All Is Not Forgotten(29)
Chapter Eleven
The driver was a young man named Cruz Demarco. He was arrested in Fairview for selling marijuana. He picked up an additional felony charge for selling drugs within 1,500 feet of a school. Of course, that was just the beginning.
I have two observations. First, while it may seem absurd that the presence of a modestly priced sedan on a residential street in Fairview would arouse such suspicion, it is actually quite logical, and in this instance, it paid off. It was profiling. There’s no way around that. I don’t disagree with our decision as a community to curtail its use. There are unfair consequences to innocent people, and that is unacceptable. However, that argument does not diminish the statistical facts. By example, there was a very low probability that the Civic, with New York plates, under those circumstances, belonged to a resident—maybe 1 percent. This is a fact—not an opinion. Checking Civics in Fairview was the first thing Parsons did after interviewing the kids at the party. There was a larger probability that it belonged to a housekeeper, landscaper, nanny, caregiver, relative, or the like. Consider also that no one came forward to report anything like this. Given the time of day and where it was parked, the largest piece of the pie chart would contain outsiders. And why would an outsider be parked outside a high school party, at night?
The second observation I have is how everyone in this town was so eager to believe Jenny had been raped by an outsider, how they clung to this Civic like a life raft of hope. Parsons was first and foremost among them. His excitement at finding this car felt desperate to me.
My heart was pounding when we approached the car. Man, I was so glad we waited for a transaction to go down. I was ripe for a bad search. No way I was letting this guy go without questioning him and searching that car. I kept thinking, “Holy shit. We got him! We got him!” But we didn’t have probable cause till we saw the sale go down. Thank God my partner was there, holding me back.
An unwitting sophomore named John Vincent had emptied his mother’s wallet earlier that morning in anticipation of Demarco’s return to Fairview. He walked nervously to the passenger side of the Civic.
This poor kid. What an idiot. He was trying to be discreet, you know, looking around but pretending he was just taking a stroll. Then he bends down at the side of the car. We can see the money going in. A small package going out. Right out of some cheesy cop show. We waited long enough to let the kid run away. You know, did one of those “Hey, you! Stop!” but then didn’t really make an effort to chase him down. My partner was already at the driver-side window. Had Koper pull the squad car into the intersection. Guy had nowhere to go.
This part of the story amuses me in a silly way. Officer Koper—it’s pronounced with a long o but still, it looks like it could be “copper.” And Cruz Demarco. That was his actual name, as ridiculous as it sounds, given to him by his nineteen-year-old mother, who probably thought it sounded cool. Or maybe it was some character from a video game, or one of the men who could have been the father. Cruz had his sob story. Single mother. Poverty. Shitty childhood in Buffalo. All I could think when I heard about him was that he would get eaten alive up in Somers.
I feel as though I am at the top of a roller coaster. I despise roller coasters, so I suppose I have been stalling. I have been a bystander thus far, an observer passing my judgments and rendering opinions. Everything started to happen that very early spring. My involvement with the Kramer family, treating Jenny as a patient, Sean Logan, and then the arrest of Cruz Demarco. The collision was coming, and I didn’t see it. With all my brilliant powers of deduction, I didn’t see it coming at all.
They found close to three pounds of marijuana in the blue Civic. That was more than enough for the arrest.
We got him down to the house. Impounded the car and called in forensics from Cranston. No way I was messing around with that. Can you imagine? If they found dirt matching the stuff behind Juniper Road? Or the black mask with the same fibers that were found under Jenny’s nails? I was like a kid on Christmas morning.
Demarco was an unpleasant human being. He was twenty-nine years old. Barely stood five feet four inches. Weighed under 120 pounds. If you’re a woman, you know what that looks like. He was skinny, and his pale white flesh hung from his limbs like an old woman’s. His black hair was long in the back and the front, shorter at the sides. It was slick from excessive hair gel. He moved with various twitches, in his walk and his speech, even his eyes. And he smelled of cheap soap. I did not meet the man in person, but he was described to me in great detail by Detective Parsons. From the photos in the local paper and what I was able to find on the Internet, he did not quite bow to the level of repulsion ascribed to him. But this is common. We want to hate someone, assign guilt or blame, impose punishment, so we see them in the worst possible light and impose upon them the worst possible traits. Or perhaps he was all those things. There was no doubt he was a criminal. But drug dealing and rape are two very different crimes.
He didn’t ask for a lawyer. I went so far as to have him sign a waiver. No way I was gonna risk a Miranda question. Got a camera wired up. Two cops watching from the outside. Me and my partner inside. We gave him his cigarettes and an orange soda. Started out making him feel comfortable, you know? See if that would work before we even let him know why he was really there. I just started the conversation while we were waiting for his sheet. I was like, “Yeah, tough break. This stuff is pretty much legal now. Maybe we can work something out. Really just want to keep our kids from getting off track, you know?” He shrugged. He said it was his brother’s car and he didn’t know anything about any drugs being in it. My partner got a little “bad cop” on him. Reminded him we saw him make a sale to the kid. He smiled. Said, “What sale? That kid was just asking me if I was lost or something. Reached in to help me read my map.” Seriously? I mean, yeah, there was a map in the glove compartment. But who the hell uses maps anymore? That thing was probably ten years old. Then we get a knock. They had his sheet. Bingo.