Jack of Spades Read online

  The outcome of Rivers’s trial was a foregone conclusion. The evidence against him was overwhelming. During their authorized search for evidence of illegal drug activity, police officers found, in the back of a drawer in Rivers’s nightstand, Polaroids of Rivers’s nine victims. In each of the photos, the victim was already legless. In a few of them, the victims were either unconscious or dead, having already died from their wounds or passed out from the pain or blood loss. In three of photos, though, the victims were clearly still alive, their eyes wild and uncomprehending. In the same drawer as the photos, the police found a tube of K-Y Jelly.

  In a box on the floor of a closet, police found paperwork leading them to a self-storage facility in Revere, just a few miles from Rivers’s apartment. Pursuant to a search warrant, they used bolt cutters to remove the combination lock on Rivers’s unit. Inside, they found the mother lode. More photos of the victims, both before and after amputation. The camera used to take the pictures. A stun gun of sufficient voltage to inflict the burn marks on the victims, and whose prongs matched the distance between those wounds. Duct tape of the kind used to bind the victims. A black running suit and black ski mask. Several pairs of black rubber gloves, two of which carried traces of the blood of three of Rivers’s victims. Apparently, Rivers was careful. He came to this storage unit immediately before and after each of his crimes, leaving very little in his apartment to link him to the crimes. But he needed the photos nearby. It was part of his sickness. And there was more to be found in the storage unit, more than enough to make the case against Rivers a slam dunk. With headlines like, “Jack of Spades Is King,” the press made a minor celebrity of Detective John Spader, the handsome, modest cop who put an end to Eddie Rivers’s atrocities. What he’d accomplished, along with his natural good looks and the nickname he’d been stuck with, made him a natural choice to become the new face of the Massachusetts State Police—indeed, of essentially all law-enforcement personnel in the state. The commissioner encouraged him to give on-air news interviews and make appearances on local morning shows, and though he was reluctant to do so, to step into the spotlight, he did as asked and did it as well he could without letting it interfere with his real detective work. He was a natural, it turned out, his capability and humility coming across for all to see. Everyone loved him.

  And then it all fell apart. Rivers’s defense team moved to suppress every scrap of evidence obtained during the search of the defendant’s home and the self-storage facility—which, of course, was virtually everything the prosecution had. According to the defense, the search warrant Wagner had drafted at Spader’s request was defective. In such situations, the court would look at “the four corners” of the warrant. If it didn’t pass constitutional muster on its own, without consideration given to any evidence later obtained pursuant to the warrant, no matter how incriminating, then everything found during the search—that is, all the evidence taken from the apartment, including the photographs and the paperwork that led them to the storage facility—would be found to have been illegally obtained. Furthermore, any evidence in the storage facility would be deemed inadmissible, as well. The lawyers called it “fruit of the poisonous tree.” The entire case against Rivers for multiple murders, therefore, hinged on the warrant withstanding judicial scrutiny.

  It didn’t. Spader had instructed Wagner what to put into the warrant application, hitting only the high points. Wagner was a pro and had drafted countless warrants. One essential element was the assertion in the application that officers had surveilled the apartment building, having suspected the defendant was dealing drugs on two dates from that location, and during the course of that surveillance witnessed a significant amount of foot traffic entering and leaving the building—traffic that, in the cops’ experience, was consistent with drug dealing. In fact, Spader had lied on this point, having merely been provided the dates by his informant for the specific nights that Rivers was dealing. However, possibly because he’d been drinking, one of the two dates Wagner typed into the warrant application was wrong. One of the nights Spader supposedly had Rivers under surveillance, and purportedly watched what appeared to his experienced eye to be evidence of drug dealing, was incorrect. It was off by a day, the second of the month rather than the first. And Spader, trusting Wagner, never read the warrant when Wagner brought it to him.

