by Mark Zubro
Saturday 7:03 A.M.
When he got back home, it was just after seven. Ben was still asleep. Paul didn’t hear the boys stirring. In the laundry room, he found a pair of freshly washed and dried gym shorts from when he was in high school. He changed out of his jeans. He liked the well-worn cottony feel. He made himself a cup of coffee and sat on the back porch. With the shorts on, what little breeze there was outside stirred the hair on his arms and legs.
The humidity seemed almost close to bearable. The garden needed weeding. He’d have to get to that. Ben tilled and planted. Paul tended and harvested. The tall fence, the garage, and the large trees in full leaf screened the porch from any prying neighbors.
Paul watched the summer light spread around the yard. He was tired from stress, the long hours of work, and lack of sleep. He sat and mulled until he heard Jeff’s wheelchair. It stopped in the kitchen at the espresso maker for a minute or two. Then the back door swung open, and Jeff wheeled out.
“Morning,” Paul said.
“Morning.” The boy busied himself balancing his small cup of coffee as he transferred himself to the swing next to Paul. His dad was careful not to help without asking first. The boy was sensitive about doing things on his own. It took longer, but Paul figured if the boy needed a few extra moments, as a dad, he could spare the time. Paul took off his shirt and wiped sweat off. He draped it on his chair to be tossed in the laundry hamper later.
Jeff settled then said, “You got in after I fell asleep.”
“It was late.”
“You’re up early again. What’s wrong?”
“Things at work are complicated.”
“I read all the reports on the Internet including from the local newspapers. Are you part of the Code of Silence in the department? Is that what’s happening in this case? Does the Code of Silence work for you or against you since it’s a fight between detectives?”
“What do you know about it?”
“Just what was in the papers.”
“And what did it say?”
Jeff began to recite chapter and verse from what he read. The boy’s memory was phenomenal. As for his understanding of what he read, he still often needed help. He continued for several minutes, paused, sipped from his espresso cup, then finished with, “Are you going to be okay? Are you okay?”
“On the job, I’m going to do my work as best I can. I’ll talk to who I have to talk to. It’s more complicated now because there’s been a history, then again, come to think of it, there’s always a history that makes things complicated.”
“You’re not going to get fired?”
“No.” Paul knew that as long as Molton was his Commander, he was reasonably safe.
Jeff said, “The bullies always win. The rich always lie. Are they going to try to kill you?” At the end, the boy could not suppress a plaintive tremble in his voice.
Paul put his hand on his son’s arm, looked him in the eyes. He said, “I’m going to do the best I can to keep you, Brian, Ben, and myself safe. After that, I catch bad guys. Today will be the same as any other.” Paul hoped this was true.
Jeff nodded, which Paul took to mean acceptance of what he’d said. The boy asked, “What does it mean when it says a police officer has been ‘stripped of his police powers?’”
“That he or she sits at a desk doing boring work for hours on end.”
“But still gets a paycheck.”
“For now.”
“Is Mr. Fenwick okay?”
“As much as he ever is.”
“They’ve got all those review boards. Do you have to face them?”
“Anyone can face them at any time. I haven’t done anything wrong, so there’s nothing to fear.” He hoped that was true. For now, it was enough truth for his son.
“But you saved that kid from Carruthers. You saved those kids from the storm.”
“Just doing my job,” Paul said.
Jeff said, “Why doesn’t the Code of Silence work both ways?”
“What do you mean?” Paul asked.
“The Code of Silence hushes up mistreatment of minorities and tolerates misconduct. Those guys won a lawsuit against the Code of Silence. Costs the city two million bucks. But even so, whoever snitches is a ‘rat motherfucker’. I can say that in this case right?”
“For now.”
“Well, if Carruthers is one of their own and they rally around to protect him, and if you and Mr. Fenwick are ones of their own, why don’t they rally around to protect you? Why doesn’t it work both ways? I think they might contradict each other. You can’t be on both sides at once.”
Paul said, “Sometimes people feel they have to choose, or feel they need to.”
“They think you broke the Code of Silence by saving that kid?” Jeff banged the arm of the swing. “That makes no sense. You saved somebody’s life. Carruthers’s reputation is more important than that kid’s life?”
“It’s what each person has invested in Carruthers’s reputation that makes a difference.”
Jeff banged the arm of the swing again. “That’s bullshit.”
Paul said, “Besides making your hand and wrist sore, what good does banging it do?”
“I’m mad. It makes me feel better.”
“Is that the best way to deal with frustration?”
“You know I get mad.”
“And I know this isn’t the only time we’ve talked about this.”
“I’m defending you.”
“And I appreciate it. Do we bang things, throw things, hit out?”
Paul got a whispered, “No.” Jeff paused for a moment than asked, “Don’t you get mad? Don’t you get angry?”
“Yep.”
“So what do you do?”
“I work even harder to be logical, do research, and make sense and take deliberate, useful action. It’s the difference between President Obama and his predecessor and his successor.”
“But that’s distant and far. I’m talking about us.”
