The Ten-Mile Trials (8 page)

‘Fine.' He stood up. ‘You're a bundle of fun on Monday mornings, aren't you?'

‘Yup. Bring me your revised schedule by close of business today.'

He sat back down. ‘You're serious.' I nodded. ‘Frank really means it?'

‘Because the City Council really means it. The tax base is in the toilet, and they're having bad dreams about the power company turning off the heat in December.'

He stared out my tiny window. ‘I don't see how we're going to . . .'

‘Yes, you do. We might have to put a brave face on this for the public, but let's not bullshit each other. We're barely staying afloat now – I've been begging for more resources since last fall. Take away twenty percent and there are some calls you'll never get answered. Starting today, we're going to quit having weekly meetings. LeeAnn's setting up an in-house email site, and the three of us – you and I and Ray – are going to publish any changes to rules and regs, useful sources, late-breaking news, and helpful hints. And everybody's got to read it every day.'

‘A house organ! My God, isn't that original? What are you going to call it, Uncle Jake's journal?'

‘Go fuck yourself! This is not a joke, can't you get that through your head? After you've thought about who gets dumped back down to patrol, you and Ray and I – if there's time – will have one last meeting and prioritize.'

‘Oh, now there's something to look forward to, a prioritizing session with Ray Bailey.' He beetled his brows, screwed his mouth down at the corners, and growled, ‘Laptops and trail bikes can wait, goddammit, but we can't let a stiff lie around till we get to him.' His imitation of Ray's voice was pretty fair, I thought, but he could not twist his self-satisfied face to within a country mile of the legendary Bailey gloom.

‘Go easy on Ray,' I said. ‘He caught a real pisser of a case Friday night. I helped him all I could, but he's been working nonstop both days. Something else is bothering him, too, but I haven't figured out what it is.'

‘Oh, well, I can clear that up for you.' He glanced into the hall to be sure nobody was coming, leaned across the desk and hissed, ‘The poor old dork's in love!'

‘In love? Ray Bailey? With . . .' I puckered. ‘Whom?'

‘Oh, my gracious,
whom
? And from whence, you want that too? Whence is right down the road in Mantorville, and whom is that dowdy little waitress who was keeping house for the long-haul driver. The one you found shot and half-naked in a snowbank a couple of years back. Remember? The body under the overpass, and his eighteen-wheeler in two other places?'

‘You serious? That woman who was so devastated? What was her name? Cathy something. Was it Niemeyer?'

‘Yes. Doesn't it figure? The saddest woman you'd ever met, you told me.'

‘Well, Ray and I were both impressed by how much she cared about the guy. So Ray's been seeing her all this time and never said—?'

‘Oh, it's even more Charles Dickens than that, Jake. They haven't been dating at all. He's just been driving out to Mantorville once or twice a week to see if she needs anything. He's never asked for anything in return. Giving her time to finish her grieving, he said.'

‘Jeez. That's so . . .' I couldn't think of a word that wouldn't sound embarrassing.

‘Touching. I know. Especially coming from Stone-Face Man. Some time in the last couple of months he finally screwed up his courage to ask her out to dinner.'

‘How do you know all this?'

‘He's friends with a couple of my detectives. He worked a long time in Property Crimes, remember. They sit around with a six-pack on Friday nights and tell stories about matching up rifling marks and heel imprints.' He rolled his eyes up to express despair over squandered Friday nights.

‘And they actually tell each other about their dates? Like back in Junior High?' Not for the first time, one of Kevin's stories was making me helplessly hilarious. ‘Jeez, I can't remember the last time anybody told me good stuff like that!'

‘You don't hang out in the right tree houses any more, Jake. You've been busy with grown-up stuff . . . having a baby, getting shot. How's your leg, by the way?'

‘It still forecasts the weather. Otherwise, better all the time.' He was with me the day we walked into that mess. He walked out, I didn't. ‘So that's why Ray was so grouchy all weekend. They probably had something planned. Wouldn't you think he'd say something?'

‘Not Ray. He's a soldier. What's he chasing, the Rutherford Strangler?'

