Page 88 of The Fourth Option
“Good morning, sir,” J.J. said, walking forward in dress pants and a tucked blouse, Glock and badge on her belt, folder in her hand.
“Close it, please.”
J.J. had been in the district office for just over a year. She had transferred from Miami, where she had spent eight years as a special agent assigned to the criminal drug squad. An attentive, observant, athletic former Chicago prosecutor turned agent, she was objectively good-looking, with the dark features and black hair that streaked naturally brown in the summer. Stanton was not concerned with her beauty; he was interested in her intellect, dedication, and investigative instincts, which was why hehad called Augie Lloyd on the way in and requested that J.J. be assigned to the Garden Murders and report directly to him.
She shut the door, and Stanton waved her to the chair in front of his desk.
“Okay,” he said. “What did you find?”
“The Staub kid’s OD was handled by the COPE squad at NOPD.”
“Lieutenant Bates’s unit.”
“They do a lot of work in the Ninth. Not surprising they got the call.”
“Do we know how the call came into dispatch?”
“It didn’t come into dispatch,” she answered. “Records indicate it was a routine patrol. I have inquiries into the NOPD vehicle pool to see if they match up. Also checking the standard routes that they drive over there.”
Stanton nodded his approval.Thatwas why he had chosen J.J. “What else?”
“Like you said when you called earlier, sir, no probable cause listed when the officer, Rayne, opened the trunk, but as it was a homicide he didn’t need one.”
That had been nagging at Stanton. The drugs found inside the trunk had informed the cause of death. An open-and-shut case. Too simple? Sometimes, cases actually were exactly what they seemed. But not always.
“The car is a ’93 Jetta, base model,” he said. “I looked it up and, at least according to what I could find, that model didn’t come with an inside trunk release.”
“Meaning Officer Rayne would have had to reach across the dead kid to grab the keys from the ignition or search his pockets for them to open it,” she said, completing his thought.
“That seem strange to you?”
“Not necessarily. They were in the Ninth. High crime area with a dead kid. I don’t think it would be all that unusual to search the car. Inventory exception allows him to do it since they were seizing the vehicle, though it is a little odd that he did it alone.”
He tented his fingers before his face and rocked in his chair. “And the tox screen?”
She glanced at her papers. “A smorgasbord of opiates.”
“Do you mean opiates, as in truly derived from the opium poppy plant? Or opioids, as in synthetics?”
“Both, according to the tox screen.”
“Fentanyl?”
“No.”
“What drugs exactly, then?”
“Like often happens, the OD was a result of a drug cocktail. There were elements of opiate-based heroin, but also synthetic opioids. When they intermingle, the lab techs can’t attribute the lethal chemicals back to individual drugs.”
“Any of that drug we’ve been hearing about from up north? Snowball?”
“There’s no telltale chemical signature to Snowball. It reads as another synthetic opioid. I can say that there were no pills at the scene. Just the heroin bricks.”
“So, he took pills somewhere else?”
“It happens. Or he had some leftover pills in his system and shot up with heroin before he crashed and burned.”
“Track marks on his arms?”