Paul sighed, “Sometimes when I’m angry, very angry, frustrated, the question for me is what can I do about the anger, how can I ease the frustration? I’ve never found hitting something made a problem any better.”
“But wouldn’t you feel better?”
“I feel better when I can solve the problem.”
“I’m a kid.”
“Took me a while to learn as well.” Paul paused then said, “I will listen to you explain your anger for as long as you like. Please don’t hit.”
A teenage pause and a mumbled, “Okay.”
The two sat in companionable silence.
Ben, wearing a pair of baggy basketball shorts, showed up and stood next to Jeff. The three chatted for a while. Jeff had to get to his Saturday morning chess league meeting. He did his wheelchair thing in reverse and then trundled off.
Ben sat next to Paul. “You okay?”
“As much as I can be with work a mess.”
“Is Carruthers suicidal?”
“I never thought so before these events. His wife certainly gave that impression.”
“The world is against him. From what you described, his wife isn’t very fond of him. Why does she stay married to him?”
“Who knows? But suicidal? Beats the hell out of me. He’s so relentlessly Carruthers, it’s hard to think of him as anything else. I reported it to the Commander and let Barb Dams know. I did my part. They’ll follow all the procedures.”
“Are his protectors abandoning him? I would if I were them.”
“I don’t know because I’m not sure who his protectors are. Certainly they’re going to try to save their own skins, their own jobs, their own careers. They wouldn’t let Carruthers threaten that. I don’t think.”
“But you’re a threat to all that is theirs. That’s what I worry about. What if they want to get you out of the way?”
“We’ve got Molton, and now that Carruthers is gone, according to Barb Dams, all the detectives on the squad at Area Ten.”
/> “There’ve been random killings and random shootings.”
“That’s what makes them so hard to solve.”
“But they could become specific to you.”
As they sat, their elbows and arms touched, they could feel the hair on each other’s legs. Paul loved the warmth and masculinity. Neither wore a shirt, so their hairy-chests and six-pack abs stood out.
Paul said, “That’s one of the reasons Fenwick and I are going in early again today. We want to solve the murder case so we can concentrate on the Carruthers bullshit. Although as far as Molton, Fenwick, and I can see, it’s all one big case.”
Saturday 8:38 A.M.
Turner and Fenwick met up a little after eight thirty in the headquarters parking lot. As they walked in, Dams caught them in the hall. “You might want to watch this.”
The television in Molton’s office was on. It showed Griffin, the assistant Chief of Detectives, giving a press briefing. He was saying, “Well, we don’t know exactly what happened.”
“After all this time?” shouted a reporter.
Griffin ignored him. “They are many unanswered questions that we need answers to.”
Fenwick muttered at the screen, “Bullshit.”
Griffin went on, “By talking to you now and at periodic intervals, we’re showing all of you how transparent we are trying to be. We’ve got evidence techs and crews, even as we speak, going through surveillance video. It takes time.”
They chose not to listen to any more and turned to go up to their desks. Dams motioned them over to her desk. She picked up two thick manila envelopes. She gave one to each of them. Turner glanced inside. He said, “This is Carruthers’s file.”
Dams said, “The real one. I also cut and pasted the thing onto emails that I sent you both.”
“We never got this from you,” Fenwick said.
“Announce it to the world for all I care.”
“How’d you get it?” Fenwick asked.
Dams gave him a grim smile. “Sometimes people are stupid. When we digitized everything, we didn’t destroy everything, at least not my backups. Nobody gets to my files, and if they try to, I have backups to the backups. Never fuck with an all-powerful secretary.”
The detectives knew this to be true, even to the point of never fucking with a less than all-powerful secretary.
Turner said, “Thank you.”
They walked upstairs to their desks. Five feet from his, Fenwick halted, then asked in his deepest rumble, “Why is there a broken lock in the center of my desk?”
Turner stopped. He whispered, “It can’t be from the door that led onto the roof where the shots came from.”
“It can,” Fenwick whispered back.
“More proof the two cases are connected? Or it’s our fellow cops out to get us?” He shook his head. “Or more likely both.”
Fenwick said, “I was depressed before this.”
Turner said, “I’m just totally pissed.”
Molton wasn’t in. They called Dams, Fong, and crime scene technicians.
Saturday 9:03 A.M.
They headed for the nearest Starbucks, three blocks away. They took great care to be sure they weren’t followed.
This morning, the sun shone brightly. After the few short blocks, Fenwick’s clothes showed nearly as much dampness as after they’d been in the rain last night. The air-conditioned coffee shop was fabulous. Severe storms were predicted for that evening. A tornado watch had been posted from noon today to noon tomorrow.
In the crowded establishment, a table came open in the back.
Fenwick stirred his sugar and cream-filled coffee then slammed the wooden stir sticks down hard enough on the table top to splinter them.
Turner said, “I agree.”
They drank, watched the crowd, gazed out the windows, and mulled their situation.
Fenwick said, “I am not happy about this. Somewhere, somebody else is going to be unhappy when we get to the bottom of this. And when we do, it’s going to hurt. Them. A lot.”
Turner said, “Yep.”
More coffee drinking and mulling.
