Текст книги "Death Trap"

Автор книги: M. William Phelps

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

6

GBI investigator Kimberly Williams was at the Hawkins Academy Road crime scene in Georgia most of the morning. She arrived, along with several other investigators from the Morgan County Sheriff’s Office and her GBI colleague Todd Crosby, near 6:30 A.M.

By late morning it was confirmed that the car was indeed the same red Pontiac Grand Am that Alan Bates had rented at the Avis airport terminal in Birmingham. Of course, this was not good news for Philip, Joan, Kevin and Robert Bates, who were now huddled together in Marietta, waiting for any sign of hope that Alan and Terra might be alive and well—that this entire episode was nothing more than a great misunderstanding.

GBI investigator Williams was familiar with the location in Rutledge where the bodies were recovered. She lived north of Milledgeville, about twenty minutes away. As she walked the scene, the wind picked up steadily, blowing the investigator’s blond hair wildly around. With the wind came the cold, at least by Georgia standards. Williams was assigned as case agent; she was now in charge of the Bureau’s side of the investigation from this point forward. By now, the seasoned investigator was aware that Alan and Terra Bates were supposed to have picked up Alan’s kids outside Birmingham in Hoover and driven to his parents’ house in Marietta. It was a good bet, considering the makeup and description of the bodies found in the trunk, that somewhere between Birmingham and Rutledge, Alan and Terra Bates had met with the violent hand of evil.

Williams had been with the GBI since 1995. A cop with her experience didn’t need DNA and dental records to override her gut instinct. When all the cards were turned over, the only hand Williams could see was that the bodies in the trunk were Alan and his wife. Williams had been around her share of murder scenes, family arguments turned deadly, husbands and wives shooting each other for no apparent reason. Murder was not common, but it had a certain pulse to it that spoke through victims and the way they were found.

“I definitely would not say that I have seen everything,” Williams said later, “but I have been exposed to a great deal by working narcotics and field cases.”

The answer to what was now a mystery, Williams knew after realizing where the car had driven from, was in Birmingham. Or at least that was probably the best place to start. The other concern was the children who were supposed to be with Alan and Terra. Where were they?

Thank God—in some strange way—that there were only two bodies in that trunk—and both were adults.

“Once we identified who the car most likely contained, obviously the victims could not be identified formally,” Williams said, “and once we talked to the Bates family and found out Terra and Alan Bates were overdue . . . we focused on where they were last seen.”

And all roads led to Birmingham.

Backtracking, following Alan and Terra’s footsteps, Birmingham was the ideal location to begin that end of the investigation. Seeing that it had been confirmed that Alan walked out of a deposition downtown somewhere near 3:30 P.M. the previous day and hadn’t been seen or heard from since, Birmingham was the start of the GBI’s timeline—or, more like it, deathline. The other arm of the investigation was going to be the hardest to go forward with right now: questioning Alan’s family. Searching for those important details and clues without letting them know what, exactly, was going on. The GBI couldn’t come out and say they had found Alan and Terra in the trunk. They needed positive identification before that could be done. It was a catch-22: because for positive identification to be made, they needed dental records and DNA from those same people.

“Vance,” Williams called out to MCSO investigator Sheron Vance, who partnered up with Williams almost immediately, “can you come with me?”

Williams and Vance left the Rutledge scene for Pelham, Alabama—this, while a second GBI agent, Sherri Rhodes, took off for Marietta, Georgia, to interview members of the Bates family. They could discuss developments via radio and receive updates about the crime scene from the road. Best thing to do was to spread out and begin putting the pieces together.

Jessica McCord’s second husband, Jeff, was a Pelham, Alabama, police officer. Cops helped each other. That clichéd code of blue silence and brotherly love they all lived by might come into play here. The brotherhood of law enforcement. Jeff would be the best person to start with. Williams and Vance decided that the Pelham PD was as good a place as any to begin. From talking to Jeff, they could track down Jessica and find out if and when she saw or heard from Alan last—that is, if everything went as planned, and Jeff was willing to help.

“Primarily,” Williams told me, “[we selected an interview with Jeff McCord first] because we knew where he was supposed to be, which was at work.” Jeff had swapped shifts, GBI found out, with another officer earlier that week; he was scheduled to be working that Saturday, covering for the cop. After speaking with the chief of the PPD, Williams understood the best way to approach Officer Jeff McCord was to arrive at Pelham before Jeff’s 3:00 P.M. shift started. The chief assured Williams that no one would tell him the GBI and MCSO were on the way.

