Killer Storm

by Jen Wright

  I woke up. Stunned. What the hell was that about? What did Lou have to do with the missing drugs? Could he be involved somehow? Maybe my subconscious mind was warning me not to overlook the possibility. Shit!

  I went downstairs to see if there was any ice cream left. I vowed to replenish their supply. Sure enough, there was a fresh container of Haagen Dazs vanilla Swiss almond. I resumed my thinking position in front of the fire with my two begging dogs and began to ponder.

  Again I thought about all of the facets of this case and also whether Lou could have played into any of it. There was a leak and a thief on the inside of the PD. Lou had full access to the PD, but Lou was not living beyond his means. He had a viable source of extra income. Nichols had said that he would run the PD. Or was it "own the PD"? I'd have to check that out. Lou was not part of the PD. The likely mole was there. I didn't know enough about the inside workings of the PD to know who was most likely crooked. Lou was working on it, I felt sure. Police Chief Knight was most likely too removed to know. I'm sure Nate had some theories.

  On Friday morning when I got to work, there was a message on my work machine to call Nate. The police had located the U-Haul van. It had been under armed guard. They wounded the guard and recovered the drugs. I asked him if he had a theory about the leak. He did but couldn't talk to me about it over the phone. The police were planning a trap to flush out the traitor. They had installed guards of their own to protect the drugs. FBI agents, affectionately called "Feebies," would help out with that. They would also be heading up the trap. From the diagram Lou had put together, Smithy Nichols and one other high-ranking gang member were left to be located. The jail had cooperated in keeping the gang associates separated there. The jail was also under tight surveillance. This was doing a number on the PD overtime budget. The mayor wouldn't argue, though. This whole thing had been a PR nightmare.

  I spent an hour calling around about security systems. I found one that could dial into 911 after a call went out to my home and cell simultaneously. It also had an arm/disarm feature. It was going to eat a chunk of my savings, but I authorized the installation.

  I wasn't sure what I was going to do about the boys yet, but this was a start. The security company would have the system installed in three days. By Monday morning, I would be in my own house. I was kind of enjoying the company and care of Kathy and Donna, but I also didn't want to wear out my welcome. I was feeling relatively secure, assuming that most of the gang was in custody. I could not ignore, however, the possibility that the intrusion was a botched hit ordered by Nichols and that someone would come back to finish the job.

  I was struggling with why I would be perceived as such a threat. Nichols was a nut with a god complex, and he seemed manic. Methamphetamine freaks can get that way, but they eventually calm down after they clean up. Some bipolar clients self-medicate with all kinds of drugs. The remote possibility also existed that he was getting something in lockup. We couldn't urinalysis test while clients were on pretrial status. I'd have to make sure we got a psychological on him for his predisposition investigation.

  I found myself thinking about the dream I had had about Zoey. I wondered how things would go on our first date. I spent the rest of the day catching up on what the staff had been doing all week. Court was business as usual. Predispositional investigations were being completed. Violations of probation were being processed. School, office, and home checks were taking place. The groups were quite alive with the talk about what was going on. The PO's were capitalizing on this to get the kids to think about their lives, their choices, and the subsequent consequences.

  Midafternoon, I took a walk to the Courthouse to talk to Judge Manning. Over the years, I have learned that an occasional visit to him pays big dividends to my unit, and to the kids we are trying to help. In the five minutes it took to walk the two blocks, I thought back on my history with Judge Manning. A distinguished looking, middle-aged man, he could easily pass for thirty-five. He has carefully groomed dark hair and a goatee. As the primary Juvenile Court Judge for the past twenty-five years, he has been passionate about kids and has assumed a personal level of responsibility for crime in the community and the welfare of the CHIPS (child in need of protective services) clients, but he is often tough on the professionals who come before him, calling attention to problems.

