Monday’s Child
Homicide: Life With Nick
Jamie Lee Scott
LBB Company
Text copyright © 2015 Jamie Lee Scott
All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 978-1-942245-08-7
MONDAY’S CHILD
Copyright © 2014 by Jamie Lee Scott
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, LBB Company, 1106 Hwy 69 N, Forest City, IA 50436.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Scott, Jamie Lee, 7-21-15. Monday’s Child. LBB Company. eBook Edition.
ISBN: 978-1-942245-08-7
Contents
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Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Other Books By Jamie Lee Scott
About the Author
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HOMICIDE, LIFE WITH NICK
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Introduction
This story is for all of the readers who love the Gotcha Detective Agency series. This is Nick’s story. His life leading up to his transfer to the Salinas Police Department. Maybe you’ll see Nick a little differently now, maybe not, but I wanted a place to tell his stories. You don’t have to have read the Gotcha series to read this series of novellas, but you’d be missing out. Ha!
1
By the time I found my first dead body, I’d been with the San Francisco Police Department for just over a year. I was still wet behind the ears, as they say, and still drinking. The rehab hadn’t taken for the alcohol, but I hadn’t touched a drug of any kind since I’d been released from the NFL. At least I’d learned that much at the time.
It was difficult to go from a high six-figure income to mid-five figures, and I hadn’t been smart enough to sock away a nest egg for myself. In hindsight, my manager sucked. But then, I shouldn’t have expected others to be more worried about my welfare than I was, and I wasn’t even remotely worried. I mean what were the chances I’d only be in the NFL for four years. I thought I’d have a lifetime of hard living and money pouring in.
As a uniformed police officer, I was now a bad guy, pulling over some of my former teammates who’d been stupid enough to drive under the influence. I had no problem cuffing them and taking them in because they had no problem forgetting I ever existed. The NFL had changed a bit since I was released, but substance abuse is still rampant. Released. Ha! I was fired.
I was lucky my pro-football status helped me get hired by the police department and also seemed to overshadow my DUI. I’m not sure how I ended up being a cop, except that I didn’t know how to do anything else. The only issue on the job, so far, was when people recognized me from my former career. Even then, the job was good, and had something different to offer almost every day.
I can tell you, nothing ever prepares you for seeing a dead human being, and even though they tell you it gets easier with time, I don’t think it really does. You learn to compartmentalize and push that stuff to the back, or you can’t do your job, but you’re never really prepared for what you might see.
Prior to my promotion to homicide, I worked the streets of the Castro District. I thought being a football player was challenging, but this pushed the limits. Thank goodness we weren’t piss tested during those days because I couldn’t get through a shift or go to sleep without several drinks to dull the pain. Not the pain of being a cop, but the pain of failure, and how I’d been given the opportunity of a lifetime and I’d thrown it all away on drugs and alcohol.
It was a night on my beat, patrolling the Tenderloin, that changed my thoughts of being a cop forever. I’d been cruising Geary Street and making my rounds when I stopped at La Rouge Café. I’d called in my order for a Double Double and a large order of steak fries, so after a relatively uneventful night, I stopped in to pick up my food.
Elsie Groober ran the place at night. Hell, probably in the daytime, too. I think she was the owner, but I never asked. I’d parked my patrol car in front and when I went inside, I realized my food would be cold before I got to eat anything.
Elsie’s face was ashen. She met me at the door, and her boney, wrinkled, heavily veined hands shook like a junkie as she grabbed at my arm. Actually, all of Elsie was wrinkled and boney.
“Officer Christianson, you need to come with me.” She pulled at my shirt sleeve. “It’s very bad.”
I didn’t like being touched by citizens, and Elsie’s tugging at my sleeve irritated me. I didn’t say anything because she’d never been anything but kind and funny when I’d patronized her store in the past. Needless to say, this demeanor was unsettling.
La Rouge sat behind a Motel 6, and the traffic in the motel’s parking garage made the wall rattle slightly as I followed Elsie down the single aisle of the restaurant. The place only had ten tables, upholstered in a worn vinyl fabric, and seated forty people at maximum capacity. Make that forty-five, since Elsie also hosted patrons at a counter in front of the kitchen pass thru window.
It was that counter she’d tugged me past and into the kitchen.
I tried not to see the kitchens of most restaurants, or I’d never be able to eat out again, but Elsie’s place wasn’t as bad as most. At least, in the harsh fluorescent lighting I didn’t see anything scurrying across the floor. She now had my hand in a vice-like grip.
She stopped. “I can’t go back out there. You go.” She pointed to the back door of the kitchen. It was a solid steel door with a normal lock, but it had a board slid across the door and the frame to keep anyone from breaking in.
