BLUE BLOOD RUNS COLD (A Michael Ross Novel Book 1) (10 page)

              Upon seeing the police officers, Rachel said, “Excuse me, I don't believe I know who you are. I'd like you to leave at once, please.”

              Ross stood up and offered his hand. He said, “I'm sorry for the intrusion. I'm Detective Ross, this is my partner Detective McGee. We're from the Shippensburg Police Department.”

              Rachel shook hands with both detectives then said, “Have you been asking her questions? She's just a child, you know. She should be accompanied by a legal guardian or a legal representative.”

              Shannon coughed into the one forearm she could move, but no one noticed. She wondered why it was that her mother was so knowledgeable about the law in regard to any person not involving her husband. What she knew, she knew from reading John Grisham novels and watching
Law and Order
. Though it did not amount to much, Rachel had chosen to ignore the words,
assault, assault and battery,
and
torture.

             
Ross put his hands in his pockets and said, “Actually, I did some checking on that. She's twenty years old. The legal age for consent begins at eighteen. We entered the room and asked her permission to ask her questions. She consented, and here we are. Had she refused, we would have then gotten a warrant.”

              Shannon froze in place when she heard the word warrant. It took her a moment to regain her composure. When she did, she said, “Mom, don't be a nuisance. Just let the man ask his questions.”

              As if physically struck by a hand across the face, Rachel stepped back, then retreated out of the room. Shannon knew that she would hear a lecture from the woman later on; she expected that she would ignore it as usual. Her mother's lectures had lost their efficacy when she was sixteen and had purchased condoms with money she had earned from mowing grass around the neighborhood.

              Both detectives sat down again. Ross said, “I just have a few more questions. Then we'll go.”

              Shannon said, “Okay.”

              Ross paused for a moment, collecting himself. He said, “It's just a small point. Under the law, you're not required to answer if you don't want to. You'll be giving away information protected under HIPAA laws. So if you say you don't want to answer, just say that and we'll leave.”

              Another pause. Then he asked, “What time were you admitted to the hospital?”

              She tried to make sense of why the question was so important to him. When she was unable to come up with an answer, she said, “This morning, at 7 a.m. I came into the ER. They sent me to the outpatient clinic. Why, what's so special about that?”

              Both detectives shared another conspiratorial glance, this one with more weight than the first. McGee said, “So after your injury occurred yesterday morning, you did what? Stayed around campus the rest of the day and the rest of the night in your condition?”

              Though Shannon felt herself being led into a trap, she decided that no matter how much they found out, they would not be able to do anything with what she told them. She said, “Yes, I stayed on campus through the night. I couldn't sleep very much. The pain's really intense. I guess I made it through, but I'm not sure how.”

              McGee asked, “Did you sustain any permanent injuries resulting from being pepper-sprayed in the face?”

              “No. The whole group, we went back to my dorm room. Someone looked it up online, how to treat exposure to that. They told me I would just have to wait it out. I only left when my vision started clearing up.”

              “And what did you do before you came to the hospital?”

              “Why is that question important? Am I a suspect or something?”

              McGee waved a hand in front of his face, as though clearing away flies. He said, “No, ma'am, we're just trying to establish the facts here. As you know, what Officer Bailey did is illegal. It's our job to investigate what happened after that.”

              Shannon looked from the detective to the television, upon which a rerun of an old sitcom played. She forced herself to look back in his eyes, those eyes that held neither compassion nor sympathy, but instead held something that she could only call intransigent disregard. She knew at once that none of what he was doing mattered to McGee. He was out on a Saturday, away from his family, from his leisure activities, pursuing a case. She did not think he was happy about that.

              She said, “I don't see what bearing my whereabouts have on what he did. You've got a crime, done in broad daylight, in front of all those witnesses. It's open and shut, isn't it? Just arrest him and be done with it.”

              Ross put a hand on his partner's forearm, then said, “Miss Moore, I'm afraid that Officer Bailey is dead. He was murdered sometime last night. That's what we're investigating.”

              Everything became clear to Shannon at once. She said, “And I'm a suspect, aren't I? You think I did it?”

              Ross said, “I'm not sure what I think right now. This case is too muddled. There's too much up in the air. For now, we're just following threads to see where they lead. You can see how this plays out, can't you? Campus cop uses excessive force on a student, then winds up dead the next morning. The student then says she spent the night at the campus even with a serious injury. So the last question I have for you is, why did you stay? Why not seek medical attention at once?”