  He and I have gone nose to nose many times about how he treats PO's in the courtroom. He is particularly tough on new PO's. He has a tendency to take his frustrations out on the professionals when a case is hard or when he can't do what he wants to do for technical reasons. The new PO's eventually toughen up and can even help him laugh about his reactions. He respects the ones who come right back at him, and consequently, we have carved out a relationship of trust and respect over the years. He also has a good handle on the various levels of kids who come before him. He is good about not labeling or overreacting to low-risk kids, but he comes down hard on the kids who need it.

  I found myself comparing him to some of the other judges and prosecutors who are either too liberal or too conservative. Liberal judges lose sight of victim impact and community safety, and are overfocused on helping the offenders change, while conservative judges overfocus on punishment and alienate themselves from the offenders, jeopardizing rehabilitation. Judge Manning has a good balance. He is also research based in his approach. I considered him to be an ally – one with whom I wanted to keep the lines of communication open.

  I entered the Courthouse from the front of the building. I have never tired of the historic marble pillars, the high ceilings, and the ornately carved oak handrails. I took in the sound of clients and lawyers preparing for their hearings in the echoing hallways, and the sharp click of my footsteps as I walked down the hall. Judge Manning's clerk motioned me in as she glanced up from her computer. He was reading what looked to be a brief and had stopped to watch a salty slip under the lift bridge from his viewpoint on the fourth floor. We sat there in silence until the ship had passed into the bay.

  He set the brief down and asked how the investigation was going. He knew that I knew how much I could tell him without making him have to remove himself from any future related cases. I told him we had most of the major players rounded up and were looking for the last two.

  He asked me how I was holding up. I told him I was in good hands but missed my house. He gave me a couple of positive reports on the activities of my juvenile probation officers, and we parted ways.

  Probation was next on my list, and I took the stairs down a flight and headed straight for Chief Long's office. He was buried in what I presumed to be our budget. His desk was strewn with paper. Two stress lines were etched deeply above his nose, and he was looking all of his sixty years. His gray hair was thinning, and he seemed to have lost a little weight since I had last seen him. He was wearing his characteristic suspenders under a medium gray suit with a white pressed shirt. Having worked for the agency for thirty-five years, he knew all of the 230 staff that made up our organization.

  "Hey, Chief. What's new?"

  "You tell me. I could use a break from all of this." He gestured toward the paper covering his desk.

  "Glad to be of help."

  I filled him in on the recapture of the drugs and the number of apprehended gang members. He asked how I was holding up and whether I had received any new threats. I told him no, but that I had a security system going in. He mentioned that he would approach the board about at least partial reimbursement for it, and for the window expense as well. That was a nice surprise. I think it was the only joyful thing he was going to do all day. I felt bad for him. I vowed to myself to have him and his wife out for a nice dinner. He didn't have a homophobic bone in his body. His oldest son was gay, but for some reason didn't include Chief Long in his life much. I think the Chief liked to spend time with me in part because of that.

  My final stop was the City Building located just east of the Courthouse, one of the three buildings that make up the Civic Center complex. I lingere
d on the bench that encircles the Statue of Sieur du Luth and took in the gardens and the enormity of the Courthouse. For some reason, I noticed the delicate Roman style letters stating "Public Service in Pursuit of Knowledge and Justice." What does it say about me that I have never stopped to think deeply about the phrase? Prior to that moment, I could not have even told you what the phrase was. I wondered if anyone who worked in the building could. Perhaps the guy who had to clean it. I realized my meandering thoughts had turned to cleaning, and I shook them off, wondering why I was procrastinating going into Police headquarters.

  My goals were to catch up on the interrogation of the three new custodial suspects and to check on Lou. I found Nate in his office. He said Lou was meeting with the guys individually at the jail and at the detention center. He was trying to build rapport to see what they had to say. Lou approached them as a PO trying to decide if they would qualify for some type of supervised release. In reality, there was no way in hell these guys were getting out.

