Background Check
  by Jim Doherty

"I didn't like him a bit!" said Officer Earl Peters. And suddenly my simple, by-the-numbers background check of Berkeley Police Reserve Applicant Raymond B. Jenner became complicated.

Jenner was already a reserve officer in the King City Police, down in Central California, and before that he'd served as a reserve in the East Bay Regional Park District's Department of Public Safety, where Peters had been his field training officer.

Since he'd already passed two background investigations, I figured this would be a cakewalk. But when a police applicant has already been a cop elsewhere, and one of his former partners, particularly his FTO, says something uncomplimentary, it's no longer a matter of simple routine.

"Is he trying to get on with you guys?" asked Peters.

"He's on the list for regular officer," I answered, "and he's also applied for the reserves. I'm doing the BI for the reserve slot."

"Well, I was glad when he left here, and I wouldn't want him on any department I worked for."

"Why's that?"

"He just had a bad attitude. Particularly about women. I mean he was the horniest bastard I've ever known. Don't get me wrong. I like looking at a pretty girl myself. But the way this guy used to ogle anything vaguely feminine was offensive. And the way he talked about them was even worse!"

"Like how?"

"Like they were good for nothing but sex. He used to mention this one 'broad' he was seeing. That was his word for 'em. 'Broads.' Like he was Frank Sinatra and it was still the '50s, you know. Anyway, this woman was apparently married, but she'd left her husband. Or maybe he'd left her, I wasn't really sure. But Jenner was the reason. Point is, he seemed really proud of having broken up this marriage. Not because he cared about the girl, or thought she'd be better off without her husband or anything like that. Just that it showed how skillful and potent Jenner was in the sack. It was an ego boost!"

"Was she the only woman he saw?"

"Not to hear him tell it. According to him, he soaked 'em up like a sponge. He talked about her more often than any of the others, though."

"He ever mention her name?"

"Marian, I think. Never got her last name."

Curiously, the City of Berkeley, capital of the People's Republic of Political Correctness, would probably care less about Jenner's alleged adultery and promiscuity than they would about the fact that he referred to women as "broads." Casual, non-committal sex is, after all, a private matter (provided it's between consenting adults and responsible safety precautions are observed). But using offensive words? That sort of thing could get a guy disqualified!

The vehemence of Officer Peters surprised me a little. Most single guys in their 20s are hounds, and while calling women broads doesn't indicate a particularly raised consciousness, it's far from the worst thing I've ever heard.

Not that I personally approve of cheap sex or of disrespecting women. But, while I've never engaged in the kind of elbow-in-the-ribs banter about sexual conquests that routinely goes on in police locker rooms, I've also never, except by my non-participation, protested. Besides, I certainly can't claim I've never let by my hormones do my decision-making, and while "broad" has never passed my lips, terms like "chick" and "babe" have. Maybe I don't live in a glass house, but I sure as hell live in one with a big picture window. Who was I to cast stones?

Still, the bottom line was that Peters, a cop of many years' experience, had made some highly negative comments about the applicant I was investigating. And that meant I was going to have to put on a full-court press instead of taking a nice leisurely stroll over old ground.

So I'd forget about the other two BIs that he'd passed, and start checking his background as though it'd never been checked before.

One thing I'd normally do, but hadn't bothered with so far, is personally visit the local police in each city that he had either lived or worked in (at least, in each city within reasonable driving distance of Berkeley) to check local files. And since Samson, a tiny suburb in nearby Contra Costa County where Jenner'd worked at a fast-food joint seven years earlier, was just a twenty minute drive, that seemed like a good place to start.

The Samson Police Department was headquartered in the basement of the City Hall.

I showed my star and ID to the desk officer at the front counter, said, "Dan Sullivan, with Berkeley PD," (Jim -- it looks like this was supposed to be in quotes, but they didn't make it through, so I stuck them back in. Obviously, cut 'em if they're not supposed to be there.) and passed him a copy of the release form Jenner'd filled out. It enabled me to obtain any files or information that would otherwise be shrouded by the veil of confidentiality.

"He used to work here in Samson," I said. "Just need a local file check to dot some I's and cross some T's."

Most departments have gone to computerized records, or at least microfiche. Samson PD still had an old-fashioned alpha file, a cabinet full of alphabetically arranged three by five cards, each with a name on it and a reference to the case, or cases, in which the person named on the card figured. The desk cop checked in the drawer marked H - L.

"He's in here," he said, holding up a card.