              Shannon bit her bottom lip. She had not wanted to say it, especially with her mother lurking outside the door. She had not wanted to give voice to what she had decided she would do. Though she knew it had to be done, it was too painful to contemplate. She would be leaving all her friends, everything that was familiar. She would also be giving up her stable life, her ability to be away from her family, all on a roll of the dice. She had decided on an uncertain future, one that could very well lead to her moving back in to her father's house, or into a homeless shelter. She had chosen it because she knew she could not stay. Staying would have meant spending an entire semester always on the lookout for Beady Eyes, always looking over her shoulder for the next misfortune to strike. She could not live like that, even if it meant getting a degree sooner. She could not stay at a place where she had given everything she had toward her studies only to pass by Ravney Hall, whether they condemned it, repaired it, or tore it down. She couldn't stay in a place that reminded her of Wednesday milkshakes with a friend she had known for too short a season. She had to leave.

              She said, “I stayed so that my friends could take my stuff out of my room. I moved out, as of this morning. I won't be going back to Shippensburg.”

              The final sentence brought her such relief that she could hardly credit how she felt after she had said it. Now that it was out in the open, now that two, perhaps three people had heard it, she could say it again. She could keep saying it as many times as she wanted. She had never said it to the friends who had gathered to help her while she, blinded and in agony, cried out in pain. As soon as she told them to pack her things, they understood. No words needed to be spoken on that subject, save for Carly's sympathetic, “We'll miss you.”

              Detective Ross stood up. His partner followed suit. He said, “Thank you, Miss Moore. You've been very cooperative.”

              Shannon blurted out, “That was weird.”

              Ross smiled. He said, “It can be, sometimes.” He opened the door, then turned back to her and said, “Take them for everything they've got. Bleed them dry. You hear?”

1

              In the hospital parking lot, Michael watched his partner yawn into a cupped hand. Though they had stopped for coffee on the way out, the few sips that Billy had managed of the steaming hot liquid did not immediately revive him. Michael knew officers who had pushed themselves through double shifts, though seven-day work weeks, often at the expense of their personal well-being. He'd also seen officers who had done the bare minimum that was required of them. Those officers worked single shifts, five a days a week and weren't heard from otherwise. They held cookouts with other officers in the summer, and stayed in their homes during the winter. They were, as his drill instructor had said, just in it for a paycheck.

              Billy McGee was sometimes in it for the money, and sometimes in it because he genuinely enjoyed his job. He didn't enjoy it every day, especially not on the days when Internal Affairs came calling. Those days were becoming more and more frequent. Even officers with a completely clean track record were now being investigated as a matter of course. Billy often said that police work was more about minutiae than about making streets and neighborhoods safer. The passion went out of him then. During those times, he could no longer bear the waiting that came with establishing a chain of evidence to link a suspect to a crime. Though he had more good days than bad days, Michael knew upon the leaving the hospital that he had found Billy on a bad day.

              Michael said, “What do you think? Are you buying it?”

              Billy threw his toothpick into a bush. He said, “Fifty-fifty, I'd say. She held some things back and told us some things she didn't have to tell. She didn't trust us, and I can't say as I blame her for that one.”

              Michael opened the door of Billy's car. The scent of evergreen emanating from an ornament hanging from the rearview mirror struck him at once. He leaned on the roof and said, “What I mean is, do you think she did it? Went out in the middle of the night and shot Bailey in the chest?”

              “Yeah, I've been thinking about that. See, Bailey wasn't supposed to be on campus then. So there's no one that could have known he was there. Now either you have someone with a gun staying up all night hoping this man will show, or you've got a murder done on the spur of the moment. Or, it's premeditation. A clandestine meeting gone sideways. What do you suppose Bailey was into?”

              Michael sat down in the car and closed the door. When they were both in the car, he said, “You mean he was using the campus as some kind of smuggling operation, something like that? Trading in drugs or other contraband?”

              “Maybe, who knows? I'm not going to say that's a fact, but I think we have to look at the victim as much as the killer on this one. We can establish Moore's alibi easily enough. She said she was with friends. We find those friends, the members of that group you mentioned, ask them what they did Friday night into Saturday morning, and we can either cross her off the list or put a circle around her name in red ink.”

