Marshall Law

by Paul Kilmartin

  Her father looked up again and spoke.

  ‘We didn’t want her to be so open, to tell us stuff like that. But she liked how it made her feel, to be so honest, that she kept on doing it.’

  He described a great kid, honest and open. Lance Marshall hated how he looked to parents right now, like the muck-raker, tell me why your kid was so awful, that someone would want to kill your child?

  What a question.

  ‘From everything you are saying, it seems to have been just a random event. That she was a great kid, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ He said, what they wanted to hear.

  ‘Would you like to see her room? Would it help? Is that what happens next, before you leave?’

  Lance Marshall heard the subtext, leave.

  ‘Yes, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘I can show you.’ Jane Richards spoke.

  They both left the kitchen where Roger remained seated, right in reality, stuck to the floor.

  They climbed stairs, laid down with carpet and reached a large landing on the first floor, from where Mrs. Richards took a small key from her pocket and used it to open the first door, after they had made it to the top. The lights on the landing were out.

  ‘I had to keep it locked, or he would have never come out after the next time that he went inside.’

  She spoke, but they were only words escaping, never with her eyes on Marshall. Holding the door opened, she took a step back and opened up the door for Lance alone to walk inside.

  Lance flicked a white switch by the door, and beneath the soft light of a lampshade in the center of the room, saw a bedroom, like most others. Shelves, that were full of books, and a dressing table, with little boxes and two clear glass jars, filled with pencils and pens. He looked upon the bed and saw that the cream duvet was crumpled in the center of the bed and that the pillow had seen a head upon it only recently. Lance immediately knew that it was Annie's father who had lain here.

  ‘Can I?’ Asked the Detective of the grieving mother, who now stood in the hallway, faced away from the room. She nodded, and leaned against the wall, apart from the room, with her arms held up behind her.

  ‘Roger is a notary, you know. Or was. At this point, I don’t think he will ever go back to work.’ said, Jane.

  Lance walked towards the desk and tried to observe and record everything, using only his sharp mind and inquisitive nature.

  He guessed her profession, from looking at the array of colored pencils in the jars. If she were an artist, then where were the canvasses? Or the reams of paper for drawing on. Underneath the desk, was a small box, fit for bundles of A4 sized pages, but a box which had been used, over and over again. The colors of the room spoke to Lance. The duvet was cream colored, but the walls were lilac and pink. There were silver stars, stenciled beside a large cream wardrobe, twenty of them, randomly placed, and beside them, a heap of coloured ribbon. Marshall remembered the red slip that he had found close to the body.

  ‘What’s the ribbon for?’ He asked Jane.

  ‘It belongs to Roger. He uses it to bind up pages, that need to be sealed.’

  Lance didn't open the closet but felt assured that inside, were Annie-Ann's shoes, and some outfits. A party dress or two, and the rest would be functional, capable, stylish, but wearable every day of the week.

  ‘What school did Annie-Ann teach at?’ He asked, before bending down to look beneath the bed, finding nothing.

  ‘Eleven Stars Pre-School, Westlake in the south of the City, or at least she used to,’

  Westlake was a good neighbour-hood, full of affluent families and thriving businesses.

  ‘Annie was let go, a couple of weeks ago. She was helping me with some of my work.’

  Lance stood up, and looked towards the door, and saw a head leaning across, but still looking away past the door.

  ‘Was that out of the blue, losing her job like that?’

  ‘She never told us much about any of it, apart from that it was something to do with budgetary cutbacks. She was temporary, so she didn’t seem all that affected by any of it.’

  Lance remembered how her father had told him that she had been honest with them about everything, and he now wondered if that had been accurate. He looked under the table again, at the box, and feeling a pair of eyes on him, looked back towards the door, where Roger was watching him.

  ‘It’s full of artwork that the kids had worked on. There are some drawings in there of Annie too. Do you want to take a look?’ Roger spoke.

