Federal Discipline (4 page)

“We have a thirty-five year old male by the name of Lee Brampton,” Jack briefed her. “He's killed one person and barricaded himself in an apartment, seems to be under the influence of an amphetamine.”

“How do we know that?”

“There's a steak knife sticking out of his chest. Officers are reporting that he put it there himself.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “Right, we're going to get out of the car now. Stay behind me, stay behind the officers, and stay alert, al
l right?”

Jamie nodded and followed Jack's lead as he got out of the car and crossed under the cordon. She trailed him, noticing that the vest was indeed too large. When she crouched it banged simultaneously under her chin and against her upper thighs.

The city block had not been entirely evacuated, there were a few stragglers here and there, keeping an enthusiastic eye out over proceedings. Four squad cars had the building front contained. The rear seemed to be under control as well. The subject himself was in easy evidence, hanging out of a fourth story window with the aforementioned knife sticking out of his ample chest. It had ruined what appeared to be a terrible tattoo of a dragon that was also a tiger, all set against the background of a flaming pentagram. The man was covered in such symbols, some tattooed, some scarred into the flesh of his arms, as if carved there by his own hand. As they drew nearer, he was screaming incoherently and lurching forward into empty space with all the abandon of a fledgling.

Jamie thought he might be about to jump, but instead he decided to retreat back inside the building for a short moment before emer
ging with a collection of everyday objects which he turned into missiles. Vases. Cutlery. Cups. Plates. A television. All were hurled out of the window to shrieks of abuse.

In amongst the general chaos, Jamie spotted something down low, something behind the shattered shards of cheap glass. It was painted on the wall in a silver sparkle paint that looked very out of place on the worn brick. L
ines rose to a sharp point overarched by a shining round. It looked like... another pentagram?

She
creeped forward a little. Then a little more. Then a large, heavy hand descended on the back of her neck and pinched hard.

Dragged backwards, mewling like a kitten the whole time, Jamie found herself looking up into her partner's granite gaze.

“Stay. Out. Of. The. Line. Of. Fire,” Jack ground out between gritted teeth. “Can you do that, Black?”

“Oh. Shoot. Yes.” Jamie hadn't realized she was in the line of fire.

Jack gave her a look of what she thought was probably disgust and went back to the officer in charge of the scene, leaving her crouching behind a car and feeling completely foolish. Way to dispel notions of book smartness to the detriment of common sense. Dammit. What a stupid mistake.

She couldn't dwell on it for too long. Having run out of things to throw, the suspect uttered a blood-cur
dling cry and threw himself out of the window. By some miracle, the fall did not kill him. He somersaulted through the air, landed atop a parked SUV and continued yelling, before rolling off, onto his feet and running at the cops.

Jamie closed her eyes, knowing what was coming next. Her fingers were in her ears when the shots rang out. She didn't open her eyes until a good minute later, long after the shots had ceased. By that stage there were number cards on the street and a photographer was taking pictures of the freshly deceased.

What shocked Jamie was the complete lack of shock from, well, from anybody. Down the street, people were already playing dice. One of the cops was having a cigarette. Another had found half a sandwich and was working on shoving that into his face. A man was dead, and it truly wasn't possible for anyone present to care less.

“Dead end,” Harley said, reaching down to pull her to her feet. His hand closed around her collar and she felt herself being drawn up to her feet. “You good?”

“Yeah,” she said, avoiding his gaze. “I'm good.”

“Go sit in the car.”

She obeyed the order without question, moving in something of a haze. The sound of shots was still ringing in her ears. That had gone badly. Very badly. One moment the suspect had been yelling and screaming and flailing around. Nasty and obnoxious, but alive. The next moment, he was so much meat on the road.

“Get a grip, Jamie,” she lectured herself. This was exactly what Harley had been warning her about. And here she was, hands trembling, heart racing, trying to process what had just happened.

The driver's side door opened too soon for Jamie's liking. Harley slid in beside her, gave her one of those keen looks and started the car. They drove in silence for a couple of minutes, the world passing by indifferently as Jamie sat and stared at her lap.

