Careful Measurements

by Layne D. Hansen

  “Why are you watching this again?” she asked, obviously still annoyed with him.

  It was the security footage from the break in of Patton’s house months earlier.

  “Watch this,” he said without looking at her. He rewound the video a few seconds and clicked play.

  “What am I looking for?”

  “Just watch. Notice how this guy with the long hair walks. You see that little hitch in his walk?” Patton asked her, pointing at the monitor. “It’s like he’s lifting up on the balls of his feet when he takes a step.”

  She grabbed the mouse and rewound it to the beginning. She clicked play and watched it again. Patton was right—he had a noticeable walk. Still, she didn’t see why her husband was in such a huff.

  “Okay?” she said cynically.

  He frowned at her and took the mouse out of her hand.

  “Now … this is video I shot last night. Watch the walk,” he said, pushing play and leaning back so she could get closer to the screen.

  The video was shot from behind, and although it was taken outside, the light was similar to the first video. After watching for a few moments, Jennifer gasped loudly, her palm covering her wide-open mouth.

  “Same person?” she asked, knowing full well that it was.

  Patton nodded solemnly.

  “Okay, it’s the same person that broke into our house, but who is he? Why did you take video of him last night?”

  Patton leaned back again and crossed his arms, satisfied with his discovery—satisfied that she was finally catching on.

  “We weren’t even interested in him … until after we saw him meeting with David Asher.”

  He watched her, waiting for the information to register.

  “David Asher? Why would the person who broke into our house be meeting with David Asher?”

  Patton grimaced and said, “Well … that’s why we followed him home—to see where he lived. Turns out, he lives in an apartment building not far from the bar where they met and talked. They were in there together for over a half hour.”

  Her expression told him to keep going.

  “We waited and waited. Finally we saw someone coming out of that building this morning.”

  He didn’t finish and she was about to explode at him.

  “Who!”

  He chuckled, glad that he finally had her attention.

  “Okay, do you remember that night we went to that restaurant and there was that really young brunette with that really old looking guy?”

  She nodded and then her eyes went wide. “Her?”

  Patton nodded. “Yep. I’ve got video but I’m sure you believe me right?”

  She smirked at him and kicked him playfully on the shin. “Smartass,” she said, obviously no longer angry with him.

  Patton chuckled.

  “So the person who broke into our house with a gun is connected somehow to the guy who is running to be the governor?”

  “Yes. That’s scary but I’m not sure that’s all,” Patton said, contemplative now. “I need to find out more about this kid before the election.”

  She nodded at him and said, “Yeah, but don’t you think that if this girl is involved that the old man is in on whatever is going on too?”

  “Oh yeah. Absolutely,” Patton said seriously. “He’s got to be.”

  Charlie was trying to simultaneously fight off a hangover and pay attention to Anna. Bless her heart, he thought. She won’t let me have her but she’s more than willing to show me practically everything. Anna was wearing one of her jogging outfits. The blue and white Adidas jacket was unzipped halfway down, exposing a plain black sports bra and a generous amount of cleavage.

  “So what do you think?” she asked, looking at him with her large, gorgeous green eyes.

  He shook his head, confused.

  “Sorry Honey. What did you just ask?”

  She sighed and shook her head.

  “Dammit Charlie! If you’re going to plan a meeting for this early in the morning don’t get fall-down drunk the night before!”

  He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. Being screamed at by this girl wasn’t helping his hangover any.

  “All right all right!” he shouted back, just trying to get her to stop yelling at him. “Now … would you kindly repeat what you just said? I have a hard time concentrating with your tits hanging right in my face,” he said, his eyes still closed. When he opened them he was surprised to see that she was smiling at him.

  He chuckled hoarsely and said, “Sorry Honey. Continue.”

  Anna sighed then said, “I just asked if we should spend the money to do some polling.”

  He laid his head back and closed his eyes again. Without raising back up to speak he said, “Yes, but we need to frame the questions. And we might need to oversample the numbers, you know.”

  She laughed at him again. “Charlie, with David running, we’re not going to need to tweak the numbers. We just need to get him on TV. We need to get him out doing speeches. We need …”

  “I got it. I’ve played this game before you know,” he said, trying not to show his annoyance with her. “He’s the perfect candidate. We just need to make it about him and nothing else.”

  What he didn’t tell her – what really bothered him – was that every time she talked about David Asher, her eyes lit up like night on the Las Vegas strip. He could only imagine what memories conjured those expressions. A twinge of jealousy suddenly made him feel ill.

  “What about the message?” she asked.

  He grinned at her naiveté.

  “The message will come after he’s elected. And it will come to the people in the form of policy. And when some people stand up and piss and moan he’ll get on the TV and make them like it. Just think Obama in 2008.”

  “Charlie, these are good ideas we have. You don’t think the people will get behind this?” she asked, offended at this brushing aside.

  He looked her in the eye and delivered an answer that nearly took the wind out of her sails.

  “No. They won’t. Not with the way things are now. Things are good right now. People are happy. Most of these people have more money and possessions than they’ve ever had before. The good thing is that they’re spending their money like crazy. The haves and have nots thing is already developing. In a year it will be much worse.