  Lance wondered if he had to open that box, would Roger ever have come out of that room. He spared him that pain.

  ‘No, that’s ok. I think that I am done in here. Thank you.’

  Jane slowly closed the door over, pulling her husband's fingers from the doorframe, and watching him crumbling to pieces as she closed it entirely. He cried into this shirt, as his wife leaned back against the wall, looking into the bleakness of a darkened hallway.

  ‘Come, this way.’ She spoke to her husband, leading him towards a door, further down the hallway. She opened the door, illuminated a space inside by flicking a switch, and closed the door again, leaving Lance Marshall alone and exposed in the hall.

  After a couple of minutes, she appeared again, ruffled and shaken, and closed the door behind her, leaving her husband inside. Lance had remained, still for the entire time that they had been away, outside the closed door of their deceased daughter.

  ‘He will sleep. Come, I can let you out.’ Jane said, walking softly with uncovered feet on the carpet. She led Marshall down towards the front door.

  Opening the door, Jane waited at the door jamb, and held the door close to her, exposing just the parts of her body between the shoulders. Her face sat forwards, slumped on a neck, heavy with grief.

  ‘Do not tell me that you are going to find our daughter’s killer Detective Marshall,’

  Jane Richards wore a cold expression.

  ‘That will never bring us peace,’

  She leaned her head past her body, and whispering so that her husband would never hear what she said,

  ‘Nothing you can do will ever help us unless you kill whoever did this, and even then, what you will find, will help you, and you alone. Our lives have been ruined. Good night.'

  She softly closed the door, leaving Lance Marshall on the porch, feeling empty and alone.

  Lance drove back to the station house, slowly and astutely, feeling every turn of the wheel and noticing every pair of eyes on the street.

  Marshall compiled a report on the day's findings and forwarded copies to Lindsay Dawn, Pete Brandt, and Ed Johnson.

  He thought back to Annie-Ann’s room and about the things that he saw, and the things that he didn’t see. He knew that her father would have gone through that entire room with a fine toothcomb already, even when she was alive. He was a notary, so remembering detail in all of his work, was his job.

  Now, it was his life, to think about anything else that he could have done. If Annie-Ann had some secrets, she had managed to keep them very far away from her home life. Lance didn’t doubt that she wasn’t honest, he just knew that something wasn’t adding up.

  Possible, made possible, by precision, a touch of luck and a lot of planning.

  He released a breath, slowly, so as not to wake the sleeping pigeons that nestled near to him, and squeezed the little black trigger on the suppressed AR15 rifle that clung tight to his body, like a partner who lived to dance the Tango.

  In the dark of the night, it would be hard to imagine, but he closed his eyes and dreamt of the explosion of pink that would coat the surrounding area.

  He listened intently and heard the nesting birds cawing, as the body fell amongst their hiding spots and warm beds.

  Again, he strained to listen, to shouts, or to warnings or even for a delightful scream, but none came forth.

  To shoot a target, that you don’t even know is there.

  This would be the best of all and how apt, for to
night of all nights.

  He removed his mask that had been sitting atop his head and placed it beneath the crease of his elbow, where he had been lying still for so long.

  It would be time to go soon, but for now, there was a rare opportunity to listen to the night.

  NUMBER THREE

  Detective Lance Marshall awoke at 7am, from habit, rather than choice. It had been the habit of a lifetime, instilled in him from his father when he was as young as he remembered. It had gotten to be such a habit, that now, he didn't even need to set the alarm. His body knew, and accordingly, he woke, whether he was fully rested, or not.

  This morning, he was not, but woke regardless and dragged himself into a shower. He set the dial to blue, for cold, and he iced away that tired feeling through shallow breaths as his lungs adjusted to the feeling of being constricted. Raising the temperature a little, he washed and shaved his face underneath the showerhead.