Fenwick said, “They’ve got us dizzing around here, and we’re buying into all this stupidity. I feel like I could drown in stupidity that’s as thick as all this humidity.”
Turner said, “We need to go one incident at a time. Sort them out.”
They opened their laptops and began taking notes and jotting perspectives as each other spoke.
Turner told him about the visit that morning from Pete Eisenberg, the Chicago police undercover guy.
Fenwick said, “You keep getting visits in the middle of the night.”
“This was early morning. You jealous?”
“I might be. Is this like the international gay conspiracy?” Fenwick asked.
“Only if I want it to be.”
More tapping on keyboards making notes.
Fenwick said, “It almost feels like these guys didn’t really care.”
“Who?”
“The CPD brass, whoever set up this thing. From the gaudiness of the tent to what seemed to be a poor choice of personnel. It all seems sort of slapdash.”
“Somebody wanted there to be violence? Somebody wanted the conference to fail? They didn’t care how many innocent people died while they tried to kill us?”
Fenwick asked, “Who? Why?”
“Wasn’t me. I don’t know yet.” Turner paused a moment then said, “As long as we’re listing odd things how about this. We’ve got every stripe of radical who have all learned to take pictures of police and every other speck of dust on the streets of Chicago except nobody got the picture of the killer nor did the killer post pictures of his work. Why then is he/she the only one at the convention not so posting?”
He tapped his coffee cup then said, “Can we draw the conclusion that the killer wasn’t part of the wild camera work, because he wasn’t at the conference or part of the conference or connected to the conference.”
Fenwick said, “The radicals and protesters have nothing to do with any of the killings and shots. The whole radical conference thing is a convenient red-herring? Why kill the activists? A cover-up? A diversion? Or what the hell, just randomly kill two people. Just for us.”
“You’re a cop, and you’ve read history. People have done far more cruel things for no apparent reasons. Sometimes, they’re just nuts.”
“And someone, those nuts or that nut, is in a powerful position in the city of Chicago or in the Chicago Police Department? And we’ve met a lot of nutty administrators.”
“That nutty?”
“Maybe our experience just got broadened. Yeah. I think they’re nuts enough.”
Turner said, “Using the deaths to confuse the issue. There was one target, and having two die confuses the issue even more.”
“Great. Which one was the cover up?” Fenwick asked.
“Yes.”
“And the presence of Ian?”
“A bonus for the confusion sweepstakes? Pure dumb luck? Stop me when you think I’ve gotten to something that works.”
Fenwick said, “I’m stumped.”
Turner said, “Let’s go back to another oddity. No one has reported the beat cop incident. Not officially. Sure, like those cops in the tent, they’d heard about it, but silence from all official channels. Possible logical conclusion, the cop involved knows something.”
“We gotta talk to him.”
Turner asked, “Why was there a guard on your cubicle in the hospital?”
“Huh?”
“If we’re being watched, and we’re suspicious of everyone, let’s go back and examine what we might think of as the slightest oddity. First one I thought of was the cop at the cubicle when you were getting stitched up. Who assigned him there and why? We weren’t in danger. We were cops. We weren’t going to be arrested. We were the good guys. Who the hell was he?”
“Someone is desperate?” Fenwick suggested. “Or stupid?”
“Or both,�
�� Turner said. “Okay, and why was there a guard outside the kid’s room?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Then there were all those cops hanging around Sanchez’s room, but there was one official guard.”
“They were always watching us. Always trying to listen in. What the fuck were we saying that was so fucking important?”
Turner said, “They cared about what we might say. If this was all about us, if every action on their part was to catch us, if this was all a set-up, then they could be fishing for anything random. They’ve been monitoring every incident of our day since this all started. Since the first moment of Carruthers’s first shift back from vacation.” He mused for a moment. “Who has the ability for such monitoring?” He answered his own question. “The CPD.”
“Doesn’t strike me as efficient.”
“Has anything about what has been happening since we stopped Carruthers struck you as efficient?”
“Well. No.” Fenwick sighed. Gave his coffee cup a slow twirl, took a huge gulp, and said, “Although somehow, if it involves Carruthers, and friends who can’t be much above his level of intelligence, I assume it would be fucked up. They keep shooting at us. And they keep missing me. How? Or they’re only shooting at one of us?”
“We actually only got shot at once. We weren’t there when they attacked the car.”
Fenwick said, “The storm nearly got us.”
“You saying the storm was orchestrated by evil forces?”
“Not today. Give me time. Just because we’re paranoid, doesn’t mean we don’t have enemies.”
“The storm happened just to get us wet?” Turner asked.
“How paranoid do we want to be?”
“I don’t know,” Turner said. “Having an enemy that controls the weather? Wouldn’t that make us kind of special?”
“Not special enough.”
Turner tapped at the keys on his laptop. “Why did the kid DeShawn have a guard? Who ordered it?”
Fenwick said, “The bridge.”
Turner raised his eyebrow at his friend.
Fenwick said, “If we’re going to be paranoid about everything, we should add that, too. Why was that crowd there at that time? To give me a chance to be heroic?”
