A Dime on a Headstone

Terry had been right about how rare guns like this were. The ATF records showed only four stolen from FFL holders, and the pistols had been found and returned to them after being used as evidence. The NCIC data was about the same after we searched through page after page of data.

It finally boiled down to about a hundred guns that were still missing and were the type of nine-millimeter pistol usually used by competition shooters. What we couldn't tell was if they'd been modified or not. When Terry called the original owners, only three said their pistols had been modified. Terry sent the serial numbers of those three to the ATF to be traced. Only one trace came back with usable information. The other two had been either destroyed or deemed to be unrecoverable. Usually that means the perp tossed them into a lake or river, or sold or gave the pistol to somebody else. Criminals never seem to remember who that person was.

That pistol, a Beretta 92, had been sold to Thomas Rainey of Chattanooga two years before Donnie's murder. When we called him, he said he'd upgraded the barrel to a one in twenty-four twist and had a new trigger group installed before it was stolen in a home robbery. He'd been on vacation, and the robbers broke into his house, used crowbars to pry open his gun safe and took the pistol and a couple of rifles he'd stored there.

What made this particular Beretta even more interesting was the NCIC records showed a pawn shop in South Nashville had sold this same gun a month before Donnie was murdered. The serial number had been recorded on ATF form 4473 and the pawn shop had run the purchaser's information through NCIC. NCIC did exactly what they were supposed to do. NCIC doesn't check serial numbers during 4473 checks. They only verify the purchaser is not prohibited from owning a firearm. That purchaser was one David Russel.

That information opened another case against the pawn shop owner, a case of receiving and selling stolen firearms, but more importantly, we had a name and an address of a suspect. We wasted no time in going to 3145 South Booth Street.

The address turned out to be a vacant lot. According to the neighbors on both sides and across the street, there had been a dilapidated house there a couple of years before, but it had stood empty for several months before it had been torn down. They didn't know who owned the lot.

We still had a name, so Terry said he'd start checking phone, property, and any other records for that name the next day. I went home pretty disgusted. We had a lead, but unless we could find the guy, we were pretty much back where we started.

That night, I called Barbara to tell her what we'd found out. She listened quietly until I said the guy's name.

"Troy, what did you say his name is?"

"David Russel, at least that's the name he used when he bought the pistol. Why?"

There was a pause, and then Barbara said, "Because I know him, or at least I used to know him."

I drove to Barbara's house as fast as I could get there. We sat at her kitchen table while she told me how she knew David Russel.

"I went to high school with David, and we dated a few times after we graduated. He was a nice guy and I liked him, but I was working my way through college then, so I didn't let it get serious. I didn't think he wanted it to be serious either. We just went out maybe once a month for dinner and then a walk. I thought we were just good friends.

"Then, one night, Donnie walked into the restaurant where I was waiting tables. He was home on leave from the Marines before he went to Afghanistan. I waited on him, and something just clicked between us. He asked me out, and that Saturday, we went to a movie.

"On Sunday, I called David and told him I couldn't go out with him anymore. All he said was that he understood and that he wished me well. I didn't hear from him again until after Donnie got out of the Marines and we got married. David called me and said he saw the wedding announcement in the paper and said he wished me all the best. After that, it was like he'd dropped off the face of the earth.

"I can't see him robbing a liquor store or shooting Donnie. David just wasn't that type of person."

I asked Barbara if she knew where David lived, and she nodded.

"The last time we talked, he said he was still living at home with his mother. He said he was going to go to junior college in the fall to learn how to do something besides flip hamburgers because he wasn't making enough money to get a place of his own. I don't think I deleted him from my phone. Let me check."

Barbara flipped through her phone for a couple seconds and then looked up at me.

"It's a house over on Lynx...2467 Lynx Street."

Before I left, I told Barbara I'd stay in touch so she'd know what we found out. I didn't tell her she'd just given me a possible motive for Donnie's murder. The guy who gets dumped thinks he's madly in love with the girl who dumped him and simmers for a while before deciding if he gets rid of her current love interest, he'll still have a chance.