The focus in talking to Jeff McCord would be on what time Alan and Terra showed up at the McCord home. That was going to be very important. Once Vance and Williams had that information, they could continue to backtrack—and maybe find out who had last seen Terra and Alan alive.

7

Jessica and Jeff McCord arrived home early on the morning of February 16, 2002, a Saturday. They had been out all night. To the movies, Jessica later said. Dinner. Then a long drive. Some sort of romantic jaunt to one of Jessica’s old hangout spots (they were celebrating Valentine’s Day a little late) from her teen years. Then a stop at Home Depot—the first in line at the door before the place was even open. There to pick up supplies so Jessica’s stepfather, Albert Bailey, could work on the house that day.

Both of them were tired. After putting her keys down on the kitchen table, Jessica scrolled through her caller ID to see who had phoned the house in their absence.

Philip and Joan’s number popped up several times from the previous night and that morning.

Must be Alan, Jessica said she thought at that moment. Alan had not shown up at the house as planned to pick up the kids, Jessica claimed. Maybe that was him, calling to give his excuse.

She dialed the Bates household in Georgia.

“Hello,” Philip said. He sounded frazzled. Anxious. There were voices in the background Jessica could hear. Although she didn’t know it, the GBI had sent two investigators to the Bateses’ home in Marietta. They were there to begin recording information and getting to know a little bit more about Alan and Terra’s schedules and lives. They had just arrived and were getting settled. Alan’s brothers, Kevin and Robert, had just recently shown up, too.

“Is Alan there? Can I speak to him?” Jessica asked.

“I wish I could let you,” Philip said, a note of discomfort and confusion in his cracking voice. “But I don’t know where he is.”

“What do you mean?”

“I cannot find him.”

“Oh,” Jessica said. “Oh, my gosh.” She later said this information Philip gave her was startling. It was unlike Alan to simply up and disappear. Alan was responsible. The do-gooder. The A student. The kid who never let anyone down. Jessica said she could never see Alan not alerting his parents to a new plan or his not showing up. When it came to her, she said that was a different story entirely. There were many times, Jessica later said, when Alan claimed he’d pick up the kids, but had never shown up.

Still, something was terribly wrong with this picture.

“I’m on the other end with someone important, Jessica,” Philip said at one point during the conversation. “I’ll have Joan call you back.”

Jessica hung up. Stared at the phone.

Five minutes later, Joan called.

“Alan and Terra are both missing,” Alan’s mother said matter-of-factly. “They have not come to Georgia as planned. Where are the children?” Joan was stressed and impatient. She knew how Jessica could be. She’d slept very little the previous night. She did not need her ex-daughter-in-law’s nonsense now.

“My mom’s house.”

“They haven’t shown up. They’re not here. . . .”

Jessica said she didn’t know how to react to Joan’s accusatory tone. Almost immediately, Jessica felt, Joan was condemning her. Poking a finger in her chest. She was only calling to threaten. Make the implication that Jessica had something to do with Alan and Terra’s disappearance. ( “It got ugly real quick,” Jessica recalled.)

“You’ve harmed them,” Jessica said Joan snapped at her. Joan was, obviously, upset. Uptight. On edge. Distraught. Crying. Saying things she would not remember later on. “They’re missing. Where are they?”

“Please let me know, Joan, what’s going on when you find out. I would need to tell the kids something.” The kids were expecting Alan and Terra to pick them up. They had anticipated their arrival. But Alan and Terra never came, Jessica said. As she spoke, apparently trying to explain this to Joan, she could hear Philip in the background. He was giving someone her address and phone number. Jessica could hear him clearly, as if she were in the same room. She asked Joan, “Why is he giving out my address? What’s going on? Why is he giving out my mom’s address? Tell me, Joan!”

Joan wouldn’t answer.

“Please, Joan. Please let me know, when you do, what’s going on.”

They hung up.

According to Jessica, the phone call upset her. She was bewildered and didn’t know what to make of it. She went to Jeff.

“What should we do?”

“Well,” Jeff said in his stoic Southern drawl, “let’s just go about our business here. There’s nothing that we can do. Sitting here, being upset, that isn’t going to solve anything.”