"What's it say?"

"Just one entry. 'See FI card this date.'"

"FI card" is police shorthand for "field interrogation report," the form filled out by cops when they stop somebody on the street, write down their name, address, and other personal info, and ask a lot of questions along the lines of "What's your business in this area?" You know, the "taking names" part of the "kick ass and take names" school of police work. If you are, or ever have been, a drunk, a derelict, a beggar, a door-to-door salesman, or a teen-aged boy, chances are you've been FI'd at least once.

I asked for, and received, a photocopy of Jenner's FI. It wasn't what I'd expected. For one thing, it was only a little over two years old, recording an encounter with a local officer that had occurred long after he'd quit the fast-food job. For another, the ominous number "187," the California Penal Code section defining murder, jumped out at me from the "Reasons For Stop" section of the card.

The full entry in that block read, "Obs @ Cnty Cnn Stp on D/T noted, 1 blk frm Benson 187 (see case 702-A); ID'd self as EBRP R/O." Translating the improvised shorthand, I determined that the officer had seen Jenner seated at a County Connection bus stop which was one block from the scene of the murder of someone named Benson, but had released him once he'd identified himself as a reserve cop in the East Bay Regional Park police. Presumably the date and time noted, 0045 hours on July 26, had been roughly coincident with the homicide.

"Could I get a copy of case number seven oh two Adam?" I asked the desk officer.

"The Benson murder? About the biggest thing that ever happened in this town. What's it got to do with your background investigation?"

"Don't know. But according to this stop card, my subject was seen a block or so from the scene."

He shrugged, went to another file cabinet, pulled out a large manila envelope with the case number written in the upper right hand corner, and handed it to me. I took out the report, and started to read.

For a homicide report, it was pretty thin, only two pages. The first was a standard face sheet form, with names, codes numbers, addresses, and such filled out in neat information blocks, largely designed to make computer data entry easier at some later point. The second was a narrative form in which the recording officer gave an account of how the crime came to be reported and a sketchy description of the crime scene. The victim was Mrs. Maureen Benson, a twenty-seven year old mother of two, separated from her husband, who'd apparently been beaten and strangled. The time of the discovery did, in fact, roughly coincide with the field interview of Jenner.

"This is all you have?" I asked.

"That's it."

"Didn't you do any investigation at all? This was a murder, for Christ's sake."

"We don't do investigations in this department. Too small to have a detective's bureau."

"Well, what do you do when you get a major case like this?"

"City Council has a contract with the Sheriff's Department. They automatically take over felonies once we've finished the preliminary report. Supposed t'be cheaper than keeping one or two investigators here on staff."

That meant a forty-five minute drive over to the county seat in Martinez.

Contra Costa County Detective Sergeant Horace Carr frowned as he examined the photocopied FI card I'd handed him a few minutes earlier.

"Never saw this," he said. "Course, I never asked to see all the FI cards for that shift, just all the paperwork they had on the murder. I assumed any relevant documents'd be attached. All this time on the Job, I ought to know better'n to assume. What's your interest?"

"Jenner's applied for a job with BPD. I'm doing his background. If he's a viable 187 suspect, that might just possibly be grounds for disqualification."

"Might at that. Got any reason for thinking so besides his being in the right place at the right time?"

I held up the Benson case file that had been resting on my lap. "Summarize this for me, first. Did you ever develop any suspects?"

"We always thought it was the boyfriend. Problem is no one knew who that was."

"So you ruled out the husband? Statistically, the husband was the most likely suspect, so he'd be the first one investigating officers would look at."

"He was out of state on a business trip. Three different people vouched for his being with them at the approximate time of death."

"Any witnesses?"

He shook his head. "Kids were spending the night at a friend's house, which they did pretty frequently. The closest thing to a witness was the next-door neighbor who heard Mrs. Benson screaming and dialed 911. By the time Samson PD arrived, she was already dead."

"And that was about 12:30 AM on July 26th?"

"Right."

"What made you think it was the boyfriend?"

"According to Benson, he and his wife were getting back together. She'd decided to break it off with her lover. Her best friend confirmed this. We figured loverboy for a possessive type who didn't take the brush-off like a gentleman. Way she was killed seemed to confirm this."

I skimmed the autopsy report. In Contra Costa County, the sheriff is also the ex officio coroner, which doesn't mean that he personally performs postmortems on murder victims, just that the Medical Examiner's Department is part of the Sheriff's Office, rather than being a separate, autonomous agency. This suited me, since it meant I only had to make one trip to get the relevant documents.