I took hold of her other hand and asked, “Where am I going?”
I didn’t like the idea of being led to the back alley, then having the door barricaded behind me.
“I can’t go back out there, but you must hurry. He might still be alive.”
Now I didn’t have much of an appetite, and my thoughts of getting this over with so I could eat, had vanished. I pulled the two-by-four from its hooks, placed it on the floor next to the door, and turned the lock. I wasn’t kidding about being barricaded.
Pulling the heavy door open, I said to Elsie, “Hold this open, I don’t want to get locked out.”
Elsie had no intention of holding the door, so she bent over and pulled a cinderblock from behind the door and used it to prop it open. “There, you won’t be locked out.” Then she stepped back about ten feet.
I pulled my flashlight from my belt and flipped it on. As I walked around the alley, I nearly gagged on the putrid smells of old food and a commingling of urine and feces. Smells not altogether unexpected in the back alleys of the Tenderloin. I saw a rat scurry into the shadows,
and remnants of garbage that either hadn’t quite made into the dumpsters or had been spilled when the waste management people came to remove the contents. The wet air, not quite heavy with fog yet, made the aromas stick in my nostrils.
“Elsie, what am I looking for?” I asked. Had I waited a fraction of a second, I wouldn’t have needed to ask. “Holy shit.”
No way was I going to be able to save this life as he had already expired. The rats had even taken to munching on him (I assumed it was a him by the clothing). There’d be no identification based on facial photos, unless he had a driver’s license in his wallet. Assuming he had a wallet.
I held my breath and leaned in closer. He looked like just a kid. I shook my head. He’d been beaten pretty badly and left here to recover or die. I knew better than to touch him, but I really wanted to check his pockets, to see if he had anything to offer me by way of I.D.
Instead, I radioed for homicide and stepped back inside La Rouge while I waited for them to respond.
Several other officers joined me while I waited, and one stood outside the front door of La Rouge, keeping patrons from entering. Elsie didn’t seem to mind since it was near closing time, and she could finish her cleaning and get ready to go home.
“Can I just lock up and go home?” She looked on the verge of bolting, and I thought she’d leave even if I said no.
“Give us just a little more time Elsie, it’s easier to maneuver through your restaurant than go through the alley just yet. They will want to see what evidence there may be before they drive cars and an ambulance down that way.” I tried to reassure her, but she wanted to go home now, not in a little while.
“This is bad publicity for my store,” she argued.
“No,” I said with a bit of tension in my voice. “Me arresting you for interfering with police acts would be bad publicity.”
She clamped her mouth shut tight and glared at me before turning away and heading to a minuscule office a few feet from the back door. She looked back and said, “Your food gets cold.”
Food was the last thing on my mind, but I nodded to thank her for the reminder. I knew I’d be paying a bill for cold food I probably wouldn’t eat, but I’d deal with it later.
Since a big city has many police and we all have our duties, I’d never even crossed paths with the homicide detectives in our division. I’d been at fatal car crashes, but usually only to contain the perimeter, so I had yet to be up close and personal with any form of corpse. I was still a peon.
When detectives Rhoden and Milliken arrived (I knew them by their pictures on the wall at the precinct), I was their grunt. I proud to report, in the coming years when I made detective, I never treated the officers as grunts. “Shana Rhoden,” the thirty-something brunette said. “You must be the infamous Nick Christianson.” Her smile smacked of mirth.
I nodded. I hated being known as “infamous Nick Christianson.” As a matter of fact, she’s the cop who nicknamed me “DB.”
“So, DB, this is my partner, detective Ben Milliken. We’ll be working together on this, so stay with us and try to keep up.”
She touched my sleeve, and her hand lingered a moment. Great, I thought, another chick who wanted to say they’d had sex with me. And I was too much of a douche to say no if the opportunity arose. I hoped she was more professional than that, and it was only a way to make me feel at ease. I decided to take it as the latter.
“I’m at your disposal.” What else could I say, I’d found the body, and I wanted to stay on the case.
Milliken moved past us and squatted down next to the body. “You found him just like this?”
“Yes, sir, I haven’t touched him. He was sitting in the corner, propped up against the brick wall, just like this. As you can see, he’s sort of leaning against the dumpster.”
Milliken nodded. “Definitely a he?” He unzipped the baggy jeans the kid was wearing and exposed filthy cotton briefs that looked to be white at one time. “Or a chick who likes to wear boy’s briefs.”
Rhoden rolled her eyes. “Any I.D.?”
Milliken picked through the pockets a bit more, then stood. “Best I can tell, this is a young male. No identification, but he’s been abused. There’s petechiae in the remaining eyeball, and the bruising around the throat indicates asphyxia.”