  Claiming that the defendant did not sell drugs on the second of the month, as asserted in the warrant—but remaining silent as to the other date listed—the defense filed a motion to suppress all evidence taken from Rivers’s apartment, as well as that found in the storage unit, which, if the former evidence were discovered pursuant to an illegal search, would be “fruit of the poisonous tree” and therefore inadmissible.

  The court heard arguments on the motion, during which Spader, as the trooper who claimed to have witnessed the illegal activity, took the stand. He had two options. He could admit that the date was wrong and let the prosecutor argue that the error was harmless, which meant they’d take their chances that the judge would agree and deny Rivers’s motion, or Spader could claim that the information contained in the warrant was accurate and that the defendant was either lying or mistaken. In other words, he could lie. The prosecutor wanted him to tell the truth, whatever that may be, and take their chances. His opinion was that there was a fifty-fifty chance the judge would uphold the validity of the warrant despite the error contained in it. Spader wasn’t satisfied with those odds. He figured the only way his lie could be exposed as such would be if Rivers could establish an alibi for the night Wagner had mistakenly typed into the warrant application, the night after he actually had been dealing drugs. To do this, he’d need at least one credible witness saying that he was with Rivers that night and that Rivers hadn’t been dealing drugs. The key word there was “credible.” Who among Rivers’s associates was going to be more credible than a highly respected state trooper? Of course, it was theoretically possible that one of Rivers’s drug-buying clients could come forward and say, “No, you’ve got that wrong. I bought smack from Eddie on the first, not the second.” Unlikely. Spader decided to tell the prosecutors that the date was correct and Rivers was grasping at straws.

  He wasn’t. Had Oscar Wagner chosen nearly any other day than the second of the month to substitute for the correct date, Spader’s logic probably would have held. No one would have come forward on Rivers’s behalf…at least no one the court would believe. Unfortunately, Wagner had chosen the second. And Rivers’s defense team waited until after Spader had perjured himself to introduce evidence—evidence which they could have attached as an appendix to their motion to suppress, thus eliminating the need for oral arguments on the motion—consisting of hospital admission records proving that Eddie Rivers, who had stepped on a broken beer bottle on the evening of the second, spent several hours in the emergency room waiting to have his foot stitched up. Of course, those hours included those Spader testified to having spent watching people parade in and out of Rivers’s apartment building buying drugs from him. There was even a signed affidavit from the treating ER physician swearing that Eddie Rivers was the person he had treated that night.

  The evidence was suppressed. All of it. The prosecution was left with nothing but a charge of attempted assault on a police officer and a resisting arrest charge, because even though the arrest pursuant to the tainted search warrant would be illegal, it is against the law to resist even an unlawful arrest. However, because the defense claimed that Rivers was tossing away the gun as Spader had requested, rather than raising it to fire, as the prosecution alleged, there was enough doubt that the prosecution didn’t feel confident about its chances of convicting on the attempted assault charge. Which left a mere resisting arrest charge for a man everyone in Massachusetts, perhaps the nation, knew had murdered seven people and crippled two more. Rather than risk drawing a jury sympathetic to defendants’ rights and thereby possibly losing outright and seeing Rivers walk away free and clear, prosecutors offered a him a deal. He pleade
d guilty to resisting arrest and agreed to a one-year sentence. He smiled at Spader on his way to jail.

  While the prosecutor had believed that they had an even chance of defeating Rivers’s motion to suppress despite Wagner’s error, contending that the error was harmless, the prosecutor was convinced that Spader’s apparent perjury and utter contempt of the judicial process had pissed off the judge and lost them the motion, and therefore essentially the entire case. The district attorney considered filing perjury charges against Spader, but wanted more than anything to put this ugly affair to rest and, hopefully, get it out of the public’s eye. In the end, he urged strongly—very strongly—that the state police take care of things internally. At Captain Struthers’s reluctant suggestion, the Internal Affairs Section launched an investigation into the entire matter. Investigators learned of Wagner’s history of drinking on the job and the fact that Wagner had been drinking when he drafted the warrant application. Wagner was toast.