Maureen Benson had been beaten and strangled, just as it had appeared to the responding patrol officers. She'd also been raped. It had looked like a crime of uncontrolled anger. The kind of anger that, more often than not, explodes out of a sexual relationship. The anger of a spouse. Or a lover.

"Okay, so it's not the husband. That makes the boyfriend the best bet. What do you know about him?"

"That's the problem. Very damned little. She never told anyone his name. According to her friend, Jane Keaton, she was a few years older than him. And she'd been seeing him off and on for about three years at the time of her murder. Benson, the husband, was on the road a lot. Mrs. Keaton was always willing to take the kids when Mrs. Benson needed the house clear for a night of passion. Mrs. Benson herself was always very discreet. When Benson found out something was going on, he walked out, but never filed for divorce. Even he never knew who the guy was."

"Okay, try this scenario, and remember it's all speculation at this point. Five years ago, a young stud is working in Samson at a fast-food joint. He meets an attractive, bored housewife whose husband's away a lot and they decide to engage in a little extra-curricular slap and tickle. Stud wants to get into police work and she doesn't really want her marriage to end, so they're both careful to keep everything quiet. Three years later, Stud's taken the first step in his career; he's working as a reserve cop in a Bay Area department. Meanwhile, she's decided that her now-and-then cheating isn't really worth it, so she promises her husband she'll break it off if he'll come back to her."

I got up from my chair and started to walk as I talked. "This brings us to the night of July 25th. She figures that she owes it to Stud to break it off face-to-face, so she bundles off the kids to her friend and invites him over. As you guessed, he doesn't take the news well. In fact, he goes berserk and kills her. He doesn't own a car, so his only way out of town is public transportation. A beat copper spots him at a bus stop, but lets him go when he ID's himself as a brother officer. Not exactly first-rate police work, but you or I might have done the same thing. At least he fills out a stop card so there's a record of the encounter."

I sat back down, leaning forward in my chair as I continued. "Only the stop card never makes it into Samson PD's case file, so you never see it and don't follow up. Meanwhile, Stud decides to get out of town for awhile. He's got a contact downstate, so he moves out of town, gets a new job, and joins the police reserve in another department. Two years later, he figures the case has long since been dumped into the Open File, the law enforcement equivalent of the Twilight Zone, and decides it's safe to return, so he starts applying at Bay Area departments again. Eventually, the Berkeley Police decide to take a closer look at him and I get assigned to do his background investigation. Which brings us up to now."

"Sounds good, but what do you have specifically linking Stud with Mrs. Benson?"

"Let's just drop the hypotheticals and call him Jenner. Earl Peters, his FTO at the Park District, didn't like him much, particularly disliked Jenner's attitude towards women. Peters told me that Jenner used to brag about one particular filly in his stable named, as near as he could remember, Marian. That's uncomfortably close to Maureen."

"Real thin."

"I know you couldn't convict on this. I doubt you even have probable cause for an arrest warrant. But you've got to admit you've got reasonable grounds for suspicion."

"So what do you suggest?"

"What kind of physical evidence do you have?"

"No prints. The place looked like it'd been wiped, which, come to think of it, might indicate someone who was familiar with crime scenes."

"Like a cop?"

"Like a cop. But there was semen left behind from the rape. If we'd ever developed a suspect we could've tried to get a DNA match."

"Well, now you've developed a suspect."

"Great. The only problem is, I don't think a chain of coincidences is going to be enough to convince a judge to force Jenner into giving up a DNA sample."

"Then we'll have to finesse one."

The first time I'd ever met Raymond Jenner, when he reported to the Berkeley Hall of Justice for an informal meeting prior to my starting his investigation, he'd been dressed up in a crisply pressed, three-piece business suit, as if I was a one-man oral board, or the chief of police himself, instead of just a reserve grunt like him. At the time I'd been flattered. Now, several weeks after my meeting with Sergeant Carr in Martinez, he was wearing the same suit for what I'd told him was my final interview with him before preparing my report. This time, I just felt patronized.

"Did you get your medical exam finished yet?" I asked.

"About a month and a half ago."

"Good. Anything else once the BI's approved?"

"The psych."

"That shouldn't be problem."

I looked at my watch, flipped on the cassette recorder on the desk in the reserve office and said, "Listen, I've got to take care of something upstairs. It won't take me more than fifteen minutes. Would you like to go grab a bite and then come back?"