“You think it’s a boy from Castro?” Rhoden stood next to Milliken, observing more closely.
“I don’t recognize him,” I said. “But then there aren’t many boys prostituting on Castro these days.”
“Did she ask you?” Milliken spat the words at me.
I said nothing.
Rhoden looked at me curiously. “Really?”
“Sure, there are a few still around, pimping themselves out for survival sex, but with the Internet, there’re easier ways to sell yourself without standing on a cold street corner.”
Survival sex was how these transient boys survived. They’d give five to ten dollar blow jobs, just for food and drugs. Or they’d offer up sex in exchange for a warm bed to sleep in. It rarely worked in their favor, but I had yet to see one murdered.
“What makes you think he’s a Castro District boy?” Milliken asked, making notes in a small spiral pad he’d taken from his pocket.
Rhoden said, “He’s dirty, like he hasn’t had clean clothes for a very long time.”
“Well, I’d say we take a picture and start asking around, but with that face we won’t get much.”
Milliken was right. John Doe’s nose, ears and one eye had been completely devoured by rats, and the tips of his fingers weren’t going to offer much either, as they’d been gnawed to the bone.
“How long do you think he’s been here?” I asked.
“Hard to tell. Maybe we can catch a rat and see if it still has flesh in its tummy.” Rhoden looked around as if expecting a rat to come out of the dark corners and volunteer.
“Medical examiner will be able to tell us more when they get the body in the morgue. But with the backup, it may take weeks for an answer.”
I panicked. I didn’t want my first homicide to be unsolved. “No way.”
Rhoden touched my arm again. “He’s exaggerating. They’ll get right on the preliminary exam.”
“Until then we need to have a picture of him just like he is, with his clothes on. Once we have approval to move him, we’ll take pics from the neck down, and DB can start asking questions.”
I wanted to tell him my name was Officer Christianson, but I wanted to shadow them on this case and help as much as I could, so (unlike me) I kept my mouth shut again. DB wasn’t such a bad nickname, since I was a defensive back in college and the pros.
The crime scene van pulled up at the end of the alley, and two techs dressed from head to toe in sterile white took pictures. When they were done, one of them cupped his hands around his mouth like a blow horn and yelled, “Are you about done, so we can process this scene and go home?”
Rhoden gave him the thumbs up, and we walked back into Elsie’s kitchen. One of the techs had given me a couple of duplicate Polaroids for my file, and to use in my investigation. Milliken and Rhoden sure as shit weren’t going to share theirs.
At that moment, I promised myself, if I ever became a homicide detective, I’d never have that attitude. I didn’t care how calloused I’d become to the job, I’d always want to be thorough and not care how long it took until I got home.
Secondly, I swore I’d track these impatient assholes down if this case went cold. I’d make them pay for their indifference to this dead boy.
2
The fog had rolled in like pea soup being poured from a pot. I had to roll slowly through town to the Castro District. As I did, I watched the few boys still working the streets fade into the doorways of businesses to stay out of sight. I realized I wasn’t going to get much cruising the street in my patrol car and wearing a uniform. But I couldn’t go home and change into street clothes because my shift wasn’t over, and because I didn’t want to lose valuable time.
/> I hadn’t yet developed a rapport with the kids working this end of Polk Street, but I knew several underage kids nursed drinks at Shenpo’s while they waited for old men to come in and solicit business. But before I parked the car, I wanted to make one more pass along the hangout south of Market Street. I did know a few kids there.
As my car crept along the streets, my lights cutting through the wet air, I saw a few young men huddled together against the dropping early morning temps. When I pulled my cruiser over to the curb, they didn’t even bother to move away. They weren’t hustling, so they knew I wasn’t there to arrest anyone.
Some of the boys were friendly and polite, still remembering the manners their parents had instilled, but others had been raised by wolves and called out to me as I rolled the window down to entice them into a chat.
“Hey fat boy, we ain’t got no donuts. You’ll have to wait until the bakery opens,” an older boy, maybe seventeen called out from the group.
“I’m not looking for donuts, I’m looking for some help.” As soon as I said it, I knew it was the wrong way to approach these kids.
“Help? Yeah, sure, we got nothing better to do than help the pigs who arrest us and keep us down.” The older boys flipped me off, but the rest stood quiet.
“You aren’t helping me. You’d be helping one of your own. And I know you help each other. I just need you to take a look at a picture and tell me if you recognize someone.” I put my hand out the window, showing them a Polaroid photo of the dead body.
Of course we’d covered the boy’s head in most of the pictures, but did take one with his face showing.
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