Usually those guys are known to have a short temper, but it's not all that unusual for them to be like Barbara had described David -- quiet, polite, and would never hurt a fly. According to the people who make a living developing profiles of killers, people like that develop the skill of making you think they're good people, but they can go from happy to hateful in the blink of an eye. They're the hardest killers to catch. Nobody would ever suspect them to be capable of killing another person, and they're very good at hiding the fact that they are.

The next day at about two, Terry and I drove over to 2467 Lynx Street. I intended to just talk with David Russel because I had no probable cause to do anything else. I couldn't prove this David Russel was the David Russel who bought the Beretta from the pawn shop, and even if he was, I couldn't prove he still had it or that he was anywhere near the liquor store on the night of the murder. Mostly I wanted to see if talking to me made him nervous. If it did, I wouldn't arrest him, but Terry and I would start digging deeper into his past.

The white-haired woman who answered the door looked too old to be David's mother, but when I showed her my badge and asked if David was there, she scowled and said, "What the hell do you want with my son? He's never done anything to anybody".

The tone of her voice told me she didn't have much use for cops, at least where her son was concerned, and also told me she'd probably lie to protect him if I told the truth about why we were there. I made up a reason that she might accept as true. If she didn't I wasn't out anything.

"Ma'am, we're investigating a robbery of a convenience store, and a witness gave us your son's name as a person who probably knows our prime suspect. We don't think David had anything to do with the robbery, but we can't find our suspect and we thought David might have some idea of where our suspect might go or where he might be living."

That seemed to calm the woman down a little.

"David's not here. He's at work down at the Tenth Street Diner."

I nodded.

"Well, maybe I can catch him later in the day. What time does he get home?"

The woman was still frowning, but her answer confirmed that David was still living with her.

"They don't close until midnight and David has to stay to clean up, so sometimes David doesn't get home until three or four in the morning. He'll be too tired to talk to you then. You'd best come back tomorrow after noon. That's when he gets up and I'll tell him you want to see him."

I thanked the woman and got back in my car, then radioed Dispatch and requested a car go to the Tenth Street Diner to watch and follow anybody that seemed in a hurry to leave. I didn't intend to wait until the next day, and I sent the car to the diner because I was sure as soon as Terry and I left, David's mother would call him and tell him the police were looking for him. If he was our shooter and thought the police had figured out what he'd done, he'd be gone before we could get the diner.

When we got to the diner, Zach Mason's patrol car was parked in the parking lot. Zach said he'd only seen three people leave the diner, an older couple and a young woman.

That might mean David was still there or it might mean the patrol car had gotten there after he left. In case he was still in the diner, I asked Zach to keep watching while Terry and I went inside.

The young girl who asked if she could help us looked a little shocked when we showed her our badges, but she was still smiling. I asked if David Russel was there. She looked back at the window to the kitchen, then said, "He just got a call. I think he probably went outside to answer it."

Terry and I were leaving when Zach radioed us.

"Just saw a guy running to a car. He got in and took off, and he wasn't taking his time either. I'm following him down Tenth."

I radioed back for Zach to hang back because I didn't want this to turn into a car chase. We'd see where he went and once he stopped, we'd take it from there.

As it was, we didn't have to wait. The driver evidently figured out he was being tailed, or maybe he was just nervous about a cop staying a car behind him, but when he made the turn onto Gallatin Road, he ran the light and was hit on the driver's side door by a delivery truck. Zach reported that and asked for backup and the EMT's.

When we got there, the driver was still in the car. It hadn't been a bad crash. Evidently the delivery truck driver was moving pretty slow and had locked up his brakes and just pushed the car up to the curb. The crash had mangled the driver's side door bad enough Zach couldn't get it open and the passenger door was pushed up against a light pole. He'd radioed for a rescue truck and two wreckers, and they drove up at about the same time we did. It took them about ten minutes to pull the van away and then cut the door pillars and pry the door open.

