Read Online Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald) by Margaret Maron - Free Book Online
Authors: Margaret Maron
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which players had been charged with DWI.
Her fingers flashed over the board as she keyed in the name of the boy Wally’s daughter was seeing. No outstanding warrants in his name. She tried him with DMV. One speeding ticket last year. His Social Security number did not begin with the 110 which indicated New York so she checked a reference book on her desk and saw that it must have been issued in Missouri. A few dozen more keystrokes and she was querying Missouri’s DMV.
Nothing.
She repeated the process with the father’s name and immediately scored a direct hit. At that very moment, the man was wanted in St. Charles, Missouri for aggravated assault, a nonfamily incident involving a gun. The entry ended IMMED CONFIRM RECORD WITH ORI. In this case, the originating office was that of the St. Charles County sheriff’s department.
“Oh, jeez,” said Wally when she told him. “I didn’t really think you’d get a hit. I was just playing safe. Oh jeez, Dee’s gonna kill me. She really likes this guy and here I’ve fingered his old man.”
He ripped off the printout and went away to set the appropriate wheels in motion.
Shortly before ten, her friend Jennifer phoned over from central data processing. They gossiped for a couple of minutes, then Jennifer said, “Oh, by the way: that cop that got shot over in Sheepshead Bay?”
“Mmm?” Lotty remembered hearing it mentioned during the supper break. She thought she might have seen him in passing, with some of the homicide detectives, but he was no one she’d formally met and she couldn’t really put a face to Michael Cluett’s name.
“We got in a notice tonight that you once ran a check on the gun that killed him.”
“I did?” she asked, interested. “When?”
“Almost four years ago.” Candace read off the date.
“What was it in connection with?”
“Doesn’t say. Better check it out though. Someone’ll probably be around tonight or tomorrow to ask you about it.”
“Give me the serial number,” said Lotty and wrote it down on her pad, along with the gun’s make, a Browning .380 semiautomatic.
It took a while to reconstruct that evening, but it’d happened when she was still new at the job and conscientiously noting everything in the log. When she’d finished, Lotty stared blankly at her computer screen.
One gun check in the middle of a three-hour stint with license numbers? That meant it probably wasn’t official.
It was coming back to her. Her natural friendly helpfulness coupled with who was asking. She could even remember the earlier conversation that had triggered the check.
A white patrol officer in the Bronx had run into a dark alley after a fleeing man reported to be armed. At the end of the alley, he’d turned with a menacing gesture as if to fire. The officer fired first; the man was killed.
Except that the “gun” in the man’s hand turned out to be a stolen video tape and the “man” was a fourteen-year-old black youth.
Between the press and angry community leaders, the patrol officer had been suspended indefinitely.
Unfairly, many thought.
Lotty could remember some of the frustrated comments. “In the dark, fourteen looks like twenty-five.”
“Why’d he run, if he wasn’t guilty of something?”
“The kid was a thief, wasn’t he?”
“Just a matter of time before he upped it to armed robbery. Hell, I say Kearns probably saved the state a hundred thou.”
“You don’t see ’em giving him a medal, do you?” snorted one of the old-line officers. “That’ll never happen to me,” he added with heavy significance. “If I ever kill somebody, he’s damn sure going to have a gun by the time the TV cameras get there.”
There had been a moment of silence.
“Hey, now, wait a minute,” a young officer objected. “That’s really asking for trouble.”
“Yeah? Go tell it to Kearns.”
Three nights later, Lotty was asked to run a check on that serial number.
By then they’d heard that Kearns had two
Her fingers flashed over the board as she keyed in the name of the boy Wally’s daughter was seeing. No outstanding warrants in his name. She tried him with DMV. One speeding ticket last year. His Social Security number did not begin with the 110 which indicated New York so she checked a reference book on her desk and saw that it must have been issued in Missouri. A few dozen more keystrokes and she was querying Missouri’s DMV.
Nothing.
She repeated the process with the father’s name and immediately scored a direct hit. At that very moment, the man was wanted in St. Charles, Missouri for aggravated assault, a nonfamily incident involving a gun. The entry ended IMMED CONFIRM RECORD WITH ORI. In this case, the originating office was that of the St. Charles County sheriff’s department.
“Oh, jeez,” said Wally when she told him. “I didn’t really think you’d get a hit. I was just playing safe. Oh jeez, Dee’s gonna kill me. She really likes this guy and here I’ve fingered his old man.”
He ripped off the printout and went away to set the appropriate wheels in motion.
Shortly before ten, her friend Jennifer phoned over from central data processing. They gossiped for a couple of minutes, then Jennifer said, “Oh, by the way: that cop that got shot over in Sheepshead Bay?”
“Mmm?” Lotty remembered hearing it mentioned during the supper break. She thought she might have seen him in passing, with some of the homicide detectives, but he was no one she’d formally met and she couldn’t really put a face to Michael Cluett’s name.
“We got in a notice tonight that you once ran a check on the gun that killed him.”
“I did?” she asked, interested. “When?”
“Almost four years ago.” Candace read off the date.
“What was it in connection with?”
“Doesn’t say. Better check it out though. Someone’ll probably be around tonight or tomorrow to ask you about it.”
“Give me the serial number,” said Lotty and wrote it down on her pad, along with the gun’s make, a Browning .380 semiautomatic.
It took a while to reconstruct that evening, but it’d happened when she was still new at the job and conscientiously noting everything in the log. When she’d finished, Lotty stared blankly at her computer screen.
One gun check in the middle of a three-hour stint with license numbers? That meant it probably wasn’t official.
It was coming back to her. Her natural friendly helpfulness coupled with who was asking. She could even remember the earlier conversation that had triggered the check.
A white patrol officer in the Bronx had run into a dark alley after a fleeing man reported to be armed. At the end of the alley, he’d turned with a menacing gesture as if to fire. The officer fired first; the man was killed.
Except that the “gun” in the man’s hand turned out to be a stolen video tape and the “man” was a fourteen-year-old black youth.
Between the press and angry community leaders, the patrol officer had been suspended indefinitely.
Unfairly, many thought.
Lotty could remember some of the frustrated comments. “In the dark, fourteen looks like twenty-five.”
“Why’d he run, if he wasn’t guilty of something?”
“The kid was a thief, wasn’t he?”
“Just a matter of time before he upped it to armed robbery. Hell, I say Kearns probably saved the state a hundred thou.”
“You don’t see ’em giving him a medal, do you?” snorted one of the old-line officers. “That’ll never happen to me,” he added with heavy significance. “If I ever kill somebody, he’s damn sure going to have a gun by the time the TV cameras get there.”
There had been a moment of silence.
“Hey, now, wait a minute,” a young officer objected. “That’s really asking for trouble.”
“Yeah? Go tell it to Kearns.”
Three nights later, Lotty was asked to run a check on that serial number.
By then they’d heard that Kearns had two
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