun to her house in the first place if you never carried it for security work?”

“Huh?”

“Why did you bring the gun to Chapman’s house?”

“If you wanna know, I brought it there because she asked me to.”

“She asked you?” Harry cuts in.

“Yeah. She wanted me to take her to the range, show her how to shoot. She kept pestering me, so finally I agreed. She had a thing for firearms. Handguns. Some women do.”

“Forty-five auto’s a pretty heavy piece for a woman,” says Harry.

“That’s what I told her. I suggested a twenty-two, something light. She said no. She wanted something challenging, a real firearm. So I brought the HK over.”

“Bag and all?” I say.

He nods. “I figured she would fire it once and that would be the end of it. I was wrong. She actually liked it.”

“You let her fire it?”

“It’s what she wanted. And Madelyn always got what she wanted. Tell you the truth, she didn’t even flinch, not even the first shot. It had a laser sight and a silencer. Course we couldn’t bring the silencer to the-”

“What did you say?”

He looks at me, a question mark. “It had a laser sight.”

“Where?”

“In the bag.”

Harry and I look at one another. “Not when the cops found it.”

“What are you talking about? It was there.”

“They found the gun outside in the backyard in some bushes near the back wall. The silencer they found on the rocks out near the water on the other side. The bag, according to the evidence report, was upstairs in the bedroom, on top of a dresser. They found an extra loaded clip with the bag and that was it.”

Ruiz takes the cigarette out of his mouth and looks at the two of us.

“You’re sure the sight was in the bag when you brought the gun to the house?”

“Positive. I was a little nervous about the silencer.”

Under federal law, possession of a silencer or sound suppressor for a firearm by anyone other than the military or law enforcement is a felony.

“I’d been meaning to crush it, throw it away,” says Ruiz. “I should have done it.”

I’m making notes as he talks. The silencer explains why none of the neighbors heard the shots that killed Chapman. The laser sight could be critical. Up to this point the cops have been operating on the theory that only a crack marksman could have placed the two shots that killed Chapman. It is one of the key points of their case, that Ruiz owned the gun and in their own words is a “world-class expert marksman” with a handgun.

“The laser sight. How does it work?”

“Red dot. You put it on the target and pull the trigger. The sight slides in a rail under the barrel. It runs off a nine-volt battery.”

“I assume this would lower the marksmanship threshold for the shooter. Make it easier for someone shooting the gun to hit what they were aiming at.”

“You bet. As long as you can see the laser dot and the sight’s aligned properly. You put that dot on your target and that’s where the round’s gonna go. I used the sight when I took Madelyn to shoot. It was an indoor range, a shop out near Escondido. She shot the shit out of the center ring at twenty-five and thirty yards. Then nothing else would do: she wanted a silhouette target.”

“This was with the laser sight?”

“Yeah. Truth is, she had a kind of natural talent. Steady hand and a good eye. And that’s a piece with some recoil. She held it, two-handed the thing, and laid down a pretty fair pattern. Tight, if you know what I mean.”

“What you’re telling us is that somebody who was unfamiliar with that particular gun, if they could have figured out how to use the laser sight, could have made the two shots that killed her pretty easily?” Harry asks.

He makes a face. “I don’t see why not, if your target isn’t moving and it isn’t shooting back. Piece of cake,” he says. “There’s no trick to the double tap. The key is hitting the target with the first round. You don’t sight-align your second shot. You set up and just pull the trigger twice in quick succession-bang, bang. Like that. They use it to clear close-in targets, make sure of the kill.”

“According to the cops, the shooter was thirty feet away when he killed Chapman,” says Harry.

“It’s a little long,” says Ruiz, “but doable. Especially with the laser sight. Probably froze her in place if the laser got in her eyes. The red beam tends to put you in a daze.”

A client facing capital charges usually leaks more acid than the average battery. Closeted in a cell with only their own dark thoughts for company twenty-three hours a day, even rock-hard cons used to doing long stretches can sometimes lose it. Some exude enough sweat that you would swear every cell wall in their body is collapsing, leaving you to wonder how it is possible to fashion a defense around a formless bag of saline. After a few jailhouse visits, you can usually smell it in the air, fear dripping from them like the psychic odor of warm urine. But Ruiz emits none of this. It causes me to wonder what makes him tick.

“Who else knew that the gun was in that drawer?” says Harry.

“Madelyn, for one.”

“You told her you kept it there?”

“She asked me about it. When she came back for protection, after the security detail was disbanded. Said when she was alone in the house, it made her feel better knowing it was there if she needed it. That’s why I didn’t take it when I left. I’ve got half a dozen handguns. That was one I didn’t use much. It was too large for concealed use. I used it at the range with her and that was about it. I figured if it made her feel better, I’d leave it there.”