  Marshall stepped from the shower and walked into the adjoining bedroom. It was a big room, built for two, but long since occupied by just one person, and in the larger space, he had managed to make the whole room appear cluttered. The routine, was the same as every other morning had been for the past while. Lance would try something on, decide against it, and then leave it on a chair near the foot of the bed. The chair now held at least two weeks worth of clothes, so by now, Lance was rifling through shirts that were laying out on the back of the chair.

  He had checked his phone, when he awoke and seeing no new messages or missed calls, dismissed the object and set about getting his morning started. Lance had possessed a smart phone for a while, but when after a week, he had managed to get two Facebook friends and see the same emails that he saw in work, but now carried around with him, he abandoned the technology and downgraded.

  Marshall's life was in such a place, that if it were not for work, and had he fallen down and died, it may take a while before someone noticed that he was missing. Piece by piece, Lance Marshall, was coming undone.

  Lance grabbed his keys from a plate near the door and made for Andy's to grab breakfast before the morning briefing, where hopefully, someone would have solved this case for him.

  It went without saying that Andy's was always busy in the morning with the surge of local traders and Cops, but this morning, it was especially active.

  Lance Marshall waited at the door and stretched his arms in the air, to get the attention of a rushed waitress, so she could find him a seat. Today of all days, the normal rules did not apply. He had never noticed, in all the years that he had come to Andy's, the sign that was placed at the entrance, Please Wait To Be Seated. The place was wall to wall with people, and they all seemed to be talking at the same time.

  One by one, they noticed the well-built Detective at the door, and one by one, they started to go quietly. It had never been like this when the Cop on Cop scandal had broken, so Lance took a little longer to figure out why the crowd was silently staring at him.

  Was it to do with O'Riordan? Had he mobilized the mob? In an instant, the new reality became quickly apparent to Lance Marshall. He mouthed out a loudly said, ‘Shit.' through gritted teeth and pushed his way outside, and realized that another body must have been found.

  Marshall opened the door of Police HQ and found his senses assaulted all at one time, by the ringing of telephones and the shouts of people to a beleaguered replacement desk Sergeant. McCluskey was nowhere to be seen.

  There must have been twenty civilians, crowded around the desk and all were demanding answers to their particular questions. One had turned around and noticed that there was another Cop to ask questions of, when Lance felt his collar being pulled and away he was dragged to the side, into a stairwell and away from the mob.

  Ed Johnson slammed the door shut behind him and ran his hands through his very slick hair and then bent over, panting with exertion.

  ‘You are really in the shit now, Marshall.’

  ‘Has there been a break in the case?’

  ‘A break?’ Ed cocked his head to the side.

  ‘Are you shittin’ me? A break. Marshall. You need to pick up your God damn phone when it rings.’

  Lance pulled the small Nokia from his pocket and saw that he had received zero missed calls or texts. He showed the phone to Ed.

  ‘I called you myself, and Lindsay called you,’ Ed exclaimed, and then held his hands out, and then immediately dismissed what he was about to say.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. You are here now. There has been another killing.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The Park.’

  Lance blinked his eyes, twice.

  ‘That’s impossible. The Park was being watched, guarded even. That’s not possible.’

  ‘It was a sniper. He shot him from high up.’

  ‘So, he shot a Cop? Another Cop?’

  Lance couldn’t process the information quickly enough. The only people who had access to the park had been cops.

  ‘We think that the victim was a Cop, Lance.’

  ‘I don’t understand Ed, we had people on the gates, and we had a Cop in the Park. How did someone else get inside?’

  Ed shrugged his shoulders and ran a hand down his lean face.

  ‘It gets worse Lance. The hospital maintenance guy goes up on the roof this morning to get a better view, and ends up contaminating the entire crime scene. Family members of the patients are demanding answers. That's who is out there, those people. They are looking for you.’

