Witness

by Denise Gwen

  She saw her face, for sure, and then her gaze shifted to the lower right hand of the screen and she saw the date and the time running in normal speed. It was the day before, the day when she’d gone to the evidence room and discovered the boxes were missing.

  She said nothing as she watched the image of herself walking out of the evidence room, and lifting the half-gate separating the interior of the evidence room from the outside, and she watched as her image walked out of the evidence room and away.

  Where the hell was the evidence clerk? Couldn’t everyone in the room tell this was an obvious fake? The evidence clerk, most certainly, wouldn’t have allowed her to walk out of the evidence room with two valuable evidence boxes, and yet, somehow, they’d done something to manipulate the images in such a way it appeared as if she’d helped herself to two of the evidence boxes from the room. She had no idea, no earthly idea, how they’d accomplished this, but they did. Something had been manipulated, and she didn’t know how they’d done it, or when they’d done it, but they’d done a really good job of it.

  If she were a jury member watching this during a jury trial, she’d have to come to the inescapable conclusion that she’d removed the evidence boxes from the evidence room.

  But only she, as a law enforcement officer, would know what didn’t get shown; the clerk back at the entrance to the evidence room, making sure she didn’t leave with anything. When they staged this little movie, they moved the evidence clerk off-stage.

  Kramig pushed another button on the laptop and the images faded to black and she saw her stunned reflection in the television’s gaze.

  “Empty your pockets,” Sheriff said. “That’s not something you can refuse to do, because it doesn’t amount to a statement. If you want a lawyer present while you empty your pockets, we can call for one to come down right now from the Public Defender’s Office.”

  She swallowed down her rage and looked at Rob, then at the Sheriff, who stared blandly at her.

  “Do it now, deputy,” Sheriff said.

  “Yes, sir,” she said. She knew all the admonitions of Miranda, and she wondered, briefly, if someone had slipped something into her pockets when she wasn’t looking, upon her return to the office, but the only person she’d come into close contact with had been Margie, and Margie couldn’t possibly have done something like that to her . . . she realized she had no more friends in this office anymore, but surely, Margie wouldn’t have planted something in her pocket?”

  “Deputy?” Sheriff said.

  She was dying to speak, but she needed to take a hint from her boss and not say a word, because no matter what she said in the next few minutes, it’d end up screwing her over.

  This she knew.

  Besides, it was too late anyway, to check to see if Margie had slipped something into her pocket, and so, with a rising despair, she reached into her left front pocket, pulled out the lint, rubbed it between her fingers, dropped it into the trash. Reached into the right front pocket, pulled out her keys.

  “Okay,” Sheriff said. “Now your back pockets.”

  She did the same. She pulled a bit of lint from her two back pockets and then stood there, as Rob moved in to do the pat-down.

  “She’s clean,” he said at last.

  “We figured you would’ve moved the evidence by now from your pockets,” Sheriff said, standing up as well and gazing at her with a smug smile.

  Then, even though she knew better than to utter a single word, she said, “I didn’t take anything from the evidence room. The last time I went to the evidence room, all the boxes were gone.”

  “Yeah,” Rob said and smirked. “Once we saw the footage of you stealing stuff from one of the boxes, we transferred them back to the Shelbyville Police Department.”

  “You set me up.”

  “Better not say another word, Deputy,” Sheriff said. “We’ve already turned this over to the Attorney General’s Office.”

  “I can’t believe you did this to me, Sheriff.”

  “You are summarily suspended from your post, pending a full investigation,” Sheriff said. “Hand in your gun and your badge.”

  “It’ll help me to accept all the bullshit that’s going on here right now, if you accepted the truth,” Kathryn said evenly. “All of you know perfectly well that videotape was doctored.”

  “Keep your trap shut,” Rob said.

  “Who made this up? Did you, Rob? Why’d the evidence clerk let me walk out without even a squeak of protest? You forgot to cover that base, didn’t you?”

