Fatal Error

23

Grass Valley, California

Detective Gilbert Morris of the Grass Valley Police Department wasn’t having an especially good weekend. Once upon a time, when Gil first hired on with the department, being promoted to the Investigations Unit was more of an honor than anything else. Sure you had a few car thefts and break-ins to investigate from time to time, but not many murders. Maybe one every two to three years. At that point, the Investigations Unit would get called out to do their homicide investigation dance. That, of course, was back before the meth industry came to town and set up shop.

People had started killing one another with wild abandon about the time Gil got promoted to the I.U., and there didn’t seem to be any sign of the homicide count letting up. That didn’t mean, however, that the city fathers had seen fit to adjust the budget enough to allow for any more than four detectives. In the short term that had been good for Gil’s overtime pay, but long-term it had been bad for his marriage. This week had been especially tough. Dan Cassidy, the lieutenant in charge, was out for knee surgery, Joe Moreno was off on his honeymoon, and Kenny Mosier’s father was taking his own sweet time dying in a hospital somewhere in Ohio. That meant Gil was the only Investigations guy in town, and this was fast turning into a very crowded week.

Friday was a good case in point. That night, two brothers, some of Grass Valley’s less exemplary citizens, had gone to war with each other and had both ended up dead. George and Bobby Herrera were a pair of homegrown thugs who had graduated from small-town thievery to running a meth lab out of their rundown apartment on the outskirts of town. Both had been pumped up on a combination of booze and meth. What started out as a verbal confrontation had escalated to physical violence when they took their furious sibling rivalry into the unpaved parking lot outside their apartment.

When weapons appeared, fellow residents ducked for cover and called the cops. By the time officers arrived on the scene, both brothers were on the ground. Bobby had died instantly. George died while en route to the hospital. Gil arrived at the crime scene to find both brothers were deceased, leaving in their wake a mountain of evidence and a daunting amount of paperwork.

Gil had spent all day Saturday working the crime scene. It wasn’t a matter of solving the crime, because the double homicide pretty well solved itself. Several witnesses came forward to claim that they had seen everything that had happened in the weed-strewn parking lot. A hazmat team came by to dismantle the meth lab George and Bobby had been running in their cockroach-infested one-bedroom apartment.

“It’s a good thing they’re both dead,” the hazmat guy told Gil. “If they had started a fire in their meth lab kitchen, the place would have gone up like so much dried tinder and the other people who lived here might not have been able to get out.”

Gil took one statement after another. The witnesses’ stories were all slightly different, but the general outlines were all the same. When the brothers were sober, they were fine. When they were drunk or high, look out. Bobby and George had been pleasant enough earlier that Friday morning, but by the middle of the afternoon they were screaming at one another and, as one young mother of a three-year-old reported, using some very inappropriate language.

Bobby, the younger of the two, had come running out of their downstairs apartment carrying a rifle of some kind and wearing nothing but a pair of boxers. Gil Morris had to admit, going barefoot in Grass Valley in January was something of a feat. Friday had been clear but very cold. Obviously Bobby was feeling no pain.

Bobby stood there holding the gun pointed at the door and yelling at his brother to man up and come outside. Otherwise he was a lily-livered something or other-several expletives deleted. At that point several of the neighbors, crouched behind furniture, saw the weapon, picked up their phones, and dialed 911. Unfortunately, before officers could get there, George emerged from the apartment. He was fully dressed and carrying a firearm of his own.

According to witnesses, both men stopped screaming for a moment. They seemed to be listening to the sound of approaching sirens before Bobby resumed his rant.

“You stupid son of a bitch!” he screamed. “You had to go call the cops, didn’t you.”

Just like that, as though they were on the same wavelength, they both pulled their respective triggers. George was evidently the better shot of the two. His bullet removed most of his brother’s head. Bobby was dead the instant he was hit. Bobby’s shot went low and tore through George’s femoral artery. By the time the EMTs were able to get to him, he had lost too much blood and couldn’t be stabilized.

As a police officer, Gil found himself being grateful that those two dodos had killed each other without damaging someone else. Then, late Saturday evening as he was about to call it a day, he found himself face-to-face with Sylvia Herrera, Bobby and George’s grieving but furious mother.

“Why?” she wailed at him. “Why are my boys dead, my poor innocent babies?”

Bobby and George had been twenty-six and twenty-nine respectively. As far as Gil was concerned, they were a long way from babies. And they were a long way from innocent too. They were a pair of drug-stupefied losers, but Gil couldn’t say that to their mother, and Sylvia Herrera was inconsolable.

Finally, when she quieted enough for him to get a word in edgewise, Gil said, “I’m so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Herrera. It’s the drugs, you know.”

“Drugs?” she screeched back at him. “You say it’s the drugs?”

He nodded. She reached out a hand and waggled a finger at him, thumping him on the chest as she spoke, like a mother remonstrating with a difficult child.

“Don’t you know drugs are illegal?” she demanded. “You’re the police. You should stop them.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he agreed. “We certainly should.”

On Saturday night it wasn’t necessary for him to call Linda in advance and tell her he was going to be late. Months earlier his wife of twenty some years had given up on being married to a policeman. She had taken the kids and the dog and the cat and had gone home to live with her folks in Mt. Shasta City. It was too bad, “a crying shame,” as some of the guys at work had put it. The truth is Gil had done his share of crying about it, although he’d never tell his buddies at the department a word about that. Instead, he kept a stiff upper lip and motored along from case to case.

He was sorry about losing his family, but there didn’t seem to be a damned thing he could do to fix it any more than he could stop the overwhelming flood of drugs that had taken the lives of Sylvia Herrera’s sons.

So Detective Morris dragged his weary body home to his empty house that was furnished with whatever leavings Linda’s father hadn’t been able to cram in the U-Haul. Linda had left him one plate, one bowl, one glass, one coffee cup, and one set of silverware. That simplified Gil’s meal planning, and it simplified clean up too. He washed every dish he owned after every meal. He thought about microwaving one of those Healthy Choice dinners, but he didn’t bother. They tasted like crap, and anyway he was too tired to eat. Or even drink. He stripped off his clothes, fell crosswise on the bed, and fell asleep.

The next morning Gil was still in his shorts, eating the crummy dregs from the bottom of a nearly empty box of Honey Nut Cheerios, drinking instant coffee, and wishing he had a toaster so he could have an English muffin, when the phone rang.

“Uniformed officers are reporting what appears to be a homicide at the top of Jan Road,” the dispatch officer for Grass Valley PD told him. And so, at eleven forty-five on a chill Sunday morning in January, Gil Morris found himself summoned to his third homicide case in as many days.

Yes, it’s a good thing Linda is gone, Gil told himself as he hurried into the bedroom to get dressed. Otherwise she’d be pitching a royal fit.