Jessica was unable to do chores around the house, she said. She was totally preoccupied with the situation. Pacing, waiting for Joan, Philip or anyone to call with some information. A bit of news. Some sort of word as to what in the heck was happening.

“Look,” Jeff said, watching his wife fuss about, “it’s not going to make them call any faster.”

Jessica needed to know. She’d have to tell the kids something sooner or later.

After a time, Jessica recalled, she and Jeff went back to cleaning up the house so her stepfather could come in later on that morning, as planned, to put in a new kitchen floor. In fact, according to Jessica, there was all sorts of work going on inside the house. Wall plastering. Carpeting. Wallpapering. Furniture and toys being tossed out. Cleaning. Trips to the dump. Also part of the anxious nature in fixing up the house and getting things thrown away was the fact that the state was coming to look things over as part of the child custody matter Jessica and Alan were involved in. Jessica admitted she was no Suzie Homemaker, but she didn’t want to give the state the wrong impression.

“Alan and Terra are much better housekeepers than I am,” Jessica said later. “I mean, it certainly would have been an issue [for the state], had it been in the condition it was at that time.”

8

Back at the Bates household in Marietta, the morning was a series of frantic, angst-filled uncertainties, disorder and questions. Philip called Robert early that morning to brief him about what was happening.

“I called the rental car company, Robert . . . spoke with GBI . . .”

Robert got the feeling something terrible had happened—he just didn’t know what.

“Drop whatever you’re doing and get up here,” Philip said.

Robert called Kevin, explained what was going on.

“I’m on my way,” Kevin said.

Robert, his wife and their kids were in Newnan at his mother-in-law’s house. They had driven down the night before. Robert and Kevin planned to head over to their parents’ house that afternoon—on Saturday—to meet up with Terra, Alan and the kids. They hadn’t seen each other since Christmas. Alan had turned thirty on January 22. They planned a belated birthday party for him. They were going to spend the day and night together as a family. Laughing. Joking around. Telling stories. Catching up.

Just like old times.

Kevin arrived first. As he walked in, there was a terrible, cold silence in the house. A deafening hum of pain and emotional tension. His mother sat at the table. Joan was silent and sullen. She stared blankly, Kevin recalled, “her eyes covered in tears, her face red.”

The progression of processing what was about to happen, Kevin recalled, was taking place in front of him. Both his parents were thinking things through. Facing facts. Trying to digest what was going on. What was coming. Accepting that a child is dead is not what parents are designed to do. It is a slow, wearisome transformation from protector to feeling like you’re running to stand still. You want to do something, but you have to come to the realization that there is nothing you can do.

Then you’re expected to open up and help an investigation that’s going on around you.

It’s as though the soul is being torn apart—slowly.

Philip didn’t say much. But what he said stung Kevin as he acclimated himself to the house, the tone, and what was happening. It was like being sucker punched. You had no idea you had been hit until you felt your jaw begin to swell, turned and then saw someone running away from you.

“The GBI is on the way,” Philip explained tersely, not pulling punches. His voice choked up.

The idea that Alan and Terra were in a car accident became the mainstay of thought. It was something they all considered, without verbalizing their feelings. That look Philip gave Kevin, however, told him something else. Staring at his father, Kevin considered: The GBI would not be coming here if Alan and Terra were involved in a car accident.

No way.

“At that point you realize something really wrong has happened,” Kevin said later. Before that, there was the hope that a hospital would call to say Alan and Terra were there. Alan was okay. Hurt, but okay. Terra was there by his side, holding vigil, befuddled and amazed. But safe.

When Robert walked in, he could see the look on Kevin’s, his mother’s and his father’s faces: gloom and doom. A pale shade of white. Ghostly. The life had been drained out of them, the air sucked from the room. Philip Bates was not a man who broke under pressure. He was an engineer. He thought things through with a methodical sense of composure. He analyzed situations, came up with solutions. Here, though, at this moment, Philip was dazed. He didn’t have the answer.

Kevin filled Robert in.

“Well,” Robert said under his breath so his mom and dad couldn’t hear, “I’m with you. The GBI doesn’t get involved with just a traffic accident. This is bigger.”

“We were just trying to think things through. What do you do?” Kevin later explained. “You don’t know much, and what you do know is not good.”