The EMT's were there by then, and after checking out the driver, said he'd be sore and stiff for a couple days, but wasn't hurt all that bad. They'd asked if he wanted to go to the hospital to be sure, but he refused.

Zach had him sitting on the sidewalk while he wrote up a ticket for running the red light. He showed me the guy's driver's license.

"This your guy?"

I nodded.

"You think he's OK enough he can talk?"

Zach said he thought so, because the guy hadn't hesitated when he asked him for his license.

We had our suspect and he wasn't likely to run, but we now had something else too. We had his car and because it was no longer drivable, it had to be towed. The law states that the police have the right to inventory the contents of the car before it is towed. That prevents the driver or owner of the car from claiming he was on his way to the bank to deposit his last four paychecks and now the two thousand dollars wasn't in the glove box where he'd put it. In all these cases, "inventory" really means a search of the vehicle just as if the officer on the scene had a warrant. It's surprising what those inventory searches find sometimes.

When Zach finished writing the ticket and David had signed it, he went to search the car. Terry and I questioned David.

As soon as we showed him our badges, David looked nervous. It wouldn't have been obvious to most people because it was little things like scratching his nose or fiddling with his hands or shifting his position from time to time. Any detective or street cop would pick up on it because we take training in how to read body language.

I didn't figure he'd confess right there, but I wanted to give Zach enough time to do a thorough search. I kept to the story I'd told his mother, and asked David if he knew a guy named Clarence Rhodes. That name was completely fictitious, but David surprised me by saying yes, he did. I then told him Clarence was a suspect in a robbery and that we needed to talk to him. Before I could ask David if he knew where Clarence lived, he cut me off.

"Doesn't surprise me at all. Clarence was always in trouble in high school -- smoking weed, cutting classes and stuff like that. Got caught shoplifting once and always used to brag about knowing drug dealers. I figured he was headed for more trouble. What do you want to know?"

I was smiling to myself. Evidently David believed what his mother had told him and was being what he thought was cooperative. He was also trying to send us on a wild goose chase for somebody so we'd stop talking to him.

That proved to be the case when I asked if he might know where Clarence hung out. David wrinkled up his brow a little too much before answering me. Liars usually overdo their facial expressions.

"You might try this house over on South Booth Street. Number's 3145 if I remember right. I've never been there, but Clarence said a drug dealer lives there and he used to hang out with him. That's where Clarence said he always bought his grass."

I had to give David credit for being smart. He'd given us a place to check out so we'd leave and he'd iced the cake with the idea we might be able to arrest a drug dealer too. Unfortunately for him, the address he'd given us was the one he used to buy the pistol but he didn't know we knew that. It was probably the first address that popped into his head.

Terry was getting a description of our fake guy from David when Zach walked up and tapped me on the shoulder.

"Come look what I found on the floor under a black hoodie."

One look told me we probably had our shooter. The officer had pulled back the hoodie and saw a box of nine-millimeter cartridges on the floor in front of the rear seat. They were 147 grain hollow points and the same brand as the casings from the liquor store. I asked Zach to cuff David and put him in his car, and then come back to continue the search.

We bagged the hoodie and the box of cartridges, and then searched the rest of the car. Under the right front seat, we found a map of Nashville with a line drawn on most of the streets in a twenty block area. Right in the middle of that area was the liquor store where Donnie was killed. I didn't know what that meant yet, but we bagged it too. In the trunk was a pair of black gloves and a crowbar.

After finding all that, I knew we had enough probable cause for a search warrant for the house where David lived. Zach took David back to the station and booked him on suspicion of murder. We could hold him for twenty-four hours at least, and that would be enough time to do a thorough search of the house.

By nine the next morning, Terry and I had our search warrant. After we met two patrol cars at David's house, I served the warrant to his mother. She was already fuming.