  “And when some try to remind the people that ‘Hey, we don’t need social programs to help the poor. These people started out with everything everyone else had,’ we’ll put up the smokescreen. We’ll distract and disrupt.”

  “Charlie—”

  He raised his hand to her.

  “It’s not that I don’t believe in what we’re doing,” he said in his grandfatherly voice, “it’s just that we have to create the situation that will allow us to implement our program.”

  Anna had never been more disappointed in her life. She felt like the little girl that found out that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy were all fake. She felt disillusioned, an emotion Charlie had dealt with when he was about her age. All her political life she knew that she was right. She believed it when Marx said that capitalism would bring about its own destruction and that socialism would take its place. What Charlie was telling her was that they had to bring about capitalism’s destruction and replace it.

  Charlie could sense the turmoil Anna was going through. He eventually understood that Marx had been wrong about history, but not wrong about what created a fair and equitable society. What mattered was the outcome, not the process. Charlie patted the couch beside him and she reluctantly sat next to him. And, like his own patient schoolmasters had done for him, he spent the next couple of hours educating her on how the world actually worked.

  CHAPTER

  15

  Election Day in Blue Creek broke clear and cold. Tur
nout was expected to be low to moderate. If people turned out in droves, Patton figured that David Asher could pull a majority, thus negating any chance of Mike Wilson becoming Blue Creek’s first governor. To win they needed to get David Asher in a one-on-one runoff and then make the case that Mike Wilson was more qualified to lead. Polling locations opened at two in the afternoon and closed at seven that evening. This allowed business owners to operate normally and still have an opportunity to vote. With little news anywhere else in town, all of Blue Creek’s media outlets constantly reported any updates, no matter how meaningless they were.

  The media released their first exit polls at five o’clock. Results showed a likely rout for Asher, who had nearly fifty-seven percent, with Mike Wilson at a just under thirty percent. The rest of the vote was split between the other five candidates. By six, however, and this was just as Patton had predicted, the vote count started to close up. The second exit poll showed that Asher was coming back down towards the fifty-percent line while Mike’s count was increasing. When the polls closed at seven, the count had David Asher at forty-five percent, with Mike Wilson edging up to thirty-five percent.

  Although exit polls were often inaccurate, Patton was sure they showed what was going to be the final outcome—the one he wanted, a head-to-head matchup between his candidate and David Asher. It was going to be a tough climb for Mike, but if they could find something negative about Asher, they might just have a chance. Patton had two weeks to put a campaign together. It was going to be difficult, considering the media’s fawning coverage of David Asher. It reminded Patton of the 2008 election, when America’s national media lost their mind for Barack Obama. Asher’s controllers obviously knew what they were doing—they were merely following the playbook that got Obama elected twice.

  Because of the campaign, David Asher became the biggest celebrity in Blue Creek. His campaign team transformed him from a candidate for a small town mayor into a rock star. Asher’s face was on billboards, the local newspaper and magazine, and plastered on posters all over town. His face was constantly on television screens and social media videos, either doing interviews or on his commercials. Of course it had a polarizing effect. There were those who loved him, those who hated him, and those who just wanted the damn election to be over with, no matter who won.

  Standing in stark contrast to David Asher was Mike Wilson, who was definitely the more serious of the two candidates. He talked about keeping government “light, lean and effective” but his message had not resonated as much as Asher’s mere presence had. Mike wanted to get Asher to commit to a series of televised debates, but to that point, Asher had turned down the offer. Patton knew it was because he was afraid that some of the luster would come off the coin when he had to answer some questions, but Asher’s campaign would never admit to that.

  What Patton had to do was to dig deeper into Asher’s connection with the girl and the mystery man from the bar. He thought the trail would ultimately lead to the old man, and he knew that there was something the old man wanted to keep hidden.

  Travis felt uneasy. He took a sip of coffee from a gigantic porcelain coffee mug and then set it down on a hand-carved mahogany coaster with a thin, gold inlay. Travis wanted to laugh at how pretentious Charlie was, but he didn’t want to set the old guy off. Not that Travis was afraid of Charlie Henry. He just didn’t want to deal with his infamous temper. The unease came from the way that the old man was looking at him—as if Charlie was a psychiatrist, trying to determine if Travis was telling him the whole story. And although Travis wasn’t a wet-behind-the-ears kid, he had a hard time sitting in front of Charlie Henry’s gaze.

  “What does Asher know?” Charlie asked, twirling a pair of reading glasses in his right hand. He was leaned back in a large stuffed leather chair, his feet propped up on a matching Ottoman. Travis took another sip of coffee and held onto his mug this time. He gave a slight shrug and shook his head.

  “Has Anna said that she’s told him about his role?” Charlie asked, anger starting to form in his eyes.

  Travis just shook his head again.

  Charlie sat up and set his feet on the floor, shaking his head at the younger man as stood out of his chair.

  “I didn’t bring you here to nod at me,” he said, pacing back in forth in front of the stuffed chair. He stopped and looked at Travis with a piercing gaze. “Well? Are you going to respond?”