  At this, Randy stirred, then spoke. “From this moment onward, until you receive further notice, you are on paid administrative leave. Once the indictments are returned you will, of course, be terminated as an employee.”

  “Of course,” Kathryn said again. She unclipped her badge and laid it down onto the table, then unholstered her service revolver and laid that down as well. She put her hands on her hips. “I expect a letter of recommendation.”

  At this, Rob chortled and Kathryn flashed him an ugly look.

  “It’s all right,” Randy said, and grunted. “I’ll give you a letter of recommendation, Kathryn.”

  “I’ve got a lot to say about all this, but I suppose it’s best if I don’t say anything.”

  “That’s best, Kathryn,” Randy said.

  “So, I’m going to leave.”

  “I can’t believe you,” she said, to each of them in turn, and then, because she couldn’t help it, she wept.

  “Rob will escort you from the building,” Sheriff said blandly, ignoring her tears. He stood up, thrust his hands into his belt loops and rocked back on his heels. “He’ll walk you to your cubicle, hand you a box to put your stuff in, but I want you out of here within the hour.”

  She knew better than to let this happen to her, but she hung her head in shame as she walked out of Randy’s office.

  “So, as you can see,” Rob said nonchalantly as they walked down the hallway, as if he’d been in the middle of a conversation and been interrupted, “you’ll be charged with obstruction of justice and tampering with evidence.” He glanced back over his shoulder. “We’ll be formulating additional charges, of course.”

  “Of course,” Kathryn said, and snorted.

  Rob glanced sharply at her but said nothing further.

  A few minutes later.

  Rob stood over her as she filled a banker’s box with all her stuff. She pulled out the drawer from which she stored extra paper clips, binder clips, post-it-notes, and other assorted odds-and-ends, dumped the contents of the drawer into the box, then hurriedly stuffed her bags of candy and Granola bars into the box as well. Margie sat at her desk, weeping silently, as she worked, and then at the last, Kathryn scooped the two picture frames off her desk.

  Rob smirked as she forced the lid onto the box and hoisted it up.

  “You want a hand there?”

  “No thanks,” she said, fuming. “I’m good.”

  “Don’t want you to strain something,” Rob chortled.

  “Rob, don’t be mean,” Margie said.

  She knew he was trying to provoke her. She knew he was trying to get her to do or say something, and she dearly wanted to do and say something to him, but she set her mouth in a hard line, hoisted the heavy box onto her right hip, and stood there facing him. “I want you to know something, Rob.”

  “What’s that, McGlone?”

  “There’s something hinky going on around here, and I think you’re behind it, and I think the Sheriff’s involved as well, and you’re protecting the Sheriff. But rest assured, I will be acquitted of all these charges, and what’s more, you’d better start dusting off your resume, because next January, I’m taking out a petition to run for Sheriff, and I’m gonna win the election, and I’m gonna clean up this Sheriff’s Office lickety-split, and if you think I’m gonna let some corrupt asshole work for me, then you’re an even bigger dumbass than I thought.”

  And with that, she walked out of the Sheriff’s Office
and to her car. She put the box into her trunk and drove home.

  They’d wanted to get rid of her for the longest time, even longer than before her last sanatorium stay, and at last they’d succeeded.

  As easy as that.

  Thirty minutes later.

  Surging with resentment, Kathryn drove away from the Rowan County Sheriff’s Office, realizing it’d be the last time in her life to do so, and this filled her up with bitterness and sorrow.

  She also felt shame.

  Yes, shame. A deep and abiding shame at being fired so blatantly and cruelly and so unfairly, too. It enraged her, it cut her to the quick. It filled her up with an inexpressible anger and resentment. Rob Billings had sat there, the smug, supercilious bastard, his arms crossed over his chest and a self-satisfied smile on his smirking face. If it hadn’t been so dad-blamed awful, she might’ve socked Rob across the jaw; she’d been dying to sock him one for years, ever since the ass-kissing punk ass first arrived on the scene and brown-nosed his way from one promotion to another.