"I don't mind staying here."

"Suit yourself. There's some vending machines in the lunch room around the corner."

I'd turned on the recorder before making that announcement for legal purposes. In a few minutes, I was going to try to trick a guilty admission out of Jenner, and I was going to do it without warning him of his Miranda rights. In order for such an admission to stand up in court, it was essential that I be able to prove that Jenner couldn't have reasonably considered himself to be in police custody. The fact that he'd come down voluntarily to talk about his BI, my leaving him alone in the reserve office, and my informing him that he was free to leave the H of J and come back after I'd taken care of some minor chores would all lend credence to that assertion.

I went upstairs to the Service Division and dialed Carr's direct line.

"Sergeant Carr," he answered.

"This is Dan Sullivan, Horace. Did the judge go for it?"

"Sure did. Signed the warrant this morning."

"Is it in the system?"

"Entered it myself."

"Good enough. Hope you don't mind my being the one to serve it."

"You earned it, Dan. I'll still get the credit for the clearance."

I hung up, wrote Jenner's full name, birth date, race, and sex on a piece of scratch paper and walked into the RB-1 dispatcher's office adjacent to the Service Division. The police aide stationed there was hunched over a computer terminal. I handed him the scratch paper.

"Run this guy for me, will you?" I asked. "If he's got a warrant, confirm it and call me down at the Reserve Office. That's 4-6654."

I went back downstairs. Jenner was still seated and the tape was still running.

"Well," I said, "that didn't take as long as I thought it would. Now I just have a few more questions. First of all, nowhere in your Personal History Statement do you mention a regular girlfriend. Do you have one?"

"Nobody special. Why?"

"Significant others can give some pretty good insights into an applicant's character. Ever have a regular girlfriend?"

"Well, I suppose in high school--"

"What about after high school?"

"Not really."

"What about Maureen Benson?"

He paled, just slightly, and paused, just for a beat, before saying, "Who?"

"Maureen Benson. The married lady you met back in Samson. When you were managing that burger joint."

"I don't remember any--"

"Sure you do," I interrupted. "You were still going with her by the time you went to work for the Park District. Earl Peters remembers you bragging about her. Of course, you never said her full name. Just called her Maureen. But, that's who you were talking about, wasn't it?"

He just sat silently, trying to collect his thoughts.

"On the other hand, Maureen's husband did have your full name. He told me you and his wife had been seeing each other for about three years at the time of her death."

"But he never knew--" started Jenner, cutting himself off just a few words too late.

"Never knew what? Never knew your name?"

The phone rang at that point, ruining my rhythm. Didn't matter. I had my admission. Not much of one, but with the physical evidence it was just icing on the cake, anyway.

"Berkeley Police Reserve. Officer Sullivan."

"You've got one confirmed warrant for 187 PC out of CoCo County SO," said the RB-1 operator.

"Thanks," I said. Then, to Jenner, "Stand up, turn around, and put you hands behind your head."

"What's going on?"

"I'm putting you under arrest for murder, that's what s going on. Now stand up and turn around."

I gave him a quick frisk, cuffed his hands behind his back, and marched him out of the office towards the prisoner's elevator. As we headed to the booking area he asked, "Even if I knew her, what does that prove?"

"You raped her, Jenner, and you left behind physical evidence. The semen that they found in her matches your DNA."

"No way! I never gave up any DNA samples!"

"You had a pre-employment medical exam a few weeks ago. At that time, the doctor took a sample of your blood, part of which was turned over the Contra Costa County crime lab. The results came in yesterday. The warrant was signed this morning. Now you know where you stand, so you can explain something to me."

"What's that?"

"Did you hate King City that much? I know it's not exactly a thriving metropolis, but if you'd just sat tight, you'd've been home free. Why'd you decide to come back to the Bay Area?"

He shrugged.

"I'd already gone through all the decent-looking broads," he said.

Currently a law enforcement officer in the Chicago area, JIM DOHERTY has, in his ten-plus years of police work, served in six different agencies and four different states. His series cop, Dan Sullivan, who makes his HANDHELDCRIME debut in this issue, has also appeared in MYSTERY BUFF, BLUE MURDER, and OVER MY DEAD BODY! among other venues. Jim's first HHC story, "Red-Handed," appeared, under the pseudonym of "Scott Morrison," in Issue 26.

Copyrights (c) 2002 Jim Doherty

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