  Travis set his coffee mug down and looked at Charlie with a playful grin. “Was there a question in there somewhere?”

  Not wanting to lose control in front of a subordinate, Charlie decided to say nothing. Knowing that he wasn’t going to get anything out of Travis he invited him to leave.

  “He’s coming out,” Mike Wilson said, handing the binoculars to Patton.

  Patton didn’t need the glasses to see his prey. He could spot that walk a mile away now. He clicked his tongue against his cheek and exhaled deeply. “If I’m right, the old man lives in that house,” Patton said, feeling like he’d just clicked the last puzzle piece into place.

  “Well, I’m sure it is,” Mike said. “But what does that even mean?”

  Patton thought about it for a moment.

  “I’m not sure,” he said, sighing, “but I’m sure it’s not good whatever it is.”

  Two hours later it was just Patton on the stakeout. After watching the long-haired kid leave, Patton drove Mike home, figuring it wouldn’t be good David Asher’s opponent to be caught spying on Blue Creek residents.

  “There he goes,” Patton said to himself as he watched Charlie Henry pull out of his driveway in his black Cadillac crossover.

  So here he was, about to commit what would be a felony back in his home in California. Technically, though, Blue Creek had no laws on the books yet so what he was doing wasn’t really a crime. Patton cringed at his hypocrisy in justifying his actions, but then he shrugged and waited for darkness to come.

  The sun had set but it still wasn’t dark enough for comfort. Patton didn’t know how long Charlie Henry was going to be away from his house and that was a problem. Luckily he had a backup plan to keep Charlie away. After another half hour of waiting in his borrowed vehicle, it was sufficiently dark to make his move. Patton reached into the backseat, grabbed a black duffel bag, and exited the vehicle.

  The streetlights were on now, making it easier for a nosy neighbor to see Patton. As camouflage, he walked as casually as his nerves would allow. He continued down the sidewalk and then turned into the alleyway that ran behind Henry’s house.

  The old man was obviously wary of break-ins, Patton could see. He had an eight-foot privacy fence with lots of trees and tall, leafless bushes. Patton threw his duffel bag over the fence and then knelt down and listened. He looked both ways to make sure no one was watching. As he pulled himself up and over the fence, a security light came on. Patton dropped into a crouch and waited and listened again. Nothing was amiss so he grabbed his bag and made his way towards the house.

  Patton found an open window and made his way inside. He pulled a pair of night vision goggles from his bag and put them on. He pulled on a pair of latex gloves, slipped the strap of his bag over his shoulder, and made his way down a hallway. The main level was clean and well organized, filled with expensive furniture and decorations. A clock on the stove told him that it was just after 6 PM. He figured he had an hour to do what he had to do, clean up, and get out unseen. Jennifer and Mike were watching the old man and would warn Patton if he started on his way home. Until then, Patton had to get busy.

  Patton found the master suite and pushed open the heavy oak door. A large, four-poster bed dominated the room. It reminded him of his grandparents’ bed that he slept in as a young child. Patton set down his bag and pulled out a Ziploc bag that contained the tools he would need. After riffling through the drawers of the vanity, Patton found a hairbrush. He removed a pair of tweezers from his pocket, locked onto a few of the hairs l
ocked in the bristles of the brush and pulled them out and placed them into a plastic tube. Patton then pulled out a spray bottle and a white light. He sprayed Luminol onto the sink, hoping the chemical would reveal traces of blood that Patton could use for a DNA sample. He shined the black light across the sink’s surface. It was nearly spotless, but after close inspection, he found a light smudge of what was probably blood. He wiped the smudge with a cotton swab and placed it into another plastic tube.

  Finished in the bathroom, Patton made his way back into the bedroom and removed a small fingerprint kit from his bag. He spread some powder on the nightstand and on the lamp. The white light revealed several prints. Patton took a clear, sticky patch, stuck it on the clearest print, and put it in the bag. He looked at his watch. He’d only been inside the house for fifteen minutes. Not wanting to press his luck, Patton cleaned up any evidence that he’d been inside the house, stowed his gear, and exited the house the way he’d come in.

  When he got home, Patton placed all of the samples he’d taken from Charlie Henry’s home in a FedEx box. He printed the label, affixed it to the box, and walked out to his truck. Not wanting to wait until morning to send his package, Patton drove nearly an hour to Brigham City, Utah, and mailed the package.

  Days later, the email Patton had been waiting for finally came. Part of him was nervous that he wasn’t going to get the news he expected, but one sentence in, Patton let out a loud breath, relieved that his instincts were still sharp.

  To: patton_larsen@gmail.com

  From: watson.w@cobrasecurities.com

  Cc:

  Subject: Harrell, Charles aka Henry, Charles

  Attachments: dossier: Harrell, Charles

  Patton,

  Your instincts were right on this one. Charles “Henry” was hip deep in Students for a Democratic Society and a Weather Underground wannabe. Not only does he have an extensive police record in three states, he has an FBI file…and get this…a CIA file. Supposedly he bragged about meeting Castro in 1974. I did some back checking and it seems like the story might be true.