“You al
l right, agent?”

“
Mmm.”

“That's one lead down,” he said. “Unfortunately. The scene guys will do their job and we'll see what they turn up.”

“Uh huh.” Jamie tried to sound detached. Neutral. She thought about anything besides what she'd just seen. She wondered if she'd filed her tax return correctly, if her bathtub needed to be caulked. She thought about buying a new pair of even more sensible shoes.

“Hey,” Jack said, reaching across to squeeze her shoulder. “It's okay to be a little shaken up. That was rough.”

“I'm not shaken up,” she lied. “I'm just thinking about the case.”

Jack pulled the car over. She didn't know why. She didn't ask.

“You're in the deep end here, Black,” Jack said sympathetically. “This is nasty.”

“You warned me,” she shrugged, looking out the window. She noticed they were stopped by a sh
oe store. Leather boots on sale, 50% off. Were they comfortable? Sensible?

“Look at me.”

She slowly and reluctantly turned her head. He gave her a concerned, piercing look, his gaze going right through to her soul.

“It's not too late to back out,” he said. “Today was bad. You watched a man die.”

“I didn't. I heard him die,” she said. “I hid behind a car and I closed my eyes and I plugged my ears and I pretended like it wasn't happening. Happy?”

“No,” he said. “I'm not happy. I'm sorry. You were in no way ready for that. Today is your first day – and it's been a heck of a day.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said. “It has.” Her gaze drifted back to the shoe store. Nice long brown leather boots. Jamie wondered how hard they'd be to get on.

“You want to get some ice cream?”

“What?” She turned back to him. “Ice cream?”

“Sure,” he winked.

Jamie was too numb to object, or to really understand if he was being kind or if he was subtly mocking her. She nodded, focusing on keeping her emotions in check as they drove a few blocks to an Icy Joes.

“Chocolate?”

“Hmm? Oh, yes, thank you.”

He was gone for a few minutes and then he returned with a single scoop in a cone. He handed it to her. She thanked him, noticing that he had chosen a raspberry cone for himself.

“Do you always go out for snacks after someone dies?” Melted chocolate slowly traced down the edge of the cone as she looked at him. He was eating his ice cream as if nothing was bothering him. As if some poor soul hadn't just been violently freed from the chains of existence via hot lead injection.

“I thought it might make you feel a little better.”

She lapped at the ice cream thoughtfully. It tasted good, rich, creamy, full of flavor. To her surprise, she did feel a little better. She felt comforted. She felt... looked after. Glancing across at Agent Harley, she wondered why he was suddenly being so nice.

“Are you going to recommend for my transfer now?”

“That back there, that was a baptism of a kind,” he replied. “You can leave if you like. The door is always open, but I'm not going to send you through it.”

Not a baptism, Jamie thought. A test. A test she appeared to have passed. She started to feel a little proud. And then she felt guilty for feeling pride at the cost of a man's life.

“What are the odds Lee Brampton was the one responsible for all these murders?”

“Fifty-fifty, I suppose,”
Harley said. “Either he was, or he wasn't.”

True enough, Jamie supposed. Not precisely precise, but somewhat accurate.

“Tell me something,” he said, crunching into the cone. “What made you want to work violent cases?”

“I'm an orphan,” Jamie said, deciding to tell him the truth. She didn't like to talk about her past much, but Harley seemed trustworthy. He also seemed like the sort of person who would keep the information to himself. “I lost both my parents to a mob hit when I was eight years old.”

“I'm sorry.”

“I don't remember much,” Jamie said. “But I remember the agent who worked on the case. She saved me. She saved me and she made sure that the people responsible spent the rest of their lives behind bars. I wanted to be like her when I grew up. I wanted to stop the bad guys.” Jamie nibbled at the cone and thought back to the woman with the kind brown eyes. “Whenever I missed my parents, whenever I thought about going off the rails, I thought about what I wanted to do. I thought about all the people out there doing terrible things and not getting caught. And I worked harder, and I graduated college and
I got accepted by the academy and I was so excited because I knew I was going to make a difference. I was going to be one of the good guys. But right now... I don't feel like a good guy. I feel like I just hid and let someone commit suicide by cop.”

