Smoke and Mirrors (Goosey Larsen Book 2), page 4
“These college kids, the good majority of them are white and well-to-do. But because of the rising housing market, they’ve recently been gravitating towards Elliotborough and Cannonborough. These are neighborhoods with cheaper rents and let’s be honest, that’s because they’re historically all black. Take a look at our dispatch logs from the past two years, you’ll see that calls for service involving loud parties or drunkenness have increased nearly seventy-five percent. Now with all those facts in mind, we’re also considering the possibility that these fires have been set for revenge, maybe as a plan to scare the white kids out of the area. If that is indeed the case, then we’d almost certainly be looking for a black male suspect. Most likely a family man, one who works a blue collar job and has minimal education. A man who’s worked all his life and is nearing retirement age would be the most likely to get incited by an invasion of college kids.”
Captain Russell rose from his chair, moving to take back control of the briefing, but for once in his life Big Jim was quicker. He leaned forward and said, “I didn’t quite catch all of that suspect information, son. Could you read it back for me?”
I had caught on to the game by that point, and Slipper was only a split second behind me. He hit me square in the ribs with a vicious elbow, and I had to bite my lip to keep from crying out as the rookie snapped upright once again. “Yes sir, Lieutenant Cobb. We’re looking for a male, possibly either black or white. He might be somewhere between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five, and he’s either going to be a high school dropout or a recent college graduate.”
So basically, we had nothing. Tears welled up in my eyes as I clenched my jaw, fighting to choke back the giggles. Captain Russell stomped across the floor, furiously slamming those spit-shined size eights down just as hard as he could. The noise might have actually sounded impressive if only the floor had been anything other than a thin layer of linoleum, which in turn had been installed by the lowest bidder. As it was, the Captain’s boots just made this annoying clicking sound with every step he took.
“That’s quite enough, young man” he barked. The rookie quickly took his seat, and even though Abbie Rothschild had long since passed the point where anyone would consider him young, he did the smart thing and shuffled offstage too.
The Captain took a long, slow look around the room. “This is precisely what we’re up against, officers. Now in the past there’ve been no injuries, so these cases were simply written off as property damage. Quite frankly, for the most part they were dismissed as the work of the city’s homeless, or possibly a few college pranksters. But today, things are different. A young lady is dead, and that’s no laughing matter.” He looked around the room once more to ensure that everyone was wearing their most serious face. They were. I joined the crowd by setting my own jaw, and even Slipper did the same. When I glanced in his direction, I was floored to see that he was actually taking notes. I swear, I didn’t even know that guy owned a notebook!
Captain Russell went on. “So, ladies and gentlemen, that is why we’re all gathered here tonight. Now I believe that Ms. Maslow from the County Coroner’s office would like to add her thoughts next.”
“Thank you, Captain.” I felt myself shudder at the mere sound of her scratchy voice. Slipper gave me a hard kick in the shins, his way of making me aware of the fact that he was on to my dirty little secret. There was simply no chance of ever getting anything past that guy. What was odd, though, was that he still didn’t look up. He just kept right on scribbling notes to himself, working harder than I’d ever seen him.
Katie’s chair groaned with relief as she stood up to waddle across the room. She wore a clean white lab coat, which looked more like a circus tent than a jacket, although it still seemed to fit her pretty snug. She cleared her throat, clutching the podium with two pale pink fists. Between stutters, she managed to choke out a few prepared remarks. “You’ll have to bear with me, I’ve never been any good at public speaking, but I hear that the best thing to do is to picture your audience naked.” She looked directly at me and smiled. I squeezed my legs together and averted my gaze down at my fingernails, which were in serious need of a trimming.
“What happened to Ms. Newberry last night was a tragedy. The young lady never had a chance, particularly since the autopsy revealed such a high level of alcohol in her bloodstream. This meant that she wouldn’t have been able to smell the smoke as it spread through the house, which is a very common occurrence in fire-related deaths. More often than not, the victim actually succumbs to smoke inhalation rather than the flames themselves. Carbon dioxide works to displace oxygen from the air, which makes it impossible for sleeping victims to escape without assistance. In most cases they’re dead before the flames even hit them.”