As they comforted one another, various emotions came in waves: hope, worry, dread. Up. Down. Tears. Then a happy memory. More doubt. Then a glimmer of optimism.

At this point they just wanted to know where Alan was. The GBI had not given them any specific details.

The GBI agents at the house were total professionals. They walked in. One of them comforted the family without giving away too much information. As they talked, another agent was getting details via walkie-talkie from the other agents at the crime scene and out in the field.

The agent asked the family for the spellings of names. Addresses. Phone numbers. Where? When? How? What time?

Everything seemed to be going at hyper speed. Kevin and Robert gave the agent as many phone numbers as they had. Philip explained what he knew up to that point. And this was the reality about tragedy: in its early stages you’re forced to go over the same stories again and again. The details are in the repetition.

“Where was Alan? Where did he fly into?”

Robert answered.

Then they’d ask how he seemed: Happy? Sad? Upset? Angry?

Slowly the pieces of the GBI’s investigation began to emerge and come into focus for the Bateses. The GBI’s questions, in turn, gave the family answers. The agents didn’t need to say anything more.

“They handed the bad news out in bites you could handle,” Robert recalled. He appreciated that immensely. This wasn’t a movie of the week. No knock on the door by two state troopers with their hats in their hands and a mouthful of heartbreak. This was a process. A slow dance toward what was looking to be an inevitable truth the family was going to have to contend with, one way or another.

Knowing how distraught and upset Philip and Joan were, the agent called Robert outside. It was there, out of the earshot of Joan and Philip, that she explained how they had uncovered two bodies in the trunk of Alan’s rental car. She wanted to let Robert know that they needed Alan’s dental records.

Robert’s stomach turned over when she asked. He knew, then and there, his brother was dead. He didn’t need DNA or dental confirmation. Instinct grabbed hold of his throat, put a lump in it. The only silver lining—if it could even be called such—in the middle of this devastating news was that there had been only two bodies found in the car.

Not four.

That meant the kids were not with them.

The agent wanted to let Robert know first, before breaking the news to Philip and Joan. It wasn’t corroboration that Alan and Terra were dead, of course—that’s not what the GBI was implying here. The investigator said she’d seen more bizarre things happen in her career. But there was a good chance it was their bodies. The dentals records would answer a lot of questions.

“How do you think I should deliver this to them?” the agent asked Robert, meaning Philip and Joan.

“Dad likes to deal in facts. Give him the facts—however you choose to—and he’ll manage.”

As the morning carried on, bits of information came into focus. As they spoke, first the GBI let out that they had uncovered bodies in the trunk of Alan’s rental; a while later, it became a car fire; then, “Can we have those dental records?”

One plus one plus one equals three. Every time. Kevin and Robert knew it. The slow walk toward the bitter, sad truth: Alan and his wife were dead.

Murdered.

The agent also mentioned that the GBI had investigators heading into Birmingham.

Kevin and Robert looked at each other. Birmingham?

“We may have another crime scene over there.”

Philip came by. He seemed to be listening. “Alan was in Birmingham,” he said, “giving a deposition in his child custody case.”

That was important.

After a bit more going back and forth, some history of what was going on with Alan and Jessica, where Alan might have taken off to if he decided not to pick up the children, the GBI had what it needed and got ready to leave.

“We’ll be calling you with updates, okay?” the agent promised.

Philip nodded his head. “Thank you.”

What was left for the Bates family to do now? Especially because in their hearts they knew, deep down, that Alan and Terra were dead. This new dose of anxiety came in the form of an explanation as to what had happened, who had killed them.

Kevin and Robert went into autopilot, comfort mode, without even thinking about it. Stay busy. Do things. Make calls. Get Terra’s family involved. Get family members over to the house so they could begin to put a support system in place for what they knew were going to be the roughest days of their lives ahead. Someone would have to tell the kids. Someone would have to sit them down and explain that their father and stepmother were gone. In fact, as Robert and Kevin and Philip thought about it, where were the kids?

9

Kimberly Williams and Sheron Vance made it to the PPD by 2:00 P.M. Of course, they had gained an hour as they passed over the invisible line of the Central time zone.

They waited around. Had some coffee. Explained the situation. “We talked to the chief and a couple [Pelham] investigators about Mr. McCord,” Williams told me.

Through that, one thing became clear: Jeff McCord was not your typical cop. He had never been part of the blue crowd.