  Curiously, she didn’t feel nearly as much animosity toward the Sheriff, and she didn’t know why, for he was the very reason why the entire department behaved like a pair of randy frat boys at a hazing party. Randy set the tone, and yet, she still felt some affection for him.

  After all, he didn’t fire her when she had her melt-down; he’d approved the request to send her to the sanatorium.

  And then something else stabbed her consciousness. Rob had manufactured the false tape to make it look as if Kathryn had removed the evidence boxes. As she’d studied the grain images, something had seemed wrong to her, and she hadn’t quite been able to place her finger on it, but there’d been something wrong, off, with the videotape. They’d either superimposed her face onto the body of a woman they’d used as a stand-in for Kathryn; some girl with a similar build and way of walking, and then transposed Kathryn’s face onto the screen for the last shot of her allegedly walking out of the evidence room with the Miranda Randalls evidence boxes.

  And what were the Miranda Randalls evidence boxes even doing in the Rowan County Sheriff’s office to begin with? Who the hell let that happen? The evidence boxes should’ve been stored in some other facility—with the Shelbyville Police Department, for instance—but not the fucking Sheriff’s Office.

  From the very beginning, this investigation had been botched up.

  And, firing or no firing, Kathryn was going to get to the bottom of this and find out who killed Sherri Randalls.

  But first, she needed to go home and take a long, soothing bath.

  A good cry wouldn’t hurt, neither.

  A few minutes later.

  “How’d it go?” Randy asked as Rob walked back into his office.

  “She’s a feisty little thing, I’ll give her that,” Rob said, chuckling as he sat down across from Randy’s desk.

  “Why, what happened?”

  “Well, at first I thought she was gonna do a return command performance of her epic meltdown, the one she did four weeks ago, before we sent her off to the nut-house, but instead this time she went all cold and Dirty Harry on me.”

  “Huh,” Kramig said.

  “Yeah, she looked at me, like this—” and Rob scrunched his eyebrows together and glowered at Randy “—and she said, in this low, deep voice, ‘Come, January, I’m gonna run for Sheriff, run all you assholes out of here, and clean the place up.”

  At these words, Rob’s smile faded as he saw the look of concern on Randy’s face, and thought, He’s not really taking this crazy chick seriously, is he?

  “I wonder,” Randy said, “if I made a mistake in sending her away.”

  “Nah, boss,” Rob said. “With McGlone loose and out in the community, stirring up trouble, folks will realize what a kook she is and write her off.”

  “All the same,” Randy said.

  Rob’s grin faded. “Boss, you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Randy said. He jerked his head at the door. “Let her run. Let her see how hard it is to get elected to Sheriff.”

  “Hell, Boss, she couldn’t get elected dog catcher.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” Randy said.

  “What’s that, boss?”

  “That stay in the mental hospital sure gave her a bit of backbone. I didn’t know she had that much fight in her,” Randy said, half-admiringly.

  Rob, unaccustomed to Randy praising McGlone, again, had to fight down an edge of unease. “Yeah. She’s got a mighty fine pair of balls on her, don’t she?”

  “Yes, she sure does,” Randy said. “Yes, she sure as hell does.”

  Thirty minutes later.

  Rob drove home, his thoughts and his mind in a deep funk.

  They’d been planning this out carefully for a long time, and when Randy first suggested it, Rob had been completely on board with it. He’d loved the idea. By the time McGlone got around to hiring a lawyer and getting the lawyer to hire an expert to take the videotape apart, they’d be long rid of her darkening the halls of the Sheriff’s Office, and well on their way to getting everything neatly cleaned up and tightly sealed.

  He’d hired a professional filmmaker he knew out of Indy whom he’d busted once for possession but got him off on a slap on the wrist, in exchange for the guy doing favors for him, as the need occurred. And this guy had been an asset to Rob’s arsenal of tricks. He’d set up a soundstage, tossed some boxes on metal shelves to make it look like the evidence room, and then filmed a slender young woman dressed in a deputy’s uniform, as she went through the motions of ‘stealing’ evidence from these empty boxes. And then the guy, what a genius, the guy was, he really was, had then superimposed McGlone’s face onto the young woman, and if Rob didn’t know any better, he’d say that McGlone had done the theft of the evidence, it was that real and life-like looking.