              Michael thought that on that one, she was telling the truth. She had not lied when she said that she stayed the night to pack her things so she could move out. There had been too much emotion in her voice when she said that. He knew that he heard a secret confessed for the first time, one that she had not been willing to say. The question was, did she stay behind to move out
and
kill Kevin Bailey in the same night?

              He said, “Okay. I think the next thing we do is we get a judge to write us up a warrant to search Moore's dorm room, and for the president to turn over the phone numbers and addresses of any student connected with the love group. If we can get that done by this evening, then tomorrow, we can go to St. Andrews, see if the pastor there knows anything about Bailey. The card that was in his wallet, that's the kind of thing only a pastor carries around in his office. He thinks it could be neat to have business cards of his church printed, so he orders some. They arrive, printed nice and neat, only he realizes that people get put off when they're handed small cards by religious people. So instead the cards sit in his office. He hands them out to people who are seeking help. Some people still do come to churches for financial help. I think we can rule that one out for Bailey. Others come to the church for spiritual guidance. That seems the more likely case here. If that's true, then Bailey might have told the pastor a few things he wouldn't be willing to tell anyone else.”

              Billy turned on the car and put it in reverse. He said, “I keep forgetting all those years you spent at your father's church. You must be the only atheist expert on religion.”

              Michael put his seat belt on. He said, “You'd be surprised.”

2

              The chill of the morning had given way to a slight warmth in the afternoon. Once noon came, temperatures rose above freezing so that the snow began to melt once again. What had begun as a bleak, dismal morning had turned into an even more dismal, even bleaker day. Gray clouds gathered over central Pennsylvania, without which temperatures would have risen higher still. A smattering of rain began to fall across the mid-state region. It was a cold, heavy rain—one that turned all the unmelted snow into slush. Cars driving past the courthouse in Carlisle, PA splashed slush on to the sidewalks, for despite the town's best efforts to maintain its local roads, potholes had appeared as they always did every winter.

              Around the town walked the area's usual transients. A man with a scraggly gray beard, a stained red jacket, and a backpack that carried everything he owned in the world struggled his way through the rain, keeping his head down except to look at the passing traffic. He ignored the electronic box when it showed a green figure of a man walking just as he ignored it when it showed a hand held out, palm first. He only paid attention to the traffic, for no one had ticketed anyone for jaywalking in Carlisle. Though there was talk that this might change—as some boroughs were fining people for failing to remove snow from sidewalks—the homeless man who divided his time between his secret sleeping places and the local soup kitchens suspected that jaywalking would never be enforced. There were too many lawyers and law offices in Carlisle. Writing more fines would only increase the number of contested cases brought before magistrates; even he knew that.

              The Salvation Army soup kitchen opened at 1:30 p.m., a time he had always thought odd. The church where he went for breakfast every morning served meals from 7 to 8:30. That left him, at best, a whole five hours for hunger to gnaw away at him while he snacked on stale bagels, stale slices of bread, ziplock bags full of strange-tasting potato chips, and glazed doughnuts. None of these foods filled him up the way a good, hot meal did. The best that he had ever been able to say was that eating so many grains gave him the calories he needed.

              For him, the cold rain was a curse. He hadn't minded the snow through the previous week, no matter how much it had fallen. He had simply walked through it, taking his time as he always did, to the same fenced-in property, down the same sloping driveway, into the same dining room with uncomfortable chairs and dirty silverware. The snow had not been as much of a problem as the rain, for the rain soaked his faded blue and orange Gulf baseball cap through. He had been obliged to take it off, tuck it into his backpack as best he could—an object which itself was become soaked.

              There were days such as this messy Saturday when he did not know why he stayed alive at all. He enjoyed being able to laugh with the regulars at the food kitchen, many of whom complained about their circumstances as though the entire world was to blame for their conditions. Though he'd suffered so many blisters on his feet that the skin of the bottom of his feet had turned to something resembling rough leather, though he had a persistent cough that came with smoking cigarettes when he could get them, though he felt his energy decreasing every year, though he knew that the time was fast approaching when he would be placed in an unmarked grave at the cheapest expense possible, he never saw any reason to blame anyone or anything else for his circumstances. Perhaps he could have made better choices in his life. With the years sprawling out behind him, merging together in soup of memories, both visual and audible, he had trouble remembering all the steps he had taken on his slow yet inevitable decline from a nice apartment with a good job to trespassing everywhere he went just so he could find a place to sleep.

