38 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY10, 2020
as homicides. Minerd said, “To watch
parents who have parented the right way,
and who raised their kid in a commu-
nity they thought was safe and that kid
still overdosed? They’re not moral fail-
ures. They didn’t parent wrong. That’s
always been the motivating factor for
me, listening to the stories of the fam-
ilies. The hurt in their eyes—that’s what
motivates me.”
The task force has expanded its scope,
and now collaborates with some twenty
law-enforcement agencies in Franklin
County. Smith recently left hope, in
order to teach at the training academy
for the Franklin County Sheriff ’s Office.
A new sergeant, Brian Toth, transferred
in, from organized crime. The task force,
which works within the sheriff ’s under-
cover narcotics unit, now has four ded-
icated detectives. On multiple occasions,
I joined them, and the wider narcotics
team, as they worked various cases. One
day, swat operators raided a house and
found drugs, cash, and a gun. In another
case, detectives met a compromised car-
tel courier in a trap house; they confis-
cated heroin that had been sewn into a
pink velveteen pillow stitched with
“There’s no place like HOME.” In a sting
operation, detectives used hidden cam-
eras, and the help of a real-estate agent,
to arrest a woman who was accused of
posing as a prospective home buyer in
order to steal painkillers from people’s
medicine cabinets. In an October case,
a man was discovered dead, on his aunt’s
sofa, surrounded by “Gone with the
Wind” memorabilia and still holding
the TV remote. Drug paraphernalia was
present, but his cell phone offered no
immediate leads on where he’d obtained
the drugs; detectives inventoried it, any-
way, in the hope that further scrutiny
would yield clues. In another incident,
where three people died in the same
house, detectives used a cell phone found
at the scene to text the person they be-
lieved had delivered the fatal batch, and
pretended to order more drugs; they
then arrested the guy who showed up
with dope.
One morning in August, Toth re-
sponded to a call from an old brown
brick apartment building north of Co-
lumbus. It resembled a two-story motel,
with exterior staircases and iron railings.
The referring detective told Toth that a
woman and her boyfriend had fallen
asleep together the previous night: “Shewakes up this morning, about 8 a.m.—
he’s fuckin’ dead.” The girlfriend was sit-
ting outside with a neighbor, wearing a
pink tie-dyed shirt, black leggings, and
Nike slides. Toth, noticing that the
woman had uncontrollable jitters, said,
“Look at that leg.”
Upstairs, in Apartment H, the dead
man lay face up at the foot of a mat-
tress on the living-room floor. He was
bare-chested, and wearing dungarees
and dark socks. Foamy vomit had run
from the left side of his mouth and down
his face. The inside of his left forearm
held needle marks.
The detectives looked around. The
apartment was largely empty, but on a
dresser they found a charred spoon,
scales, baggies, and a razor blade. A heavy
stick leaned beside the front door; in
one corner was an aluminum bat. There
was a deck of cards, a bunch of dice, and
a scorecard pencilled with players’ names:
Daddy, Baby. Baby was up by one.
Next to the body lay a pack of Marl-
boros and a purple lighter. A tiny pho-
tograph of a woman was taped to the
pack. That’s how personal property is
labelled in rehab, one of the detectives
pointed out.
The woman in the photograph wasn’t
the girlfriend—it was a neighbor, who
was in jail. Toth put the girlfriend in
the front seat of his unmarked police
vehicle and asked for an explanation.
Detective Chuck Clark, whose case it
was, sat in the back, listening closely.
The girlfriend told the investigators that
whatever had killed her boyfriend must
have come from elsewhere. She said, “I
know he found something in that cig-
arette pack—I know it! I can feel it in
my fucking soul!”
The detectives hadn’t found anything
in the pack except cigarettes. Toth said,
“You saw something in that cigarette
pack.”
“I did not!”
The girlfriend claimed that she’d
spent the night with her head on her
boyfriend’s chest, which also seemed
dubious: in many overdoses, loud “ago-
nal” breathing precedes death. Another
detective, listening at the car’s open win-
dow, finally murmured, “Code B,” which
meant to arrest her.
Toth gave the woman one last chance.
He said, “Your boyfriend is no longer
here, and all we want to do is—”“There! No more wobble.”