  Nate was working on the leak problem. I couldn't get him to budge an inch about the trap, but he thought out loud with me about possibilities. I think he was glad to have an ear from outside his agency that he could bounce things off of without it getting back somehow.

  Jim Stocke was a beat cop who had been demoted from sergeant last year and moved from narcotics. He was caught with drugs in his possession on two occasions. Policy is that any drugs need to be logged procedurally as evidence and accounted for in reports. His story was that he was planning on doing it but had not gotten to it yet. Officers are not drug tested as a routine employment procedure, and subsequent testing proved negative. The drugs he was caught with could easily be metabolized in twenty-four hours.

  The department had received several complaints against Officer John Moore about possible missing money after he had responded to dead body calls. The money had allegedly been taken by Moore out of the purses or wallets of the corpses. If the allegations were true, this guy was very cold. The accusations couldn't be proven, though, because he was first on the scene and had to clear folks out of the area while he secured the residence to determine cause of death.

  "This is just too hard to figure out based on speculation. It's a big department," Nate said.

  "Any chance that it is someone outside the department? Connected somehow?"

  "That's a long shot. The individual or individuals who took those drugs knew where every camera was and avoided ones that led to the area. My guess is that it was one of us."

  "Maybe it will be up to the Feds to turn over that stone," I said.

  "Well, there is another way to investigate this. We're running all the names and addresses of our known suspects in the Computer Aided Database System. Every call to every residence, responses to complaints, or street interactions are logged into this system on scene. The officers can also retrieve information from it in the squads. We can determine which officers have responded to calls involving these guys, and see who or what pops up. I have Lieutenant Hayes on this. She's at my level in another department, and I trust her. We have a chance of narrowing the field."

  "Can I ask when the sting is going to go down?"

  "Sorry, Jo."

  I finished out the day by calling my dad. "Hey, Dad, what's up?"

  "One good thing about this situation is that you call me more. Why do you have to have a reason?"

  I didn't have a good answer for him, so I just let the silence hang there.

  "Lois and I are going on a gambling cruise tomorrow with some friends. We'll be gone for a week. Is everything OK with you? I see the police and that PO got the drugs back." He put the emphasis on the PO.

  "Yes, they did. Things are moving along here. I should be back in my house by next week."

  "Great! Glad to hear it, sweetheart. We love you."

  "I love you, too, Dad."

  It did unnerve me a little that he was being so sweet. Maybe it was all a part of aging. While I didn't have to worry about him reading the on-line newspaper and panicking for a while, I did wonder to myself why I didn't call him more.

  Chapter 14

  The time for my date was fast approaching. I had successfully avoided thinking about it for most of the day. I brought my car to the drive-through car wash and made my way up the hill to Zoey's place.

  Zoey lived in an area near the University. I wondered whether she walked to work. There were nice Tudor and traditional homes in this neighborhood interspersed with college rental properties.

  I thought about how the college houses can contain as many as eight students under one roof. The city tries to regulate the number of bodies with rental permits, but the students find many creative ways around the regulations. Property owners want to get paid while avoiding damaged houses from too many keg parties. A new city ordinance allows a landlord to be fined if the police are called to a college rental house more than three times in a semester. I don't think it has cut down on the parties much. The drinking age in Duluth is twenty-one. Most of the college freshmen are eighteen, and graduate at twenty-two or twenty-three. The problem is obvious. Campus police issue hundreds of consumption tickets, and they run them through the courts. Some students see them as badges of honor. Judges tend to throw frequent offenders in jail for ten days over the semester break.

  It occurred to me that I have a jaded view of this city because of my job, so I tried to clear my mind as I walked up to Zoey's house. She lived in a cute little Tudor with an arch over the front door and a dormer upstairs. The walkway was brick.

  It had begun to snow lightly. The scene was made more inviting by Christmas lights strung over the entryway.

  I hesitated before ringing the bell. Was I ready for this? How would I know if it wasn't right? I have not had good judgment in the past. Would I ever develop an internal gauge for compatibility?