“They told us he was a loner. Strange person. Kept to himself.” Not your traditional blue blood. Jeff was that guy who didn’t say a lot but always seemed to have something heavy on his mind. We all know someone like this.

By 2:45 P.M., Jeff McCord arrived to clock in for his shift.

“His superiors told him to come in and talk to Miss Williams,” someone close to the case later said. “There’s a . . . question about whether or not it was voluntary.”

Primarily, Williams and Vance wanted to create some sort of timeline for Alan and Terra, and find out what piece of the puzzle Jeff McCord could bring to the table. Simple stuff. Common questions Jeff had probably asked suspects himself as a police officer. There wasn’t going to be any dark room, a chair in the middle of the floor, lights in his face. Just three cops talking. Getting to the truth.

At least for the time being.

Immediately Jeff came across as standoffish and aloof. He had an attitude about him that said, You got a lot of nerve questioning me! Kind of odd for a fellow cop to be so cagey and unhelpful. Then again, Williams understood, she didn’t know the guy. She had nothing to base her judgment on. Maybe this was Jeff’s general demeanor? The way he acted around everyone.

“You always want to try and build a rapport first with a witness,” Williams explained in her clear Southern accent. “This way you can tell how he answers questions.”

With Jeff, that was not going to be easy; he did not want to talk.

Jeff was concerned about speaking with two investigators from another state regarding a case that they did not want to divulge any information about. Jeff asked Williams why she needed the information, and Williams danced around that issue. She wasn’t about to show her cards. Both Williams and Vance weren’t saying much more than how they were looking for Alan and Terra Bates. On top of that, Jeff had been up most of the night with his wife. He was playing on a short fuse. He’d slept for a few hours that afternoon, but for the most part, he hadn’t slept in the past two days.

Jeff’s chief pulled him aside, according to what Williams later said. “You’re under no obligation to talk to these investigators,” the chief told his officer. Yet, there was something in the chief’s voice, a look, letting Jeff know in not so many words that it might be in his best interest to tell them what they needed to know.

“I understand,” Jeff said.

As the interview went forward, the tone remained informal. Very brief, too. Williams asked Jeff where the kids spent the previous night.

“The kids, oh,” Jeff said as though he’d had a memory lapse, “I supervised them packing for the weekend. They were supposed to be picked up by Alan at six. When Alan failed to show up, we dropped them off at their grandparents [Dian and Albert Bailey, Jessica’s mother and stepfather], somewhere near six forty-five.” Dian and Albert lived on Whiting Road in Hoover, Jeff explained, about a half mile from the McCords’ house on Myrtlewood. The drive took minutes.

Williams nodded and wrote that down. 6:45.

They stood inside the same interview room the Pelham police used to interrogate suspects and witnesses. Jeff sat. He had his uniform on. His weapon holstered. He kept looking at his watch. He needed to get ready for his shift.

Williams asked where Jessica was at the moment.

“Her mother’s house.”

“What was supposed to happen yesterday?” Williams wanted to know. She asked Jeff for the day’s schedule. What was the McCord plan and how had they carried it out?

Jeff shrugged. Didn’t want to respond to that.

“Did the Bateses show up for the depositions?”

“Yeah,” Jeff answered freely. “They did.” But Jeff wasn’t there. He said he was at home with the kids.

“Did you personally have any contact with them afterward?”

“Nope.”

Jeff wasn’t going to say much more than yes or no. He was either obviously hiding something or this was the way he reacted to questions from anyone. Williams and Vance had nothing to compare his reactions to. They had just met him. And the guy was easy not to like right from the start, Williams said. “We wanted to know about these depositions—what happened before, after, and so on,” she explained later. “What he knew about them being in Alabama. What he knew about where they went, and what the plan was for them to pick up the children.”

But Jeff McCord kept “talking in circles,” Williams said.

“Just tell us, then,” Williams stated at one point during the interview, now a bit frustrated and impatient with this fellow cop, “what you did, Officer McCord? What did you do yesterday since the time you got up? Talk us through your day until right now.”

For Vance and Williams, they got the idea Jeff was being uncooperative. “We had no idea if this was the way he was or [if] he was actually hiding something. We had no idea how he processed things, or how to gauge when to be alerted about something. He was just very . . . very quiet.”