Slipper yawned as he stopped taking notes. I snatched the pen from his hand and used it to probe my right ear for wax, then pulled it out to check the results. Minor buildup, but nothing serious.
Katie went on rambling. “I realize that I’m not a police officer, but I’ve been handling forensic autopsies for almost ten years now. With that in mind, I’d like to give you some food for thought as to how you conduct your special patrols over the next month.”
Slipper was caught off-guard. “What the fuck did that cow just say? THE NEXT MONTH?!?”
I couldn’t believe it either, and immediately looked to Big Jim for confirmation. His arms were hanging straight down by his sides, each hand clenched tight and squeezing the jelly from a matching pair of powdered donuts. Obviously, her announcement came as news to all of us.
A general grumbling spread across the room, but Katie simply raised her voice and pressed on. “Please remember that in cases of smoke inhalation, death can occur within minutes. And with the way that houses are so tightly packed into your target area, any rising smoke will be extremely difficult to see at night. So please, pay careful attention when you make your rounds. Just a few seconds could be the difference between life and death.”
Katie headed back towards her seat while Captain Russell popped up for one last pep talk. Now that all of us had the wind knocked out of our sails, that old spring had found its way back in his step. That little jerk always seemed to take a particular delight in making the beat cops miserable. “Now. The duty schedules are still being finalized.” He flashed a sick little smile as he extended a crisp sleeve towards Big Jim. “I believe I will lay that assignment in the capable hands of Lieutenant Cobb. However, all of you present should plan on working this same detail every night this week, until Friday at the very least. And let’s figure on standing post until, let’s say, zero five hundred hours.”
I hung my head, feeling as if the Captain had just kicked me square in the gut with one of his tiny boots. Even I could manage to suck up working a night shift once in a blue moon, but certainly not an entire week of them! I immediately set my mind to work brainstorming excuses for banging out sick the next day. Who knew, maybe I could get away with saying that all the exposure to bright moonlight had caused my skin cancer to flare up again.
Now that all of the cops were sufficiently heartbroken, Captain Russell squeezed his hands together to pump himself up for a big finish. “Gentlemen, at present we’ve got two kinds of information on our suspect: little and none, but that’s where you fine officers come in. I want all of you to grab black and white patrol cars for this assignment, no unmarkeds. We need a show of force. Get out there in the target areas and stop everyone moving, and I do mean everyone! Stop everyone driving through. Stop everyone walking past. Stop everyone on a bike. If someone is even remotely in the vicinity of Spring Street, I want you to complete a field interview card on them. Now I gave the Chief my word that there wouldn’t be any more fires tonight, so let’s hit the streets!”
The crowd of cops slowly stood, shuffling out into the hallway in a ragged mob of broken spirits. Big Jim let out a growl as we went along, his voice just loud enough for everyone but the Captain to hear. “No fires tonight, huh? That should be easy enough to manage since it’s fucking POURING outside!”
4.
Sheets of rain were sliding in from the west. The water fell almost sideways, soaking my uniform through in a matter of seconds. The soaked dress shirt clung to my body like a dark blue polyester wetsuit. I might have been able to get off easy, maybe only a little damp, if I had simply ran through the parking lot back to my cruiser. In fact I almost did, at least until I remembered that the Captain had specifically said to grab a marked car for the assignment. I wasn’t dumb enough to test his willpower, at least not until some other sucker did first.
After nearly ten minutes of splashing through mud puddles, I finally found an unlocked black and white cruiser sitting all by its lonesome in the auxiliary parking lot. The gravel lot had been transformed into a sea of mud, which quickly covered up the fresh shine I had thrown on my boots for last October’s departmental inspection. The car was a beat-up Chevy Caprice, maybe late eighties or early nineties, with a single blue bubble light centered on top of the roof. The bumpers and side panels were covered in scratches and dents, but I figured that the weathered look might actually work to my advantage. With an older car like that, nobody would notice a couple more dings if I happened to jump a curb or scrape against a parking meter.
