Judgment Calls by Alafair Burke Page B

cases because they were hard to prove, hard to win, and hard to take. The career prosecutors who handled the major felony person crimes didn’t want them because they were viewed as less important than murders and other violent offenses. But I felt more rewarded by those cases than I’d ever felt prosecuting even complex federal drug conspiracies.
    Today, however, my plate was full of drug charges. No surprise, the grand jury returned indictments on all four of the cases I presented. Most drug-related cases are pretty much the same. The only variation tends to be in the type and degree of stupidity involved.
    Usually it was a matter of poor strategy. My daily caseload is full of tweekers who agree to let the police search them, even though they’re carrying enough dope to land them in the state pen for a couple of years. Apparently, an undocumented side effect of dope is a gross overestimation of one’s own intelligence. Dopers become convinced they’ve hidden their stash so well a cop won’t find it. They’re always wrong.
    But sometimes it goes beyond poor strategy to straight-out stupidity. In one of today’s cases, two men did a hand-to-hand drug deal standing two feet from a Portland police officer. What stealth tactic had this shrewd officer used to avoid detection? He was part of the city’s mounted patrol unit, which covered a downtown beat on horseback. When the men were arrested, one of them said to the officer, “Dude, I didn’t even see you up there, man. I just thought it was cool that a horse had found its way to the park.” It hadn’t dawned on them to look up and see whether someone might have accompanied the savvy equine.
    Despite all the talk about the modern “war on drugs,” the truth is that most police don’t go out of their way to investigate minor drug offenses. They don’t have to. There is so much dope out there, and the people taking it are so dense, that the cases literally fall into the cops’ laps, whether they want them or not. The upside is that it makes my job easier.
    When I was done getting my cases indicted, I called MCT to see if a detective could drive out to Rockwood with me to interview Kendra. I wanted to talk to her tonight, before she got antsy and ran away again. Grand jury was Friday, and I needed to know what to expect from my star witness.
    I try to have a police officer or DA investigator with me whenever I talk to someone who will be testifying in one of my cases. If the witness ever went south on me, I’d want a person present who could testify about the witness’s statement, since lawyers are not allowed to testify in their own cases.
    Someone picked up after four rings. “Walker.”
    “Detective Walker, it’s Samantha Kincaid at the DA’s office. I’m calling about the Derringer case.”
    “Sure. What can I do you for?”
    I told him what I’d found out the day before from Deputy Lamborn and Dave Renshaw.
    “Oh, hang on a sec. The rest of the guys have got to hear this.” I heard him put me on speaker. “You want to tell ‘em or should I?”
    Figuring I was more likely than Walker to keep the conversation on track, I repeated the information about Derrick Derringer’s previous offer to serve as an alibi witness for his brother and then got to the part about Derringer’s body hair.
    Walker couldn’t help himself. “Can you believe what a fucking waste of time and money that is? Everyone knows these guys never change. They just get off having someone watch them watch that smut. But the system manages to find the money to pay some doctor to handle these guys’ Johnsons, when it could use the money to keep them in the pen where they belong.”
    I heard Ray Johnson nearby. “How many times I gotta tell you that you make my workplace hostile when you call something like that ajohnson, man? So, Kincaid, what’s the doctor say about Derringer’s broken pecker?”
    I certainly didn’t know what it meant. “Look, five different shrinks could