Flesh Collectors by Fred Rosen

Author:Fred Rosen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497697249
Publisher: Open Road Distribution

Chapter 9

Years ago, police used to put out an all-points bulletin (APB) when a suspect was wanted. The APB would go out across a statewide and sometimes nationwide network of teletype machines. Later, faxes would be added to the mix along with the basic telephonic and shortwave communication that still forms the foundation of information exchange between law enforcement agencies

With the rapid growth of the Internet through the 1990s, the APB gave way to the be-on-the-lookout-for (BOLO)—instant bulletins conveyed electronically to police department computers nationwide. While the terminology, as well as the technology, may be different, the methodology of the bulletin is the same: be on the lookout for X criminal who may be in your area. The BOLO that the Lake County Sheriff’s Office received on May 9 from the Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office said: “Be on the lookout for Jeremiah Rodgers on suspicion of murder.” Since Rodgers had access to Lawrence’s arsenal, “subject may be armed and dangerous; approach with caution” was added to the BOLO. It concluded with Rodgers’s description.

Police began contacting their snitches in the area with Rodgers’s description. Detective Alex Bruck and Sergeant Wendell Garratt met with Lieutenant Stu Schwartz in the Umatilla area of Lake County to discuss the Rodgers BOLO. Schwartz told his detectives that the Rodgers family lived in the area. It was possible Rodgers was trying to reach them. Schwartz gave Bruck and Garratt the fugitive’s description and the make and model of the car he had stolen and was thought to still be driving. The detectives hit the streets. Rodgers’s father was in town. They decided to pay him a visit.

On the way out to see Rodgers’s father, they drove by a downtown bar called Love, Sydney. In the darkened smoky interior, Jeremiah Rodgers was relaxing at the bar. It was a friendly place, where he liked to hang out when he was in town. He knew the owner. Soon Rodgers decided he’d better get going. When he left, another man joined him at the door and they went out together.

Every town has its snitches. The word is still used by police in a derogatory way to describe informers, low-end criminals who can’t make it any other way but by informing once in a while on their fellow criminals. And inside Love, Sydney was one of the town’s informers who recognized Rodgers. He saw Rodgers leave with “an older white male driving a gold-colored vehicle.”

Unlike in the movies, cops don’t spend a lot of their time doing surveillance work. It costs a lot of money to put two or more cops in unmarked cars and stake out a location on the chance that something might happen. But when a case is about to break, as this one was, it certainly paid to go the stakeout route, which was how Garratt and Bruck found themselves in an unmarked car staking out Jeremiah Rodgers’s father’s house.

Nothing happened. After a while, the detectives went across the street and knocked on the front door.

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