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Lucas said. “Luckily, we didn’t find anything, except the dirt on the shovel.”
“That’s already in the lab...”
“Your lab, or the FBI lab?” Lucas asked.
“Ours,” Virgil said. “We’re good on Minnesota dirt.”
“Call them. Tell them to work it now. We need whatever they’ve got,right now.” Lucas checked the time. “We better walk on over to the courthouse. We don’t want to miss any of the action.”
—
Whatever the actionwas, they were going to miss it. Coffman didn’t want anyone in his chambers except the attorneys. The rest of the gathered cops and FBI agents were left to stand around in the hallway, trying not to look at each other. Heath was in the hallway with the rest of them, standing by himself, bouncing on the balls of his feet, looking at the ceiling or the floor, anything but the cops.
—
Inside Coffman’s chambers,the magistrate had his clerk bring in a folding chair. Coffman was in shirt sleeves, a lanky man in his fifties with tight gray hair, black glasses on a narrow face, an angular nose over thin lips. He had a metal coffee cup warming his fingers as he put Heath’s two attorneys facing the U.S. Attorney and the assistant U.S. Attorney who’d approved the warrant.
When everyone was settled, he took a last sip of coffee, put the cup aside, and asked U.S. Attorney Jackson Morely, “Is this going to make me angry, Jack?”
“That is possible, sir, which is why we are here. Early thismorning, Ms. Cynthia Clayton and Richard Roverson”—he nodded at Heath’s attorneys—“called me at my office and said that a search warrant for the residence of Mr. Noah Heath had been improperly and, actually, fraudulently sworn to by a St. Paul police officer. It came to you because the FBI has overall jurisdiction in the case, although the actual investigation is being done by local authorities, with monitoring by the FBI...”
“Why isn’t the FBI doing the actual investigation?” Coffman asked.
“Frankly, because the local authorities are very good with crime scene analysis and have the manpower for what seemed like it would be a wide dragnet of dozens of possible suspects.”
“Go on.”
“That happened—the warrant application—the day before yesterday and we applied for the warrant on an emergency basis,” Morely said. “You granted it yesterday morning, if you’ll recall.”
“I do recall,” Coffman said, nodding.
Morely said that Heath’s attorneys’ claim of fraud or misrepresentation was serious enough that he thought Coffman should consider the problem, although, he added, “There are good reasons to maintain the warrant as is, though the evidence in support of the warrant is perhaps less sound than it was represented to you yesterday. We thought this problem should be discussed before we went any further with this investigation.”
Coffman was calm enough: “And why is the evidence now weaker than yesterday?”
“There is the possibility that we had a certain amount of... gaming by the police, specifically by St. Paul police sergeant Jimmy Russo.”
“Is Sergeant Russo here?”
“Yes sir, he’s out in the hall, if we need him.”
Morely went on to summarize the evidence for the warrant, the same evidence that the judge had heard the day before.
“All of that evidence, with one exception, is still relevant,” Morely told Coffman. “However, one piece of it, which you may or may not have considered to be critical, involved a man seen leaving a van at MSP. The man in the video was dressed identically to the Sand killer. There was other evidence, which was not presented to us at the time, and that the FBI had... mmm... apparently forgotten, or hadn’t seen, that suggests that Mr. Heath could not be that man. In fairness, I’ll ask the attorneys for Mr. Heath, Ms. Clayton and Mr. Roberson, to tell you about that.”
Clayton made the presentation. A mid-sized, gray-haired motherly woman with small steel-rimmed glasses, she presented Coffman with a list of witnesses who said that Heath was with them at the time of the Sand murders.
“The FBI has had jurisdiction in the case, but most of the actual investigation was left to a task force of local law enforcement officers led by Detective Russo and Gary Durey of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Clayton said. “They knew that Mr. Heath could not be the Sand killer, and if the man seen getting out of the van was the Sand killer, it couldn’t be Mr. Heath—but they presented that as evidence to get the warrant.”
She argued that the warrant should be vacated, that any evidence seized from the Heath house be suppressed, and everything taken from the house be returned.
When she finished, Coffman said, “I’d like to hear directly from Detective Russo. Could we get him in here?”
The Assistant U.S. Attorney hurried to the door, stuck his head out, and called, “Sergeant Russo?”
When Russo was inside, Coffman gave him a quick review of the claims of Heath’s attorneys, and then, “Detective, what do you have to say for yourself?”
Russo said, “Your Honor...”
