by Jim Riley
The problem with gut feelings is that they are not always as black and white as our logic sometimes tries to make them. In this case, my gut was telling me that something was wrong with our marriage. My logic immediately went to the most obvious answer. The beauty had finally figured out she was living with the beast.
In reality, the problem was not with her, but with me. She wasn’t interested in someone else, she was just losing interest in me. Or, probably more appropriately, I was making it impossible for her to compete with my mistress—work.
After the Goldstein building episode, I was determined to concentrate on my marriage. I had finally wised up to what was important. Maybe that, coupled with the fact that I had gotten one last hoorah in St. Louis, made me grow up enough to think of someone besides myself. Being the optimist I was, I just knew it was going to work. Life was going to change for us, and I was going to do better by her. Then the phone rang again.
“This is Sergeant Moffat.”
“I just got a call from a reporter wanting to get a copy of a photo of you in your uniform and asking if you had been involved in the St. Louis thing.” It was Toby, my Sheriff, and he was calling me from home where they had tracked him down. It hadn’t been that hard, since unlike most cops he had his home number listed in the book.
“What reporter? From where?” My questions probably sounded normal, but I was shitting bricks.
“CNN.”
The stories about the St. Louis terrorist attack had been running on the cable news networks non-stop since it happened. I had watched them for the first day or two, but quickly tired of the journalists who gave subjective opinions as fact, and the talking-head experts who would have done it better or differently. I guess, too, I had decided to put the whole thing behind me. I wasn’t even allowed to talk about it to Tish and figured it would be just as well to let it go.
Toby had not released my departmental mug shot, the one that was on my LCSO commission. Nor had he confirmed that I had been in St. Louis. He did tell them I worked for him and was not available to take their call right then. I wasn’t sure what it all meant and why they were calling me. It wasn’t a huge secret that I had been there, but I didn’t know why it was newsworthy either, considering the facts, as the FBI put them out, about me hiding under a desk.
I got up from my desk and went into the squad room. One of the patrol sergeants, Pat Baker, was busy checking in reports and we exchanged hellos. I flipped on the television to CNN. It was on a commercial, and I flipped over to FOX News. It must have been that time of the hour, because they were on commercial break as well. I flipped back to CNN and muted the sound, since Pat was picking up the phone to make a call.
I flipped through one of the many police equipment catalogs strewn in the squad. I wasn’t paying any attention to what I was looking at, since my mind was on why the CNN reporter had called. I left the sound muted and watched CNN for a few minutes. The reporter was in front of a courthouse, and I could see the flotilla of satellite trucks behind her and off to the side. She was reporting live from the latest preliminary hearing of the latest sports figure or movie star to rape, kill, or get caught drunk driving. I didn’t know and didn’t care. They flashed a mug shot of a man with mussed up hair, and I thought I recognized him from some movie I had seen. The ticker on the bottom of the screen was replaying all the same news that had been talked about the previous hour. I quickly bored of it and went back to my office.
I had been working on my bank embezzlement case for about an hour when the phone rang. I picked it up absentmindedly.
“Yeah, this is Moffat.” Not very professional, but it was getting close to the end of the day. It was Tish again, and she sounded out of sorts.
“I just got a call from a reporter from MSNBC. They wanted me to confirm that you had been at the JP Goldstein building and had been involved in rescuing the hostages.”
The words had been in the form of a sentence, but the tone was in the form of a question.
When I came back from Virginia, Tish had naturally asked me all about what had happened. I told her the story the FBI was proffering, but she saw right through it and pressed me. I finally told her I couldn’t tell her what I knew or had done. I shouldn’t have even added the last part about doing something because it confirmed that I had most likely done something besides wait patiently in an office.
With all the assignments I had been involved in over the years, Tish and I had developed a good working agreement on what I could and couldn’t tell her. At first, when I would hold back, she took it personally, as though I felt I couldn’t trust her. She finally came to realize it had nothing to do with me trusting her. I explained to her that if something went wrong and it appeared someone had dropped a dime on an upcoming bust or mission, everyone who had any knowledge was instantly on the suspect list until they could be crossed off. With me not telling her, she never even made the list.
Her concerns now were that I had done something that was somehow not right and was being covered up. She wouldn’t say it, but I could tell.
“I really don’t know what it’s about, babe. What’d you tell them?”
“The truth. You were there, and you told me that you waited in an office until you were rescued. I left out the part of you hiding under the desk.” She said it with a little laugh. She couldn’t picture me hiding under a desk and, for her, it had been the proverbial icing on top of a cake of bullshit.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“No problem. You still coming home on time?”
“I’m leaving now.”
It was still forty-five minutes before my day officially ended, but screw it. I folded my case file closed, shut down my computer, and turned off the light. I was walking down the hallway toward the exit when Sergeant Baker yelled at me from the squad room. I heard my phone ringing behind my closed office door as well. Instead of going back in and answering it I just walked back down the hallway to the squad room. Baker was yelling for me again as I entered the room. He looked at me and pointed toward the television. I had forgotten to turn it off when I left the room earlier, and it was still on and muted.