  And the crazy bitch had bought it, too.

  And now he had time to tidy things up at Houser’s Farm, make his last delivery, and arrange for a new crew to handle this delicate arrangement.

  He knew he ought to be happy, but something troubled him, at the back of his mind.

  Only, what was it?

  He pulled into the driveway at home, killed the engine, and walked into the house through the kitchen. Shelley nearly collided with him as she walked out of the house with the kids in tow. “Oh, honey,” she said, “I didn’t think you’d be home yet.”

  “Left early,” he said. “The kids got soccer?”

  Robby Junior, at the age of four, was playing pee-wee soccer, and his little sister stood on the sidelines with Mommy to cheer and shout.

  “Yeah,” she said, apparently distracted, and more so than usual, he thought, than her usual I’m-running-the-kids-out-to-the-soccer-fields-and-I’m-running-late state of distraction, but something harder, deeper, inside her.

  Or was he reading things into her that weren’t there, just because he was on edge because of McGlone?

  “Want me to take the kids?” he asked.

  “What, oh, no, that’s fine, that’s fine,” she said. “I can do it. We’re on the way.”

  “Did you guys get any dinner?”

  “No,” she said, “we’re gonna do McDonald’s Drive-Thru.”

  “Well, okay, then, let me change really quick and I’ll take you all.”

  “You are?” she asked, surprised.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I don’t do my second job till tomorrow.”

  The second job, of course, being the sex-trafficking operation out at Houser’s Farm. She’d been after him to quit; had told him he needed to stop now, because she was getting a bad feeling about it all. But what with Randy and this business with McGlone, he’d been too busy to talk to Randy and find a replacement, and besides all that, he’d been too god-damned busy.

  But at the sound of the words second job, her face fell.

  “I thought you were quitting.”

  “I am, when I get a chance to talk to my boss. Things have been kind of crazy lately, honey
.”

  “Okay,” she sighed. “I’ll get the kids into the van while you change.”

  “Good idea,” he said, and ran upstairs to their bedroom.

  He should’ve known better than to think the subject was closed.

  Thirty minutes later.

  From as far as Rob could see, pee-wee soccer amounted to watching a bunch of little kids, all dressed up in their official soccer jerseys, running around a grassy field, sometimes in pursuit of the white-and-black ball, sometimes in pursuit of a butterfly, and then stopping to pick their noses or cry when the spirit moved them.

  And yet, it was nice to sit next to Shelley in the pop-up fabric chairs and sip a Coke and watch the fun.

  His baby daughter had found another little girl of her size, and the two little mites were running around.

  Looked like the little girls were having more fun playing than the little boys playing soccer on the field.

  He was just about to say so to Shelley, but when he glanced over at her, he saw the furrowed eyebrows, the look of thunder in her eyes, and the words died in his throat.

  “Honey?” he asked.

  This must stop,” she said, her lips trembling.

  She looked scared . . . and angry.

  “Sweetie,” he said, reaching for her hand, and she did not resist his attempt to hold her hand, but she did not respond by squeezing his hand back. She sat there, rigid, implacable, and nearly crying.

  “Honey,” he said, frightened. “What’s wrong?”

  “I heard something at the grocery store today,” she said, and stopped, as a soccer mom walked past with her little daughter. “Hi, Shelley,” she said.

  “Hi, Maureen.”

  “Hi, Rob,” the soccer mom said to Rob, in a sultry voice.

  “Hi, Maureen,” he said.

  Maureen paused for a moment, as if considering whether to hang out and flirt with him a little, but Rob kept his gaze down and watched out of his peripheral vision as Shelley struggled to regain her composure.

  “Come on, Evelyn,” she said, pulling the little girl away.