"David called me and said you put him in jail for murder. Why can't you assholes go arrest the people killing each other every goddamned night instead of arresting my son for something he didn't do? Well, you're not coming in my goddamned house. You'll show me something you brought with you and say it was David's because you found it here. Now, get the hell off my property."

I politely explained to the woman that she had no choice and that if she didn't let us inside, one of the officers would handcuff her, take her downtown, and book her for obstruction. She mumbled something about suing our asses off and then went to sit on her couch.

We started and ended the search with David's bedroom. He might have been smart about some things, but he was dumb as hell about how to hide a pistol. We found a Beretta 92 tucked under some shirts in a dresser drawer. Terry put on latex gloves, cleared the pistol, looked at the serial number, and then held it up to the light so he could see down the barrel. A second later, he turned to me and grinned.

"It's the same serial number and it has a slow twist barrel just like mine. I'd bet my left nut that a bullet fired from this pistol will match the bullets that killed Donnie."

In that same drawer, we found a scrapbook, and inside were newspaper clippings that all related to either Donnie or to Barbara. There were also pictures of Barbara from when she was younger, probably high school, and an old valentine that said, "Roses are red, violets are blue, you should be glad, that I like you". It was signed, "Barbara". The last pages in the scrapbook were the articles about David's murder and his funeral.

Finding that pistol and the scrapbook tied up most of the loose ends of the case. We went back to the station to see what the Crime Lab had found on the hoodie and gloves. If there was blood on either, we wouldn't have DNA back for a week or so, but the Crime Lab could tell us if the blood was human and the same blood type as Donnie's. They could also fire the Beretta and match the bullet to the bullets recovered from Donnie's body. A lot of murderers have been put in jail with less evidence than we had right now.

Interrogations always go better if the detective knows the answers before he asks the questions, so we waited for the Crime Lab information before we questioned David.

It was one in the afternoon before I got a call from the Crime Lab. Rosy told me the bullet they fired from the Beretta was a positive match to the bullet the coroner had removed from Donnie's brain and probable matches to the others, though they'd been mushroomed pretty bad and there wasn't much to compare to. She said there were only some grease stains on the hoodie and on the gloves, but they'd collected some fibers from the liquor store door, and they were a match to fibers from David's hoodie.

When I advised David of his rights, the son of a bitch was egotistical enough he thought he could sweet talk his way out of this. He said he didn't need an attorney because he hadn't done anything wrong.

He said he'd bought the pistol from a guy he'd heard sometimes sold guns. He wanted a gun for his mother because she thought she'd heard someone trying to break into her house and he was at work most nights. I said it would be pretty hard for her to get that pistol when it was in his dresser drawer. David just smiled.

"I was trying to be responsible because a pistol is a dangerous weapon. Before I gave it to my mother, I was going to take her to a shooting range and teach her how to shoot it. I just haven't had a chance to do that yet."

When I told him I didn't think he'd bought the Beretta from some guy because his name was on the 4473 from the pawnshop, he just shrugged and said that had to be someone else using his name.

He had an answer for why the bullet from his pistol matched the bullet from Donnie too. According to him, the guy he bought the pistol from was probably a criminal and had killed Donnie during the robbery before he sold David the pistol.

Then he said, "You know, now that I think about it, I called that same guy about a year ago to see if he had any guns for sale. I thought it would be fun to do some target shooting on my days off. He didn't have anything I wanted at the time, so I gave him my name and phone number and said if he got something he thought I'd like to give me a call.. I'll bet he used my name to buy it and then sold it to me after he used it to kill that police officer. Well, that's a lesson learned. I'll never do that again."

He maintained he'd never been in the area around the liquor store. When I showed him the map we'd found in his car, he said he'd been looking for a job in that area but he hadn't been there yet.

After an hour, he smiled at me.

"It should be obvious by now that I couldn't have done what you said. You need to let me go now and find the guy who sold me the pistol. If I remembered his name, I'd give it to you, but I don't remember that he ever said. I don't want the pistol back, not after finding out it was used to kill someone. I couldn't live with that, so you keep it."