I glared up at the screen. Baker was talking to me about something, but I couldn’t hear him. I had tunnel vision and was trying frantically to find the remote to turn up the volume. Finally, Baker simply walked over to the set and turned it up using the buttons on the front. A voice-over was talking, but the picture in full screen was not him. It was me.
I sat and listened to the “Special Report” as people slowly filtered into the squad room. It was like a roach motel. They came in, but no one left. Pretty soon we had eight or ten people in the small room. The report was short, but powerful. It was obvious that the reporter didn’t have a lot of information, but more than enough to break the story. The facts only took them a couple of minutes to report. The filler, the stuff they had been calling around all day and collecting, was what droned.
The facts, as they knew them anyway, were that I had single-handedly taken on all but a few of the terrorists in the building and won. They were even giving me partial credit for the hostage rescue. What caught my attention was that the report made it clear that I had not been involved in the explosive breach entry which they were saying had culminated in the death of a few of the hostages. I knew from the debriefings that the explosive breach had not factored into the deaths, and in fact, had probably resulted in fewer deaths since the well-placed charge had taken out one of the terrorists.
I sat quiet and unresponsive to the questions and comments that were coming at me like a cross-examination on the stand. The only thing I could think about was Colonel Percy Rodriguez chewing on his cigar and cussing me like a bastard step-child.
Later at home, Tish glanced back at me and mumbled that she had tried to call me at work. I mumbled I wasn’t there and sat down with her in front of the television. The reporter was rehashing the same things he had said thirty minutes earlier when I had watched him at work, ex
cept now he was getting asked more interesting follow-up questions by the newscaster. The most noteworthy of which was how did one lone cop manage to take out an entire building of terrorists?
“We’re not sure of the answer to that one yet, Don. But according to my sources, it may have had something to do with the equipment he was provided.”
“What kind of equipment, Bill?”
“Well, we’re not sure, and the FBI is not saying. Only that it was state-of-the-art.”
The telephone rang. It was Brett Haston, my assistant SWAT Team Leader and pretty good friend. “Are you watching FOX News?”
“No, CNN.”
“Better check out FOX. Some gal on there talking about you.”
I switched over to FOX News and saw a young, dark-haired girl. She was walking in a parking lot and looked harried or maybe confused.
“Can you confirm, Ms. Calder, if this is the man that rescued you from the JP Goldstein building in St. Louis?”
It was the first time I had seen the girl since I had killed her rapist, then dropped her off in the empty office of the building. I was surprised that it didn’t evoke some kind of emotion in me and wondered why it didn’t.
She looked at the photo the journalist was holding up to her. She mumbled something to the effect of, “I’m not sure. I guess,” but was also nodding her head slightly. I’m not sure she even knew she was doing it. But that’s all the reporter needed to confirm the source. The girl unlocked her Jaguar XK8 and quickly got in. Anyone could tell she was distraught by the encounter. The camera filmed her beginning to drive away, then returned to the female journalist.
“That was Ms. Mary Calder. She was one of the hostages that was rescued from the JP Goldstein building two weeks ago by Sergeant Dell Moffat.” An old Dallas P.D. photo of me in my uniform flashed onto the screen. “My sources are telling me that Sergeant Moffat was instrumental in bringing the entire episode to a close without a tragic ending.”
Tish turned the television off and turned to look at me. I had no idea what was going through her mind. I didn’t know if she was mad at me for not letting her know, proud of me for being a hero, or what. She leaned over and hugged me, putting her face into the crook of my neck. I could feel her sobbing, but she wasn’t making any noise. I let her cry.
I didn’t know what to expect of the media, but I imagined it wasn’t going to be good. I was right. By the middle of the night, satellite vans and trucks were scouring Logan County looking for my address. I still hadn’t found out how MSNBC had gotten my unlisted number, but assumed they had sources. I figured those same sources could give them my address as well. What I had going for me was the rural nature of Logan County. Nothing in the county is marked. Directions are given in mile markers and landmarks. Like, go to milepost 14 and take a left on County Road 12. Go to the Halstead ranch and turn left on the dirt road for three miles.
Poor directions only slowed them down, though. Like buzzards to a fresh kill, they found me. And like an opposing army, they moved in at daylight.
I woke up with the sun. I scooted over to the window, expecting to see them out at the gate. They were there, and it startled me. Now, I have no idea why it startled me since I had told myself they would be there. Maybe it’s like a close relative dying … you know it’s coming, but when it happens it still catches you off guard. My driveway is almost a quarter of a mile long, but I could easily see the road, and they could easily see my house. I had made up some impromptu “NO TRESPASSING” signs stating that violators would be prosecuted and had put them on my gate the night before. So far, it looked like they were paying attention to them. I doubted those signs were going to hold, though. My back-up plan had been to stake out Butch, our English bulldog, in the front yard. Normally, he ran loose, but I wanted him right in front of the door.