“Sometimes what we do is black and white,” Jack said. “And sometimes everything is just black. Some days everybody loses. But there are good days too. There are days where you know that because you showed up and did your job, the world is a little bit safer. Those are the days you hold on to.”

Jamie nodded. He was probably right. It sounded right. It didn't make her feelings go away, but it did at least put them in a context where she could feel a little bit better about them.

“We're going to finish our ice cream,” he said. “And then we're going to go back to the office, review the files and make sure we're ready to take away everything we can from the scene report. Oh, and we're going to get you fitted with a vest that doesn't make you look like one of those ninja turtles.
That sound good to you, Black?”

“Yes
sir,” Jamie agreed.

He smiled at her. She smiled back.

Jack was impressed. He'd expected hysterics from the pale young woman with the wisp
y gold hair. She didn't look tough. She looked like any other woman her age, well presented and vaguely fragile. Jack didn't consider himself a misogynist. He knew women could be tough. But the vulnerability in Jamie's eyes concerned him. She was a woman on a mission, there to fight past daemons. But there were daemons everywhere, and even if she did manage to lay one set to rest, they would still cluster around her on every side.

It wasn't his habit to be so protective or concerned about fellow officers. Rookies needed extra attention though. They were prone to breaking at the worst possible moments. To Jamie's credit, she'd held it together pretty well during the shooting. There could still be trouble coming down the line
, though. The worst reactions never happened in the heat of the moment. They happened hours, days, weeks later, when the immediate stress had dissipated and the full reality of what happened had settled in.

The fact she'd shared her early trauma gave him mixed feelings. On the one hand, it was as good a reason as any to join the agency. On the other, it suggested possible instability. The psychometric testing would probably have picked it up if she was seriously unbalanced, but that didn't mean she didn't have a crack in her psyche, something that could be burst wide open with repeated exposure to violent acts.

Stability. That was what she needed. Stability and order. Same as any other rookie.

But as much as Jack tried to convince himself Jamie was like any other rookie, he knew it wasn't true. She wasn't like any other rookie; she was a rookie that made his palm itch and his heart beat faster in his chest. She was a rookie with a tight bottom housed in simple black slacks that did nothing to hide its rounded curve. Her attitude made him want to grab her, pull her over his knee and smack her bottom until she dropped the hard-nosed act – and maybe her panties too.

He waved as Jamie left the office after her first, incredibly grueling day. A part of him wondered if she would show up the next.

*****

Jamie did show up the next day, bright and early with a smile on her face and sporting no signs of the trauma the day before. She was a tough little thing.

“What are we doing today, boss?” She beamed and perched on the edge of his desk in a way she probably shouldn't because it made the curve of her rear all the more tantalizing. She was in a very nice pair of fitted slacks that were simultaneously professional and, well, almost sinful with the way they cupped her bottom. The matching blazer she wore did nothing to hide the proud rounds, which filled out the rear of those pants in a way that would have
, no doubt, made the designer proud.

Dragging his gaze away from Jamie's bottom, Jack glanced back at the piece of paper in his hand. “Today, rookie, we're going to interview the widow of the man who died yesterday.”

“He was married?”

The question was redundant, but Jack could forgive her for it, as the man who had hurled himself into a hail of bullets didn't precisely seem like marriage material. “Evidently.”

They left the office and headed out to a lawyer's office where the widow had consented to be interviewed. It was in the financial center of town, where the streets were swept clean religiously and panhandlers were moved on before they had a chance to settle. A lot of people felt more comfortable there, amongst the carefully manicured trees in oversize pots and the shining windows that reflected you back at yourself in the glazed smiles of mannequins, but Jack didn't much care for the place. Everyone and everything was facade this side of the city. Perfect white smiles hid horrors beyond normal imagination. This was the part of town where a sociopath could destroy hundreds of lives with little more than a smooth pitch and a well-bound investment prospectus.