  ‘Ok, Ed. I need you to find that maintenance guy, and find out what made him go up on that roof so early. Plus, get to the security in the hospital and pull all of the CCTV footage. There must be a picture somewhere now of this maniac getting up to the roof. Oh, and did anything turn up from your walk around yesterday of the hospital? I didn’t receive any reports from anyone last night.’

  ‘Still following up on a few leads, maybe more will turn up after last night’s events.’

  ‘Run the staff rosters, on the night Annie-Ann died, to Alan O'Riordan, to this new Vic. Get me the names of everyone who was on shift for those nights.’

  Lance tried to think as fast as his heart was beating, but he felt his mind wandering, as he decided to focus on an obvious clue.

  ‘Anything else boss?’

  ‘Nothing. I have to get into this morning briefing, but have some answers for me afterward.'

  Lance Marshall walked upstairs as Ed Johnson walked back through the door and out into the chaos of people who were looking for answers. They wanted answers that Lance Marshall couldn’t give.

  Marshall opened the door on the second floor and walked toward the briefing room, where he could already feel that a crowd was awaiting his arrival. The bullpens were quiet, save for a few secretaries, and they mostly didn't even notice him walking past them, though he felt that his steps were substantial and his breathing labored. Lance looked ahead and saw two people come outside of the briefing room, themselves exhaling deeply.

  Lindsay Dawn and Pete Brandt. They saw Lance Marshall approaching and relaxed a little.

  ‘I heard, any ID on the Vic? A name?' Marshall asked.

  The air around Lindsay cleared a little that at least the boss was as up to speed as they all were.

  ‘Nothing Lance. We have a body. Shot with a high caliber round, up high. We can't run any facial scanning, because we don't know what we are looking for yet. The body is a bit of mess, so we can’t even for sure ID the gender. McIntosh is down there now with his team.’ Brandt led the way.

  Marshall closed his eyes for a moment. The shot had come from up high and had taken away enough of the head, to make facial identification a near impossibility.

  ‘Run the prints, on all databases, including our own, and Pete, see if you can liase with Dr. Randall this morning. I need to know, when he knows.’

  Lindsay and Pete nodded.

  ‘Did anything turn up from the Q and A with potential witnesses yesterday?’ Marshall asked of Brandt.

&nbs
p; ‘The Park is sealed shut from the outside. Not only is there the ten-foot wall, that goes around it, but after that, thorn bushes, as thick as two Greyhound buses. The only way in, or out, is through those four gates.’

  ‘CCTV, surely that’s turning up something?’ Marshall asked Brandt.

  ‘Nothing. The cameras that could help, packed it in a few months back, and haven’t been fixed. Which makes things worse boss.’ Brandt gravely nodded his head.

  ‘So that means, that only an insider would know that those cameras are not functional. Ok.’ Marshall felt that old friend called migraine incoming. Brandt continued.

  ‘Ed was coordinating the one to ones with all of the hospital patients and staff, and he didn't say anything about any breaks in the case last night. Maybe he had more to do, and then this morning happened, and that's all gone to shit.’

  ‘I didn’t receive any reports from anyone last night. What happened there? Did you both get mine?’ Marshall asked.

  ‘I got it, and then Lindsay sent a follow-up, that I saw had been forwarded onto you and Ed.'

  Lindsay shrugged.

  ‘Me too, I got one from Pete, and one from Ed, and forwarded them both onto you. But I didn't receive anything from you, Lance. I presumed that you had hit a brick wall in the nursing home and with the Richard's family.'

  Lance used an open palm and placed it across his temples, squeezing inwards. He pushed in his eyeballs and made his vision go a little blurry. The case was getting so far ahead of him, like he had gotten to the train station, but the train had gone, a day ago. He pushed forward and opened the door of the briefing room, wide enough for Lindsay and Pete to push through after him. They took their seats near the back as Lance made his way towards the small podium at the top of the room.

  ‘Ok, quiet down, quiet down. Let’s begin,’

  Lance looked down at his feet, while the murmurs died down.