Inside the car was a black duffle bag with the name “Jones, Stefan” stenciled on the side. It was taking up the entire front passenger seat, so I quickly shoved it behind me. That Caprice was the oldest car in our fleet, which meant that it must have been Scooter Jones’ permanent line car. Scooter was another of CPD’s career Corporals, and the guy was a one-man wrecking crew when it came to police cars. In his twenty-plus years on the job, Scooter’s managed to trash eighteen separate cruisers, and that’s not even counting all the little fender benders that never got reported. No street sign in the downtown peninsula was safe when that guy was backing up.
Just a couple years back, the Chief finally got fed up after Scooter sideswiped a carriage full of tourists during an alarm response. He told Scooter to turn in his car keys, then signed a transfer order sending him to the mounted horse patrol. The move probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but it just wasn’t meant to be. Not three weeks into that new job, Scooter got into a galloping pursuit with a purse snatcher down in the Market. His horse slipped on a manhole cover and went down hard, breaking both the suspect’s arm and the horse’s neck during the fall.
Now would you believe that in over one hundred and fifty years of law enforcement service in the city of Charleston, not one single police horse had ever been crippled in the line of duty? Because of that spotless safety record, neither Scooter nor his sergeant had any clue what to do next. To make matters even worse, there was this whole crowd of horrified Japanese tourists circling about and documenting the moment in hundreds of high-quality digital photos. The scene got so hectic that Scooter Jones actually drew his Glock and was eight pounds of trigger pull away from putting the horse out of its misery, just like in one of those old Western movies.
Slipper had shown up to the call that day, but more out of curiosity than from any actual sense of supervisory responsibility. He told me later that it was only the sound of all those terrified little Asian kids screaming that made Scooter think twice about opening fire. Instead, the cops had to shut down both sides of Market Street for hours until a wrecker arrived. The towing crew had to rig a special strap harness in order to hoist that poor horse up off the street, and he dangled there for the entire hour-long drive out to an emergency veterinarian on Johns Island. Finally, after nearly ten hours of surgery and thousands of dollars in blown taxpayer money, the horse died on the operating table.
After that little fiasco, the Chief had no choice but to sit down and crunch the numbers. He finally decided that even though Scooter had been involved in eighteen motor vehicle accidents, at least he hadn’t actually killed anything while behind the wheel. On a horse, though, he was batting a thousand. Since Jones only had a couple years left until retirement, the city threw him a bone and let him keep his job. The Chief even appointed him supervisor of the city’s one-man Segway scooter patrol team, which meant that he also got the oldest cruiser in the fleet to drive on rainy days. Scooter was given strict orders to limit his patrols to the East Side ghettoes down in Team One, with the idea being that if he ever did happen to run over some hapless citizen, at least there was no chance of it being anyone important.
It took a few minutes, but I finally cleared enough trash off the floorboards so that I could stretch my legs out comfortably. The Caprice’s dashboard was covered in dust, but I wiped a spot clean with my sleeve to set down my second dinner, three beautiful Krispy Kreme doughnuts from Big Jim’s generous bounty. I scarfed one down immediately, then paused to take a closer look at the rest of the cruiser. It was an absolute mess, with several weeks’ worth of fast-food bags piled up inside. They covered most of the floorboard and half of the backseat, barely concealing the torn upholstery with its lingering smell of cheap cigars. I did my best to work the seat with my back and shoulders until I had shaped it into a nice, form-fitting mold, then took a deep breath. In all, Scooter’s car was actually a pretty relaxing little womb, with a musty smell that reminded me of home.