Jeff’s posture told another story—and this was something Williams studied furtively, intuitively. It stood out after a time. Jeff appeared defensive in his movements, especially the way he reacted to questions—which is something else entirely. A suspect cannot camouflage how his body reacts to questions put in front of him, no matter how hard he tries. It’s instinct. All people do certain things with their hands, legs, maybe a crinkle of the brow, an eyebrow lift, a rub of the nose. Makes no difference how hard a suspect might try to conceal his actions and movements. His ticks. Cops just need to figure these out and they can give a lie detector test on the spot without a person even realizing it’s going on.

“It was like pulling teeth,” Williams said, “getting information”—even basic stuff—“out of him, and then when he decided to talk, he ran us in circles.”

Did Jeff know this trick, too?

As the interview carried forth, Jeff rattled on and on and seemed to be talking about nothing. So Williams interrupted him. “What point is it that you’re trying to make, Officer McCord?”

Jeff lifted his shoulders and dropped them back down. Did he even know?

What is going on with this guy? Williams thought at that moment. “It was beginning to concern us, just because he was so matter-of-fact at times and jabbering at others.”

Up and down.

This turned out to be another red flag. The fact that the guy was all over the place was cause for concern. He was apparently hiding something.

“What did you and your wife do last night?” Williams asked, breaking it down into bites. She decided to start back at the beginning.

Jeff went into a long “spiel, this convoluted” story, Williams explained, about what they had done.

“We saw Lord of the Rings,” he began. “Then snuck into Black Hawk Down. We went for a river walk and drove around. . . . Oh yeah, and . . . well . . . Jessica wanted to go to a strip club, so we went.”

“Okay . . .”

Strip club?

“Well, look,” Jeff said, reaching into his back pocket, pulling out his wallet, “I have the movie stubs.”

How convenient, Williams thought. Time– and date-stamped movie stubs.

The GBI had already contacted the HPD and had gotten them involved. By now, both agencies had positive confirmation that the bodies were Alan and Terra Bates’s. They had been murdered. As originally thought, they were dead before being stuffed into the trunk of Alan’s rental car.

Once the GBI knew Alan and Terra were supposed to pick up the children at the McCord house the previous evening, they decided to put a surveillance on Jeff and Jessica’s house. Philip and Joan Bates mentioned there was some animosity between the two families, and Jessica hated her ex-husband and was fighting him for custody of the children. Standing in front of Jeff McCord, questioning him regarding his whereabouts the previous night, Williams and Vance knew a good portion of this corrosive history. And now they had Jeff handing over—he just happened to have them on him—movie stubs. At best, it all seemed so staged. At worst, Jeff was just a numbskull and didn’t really understand the ramifications of his highly suspicious actions.

“Can we see those stubs, Officer McCord?”

“Sure,” Jeff said happily.

Jeff produced what Williams described as “two pristine movie stubs” from the Carmike Cinema on Lorna Road, in Birmingham. He took them out of his wallet. The date on the stubs was, sure enough, February 15, the previous night, 6:57 P.M.

How ’bout that.

Williams and Vance looked at each other. “This was a definite red flag,” Williams told me later. “Generally, people leave movie stubs in their coat pocket, pants pocket . . . and here are these two pristine—in case I needed them, apparently—stubs.”

“You cannot keep those,” Jeff said. Then, with an overconfident smugness, “But you can go ahead and make a copy of them.”

Why doesn’t this guy want to help? Williams pondered.

Okay, so they had gone to the movies. “A night out,” as Jeff put it. And he and Jessica were, in fact, gone until the break of dawn. That much could be proven. They had driven over to the Home Depot in Birmingham first thing in the morning, 6:00 A.M., to pick up materials to begin several long-overdue remodeling projects. Yet, they walked out of the Home Depot with basically nothing.

On the face of it, Williams and Vance considered, it sounded like, well, a story.

A carefully crafted alibi.

“The thing is,” Williams said, “the truth doesn’t change. It is what it is. No matter how you remember it, the truth does not change.”

After they concluded the interview, Jeff took off to another part of the station house, one would imagine, as far away from Vance and Williams as he could get inside the same building. Williams and Vance went in to see Jeff’s chief. They needed a few favors.

“Keep him here for his shift, could you?”

“Sure,” the chief said.

“Yeah, we want to keep him off the road.”

“No problem.”