‘Worse. No, it's too messy to tell you about right now. Go on, figure out which two guys in your section have to go back out on the street and which newbies down the line have to get laid off entirely. Oh, and whatever you do, don't let anybody log any overtime. You hear me? Beginning today, overtime's out.'

‘Jesus. I leave for three lousy days and you turn into the Wicked Witch of the West.'

‘Not me. Blame Governor Pawlenty. He's the one that cut back on aid for cities and towns.'

‘That isn't his fault. Obama didn't put enough zing in the stimulus.'

‘Obama did the best he could,' Rosie Doyle insisted from the doorway. ‘But the senate Republicans got fainting fits at the thought of giving money to anybody but bankers. Mitch McConnell, that's who's at fault.'

‘Listen, if it wasn't for Mitch McConnell,' Ray Bailey said, walking in behind her, ‘those tax-and-spend Democrats would have given away the store.'

‘Tax-and-spend Democrats my ass!' Kevin had one foot in the hall, but came back in to help raise the noise level. ‘You think Cheney's stupid war in Iraq was free?'

We had been having this revolving-door conversation since February, and the end was nowhere in sight. The Bush administration had finally ended, and we had to pick somebody new to blame. It was tough, dirty work, but we were enfranchised Americans with grievances and we were going to keep at it till we got it right.

But not today, at least not in my office. ‘Kevin, go away. Ray, sit down, we need to talk. Rosie, what do you need? The short version.'

‘I hear you're revising the schedule.'

‘Yes. What would you want if you could have it, which you probably can't?'

‘See, this is the new Jake Hines administration style,' Kevin said, walking out at last. ‘He's a hammer, and all the world's a nail.'

Rosie made a little shushing gesture at his back, staying focused as usual on her own concerns. She said, very fast, ‘If we can't log any more overtime, will somebody have to take weekends?'

Was she eavesdropping on my brain? I'd been thinking that very thought. I hadn't said it out loud because I didn't see how we could tolerate being even more short-handed on two weekdays. ‘Maybe. You saying that's what you want?'

‘Yes.'

Why would she . . .? Something about Bo, probably. To keep from hearing about that, I said quickly, ‘So noted. Anything else?'

‘No.' She looked at Ray. ‘BCA took the Mass card?'

‘Yeah.'

Rosie shook her head mournfully.

‘I know,' Ray said. ‘I hated to let it out of my sight, but what can you do? I told them I'd raise hell if they lost it. I made it clear that it's the only thing we've got so far that's worth anything.'

‘What are you talking about?' I asked them.

Rosie said, ‘You know the victim's prints haven't turned up a match? He's not coming up in any arrest records nationwide. We're searching immigration now.'

‘I heard.'

Ray said, ‘And then we all thought the way they left the murder weapon there with him . . .'

‘Looks like a pro hit,' I said. ‘Does that surprise you in a drug house?'

‘No,' Ray said. ‘What does surprise me is that the gun is a Smith & Wesson .38 special – the Victory model.' He recrossed his legs, looking discontented.

‘Oh, yeah? I don't know that gun. I've had the Model Fourteen for years, I used to use it for competition shoots . . .'

‘Well sure, most of us did. But that was the Masterpiece.' He sighed, remembering. ‘What a great weapon!'

‘I had mine rigged out with a six-inch barrel and custom-fitted handgrips . . . it was almost guaranteed to raise your score.'

‘Right. But those old Victory models, you say you never fired one?'

‘No.'

‘They'd compare to the Model Fourteen like a Ford Falcon to a Cadillac. World War Two, they made about a million of them for the army, rough-finish cheapos. I see them sometimes in old movies. Some phoney like Dick Powell playing an asshole private eye sneaking down dark alleys alone at night.'

‘You're saying it's not a very practical—'

‘I'm saying it's been discontinued since about 1982 and no bad guy's going to walk into a dealer's shop this year and buy one for protection.'

‘Somebody's collector's item, then. A stolen gun.'