  I rang the bell. She came to the door with a smile and let me in. She took my coat and ushered me into the kitchen. The house had open archways between the living room, dining room, and kitchen. The floors were light maple, and the walls were an eggshell white. She had watercolor paintings in the living room and a large weaving in the dining room. The kitchen floor was a Mexican-style, solid-color tile, with a colorful back-splash behind white-tiled countertops. I smelled something spicy in the oven.

  "Mmm smells good."

  "Oven-baked burritos. My great grandmother's recipe. She was Chicana. I suspect the ingredients have been Americanized quite a bit, though."

  "Where did your green eyes come from?"

  "You are observant, aren't you? My dad had green eyes. His grandmother was Austrian. That whole side of the family has similar eyes."

  "They are unique, and beautiful."

  (Shit, why did I say that? Slow down here, Jo. You don't even know this woman. Think before you speak!)

  She just smiled and thanked me, offered me a glass of red wine, and continued to prepare an appetizer made with tortillas that had a red sauce, cheese, and light spices. We took the appetizer and moved into the living room. I noticed that there was no television. We sat on the floor in front of a gas fireplace with our backs to the couch. She filled me in on the details about how she ended up in Duluth, saying that she found the summers in New Mexico too harsh and the lack of seasons barren. She had taken a college vacation in the Boundary Waters and fallen in love with the country. She had a curiosity about the snowy winters here, but she was not without fear. The first snow she had seen had been three nights before. She thought it was beautiful, but she was terrified to drive in it. She had purchased a shovel, mega winter clothing, and was excited about the falling snow outside. It had really begun to come down. With the wind rising, it was fast approaching white-out conditions. I was a little worried about how I was going to get home in all of this, but I was happy to be able to see her experience real snow for the first time. That would be a treat no matter how the night turned out.

  The oven-baked burritos were excellent. Peppers, beans, cheese, and rice all ba
ked up in one pan. It was such a simple meal. I would have to try to recreate this dish. Over dinner, Zoey asked about my work and the current case. I found it very easy to talk to her; it was nice not to have to downplay things as I did with my dad and with Kathy and Donna. I told her about the case, leaving out names, and just talked and talked. I even revealed to her my fears about Lou and my conflict about those fears. It occurred to me in the middle of the meal that I wasn't nervous anymore.

  When we finished dinner, I helped with the dishes. She put Norah Jones on the CD player, and we did the dishes in relative silence. I noted that she was sensitive to how we worked together while seemingly giving herself over to the music. I did the same. It was almost like a dance – a lot like how Kathy and I work together on projects. We don't have to talk about how to work together; we just do it. I love companionable silences.

  The snow was really coming down outside, and I couldn't see my car. I suggested that we go outside to play a bit. I didn't have snow pants, but I did have a long coat, hat, and gloves. We went out and just stood on the front walk watching the snow.

  "Does it always snow this hard? Is this normal?"

  "No, this is coming down unusually hard. It looks like we're in for a blizzard. Sometimes in a blizzard you can't tell how much snow there really is because it blows around so much. This is a lot of snow, though. It's already three inches deep. Let's take my car out and give you some driving lessons."

  "Really? OK."

  We took the Range Rover to the faculty parking lot at the University. On the way over, I was wondering how much snow we were going to get and how the heck I was going to get home. I really wanted to play in it a bit longer, though. The parking lot was deserted, so I demonstrated stopping, starting, and whipping donuts. She took the wheel with a little trepidation, but that same mischievous grin soon appeared. She practiced stopping, starting, pumping the brakes, and turning in the snow. When it came time for the donuts, we took it out of four-wheel drive, and she did one tentative donut followed by another. Then she did a three-donut spree while yelling "Yee-haw." It was a blast. Then I showed her how to steer a skidding car while pumping the brakes. When the lesson was over, we struggled to make it back to her house.