              He had gone in and out of the region's homeless shelters, all of whom had strict policies about how long a resident could stay. He needed the stability that came with a roof over his head and a working shower. That would at least have given him enough opportunity to go out looking for work sure that he was as clean and presentable as he could be, instead of having the stains of the road upon him while he smelled strongly of garbage juice. He distinctly remembered a time when he had been living at the very same Salvation Army shelter where he went to get his meals. They had let him stay there so long as he volunteered in the kitchen or with the clothing. Though he did not like working for free, he had put up with it just to have a very small room in which to sleep—one he had to share with a recovering alcoholic whom he had no doubt would hit the bottle hard as soon as he could manage it.

              That had come to an end when, after finding a part-time job for minimum wage at a failing gas station, a mix-up in the office resulted in his few possessions being put into a black plastic garbage bag. By the time he got back from his four-hour shift, his room had already been given to someone else. He was left working before the public without a shower and without a place to sleep. He had told the boss of this development the next day, but the boss, a short old man who was old enough to be a great-grandfather, just clicked his tongue inside his mouth like he always did, a sign of his anger. No home, no job. That was the way of the way of the world.

              All that remained to him was a lively interest in the doings of other people. Instead of television, he had the drama of an entire town laid out before him—a town with drugs, with homeless people like himself, with welfare kings and queens living the high life as a result of their disabilities, either real or perceived. Over time, he had become disconcerted with the welfare system. Though he applied to subsidized housing multiple times, because he was a single man, he was continually told that he would have to be on the waiting list for four years before he would be accepted. Though he'd managed to get a food stamp card by walking a total of seven hours one day to a remote location well away from the center of town, he was unable to store groceries for the long-term, save in his backpack. That meant going into the grocery store over and over where he received dirty looks from the managers and cashiers, all of whom knew nothing about what it was to be unable to afford deodorant or shampoo. Though he wanted to go late at night so he would have to deal with fewer store employees, it would have meant buckling down on someone's property to sleep during the day.

              No matter which way he turned the central problem of his life over in his mind, he found it impossible to make a substantial difference. It wasn't the economy, the area, or a lack of effort on his part. It simply came down to how things were. He could either accept it, or he could throw his life into the void that he suspected awaited him after death. He had chosen to accept it, carrying within him the smallest hope that one day, things would change. The economy would get better. Some rich man with money to burn would open up a new homeless shelter, one where he could sleep and shower and brush his teeth, albeit without toothpaste. Someday, things might change. He had always thought this when his desperation felt especially strong. There had to be some reason why he continued living. His life had to amount to more than being a drain on public resources. He just didn't know what the reason was, or if a reason existed at all. He hoped that there was, but often doubted it.

              Had it not been for the rain, he would not have taken shelter under the eaves that hung in front of a pizzeria. He knew that though businesses did not like to have him outside their establishments, he had to stop both to catch his breath and to shake as much water off as he could.

3

              The pizzeria had belonged to a man named Donald Hedfield. He had named his business Donnie's in an attempt to make his operation seem as Italian as possible, in spite of the fact that he had been born the son of a plumber from Pittsburgh. Stenciled on to the building's windows, those which faced the street, was a caricature of Donald himself—his fat face, bald head and smiling mouth all colored white. Next to the face was the company logo and the store's phone number, both in red and green colors. Despite the many pictures of famous people that hung all over the interior of the pizzeria, few people in town had known Donald. His passing some years ago had evoked no response from the community, for those who did happen across his little shop on High Street, across from a mostly unused movie theater, thought that he still ran the show from behind the scenes. His daughter, who had inherited the business, often had to say that Donald had gone to his eternal rest years before.

              The daughter, Rosaline Hedfield, had been at the cash register when she saw the homeless man hanging out in front of the store once again. She had told him and told him not to loiter there. She had even put up a large sign with orange letters which said NO LOITERING. However, as she was not sure that he could read, she made a point of telling him to move along. On that Saturday, she was in a particularly foul mood. Two calls off on the same day by people she had just hired within the last month had forced her to come in on the weekend when she had tried as much as she could to train up the store's three managers so that she could enjoy her weekends off. Though she found her managers competent enough, it didn't amount to anything if there was no one to run the register.