Fountain of Death(81)

Gregor folded the napkin and put it into the pocket of his jacket along with his pen.

“None of this,” he said, “is getting us into that house, and if we don’t get into that house, we might as well give up on the rest of it. I wish Tony hadn’t made such a big public deal out of hiring me as a consultant. If I were a little less official, I could just go over there and break in. I might even get away with it.”

“You’d lose your element of surprise if you didn’t get away with it,” Connie Hazelwood pointed out. “You’d get arrested and be in all the papers.”

Philip Brye drained the coffee from his cup and put the cup very precisely back into its saucer.

“I think,” he said carefully, “that I may know of a way to get into that house. Perfectly legally. And without letting Tony Bandero know about it.”





2


IF THE DRUG WAR were a real war, it would have command centers as well as armies, bunkers as well as ordnance. Of course, the drug war was supposed to have all those things. Presidents kept appointing drug czars. Drug czars kept setting up offices. Policy kept switching between “punishment and detention” and “prevention and treatment” with no known effect whatsoever. Nobody seemed to notice that “punishment and detention” got more and more people arrested and more and more people in jail without shrinking the addict population one iota. Nobody seemed to notice that students who graduated from the most popular high school drug prevention program had a rate of drug use higher than students who didn’t or that there wasn’t a single drug rehabilitation program with a recidivism rate under 96 percent. Gregor Demarkian had spent his life as a federal cop, not a politician, so he knew numbers most people never saw. That was how he had ended up chasing serial killers. He would have allowed himself to end up pushing paper in an office in Salt Lake City if it had protected him from having to work on drug cases. Almost every agent he had known in the Bureau had felt the same way. Somebody had to like chasing drug dealers and picking up addicts. There were drugs squads in police departments across the country. There was a Drug Enforcement Agency. As far as Gregor knew, these projects had no trouble attracting personnel. But he couldn’t imagine doing the work himself. He didn’t think it really had anything to do with criminal justice, in the classic sense, or with fighting crime. In 1800, cocaine had been both legal and widely available in the United States, and almost nobody had wanted it. Now it was not only illegal but dangerous to acquire, too often involving guns and gangs and bad neighborhoods, and the tide of addicts seemed to get higher every year.

The drug war in New Haven, Connecticut, was represented by a short, slight, bookish-looking man named Roger Dornan. There were also police officers on the regular force who investigated drug cases and a group of social workers who provided “drug education” in the public schools, but Roger Dornan was New Haven’s official liaison with the federal drug enforcement programs, and that had made him somehow “official.” When the papers needed a quote for a story having anything to do with drugs in the New Haven area, they went to Roger Dornan. When the television news people had to identify Roger Dornan to the public, they said he was “head of drug enforcement operations for the city of New Haven.” This was inaccurate, but it suited everybody involved. There was no one else in town who wanted to be “head of drug operations for the city of New Haven.”

“It’s a dismal job to have,” Philip Brye had explained to Gregor, unnecessarily, on their way over to Roger Dornan’s office, “because you never do anything but lose.”

Roger Dornan didn’t look like the head of anything. His office was a cubbyhole in an administrative building otherwise filled with women who worked for social services departments. He had a desk and one chair and a lot of bookshelves crammed with papers. Gregor and Philip Brye had left Connie Hazelwood circling the block in her taxi searching for a parking space. Gregor thought the state of Roger Dornan’s office was indicative of what was wrong with the drug war. It was cramped. It was dark. It was overworked. And nobody else in the building wanted to go near it.

Roger Dornan had listened to Gregor and Philip Brye explain their problem and ask their favor, fiddling all the time with a five-by-five inch stand-up cardboard sign that said: “MAKE IT TO THE NEW YEAR, DON’T DRINK AND DRIVE.” Gregor had gotten so used to these signs, he had almost stopped seeing them. This was the way city and state officials celebrated New Year’s Eve. They got ready to deal with the carnage.