  Spader, on the other hand, was either mistaken about the dates or had deliberately lied. If mistaken, well, some discipline for sloppiness—more technically termed “neglect of duty”—would be warranted. On the other hand, deliberately lying in the course of one’s duties, known as “departing from the truth,” was a very serious offense. Additionally, Spader could have been charged internally with “failure to conduct himself in a professional manner” and “conduct unbecoming a state trooper.” He could have lost his job. Whether he was ultimately cleared because the investigators couldn’t find enough evidence against him, or because the investigators and the powers that be in the force secretly knew and respected what he had tried to do, even if they’d never admit to that, Spader would never know. Or perhaps Oscar Wagner was right. Perhaps in him they had a scapegoat and they didn’t need another. What mattered most to Spader was that he was cleared of the more serious charges and was merely suspended for a week without pay for neglect of duty. The government and the state police had gone lightly on him. As Spader later found out, the media and the general public would not.

  A month into Rivers’s one-year sentence, Spader visited him. He looked at Rivers’s smug face through the thick glass separating them, at the remains of a few dark bruises on Rivers’s cheek and around one eye. Rivers looked back and smiled.

  “Well, if it isn’t the Jack of Spades,” he said.

  “You’re not looking so good.”

  “I had one tough night, but I’m in solitary now. For my own protection. So I got privacy, a TV. And the food’s not bad.” He licked his lips, then said, “See, Spader, I told you I didn’t kill those people.”

  “But you did.”

  “But I’m not going to jail for it and I never will. So it’s just like I didn’t do it.” He paused, thinking. “Well, it is to me, anyway. I guess it’s not for all those unfortunate victims and their families.” Then he smiled that shit-eating smile of his and stood. “Nice seeing you, Spader, but I gotta get back to my cell. It’s almost lunchtime and I heard it’s mac and cheese today.”

  Good behavior sprang Rivers in just under nine months. When he walked through the jail’s main doors, Spader watched from across the street. Rivers saw him leaning against his car and gave a friendly wave before stepping into a waiting cab. Within two weeks of Rivers’s release, Gregory and Elaine Tannenbaum returned from a night at the movies to find, stacked like firewood by their front door, the severed legs of Justin, their nine-year-old son, and Tammy Walker, his seventeen-year-old babysitter. To make things as clear as possible for the authorities, Rivers added a new wrinkle. He dipped his finger—and fingerprints determined it was his finger—into the boy’s blood and drew a capital “J” and a spade symbol, like those found on playing cards, followed by the words, “Parting gifts for you.”

  And then he disappeared. Even though everyone knew he’d killed all those people before being arrested, the constitutional prohibition against double jeopardy meant he was untouchable for them unless new evidence was found, and that would have been unlikely, because the police had already found everything. In other words, he could have gotten away with murder. He was off the hook. And instead breathing a sigh of relief for the close call and starting a new murder-free life somewhere, Rivers went right back to work, grabbing his first opportunity to add to his body count. And, in Spader’s mind, to his own, as well.

  The beer wasn’t doing its job. Spader rolled out from under the sheets, splashed some water on his face in the bathroom, then dropped back onto the bed. He didn’t bother getting under the covers, as they were merely getting in the way of his tossing and turning. He wondered if sleep was going to come that night.

  In the wake of Rivers’s most recent murders, Spader’s failure with the warrant was examined from every imaginable angle by the media. And he was vilified. He went from being the hero who had captured a monster to the man responsible for leaving the monster’s cage open, letting him out to strike again. And the monster had wasted no time in doing so. For weeks after that, it seemed, Spader couldn’t walk down the street without being reminded of his tragic failure. Headlines he passed on newsstands berated him. “Jack of Spades Folded on Stand.” “Rivers Called Jack of Spade’s Bluff.” “Killer Freed By Cop’s Mistake Kills Again.” And those stories were usually accompanied by Rivers’s picture, his smug face staring out at Spader, taunting him. Sometimes the papers also ran his own picture. Worst of all, though, were the stories that ran photos of Justin Tannenbaum and Tammy Walker, the two kids whose blood was on Spader’s hands. Those people who recognized his face from the TV or the papers either looked at him with barely concealed contempt, or boldly stated their opinions of his detective skills, his worth as a human being, and his fitness to breathe the same air as everyone else on the street.

