After the burglary list was a report detailing all thefts of black Grand Cherokees in the county during the last year. Winston had apparently believed the shooter’s car was also a contradiction-a high-line vehicle used in an economically low-line crime. McCaleb thought it was a good jump to consider the car was probably stolen. There were twenty-four Cherokees on the list but no other reports indicating any follow-up. Maybe, he considered, Winston had simply changed her mind after connecting her shooting to the Torres case. The Good Samaritan had described a getaway vehicle from the market shooting that could be a Cherokee. Since that indicated the shooter had not gotten rid of it, it possibly hadn’t been stolen after all.
The autopsy protocol was next and McCaleb flipped through the pages quickly. He knew from experience that ninety percent of any autopsy report was dedicated to the minute description of the procedure, identifying the characteristics of the victim’s interior organs and state of health at the time of death. Most of the time it was only the summary that was important to McCaleb. But in the Cordell case even that part of the autopsy was irrelevant because it was obvious. He found the summary anyway and nodded as he read what he already knew. Massive brain damage had led to Cordell’s death within minutes of the shooting.
He put the autopsy report aside. The next stack of reports dealt with Winston’s three-strike theory. Believing the shooter was an ex-convict facing life without parole for another conviction, Winston had gone to the state parole offices in Van Nuys and Lancaster and pulled files on paroled armed robbers who were Caucasian and had two prior felony convictions on their records. These were people facing third-strike penalties if arrested again under the new law. There were seventy-one of them assigned to the two parole offices geographically nearest the two robbery-shootings.
Winston and other deputies had slowly gone through the list in the weeks since the robberies and murders. According to the reports, they had paid visits to nearly every man on the list. Of the seventy-one, only seven of the men couldn’t be found. This indicated they had violated parole and had probably left the area or might still be in the area hiding and possibly were more likely to be committing armed robberies and even murders. Nationwide parole pickup bulletins were issued for all these men on law enforcement computer networks. Of the men who were contacted, initial interviews and investigation cleared almost ninety percent through alibis. The remaining eight had been cleared through other investigative means-chiefly because their physical dimensions did not match those of the shooter’s upper body on the video.
Aside from the missing seven men on the list, the three-strikes avenue of investigation was stagnant. Winston was apparently hoping that one of those seven would eventually turn up and be tied to the shooting.
McCaleb moved on to the remaining Cordell reports. There were two follow-up interviews with James Noone at the Star Center. His story never differed in these reports and his recollection of the Cherokee driver never got any better.
There also was a crime scene sketch and four field-interview reports on traffic stops of men driving black Cherokees. They had been stopped in Lancaster and Palmdale within an hour of the ATM shooting by deputies made aware of the Cherokee’s use in the crime by a sheriff’s radio broadcast. The identification of each driver was run through the computer and they were sent on their way after coming up clean. The reports were forwarded to Winston.
The last item McCaleb read was the most recent summary report filed by Winston. It was short and to the point.
“No new leads or suspects at this time. Investigating officer is waiting at this point for additional information that may lead to the ID of a suspect.”
Winston was at the wall. She was waiting. She needed fresh blood.
McCaleb drummed his fingers on the table and thought about all he had just read. He agreed with the moves Winston had made but he tried to think of what she had missed and what else could be done. He liked her three-strike theory and shared her disappointment at not being able to cull a suspect out of the list of seventy-one. The fact that most of the men were cleared through alibis bothered him. How could so many two-strikes dirtbags be able to perfectly account for their exact whereabouts on two different nights? He had always been suspicious of alibis when he was working cases. He knew it took only one liar to make an alibi.
McCaleb stopped his finger roll on the table as he thought of something. He fanned the stack of Cordell reports across the table. He didn’t need to look through them because he knew that what he was thinking of was not in the pile. He had realized that Winston had never geographically cross-referenced her various theories.