Jamie had little to say, which was different for her. He was used to her mouthy approach to almost everything. But she
, too, was looking about with an expression that could only be described as vaguely suspicious. Without speaking a word, Jack knew they shared certain feelings about their surroundings. It made him feel closer to Jamie, even though she was the sort of woman who could have fit in immediately if she simply changed her businesslike slacks for a short skirt, and her sensible shoes for high heels.

After seeing the deceased, Jack would have expected any wife to
have been on the heavily tattooed, somewhat toothless side of the equation. Instead, he found himself confronted with a quiet woman with mousy brown hair cut in a neat bob. She wore a long skirt and a blouse with a silk scarf knotted about her neck. Preppy didn't begin to cover it.

“You're the wife?” Jamie asked the question in shocked tones.

“I am Mrs. Brampton,” the woman said, speaking in soft, cultured tones. “My husband has been missing for a month. He simply disappeared from the office one day.”

“He was a stock
broker, correct?” Jack took over the interview, throwing a sharp
be quiet
glance at Jamie.

“Yes,” Mrs
. Brampton nodded, straightening a piece of paper and chasing a non-existent stray wisp of hair away from her face. “He traded equities.”

“And did rather well at it, by all accounts.”

“Our lives have been comfortable as a result of my husband's work, that is true,” Mrs. Brampton said. “Which is why we suspected foul play when he disappeared.” She began to tear up in spite of her staunch efforts to remain impassive. “I did not recognize him at the morgue.”

“No,” Jack said gently. “I understand it was the dental records that provided the match.”

“Yes,” she sniffed, delicately dabbing at her eye with a lace trimmed kerchief. “I can't quite bring myself to believe it.”

“Did he show any signs of instability before he went missing?”

“No,” she said, “none. Lee was a very clean living man. He was religious and serious about his health. He would never have done anything like this of his own volition.”

“Can you think of anything that might have caused him to snap this way?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head profusely. “The only thing I can imagine is some kind of... some kind of daemonic possession.”

Jack glanced over and noticed that Jamie had indeed made a note on her pad about daemon
ic possession. Of all possible causes of death, Jack did not regard it as being one of the more likely contributors.

“We will be investigating his death very thoroughly, Mrs
. Brampton. You have my word on that,” Jack said. “We may need to contact you again with further questions. I hope you will be available.”

Taking a lavender
kerchief, Mrs. Brampton dabbed at her eyes and then nose, neither of which were running. “I will do all I can,” she assured him.

“Then for the moment, we will leave you be. Thank you very much for your time, Mrs
. Brampton.”

*****

“Maybe we should get her a psych screen,” Jamie said as they rode down in a shining elevator, which played strains of classical violin over the smooth churning of gears and rollers beyond the embossed walls.  “She's gone off the deep end.”

“H
mm?”

“The daemon thing. She's blaming this on ghosts. Isn't that ridiculous?”

“Grieving people will believe in anything,” Jack replied. “It's no doubt easier to think that her husband was taken over by an evil spirit rather than left her of his own volition and spiraled into a very dark place.”

“I guess,” Jamie said, sounding a little more sympathetic. “I mean, how
does
a stockbroker end up a meth-head throwing himself at the cops?”

“Psychotic break, perhaps induced by prior drug use,” Jack suggested. “These brokers usually aren't strangers to cocaine at the very least. It's not all that great a jump to crystal meth. The wife may not have known about it, may have attributed signs of drug use to overwork.”

“Hmm,” Jamie nodded. “Makes sense.”

“Right now,” he said. “We're going back to the scene of the death. Forensics should be done with it by now, we'll see what we can glean from the place and see if there is anyone about to interview.”

“Sounds good, boss,” Jamie smiled.

He smiled back. After the first day from hell, Jamie was actually being very pleasant and placid. Maybe he had misjudged her. Maybe she wasn't a complete pain in the rear end. Maybe it had just been those first day jitters that made her so completely arrogant.