“Logan County Sheriff’s Department. How can I direct your call?” It was Nora. I could tell from the disgust in her voice that she was having an irritating day already. Then I realized she was in the office an hour before her day was supposed to start.
“This is Dell. What are you doing in so early?”
“Because of you, Mr. Hero.” She had emphasized the “e” in hero and dragged it out, making it sound hokey. “You still at home?”
“Yeah.”
“Stay there. You don’t want to come in here. It’s a zoo.”
“Well, I got all the monkeys and hyenas here at the house.”
She laughed. “Is it true?”
I knew what she was talking about. The same thing everyone else was. Had I really done what they were saying I had? “Can’t tell you.” She put me through to Toby like I asked.
“This is Sergeant Moffat’s personal secretary. He is not available for personal appearances or interviews today, but if you would like to leave me your name … ”
I cut him off. “Very funny.”
He undoubtedly thought it was and chuckled. That’s the thing about Toby, very little rattled his cage.
“Where you at?”
“Still at home. I’ve got an army in front of my house. I’m thinking about not coming in today.”
“Yeah, I don’t want you here. It’s easier to get rid of them if they don’t think you’ll be here. Besides, I think you’re going to be having company shortly.”
“Who?”
“Feds. FBI, to be exact.”
“Anyone else?”
“Don’t know. I talked to him on the phone.”
“What’d he say?”
“Asked if you were here. I told him no, and you probably wouldn’t be in today. He said he’d call you at your house.”
“You didn’t give him the number, did you?” It was a stupid statement, and I regretted it before it finished coming out of my mouth.
“No. He said he had it. Stay home and call me when you know something. I won’t expect you in today, or tomorrow for that matter. Do you need a place to vanish to?”
Toby was one hell of a friend and boss.
“Maybe. Let me see if anyone shows up from … ” I stopped talking and realized I was stepping very close to the line of confirming what the news reports were putting out there. Toby caught it, I was sure, but didn’t ask.
My phone had begun ringing non-stop shortly after the day began. We didn’t have Caller ID in my part of the county, but I was screening the calls with my answering machine. I was up to forty-five calls when one finally came through that I needed to take.
“This is Agent Denova of the FBI, and if you are there, I need to speak to you, Sergeant Moffat.”
I picked up the handset. “This is Moffat.”
“We need to talk to you, Sergeant Moffat. When would be a good time? I would actually like to come out there right now.”
The question about what time was pretense. He was coming out now, whether I liked it or not. “Now is good. You should know that it’s a zoo in front of my house with reporters.”
“Thanks. We’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
Fifteen minutes. That meant they were in town, and maybe even already headed my way. Whatever time is good, my ass.
Agent Denova and his partner, whose name escaped me, were professional, but cold. There wasn’t any professional courtesy, though, underlying their questions, and I felt like I was being treated like a perp. I guess in reality, that’s what the suspicion was. I assumed they would think I somehow had spilled the beans. Judging by the questions, it was apparent that was indeed their thinking.
I assured them I hadn’t talked to anyone, and they interviewed Tish separately. She told them that I had never even hinted about my involvement with what had gone on in the building. They left like they had come. Professional, but cold and without comment, except that I shouldn’t speak to the press. I didn’t know if they believed me or not about keeping the information to myself. Frankly, I was beginning to not care.
The next day and a half, Tish and I spent in the house. On one occasion, a reporter tried to slip up from the back of th
e place. I happened to see him and turned Butch loose when he got close. Afterward, I chastised myself for doing it, knowing that if Butch had taken a chunk out of his ass, I would have been sued up the ying-yang. At the time, it seemed like a good idea, though. And it did work, since none of them tried it again.
The calls kept coming, and a few were even from friends. But I didn’t even answer those. We were having to erase the machine every hour or so because it would fill up. By now I was getting prank calls, since someone had managed to locate my phone number and had already started a web page telling all about me. I got online and looked at it. About only one-tenth of it was true or correct.
I had even gotten a proposal for a movie deal. It was from some guy I had never heard of, and Tish and I had a good laugh over that one. The calls kept coming in, and then I got another one that caught my attention. It was from Mary Calder.
“Sergeant Moffat?” The voice was confident, but frail. Not really like I remembered it, but familiar all the same.
“I’m sorry to bother you.” She paused. I figured she was having a hard time saying whatever it was she wanted to say. I didn’t push her. I had dealt with many victims over the years. It was one of the few times I knew how to be patient.
“No bother. How are you?”
“I’m fine. I just … I wanted to call and thank you.”
“You don’t have to thank me. You doing okay? I saw you on the television. The reporters hounding you?”
“No. My dad flew me out of the country right after they talked to me in the parking lot.” I wasn’t completely sure why she had called me and figured she may not be sure either.
There was a long, awkward pause in the conversation, and I had run out of things to ask after I inquired about how she was doing. She finally broke the silence. “Well, I just wanted to call and tell you thank you. Thank you for saving my life.” She was starting to lose it, I could tell by the warbling in her voice.