“According to the police report, you told the cops you forgot the gun at the house,” Harry points out. “Now you’re telling us you left it there because she wanted you to.”

“At first I did forget it. When she called me, after the security detail was ended, I told her I needed to come by and pick it up. That’s when she asked me if I could just leave it there a while longer. I figured there was no sense telling the cops: they weren’t gonna believe me.”

“What about other people on the security detail? Did they know the gun was there?”

“They may have. Like I said, toward the end I tried to make sure I was never alone with her at the house. It was getting to be bad form.”

“So somebody might have seen the gun in the drawer?”

“It’s possible.”

We go over the list of names. This is short: two other employees of Karr, Rufus.

“Did they find any fingerprints on the gun?” asks Ruiz.

“Should they have?” says Harry.

“I assumed that if they found somebody else’s, they wouldn’t have arrested me,” he says. “Did they find mine?”

“No.”

“I’m not surprised,” Ruiz says. “I cleaned and oiled it pretty well last time we used it. After we went to the range. Put it away wet: figured I probably wouldn’t be using it again for a while so it was best to give it a good oiling. You’re not likely to find prints on something like that.”

Ruiz seems to know a lot about this, the forensics of fingerprints on firearms. It is a truism that most people don’t realize that good prints are rarely found on a firearm after a crime. One of the reasons is the oil used to clean the gun, along with the shooter’s sweaty hands-that is, if he isn’t wearing gloves.

“The oil and the recoil usually screw up anything that might be readable,” says Ruiz.

“You sound like you might have worked crimes at one time,” I say.

“No. Just done a lot of shooting. You pick up bits and pieces of information.”

Harry changes the subject. “Have you ever heard the name Primis?”

Ruiz looks at him as if perhaps he’s talking to someone else. “Excuse me?”

“Primis software?”

He gives Harry a face, a kind of scrunched-up expression, then shakes his head, shrugs. “Never heard of it.”

“What about Protector?”

He shakes his head. “No. What is it?”

“You never heard Chapman talk about either of these?”

He thinks for a moment. “No. Like I told you, she didn’t talk about business. At least not with me. What are they?”

“You never overheard her talking to anybody else when she might have mentioned these?”

He shakes his head. “I told you. No.”

We’re done for the session. Harry begins to gather his papers, slipping them back into his briefcase.

“Oh, one other thing before I forget: the handgun. The forty-five. It has some letters engraved on the side of the frame. Do you know anything about those, what they stand for?”

“I don’t think so.”

I pull a slip of paper from my pocket, the yellow Post-it, and read from it. “The letters read USSOCOM. All capitals cut into the side of the slide.” I look up at Ruiz.

He’s standing there, one foot up on the metal chair at the other side of the table, gaze cast down at the flat stainless-steel surface in front of him. He arches his eyebrows, cigarette pressed between his lips, one hand up to cup it. He slowly shakes his head. “Doesn’t ring any bells.”

“I checked it out. Ran a Google search. You know what that is?”

“Internet, right?”

“Yeah. Seems there’s actually a site on this particular model handgun.”

“That so?”

“Yes. Heckler and Koch Model Mark Twenty-three. Originally it was made for only one customer, the United States government.”

“Really?”

“They make a civilian model now, but the original, the one you had, that was made only for military use under a special contract. The letters on the side”-I look down at the note in my hand again-“USSOCOM: it stands for United States Special Operations Command.”

If this sets off galvanic responses in his skin or elevates Ruiz’s blood pressure or respiration, you wouldn’t know it by looking at him. “Oh, I have heard of Special Ops Command. Didn’t recognize the acronym.”

“They’re headquartered down in Tampa,” says Harry. “MacDill Air Force Base.”

Ruiz takes it all in but doesn’t say a thing.

“Seems there’s a lot of interesting things going on down there,” Harry remarks.

“Really?”

“According to the online site, they have an Army Ranger unit attached. Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment?”

“Not familiar with them,” says Ruiz.

“And there’s something they call Psy Ops,” says Harry. “Psychological Operations Command. And a special-warfare school.”

Ruiz doesn’t say anything, just takes a drag on the cigarette, which is now down to a butt.

“So, have you ever been there?”

“Where?”

“MacDill Air Force Base?” says Harry.

Ruiz smiles. “I was wondering when you were going to ask. Sorry to disappoint you. The answer is no. Listen, the fact that that sidearm was issued doesn’t mean a thing. That particular weapon is probably issued in half the military ranges in the country. For training purposes.”

“So you’ve never been attached to Special Operations Command?”

“To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever even driven past MacDill Air Force Base,” says Ruiz.