‘But not from here. Saturday afternoon, I remembered how Property Crimes guys been yelling about so many break-ins, and I decided to look brilliant and solve this case all by myself. So I searched their last two weeks' reports, thinking I'd come up with the .38 right away, but I got zilch. This morning I got LeeAnn to do a bigger search. She found no match in the last two years.' He rubbed his face. ‘That gun wasn't stolen here. We're searching the five-state area now.'

‘OK, pros from out of town. The victim wasn't wearing a holster, was he? It's not his own gun?'

‘Don't think so. Far as I could see, his only weapon was an ordinary boot knife in a holster on his right leg.'

‘A boot knife. Not likely we could trace that if it was stolen.'

‘Which may have been the point.'

‘Huh. So what's this Mass card you're both so hot about?'

Rosie said, ‘Ray found the card buttoned into an inside pocket of that jacket when they took it off him. You heard how all the labels had been cut out of his clothes? He was trying to be a nonperson – but he was carrying this card. Soon as Ray showed it to me, I said it looks like the Mass card you get at a funeral. It's got a cross at the top, has a name and a date and a prayer – I think it's a prayer. But it's printed in some foreign language. Weird, strange lettering.'

Ray said, ‘I showed it to Pokey – he got pretty interested, said he recognized the odd-shaped alphabet, he's pretty sure it's Ukrainian. He got a steno in the lab to come get it and make a copy for him.'

‘But Pokey is Ukrainian. Wouldn't he know if it was his own language?'

‘You'd think so.'

‘Anyway, you've got to admit it's kind of interesting.' Rosie's eyes held a little sheen of excitement. ‘Isn't it? A doper hoodlum who's stripped himself of all identity but carries one keepsake. Maybe something he couldn't bear to part with?'

‘Or maybe it was left in the jacket by its previous owner, whose house he robbed?'

I saw her face set in stubborn lines that said she liked her own story better.

‘Well, BCA will sort it out, I guess. Now, who's going to court with the prisoners?'

Ray said, ‘Andy Pitman will take the tat freak – what's his name?'

‘Hogarth Peter Weber.'

‘Oh, right, how could I forget that? He's a real hard case, isn't he?'

‘Yes. I'm hoping I've got the County Attorney pumped up to charge him with Murder One – no plea bargaining now, even if he begs.'

‘The man annoyed you seriously, huh?' Ray looked pleased. He likes to stick it to the malefactors. ‘Rosie's going with the woman, and I want her to take Winnie along. I hate to spare both of them for two hours, but Winnie's got to learn these routine chores as they come up.'

‘Agreed. My notes from the Gloria Funk interview are in the case file online, Rosie, and you can watch the DVD. She's willing to plead guilty to possession, even a little trafficking if the C.A. holds out for that. And she'll tell us everything she knows about the operation. In return, she wants some help with her habit and visitation rights with her daughter. Do everything you can to encourage that idea, will you? Try to keep her away from the boyfriend, because he'll try to scare her out of it. He's a snake.'

‘I heard.'

‘OK. Tell Andy, will you? He's got the bad boy of the outfit. He can find the very brief notes I made on Saturday after Hogarth Peter blew me off.'

‘OK. You'll let me know about the skej?'

‘When there's anything to tell you, I'll tell you.' Rosie has bulldog tenacity for anything she wants. The upside is, she doesn't pout. She fights like hell, wins or loses, and goes on. She says it comes from being raised in a house with many aggressive brothers. ‘My parents were too busy to baby me,' she told me once. ‘In my house, you got what you could take and hold.' I can't speak for the truth of that family dynamic, but I know I've got one female detective sergeant who needs no looking after.

She went back to work in her own space, and Ray and I took an hour to sweat the new schedule. ‘Let's take it a month at a time,' I said. ‘What's the use projecting any further when nobody knows what's next?'

‘God! Won't that be hard on everybody, though? Not knowing when you're going to be working.'

‘Everything's hard on everybody right now,' I said. ‘Nothing I can do about that.' A small inner voice congratulated me on sounding more like Frank McCafferty all the time.

In the end, we decided not to detail anybody to weekend duty. ‘As it is, I'm working with a skeleton staff,' Ray said. ‘What happens when somebody takes a training course?'