It took me three tries to get the phone number right. Julie answered on the second ring.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“In the car,” she said. “With Casey and Lainey.”
“Can you pull over?”
“Why?”
“I need you to write something down and I don’t want you to get into an accident.”
“What’s going on?”
“Just pull over.”
“I’m in a driveway. What?”
“I need you to call a lawyer named Roger Synenberg.”
“What? Why?”
“I’m in jail,” I said.
* * *
Let’s jump back a bit. There’re some things you should know before we get into this.
My mom. She lived in a house on the nice side of Lakewood, with three of my sisters. Barb, the middle one at twenty-two, shared the first floor with our mother. Barb had two dogs, one of which was an American Bulldog, a beast of an animal. I had been trying to talk her into getting rid of it for the better part of the year. Barb reminds me of Maura in many ways and I often asked her for perspective on this mystery as it progressed. She was athletic, like Maura, attractive, quiet. Supersmart, but struggling in college. Studied nursing. Knew her way around bars.
The trouble started when her bulldog attacked another dog outside her house. The dog’s owner filed a report and an animal control officer came to the house. He was a young man, Barb’s age. Skinny guy, squinty eyes; let’s call him Brian. After that first meeting, Brian inserted himself into my sister’s life in increasingly odd ways. He started dropping by the house, calling her on the phone. Funny thing, though: Every time he visited, every time he called, he made a point to tell Barb that he was “off duty” and the visits were “not official business.” This behavior escalated over several weeks. When Barb didn’t answer his calls, Brian called our mother at work to ask where she was. Then he showed up at the house again and told Barb to let him inside so he could look around the first floor. What he was doing was way beyond the scope of his powers. My first thought when I heard all this was that this man was casing the place.
My mind is an encyclopedia of deviant behavior, and Brian’s actions reminded me of Dennis Rader—BTK—the serial killer who terrorized Wichita, Kansas, from 1974 until 2005. Rader worked as an animal control officer and used that position to gain information about his victims: whether they had a guard dog; the layout of their homes.
Our mother caught Brian outside the house a few days before she called me. He was out of uniform. He told her that he happened to be walking down their street, off duty, because he lived in the area. But when I ran his background, I found he lived in Westlake, two towns over.
Barb was due in court to answer questions about the dog that day, a Monday. I left the kids with the babysitter and drove up to the Lakewood muni building and got my first look at Brian as he walked into the courtroom. The young man gave me the heebie-jeebies. He sat ten feet from my sister, and leered at her.
The judge came in: Judge Patrick Carroll, an old, cantankerous judge with a reputation for busting chops. He was particularly harsh on drunk drivers.
When he called Barb’s name, I escorted her around the partition.
“Who are you?” the judge asked.
“I’m her brother.”
“If you’re not a lawyer, you can’t be here.”
“I know,” I said. “But there’s something going on that you need to hear about.”
“Let me ask you again. Are you a lawyer?”
“No.”
“Then get out.”
I turned to Barb then, realizing, a little late, that this was not going to work out in our favor. Not there. Not then. “Just plead not guilty,” I said. “We’ll come back.”
“Out!”
A police officer who had been standing by the door stepped toward me. I put up my hands to let him know I was leaving. But as I went, I made myself heard. “That man,” I said, pointing to the animal control officer where he sat by the prosecutor, “is stalking my sister. Somebody needs to check him out.”
I was at the door by the time the judge gave me the ultimatum. “If you say one more word, I will find you in contempt.”
It felt like someone had thrown open a door inside my mind. CREEEK! Out comes the rage monster. My mind was a whir of memories. What did I know about Judge Carroll? What could I say that would make the most impact, show him how much contempt I really did have for him. Ah yes. The one thing you could never call Judge Carroll …
“You’re just a drunk!” I shouted. An audible gasp went around the room. I turned my back on him and walked out the door.
The officer by the door was a young fellow by the name of Anthony Ciresi. He’d just escorted a man from jail. That’s why he was there. Ciresi followed me out of the courtroom and then threw me across the hall, hard, into the concrete wall. I lost my breath. Couldn’t breathe.
I had two distinct thoughts.
Thought one: Oh shit. The rage is still in control. Wait. Wait. Give me a second to calm down.
Thought two: Okay, asshole. You want to fight? Good. Because I’ve been waiting for a long time to fight someone and you’ll do just fine.
I felt hands on my wrists. I spun, grabbed Ciresi’s arm, and flipped him away from me. It was like tossing a bail of hay off a truck. I looked down at him as he picked himself up off the tiled floor, saw the fear in his eyes. Loved it. Loved it if nothing more than for the fact that for the rest of his career, when he feels like roughing up a perp, he’ll remember me and how easily I got the drop on him.
I was ready to pounce. I wanted a few swings at that smooth face before anyone could interrupt us. But that other part of me, that newer part of me, that part that is a father and a lover, stepped forward and spoke up: Don’t make it worse!
It gave Ciresi time to reach his belt. He pulled a weapon. At first I thought it was a gun. But then I noticed that it was bright yellow. A Taser. It was aimed at my heart.
I raised my hands. “Okay,” I said.
“Turn around,” he growled.
I complied. In a moment, he was cuffing my wrists, digging into the skin as far as it would give, pushing my face against the wall. I turned my head and saw a woman sitting in the hallway, waiting to pay a bill. She’d seen everything, the only witness. Her mouth was open in a comical look of shock. I smiled, tried to look friendly. “Did you see him throw me into the wall?” I asked.
She nodded.
“I’ll need your name,” I said.
Ciresi pulled me around and marched me down the hall, around the corner, toward the police station on the other side of the building. Other officers were running toward us, in response to the sound of the fight in the hallway. They slowed down when they saw I was cuffed. A couple of cops clapped Ciresi on the back and said odd things such as, “Like father like son.” I would discover later that Ciresi was actually the son of the guy who’d run the Lakewood Police Department’s detective bureau for many years. Dumb fucking luck.
“I’m not some drunk piece of white trash,” I said, trying my best to put the Hulk away, lock that door up before I got myself in deeper. “What you did back there is called ‘excessive force.’”
“That right?”
“You’re going to be writing parking tickets in a month,” I said.
He sighed and wrote something down in his notepad. I had picked the worst thing to say, again.
They charged me with “Assault on a Peace Officer,” a felony of the fourth degree. Eighteen months in prison, if convicted. I was given one call, which I used to reach Julie. After that, I was assigned an orange shirt and pants. Someone handed me a bedroll. Another officer escorted me to my cell.
I lay down on the mattress and replayed the events of the day in my mind, tried to figure out just how much trouble I was in. There were about eight other dudes in the jail with me, sitting in the common area, watching TV. They wanted to know what I was in for, but I wouldn’t talk to them. I was going to be out soon. I knew I would. I didn’t belong there, with them. I pulled the door to my cell shut and locked myself inside.