My bliss didn’t last long, however, just until I turned the key. When the engine finally caught, the FM radio kicked on at full volume, tuned to a talk radio station. Just a second later the police scanner, emergency lights, and siren all came to life too. Even the heater was cranked up to full blast, shooting out a powerful jet of scorching hot air that nearly blinded me. It took almost a full minute before I could cut everything off, and another five minutes or so just to ease my blood pressure back down to a safe level.
That bastard, I thought. Using a regular alarm system to protect his cruiser, or even the Club steering wheel lock, just wasn’t good enough for him. Scooter had actually set booby traps! Once I’d regained my composure I noticed that the fuel gauge was hovering just above ‘E’, so I pulled around to the gas pump and bumped it up to a quarter tank. I could’ve just as easily gone ahead and filled it up, but there was no way in hell I was doing Scooter Jones any favors. The rain was still piling down, so I did my best to waste time beneath the safety of the garage awning. I checked the pressure on all four tires, then flattened them down just so I’d have an excuse to inflate them back up again. I checked the oil level as well, but unfortunately it was fine.
Just then, I spotted Captain Russell making a stubby-legged dash out from the station towards his own cruiser. That was my cue to find another hideout, but luckily I already had a place in mind. My favorite downtown hiding hole was clear across the peninsula, inside that spooky old Magnolia Cemetery. The property was set all the way back in the marshes behind the Bayside Manor Apartments, much closer to the projects than I normally venture, but the seclusion was unbeatable. The way I saw it, there was no chance of getting caught up in any actual law enforcement work if I steered well clear of the detail’s target area.
The rain had already backed up the sewers and flooded most of the side streets, so it took me almost half an hour just to get across the peninsula by picking my way through the deep puddles. I felt a sharp pain in my stomach as I turned into the cemetery and saw that two other cruisers had already beaten me to my fortress of solitude, effectively ruining my chances of a good nap. The cars were lined up side by side, their headlights shining directly at the gravestones and lighting up two rookies who were stupid enough to be standing out in the rain.
I cranked my window down, unleashing a thick stream of water. “Whatcha got, pal?”
The kid looked back and I saw it was Don Samuels, the investigator for Team One. The dude was a snobby young college boy who seemed to be overly conscious of his career, but other than that he was harmless. As he turned and started to walk over, I eased off the brake and let the car inch forward like I had somewhere to be. It’s been my experience that maintaining constant forward progress is the best way to end an unwanted conversation.
“Hey Larsen, what’s shaking? There’s absolutely nothing moving in this weather, but we figured that Captain Russell would jump our hides if we came back in empty-handed.” He jerked his thumb back toward the gravestones. “We’re just copying down a couple of names and DOBs for our FI cards.”
My car had already made it a few feet down the path. I’ve never been a big fan of college kids like Samuels, but I’ll be the first to give credit where credit is due. That was an ingenious move on his part, and it was nice to see that his high-dollar education was finally paying off. I called out, “Don’t hurt yourself!”, then coasted away before he could answer. A few hundred feet later I pulled up underneath an oak tree, where the hanging Spanish moss diverted most of the rain off to the side. With the dome light on and me leaning back in the seat, it looked as if I had simply ducked in for a few minutes to catch up on the newspaper.
Finally, after another ten minutes or so, Samuels and his buddy got back into their cruisers and pulled off. Once their taillights were far enough down Hugenin Street that I was certain they wouldn’t return, I slipped the Caprice into drive and crept further back into the cemetery. I hadn’t really figured on doing any work that night, but there certainly wouldn’t be any harm in whipping off a handful of field interview cards of my own.
With the high beams on, I could make out most of the larger inscriptions without even having to get out of the car. The biggest tombstones featured all of Charleston’s old founding fathers, famous names like Huger and Porcher spelled out in big block letters. I focused my scribbling on these ones, since they were probably a good deal more important than the other dead guys. Besides, there was no way in hell that I was going to get myself soaked by squinting around in the dark for a mere Smith or Johnson.