Together, Jack and Jamie drove out of the city center and to the rundown edge where city met suburb in a stormy clash of class and culture. Just a few miles further and there were leafy green well-manicured yards with painstakingly whitewashed fences and well kept houses with all-American families. But where they stood, large red brick buildings rose four stories high, housing those who did not quite have the income to purchase a little piece of peripheral paradise.

“Man,” Jamie said as they got out of the car. “This place is a dump.”

A certain smell hung in the air, a used, decayed, dirty smell as if all the inhabitants had decided that bathing was too bourgeois. In reality, it was not a matter of those who lived there smelling, but the fumes of nearby factories, tanneries and gelatin plants belching the rot of animal decay into the atmosphere.

Out here, when something got broke
n, it stayed broken. Many of the apartments had windows boarded up, not because they were abandoned, but because the cost of replacing the glass was deemed too high. Inside, electric lights would be burning, consuming more electricity than would be necessary if the window had been fixed in the first place.

Fact of the matter was
, living in the ghetto wasn't cheap. Shoddy construction and lack of maintenance meant water damage, rot and mold. It also meant that there were plenty of places where buildings had warped and were no longer weather tight. In the winter, keeping warm meant running heat 24/7, which cost a bundle. It was more expensive to heat a one roomed apartment out here than it cost to keep an entire house warm out in the well insulated, double glazed suburbs.

Jamie was right;
it was a dump.

“Keep an eye out,” Jack said. “We'll want to question anyone who might have known Mr
. Brampton before he died. Stay close by me and don't get too mouthy, all right? People around here don't like to talk to the authorities, so don't expect a warm reception.”

Jamie nodded and fell in behind him. Again, Jack felt a modicum of relief. Maybe he'd worried for no good reason. She seemed to be able to do as she was told after all.

For an hour or so, they went back and forth, asking people sitting out on porches if they'd known the man who died the day before. For the most part, people were closemouthed. They looked at Jack and Jamie with sullen, hostile gazes and said little.

“And this,” Jack murmured to Jamie, “is why we pay informants.”

“Some of them are just avoiding us,” Jamie scowled. She was growing impatient with the process, which was getting them nowhere. “Don't they know we're just trying to solve a crime?”

“They do,” Jack chuckled. “But most of these people aren't exactly accustomed to being on the right side of the law – or seeing the state as a friend, for that matter.”

“They damn well should,” Jamie grumbled. “Where do they think their food stamps come from?”

“Easy, Tiger,” Jack said sharply. “We're not here to judge. We're here for information.”

Jamie shrugged, then pointed. “What about that guy? He looks like he might know something.”

The moment she pointed, the man, who had been walking down the street minding his own business, broke into a run.

Before Jack knew what was happening, Jamie had given chase.  He took to his heels after her, but she had a head start and she was fast like a greyhound – triggered by motion like one too, as far as he could tell. She couldn't have been more invested in the chase if she were a dog on the track pursuing a fleeing fake bunny.

“Stop,” she yelled, giving entirely unnecessary voice. “FBI!”

The news that he was being chased by the FBI did nothing to slow the suspected witness. If anything, he ran faster. Unfortunately for him, Jamie was hot on his tail and closing the distance. She was fast. Very fast. Much faster than Jack would have given her credit for, in fact.

What she planned to do when she reached the man was unclear. He was a good deal larger than she, and she hadn't drawn her weapon, so she obviously wasn't planning on opening fire. That was the only redeeming part of the whole
clusterfuck as far as Jack was concerned.

“Stop!” Jamie shouted, hurling herself into thin air. Jack watched incredulously as Jamie wrapped her arms around the suspect's lower legs and bought him down in a rugby tackle. It was impressive to watch a 120 pound woman bring down someone at least twice her size, but the fight had gone to the ground, which was bad news for Jamie – fast and nimble as she was, there was no way she was going to subdue an angry man more than twice her size alone.  Almost close enough to help, but still vital steps away Jack watched her dodge several punches, big fists missing her head by fractions of an inch.