I was only thirty yards away when the subject saw me. It was only by chance that he did. A porch light came on at a house on Junction Street in response to my partner’s gunfire. When he turned momentarily in response, his eyes fell on me. I could see in the look that the shock nearly turned him to stone. His throat erupted in a primal scream of rage—or was it fear? I knew at that moment that never before in his life had he felt the humiliation of that emotion. He tossed away the rifle he held in his hands and bolted.
Even as he coursed along the fence row, his legs pumping furiously, I put myself in his mind and could almost hear his thoughts. How had this happened? He’d no doubt been chortling in self-satisfaction over being able to find my partner and me sitting unsuspecting in the unmarked scout car, and to sneak up—so he thought—behind us so easily. Then I came upon him from behind, found him in the dark. Why, by the blood of Zarabanda, didn’t I feel him approach? I could almost hear him shout. But he must have forced the distracting thoughts aside, because he pelted furiously toward Junction, with me in close pursuit.
A fence enclosed the western end of the field he’d been hiding in, so I doubted he would head that way: a man might climb a fence when he came to it, but it would slow him down. I sensed that he would head toward Junction. I was right. As I lurched into stride and raced after him, I heard more shots reverberate from the direction of Merritt Street, where my partner apparently engaged an accomplice. No matter now. Nothing I could do. The chase was on.
The subject emerged from the field and ran onto Junction. He crossed the street and continued eastward on Merritt, skirting another warehouse on that side of the street. I was only twenty paces behind. But I wasn’t young anymore. At forty-three, my wind was no good. He began to pull ahead.
I was still only thirty paces behind when he reached the far corner of the warehouse and turned left. In the time it took to take two breaths, I reached the corner behind him. Despite my ragged breathing, I grinned with satisfaction. I knew this building, and I knew that the subject had fled into a blind alley—there was no outlet, the high walls of the storage buildings rose on all sides. The alley ended in an impenetrable wall of cement. He was trapped.
As I paused at the corner of the building for the barest fraction of a second, I eased my head past the brick façade just far enough to peer with one eye down the alley. I was stunned. The cul-de-sac was deserted. The subject was gone! I thought at first that my eyes were deceiving me. I looked again, my whole head emerging from behind the wall. Nothing. I stepped quickly out and walked warily down the alley, my .357 Magnum revolver at the ready. Had some workman left a door ajar, permitting the subject to escape into a building? What rotten luck! But no, as I remembered, there were no doors, just the walls of the buildings . . . and the roofs were twenty feet in the air.
I walked all the way to the end of the alley, my eyes searching every corner and crevice. There were no parked cars. There were no trash dumpsters. There were no stacks of crates. The alley stood as clean and empty as an airplane hangar. There could be no mistake: the subject had simply vanished.
I holstered my weapon and stood for a moment in the darkness of the alley, the silence filling me. The cold, the sense of malignancy, were gone. But a trace of something intangible lingered in the air; a faint smell, so ethereal that I wasn’t sure it was really there. I sought it, tried to identify it, finally lost it. I let the quiet and the silence fill me completely. After a while, I smiled.
I finally walked away, returning to Merritt Street and my partner, who was thankfully alive and uninjured after a shoot-out with one of the subject’s associates.
Only when a lieutenant and an inspector arrived, took charge of the homicide scene, made notifications, and started asking questions, did I break out of my reverie and start talking to Magaly, the New York City magazine reporter who had been riding along with my partner and me for over a week.
“Where have you been?” she asked, breathless, her hair disheveled. She was completely out of sorts over the shooting she’d witnessed only moments earlier.
“Chasing someone,” I said. “Chasing our guy. It was him. I know it. But he’s gone. He got away. Disappeared.”
Looking into her eyes, I could tell it was impossible for her to gauge my mood. She finally said, “Well, it’s dark. It’d be easy to lose someone . . . I guess it happens, huh?”
“No, I mean he disappeared,” I insisted. “He just vanished, Maggie. He ran down a dead-end alley. I had him. I really had him. He was cornered. Then he was . . . gone.”
“Well, he couldn’t just—”
“He did.” I turned again and looked into the night. “He did.”
Maggie shivered. “It’s him, then,” she murmured. As you say, Bill. It’s him.”
I quietly nodded.
Before the arrival of the homicide team, the lieutenant, with the consent of the inspector, took initial steps to preserve evidence and organize the scene. First, I ordered a scout car crew to go back up to the vacant lot where I had discovered the subject hiding and secure the area. They quickly found the rifle the subject had thrown away, nestled among some weeds. They let the weapon lay where they found it, and waited impatiently for it to be photographed, measured, and ultimately retrieved and tagged by responding evidence technicians.
Next, the lieutenant requested a K-9 unit to come out to the scene to attempt a track of the subject. The dog handlers arrived within a few minutes and were directed to the waiting officers along the fence line in the vacant lot. The dog, a big German shepherd, immediately picked up a scent from the ground, as well as from the rifle. He pulled eagerly at his leader and struggled against the leash, pulling his handler along at a trot. “Find him, Rocky,” urged the handler, a young cop whom, Magaly said, looked like Andy Garcia. “Find him, boy!”
The dog followed a strong scent all along the route I’d taken in pursuit of the subject, all the way into the dead-end alley, and down to its end. The dog sniffed nervously along the blank wall for a moment and then sat on its haunches, staring straight ahead—it was trained to do that after locating the person it was looking for. Rocky was doing his job. “There,” he was saying. “There he is—in the wall.”
I never saw the subject again, and no arrests were ever made.
Excerpt from Burnt Offerings by Charles W. Newsome, Detroit Police Department, Retired.