  Internally, and officially, state police brass placed all the blame on Wagner, believing Spader was mistaken about the dates, having become confused by Wagner’s error. Spader suspected that unofficially—very, very unofficially—the higher-ups respected him for what he tried to do, even if his attempt had been misguided and ultimately unsuccessful. But that didn’t make Spader feel any better about possibly being the last straw for the judge, the one that helped Eddie Rivers walk. And he knew that in many eyes, he had screwed up, lied on the stand about it, and had gotten away with a slap on the wrist. For months, some of his fellow troopers gave him the cold shoulder. Some were openly scornful. Some simply opined that he should have shot Rivers in the face. For a while, Spader would respond that, no, he should have dotted his i’s and crossed his t’s on the warrant, but no one wanted to hear that. Oscar Wagner apologized to him in private but never stepped forward and acknowledged his part in chucking a wrench in the gears of the judicial machine. Spader wished the guy had had more of a backbone, but it didn’t really matter that much to him. Wagner had been forced to turn in his papers, so it wasn’t like he escaped unscathed. And besides, Spader knew, it was his case. He should have done things differently.

  Spader was getting tired of nights like this, nights when he’d lie awake with his fists jammed against his closed eyes thinking about all his mistakes, his questionable judgment, all the things he’d have to live with. On nights like this, he wished he’d just had Wagner read him the warrant application over the phone before he took it to Judge Banks. Or that he’d read the warrant himself before they served it on Rivers. Now and then he wished he had told the truth on the stand and taken his chances with the judge reviewing the search warrant. And almost always, on the darker nights, nights like this one, when the wind outside sounded a little like angry, whispered accusations, he wished he had, in fact, aimed his gun a little higher and to the right that day.

  SEVEN

  Spader dropped the phone receiver into its cradle and rubbed his tired eyes. He could have used more sleep last night. More sleep and less beer. He was sitting at his desk at work, having just called Stanley Pendleton, the only victim so far to have survived Galaxo’s attacks, to see if he remembered anything new. S
adly, he did not, so Spader accomplished nothing more with the call than to leave one of the victims with the distinct impression that the cops didn’t have a freaking clue what they were doing on this one. Spader closed his eyes and rubbed them again. When he opened them a civilian staffer was walking up to his desk. He handed Spader a fax several pages long and moved on.

  “Whatcha got?” Dunbar asked around a mouthful of bagel. His desk was next to Spader’s.

  “Fax from the FBI.”

  “Our profile of Galaxo?”

  Spader nodded.

  “Wow. That was fast.”

  Spader scanned the document. “Cover note says the Galaxo angle was intriguing, so the profiler, a Special Agent Dwight W. Daniels, fast-tracked it.”

  “We should send Dwight some flowers. So what’s it say?”

  “Says here Galaxo is a bad guy.”

  “And you were saying he was a sweetheart. How about giving me the highlights?” Dunbar grabbed a bowl of walnuts off the corner of his desk and leaned back in his chair, nutcracker in hand.

  Spader began reading the document and tried to ignore the occasional cracking and chewing sounds. The profiler said he’d reviewed the materials Spader had sent down—fact sheet, follow-up report, pathologist’s reports, maps of the neighborhoods, crime scene photos and video, and the like—to produce the profile in Spader’s hands. He cautioned that profiling is more common sense and educated guesswork than science, and noted that additional information that comes to light, no matter how seemingly minor in nature, could change the profile a great deal. With those disclaimers in place, he provided his “general impressions” of the “type of person” Spader “may” be looking for. Spader wondered if Daniels was disappointed that he hadn’t been able to find room for additional weasel words in that sentence.